Sermon: Unfair!

First Presbyterian Church

September 20, 2026, Pentecost 17A

Jonah 3:10-4:11; Matthew 20:1-16

 

Unfair!

 

 

On the surface, it might seem odd to put these two scriptural accounts together. Obviously, the makers of the Revised Common Lectionary felt otherwise, but you can be forgiven if you don't see what these two stories have in common. To see what makes these two stories complement one another, we might need to adjust our perspective; who are the important characters in each story, and why do they do the things they do?

We come to the book of Jonah after the famous part. The "great fish" has already done its work, gathering up Jonah after his attempt to run from God's call and depositing him in such a place that Nineveh, the city Jonah was trying to avoid, was about the only place he could go. Jonah gave up fleeing and made the pronouncement God had commanded. We are not told how much energy or effort he put into that announcement, but whatever he did it took effect in a way very few prophetic warnings ever have. The king himself took up the public role of chief mourner and commanded that all of Nineveh join in repenting. Our reading begins with God's response, in the last verse of chapter 3: "God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it."

At this Jonah "loses it." Jonah was upset precisely because his prophetic proclamation, so to speak, "worked." Nineveh and its king repented, and God relented. And this, it seems, made Jonah angry.

This is probably hard to stomach for most of us, wishing for that kind of destruction on anybody. I suspect, though, if you asked a citizen of Ukraine right now if they'd want to see Moscow destroyed, at least some would say "yes." We need to remember that this wasn't a random, unprovoked reaction; Nineveh and the kingdom of Assyria over which it ruled had wreaked havoc over Israel and Judah (and a lot of other nations) multiple times, with horrific levels of violence and destruction. Jonah's anger may have been over-the-top, but it wasn't without foundation.

Nonetheless Jonah has no answers for God, so he goes off and sulks like most people who know they've lost an argument, perhaps waiting to see if anyone in Nineveh might screw up and God might overthrow the city after all. God "appointed" a bush (what an interesting word choice, "appointed") that brought shade for Jonah, which gave him at least some pleasure. But then God "appointed" (that word again) a worm to kill the bush, and Jonah wilted as the hot, dry wind began to blow. For the umpteenth time he ordered God to let him die. That's when God settled the argument for good. Jonah could get all upset over a bush he had done nothing to grow or nourish, but God was not allowed to care about "Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?"

Again, it's hard to see what this story has to do with the parable from Matthew. A vineyard owner keeps going back to the marketplace and calling forth more day workers to go out into the field and work for him for the day. That's okay, as far as it goes, but when day's end came and the owner paid the latecomers the same wage as those who started at first light, things get testy.

The answers given by the vineyard owner don't necessarily look great on the surface, do they? "You got what you agreed to." Well, yes, but one of the workers might note that doesn't answer their complaint. "Take your wages and go; it's my choice how to pay." Also true, but it's not going to silence many cries of "unfair!" "You're telling me I can't do what I choose with what's mine?" And finally, the kicker: "Or are you envious because I am generous?"

We need to take note of that last answer. "Envious" is not an uncommon translation for the words used here, but it's not very literal. What is recorded here is an idiom. A literal translation of that question would be "Are your eyes evil because I am jealous?" That's a pretty evocative metaphor. If nothing else, that will hopefully give us pause before we dismiss envy as some kind of lesser transgression. It is one of the seven deadly sins, after all.

Back to the story: our tendency is to latch on to those first laborers as the "main characters" in the story, much as we tend to assume that, well, Jonah is the main character in the book of Jonah. Doing that, though, probably hinders us from seeing what God - the real "main character" in most anything from the Bible - is doing. God moves heaven and earth (and even the sea) to get a prophet to Nineveh to warn that city into repentance, and then hears their repentance and relents from destroying it. Clear enough, I suppose.

But to get a grip on the vineyard parable, let's try a different perspective. Instead of the first group sent into the field, take a look at those left waiting; some finally get sent out to work at about 9:00 a.m. (adapted for our daily patterns), another batch at noon, still more at about 3:00 p.m., and finally one more group, somehow overlooked all day, gets sent with maybe an hour of daylight left.

From not getting any work for the day, these laborers go to getting "the usual daily wage." Some translations might use the word denarius here, but perhaps it's useful to take that out of the equation and get to the core of the matter. While this is still a subject of some discussion in biblical scholarship, one of the more strongly held positions is that "the usual daily wage" would typically be enough to feed a family for three or four days. That doesn't necessarily sound like much to our ears, but it's not nothing, and being able to feed your family for a few days can be a major blessing if there's no work to be found the next day.

The point of the story is the generosity of the vineyard owner (and let's just acknowledge that this is probably the answer to the perennial parable question "where is God in this story?"). This is where God is revealed; this is what the kingdom of heaven is like; as God was unwilling to give up even the people of Nineveh to destruction in the Jonah story, so God (in the person of the vineyard owner) is unwilling to give up any of the laborers to go without.

God's economy is not our economy, nor will it ever be limited by our economy. Our standards are (whether we admit it or not) all about bringing in those who are deserving, or have some special merit, or something that (in our eyes) sets them above others. God, on the other hand, wants everybody, and God doesn't care how late they come to the work. God doesn't care how horrifying they have been, as long as repentance is real and put into action. God brings in all, no matter what we say.

This is an interesting thing to ponder in a time when churches of many different kinds are struggling to stay afloat, having declined precipitously from the pinnacles of size, wealth, and influence they knew many decades ago. At that point a church could get away with being quite selective about who they would welcome in - not that anyone would be turned away, mind you, but there's a difference between letting folks come to worship services and welcoming them into the church. Nowadays, you have to wonder if some of those churches can remember how to be welcoming to "all" of those whom God seeks, even when their institutional lives might well depend on it.

Maybe it's The Parable of the Generous Vineyard Owner? It is at the last a story of a God who seeks to draw in and save and redeem and justify all of us, even those who seemingly get passed over again and again. Really, the only thing for us to do is get on board with God.

For a generous God, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #620, Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven; #36, For the Fruit of All Creation; #725, O Jesus, I Have Promised

Sermon: Who Are These People?

First Presbyterian Church

September 13, 2026, Pentecost 16A

Romans 16:1-16

 

Who Are These People?

 

 

I don’t know how it was for you, but when I was growing up we children were given “illustrated” Bibles – that is, Bibles with pictures in them. Usually the pictures were reserved for the “big stories” – Noah and the ark, the Exodus, maybe Jonah, maybe a prophet being all fiery. In the New Testament you’d get something from the birth of Jesus, one or more of the miracles like the feeding five thousand or walking on water, the crucifixion and the resurrection. In Acts, you might get something for Pentecost. As I remember it, though, the pictures tended to become a lot less prolific after that.

There are obvious reasons for that, of course. The remaining books in the New Testament don’t necessarily suggest obvious pictures. For example, would you really want to illustrate anything we've read from Romans these last weeks?

Anyway, as best as I remember them, all the stories were illustrated with bunches and bunches of … dudes. Men. Obviously, there were some exceptions – you can’t do a Nativity picture without Mary, for sure – but between ancient armies and twelve disciples and crowds of Pharisees, there were a lot of guys in those picture Bibles.

Here’s the thing; I was pretty impressionable at that age, and when the denomination in which I was raised was not (and still is not) friendly towards women in leadership roles except for children’s Sunday school classes, it was pretty easy for me to come away from those pictures with the distinct if subconscious impression that church was “men’s work.” The pastor and all the deacons and even the music director were men. The girls didn’t get to preach on Youth Sunday, even. Men’s work.

Clearly, they weren't reading Romans 16.

As has been noted earlier in this series, Paul had not yet been to Rome when he wrote this letter, but that didn’t mean he was unfamiliar with the church or churches there, and while such greetings are typical of all of Paul’s letters, these are much longer and more elaborate than usual, both to extend genuine greetings to his friends and comrades among the Roman Christians and to make clear to the others reading or hearing the letter that he knew more about them than they realized.

The first name in this extensive list, though, is not one of the Roman Christians; rather, Phoebe was one of Paul’s fellow laborers in the faith, and probably the one who was delivering and proclaiming the letter to the Romans personally. Paul also calls Phoebe (who is mentioned nowhere else in scripture) by two distinct Greek nouns: διακονος (diakonos) and προστασις (prostasis). The former is indeed the root of the modern English word deacon, as it is translated in the New Revised Standard Version. The term διακονος represents an official title or office in the early church, unlike other possible translations such as “minister” or “servant,” although those are valid translations in some contexts. At any rate the term denotes leadership by service. The term prostasis also connotes a leadership role, in this case one involving patronage and official representation. For example, if a member of the community at Cenchreae were called to appear before the local court or government, Phoebe could appear as that person’s representative or advocate.

Now those whom Paul greets among the Romans are also an interesting mix. The only ones we know appear elsewhere in the scriptures are the first ones mentioned, Prisca and Aquila, Paul’s fellow evangelists. They first appear in Acts 18 (Prisca is called “Priscilla” there), as among those who minister both to Paul and to Apollos, an eloquent and passionate, but ill-educated, young evangelist who becomes their student, learning the Way of the Lord more accurately from them. Greetings go out to Prisca and Aqulia in 2 Timothy, and they are with Paul extending greetings in 1 Corinthians. Paul indicates that he even owes his life to them, and that’s not a metaphor in this case.

Another interesting greeting goes to Andronicus and Junia, whom Paul calls “prominent among the apostles” and “in Christ before I was.” At minimum this suggests that these two (possibly husband and wife like Prisca and Aquila) had been converts before Paul, and possibly eyewitnesses to the resurrected Christ. The title “apostle” also denoted its own form of authority. These two, like the apostle Paul, were apparently traveling evangelists or what we might call “church planters” today, and had apparently been in prison with Paul at least once.

Later in the list, three women are singled out by Paul as “those workers in the Lord”: Tryphaena, Trypohsa, and Persis, who Paul says “worked hard in the Lord.” While no specific title is applied to those women, their work has been enough to be singled out by Paul along with the work of Urbanus, “our co-worker in Christ,” although it is possible from their position in the list that Paul is not as well acquainted with them as with those named earlier.

One other interesting name is that of Rufus. Back in Mark 15:21 we are introduced to Simon of Cyrene, the man compelled by Roman soldiers to carry the cross of Jesus when Jesus had collapsed. For reasons known only to Mark, the gospel identifies Simon as “the father of Alexander and Rufus.” While it is impossible to know if the son of Simon is the same Rufus greeted by Paul, there is some logic to the possibility, not least that both Mark and Paul feel compelled to single him out: Mark as an identifier (if his readers didn’t know Simon’s name they’d know his son’s), and Paul as one “chosen in the Lord.”

One more note on names, some of which suggest a particular role in life for their bearers. The names Ampliatus (which means “ample”), Narcissus (a name taken from mythology), the aforementioned Tryphaena (“dainty”), Trypohsa (“luscious”), and Persis, and possibly Hermes and Hermas (more names from mythology) were all common names for persons enslaved in the Roman Empire. This does not mean that all of them were actually held in slavery at the time Paul writes, but it is quite likely that some or all of these persons were either enslaved, formerly enslaved who had been granted or able to buy their freedom, or children of persons enslaved or formerly enslaved (whether freed somehow or even born free).

I don’t know how I’d have reacted, with those illustrated-Bible pictures in my head, had someone taught me this chapter in my childhood. The deacon/minister Phoebe, the evangelist Prisca, and the apostle Junia would have caused much cognitive dissonance in my young mind up against the pictures presented to me every Sunday in church. Over the centuries some have experienced that cognitive dissonance, to the point that some translators over the centuries have tried to take away Phoebe’s office, calling her only “servant,” or to suggest that “Junia” must really have been a male, “Junias,” because obviously a woman can’t be an apostle – even though; (1) in all the records of that era, the name “Junias” does not, technically, exist, and (2) the first use of the not-a-real-name name "Junias" doesn't appear in biblical manuscript until the 13th century, more than a millenium after the fact. The degree to which Paul made no accounting for class – enslaved or formerly enslaved persons jostling right up next to the wealthy or even nobility wouldn’t have fit very well into my brain either.

And yet this is the church.

Where all are called to use their gifts to the glory of God, no matter their gender or class or anything else, where there is “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free,” this is the church. This is the body of Christ, and everyone members of it.

What probably looked like a strange and motley crew to the Romans around any of those groups (remember, we're probably talking about several house churches instead of just one) was something glorious for Paul to see, and indeed a collection of followers of Christ with much to teach us even if we know almost nothing about them. Let’s face it, folks: without women to serve as elders we’d have a severely difficult time comprising a session around here, just to name one example.

And yet even today there are churches and pastors out there today that would utterly dis-fellowship that Roman church if they came upon it today for all the ways they violate "what scripture says" about the church. This would be pretty ironic, since if we take scripture seriously Romans 16 is what scripture says about the church, or at least part of it.

The church at Rome is kinda all over the place, and yet the body of Christ. Maybe that sounds or looks familiar to us, or maybe it doesn't. Anyway, like the church at Rome that Paul so commends, our job is to welcome those who seek, no matter how different from us they may be, and to do the work of the church, no matter what anybody else has to say about it.

For our mothers (and fathers) in the faith, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #409, God Is Here!; #---, See the children of God; #306, Blest Be the Tie That Binds

 

 

 

 

 

Sermon: Food Fight!

First Presbyterian Church

September 6, 2026, Pentecost 15A

Romans 14:1-12

 

Food Fight!

 

 

I'm going to begin today by introducing you to one of our cats, one that is no longer with us. Felicity came into our household ten years ago, after the death of one of the members of my first-call church. None of their children could take them in, and well, we’re suckers for cute kitties. So Felicity and her sister Phoebe came to our place, doubling the cat population at the time.

It turned out that Felicity was, and I’m trying to be gentle about this, two things: terrified, and crazy.

She was terrified of basically everything. She hid under beds, she hid under blankets, she hid under books (or between them), she hid under her sister (and this was before they were even introduced to the cats already in the household). If anyone (besides her sister) got near her she turned, if not quite vicious, definitely hostile. When Mickey and Pluto came into the picture things only got worse, with Pluto in particular becoming the focal point for a lot of hostility. It was enough to have us wondering if we'd be able to keep all four cats after all. She was, so to speak, the weak link.

At one point she and Pluto got into such a fight that one of Felicity’s claws was damaged, and she had to go to the vet for treatment. When she returned home, she had to be kept in isolation from all of the other cats and given a litterbox with shredded paper, because exposure to cat litter could have caused a much worse infection in the wound. As a result, Felicity took up residence in our bathroom.

It was this period of isolation that allowed a non-fearful personality to show in Felicity. She hated the wound treatment Julia had to give her, but otherwise during this isolation she actually started to respond to the world around her with something other than hostility and fear. She actually accepted attention and affection at times, and even started to give it sometimes. Figuring that maybe it was better to go with it, we kept our bathroom set up for Felicity and continued to do even when we moved to Kansas. There were bumps in the road, to be sure, and she and Pluto never got along, but Felicity became a much-beloved part of the fur family, no less loved than any other of the cats, and even ventured out into the hall and the living room on occasion. And she outlived Mickey and Pluto and her littermate sister Phoebe (and took over the whole house). (Not to mention she was the one cat that would actually snuggle up next to me.)

Okay, it’s not a direct path from Felicity to today’s reading from Romans, but Paul might recognize in her (to the degree he wasn’t freaked out by us moderns keeping cats in our homes) one of the “weak” of which he speaks, within the dynamic of our home back then. And the point of Paul’s instruction here, or at least part of the point, is that the “weak” are called of God, chosen of God, forgiven by God, and loved of God every bit as much as the “strong” - and the strong don't need to act otherwise.

Of course, Paul doesn’t really help his case here by using words like “weak” and “strong” (and you’ll notice if you read on to verse 14 that Paul counts himself among the “strong” on this particular subject, having no problems eating meat). While it might be surprising that food is the thing that apparently trips up the Romans to whom Paul is writing, a very similar problem also prompted Paul to spill a lot of ink in his letters to the Corinthians. On the other hand, if you’ve come together for a big holiday meal only to discover that one of the grandkids is a newly-minted vegetarian, maybe you do understand how food can become a flashpoint.

To explain as briefly as possible, people living in Rome didn’t exactly have access to herds of cattle from which to obtain meat to eat. Therefore, one would have to go to a market to purchase some to eat.

Where that market differs from the local Hy-Vee is that in some cases, the meat offered for sale might have had an interesting history. Rome, not unlike Athens of its time, harbored quite a few shrines to numerous deities, and in some cases those shrines practiced sacrificial offerings, in which the meat had been offered on or over an open flame – in other words, roasted or broiled. Since the stone or wooden idol never was going to consume that offering literally, these shrines had an awful lot of perfectly good meat on their hands, and sometimes that meat ended up at the local market.

This could be a problem to the discerning Christian shopper in two ways: (1) for some, the very idea of eating meat offered to an idol, i.e. a false god, was itself problematic (this particular question is what Paul addresses in his first letter to the Corinthians); and (2) meat offered in such fashion was very unlikely to be prepared according to Jewish dietary law; in other words, it wasn’t kosher. The latter seems to have been the root of the issue in Rome, whether among Jewish-born members of the churches at Rome or among Gentiles who had converted to Judaism before following Christ.

In this, one of two cases in this letter in which Paul seems to be addressing a very specific concern in the church communities of Rome (the other being a taxation issue in the previous chapter), his answer still points to the very universal teachings that have been laced throughout the letter. For example, only God can judge; it is not our place to presume to judge those who, by our standards, are “weak” (and remember, the non-meat eaters probably considered themselves "strong" and the meat-eaters "weak"). Sin is still always lurking, seeking any entry to create discord and hatred, and quarrels over food are as good an opportunity as any. Our freedom is not an absolute license to do whatever, whenever, however. Our freedom in God is freedom to build up the community, not to tear down one another over food, or the color of the cloth on the communion table, or any other matter great or small.

To put it bluntly, we aren’t the gatekeepers of the church.

In his systematic theological treatise Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin stressed as one of the most central tenets of Christian faith that God, and God alone, held all rule and dominion over everything – all created things, all people, everything. From this idea Calvin extrapolated that the fate of all people rests solely in the hands of God.

It all sounds good and theologically proper to us, but we’re not always good at following through on it. We – speaking broadly of the Church Universal – have an incredibly persistent tendency to appoint ourselves gatekeepers. They can’t be in, because they don’t believe <insert favorite doctrine here>. <My favorite Bible verse> says this, so they have to be going to Hell. No. To be more theologically precise, Hell? No. The moment we find ourselves slipping into anything like that mindset we are usurping the sovereignty of God.

And with exclusive sovereignty comes exclusive judgment. That’s how Paul wraps up this segment of his letter, reminding the Romans that judgment is the work of God and God alone. As verses 10-12 put it,

Why do you pass judgment on your brother and sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For all will stand before the judgment seat of God.

For it is written, ‘As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.’

So then, each of us will be accountable to God.

 

We are not in a position to judge, and that holds true for issues far beyond eating or not eating meat.

Just as in chapter 12 Paul had reminded the Romans that vengeance was solely the province of God, here too judgment is solely the province of God. And that remains true no matter how many Bible verses you summon up by which to judge others. Let's put it bluntly: the moment you set yourself up to judge who is or is not "in," you are setting yourself outside of the body of Christ, and nobody else.

The flip side of this point is that in all cases, the meat-eaters or the vegetarians, Sunday abstainers or Sunday indulgers, the honor goes to God. Again, it’s not about a checklist – it’s not “eat this, not that.” Whatever you eat, do so honoring God. Whatever you don’t eat, do so honoring God.

And yes, this goes well beyond meat-eating or not meat-eating. Whichever we do, we do so in the Lord. We don’t do so only to ourselves – we aren’t islands; we are in the Lord. And as the body of Christ, we are in the Lord together, whatever we eat or don’t eat.

Leave aside the judgment and gatekeeping; live in forgiveness, live in grace, live in the Lord.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #269, Lead On, O King Eternal; #754, Help Us Accept Each Other; #363, Rejoice, the Lord Is King!

 

 

 

 

Felicity, once she finally decided our bedroom was hers.

 

Sermon: Love Out Loud

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

August 23, 2026, Pentecost 13A

Romans 12:9-21

 

 

Love Out Loud

 

What does love look like?

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

This is what love looks like.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nevertheless, Thanks be to God, anyway. Amen.

 

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

Sermon: The One With All the Languages

  

First Presbyterian Church

May 24, 2026, Pentecost A

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

 

The One with All the Languages

 

 

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

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

 

I believe in the Holy Ghost...

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sermon: Going to Extremes

First Presbyterian Church

April 12, 2026, Easter 2A

John 20:19-31

 

Going to Extremes

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You realize that’s us, right?

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

Yes, that’s us. Blessed.

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

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

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

 

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