Sermon: Opening Day

           

 

First Presbyterian Church

April 5, 2026, Easter Sunday A

Matthew 28:1-10, 16-20

 

Opening Day

 

 

First, an acknowledgment: I really did get the inspiration for this sermon title and theme from the church sign from a couple of weeks ago.

Did you notice that, somewhere amidst all the basketball foolishness of the past few weeks, baseball season started?

I'm old enough to remember that Major League Baseball's opening day always happened in Cincinnati, on a weekday afternoon There was a great big tradition and all behind it, with an Opening Day parade and everything. I remember it mostly because growing up in Georgia, I often saw that game on TV because Atlanta was frequently the opponent for that first game of the season. In fact I was watching to see Hank Aaron tie Babe Ruth's all-time home run record on Opening Day in Cincinnati in 1974. (And you better believe I plan to be at the River Bandits' home opener Tuesday night, if I can ever get the online ordering system to work.)

Funny thing about Opening Day; no matter how big the celebration, no matter how the big the win or heartbreaking the loss, no matter what (except maybe for rain), there was another game the next day.

There's a lesson in that. We'll get back to it later.

Every gospel’s retelling of the resurrection has its own quirks (for example, Mark barely tells you anything at all, and you never even see or hear the resurrected Jesus?), and Matthew’s definitely has its own distinct features, but there is one thing all four of them have in common: in none of the accounts does anyone actually see the resurrection happen. As Barbara Brown Taylor points out in Learning to Wait in the Dark, there is technically no such thing as a “witness to the resurrection.”

Aside from Mark’s aforementioned gospel, all of the others show us the already-resurrected Jesus, some quite extensively such as Luke’s several encounters seemingly all on the same day, and John’s extensive retelling of Thomas’s particular encounter in Chapter 20 and that breakfast scene on the lakeshore in chapter 21. Matthew’s account is a bit more terse, and appearances of the risen Christ only add up to two – the encounter with the two Marys and then the Galilee appearance to the disciples that culminates in possibly the most famous verses in this gospel, the ones at the very end that constitute what we have come to call the Great Commission – “Go ye therefore and teach all nations…” for those of you who have it memorized still in the King James Version.

The odd thing about Matthew’s account is that even though the two Marys witness quite a spectacle when they arrive at the tomb – an earthquake, a lightning-like angel descending from heaven and rolling back the stone, the guards becoming “like dead men” – all of this spectacle is prelude to the announcement that “he is not here.” Somehow, Jesus is already gone from a tomb that had (presumably) been sealed before the angel rolled it back, if 27:66 is to be believed.

Meanwhile, what the two Marys get is not to bear witness to a miracle. Instead, they get a job to do. (This is where that part about Opening Day comes back.)

First the angel gives them the word to go find those other disciples and get them headed towards Galilee, where Jesus will meet them. While they were headed off to do just that, with the curious mixture of “fear and great joy” Matthew describes, Jesus himself makes his appearance – just as in John’s gospel, Jesus appears to the women first – and basically gives them the same message: go tell the disciples to meet me, not in the great city of Jerusalem, but back in rural Galilee, where Jesus spent so much of his ministry.

This is no great spectacle in front of great numbers, but only to two women, isolated from the rest of the world that was going on as if nothing had happened. No great crowds, no great gathering: just the two Marys. Later the disciples (eleven, after what Judas did) get their turn. As far as Matthew’s gospel goes, that is maybe thirteen witnesses to the resurrected Christ?  It’s almost as if it’s a secret, at least until Jesus commands them to "go therefore and make disciples of all nations..." At least we have Christ's promise that "I am with you always, to the end of the age." This is where Opening Day means there's another game tomorrow, and the next day, and so on. Easter's not over; the season is just getting started.

Maybe the point of Easter is about our job to bear witness, to testify. We receive that commission no matter where we are, no matter how big or how small, how important or unimportant. Whether anybody saw it or not, Christ is still risen and still calls us to bear witness, whether we're in the big leagues or the minors.

Easter is not the end of anything. It's Opening Day. The season is just getting started.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #232, Jesus Christ is Risen Today; #233, The Day of Resurrection; #511, Come, Behold! The Feast of Heaven; #239, Good Christians All, Rejoice and Sing!

 

 

 Opening Day, April 4, 1974. To be fair, Aaron did get the next game off. 

 

Sermon: Remember Me

First Presbyterian Church

April 2, 2026, Maundy Thursday A

Matthew 26:26-30; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

 

Remember Me

 

 

I have very distinct memories of the Lord’s Supper, when I was a child, looking for all the world like a funeral service. Table (and all the elements on it) covered in a shroud, the church’s deacons (no elders in that denomination), all male, dressed in black and looking exactly like pallbearers at a funeral…the only reason I didn’t immediately think of it this way was because, at that young an age, I hadn’t been to enough funerals to know. When I finally did see a couple of funerals and then saw the Lord’s Supper in church on a Sunday looking pretty much the same, I honestly think I was scarred just a little bit. It might have been worse if we’d had it more than four times a year.

Since then I have studied enough history to know that such presentation of the Lord’s Supper was not only common, it even came with official backing in at least one of the ancestor denominations to the PC(USA); its Book of Order described and prescribed exactly that kind of setup for the table, even to the point of how the shroud was to be folded when removed, and how it was to be replaced over the elements when the Supper was done. This was as far back, if I remember correctly, as 1796. There is a long history of treating the Lord’s Supper primarily as a memorial.

At this point in my life and ministry I can no longer believe that’s precisely what Jesus was going for here, as recounted by Paul in what we now know as the Words of Institution.

As Paul describes the scene (in what is our earliest written account of it), Jesus performs the acts we know – breaking the bread, filling the cup – and marks each one with the appropriate theological significance – “my body that is for you,” “the new covenant in my blood.” But then what does he say? “Do this in remembrance of my sacrifice”? “Do this in remembrance of my death”? “Do this in remembrance of what’s going to happen tomorrow?”

No. “Do this in remembrance of me.”

“Do this in remembrance of me.” Remember me. Remember the one who journeyed with you all around Galilee and Judea. Remember the one who taught you, who sent you out to preach and teach and heal. Remember me, the one with whom you shared so many meals at so many tables. The one who lived with you all these years.

Later in this same letter Paul will take issue with some in the Corinthian church who somehow doubt that Christ was ever raised from the dead.  It is one of the most impassioned parts of this epistle, and in the end Paul finally goes so far as to declare that “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (15:17), and even further, “if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (15:19).  But then the good news: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (15:20).

Even back in our words of institution, Jesus instructs his disciples that in the sharing of this bread and cup, we do “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (11:26). If all we have to show here is Jesus’s funeral, if what happened in this meal and then in the garden and finally on Golgotha is all there is to the story, then we really are kinda hopeless, aren’t we?

Do this in remembrance of me. Remember me.

The animated film Coco understands what power memory has. The young boy at the center of the story, who accidentally journeys into the Land of the Dead of Mexican folklore, is in the end rushing back from that land to be at the side of his "mama Coco"; as she is slowly fading, her memories slipping away, the boy sings to her a song that her own father had sung to her as a young child, before leaving the family to try to provide for them as a musician - a journey on which he ends up being murdered, unbeknownst to his family. That song had been made famous by the man who murdered her father and stole the song, presenting it as his own and becoming famous. But in these final moments, as the boy sings her father’s song haltingly to his mama Coco, the first sparks of life come to her face. (Any good music therapist will tell you that music can sometimes do this.) Her fingers begin to move, almost imperceptibly; her eyes open, ever so slowly; in the end, her own halting voice joins with the boy’s to finish the song, as she smiles for possibly the first time in years:

Remember me, though I have to travel far
Remember me, each time you hear a sad guitar
Know that I’m with you the only way that I can be
Until you’re in my arms again
Remember me

 

In this supper, in this bread and this cup passed among us, broken however imperfectly and maybe spilled a little bit, we remember Jesus, the whole life, the whole word, and in that remembering we are brought to new life, given a song to sing, a smile amid the tears of the everyday; we live in this testimony of the Christ who is coming again, and in whose life is our life.

Do this and remember.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Sermon: The Saddest and Holiest Joke

First Presbyterian Church

March 29, 2026, Palm Sunday A

Matthew 21:1-17

 

The Saddest and Holiest Joke

 

 

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

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

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

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

 

Buechner concludes:

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

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

Sermon: The Sword

First Presbyterian Church

March 15, 2026, Lent 4A

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

 

The Sword

 

Honestly, this just doesn’t fit.

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

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

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

A sword?

Not what we want to hear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

Sermon: 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