Homily: What Do We Hear?

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

August 30, 2026

Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:15-20

 

What Do We Hear?

 

The fifth Sunday of a month is often observed here as a "hymn sing Sunday." It doesn't always work out - the next fifth Sunday will be in November but we'll be busy with the first Sunday of Advent that day - but frequently such a Sunday gets loaded up with several extra hymns, a little differently each time depending on the pastor or musical leadership trying to put it together.

In this case that format is being modified slightly; change an 's' to an 'r' and you've got a "hymn ring Sunday," which seems about as good a description of the day as we're going to come up with. Indeed, while such parts of the service as the prelude and introit are not necessarily hymn-based, you will notice that there are three distinct portions of the service given over to hymns arranged for and played by bell choir (with a couple for us to sing as well).

I invite you, as we go through this service, to pay attention to what these arrangements of generally well-known hymns have to say to you in this particular presentation. Do you find the words matching themselves to the tune in your head? Is there some deep past association with the hymn coming into your memory?

The psalm verses heading each set nudge us toward what the hymns in each set have in common; songs of comfort and reassurance in the first set (including in that second setting the hymn with probably the most gutting origin story of any hymn I know); the forthcoming set reminding us of what might be called "the basics" of faith; and the final set offering up praise and glory to God. Of course, there are many other ways that hymns can function in the life of the church; there are hymns that teach, hymns that grieve outright without words of reassurance, hymns that relay scripture to us, hymns that mark occasions or events in the Christian faith and life, hymns that keep us on the right path (which might be the point of that reading from Ephesians), and many more.

While I do want to mark the hymn settings on this particular day, I cannot let the moment pass without also commending those pieces we have heard that do not have familiar hymns or words attached to them. Hymn arrangements can be comfortable and easy to listen to, but the music with no words attached can play a unique function in worship; if we are willing to open up and listen to those "songs without words," we may just be able to hear nothing less than the Holy Spirit speaking, or maybe singing, to us in those musical moments. Can we allow ourselves to tune in to such a moving of the Spirit?

As for the rest of this service - and it is a service of worship indeed, perhaps delivered through an unusual medium - let each setting to come speak each its own message, to its own text, to the things that the music conveys itself, maybe even those "sighs too deep for words" that came up in Romans a few weeks ago. Hear, and be led by the Spirit.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (actually sung, from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #839, Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine; #641, When In Our Music God Is Glorified

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: To Be Transformed

First Presbyterian Church

August 16, 2026, Pentecost 11A

Romans12:1-8

 

To Be Transformed

 

So what’s the point anyway?

Well, yes, but what of it?

What does any of this mean to me?

What am I supposed to do with all this information?

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of those long and winding lectures and been waiting for the speaker to get to the point, you might have asked one of those questions or something similar. Or perhaps in some cases you’ve had such a question thrown at you – perhaps by one of your children? You might have wondered this about a class in school or a job assignment, or maybe even a sermon on occasion (though I hope not).

It’s fair to suppose that maybe even some of the Romans to whom this letter was addressed, the Jewish and Gentile community of followers of Christ hearing this letter read as a part of their assembly for worship, might just have started wondering the same thing after a while. Paul (who, remember, had never been to Rome and whom most of the Romans had never met) certainly had a lot to say, and had constructed some serious and intricate arguments about sin and human weakness, the grace of God and the love of Christ, and his own feelings about the rejection of Christ by many of his fellow Jews (in what we know as chapters9-11). By this time it’s entirely possible that those hearing the letter were beginning to wonder “OK, but what’s the point of all of this? What difference does it make? What am I supposed to do with all this?”

Well, now it’s time for the “so what.”

Not surprisingly, Paul introduces this final stretch of the letter with a great big transition word. In Greek it’s ουν (“oun”), which we translate as “therefore.” Paul has used a lot of that kind of language so far, but this is the big one: everything that has come before leads to this. All the intricate and heavy teaching that has come before? Now this is what it looks like in “real life.”

Beyond the opening word, the first two verses of this chapter serve not only to make the transition from teaching to application, but they also provide the foundation for the descriptive material to come. In this platform Paul deftly makes clear that the life for followers of Christ to live is not merely a “private” matter of the heart or the mere checking off a list of beliefs to profess; it is all-consuming, changing the way we live in both body and mind.

Paul’s first exhortation challenges his hearers to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” Two things should be clarified here. While we might get hung up on grisly images of sacrifice, the act of sacrifice took many forms in ancient Israel and other religions of the time, many of which did not involve the sacrifice of an animal. You might get a clearer image by using the word “offering” here. Also, you might remember how Paul spent a lot of time earlier in the letter lamenting the fallen condition of the human “flesh” (or σαρχ, “sarx”); here Paul is using not that word but the other “body” word, σομα (“soma”), the one that referred more specifically to the physical human body. So this is not some mere spiritualized exercise; this is an instruction that our whole physical self is to be offered up to God.

The very next verse, though, looks to a different kind of surrender: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.” It’s not enough for body or mind to be submitted, but the whole together. We are a package deal, so to speak. But it’s not about being made super-smart or some other kind of mental prowess; our minds are to be transformed to “discern what is the will of God”: to see, at least some tiny little bit, what God sees, or how God sees is the whole point of the transformed, renewed mind. And so much of being a disciple of Christ starts with this.

Perhaps it is not an accident that, after those exhortations to make our bodies into living offerings and submitting our minds for transformation and renewal, Paul’s next exhortation is to something like what we would call humility. That’s a word we often use badly or even abuse, misunderstanding it as a kind of self-abasement. Novelist and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner captures that misuse:

Humility is often confused with saying you’re not much of a bridge players when you know perfectly well you are. Conscious or otherwise, this kind of humility is a form of gamesmanship.

If you really aren’t much of a bridge player, you’re apt to be rather proud of yourself for admitting it so humbly. This kind of humility is a form of low comedy.

True humility doesn’t consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you’d be apt to think of anybody else. It is the capacity for being no more and no less pleased when you play your own hand well than when your opponents do.

 

Even this, though, doesn’t completely capture what Paul is encouraging upon his readers and hearers in Rome. It’s not super easy to capture in words, but what Paul is encouraging here is that each of us should see ourself, in Paul’s words, “with sober judgment” – or “in your right mind,” so to speak, not distorted by arrogance or hatred nor by despair or shame. 

In short, there is no room for assuming any kind of superiority – or supremacy, to use a timely word – to anybody else who is a child of God. My job is at least in part not to think too much of myself because I have the task of being a preacher, or of being a cancer survivor (so far), or because I'm white, or male, or middle-aged, or a hybrid-vehicle driver or an introvert or any number of other attributes that I might be guilty of elevating as an object of pride or a means to exalt myself above others. Your list will look a little different, but you get the idea. The things we do don’t win us extra merit in the eyes of God. We’re not in this for brownie points.

Indeed even the thought of judging our own selves “on our merits” doesn’t hold water if we’re truly thinking with that transformed mind from verse 2. It’s not about anything but seeing ourselves and one another as those who have received gifts from God, “according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” as Paul puts it, for the purpose of living together in the body of Christ. There’s a lot hinging on that “transforming of our minds,” nothing less than our very ability to be the Body of Christ.

Even our ability to present our own bodies as a “living sacrifice”, our ability to be members of the Body of Christ here in Gainesville or anywhere in the world, hinges on this transformation.  Our living in the Body depends on the renewing of our minds. All those lovely spiritual gifts in verses 6-8 start with what happens in verses 1-2.

Up to this point in the letter Paul has been trying to teach the Romans (as he understood it) a myriad of ideas about the law, and its susceptibility to sin; the grace of God and its sole power to defeat sin and to bring salvation to us; and now here is the key to living in that grace, to being “more than conquerors” living in the love of God from which nothing can separate us, as Paul wrote in Chapter 8. 

You see, there are certain things a renewed mind, a mind thinking with “sober judgment,” discerning God’s will, cannot do.  A renewed mind cannot live in fear.  It certainly cannot wallow in suspicion of those who are Other, who are somehow Not Us.  A renewed mind cannot see itself as superior because of accidents of birth or ability to check off a list of do’s and don’ts.  A renewed mind will never assume that wealth equals righteousness, or that one country is any more special to God than any other, or that our way of doing church is the only way of doing church.

A renewed mind, a mind utterly transforming the way we think and live, discerns the body of Christ equally in a city slum or a shack in the woods.  A renewed mind discerns the pain suffered by the oppressed (whether we have ever witnessed it or not), the despair and anguish of the poor and forgotten, the sins of pride of the privileged and elite, and weeps for all of them. 

And perhaps hardest of all, a renewed mind is not something we can do.  Note that Paul instructs them to “be transformed by the renewing of your minds”, not “be transformed by renewing your mind.“ It doesn’t happen just of our own initiative; we can’t just “change our minds” by ourselves.  Only in turning away from and renouncing our own willfulness and control can our minds be renewed by the same saving, loving, transforming grace that delivers us out of sin and restores us into full relationship with God.  We don’t want to give up our way of seeing the world, of dividing the world into Us and Them; but a mind submitted fully to the love of God, the fellowship of Christ Jesus, and the power of the Holy Spirit learns to see the world through the love of God, the fellowship of Christ Jesus, and the power of the Holy Spirit. 

And then, only then, are we no longer conformed to the world, with its scorekeeping and supremacy and walls. Only then do we really start to live as anything at all like the Body of Christ. 

Let your mind be renewed, and the Body will follow.

For the renewing of our minds, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #310, I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord; #---, Therefore, sisters, brothers, all; #727, Will You Let Me Be Your Servant

 

 

 

 Be transformed by the renewing of your mind...but not like this!

Sermon: Messengers Needed

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

August 9, 2026, Pentecost 11A

Romans10:5-15

 

Messengers Needed

 

How lovely are the messengers that bring us the gospel of peace

How lovely are the messengers that bring us the gospel of peace

The melody is by Felix Mendelssohn, yes, the same composer of “songs without words” from last week’s sermon.  This is from a chorus found in the second part of his oratorio Paulus, or Saint Paul.  Mendelssohn’s text was originally in German, and the English version is a rather loose translation/paraphrase of the original, meant to fit Mendelssohn’s melody as much as to translate the German text accurately.  Even so, the original German text here has nothing about “feet,” which I suppose is just as well; most of us don’t have what we’d call beautiful feet, if one wants to be literal about such things.

The verse that Mendelssohn appropriates here, and which appears in today’s reading, is dropped into the oratorio after the dramatic moment in which Barnabas and Paul are set apart – by the Holy Ghost, no less – for the work of proclaiming the gospel.  It is of course a key moment in Paul’s career, as the book of Acts describes it, and even if this verse is pulled in from Romans, it does serve its dramatic purpose effectively. 

Our reading tells us that Paul is quoting – “as it is written,” he says plainly – and in this case it’s from Isaiah 52:7.  In that context the statement is elaborated a bit:

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”

 

Not surprisingly, Paul is happy to latch on to that one phrase ‘’who announces salvation” and translate it into his own context; for Paul, of course, the gospel is salvation. 

How lovely are the messengers who bring us the gospel of peace.

Feet or no feet, Paul’s appropriation of Isaiah here serves to complete a rhetorical point that has been at least ten verses in the making by this time.  Today’s reading includes several passages from Hebrew Scripture intended to support Paul’s key claim that all – all, not just Jews but “Greeks” also – all who call upon the Lord’s name will (in the words of Joel 2:32) “be saved.”  From this end point Paul walks his readers back to the necessity of those “messengers” – how can they call upon one in whom they have not believed, how can they believe in one of whom they’ve never heard, how can they hear unless someone proclaims, how can anyone proclaim unless they are sent? 

It’s no surprise that this passage pops up in ordination services on occasion.  It does seem to offer a clear rationale for the office of a preacher, or a “teaching elder” or “minister of word and sacrament” in Presbyterian-speak, as one “sent” to proclaim the name of the Lord on whom all are invited to call.

Of course it isn’t all joy.  Paul himself has experienced firsthand, by the time he writes this letter, a great deal of rejection of the gospel message, not to mention opposition to it, sometimes violent.  He knows fully well that “not all have obeyed the good news,” and turns again to Isaiah for support, or is it consolation – “Lord, who has believed our message?” [Isa. 53:1] 

It particularly grieves Paul that many of those who have rejected the gospel are those to whom it was first proclaimed; namely, the people of Israel, or the Jews (Paul usually calls these people by the collective term “Israel”; let us not confuse it with the modern state of that name).  The whole discourse from which today’s reading is selected begins with a striking lament from Paul over this, in Romans 9:2-3:

 

I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.  For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. [Rom. 9:2-3]

 

Even as Paul spent his missionary career among primarily Greeks, even as this career proceeded under the adopted name “Paul” instead of his given, Jewish name “Saul,” he carried in his heart this grief over the general rejection of the gospel among “Israel.”  Obviously this was not a universal case; there were Jews among the Roman Christians to whom Paul was writing, as well as elsewhere in the Roman Empire.  Still, he grieved over the rejection of the Messiah by the “people of Israel,” rejecting one of their own.

How lovely are the messengers who bring us the gospel of peace

As beautiful as this passage and this key verse is, though, there is danger here.  Many of those churches who use this passage expect that, once this new pastor is ordained and installed, he or she will then take care of all the proclamation duties, allowing them to sit back and, well, be off the hook from that scary and maybe embarrassing business of (shudder) talking about religion. 

It’s scary because people might say “no,” or worse; they might change their opinion of us.  We might not be one of the “cool kids” anymore.  It’s embarrassing because we live in a world, and in an American society in particular, which has seen (and continues to see) more than its fair share of bad evangelism, preaching so permeated with hatefulness and exclusivity that any hearer would rightly wonder what’s so good about this supposed “good news.” To be honest, there are times it’s perfectly understandable to be reluctant to be seen in such a light. Maybe you’ve had the experience of “billboard evangelism,” driving up or down a freeway in some parts of the country to the sight of all those billboards from 1-855-FOR TRUTH or the one that literally aims to “SCARE THE HELL OUT OF YOU” (complete with flames around the word “hell”)?

And yet (or maybe even because of all this bad evangelism?), the messengers are still needed.  And if we look, we can actually find those who show us a better way to be those messengers, bringing good news.

We might look at Dr. Kent Brantly, a physician from Texas who ended up in the headlines in 2014 as the first American to be diagnosed with the deadly Ebola virus then raging in Liberia and other parts of Africa.  Those who know Dr. Brantly spoke of a person who was called to be there, even as dangerous or as difficult as it is to be a physician working in inhospitable conditions to combat a disease with no known cure.[i]  Bizarrely, Dr. Brantly became an object of derision for certain American elites at the time, who apparently believe it was his own fault for going off to a foreign country to do dangerous work when he could have stayed in the US and not put himself in danger.  But even a physician can, at times, bring a message of peace. (He was returned to the US to be treated and did survive ebola, unlike 90% of the people who contract that illness.)

More historically, we could look at Mr. Rogers. You know, the guy with the neighborhood. It was in the 1960s that Fred Rogers (who was, yes, an ordained Presbyterian minister) began his television show for children, and you might remember the 60s as an era fraught with conflict in American life, from the escalating war in Vietnam to backlash against the Civil Rights Movement at home. In that setting and time Mr. Rogers deliberately and decisively moved to make his show, his time with the children of the United States via public television, a time for not only teaching but showing peace, both in the skits with the various puppet characters learning the folly of war and in his relations with the human characters on the show as well.

Maybe one of his most vivid illustrations came on a hot summer day, when Mr. Rogers was cooling his feet in a small pool. As the neighborhood policeman, played by a black man, walked by, Mr. Rogers invited him to take a break and cool his feet in the pool as well.[ii] This aired on PBS in 1969, a time in this country when such an image – white feet and black feet, in the same small pool – could get somebody shot or hanged.

How lovely are the messengers who bring us the gospel of peace.

Paul slipped an important point into his discourse, practically when we weren’t looking.  Notice verse 8: “the Word is near you, on your lips and in your heart”; “one confesses with the mouth and so is saved” in verse 10; and then those beautiful feet in verse 15.  Our faith, our gospel is not confined to the mind, but it occupies all of us from lips to feet, from head to toe.  Our witness is embodied.  We are messengers of the gospel of peace in not just what we say, but what we do.  The hand of fellowship extended to the one we don’t know, who may have ducked in just to escape the heat or the rain or the snow in winter; the word of the greeting to the coworker holed up in the cubicle next door; the cup of cold water given in Jesus’s name:  our message is not just spoken, but enacted daily, even when we may not realize it. 

The message is not only embodied in each of our own individual bodies, but it is also embodied in all of us as the body of Christ.  Our witness in staying together and continuing to come together as a congregation, being not merely in our community but being part of it, our welcome to those that others – even other churches – would declare unwelcome; this is a gospel of peace. 

To be messengers of the gospel of peace, all of us – not just the preachers – is not optional; it is inevitable. The only question is, what kind of messengers of the gospel of peace are we?

How lovely are the messengers that bring us the gospel of peace.

How lovely are the messengers that bring us the gospel of peace.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #624, I Greet Thee, Who My Sure Redeemer Art; #175, Seek Ye First; #462, I Love to Tell the Story

 

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[i] “Send me: U.S. doctor treated for Ebola drawn to mission work since youth,” http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/02/health/ebola-kent-brantly/index.html (Accessed August 3, 2026).

[ii] “Walking the Beat In Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Where a New Day Began Together,” npr.org,  http://www.npr.org/2016/03/11/469846519/walking-the-beat-in-mr-rogers-neighborhood-where-a-new-day-began-together (Accessed August 3, 2026).

Sermon: Too Deep for Words

First Presbyterian Church

August 2, 2026, Pentecost 10A

Romans 8:26-39

 

Too Deep For Words

 

What do you do when you hear music without words? Yes, music with no words being sung to it, but even more music with no words at all - not a hymn arrangement or a descriptive title; just the music?

Maybe you’re the particularly blessed type who can simply listen and let the music take its course through your soul. Probably, though (if you’re like most people), you try, consciously or not, to “fill in the blank.” Your mind starts to create a story to go with the music.  Or perhaps it begins to invent a poem, in which the words fit to the tune you hear.  Or possibly, if you’re a more visual type, your mind conjures a picture or scene that plays out as the music moves along.

Either way, we modern-day humans have a sharply defined inability (or most of us do, anyway) to let the music simply be music.  (And the church, it should be noted, is particularly not helpful in this regard, relying heavily on music with words or music with words attached to them in some way.) We somehow develop the idea, perhaps unspoken but no less powerful, that the music has to mean something, something that we can somehow encapsulate in words or maybe in pictures.

Felix Mendelssohn begs to differ with you.

Mendelssohn was of course one of the outstanding composers of the nineteenth century.  He was known, among many other things, for the “Song without words,” a type of piano work that was very much in the form and structure of a song – relatively brief, with a clearly defined melody and accompaniment. The only thing missing from these “songs without words” was, indeed, any kind of sung text.

Mendelssohn wrote at least four dozen such “songs without words” in his brief lifetime.  A few of them have descriptive labels attached to them; for example, some are labeled as “Venetian gondola songs” because they so strongly resemble the songs sung by the gondola drivers in the canals of Venice.  Most of them have no title, as Mendelssohn presented them.  A few were given labels after their publication, in some cases even after Mendelssohn’s death, by editors or critics or others who felt that the music had to mean something, something that could be captured in words (or at least it would sell better if it did).

In a letter to a former student Mendelssohn very specifically rejected this idea.  As he put it, he believed that words were insufficient to the task of capturing what music meant: to him, words (many or few) were “so ambiguous, so vague, so subject to misunderstanding when compared with true music, which fills the soul with a thousand better things than words.”  He continued, “The thoughts that are expressed to me by the music I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite… .”

I can’t help but suspect that the Apostle Paul might have at least nodded knowingly at this idea that Mendelssohn expresses here.  At the very least he might have acknowledged that Mendelssohn’s idea that the music he loved was “too definite” for words sounded a lot like what Paul himself writes here in verse 26 of this eighth chapter of Romans:

 

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. (NRSV)

 

I admit that phrase – “sighs too deep for words” has haunted me most of my life, probably since some sermon I heard as a younger man (since I was raised on the King James Version, I didn't hear this phrase as a child).  Back then I wondered what that could possibly mean; being a wordy guy I couldn’t really imagine how something could be “too deep for words.”  If you couldn’t say it, how could it be real?

I’ve grown up since then and I have at least some small idea of just how silly that was, even before I ever read Mendelssohn’s own description of his view of music.  Oftentimes this sense, this deep-rooted wordless sighing has been a part of my life in times of trouble; the death of my mother, later the death of one of my sisters, or my own diagnosis of cancer some fourteen years ago.  Occasionally it has been experienced in more joyful times; our wedding day, for example, or a particularly profound musical experience.  Sometimes it has come in moments of struggle or uncertainty; the period of time when I was considering giving up the teaching career I loved to jump off the cliff into seminary stands out there.

Indeed, sighs too deep for words.  Even when my soul tried to fit words into my feelings, their insufficiency and inferiority became painfully clear.  Why does this happen?  Why did I get cancer that I could survive, and my classmate got cancer and didn't survive?  The words collapse on their own uselessness.  Sighs too deep for words.

I suspect you can search your own lives for times when you’ve known that experience of sorrow, or joy, or struggle, or uncertainty, or relief for which words could not be found or did not exist.  It’s one thing to know that kind of experience, one “beyond words.”

It’s a whole other thought to know that the Holy Spirit does that for us. 

For indeed that is what Paul tells us right here in verse 26: “that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”  When we cannot find the words to pray rightly, whether in our joy or sorrow or need, it isn’t that the Spirit gives us words to say.  No, it is that the Spirit steps in for us with its own wordless, unspeakable sighing or groaning. 

Remember in last week's reading, starting in verse 22, Paul writes of all of creation “groaning in labor pains;” not only creation, but we ourselves, “groan inwardly” while we wait for the adoption God has promised to each of us, of which Paul spoke in verse 15.  Paul has also already spoken of the Spirit bearing witness with us, in our times of crying out to God, even as simple a cry as “Abba! Father!”  In our unfinished spiritual state, when we cry out for we know not what or even when we cannot cry out, the Holy Spirit, the Comforter Jesus promised us to send after he was gone, is at work in us and with us and for us, bringing our petitions before God even when we cannot rightly articulate them or know what they are. 

And it is from this knowledge, this promise of a Spirit that intercedes for us beyond our capacity to know or understand, that Paul can exult throughout the rest of this chapter in the unspeakable love of God.  The God whose Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words is the God who relentlessly works through everything that happens to us for our good (even if the NRSV translation of v. 28 doesn't convey that very well). It's not about eliminating suffering or pain from our lives but about God blessing and sustaining us through it; this is the God who created us and foreknew us and made us to be part of the family of God; this is the God who, even though we could be charged with all of the corruption and weakness sin can muster, instead intercedes for us, not even withholding God’s own Son, that we would be reconciled and restored; this is the God who justifies, who saves, who redeems and restores; this is the God who loved us and loves us and will love us so profoundly and so unspeakably that Paul can practically sing out in joy that nothing – not death or life or angels or rulers or dark powers, nothing can separate us from that love.  God meets our sighs too deep for words with love too deep for words.

For that, dear brothers and sisters, even though the words themselves are painfully inadequate, let us never fail to say, Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #703,Jesus, Thy Boundless Love to Me; #---, God works in all things; #529, Draw Us In the Spirit's Tether; #833, O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go