Subscribe now

We have lost one of the best among us.

Wendell Berry — farmer, poet, novelist, philosopher, steward of the earth, man of faith — died yesterday, August 31, 2026, at the age of 92.

I’d like to share something he wrote. But first, an introduction.

“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,” writes the author of Psalm 130. It’s a plaintive cry for deliverance: “My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.”

Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, contains a sort of parable about a hunter who gets himself into a very tight spot. On a perfect fall day, he’s walking through the woods when he steps onto the rotted wood cover of an abandoned well. He plunges into the watery depths below, comes up for air, then grabs hold of the cool, mossy stones that line the side of the well.

Looking up, he sees a tiny circle of light, impossibly far away. There are no discernible handholds on the sides of the well. There’s no point in calling out for help, because no one’s nearby.

Berry writes:

“How does this story end? Does he save himself? Is he athletic enough, maybe, to get his boots off and climb out, clawing with fingers and toes into the grudging holds between the rocks of the wall? Does he climb up and fall back? Does somebody, in fact, for a wonder, chance to pass nearby and hear him? Does he despair, give up, and drown? Does he, despairing, pray finally the first true prayer of his life?

Listen. There is a light that includes our darkness, a day that shines down even on the clouds. A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost. He does not believe this easily or without pain, but he believes it. His belief is a kind of knowledge beyond any way of knowing. He believes that the child in the womb is not lost, nor is the man whose work has come to nothing, nor is the old woman forsaken in a nursing home in California. He believes that those who make their bed in Hell are not lost, or those who dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, or the lame man at Bethesda Pool, or Lazarus in the grave, or those who pray, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.’

Have mercy.”

— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (New York: Counterpoint, 2000), 356-357.

Paid subscribers can download for free the 58-page e-book, The Sermon on the Amount: Illustrations for Preaching Generosity. Ideal for annual financial-campaign sermons. Contains over 60 illustrations as well as articles introducing these 6 sub-themes: 1. From Scarcity to Abundance, 2. From Debt to Freedom, 3. From Consumption to Sustainability, 4. From Sporadic Giving to Disciplined Giving, 5. From Funding to Offering, 6. From Maintenance to Mission. Also, an Appendix: Biblical Generosity Texts for Preaching. Click on the button below for more information:

Sermon on the Amount book

Paid Subscriber perks

THE SERMON ON THE AMOUNT:

Illustrations for Preaching Generosity

Carlos E. Wilton

August 16, 2026

Copyright © 2026 by Carlos E. Wilton.

Purchasers are given permission to use this material freely in sermons and other communications to local congregations; attribution is appreciated but not expected. For permission to use for commercial purposes, please contact the author.

For Isaac, beloved grandson,

who calls forth new generosity in me

Subscribe now

Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

1. FROM SCARCITY TO ABUNDANCE

2. FROM DEBT TO FREEDOM

3. FROM CONSUMPTION TO SUSTAINABILITY

4. FROM SPORADIC GIVING TO DISCIPLINED GIVING

5. FROM FUNDING TO OFFERING

6. FROM MAINTENANCE TO MISSION

APPENDIX: BIBLICAL GENEROSITY TEXTS FOR PREACHING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carlos “Carl” Wilton is a retired Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister. Until December, 2021 he served as Transitional Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Hawley, Pennsylvania. Prior to that he served as Pastor of the Lamington Presbyterian Church in Bedminster, New Jersey, and for 27 years before that as pastor of the Point Pleasant Presbyterian Church in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey. He also served as Assistant Dean and Director of Admissions at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, Iowa, and as Associate Pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Toms River, New Jersey.

He holds the B.A. degree from Washington College, Maryland; the M.Div. degree from Princeton Theological Seminary; and the M.Phil. and Ph.D .degrees in Divinity from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. His Ph.D. dissertation was on the Reformed understanding of ordination as diakonia, or servanthood.

Dr. Wilton has served as an adjunct professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, teaching Presbyterian Church (USA) Polity. He is the author of several books of sermon resources based on the Revised Common Lectionary, as well as Principles of Presbyterian Polity (Westminster John Knox Press, 2022) and Illuminating Sermons: Curating Illustrations That Inspire (Fortress Press, 2025).

Carlos Wilton author page on Amazon

Dr. Wilton was the longtime moderator of the Preaching Stewardship meeting on the former Presbynet/Ecunet computer bulletin board. He is a frequent contributor to Homiletics Online, providing the majority of that publication’s sermon illustrations.

He is married to the Rev. Claire Pula, also a Presbyterian minister. They have two adult children, Benjamin and Ania, and a grandson, Isaac.

Cover illustration: Detail from “St. Francis Giving His Mantle to a Poor Man,” Giotto di Bondone, circa 1297, fresco in Upper Church, Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi, Italy.

Subscribe now

INTRODUCTION

In 1992, researchers at Princeton University conducted a major study on American values. Interviewing 2,000 subjects (150 of them in-depth), they found remarkable unanimity on one subject: the moral implications of a certain pervasive form of substance abuse.

Eighty-nine percent of those interviewed agreed that abuse of this substance is a serious problem. Seventy-four percent faulted the culture for being too permissive with those who abuse it. A similar percentage complained that advertisers who promote the substance are “corrupting our basic values.” Seventy-one percent maintained that society would be better off if the media paid less attention to its flagrant consumption. A full ninety percent complained that children want entirely too much of the stuff.

Yet when it came to their own lives, the same people who condemned the abuse of this substance admitted to feeling a profound ambivalence about it. Sixty-three percent confessed to thinking about the substance frequently, some of them obsessively. Eighty-four percent wished they had more of it. Nearly everyone admitted that this easily-abused substance, or the lack of it, caused them nearly continual worries.

Oddly (and even more troubling), seventy-one percent of respondents flatly declared that, for them, having more of this substance means “having more freedom.” Seventy-six percent spoke with awe of the power this substance exercises over their lives, admitting that the mere thought of possessing it makes them feel good about themselves.

Despite the ringing moral denunciations voiced by the vast majority of survey respondents, when the researchers asked if anyone had ever taught them it’s wrong to want a lot of this substance, only twelve percent said yes. Among those who attend church every week, the figure was only slightly higher: sixteen percent.

Then there was the secrecy. When asked about how often, outside the home, they typically discussed their family’s decisions about the rationing and use of this substance, eighty-nine percent admitted they “never” or “hardly ever” mentioned it. When church members were asked the same question — specifically, how often they typically broached the subject with fellow church members — the cultural taboo was even higher: ninety-seven percent said they avoided the subject completely.

Astute readers have surely figured out what substance the Princeton researchers were investigating. It’s money.

[Robert Wuthnow, “Pious Materialism: How Americans View Faith and Money,” The Christian Century, March 3, 1993, pp. 239-242.]

Of the spiritual challenge money poses to the Christian life, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Salvadoran martyr and saint, once wrote in a poem,

No one can serve two lords.

There is only one God,

and that God will either be the true one,

who asks us to give things up when they become sin,

or it will be the god of money,

who makes us turn our back on Christianity’s God.

[Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love, (Orbis, 2004), Chapter 6.]

In writing these words, Romero of course echoes the well-known teaching of Jesus himself: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Matthew 6:24)

Given congregants’ ambivalent, troubling and emotion-laden attitudes to this subject-matter, is it any wonder that money tops the list of subjects most preachers are reluctant to address from the pulpit?

The Case for Generosity

It may very well be that no aspect of the Christian life is more difficult for preachers to address, in this culture, than the subject of money. Other subjects — sexuality, peacemaking, climate change — may inflame media headlines and incite contentious debate, but money is the great taboo of our time.

It’s been so for years. I distinctly remember, as a young child in the 1960s, being told by my father — then a self-employed men’s clothing-store owner — that there was one subject I was absolutely forbidden to discuss with the neighbor kids. That subject was how much money he earned. It was clear to me, even at that young age, how anxious he felt about maintaining that dark secret. For a man who received customers’ money every day, unfolding the green bills and sliding them into the designated compartments in his cash-register drawer, it seemed strange that money-talk made him so acutely uncomfortable. As I grew older, I came to understand how doggedly money maintained a stranglehold on his self-worth.

My father was hardly alone. I’d venture to guess most members of the county-seat Presbyterian church we attended felt the same way. Money was a uniquely combustible and deeply personal subject.

Past generations of preachers adopted the gentle euphemism “stewardship” as the accepted ecclesiastical alternative. That word, of course, has a rich biblical pedigree — Jesus himself populated several of his parables with stewards — but there’s one very good reason we ought to think seriously about dumping the term.

The reason is that “stewardship” has dropped out of everyday parlance for all but the oldest generation of congregants. Those who hail from the Christendom era recognize it as an genteel and inoffensive code-word for a cringeworthy subject, but for most sermon listeners today it comes across as stilted, even a bit precious.

For older-generation churchgoers who’ve long since gotten the memo, the word signifies little more than a euphemism for institutional fund-raising. Stewardship indicates a mild annual annoyance — a post-Halloween, pre-Thanksgiving commercial break to be stoically endured before the church gets back to its real work of worship and ministry.

For those of any age who are less familiar with Jesus’ parables about stewards, the word may mean very little.

There’s a far better term, one that’s instantly recognizable — and that has the added bonus of being, according to the Bible, a spiritual gift. The word is “generosity.”

Who doesn’t aspire to be more generous?

If your church is still using “stewardship” to describe its annual financial campaign, try promoting a generosity campaign instead. It puts a whole different spin on the subject.

Think of that tired old complaint whispered by generations of pew-sitters: “That preacher is always talking about money!” Or the anguished cry of parishioners who are probably already on their way out of the church for other reasons: “The only time that church cares about me is when it wants my money!” (That complaint is seldom true, but the fact that money is the flash-point is telling.)

Can you imagine someone saying, instead, “That preacher is always talking about generosity!” Or try this one out for size: “The only time that church cares about me is when it wants to make me more generous!” If money is an emotional bomb fallen from the sky — its nose buried deep in the sanctuary carpeting and its sinister fins visible for all to see — then generosity, rather than stewardship, is our most useful tool for defusing it.

Six Generosity Moves

This is a sourcebook for sermon illustrations about generosity. I’ve broken that topic down into six subtopics. Several — or all — of these could form a sermon series. Or, they could simply serve as pointers to pertinent illustrations for a single sermon. Each one is structured as a move from one place to another — from an uncomfortable place we find ourselves in to a new and broad place, a place of expansive vistas and sustaining hope.

A wise person has quipped that the functional definition of insanity is to continue to perform the same, non-productive activity over and over again, expecting different results. [Frequently misattributed to Albert Einstein, the earliest known occurrence of this good advice is in a publication of Narcotics Anonymous.] Our churches will not begin to solve their persistent money problems until they cease the semi-productive or non-productive activities they’ve been pursuing for so long, and get up and travel to a new place.

In seeking to get up and move to a different place, we find ourselves in an honorable tradition, a pilgrim tradition. We’re in the tradition of Abraham, who departed the city he had inhabited for most of his life to follow God’s call to a new land. We’re in the tradition of Moses, who left the safety of the Midianite hills to lead his people on a risky journey out of Egypt. And we’re in the tradition of Jesus’ disciples, who responded to their master’s call by getting up, leaving their nets and following.

Here are six generosity moves I invite you to invite your people to make:

1. From Scarcity to Abundance: We give from our abundance

2. From Debt to Freedom: We discover freedom through thrifty living

3. From Consumption to Sustainability: We give to sustain our community and world

4. From Sporadic to Disciplined Giving: We give regularly and proportionately

5. From Funding to Offering: We make a spiritual offering to God, rather than funding a budget

6. From Maintenance to Mission: We look beyond institutional anxieties to the needs of the world

Subscribe now

1. FROM SCARCITY TO ABUNDANCE

We give from our abundance

A great many Christians in the United States are living a lie, and that lie is called scarcity. We Americans enjoy fruits from our labors, on a mass scale, that are unheard of throughout the course of human history. We are better housed, better clothed, better fed than most other people on the face of this earth. We enjoy unprecedented freedom not only to travel where we want, but to do so in privately-owned vehicles on the most extensive highway system ever constructed.

Even the poor among us — those who live in economic distress, those from oppressed minority groups, those who are undocumented immigrants — live in conditions far better then most other people on this earth. To say this is not to encourage complacency in facing dire economic problems, or to refrain from addressing the recent, disturbing trend of the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and those in the middle simply feeling squeezed. It’s simply to put our situation in a global perspective.

Since the foundation of the United States as a nation of immigrants, each generation (with the notable exception of the original native inhabitants) has enjoyed a standard of living higher than the last. This continues to be largely true, despite periodic downturns in the stock market and despite persistent unemployment in some communities and certain sectors of the economy. The gross national product of the United States has grown continuously, while exponential advances in technology have led to reduction of hard physical labor, both at work and at home, for people at every economic level.

Case in point: I am writing this book — and correcting my keyboard errors as I go — using a computer. As recently as my college days in the 1970s, I would have been using an electric typewriter and bottles of sticky correction fluid. Members of my parents’ generation would have pounded such a project out on erasable onionskin paper, using an old manual Underwood — a relic such as the one my daughter, as a teenager, once gleefully discovered at a garage sale and treated as a completely new discovery. Members of my grandparents’ generation, unable to afford that black Underwood — which in their day was an expensive business machine, out of reach for an ordinary household, let alone a student’s budget — had to be content with legal pads and the eraser attached to a pencil.

By the standards of most of our world, and of most human beings in every other era of history, we in the United States are unaccountably wealthy. Yet, the spiritual tragedy is that many of us approach life from a standpoint of scarcity rather than abundance.

“Do we,” writes theologian and educator Parker Palmer, “inhabit a universe where the basic things that people need — from food and shelter to a sense of competence and being loved — are ample in nature? Or is this a universe where such goods are in short supply, available only to those who have the power to beat everyone else to the store?” [Parker Palmer, The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring (Jossey-Bass, 1999), 124-125.] This is perhaps the most fundamental spiritual question for Christians of our culture.

From the Bible, the answer resounds. We live in a good creation, filled with ample gifts. Eden is behind us — and the way back presumably still guarded by an angel’s flaming sword — but still we dwell in a “land of milk and honey” (or maybe, in our present commercial economy, Coke and Budweiser). Life may still bring its occasional wilderness sojourns, but remember, the scriptures view even the wilderness not as a place of desolation, but as a place of simplicity and spiritual centeredness. In the vision of the prophets, even the desert blooms.

Henri Nouwen once told a story of an unhoused woman who was brought into New York City’s Bellevue Hospital in an acute state of psychiatric collapse. The hospital staff could find no identification on her person, and could not induce her to speak so much as her name. But they did notice she was clutching an object in the palm of one hand. After much effort, they managed to pry her fingers open — only to discover this desperate woman was clutching a single penny. [Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Open Hands (New York: Phoenix Press, 1984).]

On the individual scale, the patient’s behavior is easily categorized as mental illness, yet is this not the same sort of behavior we demonstrate, as a nation, in our pervasive fear of economic disaster — when in fact we are wealthier, and have substantially more to share, than any other people in the world? Is not our persistent denial of affluence a form of delusional behavior?

Insightfully, Robert Farrar Capon bemoans the “unhappy truth that the world is full of fools who won’t believe a good thing when they hear it. Free grace, dying love, and unqualified acceptance might as well be a fifteen-foot crocodile, the way we respond to it: we will sooner accept a God we will be fed to than one we will be fed by.” [Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of Judgment (Eerdmans, 1989), 121.]

One of the most life-changing gospel messages the twenty-first century American church can preach is a gospel of abundance — reminding a fretful people that, despite our stubborn economic fears, we do indeed live in a rich land. We preachers are uniquely situated to help our congregations, gently but firmly, to identify, name — and stop — their perpetual poor-talk. Jesus Christ calls us first to gratitude for the abundance we have, then to share it. He calls us to move from a closed fist to an open hand.

Illustrations on Abundance

On Getting a Bigger Cup

Enjoyment is not measured by what flows in, but by what flows over. The smaller we make the vessel of our need for use, the sooner we get the overflow we need for delight. This was well understood by the beggar who said, “Two coppers I had; for one I bought me a bun, for one daffodils.”

— David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness (Paulist, 1984), 219.

The Liturgy of Abundance, the Myth of Scarcity

The majority of the world’s resources pour into the United States. And as we Americans grow more and more wealthy, money is becoming a kind of narcotic for us. We hardly notice our own prosperity or the poverty of so many others. The great contradiction is that we have more and more money and less and less generosity — less and less public money for the needy, less charity for the neighbor.

Robert Wuthnow, sociologist of religion at Princeton University, has studied stewardship in the church and discovered that preachers do a good job of promoting stewardship. They study it, think about it, explain it well. But folks don’t get it. Though many of us are well intentioned, we have invested our lives in consumerism. We have a love affair with “more” — and we will never have enough. Consumerism is not simply a marketing strategy. It has become a demonic spiritual force among us, and the theological question facing us is whether the gospel has the power to help us withstand it.

The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis 1 is a song of praise for God’s generosity. It tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, “It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good.” It declares that God blesses — that is, endows with vitality — the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind....

We who are now the richest nation are today’s main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity — a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity....

The feeding of the multitudes, recorded in Mark’s Gospel, is an example of the new world coming into being through God. When the disciples, charged with feeding the hungry crowd, found a child with five loaves and two fishes, Jesus took, blessed, broke and gave the bread. These are the four decisive verbs of our sacramental existence. Jesus conducted a Eucharist, a gratitude. He demonstrated that the world is filled with abundance and freighted with generosity. If bread is broken and shared, there is enough for all.

— Walter Brueggemann, “The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity,” The Christian Century, March 24-31, l999.

Sometimes It’s More Blessed To Receive

In Acts (20:35), Luke quotes Paul quoting Jesus: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Like many Americans, I find it more difficult to receive than to give. In the frontier spirit I do not want to be obligated to anyone. As soon as I receive something, I make a quick subconscious calculation to determine what I must do in return to even the balance of payments, or tilt it slightly in my favor. My stiffest resistance to the grace of God is my uneasiness when I get something for nothing.

— Patrick Henry, The Ironic Christian’s Companion: Finding the Marks of God’s Grace in the World (New York: Riverhead, 1999).

Like Milk In the Breast

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one’s resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has to give — like milk in the breast.

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (Pantheon, 2011), 41.

The Treasure In the Pillow

There’s a fable from India about a rich man who’s traveling far from home. A poor man notices his fine clothes and his bulging money-bag. He decides to travel with him and look out for a way to steal his treasure.

Every night, in humble roadside inns, the poor man unrolls his bedroll early and pretends to sleep. Every time the rich man leaves his bed to go for a walk, the thief rummages through his belongings in search of the treasure sack.

He never can find it. As soon as he hears the rich man’s footsteps, he leaps back into his bedroll, always certain he’s just moments away from finding the treasure.

Every morning, the poor man once again pretends to sleep until the rich man goes down for breakfast. But morning is the same as night: the thief never can find the money-bag.

Day after day this goes on, until the two men finally reach their destination. As they’re parting ways, the thief’s curiosity gets the better of him. He admits to the rich man what he’s been up to. “How have you eluded me for so long?” he asks. “Did you guess that I was out to rob you?”

“Yes,” said the rich man, “I guessed that the very first night.”

“Then where did you hide the treasure?”

“It was very simple,” replied the rich man. “Every night, while you went to get cleaned up before bed, I slipped into the room and put my treasure in your pillow. And every morning, after you had rifled through my belongings, I got it back.”

Sometimes, in all our anxiety over finances, we, too, miss the treasure that’s close at hand.

“Sorry, We Can’t Give to the Red Cross this Year”

It had been a hard winter in the Appalachians. Snow had piled up deeper and deeper, the mercury dropped, rivers froze, people suffered. The Red Cross used helicopters to fly in supplies. One crew had been working day after day — long hours. They were on their way home late in the afternoon when they saw a little cabin submerged in the snow. There was a thin whisper of smoke coming from the chimney.

The rescue team figured they were probably about out of food, fuel, perhaps medicine. Because of the trees they had to put the helicopter down a mile away. They put on heavy packs with emergency supplies, trudged through heavy snow, waist deep, reached the cabin exhausted, panting, perspiring. They pounded on the door.

A thin, gaunt mountain woman opened the door and the lead man gasped, “We’re from the Red Cross.” She was silent for a moment and then she said, “It’s been a hard winter, Sonny, I just don’t think we can give anything this year.”

— James S. Hewett, ed., Illustrations Unlimited (Tyndale, 1988), 237.

So Much More Than Cheese Sandwiches

The Jansen family of Norway — father and mother, and two young children — had booked passage on a steamship to America. They’d used up all their savings on the tickets. Sympathetic neighbors had given them bread and cheese for the journey, which they took with them into their accommodations in steerage — the humblest part of that mighty ocean liner, the Stavanger.

The parents calculated they had enough cheese and bread to last the ten-day journey. They were grateful for the simple food they had, and figured they would find much better fare in America, once they got established.

About six days into the trip, the couple’s young son, Ole, let it be known that he couldn’t so much as look at another cheese sandwich. His father took pity on him, and gave the boy a few coins, to go to the ship’s store and buy an apple, or some other fruit.

Two hours went by. Ole did not return. The parents grew worried, and Mr. Jansen set out to find his missing son. Up and up he climbed, up each successive ladder out of steerage. With each flight of stairs, the surroundings grew more luxurious, and Mr. Jansen felt more and more out of place. Finally, after a very long time, he found Ole — in the grand dining room. There he was, seated at a table, surrounded by a veritable smorgasbord of food: everything good you could possibly imagine.

“Ole, Ole,” the father chided, “what have you done? I can’t pay for all this food. They’ll arrest me, for sure, and send us all back home!”

“It’s all right, Father,” Ole replied, as he gave back the coins. “None of this food costs a thing. They told me it’s included in the price of our ticket. We could have been eating like this the whole trip!”

How very much like us is the Jansen family, when it comes to our spirituality. Scripture assures us of God’s abundant blessings, but we hardly live as though we believe it. We sit on the edge of our bunks down in steerage, sullenly munching on week-old cheese sandwiches — when all the while a rich banquet awaits, up on the main deck. It’s so easy to let cheese-sandwich scarcity thinking dominate our decisions in life.

— Adapted from a story told by Thomas P. Williamsen, “Cheese Sandwich Spirituality,” Congregations: the Alban Journal, Alban Institute, May/June 1997.

Subscribe now

This concludes this free sample. The complete e-book, with over 60 sermon illustrations on generosity, is available for free to paid subscribers to the Curated Sermon Illustrations Substack.

Paid Subscriber perks

Read more

Perks for Paid Subscribers

August 24, 2026 — Consumerism Is a Religion

August 25, 2026 — The Tale of the Original Melania (and Pinianus)

August 26, 2026 — Ours Is Still An Oral Tradition

August 27, 2026 — We Are Ghosts or We Are Ancestors in Our Children’s Lives

August 28, 2026 — Grief Forms Us

August 29, 2026 — Unmuting Life’s Soundtrack

August 30, 2026 — A Brief History of Burnout

Perks for Paid Subscribers

Subscribe now

[This material may be especially useful in a sermon on the Sunday before Labor Day.]

There is a moment in every person’s life when the illusion finally cracks.

Usually, it does not happen dramatically.

It happens quietly.

You wake up one morning and realize the life you built no longer feels like yours.

The relationships feel performative.

Your ambitions feel strangely empty.

The version of yourself you worked so hard to become suddenly feels like a costume you forgot to take off.

And underneath all of it sits a terrifying question:

What if I’ve spent years running from truths I was supposed to face?….

[The psychologist Carl] Jung believed most human suffering comes from psychological resistance — the refusal to confront reality within ourselves. The longer we avoid certain truths, the more life begins to feel heavy, chaotic, and emotionally exhausting.

But once you accept them, something strange happens.

Life does not necessarily become easier externally.

But internally, the friction disappears.

And that changes everything….

Most people never become who they truly are because they are too attached to the identity that keeps them socially accepted.

This is the first tragedy.

Jung called this false identity the Persona — the mask designed to earn approval, avoid rejection, and survive socially.

At first, the mask protects you.

Then it imprisons you.

You begin choosing careers you secretly hate because they sound impressive.

You stay in relationships that drain your soul because loneliness feels more dangerous.

You keep performing versions of yourself that receive validation while your real self slowly starves underneath.

The terrifying part?

After enough years, you no longer know where the mask ends and you begin.

Many people think burnout comes from overwork.

Jung would argue it often comes from self-betrayal.

Your nervous system can endure stress far longer than it can endure living a false life.

That is why some people feel exhausted even when they are “successful.”

Their soul knows they abandoned themselves long ago.

And deep down, they can feel it….

Real psychological growth changes your relationships.

The moment you stop performing, some people become uncomfortable.

The moment you establish boundaries, some people call you selfish.

The moment you stop seeking approval, some people lose interest entirely.

Why?

Because many relationships are unconsciously built on roles, not authenticity.

When you change psychologically, the relationship dynamic changes too.

And not everyone benefits from your evolution.

This is why growth often feels lonely before it feels liberating.

You begin outgrowing environments that once defined you.

Conversations become emptier.

Old social patterns stop working.

You start craving depth in a world addicted to distraction.

At first, this feels terrifying.

But Jung believed individuation — the process of becoming your true self — always requires separation from collective expectations.

You cannot become yourself while remaining psychologically dependent on external validation.

At some point, you must choose:

Belonging…

or truth.

Very few people choose truth.

That is why truly self-aware people are rare.

— Science & Soul, “Carl Jung Warned: Life Becomes Much Easier When You Finally Accept These 5 Brutal Truths,” Substack.com, May 28, 2026.

Science & Soul

Carl Jung Warned: Life Becomes Much Easier When You Finally Accept These 5 Brutal Truths

They are exhausted because they are resisting reality…

Read more

3 months ago · 1256 likes · Science & Soul

Paid subscribers can download for free the 58-page e-book, The Sermon on the Amount: Illustrations for Preaching Generosity. Ideal for annual financial-campaign sermons. Contains over 60 illustrations as well as articles introducing these 6 sub-themes: 1. From Scarcity to Abundance, 2. From Debt to Freedom, 3. From Consumption to Sustainability, 4. From Sporadic Giving to Disciplined Giving, 5. From Funding to Offering, 6. From Maintenance to Mission. Also, an Appendix: Biblical Generosity Texts for Preaching. Click on button below for more information:

Sermon on the Amount book

Subscribe now

[This material may be especially useful in a sermon on the Sunday before Labor Day.]

In the song “Shelter From the Storm,” recorded in 1974, Bob Dylan reels off a long litany of troubles. Among them: being “burned out from exhaustion.” The line, which appeared on the chart-topping album Blood on the Tracks, distilled a significant cultural moment. The mid-1970s was when burnout as we know it first gained scientific legitimacy and broad public attention.

Today, burnout is a keyword for how we talk about our problems with work. Burnout was cited in one recent survey as the main reason record numbers of people quit their jobs in 2021. (Meanwhile, the people who stayed behind in understaffed workplaces were experiencing their own burnout.) But burnout has been with us for decades….

In the early 1970s, Herbert Freudenberger, a psychologist in New York, would regularly put 10 hours a day into his private practice and then head downtown for a second shift at the St. Mark’s Free Clinic, which served the medical needs of young people living in the East Village, helping them with everything from drug addiction to dental cavities….

He identified strongly with his patients at the St. Mark’s clinic. “Their problems, their battles, became mine,” he later wrote. After the clinic closed for the night, he and the volunteer staff would hold meetings until the wee hours. Freudenberger would then head back uptown, get a few hours of sleep and do it all again the next day.

After about a year on this schedule, Freudenberger broke down. His daughter Lisa recalls him being unable to get out of bed on a morning the family was supposed to leave for vacation.

The term “burn-out” was already in circulation in his professional world. An official at a rehabilitation center for young adult offenders in Southern California mentioned it as a “phenomenon” among treatment staff in a 1969 paper. St. Mark’s Free Clinic workers used the term to describe themselves, but they may have picked it up from the East Village streets, where people used it to describe heroin users’ veins: Inject into a spot long enough, and it becomes useless, burned out. In a 1980 book, Freudenberger compared “Burn-Outs” like himself to burned-out buildings.

To understand what had happened to him, Freudenberger turned his psychoanalytic training on himself. He spoke into a tape recorder, then played the tape back, as if he were his own patient. In 1974, he published a paper titled “Staff Burn-Out” in an academic journal. In the paper, Freudenberger asked, “Who is prone to burn-out?” His answer was unambiguous: “The dedicated and the committed”….

Freudenberger’s list of burnout symptoms was wide: “exhaustion, being unable to shake a lingering cold, suffering from frequent headaches and gastrointestinal disturbances, sleeplessness and shortness of breath,” as well as “quickness to anger,” paranoia, overconfidence, cynicism and isolation….

At the dawn of the 1980s, burnout became a key term to describe the condition of frazzled, defeated American workers…. In 1981, the president of the air traffic controllers’ union cited “early burnout” as the first reason union members were going on strike for higher wages and a shorter workweek.

The strike was a moment of optimism in the fight against burnout; it must have seemed possible to cure the condition through collective action. When President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 controllers for refusing his return-to-work order, that hope was extinguished. Reagan’s decision sent a message that workers still hear today: They will deal with burnout on their own, or not at all. A year later, the term had apparently become so commonplace that William Safire declared in his New York Times “On Language” column that it was itself “undergoing linguistic burnout.”….

In 2019, burnout was classified as a “syndrome,” though not an illness, in the World Health Organization’s main compendium of diagnoses, the International Classification of Diseases….

Even as awareness of burnout has grown, public and scientific understanding of the condition has not progressed much. There is still little consensus on how to measure burnout and no widely acknowledged means to diagnose it.

— Jonathan Malesic, “Burnout dominated 2021. Here’s the history of our burnout problem,” Washington Post, January 1, 2022.

This story is adapted from Jonathan Malesic, The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives (University of California Press, 2022).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/01/01/burnout-history-freudensberger-maslach/

Retrieved July 18, 2026.

“For every preacher who has cried out, ‘Where can I find good illustrations for my sermons?’ Carlos E. Wilton has come to our aid. In this delightfully written book, Wilton lights the way along a carefully created path for finding, saving, and including powerful preaching illustrations.”

- Thomas G. Long, Professor Emeritus of Preaching, Candler School of Theology

Illuminating Sermons book

Image: Detail from “St. Francis Giving His Mantle to a Poor Man,” Giotto di Bondone, circa 1297, fresco in Upper Church, Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi, Italy.

I’m very grateful to you for being a paid subscriber to Curated Sermon Illustrations here on Substack!

And so, I’m pleased to announce — in plenty of time for the fall annual financial campaign se…

Read more

Subscribe now

[We’ve all had the experience of viewing a video from social media that doesn’t make much sense — until we realize the sound is muted. Leonard Sweet finds in that experience a metaphor for the Christian spiritual life. Trying to live or even understand that life without knowing Jesus makes about as much sense as viewing one of those muted social-media videos.]

Unmute the sound — and suddenly the chaos coheres. What looked like nonsense becomes narrative. People in awkward poses become art. What seemed foolish reveals firework-displays of beauty, goodness, and truth.

The difference isn’t the motion. It’s the music.

We are all moving to a soundtrack — the only question is whether we can hear it.

This is the human condition east of Eden: we are living choreographies without a score, dancing steps we no longer recognize to a Song we’ve forgotten how to hear.

So life feels off. Out of sync. Spiritually arrhythmic.

But when the Song of Jesus is turned on — when “In the beginning was the Word” becomes “In the beginning was the Song” — everything changes.

The same lives, the same steps, the same stories — but now they fit.

— Leonard Sweet, “Unmute the Song: The Gospel According to Sound On,” Substack.com, June 16, 2026.

Leonard Sweet

Unmute the Song: The Gospel According to Sound On

Scroll TikTok with the sound off and the world looks like it’s glitching…

Read more

3 months ago · 11 likes · 8 comments · Leonard Sweet

“Illuminating Sermons artfully redirects preachers from frantic searches for threadbare illustrations to richer habits for discerning traces of God’s light everywhere around them. At once pragmatic and profound, Carlos Wilton models to the point of iridescence how to listen to one’s life, to discover grace in the ordinary, to curate capacities for wonder, and to trust that God is speaking still.” — Robert C. Dykstra, Professor of Pastoral Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary

Illuminating Sermons book

Subscribe now

Ten years ago next month, my mom died from alcoholism. I can’t really believe it’s been ten years already. I was 36, the same age my dad was when he lost his mom. And for a long time I told myself I had “handled it.” I went back to work a few days later and even answered someone’s “How was your weekend?” with something like, “Oh, y’know, my mom just died, so not the best.” Can you say cringe?

So I became the strong one, and learned how to talk about it without my voice shaking. I thought I had graduated from grief, as if it were something you complete. Check the box. Got the certificate….

2020 came and my grandma died. Next up, in 2021, my aunt, my mom’s sister. Six months later my uncle, my mom’s brother. That was my mom’s whole family gone now. And this summer, another aunt, one of my dad’s sisters. Loss keeps showing up like it’s memorized my address.

And of course I know I’m not unique in this. Many of you know this journey too, and have shared with me (so thank you).

But here’s the part I never said out loud: Every new loss broke open something old, a wound I thought had healed, something I didn’t want to look closely at again.

People assume you get better at grief. I don’t think you do, not really. You just get better at looking like you are fine, but grief stays and just becomes part of you. A new version of you who learns how to hold it without breaking. There’s a theory/analogy that you may have seen online — about a ball in a box or container. At first the ball fills the box, but as time goes on the ball (grief) gets smaller. Not because it shrinks and gets smaller, but that the box, the person’s coping skills and resilience, grow to make more space for the grief to be held in….

A few months ago I was talking to someone at work who had just lost a loved one. They said, “I should be better by now.” And without thinking I told them, “There’s no timeline for grief. It’s not about being better. It’s about being honest about how you’re feeling.”

It felt like I was saying it to myself. And suddenly I could see it — all those years of trying to be resilient. Layering mindfulness on top of pain instead of letting it support me. Being the one who holds everyone else together.

I realized that grief never stops asking for your attention. It just taps you on the shoulder every so often, not as a punishment but to remind you that you’re human….

But I like who I have become because of the losses I’ve lived through. I never expected it to change me this much, but how could it not? Loss bends you, but like a palm tree in a hurricane, you don’t break. It softens you, sharpens you. Makes you pay attention.

It taught me how to sit with discomfort instead of running away from it. And how to sit and stay with other people’s pain because I am still learning how to stay with my own.

I would never choose what happened. But it shaped me into someone I admire and trust, and that I actually like….

When grief returns, you don’t go back to the start, straight back to zero. You start from understanding, and with a tenderness. From knowing you survived it before. From knowing that pain isn’t the opposite of progress, and the realization that being cracked open again and again isn’t failure, it’s how the light finds a way in, how like fire in a forge, it makes you stronger.

— Caitlyn McColl, “Grief Didn’t Ruin Me. It Remade Me,” Dose of Wonder, Substack.com, November 27, 2025.

Dose of Wonder

Grief Didn’t Ruin Me. It Remade Me.

Read more

9 months ago · 25 likes · 21 comments · Caitlin McColl 🇨🇦

Want to discover how to curate your own sermon illustrations? You know — find ‘em, categorize ‘em, store ‘em and retrieve ‘em? I’m Carlos Wilton, author of Illuminating Sermons: Curating Illustrations that Inspire (Fortress Press, 2025). Whether you’re new to preaching or have been proclaiming the word for decades, Illuminating Sermons will get you motivated to set up your own database system and free yourself from the last-minute illustrations chase.

Illuminating Sermons book

Subscribe now

This is the final days of Patti’s first pregnancy, and I receive a surprise visit from my father at my home in LA. Now, he’d driven 500 miles unannounced to knock on my door, that’s his style. So at 11 a.m. we sit in the Sunday dining room, and we’re nursing morning beers, that’s his style.

When, my dad, never a talkative man, right, blurted out, “You’ve been very good to us.” And I nodded that, that I had, and he says, “And I wasn’t very good to you”. And, the room just…stood still. As to my shock, the unacknowledgeable was being acknowledged, if I, if I didn’t know better I would’ve sworn an apology of some sort was being made, and it was.

Here in the last days before I was to become a father, my own father was visiting me to warn me of the mistakes that he had made, and to warn me not to make them with my own children. To release them from the chain of our sins, my fathers of mine and our fathers before, that they may be free, to make their own choices and to live their own lives.

We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them, and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way, and some transcendence.

My father, on that day, was petitioning me for an ancestral role in my life after being a ghost for a long long time. He wanted me to write a new end to our relationship, and he wanted me to be ready for the new beginning that I was about to experience.

It was the greatest moment in my life with my dad, and it was all that I needed.

— Bruce Springsteen, from monologue, “Springsteen on Broadway.”

“For every preacher who has cried out, ‘Where can I find good illustrations for my sermons?’ Carlos E. Wilton has come to our aid. In this delightfully written book, Wilton lights the way along a carefully created path for finding, saving, and including powerful preaching illustrations.”

- Thomas G. Long, Professor Emeritus of Preaching, Candler School of Theology

Illuminating Sermons book

Image: Bruce Springsteen during a performance of Springsteen on Broadway in 2017, Wikimedia Commons, by Raph_PH - SpringsteenBroadWay021117-27, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67684268

Subscribe now

(I realize this article goes deeper into the scholarly weeds than may be useful as a sermon illustration. The opening anecdote about the Ghanaian oral tradition probably can be used that way, though. Perhaps my further ruminations may be useful as a theological thought-piece on biblical authority.)

The anthropologists Jack Goody and Ian Watt tell a story that comes from the state of Gonja in Northern Ghana. That state has a foundational myth, transmitted through many generations in the form of oral history. It’s the story of a founding father, Ndewura Jakpa, who came to that land for gold and conquered the indigenous people. Then he divided up the country, setting up his seven sons to rule their own chiefdoms under a larger confederation.

At the beginning of the 20th century, British colonial officials heard this tale and recorded it as the Gonja state’s official history. But then two of the chiefdoms went out of existence, merging with the others. This reduced the number from seven to five.

Sixty years later, the British noticed that the Gonjas’ founding myth had changed. It now declared that Ndewura Jakpa only had five sons. No Ghanaian had any problem with this, even when the British pointed out the discrepancy.

Rather patronizingly, the two anthropologists took a dim view of the way the Ghanaians seemed able to play fast and loose with the historical record. They derided it as “social amnesia.”

But there’s a different way to look at it.

At the time all this was happening, the Gonja people had a strong, authoritative oral culture. They did have a rich, centuries-old written tradition in Arabic as well, although only a small portion of them were literate. The Arabic written tradition functioned alongside oral tradition, as two halves of a whole. The Gonja enjoyed a living oral tradition, passed on through repetition of stories, particularly the founding story. If details of the story changed over time, what was the problem? The important thing was what the story said to them in the present.

Once an oral story is recorded in written form, it creates a historical record that’s difficult to amend. Unconstrained by such a record, an oral-tradition culture is free to adjust its past to accommodate to the needs of the present. Furthermore, this means that — as Andrey Mir points out in a recent article — “not only personal but even collective truth [is] situational: relative, contextual, negotiated, and adjustable.”

We all know a large portion of the Bible started out as oral history. The earliest stories — the creation, the patriarchs, the exodus, tales of judges and kings — were transmitted in oral form for centuries before anyone ever wrote them down. The modern scholarly consensus is that it wasn’t until the Babylonian exile that a comprehensive written collection began to take shape. That collection also included the psalms and most of the prophetic books, whose content was more contemporary.

Just as the British misunderstood how the Gonja could treat their oral tradition as malleable — deriding any adjustments to it as “amnesia” rather then honoring it in the flexible way it was meant to be used — so it can be difficult for some of us moderns, grounded in scientific method and written culture as we are, to continue to honor the scriptures. Scientific discoveries and other written records appear, to many, to call the Bible’s truth into question.

Case in point. In the early 1850s, archaeologists discovered numerous fragments of Assyrian cuneiform tablets at the site of the ancient city of Ninevah, in present-day Iraq. The evidence strongly suggested that the tablets dated back to the 7th century BCE.

They got to work translating them. What emerged was the text of an ancient creation story, known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. It bears an uncanny similarity to the creation story of Genesis, especially its seven-day creation sequence.

Since then, even earlier fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh have been uncovered, some dating as far back as the 18th century BCE. That’s several centuries earlier than the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.

The earliest hard copies of the Book of Genesis we possess, by contrast, are fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls collection. They only date back as far as around 250-150 BCE.

As for the Genesis creation story itself, the traditional scholarly view has long been that it was first written down in Hebrew as early as 1450 BCE — a couple centuries, give or take, following the Exodus from Egypt. Modern biblical scholarship disagrees — dating the book’s composition much later, around the time of the Jewish people’s exile in Babylon in the 6th century BCE. Either way, the Gilgamesh tablets are many centuries older than whatever date the Genesis creation story was first set down in written Hebrew characters.

Given that the leaders of the Jewish community resided in Babylon for more than a generation, and that the Epic of Gilgamesh is a product of Mesopotamian culture, it seems likely that the Jewish people borrowed the seven-day creation story from their Babylonian captors.

Of course, both creation stories — Gilgamesh and Genesis — circulated in oral form centuries before they were ever written down. That sets up a chicken-or-egg scenario — who borrowed from whom? Which culture orally imparted the seven-day-creation story first, the Hebrews or the Mesopotamians? Nobody can say for sure, because a purely oral tradition can’t easily be dated. But given that the Mesopotamian cultures are all much older than Israel, the money seems to be on the Mesopotamians.

Traditional biblical scholarship has been in crisis ever since.

But that’s only because its scholarship is focused primarily on written sources. Remember how the Gonjas’ foundational story — like the stories of the Hebrew scriptures — was a purely oral tradition, something most Near Eastern and Western cultures haven’t favored for millennia. Remember, too, how malleable the story about the Gonja chiefdoms continued to be, even in the 20th century. Remember, as well, how the Gonja people — steeped in their oral-tradition way of looking at the world — saw no problem when British officials presented them with documentary evidence that their story had changed from 7 chiefdoms to 5, within the span of just 60 years.

“You just don’t understand how stories work,” the boldest of the Gonja storytellers could have objected to the British authorities (but probably didn’t). “Stories are alive! They’re meant to be spoken, from one person to another. They’re not dead like your stories, confined to words on a page.”

Not long after the Epic of Gilgamesh surfaced in the world of biblical scholarship — and Darwin’s theory of evolution simultaneously shook up the world of biology — a significant faction of traditional biblical scholars responded by circling the wagons and doubling down, as their views hardened into fundamentalism. Well-meaning biblical scholars set off for Armenia’s Mount Ararat (now located within Turkish borders), digging for decayed wooden remains of Noah’s ark they could subject to carbon dating. Latest word is, they’re still looking. That didn’t stop Bible enthusiasts in Kentucky, though, from building a life-sized ark theme park, “educating” visitors that Noah drove two of every dinosaur up the ramp, along with two of every other animal.

Fundamentalism is an intellectual dead end. The longer its death-throes last, the harder its proponents struggle to justify the unjustifiable.

What fundamentalists most fear — based on a mistaken form of all-or-nothing thinking — is that they could lose the stories of their faith altogether. If archaeology and science can effectively discredit the truth of those stories, they fear, then that means the Bible is good for nothing but a doorstop.

But what if there’s another way? What if the Gonja people have something to teach us about how the biblical stories, in their oldest form, are meant to function?

What if our understanding of truth itself is too narrow? What if scientific truth isn’t the only kind of truth? What if there’s a narrative form of truth that, as Mir suggests, is both collective and situational?

What if the path forward for biblical Christianity, in the remainder of the 21st century and beyond, is built upon a rediscovery that the Bible stories we retell — like poetry — remain, on a deep psychological level, an oral tradition?

Yes, we still need to sit and read them in written form. But maybe we can’t understand them fully until we listen to them spoken — and interpreted — aloud, in the welcoming embrace of a faith community.

— For the initial anecdote, see Andrey Mir, “As print literacy fades, our perception of truth is warping,” BigThink on Substack.com, August 25, 2026.

Big Think

As print literacy fades, our perception of truth is warping

Read more

7 days ago · 150 likes · 14 comments · Big Think and Andrey Mir

“For every preacher who has cried out, ‘Where can I find good illustrations for my sermons?’ Carlos E. Wilton has come to our aid. In this delightfully written book, Wilton lights the way along a carefully created path for finding, saving, and including powerful preaching illustrations.”

- Thomas G. Long, Professor Emeritus of Preaching, Candler School of Theology

Illuminating Sermons book

Image: English: “The Over Lord and King of the traditional Gonja Kingdom in his full traditional attire of the Gonja Kings,” by Kawley. March 27, 2023. Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons license. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Gonja_King.jpg

Subscribe now

One night in Rome around AD 404, the fabulously rich twenty-year-old heiress Melania and her twenty-four-year-old husband, Pinianus, both had the same dream. “We saw ourselves, both of us, passing through a very narrow place in a wall,” Melania would later recount. “We were totally discomposed in the narrowness, so that all that remained was to give up our souls. When we came through that pain with great suffering… we found abundant great relief and ineffable joy. God manifested this to us, comforting our faintness of spirit, so that we might be brave concerning the future repose that we would receive after such suffering.”

The “suffering” that confronted the young couple arose from their families’ bitter opposition to their wish to renounce their entire fortune. Both had grown up in old-money clans with imperial connections. Their parents were Christians of varying degrees of devoutness who at the same time enjoyed living the good life as Roman aristocrats. Up until then, Pinianus and Melania had done the same (despite her longstanding misgivings). They belonged to the billionaire class of their day, owning a palace on the Caelian Hill and estates dotted across the Roman world from North Africa to Britain. Pinianus alone reportedly had a disposable income of 120,000 gold solidi per year (equivalent to 1,666 pounds or the yearly pay of 30,000 workmen).

Yet now the young couple, stirred by the recent losses of their infant son and daughter, was finding the clash between their faith and their wealth unbearable. “Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor,” Jesus had told a rich young ruler who came asking how to obtain eternal life, “and you will have treasure in heaven; and come follow me” (Luke 18:18–23). Pinianus and Melania wanted to do just that. Jesus had added that it was as difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. These words may have helped the couple make sense of their dream, the historian Peter Brown has suggested: the painfully tight cleft through which they passed into bliss was the needle’s agonizing eye….

They found that divesting themselves of their fortune was no simple undertaking. Apart from the obstacles thrown up by their families and social circle, they faced a failed ploy by the Roman Senate to preemptively confiscate their property, while also having to fend off the schemes of opportunists. Some of their first initiatives backfired. In seeking to sell off their estates outside the city, the couple freed eight thousand resident slaves. But many other slaves revolted, refused manumission, and demanded to remain on the family lands, where they could count on food and lodging (apparently they successfully negotiated their own sale at a cut rate to Melania’s brother).

Persevering, the couple found it would take years to sell the estates farther afield in Mauretania, Numidia, Gaul, Aquitaine, and Spain, some of them the size of small towns, encompassing not just farm operations but also metalworking businesses. Qualified buyers for such properties were few, even though Pinianus and Melania often took promissory notes instead of payment. The palace in Rome went unsold because none of the city’s other well-heeled families had enough liquidity to pay for it. It fell into disrepair before being burned during Alaric’s sack of the city a few years later.

There were moments when Melania and her husband felt the pang of renunciation, she would later tell her biographer, Gerontius. For her, one flash of regret came from recalling the colored-marble outdoor baths at one of their Italian villas, bordered by the sea on one side and a forest full of game on the other — you could watch the deer and wild boar while you bathed. For Pinianus, it was giving up his silk shirts for coarse secondhand clothes. But they didn’t look back. In Gerontius’ words, they had been “wounded by the divine love.”

As the property sales went through, another challenge intensified: how to give away the money. Lacking a late-antique version of GiveWell, they donated somewhat at random. “Immediately they began, with zeal, to distribute” their movable goods, Gerontius writes, authorizing agents to speed up the process. “They sent money to different regions, through one man 40,000 coins, through another 30,000, by another 20,000, and through another 10,000, distributing the rest as the Lord helped them to do.” They contributed 3000 coins to ransom a group of captives from pirates; paid to free children from prisons; offered stipends to young men if they swore to follow Christian disciplines; and gave 500 gold pieces to the hermit Dorotheus. Melania’s wardrobe and jewelry went to churches as altar decorations. They donated the Mediterranean islands they owned to “holy men.” Over time, much of their giving went to building and endowing churches and monasteries across the empire, including large donations to the diocese of the great theologian Augustine of Hippo.

From the start, they didn’t just give to the poor, but also lived with them. For the first few years, they continued to stay in a spacious villa outside Rome. It soon became a thronging Christian commune that was home to thirty families and fifty single women (many of them apparently their former slaves), also offering hospitality to travelers. After five years, as the invading Goths approached the city, the couple moved to North Africa and continued their communal pattern of living there, before visiting the Christian communities in Egypt and finally moving to the Holy Land. Arriving in Jerusalem, they were enrolled in the list of the city’s poor. Pinianus became a familiar character around town, known for his only garment, a robe made of woven straw.

They stayed in Jerusalem for the rest of their lives, eventually founding several monasteries on the Mount of Olives. Pinianus died after fifteen years there; Melania survived him by seven years. When her last illness struck around Christmas 439, she was a simple nun, having earlier quashed her sisters’ attempts to make her the convent’s superior. Gerontius, an eyewitness, reports that she died surrounded by her community, “tranquilly and placidly in gladness and rejoicing”: a fulfillment perhaps of her dream from years before, which had promised her “ineffable joy” on the other side of the needle’s eye. Her biographer adds that the only piece of linen she owned at her death was the sheet used to shroud her.

Pinianus and Melania’s story can sound like a colorful oddity without much modern relevance — a historical footnote from an age known for the kind of ascetic heroics that few today would imitate. But even from a secular point of view their life choices make a certain sense. Their decision to get rid of their wealth proved to be, as the newish field of study called happiness research would say, an effective investment in their wellbeing: they exchanged financial wealth for richness of relationships….

Consider the question: Over the past couple of hundred years, has the bulk of Christian preaching on wealth heard in Western churches — whether mainline Protestant, evangelical, or Catholic — been of the kind apt to spur new Pinianuses and Melanias to forsake their possessions? In their day, it must be borne in mind, they were outliers only in the size of the fortune they abandoned. As Peter Brown documents in his 2011 book Through the Eye of a Needle (on which this essay draws), they were just two out of a multitude of lesser-known believers in the first centuries who made similar choices. In early Christianity, the idea of renouncing possessions was routine teaching, as one moral challenge among many in a young religion unafraid to make life-changing demands.

— Peter Mommsen, “The Other Side of the Needle’s Eye,” Plough Quarterly 36, May 30, 2023.

http://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/early-christians/the-other-side-of-the-needles-eye

Retrieved July 2, 2026.

“Illuminating Sermons artfully redirects preachers from frantic searches for threadbare illustrations to richer habits for discerning traces of God’s light everywhere around them. At once pragmatic and profound, Carlos Wilton models to the point of iridescence how to listen to one’s life, to discover grace in the ordinary, to curate capacities for wonder, and to trust that God is speaking still.” — Robert C. Dykstra, Professor of Pastoral Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary

Illuminating Sermons book

Image: Saint Melania the Younger, miniature from the Menologion of Basil II, Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Melania_the_Younger,_nun_of_Rome_(Menologion_of_Basil_II).jpg

August 17, 2026 - Letting Greed and Jealousy Out of the Bag

The consequences, as described in Homer’s Odyssey, are not good

August 18, 2026 - He Called Her “Daughter”

Jesus came to help, not to offer self-help

August 19, 2026 - A Via Negativa Tale

Sometimes we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone

August 20, 2026 - It’s Impossible To Spend Time

But we can pass it

August 21, 2026 - The Happiness Deficit

Committed love is the solution

August 22, 2026 - Coming Into the Light Can Be Painful

Acknowledging the darkness is a good place to start

August 23, 2026 - A Lesson from the Pantheon

No, we don’t want to go there

Subscribe now

Consumerism has not only infiltrated our understanding and application of Christianity, but it is also essentially a religion in and of itself.

And, by almost every metric, it could easily be considered the most successful religion in the history of humankind.

Consumerism is a cultural ethic born out of the advent of mass production and further cemented by the advertising boom of the fifties and sixties. Consumerism hinges on the belief that if we only bought what we needed, our economy would collapse.

Therefore, the goal of consumerism is to create artificial demand for goods and services you don’t really need and probably didn’t even know existed.

Consumerism is so much more than an advertising strategy.

It’s a worldview that fundamentally alters the way we approach our bodies, our relationships, our mental health, and our religion….

It’s an economic system that thrives on your lack of self-control and preys on your insecurities. We give magazines, home-makeover TV shows, and social media accounts permission to sow discontent in our personal lives and shape our desires for something better….

Our religious and national holidays have become excuses to shop. Products — like cars and smartphones — are purposefully designed to make you yearn for the newer model. One of the fastest growing real estate markets in the U.S. is storage containers — so we can fill them with stuff that can’t fit in our too-big houses.

We are taught through an endless barrage of advertisements that love is best expressed through the exchange of expensive gifts and purpose can be obtained by a trip abroad….

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes,

“Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured. Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (“Just do it!”) to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.”

Consumerism absorbs, modifies, and commodifies preexisting belief systems and ideologies. And Christianity is not immune.

Because, make no mistake, consumerism is a religion.

Our temples are malls and digital storefronts, our altars are checkout counters and online baskets, our priests are advertising agencies, our sacrifices are the dollars in our checking accounts, and God is our unmet desires….

In How Churches Became Cruise Ships, Skye Jethani writes,

“The logic was simple: if the Baby Boomers did not feel the need to connect with God, then perhaps another felt-need would draw them into the church: the need for community, or entertainment, or help with their children and marriages. While they consumed the upbeat music, support groups, dramas, and therapeutic sermons, the hope was that they would find God as well.”

Evangelical churches began orientating their Sunday morning services around worship experiences with an emphasis on production. In the 1990s, the emphasis shifted to offering programs, art, and services that mimicked the secular culture, but offered a “Christian twist.”

New churches stripped religious iconography from their exteriors and interiors and gravitated toward an architectural style that blended the aesthetics of a mall, community college campus, and movie theater.

Church could be anything, as long as it wasn’t boring….

Consumerism trains our brains to treat products and experiences as disposable, and a church environment designed for consumption is no different.

In The Jesus Way, theologian Eugene Peterson writes,

“If we are a nation of consumers, obviously the quickest and most effective way to get them into our congregations is to identify what they want and offer it to them, satisfy their fantasies, promise them the moon, recast the gospel in consumer terms: entertainment, satisfaction, excitement, adventure problem solving, whatever. [But] this is not the way in which we become less and Jesus becomes more. This is not the way in which our sacrificed lives become available to others in justice and service.”

Consumer Christianity places our needs and desires at the center of God’s universe….

Our view of God becomes something one study referred to as a “combination of divine butler and cosmic therapist.”….

In today’s fractured and anxiety-ridden society, we need faith communities marked by moral depth, humility, and sacrificial love for one another more than ever. And those are the same characteristics that should separate us from a consumeristic culture….

Deep in our bones, we know Christianity isn’t going to be saved by better programs, larger facilities, or more celebrity pastors, just like we know we won’t find fulfillment in a new car, bigger house, or Instagrammable vacation. And that’s because Christianity doesn’t need to be “saved.”

Remember, consumerism is a problem in the Church because it’s a problem in all of us first. The Church was driven to consumerism because we willfully submitted to the false gospel of materialism.

— Joe Terrell, “Consumerism and the Church: Reclaiming the Gospel From Our Culture’s Most Powerful Religion,” careynieuwhof.com.

https://careynieuwhof.com/consumerism-and-the-church/

Retrieved July 2, 2026.

“Illuminating Sermons artfully redirects preachers from frantic searches for threadbare illustrations to richer habits for discerning traces of God’s light everywhere around them. At once pragmatic and profound, Carlos Wilton models to the point of iridescence how to listen to one’s life, to discover grace in the ordinary, to curate capacities for wonder, and to trust that God is speaking still.” — Robert C. Dykstra, Professor of Pastoral Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary

Illuminating Sermons book

Subscribe now

One of the best-preserved — and one of the oldest — ancient Roman buildings to survive more-or-less intact is the Pantheon: today a Roman Catholic church, but originally a pagan temple.

The Pantheon burned down in antiquity and was rebuilt twice. Construction of the most recent version began during the reign of the Emperor Trajan and was completed under his successor, Hadrian, around 126 CE.

That this building has survived is remarkable — especially its dome, a wonder of ancient engineering. The Pantheon’s dome is made of interlocking trapezoidal concrete slabs — yes, concrete! — with the top of the dome open to the elements. The cunningly-designed dome rises gracefully above the main floor of that ancient temple, with no pillars or structural support other than the outside walls. The only light comes from the sun by day or the moon and stars by night.

The Pantheon provided the design inspiration for St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the U.S. Capitol Rotunda and other domed structures across the world.

Did I say that dome has survived, intact, since 126 C.E.? Incredible!

I’ve always wondered how the Romans handled the rain that inevitably fell into their temple, through the open circular skylight. (Wouldn’t it pool on the marble floor? Wouldn’t you need a small army of temple functionaries standing by with mops?) Today I looked it up. I learned that the Pantheon’s floor isn’t flat like you’d expect, but slightly concave — so slightly canted, you can’t even tell as you’re walking over it. The rainwater runs towards the center, where it’s diverted by a system of small, hidden drains directly into the city’s ancient sewers.

The architect hired by Trajan to design the place was named Apollodorus of Damascus. He began as one of Trajan’s military engineers. That guy had to be a genius.

But I digress. As I said, the building was originally a temple. But a temple to whom?

Most Roman temples were dedicated to just one of the Olympian gods. The Pantheon’s unique in being a temple to ALL the gods — the entire, well, pantheon.

In practice, though, the Pantheon was the principal temple to the Emperor. The first incarnation of the building was erected during the reign of Augustus — the first emperor to the worshiped as a god.

The whole purpose of the Pantheon was to display imperial power. Here’s how.

The Emperor Hadrian would conduct his most important imperial audiences right in the center of the building, under that vast open dome (presumably when it wasn’t raining). Ranged around the edges of the circular chamber were towering statues of all the Olympian gods (those statues were carted out of there several centuries later, at the time the building was converted to a church, and replaced with statues of Christian saints).

The visual symbolism was that of the Emperor taking his place at the center of the divine council on Mount Olympus. Sunlight beamed down upon His Divinity from the heavens, as though sent down through the open roof by Apollo himself.

Oz the Magnificent couldn’t have conjured more impressive political theater — to be operated from behind his concealing curtain, of course.

Politically, the not-so-subtle message was, “Don’t mess with me, bro. I’m divine!”

Theologically, you could say it perfectly symbolized the union of church and state.

Which makes it a cautionary tale for us, here in these United States.

Our Constitution’s First Amendment clearly calls for the separation of church and state. There are some today who are calling for that separation to be revisited, or even revoked. Do we really want to make the U.S. Capitol (or, God forbid, the White House) into a modern-day Pantheon?

The Capitol, of course, already has the dome. The Rotunda’s dome — rather than being open to the elements — is painted overhead with a massive fresco called The Apotheosis of Washington. “Apotheosis” means “to elevate a person to the status of a god.” And that’s exactly what the painting — rather strangely — depicts. Here’s Wikipedia’s description:

“George Washington is draped in purple, worn by generals of the ancient Roman Republic during their triumphs, with a rainbow arch at his feet, flanked by the goddess Victoria, who is draped in green, blowing a horn, to his left and the goddess Liberty to his right. Liberty wears a red liberty cap, symbolizing emancipation, from a Roman tradition where slaves being manumitted would be given a felt cap (Latin pileus). She holds a fasces in her right hand and an open book in the other, to which George Washington gestures with his right hand.”

Subscribe now

(A fasces is an ancient Roman symbol of authority — a bundle of rods, with an axe blade coming out of the top; you can also see one on the reverse side of the old Mercury dime. Ominously, it’s where the word “fascist” comes from.)

Hoo boy. Is that fresco over the top, or what? (Literally.)

But here’s the thing. The artist, Constantino Brumidi, painted it in 1865, as the Civil War was wrapping up. George Washington had been dead for over half a century. The historical references are to the Roman Republic, not the Roman Empire with its deified emperors. The freed-slave symbolism reverberated powerfully in a battered nation that was wrapping up its bloodiest struggle, whose hard-won outcome was liberation for enslaved people.

Most notably, the symbolism isn’t Christian. It’s pagan!

The fresco wasn’t finished until after Lincoln’s assassination, but its design was agreed upon earlier. There wasn’t the slightest chance Abraham Lincoln would aspire to anything close to divinity. Rare among political leaders, he was a genuinely humble man. True, Lincoln frequently mentioned the Almighty in his most important speeches, but it was always with a degree of caution, even uncertainty.

Case in point: this famous passage from his Second Inaugural Address, referring to the combatants on both sides of the Civil War — “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

The Second Inaugural Address, while laden with religious language throughout — including four direct quotations from the Bible (two from the Hebrew scriptures and two from the Greek) — can be described as broadly theistic, but not strongly Christian. In fact, one of the quotations of Jesus he cites is “Judge not, that we be not judged.” Lincoln knew his audience (predominantly Christian), but — following the tradition of Washington and most of the other founders — he keeps the God-talk pretty generic.

Lincoln doesn’t sound anything like a divine emperor, standing in the middle of the Pantheon with heavenly sunlight streaming down upon his face. Nor does his speech sound anything like the establishment of a state religion. In fact, in their humility, the Great Emancipator’s words evoke the precise opposite of established religion.

The First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Let’s keep it that way.

“For every preacher who has cried out, ‘Where can I find good illustrations for my sermons?’ Carlos E. Wilton has come to our aid. In this delightfully written book, Wilton lights the way along a carefully created path for finding, saving, and including powerful preaching illustrations.”

- Thomas G. Long, Professor Emeritus of Preaching,

Illuminating Sermons book

Additional image credits:

Façade of the Pantheon. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pantheon_(Rome)_-_Right_side_and_front.jpg

Interior of the Pantheon c. 1734 with original Attic (Greek) design, painted by Giovanni Paolo Panini. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Detail of George Washington enthroned on the clouds, from The Apotheosis of Washington, interior of U.S. Capitol dome Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41977717

Subscribe now

It is far too easy for us as Christians to look down on “those who are perishing” as though they are lost children groping about in the darkness. Being “in the light,” we know that’s a spiritual reality. We forget, though, that people who have spent their entire life in darkness are accustomed to the dark.

But if someone then turns on the light, you are just as blinded by the light as someone coming in from outside would be blinded by the darkness. Either way, you are probably going to whack your shin on the coffee table.

People who have spent time in the dark room don’t have a problem walking through it. They are accustomed to the darkness, and it suits them. However, a person in the dark room is missing out on so many things that could be seen in the light….

If it is instinctive to prefer physical light over physical darkness, then why are we so resistant to come out of spiritual darkness into the light?

And even more troubling — why are those who are in the light, or “saved,” so hesitant to go into other dark rooms and flip on the switch?….

A person sitting in the dark is not necessarily happy about it, but they are comfortable with their surroundings. So, they justify their darkness, rather than turning on the light, which would involve getting out of the chair and flipping the switch….

Likewise, a person outside the church may not feel as though they are missing anything that Christianity can provide. A person walking in the light of Christ knows what the others are missing. However, we as Christians need to remember that sharing the gospel with somebody against their will is like flipping on a 100-watt bulb in a dark room. The light of Truth can burn your brain just like a sudden flip of a light switch can burn your eyes.

That is why so many people reject the gospel when they first hear it. It really has nothing to do with “logic and reason.” It is simply too much of a shock to the system for them to absorb….

No one saved me by arguing me into heaven. I did not save myself by simply deciding to “be good.” Jesus chose to save me, because that is who He is, and that is what He does.

If I were to walk into a dark room now, I might stub my toe. But I could sit with an inhabitant of the darkness and talk to them about my own previously dark room. I could share that the only way I was able to light up my room was by first acknowledging that it was dark.

— M. Scott Coffman, “Getting ‘Saved’ is More than Just a Conversion,” Patheos.com, May 31, 2023.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/truthmission/2023/05/getting-saved-is-more-than-just-a-conversion/

Retrieved July 2, 2026.

“For every preacher who has cried out, ‘Where can I find good illustrations for my sermons?’ Carlos E. Wilton has come to our aid. In this delightfully written book, Wilton lights the way along a carefully created path for finding, saving, and including powerful preaching illustrations.”

- Thomas G. Long, Professor Emeritus of Preaching, Candler School of Theology

Illuminating Sermons book

Subscribe now

Shu-sin was the king of Sumer from about 2000 B.C.E. Although his wife’s name is lost to history, her legendary words are not. Carved on a cuneiform tablet is an ode to their love, containing these lines:

Your spirit, I know where to cheer your spirit,

Bridegroom, sleep in our house until dawn,

Your heart, I know where to gladden your heart,

Lion, sleep in our house until dawn.

And down to today, this kind of romantic attachment is one of the best predictors of happiness that social scientists have identified. For example, my review of the General Social Survey finds that although 27 percent of married Americans said they were “very happy” with their lives, only 11 percent of those respondents who were never married, divorced, separated, or widowed answered this way. (Obviously, marriage is not the only romantic arrangement, but it is the one most often studied.) And research in the Journal of Research in Personality has shown that marriage can protect happiness in adulthood.

These findings may help explain the well-documented decline in American happiness, especially among young adults. In a nutshell, the U.S. is moving from a society based on couples to one based on singles. The percentage of adults who are currently married has fallen from almost 70 in 1960 to about 50 today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau….

The solution to the happiness deficit — for the nation as well as among individuals — is simply to encourage more people to pair off, right? Maybe not. A closer look at the singles trend suggests that the problem is not a lack of available partners, but that young adults may inadvertently be avoiding romantic attachment. That is the challenge we face….

I believe romantic-attachment avoidance is the missing link in the research between singlehood and the epidemic of unhappiness among young adults. Happiness is decreased by emotional isolation; we need people who know us deeply and with whom we can be vulnerable. All of this suggests that to get happier, “Pair up” is probably not the right advice. Better to solve the avoidance problem per se.

Some of the causes of avoidance are obvious, such as the way social media encourages an intense focus on oneself rather than others. Research shows that social-media use is associated with greater narcissism (as well as depression and anxiety). In addition, a diminished influence of traditional institutions that provide meaning, including religion and family, can explain why young people are turning to work to find a sense of life’s purpose.

But it is too easy to exculpate ourselves as a society by pointing to technology and trends we can scarcely control, and young adults may not be in a position to address their avoidant behavior. The rest of us can help. As an academic and a parent of young-adult children, I see vividly how people my age and in my position simultaneously encourage young adults to feel at the center of their own universe and set them up to seek as much professional achievement as possible. Modern parents, and universities in loco parentis, bear a lot of responsibility for convincing young adults both that they are No. 1 and that their worth as people can and should be measured by worldly success. We are inadvertently leaving them isolated, lonely, and bereft of what really matters: secure, loving connections with others….

To that end, let me propose a place to start, with three simple messages: You are not better or more special than others; you are not alive simply to work; happiness comes from loving and being loved. These three ideas transgress conventional modern thinking — and that’s exactly the point.

— Arthur C. Brooks, “Don’t Avoid Romance,” The Atlantic, June 1, 2023.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/insecure-attachment-avoidance-romance/674245/

Retrieved July 2, 2026.

“For every preacher who has cried out, ‘Where can I find good illustrations for my sermons?’ Carlos E. Wilton has come to our aid. In this delightfully written book, Wilton lights the way along a carefully created path for finding, saving, and including powerful preaching illustrations.”

- Thomas G. Long, Professor Emeritus of Preaching, Candler School of Theology

Illuminating Sermons book

Subscribe now

I’ve been learning Spanish for almost four years now (don’t ask me to say anything, I’m still convinced I can hardly string a sentence together) and I vividly recall the time I asked my tutor, Ilenia, what the Spanish equivalent was for the verb ‘to spend time’.

“There is no spending of time in Spanish. It is not something we are buying or selling! The equivalent is pasar, to pass time.”

Her response struck me (the irony of this publication’s name is not lost on me here).

In a culture that encourages sleeping in the middle of the day and evening meals that are yet to begin come 10pm, time is not spent and things are done sin prisas, without hurry. Time is simply allowed to pass and enjoyed for what it is.

Time is a very abstract concept on the best of days. Clocks didn’t even really exist before the 17th century. Prior to that the rhythms of our daily lives were dictated by the position of the sun in the sky.

We have the same amount of ‘time’ now as we did then. The time that passes between one sunrise and the next has never changed. So why are we so short on time today? Where does it go? And why is it always in such a rush to leave?

Certainly, our lives look quite different to those of medieval [people]. We just have so much to do.

Bills to pay, lists to clear, emails to send, cars to MOT, kids to feed, expectations to be met, people to please, world problems to solve.

But I also think it’s to do with how we perceive time and the way we live our lives in today’s modern world.

Time viewed through the lens of scarcity and abundance.

In the Western world we generally perceive our lives to be finite and with a fixed end. As an extension of this, time is viewed through the lens of scarcity and the language we use is key to our relationship with it.

We are always running out of time, there is never enough time, we are short on time. And we certainly mustn’t waste time.

Time has become a commodity we can trade. We spend time and we buy time. It is something to maximize, optimize and bend to our will.

This contrasts with philosophies from the East where time is more often viewed through the lens of abundance.

There is a Buddhist-inspired affirmation I like to remind myself of during my more frazzled days:

“Life is eternal, so there is no need to worry and no need to hurry.”

Which is a lot easier said than done.

— Leyla Kazim, “How to slow down the passing of time,” Substack.com, June 1, 2023

A Day Well Spent

How to slow down the passing of time

A big HELLO to you, friends. I have been overwhelmed by the number of subscribers to A Day Well Spent since I announced its launch across my socials last week…

Read more

3 years ago · 476 likes · 116 comments · Leyla Kazim

“For every preacher who has cried out, ‘Where can I find good illustrations for my sermons?’ Carlos E. Wilton has come to our aid. In this delightfully written book, Wilton lights the way along a carefully created path for finding, saving, and including powerful preaching illustrations.”

- Thomas G. Long, Professor Emeritus of Preaching, Candler School of Theology

Illuminating Sermons book

Subscribe now

Ask a person on the street, “What’s the world’s most famous painting?” The answer will likely come back: “The Mona Lisa.”

As many as 10 million people a year file by Leonardo da Vinci’s little portrait of Lisa Gherardini, daughter of a 15th century Florentine silk merchant. Lisa hailed from a noble family, but apart from that, we know nothing about her. Her famous half-smile only adds to the mystery. Mona Lisa’s the quintessential example of someone who’s famous for being famous.

Paris’ Louvre museum has instituted permanent crowd-control measures. Visitors line up for hours just to see her. Museum guards keep the crowds moving, so no visitor gets more than 30 seconds of viewing time.

It wasn’t always that way. The Louvre added the Mona Lisa to its collection in 1804, but until the 20th century no one would have called it the most famous painting in the place.

All that changed in 1911, when the Mona Lisa was stolen. The culprit was Vincenzo Peruggia, a museum employee. He’d recently constructed a protective glass case for it. He decided Leonardo’s diminutive masterpiece was both valuable enough and small enough to smuggle out of the museum, hidden under his coat.

But the thief had a problem. The painting swiftly became too hot to sell. Newspapers around the world ran stories about the theft. Speculation was rife about who could have done the deed. Both the poet Guillaume d’Apollinaire and the painter Pablo Picasso briefly became persons of interest, based on nothing more than rumor. Those rumors only stoked the publicity firestorm.

Peruggia hid the painting away in his Paris apartment. Two years later he took it to his native Italy and tried to sell it to the director of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. He was promptly arrested. The painting was returned.

During the two years the Mona Lisa was missing, the Louvre kept its spot on the gallery wall open. A peculiar thing happened. Crowds began to stream through the gallery, just to view the empty spot on the wall. All they could see was four iron pegs to which the frame had once been bolted.

Most of those people had never heard of Mona Lisa until she disappeared. It was all about the publicity. With every month that went by, the crowds continued to swell. Once Mona Lisa resumed her accustomed place, the stream of visitors never stopped.

What do you suppose was the appeal of lining up to view an empty spot on a wall?

It may have something to do with a Latin term the theologians use. They speak of the via negativa, the negative way. It’s like the folksinger Joni Mitchell sang: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”

The story of Easter is a via negativa tale. The disciples go to the tomb and find it empty. Where his body has gone is a mystery. But they keep coming back.

Eventually, of course, the Lord turns up again — not dead, but living. But until he does, the place where his body was laid exerts a strange fascination.

It’s very much the situation we find ourselves in, as believers. The resurrection is not something we’re ever likely to understand, until the Lord returns. In the meantime, we’ll just keep lining up to view that empty spot on the wall.

Want to discover how to curate your own sermon illustrations? You know — find ‘em, categorize ‘em, store ‘em and retrieve ‘em? I’m Carlos Wilton, author of Illuminating Sermons: Curating Illustrations that Inspire (Fortress Press, 2025). Whether you’re new to preaching or have been proclaiming the word for decades, Illuminating Sermons will get you motivated to set up your own database system and free yourself from the last-minute illustrations chase.

Illuminating Sermons book

Subscribe now

I am, as the gospel song goes — standing in the need of prayer. And I assume I am not alone in that.

I now think that whole “I’m a Christian because I am in need of help and Lord to whom shall we go you have the words of eternal life” might be the most truthful thing I know about my faith. But man, standing in the need of prayer sure feels like standing in opposition to nearly everything our culture has ever taught us.

In fact we are so ashamed of needing help that we invented an entire genre of literature called self-help. The very name is the tell, isn’t it? Needing help is fine, as long as it comes from you. But needing it from somewhere else? …from God, from community, from mercy you did not earn and cannot possibly pay back? That just smells strongly of victimhood.

Yet, just as a reminder, “God helps those who help themselves” is not found in the Bible. Yet “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” actually is….

And when the ritually unclean woman, who’d been bleeding for 12 years violates every social barrier, to reach and touch the hem of his cloak, Jesus doesn’t recoil; he turns, finds her in the crowd and calls her daughter.

Daughter.

I’ve always wondered what that one word, spoken by Jesus sounded like in the ears of an outcast and desperate woman. I bet it sounded like Music and like Medicine all at once. All I know is that, say what you will about self-help, she could reach for that hem all day long, but she could never have willed the word daughter into the mouth of God.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber, “The Corners,” Substack.com, June 9, 2026.

Want to discover how to curate your own sermon illustrations? You know — find ‘em, categorize ‘em, store ‘em and retrieve ‘em? I’m Carlos Wilton, author of Illuminating Sermons: Curating Illustrations that Inspire (Fortress Press, 2025). Whether you’re new to preaching or have been proclaiming the word for decades, Illuminating Sermons will get you motivated to set up your own database system and free yourself from the last-minute illustrations chase.

Illuminating Sermons book

The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber

I am in need of help.

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me…

Read more

3 months ago · 920 likes · 75 comments · Nadia Bolz-Weber

Monday, August 10 - Rhino on a Treadmill

God loves us as we are, not as the person we a…

Read more