At Caesarea Philippi, a place stacked with the shrines of dead gods and one very alive emperor, Peter calls Jesus the Son of the living God. Jesus blesses him for it, then tells him to keep his mouth shut. This sermon walks through why a half formed answer about Jesus can do more damage than a slow, true one, and what the Barna Group’s own numbers say about why people still like Jesus but not Christianity.

Pastor Harry Jarrett preaches from Matthew 16 at Pleasant Valley Church of the Brethren in Weyers Cave, Virginia, tracing Caesarea Philippi’s history as a pagan worship site through Rome’s occupation to Peter’s confession, and asking what it costs when we speak about Jesus before we have let him finish forming us.

SCRIPTURES REFERENCED

Matthew 16:13-20

Isaiah and Job (the gate of Hades as an idiom for death)

Genesis 6 (background reference via First Enoch and Mount Hermon tradition)

BOOKS WORTH EXPLORING

Jesus and the Powers by N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird

The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight

unChristian by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons

CHAPTERS

00:00 What actual place shaped how this pastor reads scripture

00:19 What did a two week study tour of Israel change

01:22 Where is Caesarea Philippi and what happened there

02:01 Why does Jesus ask his biggest question at this exact spot

03:34 What god was this cave originally built to worship

04:09 Who was Pan and why was he worshiped here

04:38 What did ancient worshipers throw into the cave

05:16 How did Rome and Herod claim this same ground

06:34 What was Jesus really walking his disciples into

07:13 Why do the crowd’s guesses about Jesus fall short

08:22 What does Peter say when Jesus asks him directly

09:50 Why does Peter’s answer matter more than it sounds

11:26 What is the wordplay hiding in Peter’s new name

12:31 What do the gates of Hades actually mean

14:41 What does Jesus mean by giving Peter the keys

16:01 Why does Jesus tell his own disciples to stay quiet

19:09 What does the Barna Group say about why people avoid Christianity

23:33 What three things does this sermon ask you to do this week

LINKS

Pleasant Valley Church of the Brethren: https://pleasantvalleyalive.org/

Daily Devotional: https://pleasantvalleyalive.org/devotional/

Substack Newsletter: https://pastorharryjarrett.substack.com/

If this sermon named something you have felt but never quite said out loud, subscribe and come sit with us again next week. We would love to have you.

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In the Church of the Brethren, that has not been the case. My name carried no history and no weight when I introduced myself, and I could count the number of people I knew, and that knew me, on one hand. Same name, different recognition and value. The only time my name carried any weight was when people realized who I was married to: “Oh, you’re Beth’s husband.” “I am, that, I am.” I would say.

But that is changing; not the married-to-Beth part. Today is our 40^th anniversary, and we plan on continuing that. The part about my name not carrying any history or weight. I got a call yesterday from the district’s discernment committee asking me to consider a role on a committee. They knew my name, but what she said to me was, “Our committee heard you were…, she listed a number of flattering character traits, and we would like you to serve. She knew my name, but more importantly, she described my character, to which I said, “I am, that, I am.”

Something similar is happening in our Biblical story this morning.

A man, a mountain, and a bush that will not stop burning

Moses is not looking for God when he sees the bush burning. He is doing the most ordinary thing in the world, tending his father-in-law’s sheep, and the flock wanders out past the edge of the wilderness to a mountain called Horeb. And there, in a bush that has no business still being a bush, he sees fire that burns and burns and never once consumes what should be burning.

He turns aside to look. That is such a human detail. Not “he fell on his face in terror,” at least not yet, just “I must turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned up.” Curiosity before fear. And it is that turning aside, that ordinary human decision to go look closer at something strange, that gets him addressed by name. “Moses, Moses.” And the ground under his feet, ground he has walked a hundred times with these very sheep, is suddenly holy.

Then God does something worth slowing down for. God introduces himself, and the introduction is a family tree. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Three generations, named out loud. This is not a title and it is not really a name either. It is a résumé. It is God saying, you can trust me because of who I have already been faithful to, because of the relationship I have already kept.

And for a while, that is enough for Moses. It is enough right up until God tells him to go stand in front of Pharaoh and lead a couple hundred thousand enslaved people out of the most powerful empire on earth. That is when Moses starts asking harder questions. Who am I, that I should go? And God’s answer to that one is not a resume either. It is a promise: I will be with you.

But then Moses asks something different, and it is worth noticing that he asks it. Suppose I go to the Israelites and say, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,” and they say to me, “What is his name?” What shall I say to them?

Why a family tree was not enough

Here is the question I want to sit with, because I do not think we ask it enough. Why isn’t “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” a good enough answer? It is true. It is impressive. It has three patriarchs in it. Why does Moses need more? Why will the people need more?

Because in the world Moses lived in, a name was not a label. It was a description of character.

Think about how we name things now. We pick a name for a baby because we like the sound of it, or it runs in the family, or it was trending that year. Scott does not mean anything. Brenda does not mean anything. You could swap them and nothing about the person changes. That is Shakespeare’s whole point when Juliet says a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. She is arguing that the label is arbitrary. The substance stays the same no matter what you call it.

That was not true in the ancient world, and it is not really true in the Bible. In Genesis, Jacob’s own name means something like “heel-grabber,” “the one who takes another’s place,” because he came out of the womb holding his twin brother’s heel, and it turned out to describe exactly the kind of man he would become. Later in the story, a man named Nabal refuses to help David and his men, and his wife says it flat out: “As his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name, and folly is with him for he is a scoundrel.” The name was not decoration. The name was declaration.

So when Moses asks for God’s name, he is not asking for a label to write on a name tag. He is asking, in effect: what are you actually like? What can I count on you to do, over and over, when it matters? A family history tells me who you have been faithful to. A name tells me who you are.

That is why a rose, by any other name, would NOT be a rose. Not for God. If God’s name doesn’t actually describe God’s character, then it is worthless, no matter how many patriarchs are attached to it. And I think that is exactly why the résumé, the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” was not going to be enough for Moses to carry back to a people who had spent four hundred years enslaved. They did not need a family tree. They needed to know what God was actually going to be like when it counted.

I Am That I Am

So God answers him. “I AM WHO I AM.” And then, “Say this to the Israelites, I AM has sent me to you.” And then a third time, using the name that gets translated in our Bibles in small capitals as “the LORD”: “the LORD, the God of your fathers... this is my name forever.”

Preachers have spent centuries turning that phrase into a philosophy lecture. I am self-existent. I am the ground of all being. I depend on nothing and no one. And there is something true in that. But if you only hear the philosophy, you miss what Moses’s actual audience needed to hear.

The Hebrew verb underneath “I AM” is hayah, “to be,” and scholars who have spent their careers with this word point out that in Hebrew, “to be” rarely means simple existence the way it does in English. It means active presence. Not “I exist,” in the abstract, but “I am here, I am showing up, I am at work.” One Old Testament scholar puts it this way: the closest paraphrase might not be “I Am Who I Am” so much as “I Am Present.” Some scholars have even proposed, based on the shape of that same divine name elsewhere in the Old Testament, that it carries a causative sense underneath it too. Not just “he is,” but “he causes to be.” The God who brings things into being simply by showing up.

I cannot tell you which reading is exactly right, and the scholars still argue about it too. But hold both of them together for a second. “He is.” “He causes to be.” Either way you land, you are nowhere near a distant God frozen in the past. You are looking at a God who is relentlessly, actively present, and whose presence changes what is possible.

That is the name God gives Moses to carry back to Egypt. Not a résumé. A description of what was about to happen. This God does not just exist somewhere out past the stars. Or just in the past. This God is about to show up, in a burning bush, in ten plagues, in a parted sea, in a pillar of fire that leads a people through the desert by night. The name and the character are the same thing. That is the whole point.

What our names cannot do, and what our lives still can

Now, most of us do not get names like that. My name does not describe my character, and neither does yours. If you had a baby this year, you probably picked their name because you loved how it sounded next to your last name, not because you were making a theological claim about who they would become. That is not a failure. That is just how naming works for us now. A rose by any other name really would smell just as sweet, for us, most of the time.

But I think the name of God we offer to others is very important to think about. Because it is definitely more than just a name. It holds a history, it describes a character, and it proclaims a presence that is either distant or near. It is not enough any longer in our world to simply say God or even Jesus. We must say more about the character and presence for people to know who we are really talking about.

For years, I have spoken to people who tell me they do not believe in God. I respond, “Ok, what God do you not believe in?” To which they begin a long articulation of the character of the God they do not believe in. After letting them finish, I can almost always say, “Then we agree. I don’t believe in that God either.” And then the conversation can really begin.

So here are three things to consider this week.

1. Become curious. For the first time or once again. Because that is where deep understanding begins. If you believe that you know everything about God already, you are sadly mistaken. There is so much more. And if we are not curious and never turn aside to discover more, we will follow, worship, and present the world with a very small and distorted image of the divine.

2. Accept who God says God is. I am finding that much of what the church and orthodoxy have long told me about God and Jesus is distorted at best, and just outright incorrect at worst. I am finding that by deeply studying the Biblical text with a more open mind, looking at what it actually says, and reflecting on that in the light of the culture of the time and the progressive revelation of God’s image, I am seeing things in scripture that I have never heard anyone say out loud before. And I am allowing that to have more weight than what history tells me. I suggest you do the same.

3. Ask others how they have experienced a present God and listen before you judge. You might just learn something.

I want you to remember what we heard a few weeks ago from Genesis, about a boy named Ishmael, cast out into the wilderness with his mother, dying of thirst under a bush. His name meant “God hears.” And God heard him, right where he was, not where he should have been. The name was a promise before it ever became true. And then it became true.

That is what I want you to carry out of this sanctuary. Our names are mostly just sounds we like. But the God who met Moses at a bush that would not stop burning does not have that problem. God’s name and God’s character have always been the same thing, and they still are. Not the God who was. The God who is. Not the God who showed up once, a long time ago, to a man named Moses on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. The God who is present, right here, in whatever wilderness you are standing in this morning, still calling your name, and still meaning every word of it.

Moses wants to know God’s name. Not a title, not a family tree, an actual name. What he gets back is not what he expects, and it changes what it even means to talk about God at all.

Pastor Harry Jarrett walks through Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3 and asks a question we don’t sit with often enough: why isn’t “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” a good enough answer? In the ancient world, a name wasn’t a label, it was a description of character. Jacob’s name meant “heel grabber,” and it described exactly the man he became. Nabal’s name meant “folly,” and folly is exactly what he was. So when Moses asks God’s name, he’s really asking, “what are you actually like? What can I count on you to do?”

Harry also gets personal about a season when his own name carried no weight at all, and what it took for that to change. He closes with three practical things to carry into this week, and a story about a boy whose name meant “God hears,” long before anyone heard him.

If you’ve been telling people you don’t believe in God, this one might ask you a harder question first: which God don’t you believe in?

Church website: https://pleasantvalleyalive.org/
Daily devotional: https://pleasantvalleyalive.org/devotional/
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Harry Jarrett

Harry Jarrett—pastor, former missionary/church planter, wedding-venue founder, ex-Marriott GM—writes on weaving faith, hospitality, and business into everyday life. Harry produces two weekly podcasts, Faith at Work and Faith in Process.

Pleasant Valley Church of the Brethren, Weyers Cave, Virginia

I stood in it once, sometime in the mid to late 1990s, while Beth and I were serving as missionaries down in Sicily. Roy and Florence Krieder, along with a group of ministry friends from Cornerstone Mennonite, put together a two-week study tour of Israel, and we flew over to join them. Two weeks of walking the actual dirt Jesus walked. Few things in my life have shaped how I read Scripture the way that trip did. You start to understand that the Bible happened on real hillsides, in real weather, in front of real buildings that people built for real reasons.

One afternoon we came to the far north of the country, up near the base of Mount Hermon, to a place called Caesarea Philippi. We stood in what would have been a garden area, above a natural cave hollowed out of a limestone cliff face, with a spring pouring out of the base of the mountain. It is a beautiful spot. Green, cool, with the sound of running water in a country that is mostly dry. And it is also, once you know what you are looking at, one of the most spiritually loaded pieces of ground in the entire Bible. This is exactly where our text lands us this morning. And I do not think you can read Matthew 16 well without first understanding where Jesus is standing when he asks his question.

Why Here, of All Places (verse 13)

“Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’”

Matthew mentions the location in a way that to us feels insignificant, the way you might mention which room a conversation happened in. But nothing about this location is insignificant. Caesarea Philippi sat about twenty-five miles north of the Sea of Galilee, at the foot of Mount Hermon, built around a cave and spring that fed one of the main sources of the Jordan River. In the Old Testament era, this ground was called Baal-Gad and Baal-Hermon, named for the Canaanite storm-and-fertility god Baal. Long before Jesus ever set foot there, this was a place where people had gone to worship power.

By the time the Greeks arrived, that cave had been rededicated to Pan, the goat-footed god of wild places and sudden fear, worship of him at this site attested by inscriptions from at least the first century before Christ. The rock face around the cave was carved with niches holding statues of Pan, along with Echo, Hermes, and other minor deities, and for generations people threw sacrifices into the cave, called the Gate of Hades, as offerings to whatever lived beneath the earth there.

Then Rome arrived. Augustus Caesar handed this territory to Herod the Great, and Herod, ever the political survivor, built a gleaming marble temple to Caesar Augustus near that same cave, roughly twenty years before Jesus was born. When Herod died, his son Philip the Tetrarch expanded the town into his own administrative capital and renamed it in 3 BC. Caesarea, to honor the emperor. Philippi, to put his own name on it and distinguish it from the other Caesarea down on the coast. And Jewish tradition of that same era, reflected in writings like 1 Enoch, connected Mount Hermon itself with the fallen “watchers” of Genesis 6, the corrupting spiritual powers thought to have first descended to earth on that very mountain. Here were Old gods, new gods, an emperor’s temple, and a mountain with a dark reputation stretching back to Genesis.

So when Jesus walks his disciples into that district, he is walking them into the most crowded intersection of rival claims to ultimate power in the entire region. Every stone around them is arguing for somebody’s god, or somebody’s empire, or both at once. And it is precisely there, standing in the middle of centuries of other answers, that Jesus asks his question.

The Question Beneath All the Other Gods (verses 13-15)

“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others, Elijah, and others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

Notice, every one of those answers is a flattering guess. John the Baptist, back from the dead. Elijah, the great prophet promised to return before the day of the Lord. Jeremiah, the weeping prophet who confronted kings. Nobody in the crowd was mocking Jesus. They were reaching for the highest categories they had. And still, every single guess falls short, because every one of them makes Jesus a very good example of something that already existed. A prophet. A forerunner. A moral teacher in a long, honorable line.

Then Jesus turns the question from the crowd to the twelve standing right beside him. “But who do you say that I am?” Not what does mainstream religion say. Not what does public opinion say this week. You. Here. Now, in front of Pan’s cave and Caesar’s palace temple, both of them still claiming to be the most important thing on this hillside. Who do you say that I am?

The Living God in Front of the Dead Ones (verses 16-17)

Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Remember, they are standing in front of niches carved for gods who were, in every sense that matters, dead. Statues do not breathe. Emperors, however powerful, die, and Augustus himself had been dead for decades by this point. The cave behind them was worshiped precisely because people believed the dead lived down in the darkness under the earth. And into all of that, Peter says: the living God. Not a story about a god. Not a monument to a god. The Son of the living God, standing in front of him in the shape of a Galilean carpenter’s son.

Jesus’s response matters just as much as Peter’s confession. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” One of the things every empire needs from its subjects is agreement about who holds ultimate power. In this place, you could see the statues. You could read the inscription on Herod’s temple. You could not, however, arrive at Peter’s confession by looking harder at any of it. That kind of knowing is not information gathered. It is given. Revealed. Which means the very ground the disciples are standing on, built up stone by stone to make ultimate power visible and impressive, cannot actually produce the truth Peter just spoke. Only God can give that.

On This Rock, Before Those Gates (verse 18)

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”

There is a play on words sitting right in the Greek that our English mostly loses. Peter’s name, Petros, and the word for rock, petra, sit right next to each other. You are Rock, and on this rock. But stand where they were standing and the wordplay gets bigger than a pun. Jesus is looking at an actual cliff face, an actual cave mouth that generations of people had treated as a doorway to the underworld. And he chooses that exact spot to say, out loud, that the gates of Hades will not prevail against what he is about to build.

That phrase, gates of Hades, was not new to the disciples. It shows up already in the Old Testament, in Isaiah and in Job, as a way of talking about death itself, the gate you pass through and do not walk back out of. So there are two things true at once here, not one instead of the other. Jesus is standing at a literal cave that his listeners already associated with the underworld and called the Gate of Hades. And he is also reaching back into a familiar Hebrew idiom for death itself. Both readings point the same direction.

Gates, by their nature, do not attack. Nobody has ever seen a gate go on the march. Gates defend. Gates hold something back. So when Jesus says the gates of Hades will not prevail against his mission, I do not think the picture is the church as an army storming hell’s front door, as much as we love that image in our hymns. I think the picture is closer to this: death itself, for all its ancient, cave-mouth, underworld menace, will not be able to hold the mission of Jesus back. It will not be able to keep it in. Whatever door death has always been able to close, it will not be able to close on this. That is a resurrection promise, spoken in front of the one landmark in the whole region built to memorialize that death is permanent.

Keys, Not Conquest (verse 19)

“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Again, notice where they are standing. This is Philip the Tetrarch’s capital, a town built to project Rome’s authority into the far edge of Jewish territory. Keys, binding, loosing, this is the vocabulary of who gets to open doors and who gets to shut them, spoken directly across the valley from the people who genuinely believed they held that authority over this land. Jesus is not handing Peter a sword or a legion. He is handing him keys. Stewardship, not conquest. A completely different kind of authority than every other kind on display that day, and he chooses to announce it in the one place built to make Rome’s version of authority look unanswerable.

Do Not Tell (verse 20)

“Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.”

And here is where the sermon gets its title. After the highest confession any human being had yet spoken about him, standing in front of every god and every emperor’s temple that could have used a moment like this one, Jesus tells his closest friends to keep quiet.

Why?

Here is where I land, and it is personal to me. Peter and the others did not yet have the whole picture of Jesus. They had the right word, Messiah, but not yet the full mission underneath it. Look at what happens in the very next verse, just past our reading this morning. Jesus starts to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer, be killed, and be raised. And Peter, the same man who just spoke the truest sentence in the chapter, pulls him aside and rebukes him for saying it. He still expected a conquering king, not a crucified savior. If the disciples had gone out that same week and told everyone in Caesarea Philippi that the Messiah had come, they would have been technically right and functionally wrong. They would have handed people a partial Jesus, and in the same breath, a distorted image of God, because whatever picture of Jesus we carry is also the picture of God we quietly hand to everyone watching us.

I have met a lot of Christians like that over the years. Sincere, confident, and still carrying a bent or partial picture of who Jesus actually presented himself to be. That is part of why I stepped away from vocational ministry for a season. Not because I stopped believing. Because I kept running into people who did believe, loudly, while embodying something that did not look much like the Jesus of the Gospels. I am convinced that the biggest obstacle facing the church today is not that people do not know a Christian. It is that they do. And what they see they do not want any part of. And it has nothing to do with their view of Jesus.

The Barna Group put actual numbers on that feeling recently. In a survey of adults and teens across the country, seventy-one percent still view Jesus himself positively. But ask the same people about Christianity as a faith, the thing carried by people like you and me, and only fifteen percent say they respect it. Nearly half call it judgmental. Nearly half call it hypocritical. And when they are asked why they hesitate to embrace what we believe, the single most common answer is not doubt about the resurrection, or the miracles, or anything in the text at all. It is the hypocrisy of religious people. Jesus is still winning. We are the leak in the boat. Every one of us who says we follow Jesus is telling somebody, every week, who he is, whether we mean to or not.

Let me say the hard part as directly as I can. There are people who should not be talking about Jesus yet. Not because they are bad people, and not because God has given up on them. Because they do not yet get it, not fully, and every word they speak about him while still in that condition chips a little more off of his name in front of somebody who is watching closely enough to remember it. Jesus himself apparently believed that. He is standing there with his own handpicked twelve, men he loved and had trained for three years, and he still tells them, not yet. Not you. Not this week. If Jesus was willing to silence his own inner circle rather than let an unfinished understanding of him loose on the world, that ought to sober every single one of us who opens our mouth about him on a Sunday, or a Tuesday, or in a comment section, before we have let him finish forming us.

So the reason Jesus tells them to wait is simply this. A half-formed Messiah, spoken too soon, does more damage than good news spoken a little later, once it has had time to become whole. Better a little longer in silence than a lifetime of people meeting a smaller Jesus than the real one.

That is my answer, and I am sticking with it. It is not the only one theologians have offered over the centuries though, and some of the others are worth your time too. I am going to keep working through a few of them this week over on the Faith at Work Substack, so if this question has gotten its hook into you the way it has gotten into me, come find me there and keep thinking about it with me.

Three Things to Carry Into This Week

So what do we do with all of this, sitting here in the valley instead of standing in that garden?

Three things, then, before I sit down.

First, take the question “Who do you say that I am?” home before you take it anywhere else. Before you post it, argue it, or hand it to your kids at supper, sit with it yourself this week. Who do you say that he is? Not who your parents said. Not who this congregation has always said. Sit with it long enough that it settles into something true and specific to you, right now, in this season of your life.

Second, think of one person, just one, who may have met a smaller or more bent Jesus than the real one because of something you said or did before you were ready to say or do it. You do not need to track them down this week and deliver a speech. Just let their name surface. Let it sit uncomfortably for a minute. And ask God to show you one small, humble step of repair, even if that step is nothing more than praying for them by name before you sleep tonight.

Third, and this is a very Brethren way to close, let your answer show up in your hands before it shows up in your mouth this week. During my years running hotels, we trained our staff toward something we called anticipate and fulfill. Notice what a guest needs before they have worked up the nerve to ask for it, and be standing there with it already in hand. Nobody put that on a sign in the lobby. It just showed up, meal after meal, room after room, in a hundred small choices nobody announced. That is the kind of witness I want us to practice this week. Notice somebody before they ask. Show up with the meal before it is requested. Sit in the waiting room before you get the call. Let people meet a fuller Jesus in what you do for them quietly, and let your words, whenever they finally come, only confirm what your life has already told them. Peter eventually got to preach, and preach well. But first he had to learn to serve, to wash feet, to break bread, and to be broken himself, before his words could carry the whole truth about Jesus instead of just a piece of it.

Coming Home

I think about that garden above the cave more often than I expected to when we stood there thirty years ago. I remember the sound of the water, and I remember how strange it felt to stand somewhere so beautiful that had also been the site of so much fear, so many sacrifices thrown into darkness by people trying to appease something they could not see and could not control.

We all still walk into our own Caesarea Philippi most weeks of our lives. Not a cave in northern Israel, but a noisy intersection of rival claims on our attention and our loyalty, just the same. Money says it is the living god. Fear says it is. Certain politicians, certain platforms, certain versions of success say it, loudly, with their own temples built right out in the open where we cannot miss them. And into all of that noise, Jesus still asks the same question he asked on that hillside. Not who does the crowd say I am. Who do you say that I am.

Whatever answer rises up in you this morning, and I hope it is something close to Peter’s, notice what Jesus does not ask you to do with it. He does not ask you to broadcast it, to win an argument with it, to build your own small monument to how right you’ve got it. He asks you to build a life on it. Quietly, faithfully, one ordinary day at a time, the way water keeps finding its way out from under a mountain long after anyone remembers who built which temple where.

The gates of death could not hold him. They cannot hold what he is building either. Not the loud kind of unstoppable. The patient kind. The kind that outlasts empires.

My first reaction to that story was outrage and deep sadness on their behalf. If I am honest with you, my second reaction was something less noble: relief that the decision was not mine to make. It is easier to be appalled by someone else’s closed door than to actually try and do something about changing the situation.

Isaiah 56 was written for a community facing that exact kind of situation. The prophet we call Third Isaiah is speaking to exiles newly back in Israel from Babylon, standing in a Jerusalem still full of rubble, and they are arguing over who gets to belong to the nation they are rebuilding. Some of the returning exiles wanted tight borders around it: with people who had the right bloodline, the right last name, and the right pedigree. You can read that argument in the book of Ezra, where foreign wives and their children are sent away in the name of purity. Isaiah 56 looks at the same crisis and answers it in exactly the opposite direction.

Notice who Isaiah, on behalf of God, names first in this passage. The foreigner. And the eunuch, someone the law in Deuteronomy would have barred from the assembly permanently, without exception. Here God says the reverse: hold fast my covenant, and I will give you a name and a place better than sons and daughters. You will not be cut off. That phrase is intentional. Cut off is the precise wound a eunuch carried bodily his whole life. God does not offer vague comfort here. God speaks healing straight into the exact place the hurt happened.

Then God speaks to the foreigners. “To everyone who joins themselves to the Lord, who ministers to him, who loves his name.” Isaiah does not mention their family tree, their country of origin, or how many generations their people have lived in the land. He gives one requirement, ethical rather than ethnic: love the Lord, keep the Sabbath, and hold fast the covenant. That is the only entrance exam. There is no second question. And God’s own words are clear: “these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for ALL peoples.”

Howard Thurman, writing out of his own experience on the underside of American exclusion, said Jesus ministered mostly to people with their backs against the wall, people the law and polite religion had already decided did not fully count. Isaiah’s foreigner and eunuch are that same crowd, five centuries earlier than the events Matthew 15 describes. Matthew tells the story of a Canaanite woman, exactly the kind of outsider Israelite law was built to keep at a distance, refusing to take no for an answer from Jesus. Jesus, at first, ignores her. Then he seems to refuse her. But she persists. And finally, He tells her that her faith is great and he makes her daughter whole again. Isaiah’s promise and Jesus’ welcome are not two stories separated by five hundred years. They are one continuing story, still being told. ALL are welcome and included. And this is going to make some of you a little uncomfortable. But as the story reads, it seems that even Jesus needed to learn this.

I wish I could tell you this argument of the foreigner and the eunuch was resolved in the first century by Jesus. It was not. This past year, our federal government set the refugee admissions ceiling at 7,500 people, the lowest number in the history of the program, and reserved most of those slots for one specific ethnic group while turning away families fleeing war and persecution in Afghanistan, Sudan, Venezuela, and Haiti. Just weeks ago, protections that let hundreds of thousands of Haitians live and work here legally were officially stripped away. And some of them, 300 in fact, are our brothers and sisters in the Church of the Brethren. For more than four decades that door stayed open under presidents of both parties, not because it was easy, but because welcoming those fleeing violence was treated as settled business for a country that stamps “in God we trust” on its currency. This year it was unsettled. The line got shorter, and it got far more particular about bloodline, which is the exact argument the book of Isaiah was written to end.

I am not telling you that to make you feel hopeless about Washington or to critique the current administration. I am telling you because Isaiah 56 was never a policy memo for a nation-state to begin with. It was written for a worshiping community deciding who gets a seat at God’s table. So are we, this morning, in this room.

Here is what I believe this text is asking of Pleasant Valley: that we fling the doors open. Every door. The sanctuary door, the fellowship hall door, the door of who gets called by name, who gets handed a task and trusted with it, who gets treated like they have always belonged here, because in the kingdom of God they always have.

I have stood right here over the last two years and told you the gospel is a widening circle, not a gated community, not a members-only club. I have told you that it is not by gatekeeping, nor by culture tests, that grace does its work, and grace holds. I have told you that when we as a church live this way, we can trust that the net will not break! I still believe those things, maybe more today than the day I first said them out loud to you. I want to add one thing alongside them: our only entrance requirement is Isaiah’s, “love the name of the Lord,” and even that is more invitation than exam, because God moves toward you long before you decide whether you love God back.

So, it is not about what you believed growing up. Or where you grew up. Not who you love, or fear, or voted for. Not how many times you have walked this aisle, or how long you stayed away. Just this: do you want to love the name of the Lord? If the answer is yes, then there is a seat for you at the table, and it already has your name on it.

Some of you are new here, still checking where the doors are in case you need a speedy exit, wondering if this is a place that actually means what the pastor says. I have found that it does. Some of you have been here fifty years or more and have watched the doors of this church open and close more times than you can count, and your memory of who used to be unwelcome is part of what makes your welcome now so hard-won and so trustworthy. Thank you for staying. And if you are watching or listening to this online and are still standing at the edge of the circle wondering whether the invitation was really meant for you, hear Isaiah say it more clearly than I can: I will bring them to my holy mountain, and make them joyful.

Donald Durnbaugh, who spent a career writing this denomination’s history, argued that the instinct to widen the circle was never incidental to who the Brethren are. It sits near the center of the story, present since long before any of us arrived here. We did not invent this. We inherited it, and it is still ours to practice or to let go slack.

So let the doors stand open this week. Not because we have solved welcoming. But because God has, and we are only being asked to catch up. Even Jesus, it seems, needed that reminder.

A few years back, I sat in a room in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and listened to Shane Hipps talk about wheels. Hipps, pastor of Trinity Mennonite Church and author of Flickering Pixels, made an observation in passing that I have never been able to put down. Every new piece of technology, he said, does two things. It extends some part of ourselves, and it lessens the stress on the thing it extends. The wheel is an extension of the foot: it amplifies what the foot can do and takes the wear off it in doing so.

I wrote about that idea on my blog back in January 2011, under the title “E.X.T.E.N.D. your influence, six tips.” I did not know then that I would spend the next fifteen years testing it against every new tool that came along: blogging, Twitter, Facebook, live streaming, private social networks, and now AI. Turns out Hipps was right, and the question he me that day, what does this extend and what does it cost the thing it extends, is still the only question worth asking about any new technology, including the one everybody is arguing about this year.

Here is the pattern I have watched repeat itself for a decade and a half. A new technology shows up, and the church splits into two camps almost immediately. Some people pick it up right away and start asking what it is good for. Others watch from the doorway, arms folded, waiting to see whether it is a fad or a threat. Both instincts come from somewhere real: caution has saved the church from real harm more than once. But I have always found myself in the first camp, and I do not think that is an accident. I think it is a conviction: God is not threatened by new wheels, and neither should we be.

What I actually did with the last wave

I was not just curious about this in theory. Back in December 2010 I wrote a post called “Grandma and grandpa!” pointing to a Pew study that found social media use among people seventy four and older had quadrupled in two years. I asked my readers then, “What do you think this means for church leaders and how they communicate with their congregation?” I was already asking the question that mattered: not whether the tool was respectable, but what it made possible for reaching people who were not going to walk through the front doors of the building.

By the summer of 2011, I was helping run what we called the Digital Delegate Network at the Mennonite Church USA convention in Pittsburgh. For the first time, people who could not travel to the convention were able to follow the delegate sessions through live video and audio streaming, join real time chat rooms hosted by volunteer moderators, and discern alongside the delegates in the room, all through Twitter, Facebook, and Ustream on their phones. That same year I taught workshops with titles like “The Social of Social Media” and “Continuing the Ministry of Jesus through Social Media,” and sat on a panel at the MEDA convention on faith and business in the age of social platforms. I was not doing any of this to look current. I was doing it because Luke 4 says Jesus was sent to proclaim good news and Matthew 28 says go and make disciples, and neither verse specifies a medium.

A couple of years later I built a private social network of my own, using BuddyPress, so a team could discuss, discern, and decide together online between meetings. And I wrote a post called “Revitalizing your church through crowdsourcing and open innovation,” making the case that Anabaptists invented crowdsourcing centuries before Silicon Valley gave it a name. Priesthood of all believers, congregational discernment, this seems good to us and to the Holy Spirit: that is a five hundred year old technology for gathering wisdom from everyone in the room. I was not adopting new tools instead of old convictions. I was using new tools to practice old convictions at a scale I could never have managed with a phone tree.

Now it is AI

Fifteen years later, I am doing the same thing with AI that I did with blogs and Twitter and live streaming: picking it up, asking what it extends, and going to work.

Here is a concrete example, happening right now, this month. I am using AI to go back through six years of posts I wrote on my blog between 2009 and 2015: four hundred ninety of them, about two hundred thirty two thousand words, written before anyone had a name for a content pipeline or a workflow for turning a Sunday sermon into a podcast episode and a short for YouTube. I never expected anyone to read most of those posts again. Because my blog got hacked and the data corrupted. But an AI assistant can move through that whole corrupted archive in an afternoon: removing the viruses, sorting it by theme, catching arguments I made once and forgot I had made, flagging a paragraph from 2010 that says almost exactly what I want to say to my congregation now, needing only new words wrapped around it. This piece you are reading came out of exactly that process.

That is not a machine doing pastoral work for me. The sermon prep, the reading, the prayer, the theology: still mine, still slow, still the same as it has always been. What AI extends is my reach into work I already did once and buried in an archive nobody could search, and my ability to get it back out into the hands of people who need it now, whether that is a subscriber here on Radical Obedience, someone listening to Faith at Work on a commute, or a teenager scrolling a Sermon to Screen short at eleven at night instead of scrolling something worse.

I am using it the same way for first drafts of things that used to eat whole afternoons: pulling a devotional guide together from a sermon, drafting a follow up note to someone I met with that week so pastoral care does not stop at the door of my office, digging back through old sermon notes for the illustration I know I used once but cannot remember where. None of that replaces sitting with someone in a hospital room or standing at a graveside. It just means less of my week goes to retrieval, and more of it can go to presence.

The wheel, again

Hipps’ insight goes both ways, and I want to end where I started. Every new technology extends something and lessens the stress on the thing it extends. The wheel extended the foot, and the foot did less carrying. AI is extending my reach, my research, my first drafts, and it is lessening the load on my time and attention. But the wheel did not replace the foot. The foot still had to walk somewhere. AI can help me find what I already know and say it faster, but it cannot sit in the room with a grieving family, and I am not going to let it try.

So here is where I stand, and it is the same place I landed with blogs and Twitter and live streaming fifteen years ago: I am glad to be an early adopter. I think the church is usually a little too slow to pick up new wheels and a little too quick to worry they will replace the foot. Use the tool. Ask what it extends. Watch closely for what it costs. And then keep walking, because that part we will always need to do ourselves.

Where do you land? Early adopter, or watching from the doorway? I would love to hear it in the comments.

Every hotel keeps one. Not the reservation list, the other one. VIP arrivals. Loyalty tiers. Who gets the upgrade, the late checkout, the note from the GM. Loyalty software sorted it for you every morning: who we needed to notice, and who we could let pass through without much thought at all. Who got the heavenly penthouse and who was relegated to the boiler rooms where we knew the air conditioning was on the fritz.

I got good at that sorting. Too good, maybe. It is a strange skill to carry into a sanctuary.

Because we all know church people keep a version of that list too. Who is in. Who is out. Who has said the right words, believed the right things, walked the right aisle at the right moment. And Romans 10 sounds, on first read, like Paul is handing us a new front desk to run and affirming the sorting.

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Verse nine. If you grew up in a certain kind of church, you memorized that verse as a formula. Say the words, mean the words, and you are in. It is one of the “Romans Road” verses, stitched together into a spiritual transaction you complete once and carry like a ticket into heaven.

Move verse nine back out of isolation, though, and set it inside the whole passage, and something else is going on. Something bigger than a transaction. Something that was never really about who gets past the front desk at all.

Start one verse earlier than most people do. Verse four. “Christ is the end of the law, so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.” The Greek word behind “end” is telos. It does not mean stop, like a wall you hit and can go no further. It means the fullness a thing was always reaching toward, the last mile of a road that was headed somewhere the whole time. Christ is not the cancellation of the law. Christ is what the law was for.

Everything Paul writes after that grows out of it. He goes back to Deuteronomy 30, where Moses tells Israel the commandment is not up in heaven, not across the sea, but near you, in your mouth and in your heart. Paul lays that same language over Christ. The word is near. It was always near. You do not have to climb for it or cross an ocean for it. It is already here, already within reach, already planted. (I am going to go deeper with this section in a later post this week because there is a lot here. I just did not have time in my oral sermon to flesh it out when I preached this last Sunday.)

That is important to remember, because it changes what “salvation” even means.

The Hebrew word behind salvation in the Old Testament is yasha. It carries the idea of being brought out of a cramped, narrow place into a wide-open space with room to breathe and room to move. Not a ticket. A widening. When the New Testament writers reached for a Greek word to express that meaning, they chose sozo, the same word Jesus uses when he tells a bleeding woman, a blind man, a boy with a fever, “your faith has made you well.” Sozo does not distinguish between forgiven and healed, spiritual and physical, personal and communal. It means made whole. Salvation, in its original language, was never a narrow door. It was a wideness.

Richard Rohr says something in The Universal Christ that I keep coming back to over and over. He writes that “privatized salvation never accumulates into (results in, my words) corporate change, because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with.” And further, that the good news of the gospel is that God is saving and redeeming the whole first, the whole creation, the whole human family, and we are all already caught up in what he calls the cosmic sweep of divine love. Not because we said the right words at the right desk. Because it was never a desk with a list to begin with.

That is what Paul means in verses eleven through thirteen, when he stacks up “everyone” and “no one” over and over. No one who believes will be put to shame. The same Lord is Lord of all, generous to all who call on him. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Three times. Jew and Greek, insider and outsider, the ones who grew up knowing the words and the ones who never heard them. Paul is not narrowing the guest list. He is telling us there was never a guest list to narrow.

I listen to a podcast most weeks, Sermon Brainwave from Working Preacher, where three biblical scholars discuss their way through the coming Sunday’s texts. This week they said something I think we all need to hear: verse nine is one of the most quoted, and most misused, verses in the whole New Testament, precisely because people lift it out and make it about themselves. Their belief. Their confession. Their ticket in. But Paul was never writing a personal salvation plan. He was tearing up the idea that salvation needed a plan like that at all.

So then what is the church for, if we are not the ones checking the list?

Paul answers that too, and it is the part I love most. “How are they to call on one they have not believed in? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?” Then he uses a quote from Isaiah to answer: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.”

Feet, not clipboards. Not a desk with a list behind it, but people walking, running even, out past the doors to say the doors were never locked.

I spent a long stretch of my life standing behind that front desk, deciding who got the good room. I am not there anymore. None of us are, not really, not in this. We have the good news and the feet, sent out to tell a world that already belongs to God that it already belongs with God.

Friends, this is not a passage about getting in. It is a passage about being sent out. Not who qualifies, and who does not. Not who is worthy, and who is not. Just who has heard, and who is still waiting to hear.

The word is near you. It was always near you. Go tell someone it is near them too.

Amen.

We had designed a little ministry program. It was held over nine Saturday mornings, for people trying to figure out whether God was calling them towards something. We had a curriculum. We had handouts. We had a name for the thing. The Timothy Project. And the very first decision we made about those mornings was that we would not open with a lecture. We would open with eggs.

I want to highlight it because it took me another twenty years to see it. I loved cooking that breakfast. I have always loved cooking the breakfast. What I have never once been good at is sitting down at someone else’s table with nothing in my hands.

I would rather be the host than the guest. I would rather be the one who provides than the one who needs. I doubt I am the only one.

Hold on to that. We will come back.

Two Banquets

Matthew 14 has two banquets in it, and we almost never read them together because the lectionary does not present them that way.

The first one is Herod’s. It is a birthday party in a palace, with guests and entertainment and an oath sworn out loud in front of witnesses. And it ends with a man’s head carried into the room on a serving platter. A dinner plate. Matthew wants you to see the plate.

Then verse thirteen. “Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.”

He is grieving. John was his forerunner, the man who had baptized him. He was his cousin. So, Jesus does what any of us would do. He withdraws. He gets into a boat and goes where there are no people.

And the crowds hear about it and walk around the lake on foot, and they are standing on the shore waiting when he lands.

Matthew says he had compassion for them when He sees them. Not irritation. Compassion. The Greek word is splanchnizomai, and it means it hit him in the gut. Deep in the gut, just like the grief.

Then it gets late, and the disciples come to him with a proposal that is, at face value, completely reasonable. “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late. Send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”

Send them away so they can buy their own.

I want to be careful here, because that is not a cruel suggestion. It is a sensible one. It is the one I would have suggested. It is the logic most of us actually run our lives on: everyone is responsible for their own dinner, and the kind thing is to release people early enough that they can go and get it.

Jesus then answers with eight words that dismantle their worldview. “They need not go away. You give them something to eat.”

Whose Table Is This?

Here is the part I did not fully understand until this week.

In the world Matthew was writing into, feeding a crowd was never a neutral act. It was the signature move of an empire.

Before he died, Caesar Augustus wrote out his own resume and had it carved on two bronze pillars in Rome, with copies set up out in the provinces so people could read it. We still have it. It is called the Res Gestae, “the things accomplished.” And in the middle of a list of wars won and temples built and territories added, he stops to tell you about the food. Twelve distributions of grain, bought with his own money. Cash handouts that reached, he says, never fewer than two hundred and fifty thousand people. When there was a shortage, he took over the grain supply himself, and, in his own words, at my own expense and by my own care, freed the entire city from fear within a few days.

The grain dole was a real thing, and it belonged to the empire. And the story Rome told about itself traveled everywhere. A few decades before Matthew wrote this down, the emperor Nero began putting the grain supply on Roman coins as a goddess, a woman holding out grain, so that every time you paid for something you were handling a small metal argument about who keeps everyone alive.

Warren Carter has spent a career reading this Gospel against its Roman background, and he argues that Matthew is written as a sustained protest: God’s purposes, it insists, are being carried out not by the empire and the emperor, but by Jesus and the community gathered around him.

So when Matthew sets a second banquet down next to Herod’s, he is not offering us a warm story about a picnic. He is asking us to compare.

Herod’s table has an elite guest list, a display of power, and a death.

Caesar’s table has a ledger, a benefactor, and a quiet bill of dependence.

This table has small groups of gathered people, dispersed, Jesus as Lord, and twelve full baskets for the future of the church.

What Kind of Miracle

Some of us were taught this as a miracle of multiplication, bread appearing out of nothing in the hands of Jesus. Some of us have heard it preached as a miracle of sharing, that the real wonder is that when the boy in John’s version opened his lunch, everyone else quietly opened theirs.

That second reading has a history worth knowing. It traces back to a German scholar named Heinrich Paulus, writing in the 1820s, who did not believe miracles were possible and went looking for a natural explanation for every one of them. So I do not want to reach for either idea simply because it is the comfortable option.

Instead, look at what Matthew actually tells us. He does not describe the mechanism of the miracle. Not one word about how. He tells us what was in their hands: five loaves and two fish. He tells us what Jesus did with it: he took, he blessed, he broke, he gave. He tells us who carried it: the disciples gave it to the crowds. And he tells us how it ended: all ate and were filled, and they gathered up twelve baskets of broken pieces left over.

Take. Bless. Break. Give. Those are the same four verbs Matthew will reach for again in an upstairs room on the last night of Jesus’ life.

So I am not going to focus on whether the bread multiplied in his hands, or the disciples, or in crowds. I do not think Matthew wants me to. What I will tell you is that either way it is the same miracle, because either way something happened on that grass that is far greater than making food appear.

Five thousand plus people stopped being a crowd of empire and became a household of God.

A Kingdom Asks. A Kinship Asks.

Watch how Jesus does this. He tells the crowd to sit down on the grass. Mark, telling the same story, says they sat in groups of hundreds and fifties. Not a line. Not a queue at a distribution point. Groups. Small enough to see each other’s faces. Small enough to pass something.

Our word companion comes from exactly this. Com panis. The person you share bread with.

Scholars who study the social world of the New Testament, Bruce Malina chief among them, point out that in Jesus’ world only two institutions really stood on their own: politics and kinship. Everything else, religion and economics included, was folded inside one or the other. Which means that when Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, nobody heard a religious abstraction. They heard a claim about which of those two things they now belonged to in the physical world.

A kingdom asks: who is over you?

A kinship asks: who are you responsible for?

Caesar’s answer to hunger was a kingdom answer. Register, qualify, receive, be grateful, stay quiet. Herod’s answer was a smaller and uglier version of the same thing: eat well at the top, and let the platter carry whatever the top requires.

Jesus gives a kinship answer. He puts the bread into the disciples’ hands and asks them to walk it out. He seats the crowd in circles so that the bread has to travel from hand to hand. Nobody in that field receives from a distance. Everybody receives from a neighbor.

Willie James Jennings, who teaches theology at Yale, writes that the single greatest challenge facing disciples of Jesus is “to imagine and then enact actual together life, life that interpenetrates, weaves together, and joins to the bone.”

Joins to the bone. That is what kinship means. Not proximity. Not politeness. Bone to bone.

And notice what is left. Twelve baskets. Twelve. One for every tribe of Israel? One for each disciple? Twelve as a socio-political counter statement to the twelve distributions of Caesar? The arithmetic is not about surplus. The arithmetic is about one or all of those.

The Table We Stopped Setting

I want to bring this all the way into the present, because we are living through something this text speaks to directly.

The researchers behind the World Happiness Report went through American time-use data and found that in 2023, roughly one in four American adults said they had eaten every single meal alone the day before. That is up more than fifty percent in twenty years. Among young adults, eighteen to twenty-four, it is the same one in four eating all three meals by themselves. And here is the finding that is most striking: how often a person shares meals predicted their satisfaction with life about as strongly as their income did. About as strongly as whether they had a job.

We did not sit down one day and decide to be lonely. We decided to be efficient. We decided to be independent. We built a life in which you can be fed without ever sitting down across from anyone, and we did not notice what we traded away to get it.

If you are young and reading this, hear this clearly. That hollow feeling you get scrolling on your phone with food in front of you and nobody across from you is not a personal failure. It is what happens to a creature who was made for a table with people around it.

And for those of us with more candles on our cakes: we are the ones who built it. We are the ones who taught a generation that needing help is embarrassing, and that the goal of a good life is to arrange things so you never have to ask for help.

I told you at the start that I would rather be the host than the guest. That is not humility. That is control. As long as I am the one carrying the bread, I never have to admit that I am hungry.

Not a Cup. A Cow.

There is a Brethren instinct about all of this, and I did not come by it accidentally.

In 1938, a Church of the Brethren relief worker named Dan West was in Spain during the civil war, ladling cups of milk to refugee children. There was never enough. Every day he had to decide who got a cup and who did not. And somewhere in that line he had the thought that eventually built an institution: these children do not need a cup. They need a cow.

The first heifers shipped out in 1944. It grew into Heifer International. The idea was simple and it was a theological argument: you do not answer a family’s hunger by handing them a portion. You answer it by giving them something living that they can tend, and then pass on to somebody else.

My great-uncle, M. R. Zigler, was executive secretary of the Brethren Service Committee in those years. He is the one who talked the United Nations relief agency into carrying livestock on the relief ships when they had no intention of doing any such thing. He got the cows onto the boats.

I grew up downstream of that conviction without knowing what it was called. I know now. It is the difference between a handout and a household.

The Point Was Never the Food

We keep Love Feast in this tradition. We wash feet and we eat together and we take our time about it, and I have heard people apologize for how long it runs. It runs that long on purpose. It runs that long because the point was never the food.

Here is what I believe is important about what happened on that grass.

Jesus did not send the hungry away to buy their own from empire.

Jesus did not hand bread down from a throne.

Instead, Jesus put it into neighborly hands and made them hand it to each other.

The bread of life is still supposed to move the way it moved that afternoon: out of his hands, through ours, to the person sitting next to us on the grass.

So bring what you have. Five loaves is not much. Two fish is not much. A casserole, an hour, a phone call, a chair at your table on a Thursday night when somebody you know is eating alone again. It is not much, and it was never meant to be much. It was meant to be shared.

And if you come to this with nothing at all in your hands, then hear the better news. You are not the host today. You are the guest. Sit down on the grass and let somebody pass you something.

There was enough. There was more than enough. There were twelve baskets left over.

And there still are.

Sources

Res Gestae Divi Augusti 5, 15, 18. Augustus’ own account of the grain distributions, the cash handouts to “never fewer than 250,000” persons, and his taking over the grain supply “at my own expense and by my own care.”

Annona, the personified grain supply, first appears on Roman imperial coinage under Nero (reigned 54-68).

Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations (Trinity Press International, 2001).

Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761-1852), The Life of Jesus (1828), the origin of the “miracle of sharing” reading.

Bruce J. Malina, The Social Gospel of Jesus: The Kingdom of God in Mediterranean Perspective (Fortress, 2001).

Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Westminster John Knox, 2017), 145.

World Happiness Report 2025, chapter on sharing meals, using American Time Use Survey data, 2003-2023.

Dan West and the founding of Heifers for Relief, 1942-1944; M. R. Zigler (1891-1985), executive secretary of the Brethren Service Committee, who persuaded UNRRA to carry livestock on relief shipments.

This sermon explores Matthew 14 alongside the loneliness epidemic gripping America—one in four adults ate every meal alone last year—and traces the thread from Caesar’s grain dole through Dan West’s revelation in Spain (which became Heifer International) to the Love Feast tradition of the Church of the Brethren. It’s about the difference between being fed by an empire and belonging to a household.

At Pleasant Valley Church of the Brethren in Weyers Cave, Virginia, we believe that the gospel moves through ordinary hands into the hands of neighbors sitting next to us on the grass. Not from a distance. Not from a ledger. From one companion to another.

SCRIPTURES REFERENCED

Matthew 14:13–21 | John the Baptist’s death | The twelve baskets | Love thy neighbor as thyself | One body in Christ

BOOKS WORTH EXPLORING

- “Matthew” by Warren Carter – reads Matthew as a protest against empire

- “The Social World of the New Testament” by Bruce Malina – on kinship and the household

- “Heifer International: Ending Hunger, Ending Poverty” – the story that changed everything

CHAPTERS

00:00 What happens when feeding becomes an act of power?

01:28 The difference between hosting and needing—a personal confession

02:17 Two banquets: Herod’s palace vs. Jesus on the grass

03:34 Compassion that hits you in the gut

04:32 The disciples’ reasonable proposal—and Jesus’ eight-word answer

05:32 Why feeding crowds was never neutral in the empire

06:24 Caesar’s grain dole and the story Rome told itself

07:43 Every coin a small metal argument about who keeps you alive

08:34 Three tables: Herod’s display, Caesar’s ledger, Jesus’ kinship

09:16 The real miracle: 5,000 people became a household

10:40 What Matthew never explains about the mechanism

11:12 Small groups on grass, not bread lines—companions sharing bread

12:22 Only two institutions stood on their own: government and kinship

13:04 A kingdom asks who’s in charge; kinship asks who you’re responsible for

14:28 The greatest challenge: enacting actual together life

15:27 One in four Americans ate every meal alone yesterday

16:09 How often you share meals predicts life satisfaction as much as income

16:46 Loneliness is epidemic—and it’s not your personal failure

17:26 We chose efficiency and didn’t notice the trade-off

17:48 The host’s secret: as long as I carry the bread, I never admit I’m hungry

18:33 Dan West’s revelation in Spain: give a cow, not a cup

19:08 Heifer International and the Brethren way of answering hunger

19:45 M.R. Ziegler and the Brethren Service Commission

20:06 The difference between a handout and a household

20:28 Why Love Feast runs long—and why that’s the whole point

21:34 Jesus didn’t hand bread from a throne; he put it in ordinary hands

22:18 You walked in with nothing? You’re a guest today—sit down and receive

CONNECT WITH US

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Daily devotional: https://pastorharryjarrett.substack.com/s/daily-devotional

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Jesus asked it too, and for centuries the church has answered it by pulling up people it was never meant to sort.

ABOUT THIS SERMON

In this sermon from Pleasant Valley Church of the Brethren in Weyers Cave, Virginia, Pastor Harry Jarrett walks through Jesus’s parable of the wheat and the weeds using two years of hands-on lessons from an actual sunflower field. Along the way, he traces the parable’s real cost through Anabaptist history, the persecution of the Radical Reformation, and the execution of Michael Sattler, before landing on a harder, more personal question: what happens when we stop trying to weed the grief out of our own lives.

SCRIPTURES REFERENCED

• Matthew 13:24-30 — The Parable of the Weeds

• Matthew 13:36-43 — Jesus explains the parable

BOOKS WORTH EXPLORING

• The Patient Ferment of the Early Church — Alan Kreider

• The Wounded Healer — Henri Nouwen

• Martyrs Mirror — Thieleman J. van Braght

CHAPTERS

00:00 What can a messy sunflower field teach us about faith?

00:58 Why did Pastor Harry let the weeds grow with the flowers?

02:09 What is Jesus really saying in the parable of the weeds?

02:45 What is the parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13?

03:39 Why couldn’t anyone tell wheat and darnel apart?

04:50 Why did this parable terrify a persecuted early church?

05:42 Who was Michael Sattler, and why was he executed?

06:23 What happened during the Munster Rebellion of 1534?

07:56 Why did the landowner refuse to let the weeds be pulled?

09:09 Do we secretly wonder if the person next to us is wheat or darnel?

09:44 What has every purification campaign in church history actually done?

10:52 What did Alan Kreider mean by “fervent patience”?

12:23 Does “the end of the age” really mean judgment day?

13:42 What does the word “kindom” mean, and where did it come from?

15:32 How did a sunflower field prepare Pastor Harry for grief?

16:49 What did Henri Nouwen mean by a “wounded healer”?

18:06 Good news: Pastor Harry’s fourth grandson was born

18:34 What are we actually asked to do with what we can’t sort out?

LINKS

Church website: https://pleasantvalleyalive.org/

Daily devotional: https://pastorharryjarrett.substack.com/s/daily-devotional

Substack newsletter:

Harry Jarrett

Harry Jarrett—pastor, former missionary/church planter, wedding-venue founder, ex-Marriott GM—writes on weaving faith, hospitality, and business into everyday life. Harry produces two weekly podcasts, Faith at Work and Faith in Process.

Faith at Work podcast:

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We planted twelve different kinds of sunflowers, just for the beauty and the pollinators. We planted understory alongside them on purpose: buckwheat, flax, small grains. And we let the volunteers come too: grasses, thistle, lamb’s quarter, whatever wanted to grow in that ground. We didn’t clear any of it out. We let it all grow up together.

It is, by any conventional farming standard, a mess. Twelve kinds of flowers and half a dozen kinds of weeds and grain, tangled together in the same dirt, no clean rows anywhere. And it is also, by every account I trust, one of the most beautiful things on our farm.

People come to walk that field. They pick flowers, they wander, and nearly every one of them eventually asks some version of the same question: why is it like this? Why the weeds mixed in with the flowers? Why so many bugs? My answer is always the same, and it doesn’t change no matter who’s asking: “Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way the world actually works.” Some people smile and nod like they already half-knew that. Others walk away looking a little puzzled, like I’ve told them something they’re not ready to believe yet.

I tell you that because I think it’s exactly what Jesus is doing in this parable, and I don’t think we’ve been reading it the way it was meant to be heard.

A Field Somebody Sabotaged

Here’s the story. A man sows good seed in his field. That night, while everyone’s asleep, an enemy comes and sows weeds (darnel, most scholars think) right into the same ground, and slips away. Nobody notices right away. And when the plants finally come up, the servants come running to the landowner: Sir, didn’t you plant good seed? Where did all this come from?

I want you to understand how realistic that opening is, because this parable isn’t describing something fanciful. Sowing an enemy’s field with a ruinous weed was an actual, documented form of village sabotage in the ancient world, common enough that it eventually shows up in Roman law, where a farmer could sue a neighbor for exactly this crime. Jesus isn’t reaching for a strange, made-up scenario. He’s naming a real grievance his listeners would have recognized instantly, the kind of thing that happened between neighbors who hated each other.

And the weed itself matters. Darnel is wheat’s near-perfect double. In the blade stage, you cannot tell it apart from wheat: not by looking, not by feel. Only once the grain head finally forms, months into the growing season, can anyone tell which is which. And by then, the roots have grown so thoroughly tangled underground that you cannot pull one without tearing out the other. Darnel is also mildly toxic: this isn’t a cosmetic nuisance, it’s a genuine threat to the harvest and to anyone who eats bread made from a contaminated batch.

So darnel has carried a meaning in the church’s reading of this parable for as long as the church has read it, one Matthew’s first hearers would have felt in their bones long before any of us did. An imposter that cannot be told apart from the real thing until it’s nearly too late isn’t only a farming problem. It’s the oldest fear a persecuted community carries: the neighbor who might be an informant, the face at the table you can’t quite be sure of.

That fear was not abstract for the tradition I come from. During the Radical Reformation, the Anabaptist forebears of the peace-church tradition I’ve spent my whole ministry inside of met in secret because betrayal was a real, constant danger, not a metaphor. Michael Sattler helped draft the Schleitheim Confession at a secret gathering in February 1527 and was arrested within months, tried, and executed. Dirk Willems was discovered decades later and tried specifically for holding secret meetings in his own home. Historians estimate several thousand Anabaptists were executed across Europe in the decades that followed (drowned, burned, tortured), each death authorized by people utterly convinced they were protecting the true wheat of the church from dangerous imposters growing up among it.

And I want to be fair to the other side of that fear, because it wasn’t only paranoia. A violent, apocalyptic fringe really did seize the German city of Münster in 1534, crowning a self-declared king and descending into forced marriage, mass executions, and a siege that ended in slaughter: real proof, to magistrates across Europe, that Anabaptism had to be rooted out by force. The tragedy is what that fear then did. It could not tell the violent fringe from the peaceful majority, so it did not try very hard to. Sattler and the Schleitheim Confession he helped write had explicitly renounced the sword seven years before Münster, and Sattler himself was already dead by the time it happened, killed, in fact, for the very nonviolence his confession spelled out. That distinction made no difference to the fear that followed. The wheat and the weed looked enough alike from a magistrate’s chair that both got pulled, years before the one and years after the other.

So when the servants ask, “Do you want us to go and pull up the weeds?” they are not overreacting. That’s a reasonable, urgent question from people who know exactly what’s at stake, on the ground and in the room.

And the landowner says no. “Let both grow together until the harvest.”

The Patience That Costs Something

I used to read that answer as a kind of shrug, as if the landowner were saying evil doesn’t matter much, just let it be, it’ll sort itself out eventually. But that’s not what’s happening here. The landowner isn’t minimizing the danger. He knows exactly what darnel is and what it can do. He says no for one reason only: because the roots are tangled, and pulling up the weeds now would tear out the wheat with them.

That is not permissiveness. That’s the cost of premature judgment, named honestly. God is not telling us evil doesn’t matter. God is telling us that we do not yet have the standing, or the vision, or the surgical precision, to separate what’s tangled together without doing more damage than the weeds themselves ever would.

We still feel that old fear, even now, even here. We look at another denomination and wonder if they’ve drifted from the gospel. We look at someone in our own communion, or the person two pews over, and wonder, quietly, whether they’re really wheat, or whether they’re darnel wearing wheat’s face. And once that question takes root, it asks a second one right behind it: what should we, so sure of our own good seed, do to keep the field safe?

History has already answered that question, and the answer isn’t comforting. Every purification campaign in Christian history (and the tradition I’ve given my ministry to was on the receiving end of one of the worst of them) believed itself to be protecting true wheat from dangerous imposters. Every one of them, with grim consistency, killed indiscriminately: the true along with the false, and more often than anyone wants to admit, mostly the true. The servants’ question was never really about whether the danger was real. It was about whether we could be trusted to sort it. History answers that gently but firmly: we cannot.

That same tradition, though, didn’t just suffer this. It eventually named why it happens. Alan Kreider, in his book on the early church, makes the case that Christianity spread for its first three centuries not through strategy or coercion but through what he calls patient ferment: Christians simply living faithfully, refusing to force belief or force outcomes, trusting that the work of separating wheat from weed, true from false, wasn’t theirs to rush. Kreider is blunt about what changed: once the church gained real power, under Constantine, patience gave way to compulsion, and the church started pulling up weeds by force, with predictably ugly results. The kingdom of God, Kreider argues, was never supposed to grow that way. It grows the way a field grows. Slowly. Tangled. Trusting a harvest it does not control the timing of.

That is the theological weight sitting underneath “let both grow together.” Not because evil is fine. Because we are not the harvester.

Not the End of the World: The Completion of It

When Jesus explains the parable privately to the disciples, he says the harvest is “the end of the age.” And I think that phrase has done us real harm, because in English “the end” sounds like a fuse burning down to an explosion: the world ending, everything torn apart in judgment and fire. But the Greek word there, synteleia, doesn’t mean termination. It means consummation. Completion. The word the disciples heard was closer to “when the whole thing finally comes to fullness together” than “when it all gets destroyed.”

That changes what the harvest actually is. The harvest isn’t God losing patience and finally swinging the axe. The harvest is the moment when growth completes itself and what was tangled and ambiguous becomes clear to see, not because someone forced it apart early, but because it finally, fully, is what it always was becoming. Wheat looks like wheat. Weeds look like weeds. Not because judgment arrived, but because growing season ended and the truth that was always there simply became visible.

We, His disciples, Jesus says, are the good seed, “the children of the kingdom,” sown by the Son of Man into the field, which is the world. Not gathered into a private greenhouse, protected from every contaminating thing nearby. Sown into the same tangled, mixed, complicated ground where the weeds are also growing, with real agency, doing real damage, right alongside us. That is where we were planted. Not because God couldn’t find cleaner soil. Because the field is where the wheat was always going to grow.

Those Who Shine

The explanation ends with one more line I nearly preached right past: “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” I want to sit there a moment, because I think we misread that sentence about as badly as we misread “the end of the age.”

I came across a reflection this week from , an Anglican priest and theologian, that names what I want you to hear better than I could say it myself. He writes it using a word some theologians have reached for since the 1970s instead of “kingdom”: “Kin-dom,” a term the Cuban-American theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz gave the church to reimagine God’s reign not as a hierarchy to climb but as a family of equals. Family instead of throne. Here’s what he says: “Those who shine are not those who have succeeded in separating themselves from everyone else. They are those who have allowed themselves to be transformed by the patient, merciful love of God. They have learned to trust the Good Sower more than their own judgements.”

Shining isn’t the reward for good sorting. It isn’t handed out to whoever did the best job telling wheat from weed, in themselves or in anyone else. Shining is what happens to a person who stops trying to do the harvester’s job and lets herself be grown instead, worked on by a patience she did not generate and cannot rush. The righteous, in this story, are not the ones with the sharpest eye for spotting darnel. They are the ones who finally trusted the Sower more than their own judgment.

What I’m Learning in the Other Field

That field taught Beth and me something about mess and beauty two years before I understood how much I’d need it somewhere far harder than dirt.

A few weeks ago, I stood right here and told you the truth about how I was doing after my father died, that it was harder than I expected, that “not well” was the honest answer, not the pastor’s answer. That hasn’t changed. But something has shifted in how I’m carrying it.

For most of my life, my instinct with grief was the same instinct Beth and I used to have about that pasture before we learned better: treat it like something to be weeded out. Get in there, pull up the sadness, clear the ground, get back to the clean rows of a normal, functioning life. Grieve efficiently, on a schedule, and then move on. I think a lot of us were taught some version of that, whether anyone said it out loud or not.

But I’ve stopped trying to pull it out. I’m letting the grief and the joy grow tangled together in the same ground, the way that sunflower field is tangled every summer now, and here is what I did not expect: it is making me more of a person, not less. Henri Nouwen wrote about ministers as “wounded healers,” about the strange truth that our own unhealed places, held honestly rather than hidden or ripped out, become exactly the ground where we’re able to sit with someone else’s pain instead of flinching from it. I’m finding that to be true in real time. The grief hasn’t cancelled the joy in my life. It’s grown alongside it, root to root, and something about the mixture is producing a depth of character in me that a cleanly weeded life never would have. I don’t think I could have manufactured that by trying harder to feel better faster. I think you only get it by refusing to pull.

That is a strategy that I have chosen to embrace, and I encourage you to do the same. It’s the same wisdom that pasture has been telling visitors for two summers now, just finally landing in a language I understand.

Let the Harvest Tell the Truth

So here’s where I land, for the farmers and gardeners in this room who know exactly what I’m describing about that field, for anyone carrying grief alongside something good and feeling guilty that the two haven’t sorted themselves out yet, for the students here who feel pressure to have already decided who’s wheat and who’s weed in their own lives or someone else’s, and for the rest of us with enough mileage to have tried, at some point, to weed something out of ourselves or someone else before its time.

We are not asked to sort the field. We are asked to grow in it: faithfully, patiently, tangled up with things we didn’t plant and can’t yet fully explain, trusting the Good Sower more than our own judgment, the same way we trust the harvester to know wheat from darnel even when we can’t yet see it ourselves. Not sorted now. Not separated now. Grown together, until the growing is complete.

The sunflowers are blooming out there right now, right alongside the thistle and the lamb’s quarter and the grasses we never once tried to pull, and this fall, when the flowers go to seed, the field will finish telling the truth about what all of it actually was. Not before. Not by force. Not by anyone’s hand pulling early out of fear.

“Let both grow together until the harvest.” That was never permission to stop caring about the difference between wheat and weed. It was a promise that the difference will finally, fully, be told: by a harvester who has never once been in a hurry, and who has never once gotten it wrong. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way the world actually works.

Amen.

Then my father died, and I learned what this psalm actually promises: enough light for the next step, and maybe one more.

This is a sit-down message from Pleasant Valley Church of the Brethren in Weyers Cave, Virginia. Pastor Harry Jarrett walks through the middle of Psalm 119, where the word of God is called a lamp to our feet and a light to our path, and asks an honest question: what if God never intended to show you the whole journey at once? Through the grief of losing his father, thirty years of old sermons pulled off dusty hard drives, a handwritten notebook from a decade in Italy, and the quiet courage of a woman named Martha writing cards from her chair, this message trades the false certainty of the floodlight for the honest, walkable faith of the next step.

SCRIPTURES REFERENCED

Psalm 119:105-112

Matthew 5:14-16

Matthew 4:19

BOOKS WORTH EXPLORING

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor

The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

CHAPTERS

00:00 What is a sit-down message and why does today feel different?

00:56 Why is Psalm 119 the longest chapter in the whole Bible?

02:11 What does a lamp to my feet and a light to my path actually mean?

03:25 What is the Hebrew word devar and why does it matter?

04:09 What did an oil lamp really look like in the psalmist’s world?

05:12 What does grief do to the path you thought you were walking?

06:02 If the lamp is only imagery, what part of it is still real?

07:13 Why does this psalm sound like it was written by someone older?

07:42 What did going back through thirty years of old messages reveal?

08:59 Did I preach with more certainty than I actually had?

09:39 Why did I expect God to be a floodlight instead of a small lamp?

11:06 What does sempre dritto teach about the path God gives?

12:07 What is the one promise this psalm actually makes?

12:42 Did the disciples ever know where following Jesus would lead?

13:57 What did Martha’s cards show about taking the next step?

15:03 Is I don’t know how this turns out a more honest kind of faith?

15:39 What are young people really asking about the future?

16:41 What does A Light Within Us mean for those being sent out?

STAY CONNECTED

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A yoke is a farmer’s tool, and here in the valley we know something about that. A yoke joins two animals so the load is shared and neither pulls alone. So when Jesus says, “Take my yoke,” he is not saying carry nothing. He is saying: stop carrying it alone. Get in the harness with me. Learn my pace. I am gentle. I will not drive you the way the marketplace drives you.

Notice who the invitation is for: all who are weary. Not all who have their worldview sorted out. Not all who have resolved their doubts. Not all who are grieving the right way. The only qualification is exhaustion, which means every person in this room qualifies. The rescue Paul cried out for and the rest Jesus offered are the same gift, and it is not an answer key. It is a relationship. It is a shared yoke.

So bring your questions here. Say them out loud to someone you trust rather than carrying them alone at midnight with only a screen for company. Check on the put-together ones: the honor student, the reliable volunteer, the friend who never causes trouble, because the ones who look the most settled may be carrying the most weight. Ask real questions, and then stay long enough to hear a real answer. You were never meant to pull this cart alone.

Scripture

“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30, WEB)

From Sunday’s Sermon

“You were never meant to pull this cart alone.”

Reflection Questions

1. What does it mean that the rescue God offers is a relationship and a shared yoke rather than a technique or an answer key?

2. What burden have you been pulling alone, and what would it look like to get in the harness with Jesus this week?

3. Which put-together person in your life will you check on this week, asking a real question and staying long enough for a real answer?

Prayer

Gentle Savior, we come to you weary and carrying heavy burdens. We qualify. Take from us the weight we were never meant to pull alone, and teach us your pace. Yoke us to yourself and to one another, so that no one in this church family carries their questions in the dark. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

What is Jesus saying? The deep things of God are not unlocked by having it all figured out. They are revealed to the small, the young, the ones who know they do not know it all. In the Kingdom of God, questions are not an obstacle to revelation. They are the posture that revelation is looking for.

For those of us with more mileage, this is a strong warning. The moment we start playing the wise and intelligent, certain about everything and curious about nothing, we become the ones the deep things get hidden from. Certainty can become a locked door; humble curiosity keeps it open.

The Barna researchers found a door standing wide open. Eight in ten teens said they would welcome advice about who they are from their mother. More than two-thirds said they are open to wisdom from Jesus and the Bible. Somehow we have been told otherwise, but nobody is slamming that door. The most formative thing any adult can offer a young person is not a polished answer. It is a steady, trusted presence and a faith large enough to survive the big questions.

Scripture

“At that time, Jesus answered, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you hid these things from the wise and understanding, and revealed them to infants.”“ (Matthew 11:25, WEB)

From Sunday’s Sermon

“Your questions are not an obstacle to revelation. They are the posture that revelation is looking for.”

Reflection Questions

1. Why do you think God reveals deep things to the humble and hides them from the self-assured, and how does that reorder what we call spiritual maturity?

2. Where have you been playing the wise and intelligent, certain about everything and curious about nothing?

3. Who is one younger person you could invite into your actual life this week: your kitchen, your garden, your workbench, your grief, your gratitude?

Prayer

Lord of heaven and earth, we thank you that revelation belongs to the small and the searching. Forgive us for the times our certainty has crowded out curiosity. Make us childlike again. Open our tables and our lives to a younger generation, and make us steady, trusted presences with a faith large enough for their questions and ours. Amen.

We all still live in that marketplace. But let us be honest about who lives closest to the loudspeaker. Every screen in our pockets is a chorus of voices insisting the flute is playing and we had better dance, the dirge is playing and we had better mourn, and whatever we do, someone will judge us within a minute or two.

Generation Alpha, today’s children and teenagers, are the first generation to grow up alongside artificial intelligence, and two-thirds of them are already asking whether they can trust it and what it means for being human. Those are good questions. But the rest of us are not exempt. Grown adults walk through the marketplace of social media exhausted, comparing our lives, our churches, our children, and our retirements to a highlight reel that never stops.

No wonder we are tired, all of us. The marketplace will hand you thousands of answers, and it will charge you your peace for every single one. Naming that clearly is the first step toward hearing a gentler voice.

Scripture

“But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces, who call to their companions and say, ‘We played the flute for you, and you didn’t dance. We mourned for you, and you didn’t lament.’” (Matthew 11:16-17, WEB)

From Sunday’s Sermon

“The marketplace will hand you thousands of answers and charge you your peace for every single one.”

Reflection Questions

1. What does Jesus’ frustration with his own generation reveal about how God regards the noise and judgment of every age, including ours?

2. Where has the marketplace been charging you your peace lately: a feed, a comparison, a voice you keep listening to?

3. What is one concrete way you could help someone younger step back from the loudspeaker this week, without a lecture?

Prayer

Father, we live next to the loudspeaker, and we are weary. Voices tell us when to dance and when to mourn, and they judge us either way. Quiet the marketplace in our hearts. Help us trade the endless scroll of comparison for the sound of your voice, which is gentler than any algorithm. Amen.

Why would Paul hand the church a confession of his own contradictions? Because he understood something every one of us needs, whether we are fifteen or eighty-five: honesty about the struggle is not the opposite of faith. Honesty about the struggle is where real faith actually lives.

Pastor Harry offered his own confession this week: grieving the recent death of his father, he decided not to perform when people asked how he was doing. No pastor’s answer. Just the truth: not well, not well at all. That honesty has opened doors that a polished answer would have kept shut. It has let people love him instead of merely admiring him.

The research agrees with Paul. The strongest, most durable faith does not grow in people who have been sheltered from doubt and pain. It grows where doubt is welcomed, where questions are taken seriously, where faith is treated as something large enough to hold the full weight of human life. A faith protected from hard questions is not strong. It is fragile, waiting to crack on first contact with a complicated world.

Scripture

“What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me out of the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25a, WEB)

From Sunday’s Sermon

“Honesty about the struggle is not the opposite of faith. Honesty about the struggle is where real faith actually lives.”

Reflection Questions

1. If the Bible makes room for a man to say “I do not understand my own actions” and still calls him an apostle, what does that suggest about what God requires of us?

2. Where in your life are you giving the polished answer instead of the true one, and what is that performance costing you?

3. Whose love have you been keeping at arm’s length by being admirable instead of honest, and what one true sentence could you say to them this week?

Prayer

Lord Jesus, we are tired of performing. Like Paul, we do not fully understand our own actions, and like him, we bring our divided hearts to you. Teach us that honesty is the doorway. Give us courage to answer truthfully when someone asks how we are, and give us grace to receive love and not just admiration. Amen.

A recent Barna Group study asked 1,500 teenagers a piercing question: what do you feel pressure to figure out? The answers were not about lunch tables or crushes. Three out of four feel pressure to know how they will make a living and whether their future will even be stable. Seven in ten are carrying the question of who they really are. Two-thirds wonder whether anyone genuinely cares, and more than half are quietly asking whether God is real and whether God loves them.

Here is the turn. These are not teenage questions. They are human questions. The teenage years are simply when they all arrive at once, loudly, before anyone learns to hide them. And the study found something we cannot afford to miss: the people who look the most settled are often carrying the heaviest loads.

From there the sermon opens two texts. In Romans 7, the Apostle Paul, one of the giants of the faith, says on the record, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Honesty about the struggle, Harry reminds us, is not the opposite of faith. It is where real faith actually lives. He speaks tenderly here about the recent death of his own father, and what refusing to perform his grief has taught him: honesty is the doorway that lets people love us instead of merely admire us.

Then Matthew 11, where Jesus stands in a noisy marketplace of voices that no song can satisfy, thanks the Father for revealing deep things to the small and the searching, and offers the invitation some of us have carried since childhood: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens.” The yoke he offers is not a call to carry nothing. It is a call to stop carrying it alone.

Whether the questions are arriving all at once for you or you are further down the road, there is a door standing open and a place at the table. You were never meant to pull this cart by yourself.

Run of Show

00:00 - A Pastor’s Confession: Sixty-Two Years In and Still Learning
01:16 - The Barna Study: What 1,500 Teens Feel Pressure to Figure Out
03:04 - Not Teenage Questions, Human Questions
04:31 - The Put-Together Ones May Carry the Heaviest Load
05:59 - Romans 7: Paul’s Honest Confession
07:57 - Honesty About the Struggle Is Where Faith Lives
08:24 - Two Weeks Ago, My Father Died: Refusing to Perform Grief
10:40 - Honesty Is the Doorway
11:30 - Durable Faith Grows Where Doubt Is Welcomed
13:55 - The Rescue Is a Relationship, Not a Technique
14:42 - Matthew 11: Children Shouting in the Marketplace
15:43 - Living Closest to the Loudspeaker
16:26 - Generation Alpha, AI, and What It Means to Be Human
17:36 - Hidden From the Wise, Revealed to Infants
19:22 - Come to Me: The Shared Yoke
20:32 - The Only Qualification Is Exhaustion
21:23 - For the Young: Bring Your Questions Into the Light
22:53 - For the Seasoned: Be a Steady, Trusted Presence
23:37 - An Open Door: They Welcome Your Wisdom
25:52 - The Rescue and the Rest Are the Same Gift

Research referenced in this sermon:

Barna Group, “The Big Questions on Teens’ Minds Today,” drawn from the report Reimagining Ministry for Gen Alpha, produced in partnership with Christ In Youth. The study surveyed 1,500 U.S. teens ages 13-18. It found that roughly three in four feel pressure over their future livelihood and stability, seven in ten feel pressure to answer who they really are, and more than two-thirds say they are comfortable receiving wisdom from Jesus and the Bible. Eight in ten say they would welcome advice about who they are from their mother.
https://www.barna.com/research/questions-teens-are-asking/

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If you are a teenager, none of that surprises you. You did not need research to tell you what you feel inside. But here is what the rest of us need to hear: when we read that list honestly, we do not think, “How sad for them.” We think, “I know every one of those questions personally.” Will the future hold? What is true? Who am I really? Does anyone see me? Is God real, and does God love me?

These are not teenage questions. They are human questions. The teenage years are simply when they all arrive at once, loudly, before anyone has explained that the adults nearby are still asking the same things. We have just gotten better at hiding it.

The study found one more thing worth sitting with. Almost half of teens say they have a clear sense of who they are, yet seventy percent feel pressure to answer who they really are. Put those together and you see people who have learned to look settled while privately searching. The ones who appear most put together may be carrying the heaviest loads. That is not a description of one generation. It is a description of every pew in every church, and probably of the person reading this page.

Scripture

“For I don’t know what I am doing. For I don’t practice what I desire to do; but what I hate, that I do.” (Romans 7:15, WEB)

From Sunday’s Sermon

“Those are not just teenage questions. Those are human questions.”

Reflection Questions

1. What does it tell us about God that Scripture preserves the raw, unresolved questions of people like Paul rather than editing them out?

2. Which of the five questions from the study (making a living, the future, identity, being cared for, God’s love) presses hardest on you right now?

3. Who around you might be looking settled while privately searching, and what would it take to notice them this week?

Prayer

God of every generation, we confess that we carry questions we rarely say out loud. We ask about the future, about who we are, about whether you are real and whether you love us. Meet us in our honest asking. Remind us that our questions do not disqualify us from your presence. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.

I want you to hold onto that picture, because I don’t think those promises were sentimental. I think they were fierce. Any of you who are parents know what I mean. There is almost nothing a parent will not do for a child. We will go without sleep. We will go without money. We will lie awake rehearsing every danger the world might hold and trying to figure out how to stand between our children and all of it. The love runs deep, and it runs hard, and it will spend itself completely.

So here is the question I want to sit with this morning, on a day when we are celebrating exactly that kind of love: what happens when a parent’s love, real as it is, reaches its limit? Because it does reach a limit. We are finite. Our resources run out. Sometimes our wisdom runs out. Sometimes, God forgive us, our courage runs out. What then?

The story we just heard from Genesis 21 walks straight into that question, and it does not flinch.

A family that does not fit on a greeting card

Let me set the scene, because this is not a tidy story, and I am not going to pretend it is.

Abraham has two sons. One, Isaac, is the child of Sarah, the child of the long-awaited promise, the baby everyone laughed about because Abraham and Sarah were far too old. The other, Ishmael, is the child of Hagar, an enslaved Egyptian woman. Two women. Two children. One father in the flesh, and that father is Abraham.

And the household cannot hold them both. At the celebration for Isaac’s weaning, Sarah looks at Ishmael and decides he is a threat to her son’s inheritance. She tells Abraham to cast them out, the slave woman and her boy, send them away.

The text tells us this was deeply distressing to Abraham. Of course it was. Ishmael was his son too. Brueggemann notes that this is a story soaked in real anguish, not a clean morality tale. Abraham is caught between two children and cannot protect both. So early one morning he gets up, and he hands Hagar some bread and a skin of water, and he sends his own child out into the wilderness of Beersheba.

I want us to be honest about that, especially today, especially on a day when we have just promised to protect our children. Here is the great patriarch of our faith, and his protection of one child fails. It runs out at the edge of the desert with a loaf of bread and one skin of water. The love was probably real. The protection was not enough.

And then it gets worse. Out in the wilderness the water runs out. And Hagar does the thing that I think is the most human and the most heartbreaking moment in the whole Bible. She cannot watch her child die. So she lays him down under a bush, and she walks away the distance of a bowshot, and she sits down, and she says, in the old translation, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And she lifts up her voice, and she weeps.

That is the limit of a parent’s love. Not because she loved him too little. Because she loved him so much she could not bear to watch. She had given him everything she had, and everything she had ran out, and there was nothing left in her hands but grief.

If the story ended there, it would just be true. It would be one more honest picture of how this world breaks the people we love and breaks our ability to save them. But the story does not end there.

God goes farther

Here is what happens next. “God heard the voice of the boy.”

I need you to feel the weight of that line. The mother has given up. The father is miles away. The water is gone. The child is lying under a bush in the desert. And the narrator says: God heard.

The angel of God calls out of heaven and says to Hagar, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.” Where he is. Not where he should be. Not in Abraham’s household, not in the covenant line, not in any of the places the religious imagination of that time would have expected God to be paying attention. God heard him right where he was, cast out, dying, forgotten by everyone.

Then God opens Hagar’s eyes, and she sees a well of water that was apparently there the whole time, and she fills the skin and gives the boy a drink. And the text says God was with the boy as he grew up.

Here is point one, and it is the bedrock of everything else I want to say today. Parents will do almost anything for their children. God will do more. When the parent’s love reaches its limit, God’s love is just getting started. Where the mother walked away because she could not bear to watch, God walked toward the child because God could not bear to leave.

This is the deep theology underneath what we did up front this morning. When those parents promised to protect and provide, they were not promising to be God. They were promising to point toward God. They were saying, in effect: we will love this child with everything we have, and we already know it will not be enough, so we are entrusting this child to the One whose love does not run out.

And notice how God’s care shows up here. Not as a lecture. Not as a theological argument. God hears a cry and provides water. That is it. Walter Brueggemann would call this the God of the dispossessed, the God who keeps showing up precisely at the places of abandonment. I would simply say it is the most relational thing in the world: a child cries, and God hears, and God comes. That is not a transaction. That is a heavenly Father.

There is one more detail you cannot miss. The boy’s name is Ishmael, and Ishmael means “God hears.” The promise was sewn into his name before he was ever born. Every time anyone said his name out loud, they were preaching the gospel without knowing it. God hears. God hears. God hears.

Whose children are we, really?

Now I want to make a turn, because this story is not only about Ishmael. It is about us.

The whole drama of Genesis hangs on the question of children. Who is the true heir? Who carries the promise? Whose line does God bless? And the surface answer is Isaac, the child of Sarah, the child of promise. That is the line that runs to Jacob, to Israel, to David, all the way to a baby in Bethlehem.

But here is what the New Testament does with all of this, and it is one of the most generous moves in all of Scripture. Paul takes the whole question of “whose children are we” and blows the doors off of it. In Galatians he writes that the real children of Abraham are not defined by blood at all. “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Heirs. You. Not because of who your parents were, not because of your bloodline, not because you were born inside the right family, but because you belong to Christ.

And it goes further than that. In Romans, Paul says that all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God, that we have received a spirit of adoption by which we cry out to God the way a small child cries out to a parent. And John puts it as plainly as it can be put: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”

So look at what the gospel has done with this Genesis story. The line we thought was about excluding people, picking one child and casting out the other, gets opened up until the family is big enough to hold everyone who will come. We are all, every one of us, adopted into this family. We are all children of the promise now.

And I want to say something carefully here, because I think it matters and I think it is part of the honest reading of this text. Yes, Paul at one point uses Hagar as a figure of slavery and Sarah as a figure of freedom; he is making an argument about law and grace. But do not let that flatten what the Genesis story itself actually says. Because in the actual story, God does not abandon Hagar’s child. God hears Ishmael. God saves Ishmael. God promises to make a great nation of him too, because, God says, “he is your offspring.” The narrative refuses to let the cast-out child be forgotten. The God of this story keeps reaching past the boundaries that everyone else has drawn.

That is the God we serve. A God whose family keeps getting bigger. A God who hears the children inside the household and the children out in the wilderness. A God who looked at a dying boy that everyone else had written off and said, that one is mine too.

So when we ask “whose children are we,” the answer the whole Bible finally gives us is this: we are God’s. All of us. The ones who were born into faithful homes like the children we dedicated this morning, and the ones who came in from the wilderness with nothing. Children of Abraham. Children of God. That is what we are.

The questions our children are actually asking

Now I want to bring this home to right now, to the children we just dedicated and to the teenagers in this valley and in your homes, because I think these two truths, that God goes farther than any parent and that we are all God’s own children, are not abstractions. They are answers. And our young people are asking the questions.

Just last week, Barna released brand new research, done in partnership with Christ In Youth. They surveyed fifteen hundred American teenagers, ages thirteen to eighteen, and asked them which of life’s big questions they feel the most pressure to answer. I read it twice, and the second time I read it I had this Genesis story open next to it, and I could hardly believe how closely they lined up.

The teenagers’ questions clustered into four areas. Let me give them to you, and let me show you what I mean.

The first cluster was about the future, and it was the heaviest one of all. Around three out of four teens feel real pressure over how they will ever make a living, whether their generation even has a stable future, whether society is holding together or falling apart. These are thirteen-year-olds carrying the weight of the whole economy. And yet, and this is the part that undid me, most of them have not given up hope. Around three in five say they still feel hopeful about their future, that their life has purpose. Barna gave it a name: anxious optimism. They are scared and they are still hoping, both at once.

Church, I do not know a better word for the God of Genesis 21 than “the One who provides a future when there does not seem to be one.” Hagar sat down in the desert certain there was no future, and God showed her a well and promised her child would become a great nation. To a generation drowning in dread about whether they will have a future, we get to say: there is a God who hears, and that God specializes in wells in the wilderness.

The second cluster was about truth. What is real, what is worth believing, who am I really, what does it even mean to be human, and, a brand new one, can I trust artificial intelligence. They are the first generation growing up with machines that talk back, and they are genuinely asking what makes a person a person. And here is a tension Barna flagged: nearly half of these kids say they have a clear sense of who they are, but seventy percent say they feel pressure to figure out who they really are. So a lot of them are performing a confidence they do not actually feel.

Friends, the answer to “who am I, really” is not a personality test and it is not an algorithm. The answer is the one John gave us: you are a child of God, and that is what you are. Before you achieved anything, before you performed anything, before you figured anything out, you were named and known and loved. That is an identity nothing can take from you, and our kids are starving for it.

The third cluster nearly brought me to tears, because of how it connects to this text. The third cluster was about belonging. Seven in ten teens feel pressure over where they truly belong. Two-thirds wonder whether anyone genuinely cares about them. And nearly three in five, this is the one, nearly three in five are still working out whether their own parents will always love them.

Do you hear it? That is Hagar’s boy under the bush. That is the question of every cast-out child in every wilderness. Does anyone see me. Does anyone hear me. Will the people who are supposed to love me actually stay. And the gospel answer, the Genesis 21 answer, is that there is a God who hears the voice of the boy where he is. Not where he should be. Where he is. There is a God who sees the ones everyone else has walked away from. Our kids are asking “will anyone show up for me,” and we get to introduce them to the God who already has.

And then the fourth cluster, the one that came in dead last, was the question of God directly. Whether God is real. Whether God loves them. Barna made a point I do not want you to miss: those questions ranking last does not mean our kids do not care about God. It means they are asking about God sideways, through all the other questions. Every question about the future, about truth, about belonging, is secretly a question about whether there is a God who hears. They just do not always have the words for it.

What this asks of us

So what do we do with all of this. Let me close with the most encouraging thing in the whole Barna report, because it is also the most convicting.

The research found that these teenagers are remarkably open to the trusted adults in their lives. Eight in ten said they would be comfortable getting guidance about who they are from their mother. Nearly the same number said it about their father. More than two-thirds said they would welcome wisdom from Jesus and from the Bible. They are not slamming the door. They are leaving it open and waiting to see if any of us will walk through it.

And here is the line from the report I cannot stop thinking about. The kids with the most resilient faith were not the ones who were sheltered from every hard question. They were the ones who grew up in homes and churches where doubt was welcomed, where the hard questions were taken seriously, where faith was treated as something big enough to hold the full weight of a human life. Barna said it plainly: a faith that protects you from hard questions is not strong faith, it is fragile faith, waiting to shatter the first time the world gets complicated. And the single most formative thing any adult can offer a teenager is not a polished answer. It is a steady, trusted presence, and a faith large enough to survive the questions.

Church, that is the whole of it. That is what we dedicated those children to this morning, whether we knew it or not. We did not promise to have all the answers. We promised to be a steady, trusted presence. We promised to keep pointing to a faith big enough to hold their whole lives. We promised to be the kind of grown-ups who hear them where they are.

To the parents who stood up here this morning: your love is fierce, and it is good, and it will not be enough, and that is okay. It was never supposed to be enough. Your job is not to be God for your child. Your job is to keep handing your child back to the God who hears, the God who goes farther than you can go, the God who is already out in every wilderness your child will ever wander into, waiting with water.

And to all of us, because every one of us is somebody’s child and every one of us has been out under that bush in the desert at some point: hear the good news of Genesis 21. God heard the voice of the boy where he was. God will hear you where you are. You are not outside the family. There is no wilderness far enough to put you there. You are a child of God, and that is what you are.

God hears. God hears. God hears.

Preached on a morning of child dedication, this sermon walks honestly into a hard story and lands on good news: your love for your child is fierce and good, and it was never meant to be enough on its own. Your job is not to be God for your child. It is to keep handing your child back to the God who hears.

IN THIS MESSAGE

We trace Abraham’s two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, the painful sending away of Hagar into the wilderness of Beersheba, and the moment God hears a forgotten boy and opens a mother’s eyes to a well that was there all along. The name Ishmael itself means God hears. From there we follow Paul’s stunning move in Galatians and Romans, where the true children of Abraham are defined not by bloodline but by belonging to Christ, and we are adopted as children of God who cry out to a Father who answers.

SCRIPTURE AND REFERENCES

Genesis 21 (Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness of Beersheba)

Galatians 3:29 (heirs according to the promise)

Romans 8:14 to 8:15 (the Spirit of adoption)

1 John 3:1 (called children of God)

Walter Brueggemann, on the God of the dispossessed

CHAPTERS

00:00 What Did These Families Promise at the Child Dedication?

00:44 What Happens When a Parent’s Love Reaches Its Limit?

02:32 Who Are Abraham’s Two Sons in Genesis 21?

03:16 Why Did Sarah Send Hagar and Ishmael Into the Desert?

04:43 What Happens When a Parent’s Protection Runs Out?

05:36 Why Did Hagar Walk Away From Her Son?

06:47 What Does It Mean That God Heard the Boy?

07:27 Why Does God Hear Us Right Where We Are?

08:04 What Was the Well Hagar Could Not See?

09:52 Are Parents Supposed to Be God for Their Children?

11:02 What Does the Name Ishmael Mean?

11:46 Who Are the True Children of Abraham?

13:34 What Does It Mean to Be Adopted as a Child of God?

15:21 Where Is God When You Are in the Wilderness?

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