Sermon: Can These Bones Live?

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

March 22, 2026, Lent 5A

Ezekiel37:1-14; Psalm 130; John 11:1-45

 

Can These Bones Live?

 

 

You might be caught off guard by the tone of that psalm we read earlier.

It's a psalm, at least until those last two verses, that is about as frankly bleak and despair-laden as anything you might see in scripture. That opening phrase - "Out of the depths" - has proven awfully alluring for many kinds of artists seeking to portray a state of despair or darkness. It shows up on four different Sundays in the Revised Common Lectionary, has been set to music many times (sometimes under its Latin heading "De profundis"), and has inspired writers such as Elizabeth Barret Browning, Oscar Wilde, Federico Garcia Lorca, and C.S. Lewis.

It's probably not an accident that this psalm is paired with these two scriptures offered up for the church on this fifth Sunday of Lent, readings that come a little bit like a slap in the face (or maybe a slap in the faith) at this time of the liturgical year. Both of them have the temerity to offer up, two solid weeks before the observance of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, stories of new life being brought to that which was dead. "Out of the depths," indeed.

The obvious move, the one most pastors I know are likely making, would probably be to go to John’s account of Jesus’s raising of Lazarus. After all, that’s a whopper of a reading, both in terms of its sheer length (forty-five verses!) and the impact it has on the story of Jesus’s earthly ministry. Honestly, one of these years I might be tempted to take this story and break it up over the first five weeks of Lent; I honestly think there might be about five sermons in there.

You get Jesus dawdling about going to see Lazarus, and he gets a bit of what-for over that - "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." You get what was in the KJV the shortest verse in the Bible – “Jesus wept” (every kid I knew was quick to claim that as one of their "memory verses" in Sunday school). You get the warning that if Jesus really goes through with having the tomb opened after four days, it would, well, smell, as un-embalmed bodies do after a while, even today. You get, above all, Lazarus coming out of the tomb. If you push later into John's gospel, you find that his raising of Lazarus is part of why the religious authorities are so intent on getting rid of Jesus. There's so much possibility in this account, and I have no doubt that a lot of those sermons getting preached today are going to be about the best sermons that those preacher friends of mine are going to preach this season.

But I still can’t look away from Ezekiel’s story, the one that prompted James Weldon Johnson to create the song "Dry Bones" and get his brother to set it to music.

Ezekiel is, to put it in modern vernacular, one messed-up dude. He was a priest in Jerusalem who got carried away in the first wave of exile to Babylon, when the occupying forces chose only to “cut off the head” of Jerusalem – that is, take away its leaders, including its religious leaders. The puppet king installed after this turned out not to be quite such a puppet after all, and when he stopped paying tribute the Babylonians returned and destroyed the city.

This experience seems to have taken a particular toll on Ezekiel. Ezekiel was most likely, in modern terms, a victim of psychological trauma, most likely resulting in what we would call clinical depression. The outlandish nature of some of his visions (including this one), some of his prophetic behaviors that make even Jeremiah look tame by comparison, and his sometimes-extreme tone in calling out his people and their kings for their sinfulness and rebellion suggest a man who would at minimum be deep into therapy in modern times, if not something more intense.

And it is to this broken, traumatized old priest that God brings this deeply creepy, and yet deeply hopeful, vision of death being raised up into new life. Actually, that’s not quite right. This isn’t Lazarus still more or less in one piece just waiting for the call. This is not mere death; this is a destroyed, desiccated, disassembled, dehydrated kind of death, way beyond any kind of haunted house or Hollywood horror movie. And before this scene of absolute lifelessness, God asks old messed-up Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?”

There’s a lot of wisdom in Ezekiel’s answer: “O Lord God, you know.” God was clearly up to something, and Ezekiel (perhaps all the more because of his trauma) had the wit not to get in the way. God gives Ezekiel the command to “prophesy to these bones,” and maybe only someone who had seen too much, someone as broken and hurting as Ezekiel, could take such a command seriously enough to carry it out. He does, and behold, the bones find their way back to each other, they take on all the tissue and flesh that had long ago dried up and rotted away, and there are…bodies.

Not people, not yet: just bodies, bodies that were reconstructed and whole, but “there was no breath in them” – no wind, no spirit. It’s not quite like in the account from John, in which after Jesus called to Lazarus he was indeed alive, but still all bound up in the burial cloths in which he had been wrapped. Lazarus needed release; he still needed to be cut loose from the old trappings of death that still clung to him. These bodies in front of Ezekiel still needed breath, spirit, life itself. They aren't just dried-out old bones anymore, but there is still no life in them.

So, of course, God tells Ezekiel to “prophesy to the breath.” Ezekiel obeyed (what else was he going to do at this point?), and from “the four winds” came the breath that breathed life into these lifeless bodies. As Ezekiel recounts it, they stood up, a “vast multitude,” waiting.

Waiting. Is that where we are?

Verses 11-14 bring Ezekiel's bizarre experience home. In this vision, for that is what all this has been, those dried-up bones are nothing less than God's people, the ones conquered and exiled and occupied and crushed and living without any kind of hope whatsoever. All that Ezekiel has been commanded to do before the valley of the dry bones, God will do for God's people, says God to Ezekiel. It's not just about the bones taking on flesh; it's about the breath, the spirit, being placed within them. It's about being brought back to life again.

That message of hope has come through across the centuries, not least as that previously mentioned song that connected to the still-developing civil rights movement in the United States in the early twentieth century. In the early 1920s the great poet and dramatist and author James Weldon Johnson seized upon this story to evoke a movement that was itself still coming together, complete with lyrics about the foot bone connecting to the heel bone and the heel bone connecting to the ankle bone and you know how the rest of it goes. His brother Rosamond Johnson created the tune, and the rest is history (it certainly got altered in later years).

So, where are we in this trio of readings? Are we the psalmist, reduced to crying "out of the depths" but still waiting on the Lord despite it all, still not quite letting go of hope? Are we Lazarus, newly alive again but waiting to be freed from the bonds that keep us from moving and doing? Are we Martha and Mary complaining that Jesus didn't come quickly enough? Are we the dried old bones, without hope? Are we the reassembled bodies made physically whole but without breath, without spirit? Are we the newly breathing and living, standing ready, waiting for whatever God calls us to do?

Or, maybe, are we Ezekiel? Seen too much, been broken too much in too many places by too many things? Are we too broken to hope even a little bit, and yet so broken that we have nothing left to do but hope? Are we so broken that the moment we see or hear any little thing, any sign or word from God, we're going to cling to as if our lives depend on it, because maybe they do? Can we respond, along with the old prophet, with that kind of obedience to the most ridiculous or insane-sounding commands (I mean, really, "prophesy to these bones"?)? Are we desperate enough for that?

Or are we still too sure of ourselves, too much in control, too "sane" to think that any such outlandish (and kind of gruesome) command of God could be real? Are we too much "good church folk" to find a thing to hold on to in such horrific scenes, to hear God, to hear any word from God in such bizarre circumstances?

“Mortal, can these bones live?” “O Lord God, you know.” Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #424, Out of the Depths; #---, Rise Up; #286, Breathe on Me, Breath of God

 

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: The Way of Water

 

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

March 8, 2026, Lent 3A

Exodus17:1-7; John 4:1-42

 

The Way of Water

 

 

When you think about it, water is actually awfully prominent in scripture. The second verse of Genesis speaks of how "darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters." The last chapter of scripture, Revelation 22, starts with John being shown by an angel "the river of the water of life, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city" (that is the Holy City, the New Jerusalem that had just been introduced in the previous chapter). And there's a lot of water in between. In addition to today's reading from Exodus, in which extraordinary measures provide water for the Hebrew people to drink, they also cross through a sea to escape Egypt and then through the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land. Jonah flees across the waters to avoid God's call to prophesy to Nineveh; the Assyrian general Naaman is told to dunk himself in the Jordan River to cleanse himself of leprosy. Even the psalmists have a thing for water on occasion, such as the famous Psalm 23 and its description of the Shepherd who "leads me beside still waters."

Things don't change that much once we turn to the New Testament. Jesus is baptized in the Jordan, calls fishermen as some of his first disciples, and crosses the sea of Galilee a time or two in his travels. The Ethiopian persuades Philip to baptize him after hearing the good news. The Apostle Paul spends much of his vocation traveling across the sea we know as the Mediterranean in his missionary journeys, with at least one shipwreck recorded on those journeys in the later chapters of Acts.

Even wells, such as the scene of today's reading, have some history in scripture. Both Rebekah and Rachel, eventually wives to Isaac and Jacob in Hebrew story, were first met at wells, and Moses also met his future wife Zipporah while waiting by a well. One might wonder if those first readers of John's gospel might have wondered at such a setting here, but if they had any thought of such a trope repeating itself those thoughts were dispelled quickly here. Something much better was in store.

It's hard not to notice some similarities and differences between this reading and the gospel reading appointed for last week's lectionary, from the previous chapter of John's gospel. You probably remember that reading for The Most Famous Verse of Scripture in the Universe, but one of the key features of that passage was the befuddlement of the important religious figure Nicodemus when Jesus crosses him up by talking about being "born again" or being "born of water and spirit." Nicodemus was down for the count quicker than Mike Tyson used to knock out some of his earliest boxing opponents.

In the case of this week's dialogue, Jesus crosses up his dialogue partner by starting up a dialogue at all. There are multiple reasons this is non-typical or even transgressive; for one, men typically disdained to speak to women in public, except perhaps their wives, and probably not even them. For another, this was a Samaritan woman. I had to type that word in italics - Samaritan - to make sure and emphasize just how wrong and misguided and, well, icky it would be to a typical Judean even to be in Samaria, much less to speak to a Samaritan (and a Samaritan woman at that!). The most likely reaction to a Judean reader of this passage, especially what we have as verse 4, would have likely been along the lines of "no, he didn't. He didn't have to go through Samaria. In fact, that is the one thing he absolutely did not have to do, or had not to do, or to not do or something. Why is he going through Samaria???"

A caution needs to be vocalized here. Much of the lore that has accrued around this story assumes that this woman has to come at midday because she was somehow outcast or "shamed" in the town. This of course leads to more assumptions; that this woman has somehow divorced the five husbands she has had (as will come out in the dialogue later) and is probably, as one might say today, "living in sin" with the man with whom she now lives who is not her husband. This is not supportable by anything in the reading. Given how little agency women had in being "married off" at this time, it's not necessarily likely that a woman divorced once would have much of a chance to marry again. An alternate possibility, not necessarily any more unlikely, is that she had been passed down from one brother to another, according to the supposed law about levirate marriage, whereby a woman whose husband dies without a son then marries the next brother to provide an heir for her original husband. It's a thing the Sadducees try to trip Jesus up about in Matthew 22. As to the man who was not her husband, in such a scenario it could have been a father of one (or all) of the husbands, or even her own father. The shameful behavior shouldn't be assumed, even if the locals might have done so - how many times have folks been completely wrong in their assumptions about a person's behavior or morals? Don't be those people, right?

As this dialogue goes on (it turns out to be the longest Jesus has with anyone in any of the gospels), the Samaritan woman might be caught off guard, but she never dissolves into a puddle the way Nicodemus did. Her response to Jesus's naming of her current marital status is to press him right back: OK, you're a prophet. So explain this... and "this" is nothing less than the very thing that divides Judeans and Samaritans. Her reward for this questioning, for not backing down, is nothing less than being the first person in this gospel to whom Jesus directly names himself as the Messiah, the Christ.

She goes back to the city and tells everyone what she has seen. It's not as if she's giving some kind of lead-pipe cinch "testimony" - she's still asking, "he cannot be the Messiah, can he?" and this witness persuades the whole city to come and listen, and ultimately to be persuaded of Jesus. First she, and then the people of the city, found living water.

Yes, let's go back to that early part of the exchange. It all starts off with Jesus asking her for a drink of water. One might suspect that, in Jesus's mind, before the fact of the Samaritan-Jew conflict and the male-female division, there was something more important at play: he was tired and thirsty. If we truly believe that Jesus lived a fully human life, we have to believe he could get thirsty, right? And if you get thirsty enough, you'll break whatever taboo you have to break to get something to drink.

So he asks for a drink, she quite logically wonders why a Jewish man would speak at all to a Samaritan woman and then comes the curveball. If you knew who was asking for water, you would ask him, and he would have given you living water.

The woman doesn't really get it, not unlike Nicodemus, but she keeps pressing. OK, how do you draw this water with no bucket and no rope. You know whose well this was, right? (referring to the ancient patriarch Jacob). Perhaps impressed by her composure, Jesus actually explains himself a little more than he did to Nicodemus, and she's ready; so give me this water, so I don't have to keep coming back here for water in the middle of the day. From there Jesus diverts the conversation to the husbands, and we see how it goes from there.

That image of "living water," though, is worth unpacking. What happens to water that stands still too long? Particularly out in nature, still water (even if the psalmist likes it) isn't necessarily the most appealing thing. Who knows that is growing in it or infesting it? Even today water that has been sitting in the refrigerator too long can seem unappealing, even if we can't say why.

Jesus even plays on that image a little bit in verse 14, when he speaks of this living water that he gives, saying that it "will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." From a wind from God blowing across the waters of the primordial deep to the River of Life flowing from the throne, living water moves. It's not static. It moves, it flows, it springs up, it gushes. It moves.

I wonder if sometimes that frightens us about this living water. It moves too much. It's not stable, it's not predictable. It's not safe. It's changing. Better to stick with that nice safe water in the big jug in the fridge or on the counter in the big dispenser, stuff that doesn't move unless we pour it or open the spigot.

But no, living water moves, and if we're doing it right we move with it, as unpredictably as it may flow. And we don't thirst anymore. Like the unpredictable wind in John 3, the living water fills us and refreshes us and moves us in ways we can't predict or explain.

This is the water that Jesus offers. We won't be the same after we drink of it. It might just move us to places we don't expect. But this is what Jesus offers us, and that is why Jesus offers us living water. Drink up.

For living water, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #81, Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken; #53, O God, Who Gives Us Life; #65, Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah

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

 

 

 

Sermon: The Worst Temptation

First Presbyterian Church

February 22, 2026, Lent 1A

Matthew 4:1-11

 

The Worst Temptation

 

 

When was the last time anyone dared you to go up on top of the tallest building in town and throw yourself off to prove that God loves you so much – that you are #blessed, so to speak – that God wouldn’t possibly let you get hurt?

Has anyone ever challenged you to turn a bunch of decorative garden stones at Home Depot or Lowe’s into bread to feed all the people at a local homeless shelter or soup kitchen?  

Or have you ever been tempted to sell your soul to some billionaire in order to get bankrolled for a run at public office – maybe even the highest office in the land?

As familiar as this story is – we do read it once a year from either Matthew, Mark, or Luke – one of the things we often don’t think about is that the particular temptations Jesus faces here are not really that relatable for most of us, even in more modern equivalents. And truth be told, it’s just as well. We struggle enough with the far more mundane temptations with which we are confronted on a regular basis. 

I could go through a whole laundry list of temptations any one of us might face on a regular basis. A typical preacher might toss out some manner of temptation to some financial misdeed, possibly, or a more sexual temptation, perhaps, or the temptation to make like the Houston Astros and cheat our way to whatever success or “win” we desire. 

I wonder, though, if the most insidious temptation we face on a regular basis – so common, in fact, that we probably don’t even recognize it as a temptation – is what might be called the temptation to ‘let it slide.’ It’s the temptation that comes of seeing a thing that is wrong, and knowing that it is wrong, but choosing to ‘let it slide.’

This temptation works a lot of ways. Let’s take what we might call a global example. The world’s economic food system is in many ways riddled with all manner of corruption, abusive or exploitative practices towards workers in the supply down to and including slavery, widely unethical pay practices, environmentally degrading agricultural practices, and a whole load of other such wrongdoing. The practices in question implicate an awful lot of the favorite food brands people, particularly in the USA, buy most often. Now there are in some cases particular brands or companies that take into account and seek to avoid or eliminate such practices; you might see labels such as “fair trade certified” or “rainforest-safe” or something like that on the packaging of such foods or goods. Still, you know, those brands tend to be a bit more expensive and harder to find. And, you know, you really like that particular chocolate bar or can’t function at all without that particular cup of coffee in the morning (just to name two of the worst examples). And then comes the defeatist argument: what difference can one person make, anyway?

And so, we … let it slide.

But let’s get more immediate, or more personal. You know something is wrong with the couple next door. You don’t see him, unless he comes tearing in late at night, often with a lot of noisy shouting or arguing. She’s turning much more withdrawn, less approachable, and when you see her she’s clearly trying to hide something and is clearly more fearful and on edge. You have suspicions. But you don’t know anything. And you can already hear the voices telling you to ‘mind your own business.’ And after all, if he’s willing to be that violent to her, who’s to say he won’t be that violent towards you?

And so, we…let it slide.

All creation suffers, peoples around the world are ground into dust by unrelenting poverty, women are abused constantly and even killed, and we…let it slide.

Perhaps this is where Jesus’s temptation meets ours after all. The Tempter’s challenges to Jesus are a direct attack on Jesus’s relationship to God the Father. Who does Jesus serve with his power for miracles? Does Jesus glorify God, or himself? Who is worthy of worship? Jesus lets none of these challenges slide, to say the least. And yes, that temptation to "let it slide" resonates with those questions as well. Do we serve God instead of a flashy doer of tricks? Do we glorify God instead of putting God to the test? Do we worship God instead of a power-mad tyrant?

And also, Jesus doesn’t get into great theological arguments with the Tempter either. Each temptation is swatted aside, you’ll note, with a statement that either begins with or includes the phrase “It is written…” In this case, all three of these answers are written in the book of Deuteronomy, that great recapitulation of the Law that finishes the Torah. 

We do have that resource at hand, you know. We also have a lot more “it is written” resources as well, law and prophets and writings and psalms and poetry and letters and apocalyptic visions and most of all the very acts and deeds of Jesus himself, written that we might have Jesus’s witness in our minds, our hearts, and our lives, that we might know temptation when we see it and might be prepared to rebuff it at every turn. As it is written in John 20:31, “these are written so that you might come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

See, not giving into temptation isn’t about the do’s and don’ts, the “gotcha"s and the finger-pointers. It’s about life; life in Jesus’s name, life in God’s good-created world, life in the Holy Spirit’s guidance. It’s about the choice, again and again, to live into our baptisms and our confirmation promises and the commitment we express every time we come to this table. It’s about life in the Jesus who chooses again and again to live for God and for us. 

For all this, we have to say Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #165, The Glory of These Forty Days; #---, A serpent so wily; #819, Be Still, My Soul

 

 

  

Sermon: The Fast God Chooses

 

First Presbyterian Church

February 18, 2026, Ash Wednesday

Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

 

The Fast God Chooses

 

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

It’s one of those phrases that is so familiar, we assume by default it must be in the Bible, but it’s not; it’s from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, dating at least back to 1662.  It is part of the burial service, reminding those in attendance that all of us are subject to the same finality as the deceased.  Not surprisingly, a phrase about ashes pops into the mind of many when the subject of Ash Wednesday comes up.  

Ash Wednesday is not an inappropriate time to consider our own mortality.  It marks the beginning of the season of Lent, the culmination of which finds us at a crucifixion site outside Jerusalem, where even our Savior tasted of the pain and indignity of human death.  It is not inappropriate for us to keep in mind our own finiteness, the knowledge that our days are numbered, and that we don’t know exactly what that number is going to be.  At the end of this service, you will be invited to take up a Lenten discipline and to come forward and receive a mark on your forehead or hand, a cross of ashes, and you will hear the words “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

It is not at all inappropriate to remember and reflect upon our finiteness on this day.  The challenge is: what will we do with that knowledge?  How will that reflection affect us?

There are good ways to be affected, and there are bad ways.  There are positive ways to carry forward that realization, and there are negative, even damaging ways.  

Matthew cautions us against some of those negative ways.  In these verses Jesus warns his followers against the kind of piety and fasting that damages.  Matthew records Jesus’s warnings in the context of three different kinds of pieties; giving alms, praying, and fasting.  In each case Jesus weighs in against the kind of giving, praying, or fasting that exists mainly to be noticed by others.  As crazy as it sounds, an influential person might well have had a trumpeter at hand to “announce” his gift before the public.  (Today that person would just hire publicists or spin doctors for the same effect.)  Likewise, it wouldn’t have been unusual to see such a person out on the street praying in a particularly ostentatious manner.  (We have “prayer breakfasts” for that now, I guess.)  And a person on a fast might well go about with a face pulled down into a frown, all the better to provoke others to ask “oh, dear, what’s wrong?”

Note that Jesus is not warning against giving alms or praying or fasting; in fact Jesus presumes his followers will give alms and pray and fast – “whenever you give alms,” “whenever you pray,” “whenever you fast.”  But the heart of the matter is why his followers pray or give or fast; is it to receive the praise of others?  To check off a couple of boxes on the Official Good Person Scorecard?  Or is it to give honor to God?  

Isaiah adds a slightly different dimension to the question of practicing pieties like prayer and fasting.  For Isaiah, it’s not just a matter of the public nature of the piety; it’s also about whether the whole life matches up to that public piety.  For example:

If you sit down to your meal, but those who labored to make that meal possible are living in poverty or abuse despite their labor, is that the fast God chooses?

If you pray and sing and make all sorts of joyful noise in worship, but turn a blind eye when others of whatever faith cannot worship in peace without being harassed or even killed, is that the fast God chooses?

Short answer: no.

To the degree that we do not pursue justice in all its forms, to the degree that we tolerate or even profit from oppression or exploitation, to the degree that we assume hunger or homelessness or poverty or lack of educational opportunity or any of the conditions that plague women and men and children around us is "their fault," our fast is pointless or worthless.  It is no service to God whatsoever.  

This is how our mortality, our knowledge of our finitude and limited time, is to move us; to refuse to live with the way things are, to refuse to live in ease because of the oppression and exploitation of others, to loose the bonds of injustice, to set free the oppressed, to share our bread with those in need of bread and on down the list that Isaiah gives us, that is the fast God chooses.  This is our rightful service.  This is what goes hand in hand with the right-minded piety Jesus teaches in Matthew 6.  The piety that comes from our deepest longing, the piety that cares only to be seen before God, the piety that changes the world: this is the fast God chooses.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #166, The Glory of These Forty Days; #---, You teach us 

Sermon: What Is Revealed, What Is Concealed

First Presbyterian Church

February 15, 2026, Transfiguration A

Exodus 24:12-18: 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

 

What Is Revealed, What Is Concealed

 

 

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to drive around town or perhaps across the state on a cloudy day? Not a rainy day, but a cloudy one, when the sun isn't constantly beating down and creating a glare that obscures everything? I know this is a little bit heretical to say, but sometimes cloudiness can be a good thing. 

In the Old Testament a cloud can in fact be a very good thing: it can, on occasion, be a manifestation of the presence of God. 

It happens in today’s reading from Exodus, Moses is making ready to go up the mountain called Sinai to receive instruction from God. Even from the moment the Israelites had first come to that mountain after their deliverance from Egypt (back in 19:9), God had made his presence to Moses there known by the appearance of a thick and dense cloud, from which God’s voice might be heard by the people. Even before that, during the Exodus from Egypt, a pillar of cloud had been the manifestation of God’s protection of the people as they traveled by day, with a pillar of fire taking its place by night. That cloud, in a sense, revealed God.

There are other accounts in Hebrew Scripture of cloud as manifestation of God, but my personal favorite is a little-known account from the little-read book of 2 Chronicles. In this account in chapter 5 the great Temple was being dedicated under King Solomon. At the climax of the dedication, as the priests sang a song of praise, the Temple was filled with a cloud, “so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.” I mean, let’s face it, that’s pretty cool. And again, the cloud reveals the presence of God. (There is a parallel account in 1 Kings 8, but I prefer the Chronicles version because in that story, the cloud fills up the Temple only after the trumpeters have started playing and the choir singing. Music, after all.)

So when we get to the account from Matthew’s gospel today, along with the account of going up a mountain, and the actual glowing transfiguration of Jesus, the bright, welling cloud as a manifestation of the glory of God would not have been unfamiliar to those to whom Matthew was writing. It is a scene in a gospel, but like so much of Matthew’s gospel it contains a host of echoes and resonances with Hebrew Scripture.

Still, though, there is something interesting about a cloud as a manifestation of the presence and glory of God. Clouds, after all, aren’t exactly known for their revealingproperties most of the time. Clouds aren’t translucent; they obscure. The whole reason that the cloudiness makes that drive so bearable is that it obscures the sometimes-oppressive summer sun (or even the sometimes-oppressive wintertime sun). 

And in the account from Exodus, that’s exactly what happens. The voice of God could be heard by the people, but God could not be seen, and when Moses went up the mountain to receive the commandments of God he also disappeared. Not that the people minded; already they were quite content to keep their distance; as early as Exodus 20 they were afraid that if God spoke to them directly – face to face, so to speak – they would die. In their minds, the cloud was protection.

(As for that lovely story from 2 Chronicles 5, the glory of the Lord filling the Temple with a cloud was indeed enough to bring the dedication of the Temple to a halt; “the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud” as verse 14 describes. Not sure if it means the priests were physically unable to stand or simply couldn’t stand it.)

In Matthew, the cloud seems a little different. This event is taking place six days after Simon had made the great breakthrough confession of faith recorded in 16:16: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” Jesus had followed up this confession by giving him a new name – Peter – and by launching into an extended piece of instruction on his forthcoming death. The newly-christened Peter had taken Jesus aside to rebuke him for such talk, only to get it back ten times over – “Get behind me, Satan!” 

Despite that incident, Jesus took Peter up the mountain, along with James and John, where this Transfiguration took place. Jesus himself is transfigured and glowing and shining and dazzling, and then as Moses and Elijah – the law and the prophets, so to speak – appear with him. You get a brief reminiscence of this in the reading from 2 Peter, likely written by a follower of that apostle recording his teacher's recollection. 

After this transfiguration, Peter steps into a role many of us might recognize, maybe, from times of great excitement or stress or fear in our own lives: the person whose mouth immediately starts running despite the fact that his brain is supplying absolutely nothing useful for his mouth to say. (Somehow, 2 Peter doesn't include this part.) And then, when Peter is fumbling around about building booths for Moses and Elijah and Jesus as if this were the ancient Hebrew festival known as the Feast of Booths? That’s when the cloud takes over.

The cloud “overshadowed” them. And, as it was back in the days of Exodus, a voice (the voice of God?) spoke from the cloud, to the effect that the disciples fell to their knees in fear (not unlike their Hebrew ancestors at the prospect of the voice of God). What the voice said sounds familiar – “this is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased” is an exact echo of what the voice from Heaven says at Jesus’s baptism, back in chapter 3. But there is added a command: “Listen to him!” (And don’t miss that exclamation point.) Only at the touch of Jesus (“Get up and do not be afraid”) do they look up to see the cloud gone, Moses and Elijah gone, and Jesus – “Jesus himself alone” in Matthews’ emphatic Greek construction – is there. The cloud, the glory of God, has removed the distractions of Moses and Elijah, the safe and comfortable heroes of the faith Peter and James and John knew, and left them with “Jesus himself alone,” whom they have just seen as they had never seen or heard or understood him before. 

In concealing Moses and Elijah from the overly enthusiastic disciples, the cloud also reveals; Jesus is revealed not merely as an equal to those two, but something completely other, something so far beyond what either of those figures could represent or offer. The Son of God, the Eternal, is revealed by what the clouds conceal. 

As the eminent twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth describes in his The Faith of the Church:

Eternal does not mean "that which has no end" but "that which belongs to the world to come". Eternity is not defined by its unlimited characteristic but by its relation to the world to come, to the glorious kingdom of God.

 

“That which belongs to the world to come” – a world without end. 

At a challenging time for the disciples, when Jesus insisted on his own death and severely rebuked those who could not accept it, these disciples are given a glimpse, however fleeting, of Jesus the Eternal, Jesus of The World to Come. At a time and season nearly impossible for us to bear, we receive this glimpse of Jesus the Eternal, Jesus of The World to Come. Death does not, cannot, have the last word, no matter how dark our despair might seem, how much madness might seem to hold sway in the entire world, no matter how bleak the night. The clouds pull back and conceal what is not eternal, revealing the One who is eternal. And that, strange and puzzling as the story might be, is why Transfiguration Sunday is a day of great hope. 

This is God’s Son, the Beloved, in whom God is well pleased. Listen to him!

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #189, O Wonderous Sight, O Vision Fair; #---, Upon a holy mountain; #11, Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud