Sermon: Everyone

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

September 21, 2025, Pentecost 15C

1 Timothy 2:1-7

 

Everyone

 

 

Everyone.

Kind of a definitive word, isn't it?

I mean, how do you put up an argument against something being for or about "everyone" without sounding like an idiot ("you really mean everyone?") or a hatemonger ("surely you can't mean them???") or worse? 

So it had to be a bit bracing for the readers of this letter, whoever they were, to see in this brief passage "everyone" invoked three times, in idea if not in exact word. In a time when the persecution of those identified as "Christians" or "followers of the Way" was beginning to intensify, around the end of the first century, this was going to be a hard pill to swallow.

So what exactly is being applied to "everyone"?

1. Right away, in verse 1, we see the instruction begin: "I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone...".

In case it wasn't clear the author continues, "for kings and all who are in high positions...". Exactly the folks who would be in charge, the emperors claiming divine authority and moving to squelch small, nonconforming movements like the church; pray for them. Even if you do so with gritted teeth, pray for them.

An attempt to sweeten the medicine follows: "...so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity." This is frankly a strange phrase; those last two words - "godliness" and "dignity" - do not appear at all in the New Testament aside from this letter and the two following, 2 Timothy and Titus. This is not Paul-like language at all, for that matter; "dignity" in particular is about as antithetical to Paul's body of writing as anything can be. Outside of these three so-called "pastoral epistles," so named because of their evident direction toward those in charge in the local body, New Testament writers simply don't talk like this. Paul in particularly isn't all that interested in the followers of Christ living quiet, peaceable lives. 

No, the real kicker here is in the second invocation of "everyone," that follows next.

2. "This is right and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." 

Let's strip this down and clarify this: God wants everyone to be saved. Everybody. To put it in good Southern terms, "all y'all." The most elemental, basic reason Christians would be called to play for everyone is simply that God wants everyone to be saved. God wants everyone to know that truth. God has zero interest in the lines we draw between ourselves and others. God wants everybody to be God's own. 

When we're most honest with ourselves, can we really say this? Can we really desire the salvation of those who torment us? And we're not talking in some sarcastic kind of "I really wish God would call this one home already..." wish, but truly desiring God's truth and salvation for them? Do we have that within us, wishing for the salvation - wishing the good - for those who harm us? That's what's being asked of these readers here, let's not miss that.

The word "everyone" doesn't appear again in this passage, but the meaning certainly does when the author adds this:

3. "...there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all (which is to say, everyone)." 

That's pretty complete. We are called to pray for it, God wants it, and Christ gave himself for it: the salvation of "everyone." 

This passage isn't the entire Bible, though, and we do have to remember that other passages of scripture offer words that caution us from getting too excited about this. 

Think of the "parable of the sheep and the goats," at the end of Matthew 25. The dividing line between the two doesn't have anything to do with what either said, how profusely they offered their verbal praises to God, or how strongly they proclaimed the gospel or whatever words they used at all. No, the difference-maker is all about actions that show God's desire for everyone to be saved; as 25:40 puts it, whatever you do for or to "the least of these," what Jesus calls his siblings, you have done to Jesus. 

Or take Matthew 7:21, for example, in which Jesus cautions his disciples that "not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my father in Heaven." No matter how much God may want it, it takes a response, and a response that is more than words at that. Being saved involves a changed life, a life that reflects Christ's love for us, one given to doing God's will more than to big empty words. 

And let's be honest; a great many folks out there who are extremely eager to present themselves as "Christians" don't live and act in ways that show God's desire to see everyone saved. To put it most bluntly, it's entirely possible that the biggest talkers out there, the ones who have the most to say about who is and who isn't saved, are themselves nowhere near being saved. 

To put it bluntly, not everyone says "yes." 

That doesn't make it any less what God desires for all of humanity, for "everyone." 

That doesn't make Christ any less a ransom for "everyone."

That doesn't make it any less our call to pray for "everyone."

That's our job. That's what God calls us to do.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #353, My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less; #697, Take My Life; #700, I'm Gonna Live So God Can Use Me

Sermon: The One Who Did Mercy

First Presbyterian Church

July 13, 2025, Pentecost 5C

Luke 10:25-37

 

The One Who Did Mercy

 

 

It is such a familiar story, what’s a pastor to do with it? 

It is maybe the most well-known parable Jesus told, rivaled only by the parable of the prodigal son or maybe the parable of the sheep and the goats. It’s a full-fledged story, with plot and development and conflict and all the good stuff that makes a story compelling enough to hear. 

Well, one thing we can do is back up and remind ourselves that the story didn’t just come out of thin air; Jesus is – cue the dramatic music – being interrogated. By a lawyer. 

The lawyer is, as Luke tells the story, testing Jesus. Throughout the different gospels different parties at different times do just that, trying to trap Jesus in some kind of bind that would either set him up to be found in error theologically or cause him to fall out of favor with the people. The lawyer (not the kind of lawyer we think of nowadays but an interpreter of the law) seems to be probing Jesus for some kind of theological misstep about the commandments. 

Instead, Jesus (as he so often does) turns the question on his interrogator, who could hardly get away with declining to answer – it was his job to answer questions about the law. So, he answered, and did so appropriately, turning to words from Deuteronomy 6 (with the "mind" added to the heart and soul and might - here given as "strength" - found in that passage). That's the part of the scripture reading covered in that first hymn we sang, and it also shows up in different contexts in the gospels of Matthew and John. 

In this case, with the famous parable coming right after it, it's easy to overlook this summation of the "greatest commandment," but we shouldn't. While here it is quoted by Jesus's interrogator, in those other gospel context Jesus himself states it as "the greatest commandment" and "one like unto it," to use the King James style of speech. If you were seeking to summarize the faith in as few words as possible, this isn't your worst possibility. 

Jesus more or less congratulated him and invited him to go his way in peace and security. This of course left the lawyer stewing in the same kind of humiliation that Jesus’s would-be interlocutors typically endured; their questioning turned against them, their duplicity exposed. 

But in this case the interrogator can’t leave well enough alone, and – using a long-favored legal tactic – tries to recover himself by questioning the terminology in the answer: “And who is my neighbor?” 

The novelist and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner offers this take on the lawyer and his question:

He presumably wanted something on the order of: "A neighbor (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter to be referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as neighbor to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort or kind whatsoever."

Instead Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, the point of which seems to be that your neighbor is to be construed as meaning anybody who needs you. The lawyer's response is left unrecorded.

 

Well, not that I want to be in the position of questioning a Pulitzer Prize nominee like Buechner, but one small part of the lawyer’s response actually is recorded for us. And it’s a pretty revealing answer. 

Upon finishing the parable, Jesus again turns on his would-be interrogator. Having told the story in which a Samaritan steps up, above and beyond the call of duty, to aid a badly wounded man who had been passed over by members of the religious elite, he again questions the lawyer, asking him to identify which of the three travelers in the story had been a neighbor to the wounded traveler. Do pay attention to the lawyer’s response:

“The one who showed him mercy.”

On one level, of course, the lawyer has answered rightly. Now the way the Greek is constructed in this particular sentence, a more literal translation would read something like “the one who did mercy to him.” That’s actually a theologically superior way to put it, if not so wonderful grammatically. “Mercy”, like so many of the loaded theological words we use, is active. It’s not a feeling or emotion or empathetic reaction. Mercy is, even if English doesn’t quite capture it, something you do. And this traveler had indeed “done mercy” to the wounded man, unmistakably so. And Jesus’s answer to the lawyer acknowledges this, as he leaves him with the command “Go and do likewise.”

But notice the lawyer’s answer again, even in the theologically superior but grammar-awkward version: “The one who did mercy to him.”

The three passing travelers in this story didn’t get names, but they did get pretty clear identifiers that Jesus’s listeners would have immediately recognized. One was a priest, a religious authority, and the second was a Levite, a member of that tribe set apart since Moses’s time for service in the Temple. Two figures to whom would be attributed qualities of righteousness as a part of their standing among the people.

The third man? A Samaritan. The lawyer couldn’t even say the word.

In the time of Elijah and Elisha Samaria was simply a region of Israel, the northern of the two kingdoms that had resulted from the machinations of those who succeeded Solomon as king after his death (the other kingdom was Judah, which was centered in Jerusalem). The city of Samaria sometimes served as the seat of government of that northern kingdom, and a lot of prophetic activity was concentrated there. By the time of today’s story, though, all of the region is simply lumped into a larger Roman province called Palestine. Yet over the centuries a virulent schism had erupted between those Jews (whose worship was centered on the Temple in Jerusalem) and the Samaritans, who were, technically, Jews, but whose practice had evolved to worship on Mount Gerizim in their own territory. That site was, they claimed, the original holy place in Israel, dating to the time of Joshua, as opposed to Jerusalem, which only became prominent during the era of King David. In short, a disagreement over what might seem to outsiders an arcane theological point had become a hard-and-fast schism, with Jerusalem Jews literally going out of their way to avoid even passing through the region of Samaria, much less actually having anything to do with Samaritans.

For Jesus to invoke the third, merciful traveler as a Samaritan no doubt provoked agitated bristling, and probably an oath or two, among his listeners, if they were a well-behaved group. And let's be clear; had the parable been told in Samaria, and the identity of the third passerby been Judean, reactions would have been extremely similar. Vitriol ran both ways.

It was a two-sided provocation that Jesus put before his listeners. By no means would any self-respecting Jew of what we might call the Jerusalem party even think of defiling himself by dealing with a Samaritan at all; being a neighbor to a Samaritan was out of the question, and no such self-respecting Jew would conceive of a Samaritan being a neighbor to a Jew. It would never happen, they might say, the way a plantation overseer of the 1850s might say that someone of the same skin color as the slaves he ruled over would never be President of the United States. 

Such was the vitriol that our lawyer couldn’t even vocalize that “the one who did mercy” could even possibly be a Samaritan. 

It’s easy enough for us to grasp the main point of the parable, and to apply to it Frederick Buechner’s point that a neighbor is basically anybody who needs you. But it’s not always easy or comfortable - or, frankly, desirable to us - to get Jesus’s point that “anybody” really does mean anybody. We live in a world that isn't prepared to give up our grudges, our ancient hostilities, our prejudices or superior attitudes or whatever ruses we use to divide ourselves and keep ourselves set apart from and above others. It would never happen. It can’t happen. 

I won’t let it happen.

Our society is pretty good at demeaning and dehumanizing “the other.” The world out there calls them job-stealers and threatens to build a great big wall to keep them out, never mind who’s going to pick all those tomatoes and strawberries in south Florida or California. Or people call them terrorists and yell "go back where you came from" even if they were born here, never mind that they are likely to be the ones that the actual terrorists kill first.

Or, when they get shot, people just call them thugs.

Jesus has this nasty habit of not caring one whit about our preferences or prejudices or whatnot. The world tries to respond with “but Jesus, they’re…” and Jesus cuts us off and finishes the sentence “your neighbor.” Society protests “but he’s a…” and Jesus won’t let us finish but says “the one you should imitate.” See, the kingdom of God doesn’t honor those divisions we create. The kingdom of God sees need and moves to meet it. End of discussion. If we want to claim to be part of that kingdom of God, if we call ourselves disciples, we’d better move that same way.

Which one … was a neighbor to the man who fell among the thieves?

The one who did mercy to him.

Go and do likewise. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #203, Jesu, Jesu, Fill Us with Your Love; #---, O love your God with all your heart; #707, Take Thou Our Minds, Dear Lord

Sermon: Wisdom and Trinity

First Presbyterian Church

June 15, 2025, Trinity C

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5

 

Wisdom and Trinity

 

It's an almost stereotypical image, one found in comic strips or editorial cartoons or any number of other visual media. In it you see a lone sojourner, or maybe a pair, hiking or even climbing their way up a mountainside or cliff. When they get to the top, they find a lone figure, typically an elderly man, probably seated with legs crossed, appearing as a guru or sage of some sort prepared to dispense wisdom. 

The scene is often used for comic effect, but it trades on something of a traditional image of a seeker of wisdom as being one who is cut off from society, engaged in solitary contemplation in that withdrawn setting. The writer of today's reading from Proverbs would not necessarily agree with this image of withdrawal in search of wisdom.

Today's reading is part of a more extended rhapsody (my word) on wisdom, briefly touched on in chapter 7 and then taking up most of chapters 8 and 9. It follows a discourse on a different character, one who would lead astray (in many different ways) the young student to which Proverbs is directed. In this rhapsody Wisdom is personified; most of chapters 8 and 9 are depicted as wisdom speaking to that young student. 

Let's go ahead and make this clear: yes, Wisdom really is personified in this rhapsody as a woman. Take that, guys. In context, the character in the previous discourse who would lead the young student astray is also a woman, so the passage works as a clever literary device to present the two different paths set before the young student. Still, Wisdom (divine wisdom, clearly, as the rest of the discourse makes clear) is personified as female. Right out of the Bible, folks.

The opening four verses of the chapter set forth the character (sometimes called Woman Wisdom in the scholarly literature), and our author's depiction of Wisdom at work doesn't quite square up with the mountaintop guru of comic-strip notoriety. Far from having to be sought out in some isolated place, Wisdom is out in the world, calling to anyone who would listen:

At the highest point along the way, where the paths meet she takes her stand; beside the gates leading into the city, at the entrance, she cries aloud...

 

This isn't wisdom in hiding or in secret. She's out there, calling out for all to hear. 

"All fine and good," you may say, while either being excited or offended to see something of the divine being portrayed as a woman. "All fine and good," you may say, "but what does any of this have to do with Trinity Sunday? Why aren't you preaching on something more obvious like that reading from Romans where all the persons of the Trinity are mentioned? Why is this Proverbs bit in the readings for today?" That's where verses 22-31 come in. 

That section opens with Wisdom's declaration that "The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old." It may surprise you to hear that this description was the subject of heated debate at no less than the Council of Nicaea, the first meeting of which took place way back in the year 325, and which was the initiator of that statement of faith we know as the Nicene Creed (we tend to say it in worship on Sundays when the Lord's Supper happens). In their extensive and often testy debates over the nature of the Trinity, this passage, with its confusing Hebrew about being "created" or is it being "begotten" or "made" or "born" became a shorthand for discussing whether the second Person of the Trinity - the one we call God the Son, or Jesus - was "created" or "begotten" or "made" or "born" in John 1. Indeed, for some years, this character of Wisdom was sometimes discussed as a foreshadowing of the Son of God (notwithstanding Wisdom being personified as a woman here!) and of that Son's being "in the beginning with God," as John 1 says, or being one through whom "all things were made" as the Nicene Creed ends up saying.

If that's how the second Person of the Trinity is involved here, the largest part of the reading names the first Person of the Trinity as the great Creator of all. Most of the text describes Woman Wisdom's bearing witness as God engages in the various acts of creation and even being God's "delight, rejoicing before Him always" and also "delighting in the human race." 

While the third Person of the Trinity is less directly invoked here, it has not escaped notice that the way Wisdom is described in this rhapsody looks and sounds a lot like the way the Holy Spirit gets described in various other corners of scripture. All that business about not being hidden off on some mountaintop but being out in the streets and at the gates of the city is awfully similar to the doings of the Spirit, after Pentecost in particular.

None of this should be taken as a "proof" of anything. Obviously, this was written many, many years before the Nativity or Pentecost. What this quite exuberant passage does show us is that God's people have been, literally for centuries, even millenia, seeking ways to understand and comprehend how God moves in God's world. We aren't the first to struggle with it. The Council of Nicaea wasn't the first to struggle with it. And no doubt even the writer of Proverbs wasn't the first either. Outside of the more dramatic interventions revealed in scripture - say, the Exodus, or Pentecost, or the very life of Jesus - God's people have been challenged by the work of putting together all that we have been shown and instructed in order, not to have God completely figured out, but at least not to get God egregiously and harmfully wrong. 

In the end, perhaps such words as "wonder," or even the "delight" that Wisdom herself invokes in today's reading, might be at the last the best place to end up in such pursuits. To borrow the Apostle Paul's words from 1 Corinthians, we are still in that place where we see "in a mirror, dimly"; the time when we "will see face to face" is not yet here. Would that this age of contemplation would be, rather than a source of dispute and anger over the nature of God, be a source of delight, perhaps with the help of good old Woman Wisdom.

For wisdom and her delight, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #1, Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty; #8, Eternal Father, Strong to Save; #2, Come, Thou Almighty King

For those who miss the non-heretical kittens...

Sermon: We're All In This Together

First Presbyterian Church

January 26, 2025, Epiphany 3C

1 Corinthians 12:12-31

 

We’re All in This Together

 

 

It was a nearly unavoidable song not that many years ago, when the Disney Channel first aired its infectious little show called High School Musical. First it was the television musical, then it became an actual high school musical, and now you can find television shows about productions of the high school musical. And wrapping it all up was the one inescapable, irresistible song that represented the show’s climax: “We’re All in This Together.”

That title happened upon a phrase and idea that has been batted around endlessly, it seems. You could go out and google dozens upon dozens of quotes that either use that phrase as a basis or comment upon the idea. While I don’t want to think about Lily Tomlin’s spin – “We’re all in this together alone” – I have to acknowledge, if this quote is accurate, that Johnny Cash might have put the best spin on the quote in his version: “We’re all in this together if we’re in it at all.” 

I’m pretty sure the Apostle Paul was not much for song and dance, and I doubt he played the guitar or sang songs about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. But he’d be able to appreciate at least the basic sentiment found in this pithy little saying. Being the eloquent preacher and letter-writer he was, however, it befitted Paul to find a clever and illustrative metaphor to demonstrate just how thoroughly we, the followers of Christ, really are all in this together. Borrowing a metaphor found fairly often in Greco-Roman philosophical rhetoric, Paul came up with the theme of today’s reading: the body of Christ.

That Paul chooses the body as a metaphor for the innerworkings of the people of God is striking and informative in ways that the apostle himself might not even have imagined. 

As noted just now, it wasn’t uncommon for teachers and writers in the Greco-Roman world to use such a metaphor to describe communal life, though no other biblical author makes use of it. Philosophers and political figures were particularly fond of the body metaphor in that culture. For a politician, for example, the metaphor of the body might well be used to suggest that every member of a society had his or place to fill. A body needs a head; that place was to be filled by the “elites” of society – the wealthy, the military elite, those in power. A body also needs hands and feet; here pretty much everybody else in society, those charged with the hard or dirty or dangerous work of society was to fulfill his or her role. Needless to say that metaphor never really has gone away even it if might be expressed in different ways.

Paul, though, takes a different angle on this metaphor. For Paul, what matters is the utter interdependence of the body – the degree to which the body needs everything in good working order. Parts of the body that might be regarded as weaker, or less “respectable,” are treated with greater care and covered or protected more carefully. In Paul’s scheme of the body, no part can claim to be independent of all the other parts. The eye can see all it wants to see, but without feet and legs to move, or hands to hold or to pick up, the eye is powerless. The head is useless without the rest of the body.

Many of us know what it is for our physical bodes to fail us or betray us. We see what needs to be done but we just aren’t capable of doing it physically. If one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers with it. And so it goes with the body of Christ, the church; when one member of this body suffers, we all suffer with that member.

Paul wants us to understand, in verse 13, that in being baptized in Christ we are baptized into this one body, no matter the differences between us. Indeed, following on the first part of this chapter we heard last week, the differences we bring to the body are not accidental; they are necessary, they are by design, both in a given local congregation and in the church universal – we need all those different experiences, all those different backgrounds, for the body of Christ to function rightly and bear witness to the good news.

This is where it gets tricky, though. We are not always good at dealing with difference. We don’t always care for diversity, even as we need it. New Testament scholar Brian Peterson puts it bluntly in noting that “We often confuse unity with uniformity, because it is much easer to gather with people who are like ourselves than it is to reach across the divisions which mark our culture.”[i] We are more comfortable with a church where everybody looks like us, talks like us, is about the same age as us, reads the Bible in the same way as we do – or for that matter, votes like us, roots for the Chiefs like us, and all sorts of other things that may have very little to do with the life of the church. It’s a natural inclination, but it isn’t really all that Christlike. 

In verse 13 Paul refers to two of the great divisions he knew to be at work in the church – “Jews or Greeks, slaves or free.” Admittedly, “Jew or Greek” is not a huge dividing line in the modern church, and while slavery certainly does exist in the modern world still, such a dividing line doesn’t run through the modern church in quite the same way it did for Paul’s Corinthian readers. We do, though, have lots of dividing lines among us in the church today:

Black or white, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Native American…

Or how about Democratic or Republican?

Maybe rich or poor?

Native-born, naturalized citizen, immigrant waiting to be citizen?

Straight or gay?

How about married or single?

Progressive or mainline or evangelical or fundamentalist?

How are we, as the church, the body of Christ, at truly living in the diversity that makes us work? Or are we still inclined to hole up in like-minded enclaves of homogeneity?

Whether we acknowledge it or not, when any part of the body of Christ suffers, whether they look like us or think like us or sound like us or have anything in common with us other than Christ, we all suffer, and we don’t bear witness to the gospel the way the body of Christ is meant to do. And to the degree that we stand by and let that suffering continue, we are complicit in damaging the body and its witness.

Having worked through this body metaphor, Paul now returns to the diversity of spiritual gifts, or manifestations of the presence of the Spirit, that he had discussed earlier in this chapter. Again, the list is incomplete, but Paul now places those gifts in the context of the church as God appoints people to contribute: apostles, prophets, teachers, doers of powerful deeds, healers, helpers, leaders, speakers of various tongues. And just as the body would look rather ridiculous if it were nothing but an eye or a foot, so the church becomes rather ridiculous if it consists of nothing but apostles or preachers or teachers. 

But as Paul closes this thought, he actually “teases” us with something even better, a better, “more excellent” way for the church to live or for the body of Christ to function. 

The diverse and distinctive appropriation of gifts is characteristic and even needful in the church, and the diversity of members matters profoundly as well. And yet, there is something else that matters more than all of these, or more precisely is the very thing that makes this distinctiveness and diversity work. What is it that makes the body of Christ what it is meant to be? What is it that brings all those diverse gifts and abilities and manifestations of the Spirit together in a way that enables us truly to bear witness to the Christ we say we follow?

But that's for next Sunday. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #409, God Is Here!; #318, In Christ There Is No East or West; #306, Blest Be the Tie that Binds

 

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[i] Brian Peterson, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a,” Working Preacher (workingpreacher.org, 24 January 2016 2^nd reading), accessed 21 January 2016.