Category: Sermons

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on May 7, 2023. Based on John 14:1-14.

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Today’s passage is the start of John 14, but I’d like to back up to John 13 to set the stage. John 13 opens with Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, as an example that he sets for them. He goes on to say that someone will betray him, and then Judas Iscariot leaves to do just that. Jesus gives them the new commandment that they should love one another, and says that he will be going away where they cannot follow now. Quite an eventful chapter!

So now Jesus is really hitting his stride in his Farewell Discourse. This is his last night with his disciples, his last chance to tell them what they should do when he’s gone. He wants to be sure that they know who he is and what he means to the world. As is typical, the disciples are kind of dense and don’t fully understand what he’s saying, but Jesus tries.

Part of the reason they don’t understand is the same reason we don’t understand. Jesus describes an intimate relationship with God that is so far beyond most people’s experiences that it’s hard to comprehend. We can say the words—the Trinity is three persons who dwell in each other, bound together so strongly by love—but what does that really mean? Few people ever experience that kind of love, a transcendent love that changes the way you see the world. So Jesus does the best he can with the language at his disposal.

He tries with a metaphor. Jesus says, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” Twenty-first century Americans don’t recognize this metaphor, but first-century Judeans would have. This is marriage imagery. Jesus is likening himself to a bridegroom who goes to prepare a place for the bride, where she can live with his family. In that time and place, the convention was for the bride to join the groom’s household, but of course there had to be a place for the new nuclear family to live. The groom would prepare it, and then come take his bride home to live with his family.

So that’s how Jesus describes his heavenly realm. It’s like one big family compound. As we read in so many places throughout the New Testament, the Church is the bride of Christ. He loves us and wants to build a new life with us.

Indeed, Jesus’s death is not the end, but a new beginning. It’s the end of his personal earthly ministry, but the beginning of his new heavenly ministry. In these last hours with his disciples and his last days on earth, he is preparing to join the Church with his heavenly realm and, in that way, establish God’s kin-dom.

Notice that he says that there are “many” dwelling places. He goes on to say, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” This is usually read with an exclusionist perspective: only Christians are allowed in heaven. It’s as if Jesus is ascending to become a bouncer and keep out the riffraff. I think it’s better to read it as if Jesus is ascending to become a greeter. He is preparing many dwelling places, enough for everyone. When we see him, he will welcome us with open arms and show us the way into his heavenly realm.

But wait: I’ve said many times that the kingdom of God isn’t just something that we see when we die. It’s here, right here, right at hand. God isn’t just in some faraway place, but is also here among us. Indeed, God is within us. Just like Jesus, we are bound up with God through the power of love.

So again, let’s remember the story that brought us to today. Jesus knows his time on earth is nearing the end, so he kneels and washes his disciples’ feet. Throughout the Gospel According to John, Jesus performs miracles, signs that grow more and more astounding, from the changing of water into wine to the raising of Lazarus. Jesus is God, Jesus is God, JESUS IS GOD! And then at the peak of the crescendo, what does he do? He serves his friends, as if a slave. Jesus is God, and yet he empties himself and takes on the most degrading task. Then he tells his disciples, This is what you should do. Love one another just like I have loved you. I am the way. If you’re ever wondering how to enter my kingdom, just do what I did, or what I would have done.

Jesus claims that we will do greater things than he did. How can that be? I don’t personally know anyone who has turned water into wine, much less raised the dead. Yet in a way, Christians have indeed been doing great things throughout history. A great historical mystery is how a small sect of a small religion developed into the world’s largest religion, currently claiming more than 30% of the world’s population. Historically, most religions were local or regional. How did Christianity come to be such a powerful global force? Well, one reason was the dedication of early Christians to serve their neighbors. Wherever Christians lived, they pushed the local authorities towards more humane policies, although with varying levels of success. They cared for the sick both within and outside their communities, despite persecution. They created the first hospitals. Maybe they weren’t raising the dead, but they were healing the sick and preventing death.

What else did Jesus teach his disciples? One principle was inclusion. Like I said, most religions in history were local or regional, or at least ethnically isolated. Christianity was the first religion where a gathering might include men and women of widely varied ethnic backgrounds, from all walks of life, from slaves to soldiers to aristocrats. It may have started as a sect within Judaism, but it quickly became dominated by non-Jewish believers. When Paul wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus,” he was in fact describing the church in Galatia and holding it up as an example of how people should live together and how the church should grow.

Then there was non-violent resistance. First-century Jews were expecting a Messiah who would be a warrior, who would lead the heavenly host to expel the Romans and re-establish a Jewish theocratic kingdom. Jesus came and did not look anything like the Messiah they were expecting. Instead of a violent overthrow, he taught that his kingdom was not of this world and really had no interest in changing the way Judea and Galilee were governed. He focused on teaching people how to live together in the kingdom of God no matter what government claimed authority. That lesson didn’t really take hold in Christianity, though. It wasn’t too long before bishops were arguing with each other, supposedly over theological points but also over power and authority. Once we made a deal with Constantine, we committed ourselves to politics. In the centuries since then, we have struggled to escape the orbit of governmental authority. Even the Reformation, a time when Christians rejected many of the old teachings of the Roman Catholic church, turned into a time when rival denominations could set up local theocracies to enforce their own interpretation of the Bible. That was entirely the opposite of Jesus’s teachings, and yet we still can’t escape the attractiveness of power.

Jesus taught that instead of seeking power, instead of seeking earthly accolades, instead of trying to establish a theocracy by force, we should instead seek to change the world from the bottom up with the power of love. Leaders are not to be rulers who “lord it over” their subjects, but to become as slaves. He taught that we are to love one another as he did, a self-sacrificing love that prioritizes others’ welfare more highly than our own.

You have heard me speak about the Mission a number of times. There is a movement afoot in Rolla—and there has been for some time—to get the Mission shut down. It is led by property owners and business owners who feel that the value of their property or profitability of their business is negatively impacted by the poor and unhoused individuals who make use of the Mission’s services. Homelessness is indeed a problem in Rolla, but it is not unique to Rolla—it’s a problem in every city in the nation, one that eludes easy solutions. The most disappointing aspect of the movement against the Mission is that the leaders of it would consider themselves Christians—and in fact one is a minister. I have not heard any of them propose a solution that would involve showing Christian love to those who are struggling to improve their lives. You know, most people are just a few paychecks away from homelessness. The difference between those who become homeless and those who don’t is the absence or presence of a support network. Jesus taught us that instead of using our wealth and our position in the community for our own benefit, using it to protect ourselves from those we fear, we must value each person of the community and work for their good. We should be that support network that the homeless lack.

I recently listened to a podcast about the bystander effect. Briefly, it’s the phenomenon where you see a need but don’t act on it. You think, Geez, someone should do something. Well, I’m someone, and you’re someone. Jesus taught that we are called to act out our love. Love is not a feeling so much as an action, a calling to serve our neighbor in need.

Jesus knew this would be hard. But he said that we don’t need to do it alone. Jesus said that he is the way. If we follow his path, we will dwell in Him always, and he will dwell in us, and will do whatever we ask in his name. The way to the Father’s house is abiding in the Son, being filled with his love and strengthened by the Holy Spirit. That sounds an awful lot like heaven, right? Christ is defined by paradoxes: transcendent yet immanent, Lamb and Shepherd. Dwelling in Christ and following his example is both the path to heaven and heaven itself. It is the abundant life he promised here, and the eternal glory in the age to come. Let us seek now to follow his example of self-sacrificing love, a love that values others more than ourselves, a love that risks everything, a love that is heaven itself, a love that is both the journey and the destination. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on 1 Peter 1:13-25. This sermon discusses a concept referred to as the “Cosmic Christ.” If you would like to learn more, consult The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr, the meditations on the subject that his Center for Action and Contemplation published, or this blog post by Paul Axton. The concept is well-known in eastern Christianity and is an important part of Franciscan theology.

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Last week’s Gospel lesson was about Jesus showing himself to his disciples. It’s remembered as the story of Doubting Thomas, but I have long thought that Thomas gets a raw deal. NOBODY believed that Jesus had risen. Jesus showed himself to ten of his disciples, and after a few moments of disbelief, they realized what had happened. Thomas wasn’t there, so he was left in that pre-revelation state. “Yeah, right, guys, Jesus came back from the dead. Quit kidding around.” As soon as Jesus shows himself to Thomas, he believes, and indeed surpasses the other disciples in his response.

But in a sense, we are all like Thomas. I have not personally seen Jesus. None of us saw him in his human body, though some people I know have had visions like Paul did. For the vast majority of us who have not literally seen Jesus, believing in a risen Christ is really hard. It requires a suspension of all our normal ways of making sense of the world. The only reason I can accept the truthfulness of the Gospel accounts is that so many people risked their lives, and lost their lives, because of a story that is so ridiculous nobody would make it up. Literal bodily resurrection just wasn’t something that people even considered in that era.

We believe that through Christ, we have salvation. Indeed, Jesus’s actual Hebrew name, Yeshua, means “salvation.” A challenging theological discussion is, what about all the people who lived before Jesus did? Did Jesus go down to Sheol and raise them? Or are they just the victims of the bad luck of being born too soon?

We see in today’s text a hint about God’s plan of salvation. With echoes of the opening chapter of the Gospel According to John, we read that Christ was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was manifested in these last times for our sake. This is an incredible insight for the first century. Jesus was a man who was born at a certain time in a certain place, but Christ transcends humanity and was known from before Creation. We see hints of this same understanding in Peter’s affirmation that Jesus is the Christ, and in Paul’s writings to the Ephesians and Colossians.

Irenaeus was a bishop in the second century who wrote Against Heresies. At that time, Christianity had many different understandings about who or what Jesus was. Aside from the mainstream view, there were Gnostics and Marcionites. The Marcionites believed that the God of the Hebrew scriptures was different from God the Father of Jesus Christ. Irenaeus said no, they were one and the same. Christ was known from before the foundation of the world, and God the Father led and taught the Israelites until the world was ready for Christ’s revelation in Jesus of Nazareth. The Gnostics viewed the material world as inherently corrupt, an existence from which we seek to escape into the eternal realm of spirit. Irenaeus taught that what God created is good, and humanity is very good. All creation is ultimately destined for glorification.

Our glory comes through participation in God’s plan for redemption of all creation. Christ was present at the beginning. In fact, the universe was the first incarnation of Christ. Christ was the logos, the Word, the divine ordering principle that structured the creation of the universe. Christ was and is in all things. Whenever the spiritual world and the material world are in contact, Christ is there.

But Christ was hidden. God was revealed to the ancient Israelites, but they weren’t ready yet to understand God’s ultimate plan. They could picture God as a pillar of fire or a pillar of cloud or a burning bush or a still, small voice. They could imagine gods as inhabiting idols. But it took centuries for them to be ready for a God who was united with a human being.

Finally, when they were ready, Christ was incarnated through the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was the fullest revelation of God, as a human who was fully united with the eternal, cosmic Christ. Jesus lived as an example of holiness. He demonstrated God’s love with his deep understanding of each person’s needs and the obstacles that each person erected between themselves and God. He demonstrated complete obedience to God’s will, even unto death.

His death was the end of that phase of God’s revelation, but the start of another. God had tried to teach the Israelites about the ultimate fate of the world and their role in it, but was ultimately unsuccessful. So Christ came to teach them more personally and individually about holy living. Through his death, he taught about self-giving love. Through his resurrection, he taught about the ultimate goodness of the world.

Because resurrection isn’t something that happened just once to Jesus, and isn’t something that only happens when we die. Resurrection is the process of renewal, the restoration of glory, the sanctification of our lives. When Christ was raised from the dead, he revealed this coming of glory into all things, and invited us to participate in glorifying our world.

What is the purpose of salvation? We are saved. What are we saved from, and what are we saved for? There is one way of reading the New Testament that implies that we need to follow Jesus’s teachings closely in order to earn our place in heaven. Strangely, some of the Christian traditions that teach, on the one hand, that our salvation is assured if, and only if, we pray the sinner’s prayer and profess our belief in Jesus ALSO teach that we must purge sin from our lives and quit drinking and dancing and such in order to be “real” Christians. There is another way of reading the New Testament that implies that really, accepting Jesus as our Lord is all that we need to do, and nothing else matters. To that teaching I would say, what’s the point of even living then? Traditions that say that nothing matters in this world are basically reviving the old Gnostic heresy, the belief that our goal should be to escape from the corruption of the material world.

Today’s reading, though, affirms the inherent goodness of this world. We are to become holy people. We are saved so that we may become more holy. We are saved so that we might reveal Christ who is in us. This is not about becoming sinless, which is impossible. We all fall short of the glory of God, try as we might. Becoming a holy people means aligning our lives more with God’s love. It means loving each other as if we were a family, one family that encompasses all people. It means shining forth with God’s love in those dark places of the world.

All around us, we see people in despair. We see people suffering from poverty, from addiction, from natural disasters, from violence and war. We see people suffering from loneliness, from family estrangement, from grief and fear. Homelessness is a serious problem with broad impact and no good solution. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the suffering of the world. How can I say that the material world is fundamentally good when it seems so bad? How do I find the hope that Amy spoke about last week?

In one translation, verse 17 of today’s reading says, “live out the time of your sojourn here in reverence.” This is our temporary home. We are like the Israelites who lived in Egypt, or who wandered in the wilderness, or who were exiled to Babylon. We are living in a broken world so that we may learn how to love more broadly and deeply. Yet just as in Egypt or the wilderness or Babylon, God is with us. And so, as God told Jeremiah, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” The world will one day be fully transformed, but in the meantime, our calling is to make ourselves holy by seeking the welfare of the world we live in and praying to the LORD on its behalf. In this way, we will participate Christ’s work, begun at the foundation of the world, exemplified in the second incarnation that was Jesus of Nazareth, and continuing through the centuries since.

In the season of Easter, we celebrate the reality of Christ’s resurrection. He promised that he would always be with us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Sanctification is not a task for us to do alone. It is a process by which we allow Christ to more fully inhabit us. We surrender control of our lives and let God direct us. We turn from serving ourselves to serving others. It’s a process that is never finished, one that proceeds as two steps forward, one step back. Yet we have been given this assurance, that God will never abandon us. Israel and Judah were exiled because they stopped trying to follow God’s will, but God did not abandon them forever. God was with them in their exile, and God accompanied them as they returned, and God ultimately came to them in the person of Jesus. Like the ancient Israelites, we sometimes need God to shake us and grab our attention, but remember, God’s presence is never lacking, only our awareness.

And as we grow in Christ, we will be more able to see Christ revealed through the power of love. We will become more aware of the inherent goodness of the people we meet and learn to love them as fellow children of God, rather than fearing or hating or shunning them. That creates a positive spiral, where love breeds more love, where compassion breeds more compassion, where small acts of kindness lead to transformative relationships. In that way, we become a more holy people, clothed in Christ, living our sojourn here in reverence of Christ who is all and in all. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on April 2, 2023, Passion Sunday. Based on Matthew 26:57-68.

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The lectionary passage for today is actually much longer than this. It’s the whole Passion story, basically all of Matthew 26 and 27. I encourage you to read the whole story sometime this week as you prepare for Easter. It’s a long text, rich in meaning, too much for one sermon. In fact, in some churches, they simply read the whole story in place of the sermon. I chose a piece of the story here instead. Let’s back up and see how we got here.

I looked back through the Gospel According to Matthew to find out the reason he gives for Jesus’s arrest. In large part, we see in Matthew a series of arguments between Jesus and the priests, scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees, that is, the religious establishment. It culminates in Jesus’s preaching against the way they are treating their fellow Israelites. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Jesus says again and again. Then he starts a discourse about being ready for the coming kingdom.

We are a Matthew 25 church in a Matthew 25 presbytery. The two chapters before this passage, after the woes Jesus preaches against the establishment, are an essential discourse that culminates in the separation of the sheep and the goats—the nations who cared for Jesus when he was hungry or naked or in prison, and those who did not. Just as we do or do not do for the last, the least, and the lost, so also we do for Jesus. Once he has delivered this message about caring for our neighbors, he tells his disciples that his time is short, and he is about to be handed over to be crucified.

Jesus has one last supper with his disciples, one that we will remember together shortly. Then, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane to pray, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not what I want but what you want.” He is greatly disturbed in spirit, praying three times that the burden will pass from him, while his disciples sleep. Despite praying for deliverance, he is handed over to the religious authorities by Judas, his betrayer.

So now: Jesus has spent a year or more preaching the coming kingdom, teaching his disciples, and arguing with the religious authorities. He has never once held back. When Sadducees argue with him over the resurrection, he corrects their misunderstanding. When Pharisees try to entrap him with a question about taxes, he turns the tables on them. Oh, and speaking of tables, he flips the tables of the moneychangers and drives the animals out of the Temple.

But here, he is silent. Defenseless. When they come to the garden to arrest him, he goes without a fight, and even rebukes a companion who tries to defend him. When he is brought before Caiaphas, he makes no protests against the false testimony against him, and he doesn’t try to explain the metaphorical meaning of his so-called threat against the Temple. He remains silent until he is forced to speak, and even then, simply quotes scripture, the book of Daniel.

Let’s consider Jesus’s options along the way. He knew what was coming. He told his disciples what was coming. First off, he could have stayed away from Jerusalem altogether. He could have remained in Galilee, preaching to the Galileans and hoping that the message would spread from there. He could have had a much longer preaching career that way. Think of how much more he could have taught us and how many more people he could have healed. Or, having come to Jerusalem, and knowing that Judas was going to betray him, he could have run away. That’s certainly the natural response for someone who is under threat and outnumbered.

Or, Jesus could have embraced his role as a leader of rebellion. The high priest essentially accused him of being a rebel; he could have truly become one, turned his disciples into an army and supplemented them with the heavenly host, twelve legions of angels. He was the Son of God, after all. He could have called down fire from heaven, sent the army of the Lord ahead of him to destroy the Romans, and re-established the reign of David’s lineage. When people talk about the Second Coming, that’s basically what they describe, right? Jesus could have “done it right” the first time.

Fight, flight, or freeze. Jesus chose not to fight. He chose not to flee. So did he freeze? No. When the temple authorities arrested him, he rebuked his companion who tried to defend him, explained that this was all necessary to fulfill the scriptures, and criticized the authorities for arresting him by night in the garden instead of by day in the temple. He was in full command of his faculties and perfectly able to defend himself.

But he didn’t. He chose his path. He knew that once he started his ministry, sooner or later, the day would come when he had to confront the religious establishment. He also knew that nothing he could say would change the outcome. We like to quote Jesus from the Gospel According to John, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Yet the truth has a time and a place. You can speak the truth, but if the other person is not ready to hear it, they won’t listen. Jesus knew that Caiaphas and the others were not ready for the radical truth of his Gospel: that he was initiating the messianic age, that he was overturning the powers and principalities of this world, that he is the resurrection and the life.

So instead of saying all these things, Jesus waited until the time was right, then calmly stated his truth for the record. The effect was just as he expected: rage.

Once when I was going through some difficult times, a pastor reminded me: the only way out is through. There are some trials in our lives that are simply unavoidable. We can perhaps delay them, perhaps soften them, but ultimately, some conflicts and difficulties are inevitable. When Jesus called his first disciples, he set himself on a path that would lead to conflict with the religious authorities. He delayed the inevitable so that he would have time to teach his disciples, and then accepted his fate.

Why was Jesus born? Well, as I said last week, he came to teach us how to live. The Passion story is a vivid example of how to embrace your calling. Jesus was called to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God. He knew what the result of his proclamation would be, so he prepared himself for the time of trial. We read again and again that he withdrew to a quiet place to pray, and on this most fateful night, he went to the garden of Gethsemane to pray earnestly, with his whole being. His prayer was one of ultimate surrender: Not my will, but thy will be done. He sought full unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Then when the trial came, Jesus had the strength to fulfill his mission. He had the strength to resist the urge to fight or to flee. He had the strength and wisdom to hold his tongue until the right time. He had the right words to speak in his defense, once more a proclamation of the coming messianic kingdom. And he had the strength to endure the torture and the agony of crucifixion.

We too can turn to God for strength. I read Psalm 37 last night and it fits here really well. Here are selected verses from this psalm that Jesus surely knew:

The wicked plot against the righteous

    and gnash their teeth at them,

but the LORD laughs at the wicked,

    for he sees that their day is coming.

 The LORD knows the days of the blameless,

    and their heritage will abide forever;

they are not put to shame in evil times;

    in the days of famine they have abundance.

But the wicked perish,

    and the enemies of the LORD are like the glory of the pastures;

    they vanish—like smoke they vanish away.

The mouths of the righteous utter wisdom,

    and their tongues speak justice.

The law of their God is in their hearts;

    their steps do not slip.

The wicked watch for the righteous

    and seek to kill them.

The LORD will not abandon them to their power

    or let them be condemned when they are brought to trial.

The salvation of the righteous is from the LORD;

    he is their refuge in the time of trouble.

The LORD helps them and rescues them;

    he rescues them from the wicked and saves them

    because they take refuge in him.

Psalm 37 (selected verses)

We too can lean on God for strength. Whatever our calling, we know that we will encounter difficulties. Most of us aren’t called to proclaim the kingdom of God to the masses, but we are all called to show God’s love to everyone. That can be really hard, because not everyone is so loveable. Maybe you’re called to show compassion to the sick, which means helping them to carry the burden of their illness. Maybe you’re called to serve the church as an elder, deacon, or trustee, and the work is draining. Maybe you’re called to serve the community through The Mission or GRACE or Russell House or one of the other worthy organizations, and you’re overwhelmed by the need.

No matter what your calling, you can follow Jesus’s example and rely on God for your strength. As he showed us, our complete surrender to God’s will gives us the strength to continue until we see “the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” The only way out is through, but we know that God will be with us on the journey. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on the Fifth Sunday in Lent. Based on John 11:1-45.

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Today is not Easter. Lazarus was just one man who was raised from the dead. In today’s story, Jesus did not usher in the messianic age. So why did Jesus bother raising just one man to just a few more years of life?

For that matter, why was Jesus born? Next week, I’ll talk about why he was killed, and then on Easter we hear about his resurrection. We have lots of theology built around his death and resurrection. But remember: Once Jesus was born, he was destined to die. It was a matter of when, not if. So he must have lived for a reason.

Paul wrote in Philippians,

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he existed in the form of God,

    did not regard equality with God

    as something to be grasped,

but emptied himself,

    taking the form of a slave,

    assuming human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human,

    he humbled himself

    and became obedient to the point of death—

    even death on a cross.

Philippians 2:5-8

Jesus emptied himself so that he could be like one of us. He came down from heaven to experience humanity and everything good and bad about it that we must also experience. In the process, he showed us how to live, and how to deal with the brokenness of the world.

We often talk about and idealize a transcendent God, one who is remote, removed from this world, emotionally distant. Jesus showed us an immanent God, one who is right here among us, in the messiness of real life. One who experiences the full emotional range of the human condition. In this passage, we see Jesus riding a rollercoaster of emotions.

First, when he hears that Lazarus is sick, Jesus seems a bit dispassionate and even cold. “Oh, my dear friend is sick? I’ll just stay here and keep doing what I’m doing for a couple of days.” He doesn’t even seem to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. But then he decides that he needs to do something, that he needs to be present with his grieving friends.

When he encounters Martha, he is a calming influence. He reminds her of the coming messianic age, and also that he himself is the Messiah who will usher it in, someday, just not today. He seems to defuse Martha’s anger, and the story could have ended there. But then when Mary confronts him, he gets it: death is a reason for sadness, and anger, and all of those other emotions.

In verse 33, we read, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” The two Greek words used here are kind of tricky to translate, but convey a troubled emotional state, maybe indignant, maybe angry. One is the same word used for Jesus’s emotional state when he says that one of his disciples will betray him. Here these two Greek words convey a sense that Jesus is angry at the presence of death in the world, and particularly this specific death. Mary is weeping and wailing, and Jesus is angry that death has that kind of power over us.

As the story continues, we encounter the shortest verse of the Bible: “Jesus wept.” A great sadness came over him, but it’s a quiet grief. Not the wailing grief of Mary, but a quiet weeping. What made him so sad? Was it the loss of his friend Lazarus? Was it the contagious grief of his friends? Was it the thought of his own coming death? Maybe all of those things. He was overcome with the reality of death and its power over us.

I recently listened to a podcast about death. The guest pointed out that in modern Western culture, we try to avoid the topic altogether. In fact, we try not to even say that someone has “died.” Instead, we use euphemisms: They passed away, or they’re in a better place, or they kicked the bucket, or they have entered the Church Triumphant. These are all ways of avoiding the simple fact that life ends in death. Jesus knew this, and was overcome by its reality and its close presence, and he broke down. He was not a distant, dispassionate God, but one who humbled himself and became truly human so he could know what it felt like to lose a friend.

The story doesn’t end there, either, though. Jesus once again becomes indignant over the power Death has to disrupt our lives and relationships. He is compelled to act. He cannot sit idly by while his friends grieve. So, he takes control of the situation, raises Lazarus, and is calm once again.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross broke down grief into five stages. A common misunderstanding is that people think the stages are sequential. In reality, it might be better to call them modes of grief. Each person handles grief differently, and most people jump back and forth between these modes over a period of time that could be days, weeks, months, years, or decades. There is no fixed timetable or sequence. But it’s still useful to think of the different modes: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We see these all in today’s passage. The disciples don’t believe that Lazarus is really dead. Martha is angry at Jesus, and Jesus is angry at Death. Both Mary and Martha seem to be bargaining with Jesus and wanting him to turn back time. Jesus weeps, and the others are also weeping in their own ways.

The only mode that we don’t see is acceptance. Jesus cannot accept that death is the end. He cannot let the story end with Mary and Martha trapped in their grief and suffering the loss of their brother. In fact, on that podcast I mentioned, the guest pointed out that every time Jesus encounters a dead person, he raises them. He is always, always indignant over the power of Death to disrupt relationships.

Yet his miraculous raising of Lazarus is ultimately temporary. Lazarus will die someday, just not now. So will Mary and Martha and everyone else in this story. Everything is temporary. Jesus solves the problem of the day, but doesn’t solve the ultimate problem of death and brokenness in the world.

Or actually, he does, just not in today’s story. As Martha says, Lazarus will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Jesus is proclaiming the coming messianic age, the age that comes after this one, the age in which we are all restored to life and wholeness. This life is temporary, but death is as well. Death is just a waypoint on the journey of our eternal lives.

So, what’s the point? Lazarus is dead; Lazarus will be raised on the last day, along with Mary and Martha and all those who loved him. Someday, they will all be together in Christ’s eternal kingdom. So why does Jesus bother to raise Lazarus from the dead? Why force him to die a second time?

I’m often reminded of a scene from “Moonstruck.” Who has seen that movie? OK, well, if you haven’t, I apologize for a few spoilers here. Cher plays a widow who is dating a man who proposes to her. Foolishly, he doesn’t have an engagement ring. I mean, what man proposes marriage without a ring? Well, Cher calls him on it, and he happens to be wearing a pinky ring. So she makes him give her that one as a temporary measure. She goes home and tells her father that her boyfriend has proposed, and shows him the ring. Her father says, “It’s a pinky ring, it’s stupid, it’s a man’s ring.” She says, “It’s temporary!” He says, “Everything is temporary! That don’t excuse nothin’!”

Everything is temporary, but that’s no excuse. Jesus could have just said, Yeah, sorry your brother is dead, but someday you’ll be dead too, so just suffer without him until you’re raised together on the last day. But he didn’t. He knew that even though this life, and the death that comes with it, is temporary, each one of us must do what we can to resolve the pain and suffering of this world. And later on, he promised that when he departed, he would send a Helper, the Holy Spirit, to be with us as we strive to follow his healing example.

Life is temporary. Life is change. When I look back five years, or ten, or twenty, I can see how much things have changed. Some for the better, some for the worse. Almost exactly three years ago, all our lives changed dramatically, and we all had to live with a succession of temporary measures. Think about the way we have worshipped in that time. We started with Lou Ellen preaching on her iPhone from her camper, then moved to pre-recorded worship services that I pieced together, then came back in person but with pews taped off for social distancing, and eventually got back to where we are today. There is still a sense that what we are doing is temporary, for example, that Susan and I are just placeholders. At any point along the way, we could have just said, Oh well, we can’t worship the way we used to, so we’re done here. After all, God doesn’t take attendance, and we can love God and be loved by God no matter what we do. But no, we chose to deal with the reality of the present—not the past, not the future, but the present—and find ways to continue to worship. We chose to find ways of joining together to show our love of God and our love of our neighbors.

That was the message of Jesus’s life. He knew that his time on earth was short. His active ministry may have been as short as one year or as long as three years—not very long to teach us everything we need to know. He knew the path he was on would lead to conflict with the religious and civil authorities, likely ending in his death on a cross. He didn’t give up, though. He made the most of the time he was given. He healed the sick, raised the dead, and fed the hungry. He took care of the problems of the day. He taught his disciples about the kingdom of God. He showed everyone how to live. And he sent the Holy Spirit to help us all to follow his example.

Everything is temporary. But that doesn’t excuse us from doing all that we can, every day, to serve our neighbors and help them to know God’s presence in their lives. Someday, all will be well as we enter Christ’s eternal kingdom. But in the meantime, we have work to do, today and every day, healing the brokenness of this world. Let’s get to work. Amen.

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Sermon preached March 5, 2023, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on John 3:1-17. Podcast link below, or check it out on my YouTube channel!

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Who was Nicodemus? As far as I know, the only evidence of his existence is the Gospel According to John. His name means “victory of the people.” It’s a Greek name, which is a bit unusual but perhaps indicates that it’s a nickname like Peter or Paul. We learn here that he is a Pharisee and a member of the Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin. He shows up in three places in John’s Gospel. First, he comes to Jesus by night, seeking illumination. Remember how I said that humans aren’t moths, right? He doesn’t come to Jesus because he wants to stare at the light, but because he wants the light of Jesus’s words to show him the Truth. The Book of John uses light and darkness motifs extensively, so we should pay attention here that he comes by night. Nicodemus may be ashamed to be seen with Jesus in the daylight, or perhaps we are supposed to recognize the darkness of his ignorance that is illuminated by the Word of God.

Then the next time we encounter him, Nicodemus is trying to get the other Pharisees to just hear Jesus out. He says, essentially, let’s not judge Jesus on the basis of what people are saying about him, but on the basis of what Jesus himself says in his defense. Something that Jesus said in this midnight encounter planted a seed and made Nicodemus wonder if perhaps Jesus is the Messiah. Perhaps.

The last time we hear of Nicodemus, he is helping Joseph of Arimathea prepare Jesus for burial. Nicodemus bought a hundred pounds of spices to prepare the body. Curiously, the other three Gospels don’t mention his role at all. Hmm.

I think Nicodemus is an amalgam. That is, he is a stand-in for several people, Pharisees and members of the Sanhedrin, who were on the fence about Jesus. The other Gospels hold up Peter as the bumbling buffoon that we are supposed to see ourselves in. John does some of that, too, but I think he includes Nicodemus for the sake of Jews who were trying to figure out just where they fit in the history of the world. Jews who were trying to determine whether following Jesus was really the right thing to do.

OK, let me ask, who here was born of the flesh? I hope everybody is raising their hand. We are all born of the flesh. That birth situates us in a certain place and a certain culture. Nicodemus was born of the flesh—a Jew, and so an inheritor of the covenant God made with Abraham, and with Jacob, and with Moses. He grew up to be a Pharisee, which was a relatively progressive sect of Judaism. We often speak unkindly about the Pharisees because of the way they are portrayed in the Gospels, but remember, Paul was a Pharisee, too. The Pharisees were progressive in the sense that they believed in the “oral Torah,” and they believed that God was still revealing the Truth to God’s people. This progressivism enabled the Pharisees to survive the destruction of the Temple, while the Sadducees and Essenes and other minor sects did not. Modern Judaism carries on the legacy of the Pharisees, continuing to grow and change.

We ignore our fleshy birth, and the fleshiness of others, at our peril. I recently listened to Prisoners of Geography, a book about the impact of mountains and plains and rivers and seas on the development of cultures and nations. Why is the Middle East so screwed up? Because Britain and France decided to divvy up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and they drew lines on a map with no regard for the people who lived there. They arbitrarily assembled Iraq from three distinct people groups, arbitrarily split the Kurdish people among three different nations, and smushed together other nations that had no shared history. They thought, “They’re all Arabs and Muslims, right? No problem.” Well, actually, there are Arabs and Turks and Kurds and Syrians, and there are two major branches of Islam, and there are further ethnic and religious divisions that are opaque to outsiders but very clear to the people who live there.

Here in America, we tend to trivialize these inherited relationships. We tend to follow the philosophy of John Locke, who developed social contract theory. The idea of a social contract is that people live together in society in accordance with an agreement that establishes moral and political rules of behavior. The idea is that we each choose to give up certain freedoms in order to have a functioning society. This is clearly false. There are only a few people in our church who chose to live in America. The rest of us were just forced to accept whatever rules our parents, and their parents, and their parents agreed to.

In the same way, Nicodemus was born to the covenant established generations earlier. But Jesus said, being born of the flesh is nothing. The flesh is temporary. Everything we see with our human eyes is temporary. If you think about everything that happened in the twentieth century, you can’t help but recognize the transient nature of human constructs. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the vast majority of travel was by horse-drawn cart or steam-powered train. Electricity and the telephone had been invented but were not universally available in America, let alone around the world. The sun never set on the British Empire, and much of Europe was ruled by a handful of other empires—Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and German. Then came the automobile, airplanes, and space travel. Two world wars and a revolution in Russia redrew all the maps and alliances, and then the end of the Cold War redrew them all again.

Everything is temporary. Now, I don’t mean in the sense that these restrictions caused by the pandemic are temporary and we’ll go back to the way things were. That past was also temporary, and now it’s gone. The present state of the world is temporary like the border between Lebanon and Syria. Everything built by human hands is temporary. This church is just over sixty years old, and its predecessor that served our congregation for ninety years is no longer functioning as a worship space. Those of you who have lived in Rolla for a while can surely drive around town and think, “That’s where such-and-such used to be.” Even in just the fifteen years we have lived here, I’ve seen businesses come and go, new buildings built on campus, a big hole in the ground where the power plant used to be, and so forth.

But Jesus says, what matters is to be born from above. To be born of water and Spirit. How can this be? Like Nicodemus, we wonder how we can be born again. Growing up in the 1980s, I remember “born-again Christian” being a specific belief system, one that didn’t really fit with the beliefs I inherited as a United Methodist. We typically thought of being “born again” as having some sort of profound experience, maybe like Saul had on the road to Damascus. Maybe after a car accident, or someone trying to quit drinking or drugs, or something like that. As someone who was baptized as an infant and grew up in the church, where did that leave me? Is the kin-dom of God only open to those who live a life devoted to sinfulness and then have a dramatic conversion?

No, I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant. I think he meant that God can claim us whether or not we are born under the covenant of Abraham. God can claim us whether or not we choose to follow him. We do not choose to be born of the Spirit any more than we choose to be born of the flesh. In his farewell discourse, Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.” Jesus has claimed us, each one of us, and chosen us to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We have been chosen to be in God’s kin-dom, children of a new covenant.

We do not choose membership in God’s kin-dom, but we can choose how we respond. We can choose to ignore it. We can choose to focus on our birth of the flesh. We can choose to pay the utmost attention to the web of relationships we were born to, the culture and customs we inherited. So often, what we think of as Christian values are actually cultural values with a Christian veneer. The Bible is a thick book, so we can find justification in it for whatever cultural belief we hold. Want to subjugate women? There’s plenty of support in most books of the Old Testament and Paul’s disputed letters. Whatever you believe, you can find a Bible verse to support it.

Or, we can choose instead to embrace our birth of the Spirit. We can choose to see the kingdom of God instead of the kingdom of man. We can choose to see people as Christ sees them. Indeed, we can see Jesus in each person we meet. When we do that, we live out our new birth of the Spirit into the new covenant of love that Jesus instituted.

More than that, we can create a new culture, a new legacy. Instead of perpetuating stereotypes, or the rules that privilege someone because of their birth, or the cultural beliefs that prevent people from seeing God’s love, we can create a new world for the next generation. We can love people because God loves them. Indeed, we can love people as God loves them. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. God gave everything they had. Jesus in turn gave everything he had, laying down his life for the people he loved. He did not condemn the world, but came so that the world could be saved through him.

We have inherited some good things and some bad things. We cannot choose what we receive, but we can choose what we pass down to those who come after us. Let us choose a legacy of love, a legacy of community, of self-sacrifice, of membership in God’s eternal family. Let us choose our birth of the water and Spirit as our highest calling as we enter God’s kin-dom today, right here, right now, and create a place where God’s love can grow. Amen.

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Based on Matthew 5:20-37. Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on February 12, 2023.

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The Gospel According to Matthew is structured in such a way to evoke comparisons to Moses. Jesus is portrayed as the new Moses. We are currently in the Sermon on the Mount, which echoes the time Moses went up on Mount Sinai to enter into a covenant with God and receive the Law.

Jesus is the new Moses who delivers a new Law. This section is referred to as the antitheses, meaning a sequence of statements with contrasts. But as Jesus had just said, he came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. His contradictory statements make the Law even more strict. He is saying that the Law that Israel had received was not really complete. The Law of Moses was basically set on a 7 or an 8, and Jesus is turning it up to 11.

When Moses received the Ten Commandments and then all of the other laws captured in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, God was trying to create a new nation. Israel was just a ragtag assembly of tribes wandering in the desert. If they accepted God’s sovereignty and Law, they would become a holy nation, a priestly people set apart to serve God. Jesus comes along and says, That’s not good enough. Yes, it was fine back then, but now it’s time to create a new kind of community.

This new community needs righteousness exceeding the scribes and the Pharisees. The scribes were experts in the Law, and the Pharisees were known for following the Law scrupulously. But Jesus says, I AM the Law, and I will show you the way to fuller living in My kingdom. To be a part of this kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, here are all the things you need to do. And let me warn you, this is tough stuff.

First off, don’t murder. I think I can handle that one. I personally haven’t murdered anyone today. But Jesus goes further, saying, don’t insult anyone. In fact, don’t even be angry with anyone. For anger disrupts relationships, and holy relationships are the foundation of the kingdom of heaven. If you harm your siblings in any way, you are destroying that foundation.

As I mentioned last time, some Christian sects take the Sermon on the Mount very seriously. Most Christians throughout history have not. We started out as a small group living together with everything in common, as described in the Book of Acts, but later on allied ourselves with Empire. We made a deal with Constantine and his successors, sometimes implicitly but often explicitly, that we would condone their violent ways if they would allow us to continue to serve God.

Indeed, the Christian church often went further and actively perpetrated harm in God’s name. There are too many examples to list. The earliest one I can think of is the Crusades, where Christian armies went murdering and pillaging throughout eastern Europe and the Middle East under a Christian banner. Antisemitism has been rampant since the Middle Ages, resulting in the Inquisition, pogroms, and ultimately the Holocaust. The Doctrine of Discovery was used to justify brutal acts as Christians colonized the Americas. Boarding schools were created to destroy Native American culture, no matter the harm done to the children who were forced to attend them. Many churches openly supported slavery. Incidentally, on this date in 1909, the NAACP was founded in Springfield, Illinois, after race riots there. Denominations have continued to splinter over the past fifty years because of a variety of social issues that ultimately revolve around the question of who is to be included in God’s kingdom and who should have the privilege of leading and teaching God’s people.

We are the unfortunate and unwilling inheritors of this legacy. We can say that we’re not like those other Christians who did all of those horrible things, but we are tainted by the sins committed by our predecessors whether we acknowledge them or not.

Last week, I talked about our calling to be the light of the world. We should not be dentists to the world, but we should allow Christ to examine us and to show us our failings. In order to shine Christ’s love on others, we need to make ourselves worthy of carrying His love. We need to examine ourselves individually, as a congregation, as a denomination, and as a part of the universal Christian church to expose the ways in which we have caused or perpetuated harm.

Often, we commit sins of omission rather than commission. We fail to take responsibility for being a force for good in a broken world. Elie Wiesel famously said:

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

Elie Wiesel

Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor who saw firsthand what happens when good people fail to act. Neutrality helps the oppressor. We who are strong must help those who are weak.

When I think about all the ways Christianity has sinned over the last two millennia, and the legacy of that sinfulness in terms of poverty and oppression, I become overwhelmed. I cannot undo four centuries of white European oppression of people of color in the United States, done either in God’s name or with the church’s consent. I cannot undo the harm that was done by marauding Christians throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. If I spent the entire rest of my life working for peace and reconciliation and restitution of what has been stolen, the most I could hope for is a drop in the bucket, an infinitesimal good among an enormous evil. Even if our congregation or whole denomination decided that was our only objective, we could barely move the needle.

The reality is that the world is broken in ways that I can’t heal, and that we as a group cannot heal. But, we are a people of hope, not hopelessness. We are a people who believe in a God who can overcome sin and even death. We worship a risen Christ who promises eternal life in his kingdom. Reconciliation may be impossible for us, but with God, all things are possible.

Jesus commands us to be reconciled with our siblings in the kingdom. If you’ll notice, he didn’t say, “If someone has wronged you and you are holding a grudge, go and be reconciled to them before offering your gift at the altar.” No. He said, “If you have wronged someone, go and be reconciled to them.” The onus is upon the party who has committed the sin.

Again, you may say that you haven’t broken any relationships that need to be healed. But Jesus sets the bar impossibly high and asks us to broaden our perspective. Think about the people who are not here today and why. At least some of them are people that we know who have been hurt by our actions or inaction. Many more of them are people that we don’t know, but who hold us accountable for the sins of the Church.

Being the light of the world means showing love to those who need it. Jesus says that we should be reconciled to those who have a claim against us. Relationships are healed one-on-one. Relationships are healed when the person who is in the wrong reaches out in humility and asks for forgiveness. Relationships are healed when two people come together and experience God’s presence, the binding power of the Holy Spirit. Relationships are healed when you are willing to own your role in the harm that has been done, or in perpetuating a system that is harmful, or in enabling harm through your silence or inaction.

This is hard. This can be painful. But ultimately, healing comes only when you build something new and beautiful as you work towards a greater good.

Let me tell you about a situation I was in right at the beginning of my tenure as department chair, back in August. There is an endowed professorship that historically was tied to my department. The previous professor who held that position left in summer 2021. The end of the story is that the position is no longer restricted to my department, and there is an active search right now to fill the professorship with a new hire in a different department. This was an extremely painful experience, right after I took over. I was extremely angry at various administrators, which reached its climax with a call to my dean that I regret.

The story has a happy ending of sorts. The dean and I have a pretty good relationship now. He understood where I was coming from, and I eventually understood that there were just miscommunications along the way. Also, the root of the problem wasn’t any evil act on anyone’s part. Rather, the problem came about because of a set of mutually incompatible expectations and a lack of sufficient resources. It resulted not from a personal failure but from a systemic failure.

So often, our interpersonal relationships are damaged by these systemic issues. There isn’t enough time or money or space to satisfy everyone’s needs. Saying yes to one good thing means saying no to another good thing that deserves a yes. What we say is not always the same as what other people hear, and vice versa. Decisions that were made a year or decade or century ago have repercussions that are still felt. The systems are too big for us to change on our own.

But what we can do is to heal relationships one at a time. I cannot resolve the university’s lack of sufficient resources, but I can develop a good relationship with my colleagues so that we can work together towards the greater good of serving our future alumni. I cannot resolve all of the harm done by the Christian church over the centuries, but I can show Christ’s love to those who suffer because of the church’s actions.

Jesus sets the bar impossibly high. He asks us to live in this life just the same as we will live in his eternal kingdom. He asks us to be perfect in an imperfect world. He says all these things knowing that we cannot possibly reach that ideal. But he also promises to fill us with the Holy Spirit who can help us grow in grace and become more Christ-like. He also promises forgiveness when we forgive, new life when we abide in him, and a glorious future that he is preparing for us.

Not every relationship can be salvaged. Not every harm can be remedied. But in baptism, we have each been claimed by Christ and responded by promising to be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. We embody God’s Word when we bring peace to a violent world, when we heal broken relationships, when we enable the oppressed to go free and flourish. We may fall short—in fact, we will fall short—but Christ will be with us by the Holy Spirit, helping us to do God’s will if we will only try. We are Christ’s body, Christ’s eyes and ears and hands and mouth to everyone we meet as we heal what is broken in this world. Let our yes be yes, as we answer our calling to be vessels of Christ’s reconciling love. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on February 5, 2023. Based on Matthew 5:13-20.

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Today, we are continuing the Sermon on the Mount. This is arguably the most important part of the Gospel According to Matthew, and sometimes is treated as the “canon within the canon.” Some Christian sects, such as Anabaptists like Mennonites and the Amish, elevate the Sermon on the Mount above other teachings, basically viewing the Gospel through the lens of this sermon. It contains some of the most famous teachings of Jesus, like the Beatitudes that Susan spoke about a couple of weeks ago.

The passage I just read starts with two of the most popular images to describe the church: salt and light. From a modern perspective, it is sometimes hard to understand the cultural depth of these two images. Let me first speak briefly about salt.

How can salt lose its saltiness? What does it mean to be “salt of the earth”? I’ve read a bunch of different commentaries with different explanations, so I’m not sure which is right. One possibility is that Judean salt was impure and would be kept in a sack. The actual sodium chloride would leach out faster than some of the other constituents, leaving rocks that were of no use but to be trampled under foot. Another possibility that makes more sense to me is that salt was traditionally used as a fertilizer. Too much salt kills plants, but a modest amount helps poor soil, a little bit like adding lime. For me, that squares with being “salt of the earth.” So we are supposed to bring new growth to barren lands, or barren hearts.

What I mostly want to talk about today is light. I would bet that everyone here today is within arm’s reach of a light source. I personally keep one in my pocket. If you look around, you’ll see little lights on the microphones and big lights hanging from the ceiling. Lorie has a light over her head, and I’m looking right into some bright lights. Lights are everywhere.

Indeed, lighting needs have driven technology far more than we appreciate. In ancient times, the primary source of light was lamps filled with animal fat, whether from cows or goats or fish. These lamps would stink. Rich people would use vegetable oils instead, especially olive oil. Eventually, candles were developed, still using animal fat. This was all the state of the art until the nineteenth century. The need for oil to provide light drove people in the north Atlantic to hunt walruses to local extinction. Then it drove the global whale trade.

The first major change was the use of coal, petroleum, and natural gas. In the nineteenth century, coal gas lamps became common in cities. A lamplighter would go along the street each evening and light the gas lamps to brighten the way. Homes were plumbed with gas lines. With the advent of petroleum, many people switched to kerosene lanterns. Think about this: the oil industry was born in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, but the Ford Model T, which was the first mass-produced automobile, didn’t go on the market until 1908. What were people using the oil for? Primarily, for light.

And what drove Edison’s pursuit of electrical technology? Light. He patented and commercialized the incandescent bulb in 1880 and revolutionized our use of light. Since then, we have developed more sophisticated light sources like fluorescent and LED bulbs.

Light is foundational to society. It allows us to navigate at night and indoors. It enables us to search for what we have lost. It allows us to read and to learn.

In Matthew, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” Yet the Gospel According to John opens poetically, saying, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” John wrote that Christ was the light of all people. How do we square this with Jesus’s words saying that we are the light of the world? Well, Paul described the Church as Christ’s body. Christ is the light, but we are the vessels of that light. We are the lamps filled with the oil of the Holy Spirit, burning brightly with the love of Christ. We shine, not because of who we are ourselves, but because we carry the light of Christ’s love. Jesus came to teach us how to become vessels of his love, lamps burning brightly in a dark world.

Being the light is a prophetic task. I subscribe to a daily email from the Center for Action and Contemplation, a Franciscan center founded and led by Father Richard Rohr. Their theme in 2023 is The Prophetic Path. So far, the focus has been on Jesus as a prophet. Often, we think of prophets as those who tell the future, but in reality, a prophet is someone who speaks the Truth, with a capital T, about the present. The prophet sees what’s going on in the world and points it out. Father Rohr wrote, “What is a prophet? Let me try this as a definition: one who names the situation truthfully and in its largest context. When we can name the situation truthfully and in its largest context, it cannot get pulled into interest groups and political expediency. … We don’t want the big frame. No one wants the big picture. … The prophet or prophetess speaks truthfully and in the largest context.”

Think about the first prophet, Moses. Yes, he told the Israelites about the Promised Land of Canaan, but more importantly, he denounced the evil of Pharaoh and the might of God to overcome that evil. All throughout the Old Testament, we hear about prophets speaking of the evil being done in Israel or Judah. Prophets like Amos denounce the way that the powerful mistreat the poor. He said:

For three transgressions of Israel,

    and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,

because they sell the righteous for silver

    and the needy for a pair of sandals—

they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth

    and push the afflicted out of the way;

Amos 2:6-7a

Amos goes on to proclaim that destruction is coming, but his primary message is that the present order of things is evil and not aligned with God’s will. That is the prophetic task, and that is what it means to be light. Like a spotlight, the prophet focuses the people’s attention on specific ways in which the world is broken, calling them to repent and fix the broken parts of their lives and their communities and their society.

Sometimes, the situation is so dire that a prophet is needed to proclaim Truth to the masses. Martin Luther King, Jr., was just such a prophet, speaking out against the systems and structures that perpetuated evil dating back centuries. But prophets like him are few and far between. Most often, we are dealing with the mundane, the casual, day-to-day shortcomings in our lives. Growing in God’s love is a process that takes time.

In that sense, we can be like the light of a dentist. Now, I only know one person who enjoys going to the dentist, and that’s Jesse. But most of us go to the dentist regularly to make sure we have good, healthy teeth and gums, or to correct problems that have emerged over the years. When we lived in Arkansas, our dentist was not very good. I think he just wasn’t very thorough. When we moved to Illinois, Rhonda and I went to a new dentist who found all of the things he had overlooked. Both of us needed root canals, in addition to several fillings. Our new dentist had better tools that allowed her to see the problems deep in our teeth and correct them before they got even worse. That was an unpleasant experience that played out over several months, but the alternative would have been even more suffering and eventually lost teeth.

In the same way, when the light of Christ’s love shines on the dark parts of our lives, it can be painful. If you really take Jesus’s teachings seriously, you will see all sorts of unpleasant aspects of your life: ways that you have mistreated your neighbor, ways that you have failed to love God with all your heart, ways that you have sinned by getting your priorities out of whack. Some people fear that experience, just as some people fear the dentist, but the reality is that hiding from God just delays the inevitable. If you do not root out problems when they are small, they fester and grow and ultimately can take over your life.

Now, I’m not advising you to be like a dentist, identifying all of the problems in other people. That’s a path that leads to being judged a hypocrite and alienating the people you care about. Christianity has earned a reputation for hypocrisy because churches so often criticize others while condoning sin among their members and leaders. As Jesus said elsewhere, “Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” What I’m saying is that each person needs to let Christ illuminate themselves to find those sinful parts of their lives and root them out, so that they can become Christ’s light to others.

Because that was Jesus’s commandment in this passage. Be the light! We have been given an amazing gift, the gift of membership in Christ’s family, blanketed with Christ’s love. Jesus says it’s as if we are a lamp. What is the purpose of a lamp? Let me ask it this way: Do you naturally desire to look at a lamp? Probably not. When I run at dusk or after dark, headlights are a real problem. When a light is shining right in my eyes, it becomes all that I can see. When the car passes, I am momentarily blinded until my eyes adjust. We are not drawn to light like moths. Rather, we use light to illuminate our path.

We are not called to be a dentist’s light, rooting out evil in other people no matter how painful. We are not called to be a flashlight shining in people’s eyes and blinding them to the world around them. We should not expect that our light will draw people to us like moths to the flame. Rather, we are called to be a streetlamp, illuminating the path to goodness. We don’t need to be a bright beacon like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Dorothy Day or William Barber or Desmond Tutu. We just need to be a part of the process of life and shine a little bit of light, a little bit of love, when we find someone in a dark place.

Jesus commands us to shine our light on the world to reveal the good and the bad, and to enable people to see a path to God. We are all people on a journey, one that ultimately leads to the eternal light of God’s presence. In the meantime, some people are walking in darkness, frightened of the world around them, unaware of God’s presence in their lives. We who know Christ know God’s love. We walk in the light of that love and can channel it to shine for others.

Let’s not put our light under a bushel. Instead, let’s shine for the world. That means exhibiting God’s love for the world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” God loves THE WORLD. Not just some people, but the WHOLE WORLD. Unfortunately, many people do not know the loving God that we know. They may have heard of a judgmental God, one who only loves people who act in a certain way or believe a certain thing, or one who condemns people who act in other ways. We know a God who loves everyone, who desires that each person should walk in the light of Her love.

Let us seek to be a church that preaches the true Gospel, the Good News that the kingdom of God is at hand for everyone. Let us be light in the darkness of people’s lives so that they may see the path that leads to God. Let us not be afraid of the dark, but know that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will never overtake it. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on Baptism of the Lord Sunday, January 8, 2023. Based on Matthew 3:13-17.

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We often think of baptism as a quintessentially Christian ritual that sets us apart from Jews. In reality, it was a re-imagining of the mikveh. Throughout the Torah, and especially in Leviticus, there are commandments to “wash with water.” For example, Leviticus 17:14-16:

“For the life of every creature—its blood is its life; therefore I have said to the Israelites, ‘You shall not eat the blood of any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood; whoever eats it shall be cut off.’ All persons, native-born or alien, who eat what dies of itself or what has been torn by wild animals shall wash their clothes and bathe themselves in water and be unclean until the evening; then they shall be clean. But if they do not wash themselves or bathe their body, they shall bear their guilt.”

Leviticus 17:14-16

Uncleanness is different from sin. There are other parts of Leviticus that talk about sins like murder and stealing. Uncleanness is a ritual status that keeps a person out of the community. Think about Paul’s writings about Jews and Greeks eating together. Mainstream Jewish thought in Paul’s time was that Greeks, or Gentiles, were unclean, and therefore not suitable to eat with or associate with. Jews could become unclean for a variety of reasons spelled out in Leviticus, and in fact, ritual uncleanness was a part of daily life. But all uncleanness could be resolved. Depending on the circumstances, maybe there was a sacrifice needed, or maybe there was a waiting time, or maybe there was an inspection. But in practically all cases, the uncleanness was ended by a ritual bath, or mikveh.

The mikveh was also used to prepare a priest for service. Jews in normal daily life would accumulate some uncleanness, but nothing insurmountable. Priests, though, had to be totally clean, so before being anointed, they needed to ritually bathe.

The mikveh was and still is used to prepare anyone who wants to convert to Judaism. Jews generally don’t proselytize any more, but occasionally someone will want to become Jewish. Men need to be circumcised, of course, but both men and women need to ritually bathe. The mikveh washes away their uncleanness, accrued during a life separated from God, and brings them into the Jewish community.

It was this ritual bath that John the Baptist re-imagined as his baptism. He called people to repentance and a renewed relationship with God. He extended the concept of ritual uncleanness to moral uncleanness, sinfulness that needed to be washed away. Even the Pharisees and Sadducees saw the merit in ritual bathing, so they came to him. John embraced the Law of Moses but not the religious establishment. He was in some sense like the Christian reformers of the sixteenth century. Like Luther or Zwingli or Calvin, who accepted Christianity but rejected the Pope and the Roman Catholic hierarchy and its teachings, John the Baptist accepted the Law as taught in scripture and in the synagogues, but rejected the high priest and the Temple power structures. He was a fundamentalist of sorts. He proclaimed that the Jews of his day were inheritors of an ancient covenant but had fallen short of their obligations. They had become unclean not by eating non-kosher foods but by ignoring the poor, the widow, and the orphan, and by appeasing the Roman authorities. Like many back-to-basics reformers, he attracted a number of followers who could sense that there was something wrong in their lives.

Into this mix, Jesus appears. By submitting to John’s baptism, Jesus implicitly endorses John’s world view. By baptizing Jesus, John implicitly endorses Jesus’s ministry. This scene is a transition of power, a demonstration that John and Jesus acknowledge each other’s legitimacy and Jesus’s superiority.

If we think of baptism solely as washing our sins away, we are left to wonder why Jesus had to do it. We believe that he was the Son of God and therefore incapable of sin. So why did he need to be baptized?

Well, think back to the purpose of the mikveh. Ritual bathing isn’t about sins so much as about community. If you do something to become unclean, you cannot worship God and are separated from the holy gathering. After becoming clean, you are welcomed back into full membership in the community and are able to approach God with confidence. Jesus enters John’s community and literally enters his stream of thought as he is baptized in the waters of the Jordan River.

In the past year, we have welcomed two new members of Christ’s body through the sacrament of baptism. If all goes well, we will welcome another this year. I have been working with Cassie over the past month to teach her about Presbyterianism. One important lesson was about sacraments. Roman Catholicism has seven sacraments, but Protestant churches just have the two that Jesus did: baptism and communion. Baptism is a one-and-done sacrament. It’s a grafting onto Christ’s body, which is the Church. Different denominations and Christian movements have different understandings of its function and requirements, and so some only acknowledge baptism done the “right” way. For example, Catholics only acknowledge Catholic baptisms done by a Catholic priest. Missouri Synod Lutheran churches do not acknowledge baptisms done in our denomination or even in ELCA Lutheran churches, I think because we ordain women. Baptist churches and churches in the Christian Restoration movement like Greentree only acknowledge baptism by full immersion, undertaken by someone who is old enough to make a conscious decision.

We Presbyterians are pretty open-minded. We acknowledge any baptism that satisfies two key requirements: water is involved, and the baptism is trinitarian, done in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We reject baptisms from Mormons and other non-trinitarian sects, but we acknowledge infant baptism, or adult baptism, done by sprinkling or immersion, performed by someone of any gender.

Baptism is a visible sign and seal of God’s invisible grace. Since we cannot control God’s grace, we cannot act as gatekeepers for baptism. The reason I led Bryan through classes, and I’m teaching Cassie now, and the session “inspects” candidates for baptism (or their parents, in the case of infants), is to make sure they know what they’re signing up for. Baptism grafts a person onto Christ’s body. What does that mean? Well, they are supposed to then act as if they were a part of Christ’s body. They are supposed to be Christ’s eyes and ears and hands and mouth in the world. People are baptized into a particular community, so they need to understand the expectations of that community.

Those expectations can sometimes be draining. It can be hard to love people the way God does. It can be hard to trust in God’s providence. That’s why we have the second sacrament, communion. The Lord’s Supper provides sustenance as we grow into the people God intends us to be. It’s like when a farmer grafts a branch onto a tree: it will only grow if the host tree provides nutrients to sustain it. Each month, we partake of Christ’s body to sustain our work in the world and our growth as Christians. To help us to fulfill our baptismal vows.

Let’s review what those vows are. Before being baptized, each candidate needs to answer affirmatively to three questions.

One: Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world? This should be the easy one, but everyone here knows how hard it really is. I would guess that everyone here commits a sin of some sort every day. I doubt many people here have committed murder, but as Jesus taught, being angry is almost as bad. Early church fathers taught that having two coats is a form of stealing, since the second one should be given to someone who has none. Boy, I’m guilty of that one! Not only do we all sin, but many times, we compromise with the forces of evil in the world. You all can probably guess my political leanings, and I can guess many of yours, but we must all remember that all political parties accommodate some forms of evil. We make compromises so that some good can be achieved, and turn a blind eye to the evils inherent to the systems in which we participate. The world’s political and economic systems are sinful, and that sinfulness infects us all.

Two: Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior, trusting in his grace and love? OK, this really is the easy one. Well, it’s simple, at least. In the Baptist tradition, candidates need to be old enough to make this decision for themselves. In our tradition, parents can make this decision on behalf of their children. The main thing is that you need to acknowledge Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and reject all other gods, including gods like money.

Three: Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love? This is the flip side of the first vow. It is not enough to turn away from evil. We vow to actively pursue good. We vow to study Jesus’s teachings and then to put them into action. We vow to show his love to everyone he loves, which means everyone.

John taught that people should “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” I’ve talked before about salvation and my belief that everyone is saved. Others believe that a person needs to accept Jesus Christ as their savior in this life in order to be raised to eternal life. That belief drives evangelism, because believers are driven to “save souls.” If you believe in universal salvation like I do, the goal is not to save souls, but to save lives. Jesus extended John’s teachings and, like a new Moses, provided rules for how we are all to live in this world. He taught us to love God and also to love our neighbors, and taught us who our neighbor is and how we should love them. Being a good disciple means studying Jesus’s teachings and then putting them into practice to bear good fruit.

Baptism is a rite of passage, like graduation. Remember that a graduation ceremony is called “commencement,” which means “beginning.” It’s an end to one phase and the beginning of a new phase of life. After completing high school or college or some training program, there is a public acknowledgement of your achievements, a welcome into the new community of finishers, and an exhortation to go put your learning to work. I want to tell you about this new ring I’ve been wearing for about a month. There is an organization called the Order of the Engineer. In 1922, a professor at the University of Toronto convinced his colleagues that engineers needed to take a vow to uphold the standards of their profession, and asked Rudyard Kipling to write the vow for them. The first ceremony was held in 1925 in Montreal. Then in 1970, some American engineers adapted the Canadian ceremony and instituted the Order of the Engineer in Cleveland. It’s not a membership organization. It is simply a vow that engineers make that is signified by a stainless-steel ring on the last finger of their working hand. The vow is a public pronouncement of obligations to the standards of the engineering profession, and the ring is a visible sign and reminder of that vow. I have here the certificate that I received. If you could see it, you would recognize that it is signed not by some representative of the Order, but by me. It is another reminder of the vow that I made.

I had never heard of the Order of the Engineer until this past fall, but I have often said that to me, engineering is more than just a job or career or profession, but an identity. So it made perfect sense for me to acknowledge that identity publicly.

In the same way, baptism is an affirmation of a person’s identity as a child of God and a part of the body of Christ. You are all already beloved by God, whether you have been baptized or not. Baptism is a visible sign and seal of invisible grace. It is an external indication of something that happens internally. It is a declaration that you accept God’s love, and a welcome into one particular community of believers as representatives of all the saints in every time and place. It is a beginning of a new life of following Jesus.

Once you have been baptized, you are commissioned to be a disciple of Christ. You are a part of that body of believers who received the Great Commission to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything” that Jesus commands us. Baptism makes God’s grace visible to the person being baptized, who then makes God’s grace visible to the world. We are instruments of baptism for the whole world. Jesus said that streams of living water would come from the heart of those who believe in him. That living water is the love of Christ channeled through each one of us, flowing out to each person we meet.

God desires that the whole world will be transformed into their holy dwelling. God desires that the whole world will be washed of its uncleanness and brought into holy community. We who have been baptized are part of that community. We have pledged to be Christ’s faithful disciples, obeying his Word and showing his love as conduits of his living water. Let us always remember that pledge and strive to be visible signs of an invisible grace at work in each person we meet, binding us together and birthing a new heavenly earth. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on January 1, 2023. Based on Matthew 2. This combines the First Sunday After Christmas Day with Epiphany Sunday.

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The lectionary is a structured way of marching through the Bible each Sunday. Some preachers, like Bob Morrison, don’t like using the lectionary, in part because it leaves stuff out. I figure once I have preached on every text in the lectionary, I might start venturing elsewhere in the Bible. But for now, I’m sticking with it.

The lectionary is a three-year cycle. The Gospel of John is sprinkled through all three years, but each year is primarily organized around one of the three synoptic Gospels: Matthew for year A, Mark for year B, and Luke for year C. The year starts with Advent, so we are just a month into year A. I thought I’d take this opportunity to give you a thumbnail sketch of Matthew since we’ll be in it all year.

The reason we have four Gospels is that they each have a different theme, a different main perspective. The theme of Matthew is that Jesus is like Moses and is leading his people to freedom. The Torah, or Pentateuch, is the first five books of what we call the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. There is a story arc to the Torah that starts with one man, Adam, whose descendants include Jacob, renamed Israel. Jacob and his twelve sons move to Egypt during a famine and are the fathers of twelve tribes. Their relationship with Pharaoh degenerates into slavery, so then Moses is raised up to lead the Israelites to freedom and the Promised Land of Canaan. Along the way, God enters into a covenant relationship with Israel, encapsulated in the Ten Commandments, and also gives them the Law to help them fulfill their end of the covenant. They struggle to follow God’s commands, particularly the prohibition against idolatry, so they are forced to wander in the desert for 40 years. Even Moses is not allowed to enter Canaan, but then the next generation is blessed and told to enter the Promised Land.

Matthew is structured to evoke this same story arc. The parallels are not exact, but are enough to remind the first readers of their origin story. The Gospel is oriented around five discourses, mirroring the five books of the Torah. It starts with a genealogy that situates Jesus in Israel’s history. The discourses include Law-like teachings, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper, which we will be celebrating today, he calls it a new covenant. Then the very end of the Gospel is the Great Commission: Go into all the world.

So here we are near the beginning, and Matthew is trying to establish those parallels. I’m not saying that he fabricated anything, just that he selected story elements that highlight Jesus’s role as the new Moses. The first aspect he tries to evoke is the sense that he is under threat and always on the move. The book of Genesis is a travelogue of sorts. It tells the story of Abraham’s travels, then his son Isaac’s travels, then his son Jacob’s travels, then the grand story of his son Joseph going to Egypt and asking all of his brothers to join him there. In the same way, we see the Holy Family, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, under threat and on the move. They’re in Bethlehem in Judea, but they have to leave and sojourn in Egypt. When the threat is removed, they return to what was Israel but they can’t quite go home. There is still some danger, so they go to Nazareth instead of Bethlehem.

When Jesus shows up, everything changes, and everyone’s lives are up-ended. Poor Mary was not yet married but became pregnant. Poor Joseph is betrothed to a woman who becomes pregnant but apparently with another man’s child. An angel tells him to go through with the marriage anyway, which probably leaves a cloud hanging over their family throughout their lives. Not only does Joseph need to marry this pregnant woman, but he also needs to flee to Egypt, and then move to a different town. Nothing in his life will ever be the same.

In the same way, Jesus commands that we follow him, knowing that our lives will never be the same, and that we will live under threat from the world around us. In that time and place, the major threat against Jesus and his ministry that became Christianity was from the Roman Empire and their client kings and princes, Herod and his sons, in addition to the religious power structures. When Jesus was born, he was destined to die, just like all people. But he was particularly destined to die young because he posed a threat to the people who benefited from the structure of society as it was: rulers who liked to rule, religious authorities who liked their place of authority, and so forth. Anyone who threatens the structure of society can expect to run into problems in their lives.

The Church, with a capital C, is Christ’s body in the world, and is still under threat today. In some parts of the world, there are physical threats. I just listened to an audiobook by David Platt set in the Himalayas. The local Hindus and Buddhists see Christianity as teaching foreign gods that will anger their local gods, in a way that is reminiscent of many stories in the Bible. He tells a story about local leaders burning down the house and worship structure that belonged to a couple of Christian missionaries. He tells another story of tribal leaders literally stoning a Christian couple to death.

Here in America, though, the major threat against the Church is more mundane: irrelevance. I don’t need to tell you a bunch of statistics for you to realize that church attendance and membership are in decline. They have been since the Sixties. Some individual churches are doing just fine, but the broad trend in all denominations in America and western Europe is downward. Why? Lots of reasons, but I think the pandemic revealed the utter irrelevance of the Church to the majority of people. When things shut down in 2020, a lot of church leaders protested and insisted on continuing to meet. Why? Well, they said it was because that was essential to their worship of God, but I think really they were afraid that people would realize that they don’t need to attend worship. People who had already been just going through the motions would realize that they can find spiritual connections and human community without their churches. Even among those gathered here today, I’m guessing that most find community in other organizations as much as in the church—clubs and sororities, service and professional organizations, political parties and activist groups, and so forth.

Churches are also assailed for their hypocrisy. I want to be clear that I’m not speaking of First Presbyterian Church of Rolla specifically, but churches generally. Outsiders see Christian churches as places where we congratulate ourselves for being such good people, without actually having an impact on the community. During the cold snap right before Christmas, I saw a post on Facebook lamenting the fact that churches weren’t opening their doors to the homeless and those who were in places with inadequate heat. My first reaction was that we support the Mission, which provides that service. My second reaction was that we have our own struggles, and we don’t have the people and systems to manage a ministry like that, even for just a single night. But really, that criticism is fair and just one symptom of a broader disengagement from the problems of the world. We talk about them and give money to support organizations that help people, and many of us are part of those organizations, but is that really enough? It’s not enough for the unchurched people in Rolla to see us as reflections of the Light of the world.

As I said, the Gospel according to Matthew is full of Jesus’s teachings of a new Law. We’re in chapter 2; next week will be chapter 3 when Jesus is baptized; then in chapter 5, we have the Sermon on the Mount, which is the first of five discourses. It’s the most explicit set of teachings where he tells his followers to be salt and light for the world. He expands on Moses’s teachings and moves the locus of the Law from external to internal—not only should people not murder, but also they should not be angry. He says that they should love their neighbor and also that they should love their enemies. He says many other things, then says, “Everyone, then, who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.” We are to be not just hearers, but also doers.

The fifth and last discourse ends in Matthew 25. In it, he says that he will sit on the throne of his glory and judge the nations. He will separate the nations between those who cared for the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner, and those nations who did not. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus teaches that we are supposed to care for one another, not just individually but as a community and society and world. He commands us to transform the world. He is concerned not with personal salvation, but with the salvation of all people.

The task before us in this new year is to be doers of the word, not just hearers. I want to return to that story I read about some missionaries in the Himalayas. This couple moved to a little village and built a house and a separate structure for their ministry. They helped the villagers while also teaching about Jesus. One night, a group of militants knocked on their door, with guns and torches. Pointing a gun at the couple, the leader told them that they needed to leave the village and never return. Once the couple was out, the militants burned both structures to the ground. The couple moved on, but stayed in touch with the villagers who had converted to Christianity.

Sometime later, there was a natural disaster that destroyed many homes in that village. When the missionary couple heard, they gathered up all the people they could and returned to the village to help rebuild. Even though their lives had been threatened and their possessions destroyed, they returned. They continued to love their enemies. Afterwards, the leader of the militants, who had been the conduit for so much hate directed at them, felt the love of Christ through the missionaries and converted to Christianity. He donated land for them to rebuild a worship & ministry center. He himself became an outcast and subject to hatred from his former fellow militants, but God’s love was stronger than their hate.

That’s what it means to follow Jesus’s teachings. That’s what it means to love your enemies. If you believe that Jesus loves you, shouldn’t you share that love with others? We are not saved by our works, but are saved for works. Jesus loves us and redeems us into God’s family so that we can serve others and bring them into God’s family.

The Church is now and has always been counter-cultural. In first-century Judea, that meant conflict with the Roman Empire, King Herod, and Herod’s sons. That meant conflict with the religious authorities who benefited from collusion with those secular rulers. That meant death on a cross for Jesus, death by stoning for Stephen, persecution and jail and floggings and executions for many other followers of The Way. Today, being counter-cultural means taking care of each other in an every-man-for-himself world. It means teaching love instead of judgment. It means seeking out the people who others consider problems to be ignored or eliminated and trying to bring them into community. It means working for a world in which all people are valued and know the love of God in their lives. In so doing, we will enter the Promised Land, a transformed world where God lives and reigns forever. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on the Second Sunday of Advent. Based on Matthew 3:1-12.

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Let me start this morning by setting the scene. You may recall that John the Baptist is the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Elizabeth was an old woman and childless, so her pregnancy was a miracle. Zechariah was a priest, so John could have been a priest as well. All priests in the Temple were of the lineage of Aaron, so since his father was in that lineage, John was as well and could have joined the Temple power structure. But he chose a different path.

John is described as wearing clothing of camel’s hair. You may have heard of a “hair shirt.” It’s a coarse garment made of hair that is intentionally irritating to the skin. The point of the hair shirt, or John’s camel’s hair clothing, is mortification of the flesh to help you repent. John’s leather belt would have ensured that his rough clothing was pressed against his skin. The outfit was a way for him to explicitly reject his inheritance, particularly his inherited sins. He verbalizes this rejection by saying, “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” He is rejecting the notion that membership in God’s kingdom comes by birth, and is asserting instead that it comes from God’s will.

The Temple was a massive institution. Observant Jews, as well as Gentiles who acknowledged the supremacy of Yahweh, would come from all over the known world. They would bring animals for sacrifice, or if they were coming from too far away, they would bring money. It was a huge operation that enriched the high priests. Over the centuries, they developed a cozy relationship with whoever was in power. At the time of John’s preaching, the high priests were deeply enmeshed in Roman politics so that they could continue to worship God as they had been taught by their forefathers.

John rejected this institution and went to the wilderness. He called all people to join him in that rejection. He proclaimed that the time was at hand to overturn the existing power structures and enter God’s kingdom instead. His message resonated with the poor and marginalized inhabitants of Judea, who were suffering under Roman rule. His message wasn’t really intended for the Pharisees and Sadducees, though. The Sadducees were aristocrats and the quintessential insiders in the Temple hierarchy. They were beneficiaries of the Temple operations and had everything to lose if the Temple were destroyed. The Pharisees were men of the people, but were busy setting up an alternative institution in the synagogues. Perhaps they weren’t wealthy like the Sadducees, but they still supported a rule-based religious structure.

John the Baptist preached that it was time to shed all of those rules and instead turn towards God. The word “repent” is usually taken to mean “confess your sins and stop doing them.” It’s an English translation of the Greek word metanoia, which more literally means to change one’s mind. It’s a spiritual conversion, a transformative change of heart. John was encouraging people to change the way they thought about the world.

The metaphor he used was separating the wheat from the chaff. Now, many times, this is interpreted to mean that some people are wheat and some people are chaff. Conveniently, those who interpret John’s metaphor in this way see themselves as the wheat and other people as chaff. But anyone who heard John would know that wheat and chaff come from the same plant, the same grain on that plant. Wheat is a form of grass whose seeds are edible. While it grows, the seed, or kernel, is surrounded by thin membranes that are like little leaves. These leaves dry out and are inedible. After being harvested, the wheat must be threshed and winnowed to remove this chaff. Threshing basically involves beating the grains to loosen the chaff from the kernels. Now you have a mixture of kernels that you want and chaff that you don’t. Winnowing is where you toss the mixture in the air and let wind blow the chaff away. If there’s no wind, you need to make wind with a big fan. All of this would be well-known to John’s audience. They would know that the chaff was an essential part of the plant while it was growing, but couldn’t be eaten and so it was something to be discarded.

I am reminded of the Solzhenitsyn quote which I have shared many times with you. In his book The Gulag Archipelago, which is a history of the vast system of prisons and labor camps in the Soviet Union, he wrote, “If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Solzhenitsyn knew that there are no “good” people and no “evil” people, but that indeed we are all good and all evil. Rather than the easy work of separating the evil people out and disposing of them, we must do the hard work of separating the evil out of ourselves.

John’s message is first a call to personal repentance. What is the chaff in your own life? When wheat is growing, the chaff serves an important role. It protects the kernel so that it can grow and develop into something useful. The chaff is what you see when you look at a field of wheat. It hides the kernel from animals who might otherwise steal the food that farmers are trying to provide to society. What is the chaff in your life, and what is the wheat kernel?

I would say that the kernel is that part of you that is made in the image of God. It is the part that is all-loving, that seeks the good of all Creation. It is the part that is building God’s kingdom and transforming society. And yet, every one of us is surrounded by chaff, too. I just listened to an audiobook by Brian McLaren titled, Do I Stay Christian? He has an extended discussion of thirteen biases we have that prevent us from perceiving reality, and a prayer for God’s help to overcome them: confirmation bias, complexity bias, community, contact, and complementarity biases, competence, consciousness, comfort, and political biases, confidence, catastrophe, cash, and conspiracy biases. We are who we are, and we cannot really escape seeing reality through the lenses of these biases. Nor can anyone else, and so we present ourselves to the world in ways that will be acceptable to those who have these biases. We just had a holiday when extended families gather. Often, when families gather together, some people wear a shell that hides their true self and shows their family just what is expected of them. Maybe they hide their political opinions, or their understandings of God, or their financial or job status, or their relationship status, or even their true identities. Hiding our true selves is often necessary to get along in this broken world, but it prevents us from truly participating in God’s kingdom. It prevents us from truly experiencing God’s reconciling love, a love that is stronger than any human hatred, a love that transcends our limited understandings.

So John the Baptist said, Come get baptized. Come shed those things that are preventing you from experiencing God’s kingdom. Shine forth your true self, which is an image of God. Join in holy community that is united by the Holy Spirit that flows like a river through us all. Transform yourself, and in the process, transform the systems and institutions that surround you and have formed you.

Because John was not simply calling individuals to repentance. He was also calling for institutional repentance. He was calling for the Temple hierarchy to be up-ended. He was calling for Judaism to shed the chaff that prevented them from truly experiencing God’s loving community.

Well, a few decades later, the Temple was destroyed and two religions sprouted from its rubble: rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. Then both set about building up some chaff, and here we are 2000 years later with a lot of extra stuff hanging around. In a recent podcast about the Eastern Orthodox churches, a scholar pointed out that the Church preceded the Bible. Israel had been worshipping for centuries before anyone wrote down the scriptures that we know as the Old Testament, and the choice of books to include in the canon wasn’t settled until sometime after Jesus’s birth. The earliest books in the New Testament were written decades after Christ’s resurrection. So the Bible itself is a window into God’s reality, but only one window among many, and one that came a little bit late. Over the centuries since the Bible was written, our denomination and its predecessors piled up creeds and confessions on top of it. I would now like to read to you some selections from our Book of Confessions, which since 2016 has included 12 different confessional statements.

From the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made.” Beautiful poetry, right? But what does it mean? We probably couldn’t all agree on what it means that Jesus Christ was begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.

Now from the Scots Confession: “We abandon the teaching of the Roman Church and withdraw from its sacraments; firstly because their ministers are not true ministers of Christ Jesus (indeed they even allow women, whom the Holy Ghost will not permit to preach in the congregation to baptize) and, secondly, because they have so adulterated both the sacraments with their own additions that no part of Christ’s original act remains in its original simplicity.” So here we have both misogynist and anti-Catholic bias in one sentence. The Book of Confessions does have a footnote and discussion that at least partially rejects this section, but it remains in the book.

I’ll spare you the Second Helvetic Confession, but there is a long section where it first elevates Lactantius, Epiphanius, and Jerome, then rejects the Epicureans, Manichaeans, Marcionites, Pelagians, and other heresies. If anyone can explain to me what the Pelagian heresy was, let’s chat after worship!

For a while, the only official creed Presbyterians affirmed was the Westminster Confession. In fact, there are other Presbyterian denominations that still hold to that tradition. However, our Book of Confessions actually has two parallel versions, because two of our parent denominations had diverged in places.

Some would say that the Westminster Confession is what makes us Presbyterian. But what does that really mean? OK, I know the definition of Presbyterian and its Greek root word that means “elder.” But if you asked a random person on the street what a Presbyterian was, they wouldn’t really be able to explain it. It’s just a word. I was at an interfaith dialogue when someone said, “P-Presbyterian, is that like P-Pentecostal?” I explained that no, Presbyterians and Pentecostals are about as different as any two Christian sects could be. Even for us insiders, how would you explain the difference between Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, UCC, and so forth? We are in full communion with the Moravians and the Reformed Church in America, but I don’t really know what either of them are, let alone how they differ from Presbyterians.

This is all chaff. We are supposed to be the body of Christ. We are supposed to be image-bearers who exemplify the unity of God’s eternal kingdom. And yet, we keep finding ways to divide ourselves, to decide who is “in” and who is “out,” to decide which particular interpretations of scripture are correct, and so forth.

Indeed, we even divide ourselves over externalities that have nothing to do with God. I would say that the primary difference between the Episcopal church and PC(USA) is the form of worship. Along with the rest of the World Anglican Communion, they use the Book of Common Prayer, with all the historical liturgical trappings of high church. I would say that we’re not exactly “low church,” but certainly not as liturgical as the Episcopalians. If we look around the sanctuary today, we see a Christmas tree, an Advent wreath, and other indications that Christmas is coming. I would bet that you wouldn’t see any of that in a Baptist church or in a nondenominational church in the Christian Restoration movement, like Greentree or Ridgeview.

Now, I’m not arguing that we throw out the Book of Confessions or the Christmas tree. I’m as committed to the institution of the church as anyone. What I’m saying is that these are tools, and like any tools, they can be used as weapons. They can be used to bring us closer to God, to remind us that we are made in God’s image, to reveal to us the kernel of God’s divine spark within each of us, to create an institution that reveals God’s love for all humanity. OR, they can be used as weapons to divide us from one another, to hide our light from the world, to keep out those who we deem unworthy because they don’t believe or behave or look or act like we do.

That was John’s core message, and Jesus’s core message. Jesus said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” He proclaimed that all of the trappings of religiosity would fall away, leaving only the Holy Spirit to guide us into his eternal kingdom. John said that Jesus would separate the wheat from the chaff and burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. As long as we are living in this world, we need the chaff to protect us as we grow into the people God intends. But as much as possible, we should shed those things that are only serving to separate us from one another.

This Advent, we are hopeful that God will do a new thing among us. Last Sunday, we heard an inspiring message from Pastor Greg Emery who has been helping us through this transition period. He gave us encouragement to keep on going and keep on hoping. We pray each Sunday that the Pastor Nominating Committee will find a new spiritual leader who will bring about our rebirth. But God is already at work among us. God is already calling us to shed those things that feel comfortable but no longer serve God’s kingdom. God is already raising up children of Abraham. God is ready for us to let our light shine forth as we bear God’s image to our community and our world. Be ready: Even now, the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Those things we cling to that no longer bear fruit for God’s kingdom are passing away. Let go, and let God lead you, and lead us, into a glorious future where we bear fruit worthy of God’s love for the world. Amen.

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