Sermon: Love Out Loud

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

August 23, 2026, Pentecost 13A

Romans 12:9-21

 

 

Love Out Loud

 

What does love look like?

It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men.

This is what love looks like.

 

This quote is attributed to Saint Augustine, one of the great ancestors of the church, who lived from 354-430. If nothing else it demonstrates that for a very long time, the Christian church has understood that any claim to live in the love of Christ will of necessity be visible, made known not in words but in deeds of compassion directed both at one another in the body of Christ and to any who suffer, whether “Christian” or not. Christlike love doesn’t get to be selective.

This reading from Paul’s writing to the Romans, continuing Paul’s encouragement to his Roman readers and hearers, moves even more firmly in this direction, showing to his listeners “what it looks like” to live in the love of God that redeems the human body and renews the human mind. In many ways the most similar passage to this in Paul’s output is no less than the famous “love chapter,” 1 Corinthians 13, which captures Paul at his most poetic and even ecstatic as he unfolds the beauties of love. The present passage passes over similar ground; the principal difference is that in Romans, Paul narrows his focus to how this divine love looks specifically when it is lived out in the body of Christ.

Unfortunately, most biblical translations don’t quite capture this powerful description because of a Greek grammatical choice. Certain verb forms in Koine Greek can be ambiguous when a verb is omitted, implied rather than made explicit. The beginning of verse 9 is such an example; were you to read it in a word-for-word translation it would simply say “love without pretense.” Most translations assume an imperative verb: “Let love be genuine,” says the NRSV, while the NIV uses "Love must be sincere." However, a reading as an indicative verb – “love is without pretense” – captures in some ways what Paul is encouraging on his hearers in a way more consistent with his ongoing teaching; namely, that all of the life they live in Christ, their very redemption as living offerings and transformation by the renewing of their minds, is itself dependent on the same love of God. Like that redemption and that transformation, this “love without pretense” is itself a gift of God, “not the result of works, so that no one may boast,” to borrow from the letter to the Ephesians.

With this in mind, the series of maxims that follows becomes more clearly a description of the love of God lived out in the body of Christ, and “what it looks like.”

Before that chorus of the characteristics of love, Paul amplifies his initial statement. His language in doing so is strong: “hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.” The word really is that strong; other possible translations include such vivid words or phrases as “abhor” or “utterly detest.” More than just “dislike” is at work here; the rejection of evil really is an active and emphatic and visceral thing, much as “holding fast” to the good implies an active and vigorous dynamic rather than merely passively “being good.” And this, Paul teaches, is characteristic of genuine, unpretentious, un-hypocritical love.

What follows from here not only reflects Paul’s description of living in love, but also shows one of those two poles of such un-hypocritical love: hating evil and holding fast to what is good. Altogether, these maxims remind us that living in love, far from a quiet and passive private emotion, is active and vigorous, something that can only be done “out loud” - a thing churches struggle with both then and now.

Paul isn’t making it easy here, presumably because he knows from experience. Remember, this is a man who has seen the inside of a few prison cells in his career, and in at least a few cases it was because that prison cell was the only way to keep him from being harmed by those opponents of his mission who aimed to shut him up once and for all. He had, in short, known persecution, even as he had inflicted persecution before his dramatic conversion on the Damascus Road. He had faced what any sane person would call evil, and he had faced it from his own people, because he had chosen to follow this call God had thrust upon him back on that road to Damascus.

So, alongside fairly easy instructions such as “do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord,” or “contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers,” or “rejoice with those who rejoice,” there are the more challenging traits of living in the body. “Weep with those who weep” isn’t necessarily hard, but it is hard. “Live in harmony with one another” gets challenging at times. Sometimes we can get caught wanting to “claim to be wiser than you are,” even realizing we’ve already been warned against that earlier in the chapter.

But then things get really hard. There are those that prompt the accusation that the preacher has “done quit preachin’ and gone to meddlin’.”

Take this statement: “if it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.“ Sounds challenging enough as it is, but it’s still our tendency to weaken it, to reduce it to a “don’t make trouble” instruction that we can keep quietly and without anybody noticing. Trouble is, that’s not what it is to live transformed by that renewing of our minds. Like these other instructions, it’s not passive. It requires active doing.

Maybe it’s captured best by Clarence Jordan, biblical scholar and preacher and also founder of Koinonia Farm, established as a deliberately interracial farm and community in south Georgia at peak of the Jim Crow era. Jordan’s unique contribution to biblical instruction was the “Cotton Patch Gospel,” a combination of scholarly translation of most of the New Testament with a striking re-contextualization; what if these events had happened and these letters had been written in the American South of his time? The “Cotton Patch” translation of this verse captures vividly the active sense of Paul’s instruction, perhaps because Jordan himself had experienced it vividly in his own life at Koinonia: “If it’s possible – that is, from your side – WAGE PEACE WITH ALL MANKIND.” (That last phrase, by the way, is in all caps.)

WAGE PEACE. Not a passive, unobtrusive thing at all, living transformed by the renewing of our minds. It’s active. It gets in the way. It interferes with the established interests. It does not resign itself to the “peace” of a racially and economically stratified and walled-off nation or society. It doesn’t acquiesce to the powerful oppressing and exploiting the powerless. And that’s hard.

And it only gets worse from here. “Bless those who persecute you”? “Do not repay anyone evil for evil”? “…never avenge yourselves”? “If your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them drink”?

And then the capper: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Seriously, God, how could you let Paul write anything so crazy as that? Here we go again with the active, “out loud” stuff. It’s one thing to talk like that in the safety and comfort of our own sanctuary; it’s quite another to do so when someone is glowering at you and brandishing a semiautomatic weapon. And yet this isn’t a passive life we’re called to live in the body of Christ; we live in this love among ourselves, yes, but we also welcome the sojourner and extend that good even to those who hate us. Seriously, this kind of thing makes a preacher reconsider this vocation.

Mind you, this set of instruction isn’t through yet; there's more in chapter 13. But mercy, it’s challenging enough just going this far. And it reminds us just how far that transformation has yet to go in each of us or in all of us. And yet this is what we are submitting to, this is the call we are accepting in our lives, if we claim to be any part of the body of Christ.

To love actively; to be committed to Christ and to one another; to be always ready to reach out to those most in need and to defend those most persecuted; to be active in naming and calling out and utterly detesting and abhorring and hating evil, even when it rears its head right next to us, and yet to feed the hungry enemy; this is what it looks like when we truly submit ourselves as living offerings, and are transformed by the renewing of our minds instead of being conformed to the world.

And man, oh, man, is it hard. It’s hard to believe. It’s hard even to imagine. And it’s certainly hard to trust.

Nevertheless, Thanks be to God, anyway. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #372, O For a World; #---, Let God's own love; #14, For the Beauty of the Earth

Sermon: The One With All the Languages

  

First Presbyterian Church

May 24, 2026, Pentecost A

Numbers11:24-30; Acts 2:1-21

 

The One with All the Languages

 

 

One of the things that sometimes needs to be set straight about Pentecost is that no, this is not the first time the Holy Spirit is invoked in scripture. Today's first reading provides one such counterexample, as a stressed-out Moses pleads for help and God invokes that Spirit to be bestowed upon seventy elders of the people of Israel so that they might share some of the burden of leadership. That Spirit's appearance is made manifest in an outburst of frenetic prophesying, one that spills over to include two men back in the camp, not numbered among those seventy. Joshua (in a typical fit of church leadership) wants to have those two men silenced and that unexpected outburst of Holy Spirit squelched, but Moses (in a typical fit of pastoral weariness) stuffs that idea, crying out that he wished everyone could prophesy. It's not how we typically expect to see the Spirit play out, to be sure, especially since this prophetic outburst is only a one-time thing, but it still serves to remind us that the Holy Spirit is not a new thing as the disciples show up for this Pentecost morning.

While the Holy Spirit isn't new in this case, there are certainly some distinctive features of this particular Spirit-event that are worth noting on this one day of the liturgical year when the Spirit comes to the forefront. The Ascension of Jesus got all of four words in the ancient creeds ("he ascended into heaven"), and in one case the Holy Spirit doesn't do a lot better. The Apostles' Creed, one of the oldest statements of faith in Christendom, has this to say on the subject:

 

I believe in the Holy Ghost...

 

That's it. Thankfully the Nicene Creed does a bit better, giving a whole paragraph to the subject. The church has some history of not really paying attention to this particular member of the Trinity, perhaps to its own harm; it is the Spirit most of all that is the most direct participant in the day-to-day life of the follower of Christ, and it is this Pentecost in-breaking of the Spirit that marks the ongoing truth of this presence and participation.

Since we last heard from this group, we know that they have indeed remained inJerusalem as they were instructed. Acts also mentions in an interesting aside that they elected one of their number to replace Judas, the traitor against Jesus whose grisly death is reported in an aside. And they have waited, probably wondering what exactly they were waiting for (as noted last week). Now they're about to find out.

The description itself lingers: "a sound like the rush of a violent wind"; "divided tongues, as of fire"; and then, the sound of all the languages.

Let's be clear; this group of followers is speaking languages they don't know, but that other peoples outside of Judea or Palestine do speak. Ecstatic utterances in tongues that require interpretation (what we commonly call "speaking in tongues") come later in Acts; this event is one of miraculous speech and hearing.

Those tongues matter because just outside their windows there is a crowd of folks gathered in Jerusalem for the festival of the harvest that was Pentecost in the Jewish tradition, a group ripe to hear something good each in their own language.

Have you had that experience of being in a crowd with people speaking any language but your own? The particular challenge of this was pressed home for me many years ago when I was in Quebec City for a conference back in my academic days. The conference itself was held in English but going out for dinner or frankly anything else meant being among French speakers. While some also spoke English well enough to understand me, that wasn't always the case. I'm horrible with languages, and French is one of my worst. At least in this case the worst that came of it was that I declined the sugar I very much wanted for my coffee.

These people were Jews from, as a Judean would have seen it, all over the world. The list of locations provided here literally denotes a whole range of nationalities from the east, north, west, and south of Jerusalem, a way of evoking that which we sometimes metaphorically call "the four corners" of the world. Before these followers of Jesus get sent out into the world, the world has come to them. And because of this outburst of the Holy Spirit, the world at the windows is able to hear good news, each in their own language.

This is not always a thing the church or the world has taken to heart. The Western world in particular has a particular imperial history of forcing their own languages upon those peoples whom they encounter, or frequently whom they conquer. On the North American frontier, those seeking to drive out or subjugate the Native peoples made a very specific and fixed point of pushing to eradicate the languages those so-called "savages" spoke. An Indian, in the vernacular of the time, could only be tolerated if every trace of "Indian-ness" was driven out of them, and it was presumed that one of the surest ways to do so was to take away their language, especially in the "Indian" schools that appeared on those frontiers. (I first learned of these schools while down in Lawrence, KS, where one such school was eventually changed into the current Haskell Indian Nations University, there were two such schools in Illinois in the late 19th century). The students at such schools were forbidden to speak their own language, being forced to speak English, or possibly French in Canadian schools. This, of course, was in addition to numerous other oppressions visited upon them, quite literally as a means of separating them from their families and their peoples for good.

What happens in today's scripture is the complete and total opposite of that act of emotional violence. Those seekers who came to Jerusalem, thanks to the working of the Holy Spirit, were welcomed in their own languages. They weren't stripped of who they were, weren't denied their own humanity and worth, in order to hear the gospel. One could even say that this Holy Spirit outbreak was for these listeners, the ones who heard the commotion of that sound like a violent wind and wondered what was going on, as much as it was for these followers of Jesus, or maybe even more so.

We don't really know how it worked from here forward, as the believers (including possibly those who became believers on this day) were scattered from Jerusalem into, well, all the world. There were certainly going to be language barriers to be faced as these followers of Christ spread further and further out from Judea. But these followers knew from experience that the Holy Spirit would find a way for them to communicate with those waiting to hear the gospel.

Do we actually believe that? It can be a scary thing to find ourselves in a world where, more and more, it seems like most folks out there aren't speaking our "language," whether literally or more figuratively. While Pentecost can mean an awful lot of different things in the life of the church, sometimes it can be hard to remember that the Holy Spirit has experience with helping Christ's followers find the right language to speak, if we will listen and submit to that work. It might be disruptive, and it might take us out of our comfort zones, but it has been done, and it can be done.

At the same time, the Holy Spirit also has that experience of preparing those who listen, those who seek to hear, those who call upon the name of the Lord, to be able to hear that word in their own language and to be ready to respond.

For all the languages, and the Spirit's ability to speak them, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #289, On Pentecost They Gathered; #291, Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness; #280, Come, O Spirit, Dwell Among Us

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sermon: Going to Extremes

First Presbyterian Church

April 12, 2026, Easter 2A

John 20:19-31

 

Going to Extremes

 

In every gospel, it is made clear that the first witnesses to the resurrection, whether as recipients of the announcement of angelic beings commissioned to go and tell the disciples or simply as witnesses of the empty tomb, were women. Mary Magdalene is named in all of the gospels; Matthew, Mark, and Luke have her accompanied by one or more other women, while in John’s gospel she goes to the tomb alone.

Earlier in this chapter, Mary Magdalene has gone to the tomb and found it empty; she returned to find Peter and “the beloved disciple” and reported what she had seen, leading them to the tomb where they saw it empty. They returned to their homes, uncomprehendingly, while Mary lingered at the tomb. While she was there weeping, she became the first to see the risen Christ himself, who told her to go to the disciples and report what he told her. By “disciples” here we should understand not just the eleven, based on the Greek word used, but to the whole body of followers who had been with Jesus up to the end.

Nonetheless, by the time evening fell that same day, we find the disciples, that whole body, hiding behind locked doors. Fear of the religious authorities was still greater than any hope they had gained from Mary Magdalene’s report of her encounter with the risen Jesus.

Clearly, Jesus will have to do something extreme to get through to them. And so, even with those doors locked, Jesus is in the room with them, “all of a sudden.”

This extreme measure was joined to another, as Jesus showed the scars in his hands and feet and side, the scars of the crucifixion just days before. It was this, the ultimate verification of Jesus’s reality before them, that finally got through to these slow-of-heart disciples and finally allowed them to rejoice. Continuing to “up the ante” Jesus breathes on them and announces that they are to “receive the Holy Spirit,” setting John’s gospel apart from Luke’s, in which the Holy Spirit manifests itself on the day of Pentecost.

But understand this: after the disciples first failed, evidently, to hear Mary Magdalene’s report and take heart; after the disciples locked themselves away from the world in fear rather than allowing in hope from that news; and even after Jesus appeared before them despite those locked doors only to have to show his scars to convince them…well, the disciples had no business dumping on Thomas when they finally found them and told them what they had seen.

There is, however one thing for which you can truly dump on Thomas; why wasn't he with the other disciples to hear Mary Magdalene’s news, or especially for not being there when Jesus appeared. We have no indication of why Thomas wasn’t there, whether he had thoroughly abandoned all hope and melted back into his pre-Jesus life or whether he had been hiding separately in fear or anything else. In a time of trouble, he broke fellowship with his fellow followers of Jesus. In a time when biblical scholars seem so eager to shed the "Doubting Thomas" label, he shouldn't get off the hook for deserting his fellow disciples.

Still, what Thomas demanded when the disciples told him “We have seen the Lord!” was really not much more than it had taken for the disciples themselves to be convinced. If you are going to dump on Thomas with the label “Doubting,” you really need to hammer the rest of the disciples equally. They had not acquitted themselves particularly well before Jesus showed up and showed his scars.

Whatever level of doubt Thomas may have had, he did improve in one way: the next time the disciples came together, a week later, Thomas didn’t fail to show.

To this point Thomas’s reality was a cold, hard one: the Teacher he had followed for some part of three years had been executed in the most brutal way known to the Roman Empire, which was pretty good at being brutal. The blood, the spear piercing Jesus’s side, the nails, the lifeless body, the stone rolled before the tomb; all these Thomas saw and, evidently, said “It’s over.” Still, whatever hope he might have given up, he still found enough to be there that next week.

And whatever flicker of hope he had found was rewarded beyond his imagining.

Although Jesus offers his scars for Thomas to touch, as he had said he would have to do to believe, it isn’t recorded that Thomas actually does so. What we get instead is a first: while Jesus has been called “Lord” or “Messiah” or “Son of God” or many other titles in his time on earth, Thomas is the first to make the leap and say simply “My Lord and my God!” From a place of woundedness and doubt, Thomas comes to the most striking proclamation of Jesus’s identity we have yet received.

Jesus can’t resist throwing a little shade at Thomas, though, to use a bit of modern slang. It was an aside that could as easily have been directed at all of these followers, to be honest, found in verse 29. You believe because you’ve seen me? Really? So much more blessed are those who believe even they don’t get to see.

You realize that’s us, right?

The ones who believe even though we don’t see?

Yes, that’s us. Blessed.

Those final two verses, who some have suggested were originally meant to be the end of the gospel, serve as a reminder to us of just what John, and other gospel writers to a degree, are about here. They have no interest in giving us a blow-by-blow biography of Jesus’s life, and if that’s what you’re looking for you are disappointed. John is explicitly telling us that we have not gotten the whole story out of him. What he has told us, he says, is meant to help us to do exactly what Jesus described in that previous verse – to believe, even though we have not seen, and to therefore “have life in his name.” We are given this gospel that we might believe.

We are given the Spirit to sustain us, and much of what we hear in coming weeks will be the story of how the Holy Spirit acts among our ancestors in the faith. But we are given the gospel to teach us and show us the Jesus that is our life and our way to live. Grounded in gospel, we are then sustained and led by the Holy Spirit (remember Jesus breathing that on the disciples earlier in the reading?) to give that gospel to the whole world in our lives and words and actions. That’s what it is to “have life in his name.”

For the Word and the Spirit together, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #245, Christ the Lord Is Risen Today; #248, Christ Is Risen! Shout Hosanna; #240, Alleluia, Alleluia! Give Thanks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sermon: The Saddest and Holiest Joke

First Presbyterian Church

March 29, 2026, Palm Sunday A

Matthew 21:1-17

 

The Saddest and Holiest Joke

 

 

It is common to hear the event described in today's gospel reading as Jesus "Triumphal Entry" into Jerusalem. Your Bible itself, if it's the type that includes section headings amidst the text, may give this passage exactly that heading.

What isn't exactly clear, however, is whether a disinterested observer of the event would have seen it quite that way.

The novelist, spiritual writer, and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner made, in his collection Telling the Truth, a rather challenging observation about Jesus’s parables. Instead of the grave Repositories of Inviolable Sacred Truth we tend to make of them, Buechner wonders if they might have been something else, something much more bracing and vivid:

I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath. I don't mean jokes for the joke's sake, of course. I don't mean the kind of godly jest the preacher starts his sermon with to warm people up and show them that despite his Geneva tabs or cassock he can laugh with the rest of them and is as human as everybody else. I mean the kind of joke Jesus told when he said it is harder for a rich person to enter Paradise than for a Mercedes to get through a revolving door, harder for a rich person to enter Paradise than for Nelson Rockefeller to get through the night deposit slot of the First National City Bank.

 

Buechner concludes:

 

It seems to me that more often than not the parables can be read as high and holy jokes about God and about man and about the Gospel itself as the highest and holiest joke of them all. 

 

I hope that the late Rev. Buechner will forgive me for borrowing and extending his metaphor beyond its original context. Actually, I hope he might agree that given such a setup, perhaps the saddest and holiest joke of Jesus’s earthly ministry, the one with the most outlandish setup and the most tragic punchline, is the event being commemorated today on the church’s calendar, the one known as Palm Sunday, and yes, the one often described as Jesus's "Triumphal Entry" into Jerusalem.

That’s hard for us to grasp; most years our churches have turned it into something quite different, after all, with our waving palms and big processionals and putting the children all out front. But when you get right down to it, this was a pretty meager affair, especially considered against the spectacles promoted and perfected by the occupiers of Judea at this time, the Romans.

Now, the Romans knew from spectacle and were quite proficient at putting on a "triumphal entry." Rank upon rank of Roman horsemen riding the finest horses, banners flying, making absolutely clear you knew who was in power here (them) and who was not (you); a great place of honor for the chief figure of the procession, whether the commander of this unit or the political figure being honored, as might be the case when they were entering Jerusalem from Caesarea Philippi, the principal seat of Roman governance for the region. (A modern version of such a parade would no doubt includes soldiers marching in a crisp unison, a military band, and possibly some cannons or antiaircraft guns, or even a tank or two if the road could handle it.) As Caesarea Philippi was nearer to the coast, such processions would have entered Jerusalem from its western-facing gate, where this impromptu processional likely came from the east.

Had any Roman been sent out to investigate this suspicious activity, it is hard to imagine he’d have been all that impressed. The assembled crowd very likely did not consist of any “important” people; some of whom apparently didn’t have cloaks to spread out and were therefore committing vandalism to cut branches from the trees to spread on the road; the apparent guest of honor was some anonymous-looking rustic riding not on a fine horse, but a donkey (and apparently a borrowed donkey at that), with a donkey's colt also somehow involved. The shouting of the crowd about some “son of David” probably didn’t make much sense to our random Roman investigator (though a Jewish observer would have been much more intrigued by the claim of this man as “son of David”), and it's not likely he actually knew what the word "hosanna" meant (literally, it means "save us"). Likely this hypothetical Roman would have reported back to his superiors that it was a pretty pathetic display, and not any kind of threat, but perhaps one to keep an eye on just in case.

The city of Jerusalem did have a bit more reaction, though, as Matthew describes Jerusalem as being “in turmoil.” Again, though, it’s not clear just how impressive the little parade was to them; a bunch of unsavory characters shouting about this prophet what’s-his-name from the backwater province of Galilee, as they might have described it. Who the heck is this? is probably the best way to describe the reaction in Jerusalem proper.

If this is a sad and holy joke, to return to Frederick Buechner’s image, we’re still waiting for the punchline at the end of this processional, and that might be the saddest and holiest part. But there was more to come that day.

Jesus went next to the Temple, and as we hear in verses 12-13, some moneychangers got their tables flipped and some potential sacrificial animals got set free. This story is told in all four gospels, although John's account puts it very near the beginning of Jesus's ministry instead of near the end.

The church doesn't always want to hear this story. We are prone to live according to definitions of "peace" that mean nothing beyond "preserving the status quo."  But we need to hear this story and we particularly need to hear Matthew's telling of this story because of what happens next, in verses 14-17.

When the moneychangers and animal handlers are put to flight, there are still others in the Temple; poor ones, unable to walk or unable to see, came to Jesus as best as they could, and Jesus healed them. Between this and the children there taking up the cry from the processional, "Hosanna to the Son of David," the Temple had become a joyous place indeed. It echoes Mary's words from the Magnificat, about how "he has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away."

This is, of course, quite the opposite of how any wannabe king or emperor would have conducted himself on such an occasion, as if that hadn't already been made clear by Jesus's mode of entering Jerusalem.

By our time, of course, the Palm Sunday procession has acquired a very different sheen, mostly because we know who this seemingly unimpressive backwater prophet is after all, and we can’t help but read ahead and view this parade not from the point of view of the sad and holy punchline to the sad and holy joke, but to the surprise plot twist that follows what was supposed to be the end of the story. That plot twist (we mark it next Sunday) is what makes us what we are, after all, why we take the name of that prophet as our name, why we in our fumbling and sometimes inept ways try to live as if we really do follow that prophet who rode into Jerusalem on that humble donkey from the side of town opposite the power structure that really ran everything. That plot twist is why this saddest and holiest joke of a sort even gets retold.

For today, though, maybe it is enough to see this parade as it is, a little bit shabby-looking and kind of strange, amusing to the political power structure and maybe a bit agitating to the religious structure. Maybe it can also help to remember that what follows the sad and holy joke is disrupting and healing and joyful and flies in the face of anything the empire and its religious supplicants want. to lord over us.

So the joke turns out to be on that hypothetical Roman observer, so bound to and caught up in his world’s way of seeing power that the greatest power of all slipped by him completely unnoticed. We’d do well not to fall into his trap, and yet so often we are; we get swayed by those selling and preaching the most unholy things in the name of this very Jesus at that. It is one of the great challenges of our time to stand faithful and not to be deluded by the displays of "power" and "strength" paraded before us daily, and instead to remember where, and with whom, our ultimate hope lies.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal); #196, All Glory, Laud, and Honor; #---, Prepare the way, O people; #199, Filled with Excitement; #---, Still cloaks and branches scattered; #197, Hosanna, Loud Hosanna; #199, Ride On! Ride On in Majesty

Sermon: The Sword

First Presbyterian Church

March 15, 2026, Lent 4A

Psalm 86:1-10; Matthew 10:24-39

 

The Sword

 

Honestly, this just doesn’t fit.

We call Jesus the Prince of Peace. We sing a whole lot, particularly around Christmastime, about peace – “Sleep in heavenly peace,” or “Hail the heav’n-born Prince of Peace,” or there are songs like “I’ve got peace like a river” or any hymn based on St. Francis’s prayer, “Make me an instrument of your peace.” In fact, if you go to the back of the hymnal and look at the indexes, you’ll see that in the Subject Index “peace” actually gets two different sections – “Peace, Personal (Spiritual)” and “Peace, World.”

And it’s not as if Jesus doesn’t have plenty to say about peace: earlier in this gospel, one of the Beatitudes plainly stated “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” (5:9). John 14:27 records Jesus’s words to his disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” And in some of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus recorded in the gospels, one of the first things Jesus says is some variant of “Peace be with you.”

And yet, there’s verse 34 in today’s reading, with Jesus saying plain as day, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

A sword?

Not what we want to hear.

Even another gospel writer, Luke, seems to agree with us. When Luke records this teaching, he replaces the word “sword” with “division.” Now that sits uncomfortably enough in our ears, but “a sword”? We can’t bear to hear that.

But Matthew pulls no punches. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace,” Jesus says. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” And he doesn’t stop there; he goes on to suggest that families will be divided – man against father, daughter against mother, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law – and flat-out upends what we would call “family values” altogether. The final sentence seems hardest of all: “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

The church has built up a veritable cottage industry around being peacemakers and generally promoting the idea that peace is the way to live. The modern church has also made some of its reputation around being safe and secure and a "nobody's going to come after you here" kind of place. But Jesus doesn’t seem to have a lot of patience with that idea here. Before we despair too much, though, it’s a good idea to back up and hear what has brought Jesus to this point. What sounds like a total renunciation at first turns out to be a simple statement of fact.

This passage we have heard today is part of a larger unit of teaching with a specific purpose. Jesus is, from the beginning of chapter 10, preparing his twelve disciples to go out and do the teaching, preaching, and healing that he himself had been doing. This teaching and sending is not described here in the same degree of detail as it is in other gospels – Matthew never does record the disciples’ return from this work, for example – but this commissioning does have parallels in the other gospels. On the other hand, Jesus’s teaching in those other gospels is not quite so stark and pointed as what Matthew records.

Already in verse 16 of this chapter Jesus has warned the disciples that he is sending them out as “sheep in the midst of wolves” and that they should be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” which suggests that their experience will be a bit more challenging than your average Vacation Bible School. Verse 22 makes the warning more explicit: “you will be hated by all because of my name.” So when Jesus says in verse 24 that “a disciple is not above the teacher,” he is making clear to his disciples that they should, if they are truly following him, expect the same kind of attacks and slander that he has experienced.

What we often forget or overlook here, though, is that the attacks and slander Jesus has experienced and will experience, and that Jesus warns his disciples that they will experience, aren’t from random strangers. Jesus isn’t being challenged by “the world,” that generic boogeyman we in the church love to conjure up; Jesus is being challenged by the religious authorities of his time and place. Beginning in chapter 9 Matthew records the Pharisees, the great advocates of cultic and personal piety and purity in Jesus’s day, increasingly turning their questioning against Jesus, culminating in the strange accusation in 9:34, after Jesus has cast out a demon, that “by the ruler of the demons he casts out the demons.” In short, they’re charging Jesus with being in league with the devil.  And Jesus rightly points out in 10:25 that if the religious authorities are willing to say that about Jesus, the disciples can’t expect to be treated any differently.

In the midst of this uncertainty, Jesus takes pains to remind his disciples that for all the likelihood of false accusation and defamation, betrayal and hatred, they are watched and cared for by God, the one who cares even for those two-for-a-penny sparrows. Even that comfort seems a bit late, when Jesus’s idea of reassurance is that the disciples be less concerned over “those who can kill the body, but cannot kill the soul” and more over the one who can kill both. I’m guessing that by now the disciples are wondering what they’ve signed on for after all. Even after the Sermon on the Mount and the healing episodes Matthew describes in chapter 8, this commissioning speech must have felt a bit jarring to a bunch of fishermen. Being scorned as poor dumb fishermen was one thing, but family turning on you? Being attacked by the Pharisees? They couldn’t have expected this.

Then the hard sentence, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” which makes sense in the context in which Jesus has already spoken – if you follow me, if you truly follow me and do the will of God and live into the kingdom of Heaven, the sword will find you. Even if you’re living into that beatitude about “Blessed are the peacemakers,” the sword will find you. But you are not abandoned, any more than those two-a-penny sparrows. And even the losing of one’s life – whether in a literal sense or in the sense of one’s life being truly absorbed into following Jesus in genuine and submitted discipleship – will end with life, true life, real life found, not lost. On the other hand, those whose life is caught up in the world, congruent with the world’s standards – or even the standards of the empire-accommodated church so prominent these days – will find their lives are truly lost.

Remember again that none of this means we are not under God's care. We still are called not to fear, and we are still cared for no less than those sparrows. But we also don't get to forget that those who "have called the master of the house Beelzebul" (as in verse 25) are also going to malign those who follow that master.

In the end, then, that hard sentence is just practical advice – know what you’re getting into, know what’s coming, know that the sword will find you. And follow Me anyway.

For the One who will care for us even when the sword comes, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #829, My Faith Looks Up to Thee; #490, Wash, O God, Your Sons and Daughters; #661, Why Should I Feel Discouraged?

 

 

Sermon: Facing the Snake

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

March 1, 2026, Lent 2A

Numbers21:4-9; John 3:1-17

 Facing the Snake

  

I don't think most people have much fun waking up in the morning and finding out that their country has gone to war with another country. I suppose some do, but those are probably people you don't want to be around if you can possibly avoid it.

In reckoning with where we are and how we got here, whether we are speaking of a nation or a church or anything in between, there is some pretty unpleasant business that must be carried out before any kind of repair can begin. And that is demonstrated quite clearly in this odd-looking (and possibly offensive for some readers) account from the book of Numbers, the fourth of five books of the Pentateuch, the books that sit at the head of the Hebrew scriptures as found in our Christian Bibles.

Of course, a little background is in order. We find the Hebrew people on their journey through Sinai, having been unable to gain passage through the land of Edom and seeing a way around that region. As happened more than a few times during these wanderings, the people lost their patience and began to complain, both against Moses and against God. You know that on some level they are complaining just to complain, since one of their chief complaints seems to be that there was no food and the food was terrible. When you can’t even be logically consistent, you’re frankly just trying to be a jerk. But it should be noted that in the four previous examples of such complainings in Numbers, the grumbling had been directed specifically at Moses; this is the first time the Israelites complained against God as well. As we'll see, God was having none of it.

At this provocation, poisonous snakes got loose among the Israelites, and many of them (the Israelites, not the snakes) died while others were suffering great pain. Somehow this provoked an outcry of confession among the people, and they pleaded with their terrible awful no-good leader Moses to plead for their lives before terrible awful no-good God. Their terrible awful no-good leader Moses did exactly that, and God gave Moses a curious instruction: make a replica of one of the serpents and put it up on a pole, and the people who were bitten by the real serpents would be able to look at the fake serpent and avoid dying from their wounds.

This sounds like borderline idolatry, and in fact there is some evidence that the bronze snake did in fact become something of an idol for the Israelites; in 1 Kings 8 the king named Hezekiah ordered that the snake (that apparently had been preserved ever since that exodus) had become an object of adoration or maybe even worship; in other words, an idol.

But in fact, in the immediate moment in Numbers, it works as the opposite of an idol. In order for their lives to be spared, the people would have to look directly at the snake, the physical manifestation of the consequences of their sin, without flinching or looking away. You either confronted the wrong you had done and its consequences, as represented by that bronze snake, or you died, rather painfully at that. You could not help but be reminded of the sin you had committed and the painful consequences of that sin – not only for yourself, but for others.

This same basic pattern is continued on a far grander scale in the reading from John 3. Yes, verses 14-15 are directly referring to this account from Numbers, invoking the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness as a forerunner of "the Son of Man" being lifted up; it would be hard for John's readers not to draw the parallel to the "lifting up" of Jesus at his crucifixion. It is here in this gospel, however, that this "lifting up" is directly tied, not to any retribution or punishment, but to nothing less than the love of God. While it is verse 16 of this chapter that gets all the attention, perhaps even more necessary is the following verse: "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him."

Even so, Jesus being "lifted up" on the cross still resonates with the Numbers account. Jesus being lifted up on the cross is an act of redemption, yes, but it also confronts the world with the horrid and horrible consequences of human sin. It's probably not an accident that the Son of God in human flesh was put to death in one of the most grisly and horrifying ways humanity has invented to kill humans. (Not surprisingly it took the Roman Empire to introduce that horror to the world at large.) To confront that horror and to know it is we human beings who sinned so continually and unrepentantly that Jesus experienced this, inevitably, is a breaking point. In the face of such horror one either is driven to repentance - not just confession, but repentance, the turning away from the sin that had held us in its grip - or one flees from that confession and repentance, turning and running farther and farther away from the redeeming God.

Whether it be nation or church, we inevitably have to face the snake, so to speak - to look unflinchingly at not just our sin, but the consequences of it. On the broader national level, it involves the horrors of such things as the driving of Native Americans off their lands, the internment of Japanese-Americans at the outset of World War II, and of course the enslavement of captured Africans up to the Civil War and the unending violence visited upon them in the decades since.

This past Friday night I had the unexpected opportunity to hear a second time a musical work commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. (Curious: how many of you have heard of that event?) By that year the business district of the African-American population of Tulsa was so wildly successful it had acquired the nickname "Black Wall Street." A violent attack on that neighborhood and community on May 31 and June 1 left at minimum 39 dead, with potentially hundreds of others killed and thousands wounded, with 10,000 homes destroyed. As late as last fall a new search found 80 unmarked graves likely containing victims of the massacre. And for all that, for way too many Americans, their first exposure to that attach was when it was used as a plot point in the HBO series Watchmen.

Awful as they are, we must see these horrors and know them as the consequence of our sinfulness as a nation, and even as a church as well, which too often saw such racist violence and chose to "let it slide." We must see it and know it. We must face the snake, because if we do not face the snake, the snake will continue to bite, and we will continue to die.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #645, Sing Praise to God, Who Reigns Above; #---, When Israel's people fell away; #526, Let Us Talents and Tongues Employ; #12, Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise