Scripture: Exodus 23:4-12, Luke 13:10–17

I don’t know how much bacon I consume but I’m pretty sure Arthur Broome would have a problem with how it got to my plate.

Most anyone who knows me knows bacon is my favorite food on earth. But you might not know the story of Arthur Broome. Broome spent his lifetime promoting animal welfare. He was an Anglican minister, and Broome’s convictions about caring for animals reached far beyond the pulpit.

Arthur Broome believed animals are part of God’s creation. He preached that animals’ inability to speak meant human beings needed to be their voice. Broome believed Christianity required something of the people who exercised power over animals. His convictions eventually took Broome beyond the pulpit and into places where the mercy he preached would encounter the realities of London’s economy. He would eventually give up his parish living altogether to devote himself to the cause.

Smithfield is one place where Broome’s convictions were challenged. Smithfield is where London once gathered more than a million living animals each year for sale. It was a spectacle of cruelty. The place was so nefarious it’s where Charles Dickens chose to set a terrifying journey for Oliver Twist.

Smithfield was London’s great livestock market. The market fed the slaughterhouses that supplied a growing, industrializing city’s hunger for beef, pork and lamb. But the place became synonymous with misery and suffering in the early 1800s. Livestock were driven on foot and hoof for days at a time from farms far from central London. After the long journey the animals were often penned up, purportedly without food and water. Artwork from the time shows workers beating and poking and otherwise mistreating the animals. Those old paintings somehow still fail to capture the place where Broome decided his convictions about how to follow Jesus demanded action.

Broome followed in the tradition of Christian social teaching that emphasized mercy toward animals is a duty, and cruelty toward animals is a sin. Broome squarely faced the place and the behavior that represented everything he felt compelled to change.

Broome wasn’t arguing for an end to animal agriculture. His argument was about our relationship with animals, and it had a clear point: if animals are part of God’s creation, human power over animals carries responsibilities.

Broome’s concern with animals raises an even larger question the people of God have wrestled with throughout human history: what happens when something we already claim to believe about mercy encounters the economic system from which we benefit?

As you might imagine, Jesus shows us how mercy must be the foundation of the systems that sustain us. In Luke’s Gospel lesson, Jesus heals a disabled woman on the Sabbath. The Synagogue leader objects, and calls Him out, but Jesus holds up the mirror to our behavior:

“You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?” (Luke 13:15)

I was asked to bring some thoughts about what God has to say about the ways we ought and ought not to interact with animals. Throughout our sacred text, we find a recurring concern for how human beings treat the other creatures in our care. Jesus grounds His argument with the synagogue leader in ancient Jewish teaching. We can trace the rich history of care for animals who provide for us throughout the Bible. Exodus chapter 20 includes livestock in the command to take Sabbath rest. Exodus 23:12 makes the reason explicit: stop working so that “your ox and your donkey may have relief.” Deuteronomy 25:4 forbids muzzling an ox while it threshes—the animal must be allowed to eat while working. Deuteronomy 22:4 says we may not see a fallen ox or donkey and ignore it; we must help lift it up. “The righteous know the needs of their animals,” King Solomon wrote in Proverbs (12:10).

The responsibility of caring for animals is ingrained in ancient Jewish teaching, but there’s a broader point Jesus makes about caring for life as a whole. It’s revealed in the original Greek. Luke’s Gospel quotes Jesus using the same verb for “untie” (lyei) in his example of the ox and donkey as He uses in calling for the woman to be set free (lythēnai) from her bondage.

You loose your ox. Ought not this woman be loosed? He asks.

Jesus’ point isn’t the care, but the liberation of the woman. To the crowd, His argument depended on something everyone in that synagogue apparently already accepted: mercy requires them to relieve the suffering of an animal in their care, even on the Sabbath.

The owner needs the ox. The ox produces something.

The Torah says the animal gets Sabbath. It gets food while threshing. If it falls, you lift it. If it’s thirsty, Jesus assumes you’ll interrupt Sabbath observance to water it.

The fact that we benefit economically from another living being—human or animal—doesn’t diminish our responsibility. It deepens it.

Care matters deeply in a world where living creatures suffer. Whether we are leading an ox to water or helping a hungry person eat, God’s call is to acts of mercy and the work of justice. Yes, we are called to relieve suffering. But we are also called to work that ends it.

It is easy to help when an animal or a person in front of us is hurting. The hard work is freeing those we serve from what harms them. It’s not enough to donate food to the food pantry. We have to work to stop what causes hunger in the first place.

Jesus chooses an ox to make His point. This isn’t a pet. It’s a working animal, part of its owner’s livelihood. Owners presumably have a financial interest in keeping their animals alive. People readily made room within their Sabbath observance to care for their own livestock—and therefore their own interests.

But God’s expectation of God’s people is to relieve suffering for humans and animals alike, whether we are in direct relationship with them or not. God’s people have wrestled with what that responsibility means when animals provide our food and sustain our economies. The convenience of being able to go to the store, buy a package of ground beef, or chicken - or, yes, bacon -to bring home to cook and eat insulates us from seeing the unsavoryness of animal processing.

What conditions did the creature experience while it was alive? That’s the question Exodus and Luke ask.

Did it rest? Could it move? Could it eat? Could it drink? Was it relieved when it suffered?

These days, in farming systems engineered to maximize production and profit, most of us simply don’t know. Most of the animals that become our food are now raised in large-scale systems far removed from our view. Whatever efficiencies corporate systems provide, they also allow most of us to eat animals without ever seeing how those animals lived. And so, like hunger and poverty and war and violence, when we don’t see it happening it’s far from our mind’s eye. Not seeing suffering with our own eyes, though, doesn’t let us off the hook.

The first step in the work of justice - the work of stopping the root cause of suffering - is seeing what’s going on.

Arthur Broome knew that London’s appetite for meat had consequences. And unlike us, Londoners couldn’t entirely avoid seeing them. Cattle and sheep were driven through their streets. Smithfield sat in the middle of their city. Broome decided merely seeing it wasn’t enough.

And so, two decades after he delivered his first sermon about the welfare of animals Arthur Broome put his preaching to work in the world. With his own money, the minister hired an inspector to watch Smithfield Market, document cruelty and help bring offenders before the courts.

The preacher had pointed to suffering animals and said, “they have no kind advocate.”

He hired that advocate - and went broke doing it.

Arthur Broome landed in a debtor’s prison going broke to pursue what he believed God called him to do. But it was far from the end - what he set into motion still exists. Arthur Broome founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Animal welfare has become so associated with sad Sarah McLachlan commercials that we can mistake compassion for sentimentality. For followers of Jesus our convictions must move past feeling sorry, to changing the systems that uphold suffering.

Broome hired his inspector because Smithfield needed someone to keep looking. We need someone to show us because our Smithfields have disappeared from view.

From ancient Jews to Jesus to Arthur Broome to today’s corporate farms, people of faith have long wrestled with finding the balance of how we care for all we have been given with how we personally benefit from God’s gifts. How we care for animals as we need them for food is a problem each of us touches.

Following Jesus means examining the systems that sustain us when those systems depend upon suffering we have learned not to see—the systems of economics, justice, and even religion that can turn life into abstraction. None other than Jesus Himself challenges the systems of His faith when they fail to reflect its values. The synagogue leader knew it was right to untie a thirsty animal on the Sabbath. Jesus holds up the contradiction: how can you understand mercy for the ox, but object to liberation for this suffering woman? Maybe today Jesus might challenge a religious system that would have us encounter God in gilded church spaces instead of seeing God in suffering faces.

Again and again, Jesus encountered systems that permitted suffering and asked the people who benefited from them to see differently. Here in Luke, Jesus refuses to let religious observance become an excuse for leaving anyone bound.

It is not enough to encounter Jesus in this space on Sunday morning. We follow Jesus to the places where selfishness and greed have taken root in our lives, and ask Him to show us what’s going on. Like Arthur Broome or even Jesus Himself, we have to leave our comfortable confines. There’s a reason the story of Jesus comes to us in the telling of a journey. We cannot stay stuck in our comfort. We have to follow Jesus to find the place where our own benefit is at odds with all we have been given in God’s abundance, and then really see what’s going on.

We might need someone to help us, like Arthur Broome’s Smithfield inspector, to show us where things have gone wrong. We might need to examine our grocery buggy in the checkout lane and ask questions about how the sterilized and packaged food we’re piling on the checkout lane got there. And maybe we need to make different choices about how much meat we eat, and where we get it.

So, maybe this sermon doesn’t mean I’m supposed to stop eating bacon. But I think it means I’m no longer entitled not to know how the pig lived.

Jesus says: look at the animal.

Is it tied?

Is it thirsty?

Then do something about it.

Because each of us depends on systems that sustain us. And when those systems depend upon other lives, God asks us to lean in.

To learn more.

To see what has been hidden from us.

To look closely enough to see what has been bound—and then, following Jesus, to untie it.

Note: First offered to the people of First Presbyterian Church of Pontotoc, Miss. Feb. 25, 2024.

The first problem in our journey came when someone with a badge and a gun pulled me out of the line to board our flight.

I had traveled to South Sudan on a monitoring visit for the PC(USA)-supported ministry I served at the time. The official, for his part, was fairly kind, despite the AK-47 he carried and the motion he made with it for me to join him in his truck. After a brief exchange in an office on the edge of the airfield where his boss checked my travel orders I was returned in time to catch the small, Russian prop plane to Bor, a town that was to be our base for a night before heading north to a village called Poktap.

Poktap is home to cattle farmers but mostly it’s people who have been forced from their homes by violence and war that seems to plague South Sudan. We made most of our way in our 4-wheel drive Land Cruiser. There aren’t any roads to reach Poktap, and so we used a dry, seasonal riverbed instead. It made for a fairly smooth ride - that is until the engine stalled out and our Land Cruiser eased to a stop. Clean fuel is rare in South Sudan and, after some poking around under the hood, we knew we were in for a few hours of trying to wash out a fuel filter with a bottle of water and basic hand tools.

When we finally reached our destination, we learned our job was going to be even more difficult because a battle had broken out between warring tribes fighting over cattle. In this part of the world, cattle are the most valuable form of currency. So valuable that our driver was surprised to learn I did not have any at my home in the U.S. He was even more surprised to learn that I had only one wife, and that my father-in-law did not provide me with a small herd of cattle as compensation when he wouldn’t allow me to marry both of his daughters.

My wife’s put up with a lot in our 25 years but I’m pretty sure but taking her sister as a second wife and keeping cattle in our yard as a sign of wealth are boundaries even I knew not to cross.

We slept in tents and our food was cooked over a wood fire in this pastoral community in the country’s north, near Sudan. The timing of our visit was critical. The community is only accessible for about half the year. Once the rains come, a giant earth mover used in industrial mining makes one trip each week to ferry cattle and people in its massive bed. It’s the only vehicle that can make the trip - it’s generally too muddy for anything else, so muddy helicopters and other aircraft cannot land.

Officials with guns who would impede our progress. Dirty fuel that left us stranded in a dry riverbed. Cattle wars and mud. All of it seemed like it would have been easier to stay home. To sit in the relative safety of the capital city.

But staying put wasn’t part of the vision of what we were called to bring to life.

We were called to be actors in God’s great conspiracy of love. We were called to bring medicines and tests and other supplies to help prevent malaria in a place where the infection claims more lives than almost anywhere else on the planet.

The grand vision of a beleaguered country finally free from a largely preventable and treatable disease required us to make a radical trip. To take a risk. To see the idea of something better and then leave our comfort zones to reach it. Just getting to Poktap is the kind of journey where things will absolutely go wrong. The kind of journey where we had to have faith that we could overcome every obstacle in our way in order to complete the mission.

It was one of those journeys where, if it could have gone wrong, it did.

***

I think it’s how Abram and Sarai must have felt. Abram was a wanderer. A searcher who was convinced His God was out there. That Abram wanted to have a connection with God doesn’t surprise me. He goes from living in a cave up to age 10, to being taken in by Noah, to taking Sarai as a wife and fleeing to Egypt to escape famine.

Let’s just say that didn’t work out well.

So then Abram and Sarai join Lot and his wife.

That didn’t work out so well, either.

As a wanderer and a seeker, Abram knew there was a God out there who is greater than his challenges. Greater than anything else that called his name or invited him to take action.

In his own journey where everything that could go wrong, did, Abram’s soul must have been restless and, I suspect, a little bit weary.

I live with this space in my soul, and maybe you do, too. This inner urgency that knows there is something more meaningful out there. Something more important, more righteous that we are to encounter. Now I am old enough to know the idea of contentment - of being happy with where you are and what you have - is a reflection of maturity. Intellectually, I know this. But in my heart I long for something more. Something deeper and more fulfilling than contentment. As we encounter this thing called life I think it’s only natural to struggle with the ideas of meaning and purpose, even if it’s only to help make sense of all the twists, turns and bumps in our journey.

I think there is a seeker like Abram inside each one of us.

There is no archaeological or historical proof that Abram existed. But his story is important. Abram’s experience in Genesis 17 is a new covenant God creates reflecting God’s care for humanity. It is the beginning of creating a new way of living and loving in community with one another and with God.

Abram’s encounter with God is transformative. For Abram, it brings the promise of security and stability - quite a promise to someone who had been abandoned, nearly burned to death in a furnace, a refugee from famine and Pharoah. In his largely transient life God meets Abram and says “the stability and lineage you want is here but you have to make a radical choice to journey with me.”

God wanted human beings to live and love in community differently. So differently, that God picked this wanderer and seeker from the social fringe, full of convictions and determination, to bring this beloved community to life. It’s such a shift that God gives them the new names of Abraham and Sarah as a testament to this new era of living with one another and with God. A new way of living and loving as a community that is rooted in the promise of peace, and justice. God chooses Abram to be the first of the children of Israel.

Israel, a community God calls to the work of breaking down every barrier in order to make God’s love a birthright not just for the elite, but for all.

And it all begins with God calling Abraham and Sarah to take a step into radical faith: to believe enough in the destination to be willing to leave all else behind.

Perhaps Walter Bruggeman put it best: “to stay in safety is to remain barren; to leave in risk is to have hope.”

***

Shortly after Russia attacked Ukraine I spoke with Victoria Lysenko. She knows something about this decision to stay in safety and barrenness, or to take a risk to live in hope. Through an interpreter she described the pressure to make a decision for her and her adult son, who lives with autism. Should they stay in her home, where Victoria could control her son’s environment … or should they leave, and seek safety from rockets and artillery? Just the experience of seeking refuge in a bomb shelter proved too overwhelming for her son, Andrei. He is hyper-sensitive to noise. When he is overwhelmed, he can act out physically. And because he needs predictability and sequence and order to live, she knew any journey to escape would likely bring chaos, and considerable pain in a country known for just locking away people who live with intellectual disabilities, out of sight, out of mind.

They could have stayed, Victoria and Andrei. They could have remained hunkered in their apartment in Zaporozhye (Zap-r-OH-zee) … living in that uncertain space of not knowing if the next warning siren would bring the rocket that kills them.

As the violence inched ever closer to her home, Victoria decided to lean into the risk. She made the decision to flee with her disabled son.

Vitoria and Andrei eventually made their way to Poland, where they discovered a welcome that they never thought possible. The organization I serve creates communities for people like Andrei, on whom the rest of the world often turns its back. This mother and son went from living marginalized and isolated first by stigma and then by war, to being welcomed with open arms and the assurance of safety. They believed a safer existence was possible, and so they took a step of radical faith.

Too often I think we understand the idea of a radical shift, but we don’t have enough faith to step away from the barrenness we know and into the risky world of hope. In a world that can beat us down in the blink of an eye, it can be hard to hold on to the conviction of hope. But God calls us to take risks that point to places of righteousness.

To leave our comfort zones in order to go the extra mile

To stop preventable diseases from killing children simply because they’re poor, even if the journey is full of obstacles

To imagine a new community and social order where all are fed and can feel God’s love, even if it means the risk of fleeing in wartime

To reach past the ways the powerful in this world tell us to fear other human beings, even if it means breaking with our past;

To choose a different path than violence, isolation and fear

To find our common humanity and the hope that we can make things better

It is one thing to look at these examples where human beings have stepped into a place of radical faith as otherworldly, a reflection of extreme circumstances. Yet even when our circumstances may seem mundane or ordinary, it is possible to experience the concept of radical faith. To step out of our comfort zones in order to do our part in making sure all is “on earth is as it is in heaven.”

God met Abram where he was, invited him and Sarai to risk living in hope on a journey so different it changed their names. Abraham and Sarah’s story reminds us that God’s love for us is constant. God’s love is behind us, in the past and God’s love will be, in the future. Taking a risk to live in hope is an act of radical faith and God’s love is greater than the unknowns and risks of where we are called to go … as individuals, and as a community of faith. There is a destination different from the barrenness of living in fear. The journey to get there may be difficult. It will likely be the kind of trip where things go wrong, or not according to our plans. But counting on the promise of God’s love… the promise made to Abraham; the promise made to you and to me … is all the assurance we need.

Scripture: Psalm 23, John 10:11-18 (below)

Before turning to Today’s Gospel passage, I think it important to note that it comes as part of the story of Jesus healing a blind man. Jesus had just given the blind man back his sight. The man had been told, since birth, that his blindness was a punishment for sin: the sins of others. Society had taken that and run with it, pushing the man and his family beyond the reach of the community.

This is the context in which Jesus begins to frame just who and what he is, as God among us. In the first 10 verses of John 10, Jesus begins drawing an arc that points to not only his purpose living and walking among us, but to the work of people of faith in this new covenant between human beings and God.

John 10:11-18

10:11 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

10:12 The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away--and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.

10:13 The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.

10:14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me,

10:15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.

10:16 I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.

10:17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.

10:18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”

We had spent most of the day hiking through the jungle in North Sumatra, an island in Indonesia. There were steep hills, with slippery mud underfoot. Monkeys screeched overhead, so many of them in fact that I worried about more than just rain falling on our heads and the video equipment I carried.

Our team from Church World Service was there to tell the story of a new well congregations had made possible following the 2004 tsunami - a disaster so severe that it killed nearly 168,000 people in Indonesia. More people died there than any other country affected by that catastrophic event. The well was to serve as a safe water source for dozens of families forced to live deeper in the jungle by the earthquake and tsunami. It was the only clean water source for miles, a way to keep this community safe.

The well sat at the bottom of a steep hill beside a mosque. After collecting the footage of a couple of people pouring water into jerrycans, I packed up our video gear and turned to look at the climb back up the hill. The camera, the tripod, spare batteries and media, the charger … it all added up. We divided the weight up among us and, step by step, made our way back to the top - where a gentleman waited for us with clear, cold bottled water.

Maybe he knew the bulé - that’s the slang term for someone like me in that part of the world - would only drink bottled water. Maybe he was sensitive to us in the heat of the jungle that a cold drink would quench our thirst. Maybe he just wanted to express hospitality and thanks for the well. I didn’t know why he was waiting for us at the top of the hill.

What I do know is, he was in the right place at the right time. The cold water was a lifesaver. Exactly what we needed in the moment. He told us he was the imam of the local mosque. When I thanked him for the cold water he invited us into the mosque for a rest.

The space for worship in this muslim community featured a wrap-around porch where the imam told me he sometimes slept. The porch reached out into the jungle canopy at the top of the hill. It was an impressive place to worship - a perch, an open space defined by the boundaries of the porch. I could see the edge and, in some places, walk right up to the edge, overlooking a cliff.

The boundary… the edge. The open space that we can see but is still defined by a boundary; a space with a clear edge.

“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold,” Jesus says in verse 16.

Fold in ancient Greek is aulē… and its literal meaning is an open air space. The boundary. The edge. An open space, but still a space with a perimeter.

“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold,” Jesus says.

The Greek word John uses for fold is aulē: an enclosure, often open to the sky—a courtyard or protected place where sheep might be gathered.

Jesus doesn’t say there will be one fold. He says there will be one flock. One shepherd.

The enclosure isn’t what makes them one. The shepherd does.

The temple leaders had driven the blind man out.

Jesus went looking for him.

A blind man forced to beg on the street. Jesus uses the spectacle of a healing miracle to demonstrate that God can be encountered even by people who temple leaders judged. Even people who cannot afford to pay can still belong to God, and that means everyone is worthy. In restoring his sight, Jesus reveals the worth that had been his all along—and exposes the community that had refused to see it.

The Pharisees come to investigate this miracle Jesus performed. They are focused on the healing miracle itself but Jesus beckons their focus to another counterpoint - the imagery of farms, sheep and a shepherd. In giving back the man his sight, Jesus returned the man his voice within the community. And this opens the doorway to talk about who is in and who is out among God’s chosen people.

Jesus is indicting the people who claim authority over the sheep but do not care for them. He is pointing out the responsibility to care, and that caring is more important than authority. The man born blind has just encountered two kinds of religious authority: the temple authorities, who interrogate him and throw him out.

And, then, Jesus - who seeks him out and finds him.

“I am the good shepherd,” He says.

Jesus demonstrates that each one of us belongs! And in order to prove it Jesus positions himself as going to reach those well beyond the boundaries and structures that those in society had created, the “folds” that largely keep others out.

The folds that teach us to value American lives more than other lives.

The folds that teach us to answer fear with violence.

The folds that make people prove they are worthy before we will love them.

The folds of citizenship and income and employment and religious status.

Jesus says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.”

Jesus does not promise one fold. Jesus promises one flock.

Our boundaries do not make us one. The Good Shepherd does.

When he delivered the charge at my ordination service, the Reverend Doctor Christopher Deacon made sure to remind me (and the congregation) that each of us is a minister of the church. And our tendency is that in following the model of Jesus we aim to be shepherds in our own right.

But in ministry we are never the shepherd.

Chris reminded us that each of us is a minister of the church. But he also reminded us of something I have needed to remind myself ever since: we are not the shepherd.

Maybe we’re more like sheepdogs.

Our job isn’t to decide which sheep belong. Our job isn’t to build a better fence. Our job is to keep pointing toward the Shepherd.

And some folds aren’t built around other people. Some are built around ourselves.

Perfectionism. Busyness. Status. Shame. The identities we think we have to maintain. The stories about ourselves we no longer know how to escape.

The Good News, friends, means that our folds don’t matter. As the Canadian Jesuit priest James Koester says

The good news is that we don’t need to be perfect. We only need to be found. We give thanks that the Good Shepherd continues to search for us, so that one day we will be found, gathered into His arms, and brought home.

In other words, we are known to the Good Shepherd who came to love us, warts and all. And if we can set down the folds of this world that keep us bound, inside and out … the folds that God invites us to surrender, we will experience the joy and the gift of being known.

Known to ourselves. Known to one another. Known to God.

We get glimpses of how this looks, sometimes in simple acts of kindness like a cold bottle of water from someone remarkably different from ourselves who we may not perceive to be a blessing, or an invitation to rest in spaces well beyond the folds we know. The possibilities, though, are endless, if we can push past the folds that hold us back.

And we’ll know we’ve risen above our folds… I think … from the green pastures. The still waters. The restoring of souls that only the Good Shepherd can bring.

Scripture: Psalm 130, Mark 5:21-43

It wasn’t fighting alone that made Nyathiey David leave her family’s home in South Sudan. The horror of war surrounded them like it did everyone else.

It was the gripping agony of watching her five children live in perpetual hunger that compelled her to search for a different way to live.

Her husband had left the family for reasons she didn’t share with me when I visited her. Searching for work in a country not kind to single women, even single mothers… comforting her children at night as they tried to fall asleep against the noise of war around them … and then the threat of drowning while living on a floodplain - it all proved too much for this mother of five.

She decided fleeing was worth the risk to her and to her children to find something new.

To find a new way of living.

A new system that would help her and her family survive.

Nyathiey took to the woods, subsisting on foraged berries and leaves for several days. As they wandered, her family came across first one family, and then another, all in similar, dire straits.

The few families eventually found a path where more families were traveling. Together, they headed north in search of something resembling safety.

As I sat in the vast and miserable relief camp where she and her children would land, I listened to Nyathiey David tell me her story of fleeing danger. As we talked and bathed in the awfully overpowering smell of cows that are used as currency in that part of the world, it became clear to me that she was not only searching for safety.

She was searching for another way to live.

Another way to care for her children. Another way to move beyond her tremendous pain. Another way to live in and among others that wouldn’t make it so difficult to feed her children and keep them safe.

And as she fell into that growing stream of other families fleeing similar violence, the possibility of finding a new way to live and work and care and love took root among them.

***

Finding a new way to live and work and care and love is what I hope the church can be, too. This is why I’m here, and choose to follow Jesus.

Maybe you’ve heard me say that the way I make meaning out of Jesus’ miracles is not to focus on the spectacle Jesus makes possible in the moment, but to look at the change to which each miracle points.

Jesus’ miracles point to the change that helps both the individual and the community shape a more just and righteous way of living.

These stories are the guide God gives us in how to live, and live together. The kind of togetherness that ensures we are all fed and loved and cared for. The kind of togetherness that can reach deeper than our deepest pain.

Jesus shows us something about that kind of togetherness by crossing boundaries toward people who are suffering.

Along the way to Jairus’ house we encounter the woman with the hemorrhage. Women who were menstruating were considered ritually unclean under Jewish law. She had been bleeding for twelve years. She had exhausted every resource she had in order to be healed, and she still endured pain and suffering.

And yet she reaches out through the crowd to touch Jesus.

“If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”

She crosses the boundary, and Jesus does not chastise her for it. He calls her “daughter.”

“Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”

Then Jesus arrives at Jairus’ house only to learn his little girl is already dead. Death carried its own powerful purity boundaries. Touching a corpse rendered a person ritually unclean.

But Jesus enters the room where the girl has died. He takes her little hand, soft and cool, and He brings her back to life.

A woman hemorrhaging blood and a little girl at death’s doorstep. Jesus crosses the boundaries separating him from both of them and restores these people, pushed to the edge of even our worst imagined ideas of suffering. In the face of tremendous suffering, Jesus has the courage to imagine wholeness and life.

The boundaries matter less than the suffering human being.

The crowd around Jesus could not imagine what Jesus could see. When word arrived that Jairus’ daughter had died, they told him, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?”

The situation was settled. There was nothing more to be done.

But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue:

“Do not fear, only believe.”

Do not fear, only believe.

A father’s desperate plea to heal a deathly ill daughter. A woman whose perpetual bleeding could not be solved by doctors, but who chose to believe she could be healed just by touching Jesus. Nyathiey David and her family fleeing for safety in the woods.

These are people in drastic situations who would give anything to find a different way to live and manage what life had brought them. They believed, and they made bold actions in the face of daunting challenges.

Bold actions to say, “I’m not giving up hope.”

Bold actions that crossed the boundaries that kept them bound.

Bold actions that required risking the consequences but invited one more slim opportunity to correct heartbreaking circumstances.

Their bold actions were fueled by a belief that their tragic circumstances should not define their lives. They believed they could change the equation because they could see a vision of something different.

A vision where death does not have the last say.

A vision where chronic illness and marginalization could be healed.

A vision where a mother could care for her children and keep them safe even in a country entrenched in war.

Jairus, the bleeding woman and Nyathiey David all faced fear.

Fear of losing a child to illness.

Fear born of years of illness and exclusion.

Fear of not being able to keep children safe in a time of war.

Fear is very often what holds us back.

Nyathiey stayed until she knew she had to make a change, or die. “Sometimes you must give your life to God,” she told me. “God is the only one who can protect you.”

“Do not fear, only believe,” Jesus said.

Belief doesn’t mean pretending there is nothing to fear.

There was plenty to fear.

Against the backdrop of fear, belief means believing that what is does not have to be all that can be.

And that brings the question back to us.

Do not fear, only believe.

A father’s desperate plea to heal a deathly ill daughter. A woman whose perpetual bleeding could not be solved by doctors, but who chose to believe she could be healed just by touching Jesus. Nyathiey David and her family fleeing for safety in the woods.

These are people in drastic situations who would give anything to find a different way to live and manage what life had brought them. They believed, and they made bold actions in the face of daunting challenges.

Bold actions to say, “I’m not giving up hope.”

Bold actions that crossed the boundaries that kept them bound.

Bold actions that required risking the consequences but invited one more slim opportunity to correct heartbreaking circumstances.

Their bold actions were fueled by a belief that their tragic circumstances should not define their lives. They believed they could change the equation because they could see a vision of something different.

A vision where death does not have the last say.

A vision where chronic illness and marginalization could be healed.

A vision where a mother could care for her children and keep them safe even in a country entrenched in war.

Jairus, the bleeding woman and Nyathiey David all faced fear.

Fear of losing a child to illness.

Fear born of years of illness and exclusion.

Fear of not being able to keep children safe in a time of war.

Fear is very often what holds us back.

Nyathiey stayed until she knew she had to make a change, or die. “Sometimes you must give your life to God,” she told me. “God is the only one who can protect you.”

“Do not fear, only believe,” Jesus said.

Belief doesn’t mean pretending there is nothing to fear.

There was plenty to fear.

Against the backdrop of fear, belief means believing that what is does not have to be all that can be.

And that brings the question back to us.

What are the rules and fears that keep us from imagining something different?

We have internalized rules about how to live that can keep us from following Jesus and uphold the pain of the world. Rules that prioritize citizenship or profit or sexuality or gender above trusting God that God did what God said: God told us God created each human in God’s image.

Yet we still live in a world where most human suffering is caused by human beings, and the choices we continue to make.

And so other human beings encounter poverty and make death-defying journeys to new countries just to be able to live simply and in peace.

Human beings are ostracized because they do not fit into the typical mold of straight or white or male or female.

Human beings encounter problems we know very little about.

Human beings are singled out by politicians and blamed for all our problems.

Any time any group is singled out as being beyond the reach of community, there Jesus may be found - inviting us to acts of healing and inclusion that challenge what we know or have inherited.

So this morning, as we see the same old problems play out in our world, could we finally be inspired to cross some boundaries? To leave the places where our thinking is entrenched and be pulled out of that mud into new life? Can you make that journey in search of a more loving way to live?

***

It took Nyathiey David 10 days of walking on foot, carrying one or two children at a time, to reach the Magok displacement camp where I met her.

Once she got there, she was welcomed in by a woman in a similar predicament. She, too, was trying to care for children without a husband to help. Nyathiey did not know what was to come next once she reached this place of rest and shelter.

But her new friend and host invited her to join a group of women committed to helping one another.

This small group of women — mostly mothers and widows — met to pray together, to share news and friendship.

But they also had created a small investment group. With startup funding of just around US$250, they were able to help women start businesses in this sprawling camp where thousands of others lived.

Just a couple of small enterprises to start at first, voted on by the rest of the group as the best business ideas. But once those initial businesses took off, those women repaid what they had borrowed from the group and two more businesses were chosen for startup funds.

By the time I visited with this group of women, they had grown their pool of investment funds to help women all over the camp start businesses sustaining this community of thousands.

Nyathiey started raising chicks to grow a chicken business.

The women in South Sudan gained something when they believed a new way to live in community was possible, and they acted on it.

They reached past the rules that had bound them. Rules that told them they were women and had a narrow place in our world. Rules that kept them from being included in the community. Rules that kept them from imagining something better than where they had landed, in danger and misery.

They had to “only believe” they could create something new.

And so they did. They took one small bit of help — a $250 grant from congregations like this one — and crafted a new way of living and working.

And maybe that is what “only believe” finally asks of us.

Not to believe that God will magically fix what is broken.

Not to believe that suffering isn’t real.

But to believe that the broken places within us and within our world do not have to remain as they are.

To believe enough to step beyond the fears and boundaries that tell us nothing can change.

To believe enough to imagine something different.

Because Nyathiey went looking for another way to live.

And along the way she found other people looking for it, too.

First one family.

Then another.

Then a path where others were walking.

And finally a group of women who had begun to build it together.

Another way to live.

Another way to work.

Another way to care.

Another way to love.

Maybe that’s what the church is called to believe is possible.

And then, together, to build God’s Kindom.

May it be so.

Scripture: Jonah 3-4:11; Luke 19:41-44

When Anwar Sadat stepped onto Israeli soil for the first time in 1977, I wonder how many guns were pointed at him.

Guns are the stuff of war, after all. And Sadat’s Egypt and Israel had gone to war many times.
Before he was Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat had fought against Israel as a soldier. During his lifetime Egypt and Israel had gone to war four times. By 1977, both nations had buried thousands of their own people and spent decades preparing for the next war. They exhausted fortunes that could have been used instead to do good work.

With both countries on edge and heading to war one more time, Sadat finally drew a line. Egypt was going broke building up the military it thought it needed living next door to a neighbor it feared. Egypt was terrified by Israel’s strength. With Israeli and Egyptian soldiers pointing guns at one another and the superpowers of the Cold War watching, Anwar Sadat stepped onto the floor of his country’s legislature. From there, he told the world that something had to change. Something had to stop the relentless building of arsenals. Something had to break through the noise of fear. Something had to free the stalemate of two nations out to destroy one another.
In front of lawmakers and cameras that would broadcast his words to the world, Sadat announced he wanted to find a way to peace. “I am ready to go to the ends of the earth—even to Jerusalem,” he said.

***

I was asked to preach a sermon about the United States and its war with Iran.

But I won’t.

I have traveled in places where war was not an argument on television or a question in a public-opinion poll. I have seen what war leaves behind: empty chairs at dinner tables. Broken bodies and broken lives. Families uprooted. Terrified people. Children carrying the weight of the world in burdens they did not create.

I am a pacifist—not because I underestimate violence, but because I have seen what violence does to people who never chose it.

Instead of a tailored sermon about Iran, I am led to ask different questions. Instead of asking if war with Iran is just, instead of wondering if American military might and our world-leading defense spending will ensure some righteous outcome, I want to ask what God calls us to do before we claim our role as Americans. What if God’s work throughout Scripture is not simply ending wars, but relentlessly creating peace—and inviting God’s people to join that work?

The logic beneath wars is painfully familiar. Every empire promises security through greater military power. Babylon. Assyria. Rome. Britain. Germany. And yes, the United States. We spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on our military—about one-third of all military spending on earth.

We spend a lot of all we’ve been given investing in war. Meanwhile, prophets beg for peace.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann argues that Jonah is not merely a children’s story about a whale, or even a story about a reluctant prophet. Jonah is Scripture’s challenge to the way fear and empire shape God’s people.

Jonah lived beneath the shadow of Assyria, an empire famous for conquest, torture and forcibly deporting immigrants. Israel had every reason to fear Assyria. Israel looked at Assyria and everyone thought, “those people are too dangerous for mercy. We have to bring the fight to them.”

But the author of Jonah tells a story about God loving even the people of Assyria’s capital: Nineveh. Jonah was a prophet. He believed his vocation was to speak God’s word to Israel. God revealed that the job of leading God’s people into God’s calling was to speak God’s word wherever God sent him—even if it meant sending Jonah into the heart of Israel’s greatest enemy. That Israel needed to raise an army that God would use to destroy Assyria outright.

Instead, God calls Jonah to go straight into the place he feared. Jonah discovers God’s judgment becomes an opportunity for mercy.

Jonah isn’t naïve. Jonah’s story in scripture doesn’t pretend evil isn’t real. Instead, scripture asks whether God’s mercy extends even where our fear tells us it should not.

“Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than one hundred twenty thousand persons...?” God asks Jonah. God never asks Jonah to stop being afraid. God never asks Jonah to stop seeing evil.

Instead, God sends Jonah into Nineveh to do the work of peace. Jonah is forced from his perch of righteousness and judgment and is called to relay the words that give Israel’s most feared enemy an opportunity to turn around.

Jonah does not go lovingly. He does not seek friendship. Scared out of his mind, Jonah barely cooperates. But God refuses to let fear and hatred have the last word. As nations and armies rattle sabers, God insists upon seeing human beings first.

***

That’s exactly what Anwar Sadat aimed to do. In November of 1977, he landed at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv. No Arab leader had ever set foot on Israeli soil in an official visit. But the leader of Egypt - Israel’s great adversary - stepped onto Israeli soil and met its sworn enemy face to face. Sadat planted his feet on an Israeli tarmac and shook hands with Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

It was a human gesture. It was also strategic - it changed an atmosphere of charged confrontation into an environment that might lead toward peace. In an act as simple as shaking hands on foreign soil, Sadat made it possible for the world to imagine peace - even if for a moment.

During his visit Sadat addressed Israel’s parliament. There, he didn’t surrender. He didn’t rally, or threaten, or cajole.

Instead, he spoke about the suffering of everyday people. Sadat told the world that there could be no peace in a world of occupation. He spoke about Arabs and Jews who just want to live a peaceful life, and how animosity between the two enemies no longer served anyone.

Anwar Sadat crossed a border that fear said should never be crossed.

Instead, like Jonah and Nineveh, he invested time and energy and resources in peace. He met people where they were. He “risked something big for something good.” He made himself vulnerable as peace hung in the balance.

To be sure, Anwar Sadat was no saint. His government was authoritarian, and that fragile, newborn chance for peace did not erase the sins and injustices of the past for either side. But in that moment, Sadat crossed a distance fear had made seem impossible.

The experience of living together on planet earth has set a most unfortunate stage where we’re convinced war is easier to achieve than peace. Even during the age of Jesus, Rome perfected the legion - a way to organize and prepare for wars that projected the empire’s might to the world.

Jesus knew what it was like to be surrounded by a government that made it easier to reach for war instead of peace. And so Luke’s Gospel brings us the story of Jesus seeing Jerusalem on the horizon. Other empires mimicked Rome by amassing power on the backs of the poor to fund armies. All around Jesus, rulers stockpiled weapons and promoted fear.

War raged in the world, even then. Jesus knew what it was like to move through a world ordered by empire, where rulers waged war, extracted wealth and stoked fear.

Jesus created community around another kind of power.

“As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!

“...the things that make for peace.” Jesus doesn’t speak about peace as an idea. “The things that make for peace” means peace is something we practice. It grows through mercy, justice, healing and reconciliation. Jerusalem wanted military deliverance. Jesus wept because Jerusalem could not recognize another way beyond war.

The crowd who would meet Jesus in Jerusalem wanted a messianic king who would deliver them from Roman rule. Within a generation, Jerusalem would revolt violently against Rome, and Rome’s armies would destroy it (AD 70).

Jesus sensed this doom. Luke tells us Jesus was in tears. Jesus weeps not only because Rome is strong and merciless, but because Jerusalem has failed to recognize there is another way to solve our problems besides war. It’s a way that begins when we invest in “...the things that make for peace.”

Jesus knew God’s call was for us to turn away from war. Jesus revealed how human beings are connected so much more deeply than the lies empires have told us for millennia now.

The Bible is the story of how God relates to God’s people. The story points us away from war and violence. Cain kills Abel in Genesis 4. God liberates the People of Israel from Pharoah in Exodus 14 without asking them to create another empire. God imagines the nations knowing war no more in Isaiah, chapter 2. The nations turn swords in plowshares in Micah. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus tells us in Matthew. Jesus weeps because Jerusalem does not know “the things that make for peace,” Luke 19 says. Christ is our peace, Paul writes in Ephesians. The nations are ultimately healed in Revelation.

The Bible does not hide humanity’s violence—even when God’s people are caught up in it. Yes, God called nations to war in the Bible. Yet the trajectory of Scripture is unmistakable: from the battlefield toward the plowshare, from conquest toward reconciliation, from the sword toward the cross.

The Biblical arc points towards peace, friends. But peace doesn’t happen on its own. We have to work for it. We have to show up for it, even when we’re scared. Maybe, especially when we’re scared.

No one is expecting us this morning to fly to Tehran and start hugging people. But the lesson we seem to forget is peace requires us to make different choices than we’re used to. Choices in the way we live our lives. In the way we enact our citizenship. In the conversations we have and the choices we make.

Each of us must consider the ways we contribute to building up the world of armies and might. We celebrate the roar of military flyovers but forget the planes that wow us were built for killing. We rightly honor those who have worn the uniform—many of whom understand the horror of war better than those who send them—but we rarely honor peacemakers with the same passion. We never debate the costs of war as fiercely as we debate the costs of feeding, clothing, and healing.

I have only stood on war’s doorstep, and I can tell you we should do everything within our power to stop it. War is our worst human failure. My hope is we will begin to ask why we’re so invested in killing one another. My prayer is that God will give us the courage to let go of our addiction to violence. Because in this big, dangerous world, at some point each of our hearts has to make a journey to Nineveh. God invites us to look beyond the enemies we are taught to fear and see the human beings God refuses to abandon.

That’s why Sadat risked himself for the things that make for peace.

Jonah was sent because God had not abandoned the possibility of mercy.

Jesus wept because Jerusalem could not recognize the things that make for peace.

The church is called to practice “the things that make for peace,”—even when we are afraid.

Every empire tells us fear is wisdom and force is strength.

Jesus tells us something different.

God refuses to let fear and hatred have the last word.

Even now—even in a world at war—God is relentlessly working toward peace.

The question is whether we will join in God’s work.

A note: today, one of the congregations I serve is celebrating "Christmas in July." I'll be preaching a sermon I wrote during Advent 2025 but never had the opportunity to deliver. As I reread it, I found it spoke to me differently now than it did seven months ago. Maybe it will to you as well.

Scripture: Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2: 1-20

Charlie Brown was caught up in the stress of the season. Self doubt and anxiety had gotten the best of him. With the tension of the moment and high expectations of directing the school Christmas play, ol’ Charlie loses his holiday spirit.

“Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” He asks, with pain in his voice.

The surest answer comes from Linus - timid, infantile Linus. Innocent Linus steps forward to answer the leading existential question of holiday primetime television.

Not a warrior, channeling stories like David and Goliath.

Not a silver-tongued prophet who feeds off stepping to center stage and soaking in the attention.

It’s Linus, who sucks his thumb and clutches a blanket and is the youngest and most impressionable of the Peanuts gang. Linus, who - despite his youth and innocence and belief in a magic Pumpkin that brings presents to children at Halloween - steps forward with assurance and conviction to bring Charlie Brown the answer to his struggle.

Linus explains what Christmas is all about. Linus’ power is revealed not in some sudden surge of strength. Surety and confidence don’t magically appear in his matter-of-fact recount of the story of Jesus’ birth.

Linus is powerful in that moment because of his vulnerability.

We know how nervously and timidly Linus lives his life. Even with his nervous nature, Linus steps onto the stage in front of everyone and demands focus and attention… because even in his innocence, he knows what he has to share is precisely what his community needs in the moment of angst and loss and uncertainty.

“Lights, please,” he beckons from center stage.

Whether it’s in the snow of December or the swelter of July, followers of Jesus are called to let the miracle of Christmas be born again within us. Each of us in our own way pays a visit to that innocent and impressionable place that still lives inside each one of us, even now.

It’s a place where we feel pure, and loved. A place we often keep guarded to stay safe. It’s that most vulnerable, tender place in our hearts. We might keep it hidden from the world because it’d just hurt too much if we were rejected or shamed or teased about it.

But it’s still there, that place within us that melts when we see old friends embrace. That place where we are reminded of times, maybe long ago, when we felt at peace.

It’s a feeling that can exist even if we have complicated feelings about Christmas. For many, there’s significant pain in watching the spectacle of Christmas unfold. Pain that comes when we are reminded that a loved one is now gone… or the disappointment of a broken relationship… or the indifference we feel when faced with suffering because we are overwhelmed by so much of it… this world may make it difficult to feel, or even see a way towards, the joy of childhood Christmas innocence.

The joy of Christmas and the joy of Advent are not the same. For years I insisted on keeping Advent and Christmas neatly separated. Advent was the season of longing. Christmas was the season that commerce swallowed whole. But these days I’m less interested in protecting those distinctions. In a world where one in five children goes to bed hungry... I’ll take any invitation that leads us back toward hope. I’d welcome any chance that brings us back to a place of hope and innocence. It’s that place where we feel totally safe, and loved. That place we carry within our hearts where we can feel hope coming to life, light shining in even the darkest of nights.

The world doesn’t need tougher Christians. It needs followers of Jesus who are willing to become vulnerable enough to let God’s love be born in them again.

Time and place might remind us where this place of vulnerability lives in our hearts. I can still feel the carpet of my grandparents’ living room under me while waiting to see Al Schottelkotte’s 11 p.m. Christmas Eve newscast in Cincinnati, tracking Santa with NORAD’s help. News features telling feel-good stories of strangers helping one another that made me think, even as a kid, “maybe there is a God after all.”

I think God waits for us in those tender places where we reach for the memory of childhood Christmases. Reaching for any tender memory requires vulnerability. We get there by peeling off the armor that helps us survive living in a harsh world. And when we do reach for that place of innocence deep within us, we are reminded that each of us carries love in our hearts.

It can arrive new, like Advent itself, again and again and again. This is the Advent I need and we need, even if it comes wrapped in brown paper packages, tied up in string.

Maybe we need the reminder that God came to be with us as a baby with absolutely no political power or wealth, a refugee who would reveal God’s love for the world.

Tender, vulnerable love. We seek it, at Christmastime.

Where is your tender moment?

Where is that place where you feel warmth and connection to others? Where is the place in your journey where you had the presence of mind to notice that you feel safe and secure and joy in innocence?

The journey through Advent is one to discover a God who is with us in our most vulnerable places. And having experienced the warm richness of God’s love held in our most vulnerable places, we have the opportunity to share that love so that it compels us to follow Jesus in living and loving.

… To welcome the stranger with the innocence of a child sharing candy from her Christmas stocking.

… To push past how we judge one another to see the child of wonder that lives inside even the most infuriating people we encounter.

… To celebrate the moment when our defenses and insecurities fall away to connect with one another like innocent children.

… To root ourselves in finding our belief, once again, that we don’t have to live in a world where mass shootings are common. To believe in a world of peace through justice with dough-eyed optimism. To know there is a better way to live than… how we live now.

As we seek Christmas in July, may we do more than just believe in the Christmas story. May we do more than simply be reminded that the Savior to humankind was born on the wrong side of the tracks in Bethlehem. May we bring whatever magic we feel inside our hearts at Christmas time to our lives every day. May we be innocent enough to believe in the power of a common connection through God’s love.

And even if we cannot find the joy and wonder of Christmas because of the pain of the past or the heat of July, may we still find space in our hearts to be filled with love and possibility. May we reach deep within, to our most tender selves, and share it in a world thirsty for authenticity. For innocence. For a new way of living and loving in community that we can create and share, together.

The magic that we can bring to life again and again and again begins for us when we celebrate the birth of the one who would show us not just how to live but how to come to life in God’s world.

What will we do, having received this gift?

What might you share from that place of inner love and joy that is precisely what our community needs in this moment of angst and uncertainty?

“The weary world rejoices,” the old hymn says. Perhaps it rejoices whenever Christ is born again in us—whenever we are courageous enough to let that vulnerable place become visible to the world.

And so, like Linus standing quietly in the spotlight, perhaps our cue is simply this:

“Lights, please.”

Scripture: Psalm 86:11-17, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis was a physician in Vienna. He worked at one of the leading hospitals in Europe when his friend, a pathologist, died.

The friend cut himself while performing an autopsy. The hospital’s doctors performed autopsies every morning to try to learn as much as they could. Semmelweis, though, noticed something. His friend’s symptoms closely matched those of mothers dying of childbed fever.

Childbed fever was very common, even for women giving birth in a noteworthy Vienna hospital. Semmelweis developed a theory that doctors were carrying something from the cadavers they dissected to mothers in labor. He theorized doctors carried what he called “cadaverous particles” from the autopsy table to the labor and delivery room.

And so Semmelweis ordered his medical students to wash their hands with a chlorinated solution before tending to expectant mothers.

Deaths of childbed fever plummeted.

But suspicion about Ignaz Semmelweis rose.

Semmelweis couldn’t explain why washing hands kept mothers safe. It was well before the discovery of microbes and bacteria. And so, in the absence of fact, his peer doctors were highly offended by the suggestion that they were responsible for killing their patients.

Some colleagues ignored him.

Others mocked him.

The hospital eventually fired him.

Isolated and increasingly consumed by the rejection of his colleagues, Semmelweis’ health and behavior deteriorated. He was committed to an asylum, where he died two weeks later of…an infection. What else?

The problem wasn’t Semmelweis. He wasn’t crazy.

The problem was that everyone was so sure he was wrong.

***

Jesus brings us a lesson about judgment in the form of a parable. Matthew’s Gospel is sometimes described as the Gospel of parables. Matthew’s Jesus is an existential thinker and teacher, trying to help human beings unlock the mysteries of God through stories He told.

Parables are not merely codes whose details carry one secret meaning. They are stories that draw us into God’s world and force us to examine the world we have made. In this parable, Matthew names the field as the world. Good and evil grow together, and final judgment belongs to God.

Matthew’s Gospel arrived in ancient hands at a time of considerable trial for the people of Israel. Jerusalem had fallen to the Romans. The Temple had been destroyed. Thousands died. Jewish life was being reorganized without the Temple, and Christians were increasingly being pushed out of the synagogue.

Leaders in Matthew’s early church thought Jesus would return any day now. Instead, they are left waiting, feeling increasingly alienated and pushed aside. They’re asking questions like:

“Did we misunderstand God’s promises?”

“Why hasn’t Jesus returned?”

“Why do the wicked still prosper?”

“Why does evil seem to be winning?”

Matthew’s Gospel was offered to speak into anxieties and fears of that ancient moment. We continue to hold questions like these. And if we engage Matthew’s parables to learn from them, we begin to see how our judgment keeps us from building God’s Kindom in the here and now.

***

Ignaz Semmelweis was pushed aside by his peers because there was much they did not know. His suggestion that his fellow doctors were doing something that was harming their patients cut to the quick of their egos. Doctors pride themselves on science and knowledge. Revealing a danger they had failed to recognize challenged their egos. They needed those egos to face life and death every day but, sometimes, knowing more invites even more fear of life’s unknowns.

In our world of unknowns, our judgement brings us the illusion of certainty. It is a powerful feeling to be certain of something in this world. The doctors in Semmelweis’ orbit gained their power from the knowledge autopsies brought. Semmelweis spotted a problem in that system, and judgment against him for challenging it was swift.

He was crazy, they said.

His fellow doctors decided Semmelweis was a weed that threatened the whole field. But less than a generation later the wheat of Semmelweis’ discovery was revealed. Those doctors did not know researchers would discover infections and bacteria just a few decades later.

But they were so sure of their convictions, they were willing to sacrifice a relationship with a colleague and friend.

Our judgment might have unintended consequences. We might lock away a brilliant scientist whose discovery would ultimately save lives. Or we might cast off the person who could find the cure to cancer because they didn’t meet the judgment of our moral standards. Or we might dismiss someone we disagree with politically who could turn out to be someone who shares our greatest hurt, or perhaps our deepest longing? Or maybe we’re convinced one of our neighbors just doesn’t belong. Our judgment keeps us from having to admit we’re no better or worse than anyone else. “Each of us, because he compares himself with others, indulges in a false persuasion of his own righteousness,” John Calvin writes in his Institutes.

It’s so much easier just to pluck that weed, dammit, than to think we’re anything but wheat.

God has given us fertile soil for growth. The problem is not that we make judgments. We have to discern right from wrong. We have to recognize danger, protect the vulnerable, and hold one another accountable. But discernment becomes condemnation when we stop judging actions and begin declaring the whole person worthless. We lose sight of the human being. And where we lose sight of the human, we lose sight of God.

We often lose sight of the human being when they are hidden from our view by the systems that sustain us. “They” broke the law. “They” cheated the system. I waited my turn, why shouldn’t “they?” I work hard and “they” should, too.

When our systems of justice, of citizenship, of education, of democracy, and most importantly - of religion - become tools to denigrate one another, and blind us to the image of God in one another, that’s when evil gets to work. Our judgment starts the process. In the parable, the servants assume they can remove evil without damaging goodness. Jesus says the roots are intertwined. Sometimes our attempts to purify the field simply spread the infection. We foul fertile soil.

The arc of the Biblical story leads us away from structures that define power as a means of dominance, and it points us towards the universality of love. Love that is slow to condemn and quick to embrace. Love that offers wide latitude when our narrow views are challenged. Love big enough to hold justice in one hand and grace in the other.

Can you imagine a world where we base the systems that keep us safe, the systems that hold us up, are rooted in love instead of fear?

Jesus knew we’d be quick to judge one another. Jesus knew Jews living under Roman rule would turn against one another as they suffered. Jesus knew people needed someone to blame for the pain of living under the Emperor’s bootheel.

Jesus knew what happens when human judgment is armed with the power of a corrupted government. Rome crucified Him. Religious authorities justified it. The gathered crowd was swept into it. Judgment offered everyone the comfort of believing that one troublesome man was the problem.

“Crucify Him!” They shouted, as they turned their backs on the one who healed and fed and loved.

Our capacity for judgment must keep us safe. But our certainty about one another can get in the way of God’s work in our hearts. Judgment is a barrier to building God’s Kindom. Matthew assures us God’s Kindom is already taking hold but in ways we cannot see and will certainly not expect. The ancient Jews in Jesus’ life expected the Kindom to arrive through God’s decisive judgment. Their hope was that God would vindicate their suffering, defeat their oppressors, and usher in an age of justice.

We understand that longing. We carry it, too.

Like many people living under oppression, ancient Jews wanted to be delivered from the weight of fear. Jesus’ neighbors longed for God to act quickly to deliver them.

Jesus showed them the way. Jesus shows us the way, too.

A Kindom within our reach, if we’re just patient enough with one another.

A Kindom where victory is revealed steadily, as we grow.

A Kindom where instead of certainty, we are fine with “I don’t know.”

A Kindom of patience we cultivate together, building systems that recognize people rather than reduce them to categories.

God’s love takes root in places we cannot yet see.

Sometimes what looks like a weed today will nourish tomorrow’s harvest.

Sometimes the greatest act of faith is not deciding who’s in and who’s out.

Sometimes the greatest act of faith is simply trusting the Farmer.

Scripture: Exodus 1:15-2:10, Mark 2:23-3:6

A few weeks ago, Alexandra’s phone rang with news that police had seized her husband for failing to stop at a stop sign.

“They told him he could pay the fine and they would let him go,” she said. “He paid the fine, but they arrested him anyway.”

We sat in front of a trailer her family was renting as she shared her story. She told me it was her neighbors who first told her about the arrest. Her husband is the father of their two children, and a third will arrive any day now. He has been remanded to federal custody in Tennessee, pending deportation. He worked in construction, and Alexandra worked as a painter.

She has spoken with her husband from jail. She fears for his safety once he lands in Honduras.

Gangs in their neighborhood in Tegucigalpa extorted Alexandra’s family by kidnapping her father. When the family couldn’t pay the ransom, Alexandra’s father was killed.

That was three years ago. It is what compelled her family to make the dangerous journey to the United States with their children.

“We didn’t have any other choice,” she said. “It was too dangerous to stay.”

Gang violence is entrenched across Honduras. Gangs prey on young people, forcing them to join by threatening their families: families like Alexandra’s, who have never had anything to do with organized crime. When I was in Honduras in 2020, I spoke with several parents who were weighing this heartbreaking decision: should they keep their children coming of age as teenagers close at hand but facing the daily threat of gang pressure and violence, or should they send their children barely in their teens to follow the well-trod path north, just for the hope of safety?

***

A suggestion card asked me to preach a sermon about “the morality of breaking small laws for small comforts - how big of a law are you willing to break for your child?”

Children are a guiding beacon for many of us. In them, we place our love and affection, our hopes and our dreams. As it has been described, our children become part of our hearts that live outside of our bodies. In children we see love on display. In children, we are reminded that love can help us relate to one another.

I think Shiprah and Puah knew this well. As midwives, they had front row seats to the shift children can bring to family and community. Even the greatest of differences can be made smooth thanks to the presence of kids. I don’t care how big and tough you might seem - when a toddler hands you a toy phone, you pretend to answer it.

Shiprah and Puah surely saw hearts of stone come alive when the gift of life drew in the powerful people they served. And so Pharaoh’s order to kill the firstborn male in every Hebrew household ran against everything they knew about God.

Love required them to break the law, even as they worked closely for the person who made the law.

Shiprah and Puah were not queens or prophets or generals. They were ordinary working women whom God made heroes. They knew the Pharaoh’s order was cruel. They knew Pharaoh’s infanticide ran against God’s call to love and to serve.

And so they broke the law to uphold morality. For centuries Christian thinkers have juxtaposed what is legal and what is moral. In the fourth century, Saint Augustine wrote, “An unjust law is no law at all.” Martin Luther King quotes him in his Letters from a Birmingham Jail.

Legality seeks the blessing of authority. Morality demands the blessing of love. Legality is a tool as much as morality is a calling.

Pharaoh’s power was threatened by unrest among his ancient Hebrew slaves. So he reached for the rule of law to extinguish the threat. When the power he held blinded him to killing, the Pharaoh simply made killing legal. Legality legitimizing evil is an ancient problem we can’t seem to shake.

American slavery was legal. The Jim Crow south was legal. The persecution and murder of Jews under Nazi rule was legal.

Legality and morality are different. Jesus never told us to break the law. But Jesus modeled for us how to fulfill the law through love.

He healed the destitute and the powerful in a culture of deep division to show how much we are alike.

He fed all who were hungry not because it was legal, but because each of us experiences hunger.

He welcomed the stranger not because a law compelled Him but because in a world where each of us knows what it is like to be lost, we can also experience what it’s like to be found.

And so as He walked through that grain field, He challenged what people had made of the law of the Sabbath. Jesus healed on the sabbath to show the law alone will never fix what makes us sick.

When the Pharisees witnessed a caring heart breaking the law to meet human need, they knew they were fighting a battle much greater than the ancient struggle between legality and morality. They witnessed one of the most powerful forces in the universe - a caring heart connecting with someone in need.

God and God’s power is revealed when caring hearts connect. This is threatening to the earthly understanding of power because love can operate independently of human law. As they watched Jesus love His way through territory governed by people who claimed power through the law, they were threatened that love would beat the law. That’s when religious power and government power aligned to launch a plan to kill. The conspiracy to execute Jesus was born.

It was to be one more killing that was perfectly legal.

Killing is illegal in Honduras, of course, but - like everywhere else, the law can’t stop it. Gang violence is so entrenched in Honduras that our disaster assessment team could not function like we did in other places… even places where we worked in the middle of wars. A trip between neighborhoods that should have taken only 5 minutes took an hour or more, just to navigate between territories of rival gangs.

We were only able to travel between communities because a local church group guaranteed our safety. There, churches are an intermediary between gangs and the government. Where laws could not keep us safe, where guns failed to project enough power, the church was able to ensure connection and community. Love beats the law again, even the unwritten laws of gang warfare.

“The first task of the church is not to make the world more just but to make the world the world,” Christian theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas often says. Love is what compels us to see past laws and nationality and gang allegiance to see human beings, and all we share in common.

Caring for human beings is not a Republican issue. It is not a Democrat issue. But it is absolutely an issue for the church.

We should never assume that what the state declares lawful is therefore God’s will. Love is the measure by which we should judge every law. That’s what Shiprah, Puah and Jesus all did. They made loving choices that served human beings.

The law prescribed death, so Shiprah and Puah found a way to preserve life. The law kept hungry and sick people waiting, so Jesus fed and healed right when they were needed most.

Love saves the day in times when the law makes no sense. Love is the only thing that has ever saved anyone. Love is the only thing that will save us now.

Alexandra loves her family. The threats her family endured are common. With violence all around them, Alexandra, her husband and their young children came north to the U.S. three years ago. It was a trip that took them 5 months, traveling mostly on foot.

Alexandra and her husband knew it was illegal to cross into the United States but they did so anyway. They didn’t want to break the law. They crossed because they loved their children too much to leave them in danger.

The family settled in Oxford because they knew of others who had found work here. But following the deportation of her husband, fear has driven her community underground. Even others here without documentation have shunned her family in fear.

“Nobody wants to help us,” she said.

Alexandra’s children are 13 and 11. Because of her pregnancy, she can no longer continue working as a painter. “I’m anxious about giving birth while my husband is away, and there’s so much hate right now,” she said.

This isn’t a foreign mission field. This is here, now.

Shiprah, Puah and Jesus show us how love responds to hate and fear. Acting in love to meet human need is the way to follow Jesus. Acting in love will not always keep us safe, and it surely will not keep us legal. Legality has never been a sure bet for safety. Every law must finally answer to the command to love God and neighbor.

Caring hearts connecting to love and to serve has been the only fundamental force that ever changed anything for the better. And until we, as followers of Jesus, connect and serve human beings, we will feel like strangers in a strange land. We will be stuck under the cloud of violence, and forced to consider our own journey to safety. We will feel the weight of decisions that feel like life and death. We will feel caught in a jail of division and divisiveness.

Love is the only way out of the problems we face.

Love is the only thing that ever saves anyone.

Love saved Moses.

Love healed the man with the withered hand.

Love stood taller than the tool of legal killing known as the cross.

Love compelled Alexandra and her family to seek safety.

The law holds power.

But love holds more.

May God give us the courage to know the difference.

I have seen proof of the resurrection in unlikely places all over this planet. One of them was in a bar on an Army base in Missouri.

There is a reason why Fort Leonard Wood is known colloquially as Fort “Lost in the Woods.” It’s a remote post in Missouri, and I was sent there by National Public Radio just as the U.S. war in Afghanistan began in 2001. At that time, land mines were buried everywhere in Afghanistan. And it turns out the U.S. government trained more people to disarm landmines at a special school in Fort Leonard Wood than anywhere else.

The night before my formal reporting began, my contact invited me to join some of the school’s teachers at a former officers club that became the post’s bar.

As we gathered around our beers, a pattern in the stories of how each instructor came to teach at this center became clear. The instructors had all served in special forces, specializing in the use of explosives. But what held them together wasn’t the camaraderie of service or the shared experience at being placed in a remote post.

It was the opportunity to turn the skills they had learned for killing into skills for saving lives. Soldiers, sailors and Marines who had once been experts at wielding death had found new life teaching colleagues and humanitarians from all over the world how to disarm landmines.

Unlike most weapons, landmines continue killing and maiming civilians for years or even decades after a conflict ends. Nearly all of the people killed by landmines in 2024 were civilians. This crew knew the score. Their work took one of the most deadly weapons on the planet - and sought to foster life through their understanding of it.

***

Again and again, the Biblical story tells of God bringing life out of death. Whether we’re talking about Moses lifting a bronze serpent above the people or Roman soldiers lifting Jesus on the cross, the invitation has always been for human beings to stare directly at what kills us and to be transformed by it.

As he led his people through the wilderness, Moses heard the cries of the freed slaves he led of being plagued by venomous snakes. Snakes hold significant symbolism in ancient literature, including the Bible. At first glance we think “yikes! A snake!” and fear their bites.

But snakes can also shed their skin and be transformed into new life. So all at once they can be characters that purvey wisdom and conniving, death and healing, risk and protection.

Maybe snakes are more like us than we think.

God commands Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and to raise it above the people. God commands Moses to lift up the image of the very thing that is killing the people. Deliverance from what plagues them will not come from hiding from it. Just as we move through our own wildernesses in life, Moses’ people were going to have to make the journey no matter what. As they moved towards deliverance from the Wilderness the people looked at the danger they faced, and, somehow, were transformed into faithfulness because of it.

In ancient Jewish thinking, this kind of transformation was not about living a life of righteousness to gain entry into heaven. Ancient Jews thought of time in two realms - the current age, and the age to come. The age to come is the new world, where righteousness reigns.

John tells us Jesus looked at that strange story from Numbers and said, “That’s me.” Rome lifted Jesus on a cross to display its power and shame another victim. John insists something altogether different happened there. What the empire intended as an instrument of death, God transformed into the fullest revelation of divine love.

For centuries our English Bibles have translated Jesus’ promise as “eternal life.” It’s a faithful translation but one that sells the meaning short. If John 3:16 were all we had, we might conclude that “eternal life” is the destination. Many have come to hear this verse and its stand-alone quotability as the goal of our faith. It’s as though Jesus only spoke about what happens after we die. Yes, “eternal life” is specifically named but John’s Gospel, and Jesus, have so much more in mind.

Throughout the Gospel that bears his name, John spends a lot of time framing the idea where the original Greek phrasing points: that to know God is to already belong to the coming age. “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent,” Chapter 17 tells us. For John, eternal life is more than literal continued existence. Eternal life is where God’s love is discovered and changes us. To live eternally is to know and live like we belong to God, in life and in death. The Greek text of John’s Gospel is multidimensional - eternal life is not discovered when we die. It is discovered when we come alive, even in the here and now.

We come alive when we have enough faithfulness to see the reality of what kills us, and to be transformed by it.

***

The stories I heard from those hardened military men that night in Missouri more than 25 years ago now have stayed with me ever since. Each served in an elite unit that specialized in killing.

But they could kill no more.

Their words were sparse. They didn’t regale me with stories of heroism or patriotism that blinded them to killing others. Instead, each had a transformation. They had stared death in the face, and something compelled them to put their skills to use in helping others live.

We have the same opportunity. We can continue to make choices that celebrate violence, that blind us to the image of God in others, that keep us wandering in the wilderness looking for proof of God in gimmicks and empty displays of piety.

Our time here is too short to search for very long. When I sit with people who are dying, or who are facing a great unknown about how much time they have left in this life, quoting John 3:16 is not how I bring reassurance. I remind those I’m accompanying in these sacred, end-of-life times that the promise of our baptism is that in life and in death we belong to God. We are held in God’s embrace, from before we take our first breath until we breathe our last.

I’m bringing this message because a young member of our congregation asked me to preach about John 3:16. My hope is that because of this suggestion, we all might know the promise of being held by God is far greater than what happens to our own selves when we die. God’s promise is much greater than the verse scribbled onto a sign waving at us on ESPN.

John 3:16 is about so much more than our own eternal lives. It is about how we connect with God in the here and now. It is about how we build God’s Kindom by restoring life in every way we can. It is about how we take our understanding of what kills us and work to stop the forces of death.

The soldiers I met in Missouri knew life and death in the starkest of terms.

They knew exactly how to bury a landmine.

They also learned how to find one.

To kneel beside it.

To uncover it carefully.

To disarm it.

That’s holy work each of us can do with the landmines in our world.

We all carry buried explosives inside us—fear, resentment, prejudice, pride. Left hidden, they wound whoever comes near. The invitation of John 3 is not to pretend those mines aren’t there. It is to follow the lead of Moses - to bring whatever deals death into the light, trusting that the God who so loved the world can transform even the things that once dealt death into instruments of life.

That is eternal life.

Not merely living forever.

But beginning, even now, to live as though God’s eternal life has already taken hold of us.

Scripture

I arrived in Pakistan in 2009, in the middle of a war.

Curbing to US pressure, Pakistan’s military declared war on the Taliban. Western pressure was not well received in Pakistan, and I was told over and over again that I should fear for my safety.

We drove north out of Islamabad at dawn on a Saturday morning towards Mardan, a city not too far from the Afghanistan border. I was part of a team from Church World Service surveying a displacement camp we supported, where people fleeing fighting sought refuge. It was my first experience in a war zone, and I was nervous.

Seeing my pale white skin, would someone target me?

How would I be received?

Would my presence as an American put my Pakistani colleagues at risk?

As we made our way into the crowded camp I nervously entered a tent about the size of a small office. Through an interpreter I introduced myself and asked if the family could share with me the story of what brought them to this dusty camp, ringed with a barbed wire fence.

“In a moment,” the father said. “First please have some tea.”

The simple act of offering me hospitality interrupted my fear. It is a moment in my life that embodies Matthew’s 10th chapter in flesh and blood. The cup of tea I was offered is not unlike Jesus’ “cup of cold water.”

Tea didn’t change the political situation. A cup of cold water would not end the war, or allow families to return home.

Yet the simple act of hospitality I was offered by a family enduring war - among our worst failures as human beings - calmed my fear. Taking a seat in this family’s tent in the shade from the hot sun set the stage for deeper connection. It was an act of kindness that said to me, “Before we discuss anything else, let’s recognize each other as human beings.”

The world teaches us suspicion of what we don’t know, and especially people we don’t know.

War compels us to expect hostility.

Politics forces us to sort people into categories.

Fear teaches us to protect ourselves first.

And yet, despite our failure to see the image of God in one another, God still expects hospitality. Not grand gestures - just tea. A cup of cool water. A spot to sit in the shade.

Hospitality is often astonishing because it is ordinary. It is a tool available to each one of us that opens the possibility of relationship. A family who welcomed me in the middle of losing almost everything offered me something. Before I could ask this family about their story, we needed to find a common space with one another. It came in a swaddle and weighed about 7 pounds.

Their first son was born just days after they arrived at the camp. And when they showed him to me, it was like we became parents together. We became fellow human beings together, and only after a cup of tea could the harder story of war experience be told.

Hospitality didn’t avoid suffering. Hospitality created enough trust to bear witness to it.

God was with us in that tent as I heard their story of being forced at gunpoint from their home. God was present as they described watching their next-door neighbor executed in his front yard. Hospitality did not invite God into that tent. God was already there. Hospitality simply opened my eyes to recognize God’s presence among us.

God’s own life is relationship. From the beginning, Scripture reveals a God who creates, loves, speaks, sends, and receives in relationship. The Holy Trinity reflects God’s intention of relationship. Our relationship with God becomes the foundation for every other relationship we have.

Hospitality sets the intention in our relationships. Whether it’s as simple as wishing a cashier a good day, or inviting a friend to share how their day is going over a coffee, hospitality creates the space where we discover God already waiting for us.

Hospitality is simple - but it always costs us something.

Sometimes it costs our pride.

Sometimes it costs our certainty.

Sometimes it costs our comfort.

But every time we offer hospitality, it opens the possibility that we can discover God in someone else. We may not know where God might take our relationships, and so we are compelled to trust.

Abraham had to trust God. He loved Isaac more than anything in the world because Isaac wasn’t simply his son. Isaac was God’s promise made flesh.

And yet Abraham discovered that God’s promise did not depend upon Abraham’s grasp. It depended on trust.

The ram appears, and Isaac lives. God proves trustworthy.

The God Abraham follows is not a God who delights in sacrifice.

The God Abraham follows is a God who provides life.

The God Abraham follows wants us to come alive, even when we are afraid. And our fear keeps us from living in relationship with one another.

Right now, fear has so many of us tightening our grip.

We tighten our grip on our politics.

We tighten our grip on our identities.

We tighten our grip on our certainty.

We tighten our grip on our resources.

And the tighter we grip, the harder it becomes to receive another human the way Jesus asks us to.

As Jesus prepared His disciples to go in His name and share His love and create His church, His advice wasn’t about what to pack or how to judge one another. It was about Welcome. Hospitality. Care. Concern. Jesus sends His disciples out into the world, and you and me, to be practitioners of radical welcome.

The kind of welcome that doesn’t put any qualifier on our kindness.

The kind of welcome that does not make compassion contingent upon proving one’s worthiness.

The kind of welcome that always listens.

The kind of welcome that calls us to surrender our fear of one another in exchange for being open and vulnerable.

In my own fearful moment in northern Pakistan, we talked about babies.

We laughed about sleepless nights.

We compared the joy and exhaustion of becoming fathers.

For a little while, there wasn’t an American and a Pakistani.

There were simply two dads. There in that tent the rest of the world faded away. The barbed wire faded. The army trucks faded. The politics faded. The passports faded.

Everything else that could have separated us faded away because of a simple act of hospitality. Vulnerable people who clearly knew that my country had called theirs to war, could have resented me. I was fearful. They may have been angry.

We entered that tent as strangers.

We left it as neighbors. Not because the war had ended. Not because the politics had changed. Not because either of us had won an argument.

But because one family who had lost almost everything still found enough grace to offer a frightened stranger a cup of tea.

And this is what Jesus sends His disciples into the world to do.

Scripture

Last week I asked members of the congregations I serve, and other friends through social media, to contribute to a fund to help families in my community whose breadwinners have been deported.

I was prepared to witness some generosity.

I was not prepared to encounter contempt.

I guess I should have been, given social media’s ability to turn climbing on the high horse of judgement into a thunderdome sport. It’s easier to throw a punch with a keyboard than to deliver the blow in person.

“ICE doing their job and following the laws of our country,” was the first challenge to my plea for help.

“I wonder if this whole situation could be avoided by taking the hard (but legal) route to citizenship?” was the second.

These comments come from two different people from my world who I’ve claimed as friends for decades. One of them is from my oldest friend besides my sister - someone who I don’t doubt loves me, just as I love him. Dearly.

But even if this exchange of opinion comes from the muck and mire of a digital platform known for hot tempers and instant division, it’s evidence of our lesson from scripture today.

Abiding our principles means sticking with our convictions even when we are challenged. For me, the fundamental principle of following Jesus is always prioritizing care for one another above everything else. The first act of service between human beings in Scripture is not giving someone a meal. It is giving away power, and that always costs us something.

It’s a debatable point, but Abraham giving away land to Lot might be the first act of one human choosing to serve another in the Bible. Abraham was an elder and a patriarch who benefitted from hierarchical structure. He gave away land to keep the peace, even though the law and custom and status all would have entitled him to rest comfortably, and watch suffering ensue around him.

An abundance of flocks and herds meant the land could not support families. Facing scarcity, the herdsmen and shepherds took to fighting. Abraham sees an opportunity to make peace, and so he gives away his land. His decision went deeper than giving someone a meal. Abraham’s ownership of land was his power.

Even without social media, can you imagine the comments?

“Lot didn’t follow the law. He didn’t get that land legally.”

“The herdsmen and shepherds should just follow the rules for securing grazing land, and there’d be no suffering.”

Any time power is shared, those who benefit from the existing order - the way things are - are threatened. Disturbing the structures that uphold the law and its power also disturbs identity for those who find power in participating in it. It is a threat to the existing order, and any threat to power always brings with it expressions of judgement and fear.

Judgement that our actions are not just.

We fear we might lose something of ourselves when we share power.

Our sense of power holds considerable claim on us. The only force capable of overcoming power’s grip on us is love.

And as Jesus showed us, love sometimes costs us something.

This morning’s Gospel lesson is titled, “The Cost of Discipleship.” Jesus is preparing the 12 to go out into the world to love and to serve. Travelers in the ancient near east faced a host of threats - robberies. Disease and injury. Rejection and hostility from fear of difference. And yet Jesus spends considerable time making sure they understand the real threats in what it means to follow Him.

The threat of pitting sons against fathers, and daughters against mothers.

The danger of revealing foes under the same roof.

Jesus turns His Disciples, and us, away from their old lives and points squarely at love. Throughout His ministry, Jesus describes a new social order where love is the ultimate commodity. Power is shared in the Kindom. Everyone gets what everyone needs when we make all “on earth as it is in heaven.”

In a world where we fear scarcity, the abundance of love Jesus modeled and asks us to build is threatening.

The world Jesus calls us to build is a world where we hold the abundance of all God has given so that human beings can flourish. There is enough room for all our herds and flocks to graze, and that perspective threatens the selfishness of our social order.

The path Jesus sets for us puts human well being ahead of personal gain.

It puts humanity ahead of nationalism.

Inclusion, ahead of exclusivity.

Compassion, above rules that diminish human dignity.

These are the decisions that build the Kindom. They will ruffle feathers, and if we follow Jesus long enough, it will challenge our relationships. It might even divide us.

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.”

In the Greek, Jesus uses the word for a sword, but His emphasis is not on wielding a weapon. He is describing the dividing edge of truth and the power we experience when love compels us to choose between God’s Kindom and the world’s expectations. When love challenges fear, when compassion challenges exclusion, when mercy challenges power, relationships are often tested.

Jesus knew the Disciples would encounter people who would struggle against their power to love and heal and serve. And that struggle would put their relationships to the test. It would “... set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (v. 35-36).

The act of following Jesus was going to cost the Disciples relationships they trusted and even familial connection. If our love for Jesus is authentic then we must be willing for it to cost us something. Jesus wants the Disciples to head out on their journey with their eyes wide open, and their hearts prepared to pay the costs of following Him.

But the rewards are great. Our work in following Jesus is to make more loving choices.

Choices that put human beings ahead of nationality or religion.

Choices that require us to speak up for the cause of love.

Choices that may put us at odds with people we love and trust.

Of course, the Disciples did not have a way to broadcast every feeling they had, like we do. None of them were posting on walls or doing it for the ‘gram.

Making more loving choices goes deeper than social media’s veneer. Making more loving choices points us at deeper, more fulfilling connections that can hold disagreement and strife. Rooting our choices in love makes our decisions so much easier to carry.

We can give away the land and still feel rich.

We can care for others even when the law would tell us not to, and still feel strong even when our friends and loved ones challenge us about it.

Last week, several folks slipped bills into my hand after the service, or wrote checks. I made the same request on my social media feeds. I’m thrilled to say we have raised nearly $4,000. This is a tremendous testament of love in a challenging time for families whose worlds have been upended.

The money we’ve raised reflects the flame of love in a situation powerful people have engineered to extinguish it. This openness to love, this kind of proof that love can always find a way to relieve suffering and validate the sacredness of one another, is the hope and promise of the Resurrection. Every time we respond to human need with compassion, every time we make someone’s day brighter, every time we serve as the hands and feet of Jesus in the world, we proclaim Christ is Risen! (He is risen, Indeed!)

Walter Brueggemann famously said the work of our faith is “no place for sissies.” Our journey of faith must move us beyond our comfort. Done right, discipleship costs us something if it is to be meaningful and true.

I’m not sure what this disagreement with my old friends has cost me. It played out in the paper-thin depth of social media. It doesn’t feel good to challenge them, and so maybe it cost me a comfortable, passive existence.

But not doing anything to relieve the suffering that has pierced my world would have cost me much more.

To be sure, I’d gladly buy the first round for both of these friends who challenged me.

I love them. I hope they know that.

A bar tab is cheap compared to the cost of discipleship.

Because following Jesus has never meant avoiding disagreement.

It has meant choosing love anyway.

Choosing compassion anyway.

Choosing service anyway.

If we follow Jesus long enough, there will come a day when love places us at odds with people we care about.

Jesus knew that.

That is why he warned the disciples before he sent them out.

And still, He sent them. And He sends us.

Even when it costs us something.

Especially when it costs us something.

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Footnote from Matt: I’m working with congregations in Oxford, Miss. and members of a closeby Latino congregation to build a sustainable response. As that unfolds, I’m still collecting donations of cash, diapers, food and more. If you’d like to contribute, drop me a line: matthew DOT hackworth AT gmail DOT com.

Scripture

When the world around her changes from black and white into brilliant color, Judy Garland delivers one of the most famous lines in film history.

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” she says.

Most of us remember the line from The Wizard of Oz differently. Most often, it’s “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

That fits nicely on a bumper sticker. But it’s not what was said.

As she clutches her basket and Toto, making her way down the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy isn’t making a logical deduction. She is slowly realizing that the world she knew has changed. “...I’ve a feeling,” she says.

Dorothy has been swept up by forces beyond her control. Everything familiar to her has been stripped away. The house lands. She steps outside. The world is suddenly larger, stranger, and more colorful than Dorothy ever imagined. Only then does she realize, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Dorothy’s physical surroundings have changed but it’s what she’s experiencing on the inside that really moves. She is moving from the familiar comforts of what she’s known to the unfamiliar of where she’d been led.

Moving from what we know to the unknown is fundamental in the journey of faith. Abraham and Sarah wrestle with the wonder of what God aims to do, even though they know that women their age do not bear children. Jesus invites the Disciples to leave the only life they have ever known, trusting strangers and depending on mercy.

Our biggest journeys may not require an airline ticket or even bus fare. Our biggest journeys begin when we surrender what we are so sure we know for a world of unknowns.

People of faith tend to think of God calling us in terms of physical location. “God wants me to go and do,” or “I feel called to go,” or “God is leading me to this new place.” God becomes the stand in that legitimizes our want. Physical movement allows us to remain in control. “I felt God calling me and I acted” is a satisfying demonstration of faith to show the world.

But it’s a lot easier to talk about changing places than changing our hearts. When is the last time you heard someone say, “I felt God calling me to change my mind?” or “God worked in my heart, and my feelings changed?”

We really don’t talk that much about God calling us to a new place within our hearts.

A place where we surrender control and choose to become vulnerable;

A place where we admit we’re stuck behind judgement or fear or ego;

A place where we sense we may feel unsettled and can’t quite pinpoint the reasons why.

As followers of Jesus our want is often to go and to do. But God’s use of us to build the Kindom cannot begin unless our hearts can be led. The journey between the assurance of our convictions to the surrender of “I don’t know” is as critical in the journey of following God’s call as is serving in a mission field. Our hearts have to journey to open space before we can ever feed the hungry or heal the sick or welcome the stranger.

Abraham and Sarah had to create enough space in their hearts to believe God could make use of them even in their old age. Before they could embrace the promise of giving birth to a son, they had to shift their mindsets to believe in a God greater than the limitations of age. Before the Disciples could “Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons,” they had to let go of the familiarity of home, stop worrying about money, and set down the fear of strangers. The Disciples had to surrender their hearts.

What would such a surrender look like in our lives?

When I started our family business eighteen months ago, I thought I was changing careers. What I didn’t realize was that God was changing me.

For more than 20 years I worked in a world I understood. Suddenly I found myself in a world where I had to depend on people in new ways, trust others with our reputation, and admit how much I didn’t know. Honestly, I still feel like Dorothy after the tornado most days.

The hardest lesson wasn’t learning how to run a business. The hardest lesson was surrendering the illusion that I could do everything myself. It has been a disorienting journey to a new place in my heart and in my mind and in my soul. I may still live in Oxford, but inside it’s been Oz all around.

We discover God’s claim on our hearts when we surrender control over all we think we know. Sarah’s first response to God’s promise of a baby isn’t faith. It’s laughter. Not joyful laughter. Skeptical laughter. The kind of laughter that says, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Sometimes the first step on the journey isn’t belief. Sometimes it’s simply admitting that God is asking us to imagine a future we cannot yet see.

Abraham and Sarah had to go to a new place in their minds and in their hearts before they could slip into bed and fulfill God’s promise. The 12 Disciples had to follow Jesus to a place of openness and vulnerability before they could even consider the first step on their journeys.

The journey of faith begins long before our feet move.

It begins when certainty gives way to wonder.

It begins when fear gives way to trust.

It begins when judgment gives way to love.

Abraham and Sarah discovered it beneath the oaks of Mamre. The Disciples discovered it when Jesus sent them out with nothing but the good news.

And we discover it whenever we allow God to lead us beyond the boundaries we have built for ourselves.

The path may not be as obvious as the yellow brick road. The destination may not appear on any map.

But when our hearts become open enough to be led, we eventually look around and realize that grace has brought us somewhere new.

And with Dorothy, we can only say: “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Scripture

It wasn’t long after we had arrived in a village in the mountains outside Hanoi when I sat for the first time with a communist party official in Vietnam.

He was a local honeybee farmer, a simple villager with a humble home. The highlands northwest of Hanoi look a lot like the Blue Ridge or Appalachian mountains - rolling hills full of trees and winding dirt roads.

This official’s home sat just off a rutted path. We were invited in to have some tea and to sample some of his honey. But the visit was more than simple hospitality - it was required of any foreigner who visits the village.

We were in his village to launch a sanitation campaign. Logging and other development had forced villagers from their ancient homes into new spaces. Development displaced small-holder farmers and people whose ancestors had lived in the same place for generations, hundreds of years. The forced move compromised ancient practices of sanitation. We aimed to help the community to build latrines.

But first, the tây lông - white man - had to visit the local party leader. I gazed into the cup of tea I held, a hammer and sickle printed in its bottom, a communist party slogan written around the rim of the saucer.

I think Matthew was something like the communist official who shared his tea with me. Matthew was a low-level official whose work funded and upheld the Empire. We don’t know what or why but Jesus always seems to find the light in others.

Jesus must have seen something different, even if the poor folks who followed Him may have hated Matthew. Matthew’s identity, and even his physical location - a tax-collection station - was built on Rome’s might. To the people of the poor communities where Jesus often found himself, there was no love lost for the tax collector. Matthew’s authority was Rome’s authority. He may have been an everyday bureaucrat but that’s how authoritarian governments keep control - when everyday people begin to feel powerful based on the government’s dependence on them.

The communist party in Vietnam depended on people like my new honey farming friend to uphold their power, even by the bend of a mountain road in a village with an unremarkable name. Rome depended on Matthew and others like him to fund their wars and their dominance in the streets of Capernaum, where Matthew meets Jesus.

We don’t know what else Jesus may have said to Matthew to convince him to leave his station. Perhaps Jesus could see that Matthew had come to understand himself through the power Rome gave him. Matthew was trapped inside one story about who he was, and Jesus invited him into another.

This story is recounted in Mark and Luke as well but it’s only Matthew’s gospel where the emphasis is on Jesus eating with “tax collectors and sinners.” Jesus doesn’t merely call Matthew.

Jesus goes to Matthew’s house.

Jesus eats Matthew’s food.

Jesus meets Matthew’s friends.

Jesus enters Matthew’s world.

The scandal is not that Jesus speaks to a tax collector. The scandal is that Jesus shares a meal with one.

A table full of people who many thought beyond the reach of righteousness, and Jesus sits right down. It was “dinner in the house” (v. 10) - suggesting a level of intimacy where Jesus is among those being fed.

“When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”

We don’t know for sure the folks Matthew claimed as friends. But they were comfortable with Matthew’s station as the bag man for Rome’s pocket book. Maybe they were friends who benefitted from his kickbacks. Maybe they were others who saw their own identity in Rome’s power. Maybe they were “sick” with the illness that insists allegiance to power - even national power - take precedence over allegiance to fellow human beings.

But there, Jesus heals. Jesus’ work always places the human being above all else. Jesus invited Matthew to the work of helping human beings to flourish. He shows him how: raising a girl from the dead. Healing a woman who has been bleeding for years.

At some point, Matthew had to make a choice - was he going to continue to be a cog in the empire’s machine of injustice, or was he going to follow Jesus?

That’s a choice every one of us is facing right now.

There are an abundance of pressures right now that beg us - or even compel us - to put other interests ahead of the well-being of others.

Nationalism.

Citizenship.

Rising prices.

War.

But in this story, Jesus shows us we always have a choice: where will we claim our power?

Each one of us participates in systems that oppress other human beings. When our retirement accounts fund corporate prisons, when our automobiles pollute carbon monoxide into the atmosphere, when we use our cell phones made with components produced by child and exploitative labor, we are participating in systems of injustice - even if unintentionally. Sometimes it may not feel like we have very much choice when we live in a world full of people focused on scarcity, instead of abundance.

But when we are able to choose. We claim our power and regularly compromise on how our choices impact human lives. Regardless if we are conflicted, afraid, dependent, or just trying to survive, we have become corrupted. Whenever we place any other allegiance ahead of caring for human beings, in our choices, in our compromises, we fail to follow Jesus. Jesus invites Matthew to set down his sense of power, and choose a new way to live.

It is a choice that begins in our hearts. The Gospel frequently frames this choice intimately. In this story, it’s around a dinner table, at home, among those who are indifferent to human suffering. There is Jesus, a face we dine with as we sin.

“’I desire mercy, not sacrifice’.” Jesus quotes ancient prophets. Being blinded by authority and power is an ancient problem. But it’s funny how sight returns when life flourishes right in front of our eyes.

In Vietnam, sipping a cup of tea with a low-level party bureaucrat before he could file his report to Hanoi about my visit, we exchanged niceties. I asked about his family, and the status of the honey farming operation that surrounded his home.

We talked about how honey bees fare in the winter. We talked about our families. Not communism, not even the American war. We chose to connect on a human level that belied everything we had been told about one another, and every way either of us may have claimed power. As a communist official. As an American. It’s a phenomenon I’ve been blessed to experience many times: being told to fear, to shun, to avoid or to doubt, only to find connection and humanity on the other side of a smile, a handshake and maybe a cup of tea.

Jesus doesn’t wait until Matthew becomes someone else before sitting at his table. He goes to Matthew’s house first.

Maybe that’s what mercy looks like—not approving of every choice another person has made, but refusing to let their identity be reduced to a category.

Tax collector.

Communist.

American.

Republican.

Democrat.

Rich.

Poor.

Jesus sits down at the table before any of those labels get the final word. Because mercy begins when we see one another as human beings again. And around that table, maybe even over a cup of tea or something stronger, lives begin to change.

In 1930, Alfred Blalock was a cutting-edge doctor and researcher at Vanderbilt University. His specialty was thoracic surgery—cutting open the human body to repair the heart and lungs. His research and his practice as a surgeon saved lives.

But he needed someone to help him clean the lab.

A young African American man named Vivien Thomas responded to the job posting. He started the job he was hired to do—cleaning the cages of test animals. Mopping floors. Emptying trash.

But as Dr. Blalock and Vivien Thomas got to know one another, the scientist noticed his employee understood what researchers in the lab were trying to accomplish. Their conversations about the work became increasingly technical. Blalock noticed Thomas’s attention to detail. A scientist with years of training and experience found himself catching up to his custodian’s ability to see what needed to happen next: preparing for the next experiment, arranging equipment, refining procedures, even developing surgical techniques that would eventually save lives.

Thomas learned surgery through observation and repetition. The young black man from small-town Louisiana became so indispensable that when Blalock moved from Vanderbilt to Johns Hopkins, he asked Thomas to come with him.

Thomas became Blalock’s indispensable research partner.

The pair developed methods and insights that would save countless lives. Yet the racial realities of the early 20th century prevented Thomas from receiving the recognition he deserved.

Vivien Thomas’ gifts were there all along. His brilliance was there all along. But it remained hidden behind the blindness of a broken society.

What changed was not that Vivien Thomas suddenly became gifted.

What changed was that someone learned how to see him.

Human beings have a long history of failing to see one another clearly.

Moses was dismissed as a stutterer and a fugitive before God revealed a leader. David was overlooked as a shepherd boy before God revealed a king. The same disciples who fled when Jesus was arrested; the same disciples who abandoned him in fear, Jesus made them apostles.

Again and again, Scripture tells the same story. God sees gifts in people we overlook, or even dismiss.

The psalmist understood this. After marveling at the heavens, the moon, and the stars, the psalmist asks God, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them?” It is one of the most honest questions in all of Scripture. Why would the Creator of galaxies pay attention to us at all? And yet before the psalmist ever asks that question, he makes an even stranger claim: “Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark.”

The world expects strength to come from emperors, generals and kings.

God entrusts it to children.

The world looks for wisdom among the wealthy and powerful.

God places praise in the mouths of infants.

The world searches for greatness in people with microphones standing on platforms.

God keeps hiding glory in people whose voices are not heard from where they’re standing on the margins.

Psalm 8 does not simply tell us that God loves the weak. It tells us that God sees strength where we see weakness. God sees possibility where we see limitations. God sees belovedness where we see categories.

Maybe that’s why Matthew’s account of the Great Commission begins with a detail we often skip.

“When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.”

Some doubted. These are not spiritual superheroes. These are the same disciples who fled when Jesus was arrested. The same disciples who hid in fear. The same disciples who struggled to understand what God was doing.

And yet Jesus commissions them anyway. Not after they overcome their doubts. Not after they perfect their theology. Not after they prove themselves worthy. Jesus sees apostles where they see uncertainty. He sees possibility where they see failure. He sees the foundation of God’s kindom where a group of sailors and tax collectors and other forlorn people see only their own limitations.

The gift is already there.

What changes is that Christ helps them see what God has seen all along.

The temptation of every age is to believe we can sort people into categories.

Useful and useless.

Strong and weak.

Successful and unsuccessful.

Citizen and foreigner.

Patriot and enemy.

We tell ourselves these categories help us understand the world. Most often, the categories we apply to others keep us from seeing them. The people we are conditioned to overlook, to make assumptions about, to apply labels upon may just be the very people through whom God intends to bless us.

The child nobody listens to.

The elder everyone assumes is finished.

The immigrant, struggling to learn English.

The person living with a disability.

The doubter. The skeptic.

The neighbor whose life experience is different from our own.

How many gifts remain hidden because we cannot see beyond the labels we place on one another? How many caring hearts are out there, just waiting to be revealed so that God-given talent and ability can truly save us?

On this, Trinity Sunday we celebrate a mystery that cannot be reduced to a formula.

Parent.

Son.

Holy Spirit.

Three ways of speaking about one God whose very existence is revealed in relationship. Perhaps that is why the Trinity matters. Because a God who exists in relationship is always drawing us beyond ourselves. Always inviting us to see another person. Always reminding us that no single perspective contains the fullness of truth. Always revealing gifts in places we never thought to look.

The God we meet in Scripture is never content to leave us trapped inside our tribes. This God keeps pushing us outward.

Toward neighbors.

Toward strangers.

Toward nations.

Toward people whose lives challenge our assumptions.

Toward people who bear the image of God in ways we have not yet learned to recognize.

So when Jesus says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” perhaps the first step is learning how to see beyond nationality. To see the image of God where we have been taught not to look. To see gifts where we have been trained to expect none. To see possibilities where the world sees limitations. The Great Commission is not about recruiting or converting more Christians. It is about helping people discover their place in God’s beloved human family. Humanity was always more important to Jesus than nationality. When we reach for the human beyond our flag or theirs, we are following the way of Jesus. We have the chance to discover gifts beyond the limits we uphold, gifts hidden in plain sight.

The same may be true for the immigrant we fear. The refugee we turn away. The neighbor we stereotype. The people our politics teach us to distrust. The same may be true for so many other people our world has forgotten. The same may be true for us.

Because the good news of Psalm 8 and Matthew 28 is that before we learn to see ourselves clearly, God has already seen us. Before we discover our gifts, God has already entrusted them to us. Before we know who we are, God already knows whose we are.

In a moment when we are taught continuously to fear one another, the work of following Jesus is to learn to see one another the way God has seen us all along.

After all, Vivien Thomas’s gifts were there all along.

What changed was that someone finally learned how to see them.

Scripture

There’s a sprawling displacement camp up near South Sudan’s border with Sudan where a whole town has taken shape, even if most of the homes are made of plastic tarps and sticks used as emergency shelter.

It is filled with people who have been forced from home by war. One mother I visited shared with me her story of hiding from soldiers and rebels in the forest with her children, surviving on berries and leaves for weeks as they fled fighting.

Her story was not the only one of danger in this camp. Women often pay steep costs in places where men carry guns and use them frequently. Ignored within the patriarchal society around them, the women I sat with on this visit decided to take control.

With the small investment of $250 made possible by faithful congregations, the mothers started a lending bank by moms, for moms. Each member takes a turn putting a loan from that small fund to work to start a business. Once one borrower generates income, they pay back the loan so another woman can create another business. One mother I sat with wasn’t as proud of her chicken rearing business as she was at being able to afford to pay her children’s fees to attend a local school. She had taken control back in an economy that had excluded her. A new economy of compassion took shape that belied the powerful forces of destruction around it.

Power is rarely held communally. The women I met in South Sudan had been blocked from participating in the economy by a patriarchal society that would keep them from learning how to read, let alone afford them a chance to run a business. But now, with a tiny bit of help, they can claim their power and use it for the collective good.

It is a lot like the power of the Holy Spirit.

The scripture we encounter on this Pentecost, this high Holy day in the church’s calendar, lays out stories of the Holy Spirit appearing in times of deep turmoil and violence. As the Israelites wandered without a home, Joshua, son of Nun, is a tattletale for those who claim the Lord’s presence as their own. He thought the Spirit to be exclusive to leaders like Moses. Yet Moses is unphased. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!” he responds.

In the book of Acts, the Apostles recount “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.

“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability,” we are told.

The Spirit is one way God shares God’s power with human beings universally. And it happens in times of deep need: scripture does not tell stories of the Spirit descending upon people who already have everything under control. The Spirit arrives in exhausted communities trying to hold themselves together amidst our diabolical tendencies.

War.

Displacement from home.

Civil strife.

Corrupted systems.

The Holy Spirit appears in some of scripture’s worst moments. And it does so universally - it is not private property. It is available to everyone. No one is beyond the reach of the Spirit in God’s economy.

Moses reminds us that the Spirit can burst any leader’s bubble who might claim exclusivity on sacred presence. In the age of the Apostles, Peter doubles down on the Spirit’s work among people who not only speak different languages, but come from different cultures and economies: “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” At Pentecost, people did not suddenly become the same. The miracle is that they understood one another anyway.

God’s work is always disruptive. God’s economy always moves beyond the ways we define power: in authority, in economy, in community and in fulfillment.

When the Spirit is at work, it destabilizes power. And because of God’s rich diversity, the Spirit at work will rarely look the same. There is, however, one classic trademark that can help us see the Spirit at work: the element of human connection.

Our human ability to discover God through one another gives the Holy Spirit its value. The Spirit invites us to see past all the ways we divide ourselves so that we might build God’s economy of human flourishing.

It is why mothers feel compelled to help other mothers.

It is why parents might step in to care for a lost child who is in need and alone.

It is what animates those moments where human decency wins our hearts over politics or religion or every other way we divide ourselves.

The false economies of power all around us fall when the Spirit is at work. What would our world be like if we allowed this Spirit to flip the tables on empty promises of power and authority that distract us from building God’s kindom, where all are welcomed, fed and loved?

Even though God has given us a world of abundance, we are taught from birth that resources are scarce in the world. Human fear of scarcity is ingrained in us. Just ask any teacher what happens when one student is afforded some kind of special help or support, and the same help is not available to the rest. Extra help might unlock a whole new world of learning for a student in need. But when other students see this special help, very often they want it, too - even if they don’t need it.

One of Noah’s earliest teachers taught us how she responds.

“Everybody gets what everybody needs,” is one of Betzi Beck’s taglines. And in decades as a special education teacher she’s calmed classrooms with her simple rubric. “Everybody gets what everybody needs” does more than assure elementary schoolers they will be cared for. It takes away anxiety in a world that teaches scarcity. It recognizes that each need has value, and meeting each need is possible.

I think the Holy Spirit functions in the same way. Genesis 1:27 reminds us that each one of us has been created in God’s image. And in a rich and diverse world, a diversity of needs abound.

The World would have us think there isn’t enough for each of us to have what we need to flourish. Much is to be gained from reaping the rewards of our human fear of scarcity. Political leaders try to convince us that the power of the empire is what will save us, protect us and ensure we can live in peace. Others tell us it’s the power of the weapon that keeps the balance. People in business will tell us it’s the power of the purse that provides stability and the opportunity for growth.

None of these forces are bad, or even wrong. The problem is these forces are corruptible and our fear of not having what we need is so steep that we become blind to one another. Our fear keeps us from seeing God in one another.

The Holy Spirit invites us to imagine a different world, a world where we are seen and more connected. A world where we are not threatened by people getting what they need. A world where we understand one another even across different languages. When we feel the connection of the Holy Spirit we feel the universal connection that holds us in an embrace so sacred we don’t care about the military or political or economic forces that have defined life for us.

God’s fundamental currency is human flourishing. When human beings get what human beings need, peace prevails. God’s work is always transformational, and the Holy Spirit brings God’s work to life in each of us. The Holy Spirit connects us with God across language and politics and finances and every other way we might divide ourselves. We find the Holy Spirit at work in our hearts where we want everyone to have what they need to thrive. That place exists in each of us, deep under the differences we use to justify our judgment, beyond the places where fear has us focused on us getting our own, forget the other guy.

We have to look for it to discover it, but the Spirit is at work all around us because it is available to each of us.

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved,” is how Paul described the phenomenon in Acts 2.

“Everybody gets what everybody needs,” is how Ms. Beck describes it in her classrooms.

The Holy Spirit is not some magic treat dispenser focused on meeting material needs. But it is that force of unity we discover in and through one another that calls us to honor the sacred in one another. It is what connects us. It is what sustains us and assures us our needs can be met, even in the face of our deepest failures, like war.

The group of women I met in South Sudan know what it is like to bear the weight of a world hell bent on scarcity, and not concerned with meeting human needs. As I sat with these women, and watched them celebrate each other’s accomplishments, I came to see the Holy Spirit at work, connecting them with one another even as war surrounded us. It was a beautiful sight to witness them cheer and encourage as plans for investment and reinvestment took shape. In their connection with one another, I saw the Holy Spirit assuring everyone gets what everyone needs - war around them, be damned.

Towards the end of their meeting, one of the women called me forward. I stood in front of them, ready to offer words that I hoped would help them feel seen, and loved. But before I could speak, I heard a bleating from off to my right. One of them led a goat to my side, placing the tether in my hand.

“A gift for you, for making this group possible,” one of them said through a translator.

As they handed me the lead to this stubborn beast bleating at my side, I made sure they knew I was just a representative of people of faith who care about them from half a world away. But in that moment, I felt like I had been invited to participate in the sacred economy of the Holy Spirit. It was a gift to me from one of their businesses, but it was also a gift of the Spirit revealed to this sacred community.

I asked them to save the goat for the hungry season to come but they insisted on eating the goat for dinner.

Everybody got what everybody needed that night. One of the mothers made a delicious goat stew with fried bread that fed us, sitting around plastic tables, under a sky full of stars.

We were sitting in one of the world’s worst war zones, surrounded by conflict and fear and doubt. All around us was the cost of a world built on fear and scarcity. But for one tender moment, we experienced peace as we were fed.

We didn’t speak the same language, but we still understood one another.

We didn’t know each other’s cultures, but we created our own around plastic tables and chairs. The Holy Spirit was at work within us. Among us.

Warring factions, burned villages, corrupted systems of power surrounded us. But for one peaceful evening, women forced from home reached for the only power available to them - the power to lift one another up. To transcend all the ways the men around them had told them they weren’t worth the trouble. To move past a war driven by scarcity and fear so that the Spirit could be revealed within us, and through us.

If a group of women pushed to the margins and surviving in a war zone can reach for something beyond themselves, then maybe we can, too. Maybe we can let go of our need to feel in control so that someone else can feel God’s love. Maybe we can see beyond all that divides us so that we can relish in what connects us.

More for others doesn’t have to mean less for us. The Holy Spirit keeps showing up wherever human beings stop guarding power and start sharing life. Everyone can have what everyone needs, when the Spirit appears and we allow it to change our hearts.

Scripture

She probably has never even gotten a speeding ticket. Yet Kathleen Krall can tell you with eloquence what it’s like to experience a trip on a psychedelic drug.
Doctors told Kathleen she was dying of cancer. As part of experimental end-of-life therapy, they administered psilocybin — the psychoactive compound found in certain mushrooms. Krall reflected on her experience in Michael Pollan’s documentary How to Change Your Mind.

Kathleen is a grandmother, a life-long Catholic, and an English teacher who served her community and enjoys retirement. Her life appeared conventional and built on the conviction of following the rules. Yet as she sat in her tidy little garden surrounded by a film crew, what struck me was not that this grandmother reflected the certainty of her convictions.

It was that she no longer felt alone.

Kathleen describes the experience as opening her to a state of prayer centered on Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Kathleen’s fear softened. The boundaries between herself and others softened. She spoke less about control and more about connection.

Which may be closer to prayer than we often realize.

Most of us do not pray to be transformed.

We pray to stay in control. Not because mushrooms are God. Not because chemicals replace faith. But because genuine prayer has always involved surrender of the illusion of control.

I describe prayer as an intention of the heart. The prayers of our hearts reveal a lot about our relationships with God, and the world. Praying only within the framework of our convictions keeps us in control. But if we begin with surrendering our control, we invite God into our fears. We do not pray if we do not open our heart to the most intimate of spaces and invite God’s power over it.

The places where we are vulnerable. The places where we have need.

If we don’t invite God to this depth within ourselves, we’re not praying. We’re only taking our inner narrative for a test drive, with Morgan Freeman as the narrator (of course).

The place where we claim power is where we begin to turn away from God. It is frequently a function of our egos, and our pain. When pain becomes our identity, we project it on others in all sorts of tragic ways. And when that pain finds its tribe? Watch out.

Psalm 68 is one of the oldest in the psalter. It is a plea to the community and its leaders that we fail God when we fail to include those on the margins. Widows and orphans were profoundly vulnerable in the ancient Levant. Without a husband or father to provide economic protection, they depended entirely on the mercy of others.

And so the Psalmist calls the community to remember who God is. “Let the wicked perish before God — but let the righteous be joyful.”

In the ancient world, widows, orphans, prisoners, and the isolated were often invisible to power. Empires protected the strong. The Psalmist insists God holds those on the margins as a test of righteousness.

The righteousness of a community is revealed in how it treats the vulnerable. The wicked are blinded to the wellbeing of others. And so as people find others who suffer their pain, our tribal instincts kick in. Division sets in. When the tribe becomes more important than the vulnerable, God has left the building.

That’s what makes the presence of Jesus in His time so radical. Jesus embodied human unity. His ministry touched every kind of human heart. As he faces His imminent arrest, trial and execution, Jesus gathers His friends together and opens His heart before God at the very moment His world is about to collapse. He is facing death, with a tribe in the background.
Jesus knew human instinct. He knew the very people He healed and He fed would still chant, “CRUCIFY HIM!”. Yet even as He sets to swim against the flood tide of popularism, He begs God that they would be reminded of their unity “...All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.”

I don’t have extensive experience sitting by traditional deathbeds. But I have more experience sitting with people facing the worst moments of their lives - the war that forced them from home and killed a child, the disaster that upended a family’s world, the fire or the car wreck that leaves an empty seat at the family table. The one phenomenon that connects us is that the closer we get to death, the more we are willing to admit just how much we don’t know. Death and tragedy have a way of testing our convictions, and they are often left by the wayside to stare into the unknown.

The place where we are so assured of our convictions about one another is the place where God waits to meet us. When we face the ultimate unknown our convictions dissolve quickly.

Kathleen Krall stared death in the face and was so terrified of the unknown that she was willing to try a drug she likely never would have.
She had to let go of her convictions about drug use and psychedelics and the hamster wheel questioning of why me?. She had to let go of what others might say when they found out. She had to risk the judgment of people who might never understand why she chose to take it. The unknowns were many. But when her convictions were tested against mortality itself, Kathleen chose vulnerability. She opened herself to an experience she never imagined she would choose.

Kathleen says she no longer fears death because she encountered God’s embrace during her psychedelic experience.

Whether or not you buy into the idea that psychedelics are good or bad, the lessons about prayer we can surmise from this therapy and this research are plentiful. This treatment and prayer both require our complete surrender. Kathleen describes a naturally-occurring chemical in a mushroom that took her to a realm of consciousness where she felt God and experienced universal love. Her trip began with an intention.

Prayer begins with our intentions, too. We can continue to chant with the tribe who validates our pain. Or, we can bring that pain to God, who calls us to reflect love universally in the world.

Our most honest prayers begin where our control ends. Surrendering control often means stepping away from the tribe that brings us the illusion of strength. Surrendering control allows God to soften our hearts, so that we might feel our connection with other and with God. And when God softens the human heart, the world itself begins to change.

Scripture

I had not been asleep long when I felt a hand rocking my shoulder.

“Dude,” the voice said. “Hey, do you know how to iron a shirt?”

It was just a few weeks into my stint hosting the overnight shift at Virginia Tech’s college radio station. I had just fallen asleep around 5 a.m. when one of my oldest and best friends from home — and my new roommate — rousted me.

In a state of liminal consciousness, it was like his words were hanging in the narrow space above my loft bed.

“Hey,” he said. “I need your help here.”

As the gears started turning, I remembered Neil had a big presentation that day in his first engineering class. What I didn’t know was that he was required to wear a shirt and tie to present his project.

I also didn’t know he didn’t know how to iron. This is absolutely no slight to Neil’s mom, who functioned almost as my own. I learned a lot from her, as did he — domestic tasks notwithstanding.

“Can you help me?” he said.

I kind of half-fell, half-climbed out of my loft bed. And as I plugged in our iron and tried to spare our ears the screech of the ironing board’s legs unfolding, I wondered how someone got to college without being shown how to iron a dress shirt. It strikes me as something one should know before leaving home.

Thinking through what may happen when we are absent is an act of responsibility. The “don’t forget to …” or “remember to” we offer our spouses or children or others in our lives conveys what needs to happen once we have left. This morning’s scripture is part of Jesus’ farewell — the words and directions He gave His friends before He was arrested, tried, and executed by the government.

Jesus had a message for His Disciples before leaving. God “will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever,” Jesus told His friends. It is the promise of someone going away, telling those who stay behind what to look for as evidence of God’s presence.

“This is the Spirit of truth,” Jesus said. He assures His circle that God will not abandon them once He is gone. And He reminds them - and us - that this Advocate will come from God’s very self to help them continue the sacred work of love.

It would be a Spirit “the world cannot receive because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. You know Him because He abides with you, and He will be in you.”

The presence of the Holy Spirit is something Jesus wanted His followers to know on the night before He would be removed from them. It was a direct instruction meant to help fill the void Jesus would leave. But more importantly, Jesus made sure they knew how to recognize this Advocate, this Spirit who would accompany them and help them continue their journey of restoring people and communities to wholeness in love.

The way of Jesus was so radically different from the world they knew that Jesus had to promise them they would not be left alone to fend for themselves. Jesus needed to compel grown men and women to believe that His way could and should continue long after He had left them. The followers had seen Jesus heal the sick, feed the hungry, and restore broken people and communities to wholeness, reminding them that they were created in the image of God. He needed them to believe they could keep it going, too.

He had to leave instruction for how they would continue building God’s kindom after He was gone. And to make doubly sure they understood, Jesus gave them the test by which they would recognize this Spirit at work among them. Jesus pointed them back to His fundamental commandment: to love - to love God by loving one another.

“They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

I have been blessed in my life to see the love of Jesus revealed all over the world. Often, I have seen such love revealed not by people loudly claiming to follow Jesus, but by women who were mothers.

I think of mothers I met in Sudan who found themselves surrounded by orphans. So many parents had been killed by war and violence that mothers in one camp I visited banded together to share what little they had. Children caught in the grip of terror could still feel love because something compelled those mothers to see beyond their own suffering and bring love to life for someone else’s child.

I think of mothers in Indonesia who were so poor they could feed their families little beyond corn. Corn was so heavily subsidized by the government that it was all they could afford. Their children’s development suffered — until mothers began sharing recipes using ingredients they could grow or forage themselves. Mothers shared wisdom and care that helped heal both their children and their communities to thrive.

I think of mothers in Serbia who resisted paying forward years of hatred and division by making the brave choice to enroll their children in the same schools as Roma children. They wanted the fracture between Roma families and their own white European families to end.

Indeed, if I could prescribe one thing to help heal much of the world’s pain, it would be empowering mothers.

Motherhood is one of the most universal human experiences. Every human being has a mother, at least biologically. And while I know not every mother is a source of warmth in every heart, the instinct to care and to share is often rooted in the experience of motherhood. This instinct is not exclusive to motherhood. But motherhood often reveals how the Holy Spirit takes shape among us.

The Spirit is more than warmth or affection. The Spirit is what compels human beings to continue the work of love after fear, grief, and death should have stopped them. Looking upon someone else with care when the world teaches indifference is something mothering reveals to us again and again.

Mothers who look at other children and see their own. Mothers who pack extra snacks in case someone on the field trip forgot theirs. Mothers who organize diaper drives because they cannot imagine being a new parent without enough diapers. Mothers who always welcome the child who just kind of always shows up — the kid who seems unseen, or uncared for.

If we have ever experienced that kind of care and welcome and healing from a mother in our lives — even if not from our own mother — then we know something about what it means to be embraced by the Holy Spirit.

Jesus had to make sure His Disciples knew how to recognize the Holy Spirit once He was gone. “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.” He knew He was leaving His friends behind in a hard and cruel world with the expectation that they would continue building the world He proclaimed.

The world where all are fed and loved.

The world where everyone has a seat at the table.

The world where every child has what they need to grow and flourish — physically and spiritually.

The world where hurts and divisions give way to the promise of a beloved community.

Motherhood, at its best, reshapes perspective and points us toward universal love — toward a shared humanity. It is of a similar essence as the Holy Spirit. As we wait in anticipation for Pentecost, as we prepare to celebrate the revealing of the Holy Spirit in a couple of weeks, I hope we remember that Jesus called us to love beyond His grave. I pray those of us who claim to follow Jesus find our way to show the world that love does not end with His death, but must continue through us. The Holy Spirit has life through us.

Because if we proclaim, “Christ is risen!” (“He is risen indeed!”), then the evidence of a risen Christ is that love still lives in human hearts even after the miscarriage of justice, even after the ridicule of trial, even after the humiliation and misery of execution, even after it seems God’s presence among us has died. Love must always win. Even if we carry painful experiences with our own mothers, chances are many of us have still encountered the love of someone else’s mother along the way.

That Spirit that calls us to care universally is evidence of the Holy Spirit at work within us. There is work to be done beyond the empty tomb. And while Jesus did not leave us with a detailed instruction manual for surviving a cruel and chaotic world, He did give us something deeper than practical advice. Jesus showed us more than how to iron a shirt before leaving home. Jesus showed us how to love so universally that only the Spirit of God can fully reflect it.

Maybe it wakes us from our slumber, gently shaking us into opportunities to do the work of loving more deeply. Maybe it calls us to dig deeper within when we have to put on a presentation. Maybe it’s an invitation to change something: to find the wrinkles in life where we are stuck, where we may face a challenge, where we feel we must show up in order to make the grade. Look for the most loving choice possible, and follow it.

You’ll discover the Holy Spirit - and you just might make mom proud, too.

Scripture: Psalm 31: 1-5, 15-16; John 14: 1-14

August 20, 2013 started out like any other Tuesday for Antoinette Tuff.

She woke up, got ready, climbed into her car and headed to her job at Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy that morning.

But that Tuesday would not be like any other.

Shortly after the first bell rang, a man charged into the school armed with an AK-47 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He came straight to the front office.

Antoinette saw the gun.

She also saw a man pushed beyond the edge. She knew immediately what kind of danger they were in.

She could have hidden.

She could have let fear take over, but Antoinette chose a different way.

“I just started talking to him,” she said.

Not because she had a plan but because she saw that he was a person in distress.

In that moment, Antoinette made a decision. She chose not to see the man pointing a gun at her chest as an enemy. She chose to see him as a human being.

Our instinct to match violence with violence is natural, and runs deep. Humans are one of the most cooperative species on earth. We are also one of the most dangerous.

When we feel threatened, our biology, our conditioning, everything in us says: act first. Strike back. Protect yourself. Stand your ground.

When fear rises, our bodies and our minds push us toward reaction. But the God who created us calls us to bring that impulse to something greater than our control. God calls us not into retaliation but into God’s presence.

Psalm 35 is a prayer from someone under threat, asking God to act against enemies. It is a Psalm of King David, who knew what it was like to be hunted, slandered, surrounded by threats. And in John’s Gospel, Jesus faces arrest, trial, and execution by the state. Our scripture this morning comes from two lives under threat, and neither is told to take up arms. When faced with violence, King David and Jesus bring their violent impulses to God.

Human beings are hardwired to place added emphasis on threats we perceive. Neuroscientists tell us the human brain treats threats more seriously than they often are. We are predisposed to predict the worst, and to expect the worst from others. But the Biblical message compels us to keep our instinct in check, by taking a beat to bring God our violent reactions.

“Into your hand I commit my spirit,” David says.

“Into your hand I commit my spirit,” Jesus prays from the cross.

The parallel is not an accident. It holds the tension between what we are wired to do and what we are called to do. These words surrender human impulsivity and control. The psalm does not deny the impulse toward violence. But David and Jesus refuse to let violence have the final word.

Trust is not something that comes after the crisis. Trust is the decision we bring to God in the middle of the crisis: when we feel threatened, when we are afraid, when we are convinced that more force will make us safe. God’s expectation is to bring the fear behind violence and the assurance of control we discover in violence to God.

Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

Not because there is no danger.

Not because the world has suddenly become safe.

But because, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” This is not just a promise about someday. It is a declaration about what is already true. There is a place for us. We are already held. And when we know that—when we trust that our lives are already in God’s hands—that’s when we are no longer driven by fear. We are no longer forced to react. We are no longer bound to answer violence with violence because violence loses its claim on us.

When the shooter burst through the door and into her office, Antoinette Tuff did not have time to analyze policy. She did not have time to debate strategy. She had a moment: a single, terrifying moment to decide what kind of human being she would be.

She could meet fear with fear.

She could let violent instinct determine her response.

With our track record of killing one another, even in school buildings, she could have placed her faith in carrying a gun for a situation just like this.

Or—she could trust that her life was already in God’s hands.

And because she chose trust, because she chose to see, because she refused to let fear have the final word, people who otherwise may have been killed, lived instead.

With one hand clutching a phone connected to a 9-1-1 dispatcher and her other hand raised in surrender, Antoinette spoke to a man who could have snuffed out her life with the pull of a trigger. She spoke to a man hiding behind a mask of fear, and shame.

“We’re not gonna hate you, baby,” she told him.

“It’s gonna be alright, sweetie.”

“We all go through something in life.”

“I’ve been through a whole lot myself.”

She told him the truth about her own pain.

“My husband left me after 33 years… but I’m still here.”

And slowly, eventually, the man put the gun down.

We like to think we will never face a moment like Antoinette faced but we face versions of it all the time. Not always with a gun in the room but whenever we are afraid. Whenever we feel threatened. Whenever we are told that the only way to be safe is to harden ourselves, to arm ourselves, to stand our ground.

Even when guns aren’t aimed at us, the same question arises: what kind of human being will you be?

Scripture knows the pattern of our choices.

Kings build armies.

Nations stockpile weapons.

People trust in chariots and horses and the latest killing technology.

And still—peace does not come.

The problem is not a lack of power. The problem is where we place our trust.

If we believe our safety depends on force, we will always need more of it. But if our lives are already in God’s hands, we are free to choose another way.

A way that is honest with God about fear.

A way that refuses to let fear become violence.

A way that dares to see—even when it is hardest to see.

Antoinette Tuff did not stop violence with greater force.

She interrupted it with presence, with courage, and with trust. She trusted the human power to relate more than her ability to respond with force.

We face the same choice: in our homes, in our community, and in the ways we speak, respond, and live with one another.

Scripture records Israel’s wars—but it does not present war as the fulfillment of God’s will. It shows the limits, the ambiguity, and ultimately the failure of war and its violence to bring peace. The lie we tell ourselves that our guns will make us safe, the myth that a nation’s might is measured in its military strength, the fallacy of our faith in war to bring change all stem from the same root of sinfulness. It allows us to claim power over life and death. We become God.

Our obsessions with weaponry and rights keeps us from seeing the image of God in one another. When the rights we feel we have to enact violence overshadows God’s expectations for us to see one another in God’s image, we commit idolatry. We make weapons more important than peace.

The world will keep telling us that violence is the only language it understands. Every hammer blow that drove the nails into the cross echoes that belief. But the Gospel tells us something different.

We are already known by God.

We are already held.

And so is the person we fear, or that nation we fear.

That is the truth Antoinette Tuff trusted in that office. Not that the moment was safe but that her life, and even the life of the man in front of her, were already in God’s hands. And because she trusted that, Antoinette was free. Free to speak. Free to see. Free to refuse the violence that stood right in front of her.

By the time the police arrived, the turning point had already happened.

Inside that office, a conversation had begun.

And before anyone rushed in, before any force was used,

the man put the gun down.

He walked out unarmed.

The decisive moment didn’t belong to force. It belonged to a choice. We keep asking: when will this violence end? But the Gospel asks a different question.

What will you choose when fear rises?

What kind of human being will you be when you feel threatened?

Will you trust the fear that tells you to strike first?

Or will you trust the God who already holds your life?

Because if we are already held, then we are free.

Free to choose another way.

The question is not when this will end.

The question is whether violence will have the final word. Our choices - yours and mine - will answer it.

Scripture

Anthony Bourdain wanted people to see the Lebanon he loved. When you move past the headlines, Lebanon is a country of ancient history and modern hospitality. It is a place where simple exchanges with strangers can lead to conversation and coffee. I once spent a glorious afternoon there at table with new friends as wine and food flowed. When these new friends found out I was studying to serve as a Christian minister, they reminded one another that their grandparents often spoke Aramaic at home. I sat there, listening to the language of Jesus in the shade of olive trees planted in soil where Jesus once walked. It was an amazing experience, the kind of afternoon in Lebanon Bourdain wanted the world to come to know.

But it wasn’t meant to be. After Bourdain and his film crew arrived in 2006, war broke out again between Israel and Hezbollah. The chef and TV host was trapped with his crew as fighting raged around them. What sustained these trapped Americans wasn’t their star power, or even American might.

It was the actions of ordinary Beirutis who saw a small group of human beings who were far from home, scared and vulnerable. As Anthony Bourdain and his TV crew listened to bombs fall, war inching towards them, hosts still cared for visitors. Ordinary folks brought food. Others helped them to move safely from place to place. They made sure Bourdain and his team were not alone.
“I feel like a jerk,” Bourdain later said. “These people are taking care of me, and their country is being bombed.”

It’s a kindness that stayed with him even after the explosions of war fell silent. Something deeper was at work in this moment of crisis. It was more than help, more than hospitality.

It was a connection of genuine soulfulness, and its potential exists within each one of us.

Howard Thurman is my favorite theologian. He once wrote,

“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.”

In other words, we are easily played against one another, pulled by forces that are not our own. There is a place within each of us where the armor we put on just to get through life falls away and we are laid bare to one another. It is that place within each of us we discover when we see past labels and political theater to set eyes upon another human being who loves and is capable of loving.

But this is a place, a state of being, that requires us to choose it. Follow Jesus long enough, and the choice is inevitable.

Jesus says, ‘I am the gate,’ and we tend to hear it as a kind of test—something to get right. But in this moment, Jesus is not setting a test. He’s describing a way of life — a way of being in the world where life is given, not taken. This life-giving way of being begins when we recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd.

We recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd when we encounter genuine, life-giving relationships. And every relationship is tested under pressure.

Jesus shows us that we recognize the voice of the shepherd not by power, not by fear—but by whether it invites us to life.

Shepherds give and sustain life to sheep. The image of sheep and shepherds doesn’t come out of nowhere. Just before this, in John chapter 9, Jesus heals a blind man. And the leaders—who should recognize what God is doing—don’t celebrate it. Instead, they push Jesus and the blind man out.

And Jesus says: now you can see the difference.

There are voices that cast people out…and there is a shepherd who leads people into life.

Love has a way of bringing the unexplainable front and center. The religious leaders fail to see the power of love at work in Jesus’ actions because they cling to their power and the government-sponsored religion that makes it possible.

Labeled by ideologues as sinful, excluded from the life of the community, banished for performing healing work that threatens powerful people, Jesus assures those in His orbit that the work He’s doing to heal and restore is righteous and just. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life,” He says.

Jesus names the pattern of genuine soulfulness. Where life is diminished, God’s people have been led astray. Where life is restored is where the shepherd is at work, and we must follow it.

But we get tripped up along the way. The strings of our hearts are often pulled by something other than the genuine love in which God created us. The religious leaders followed a different voice. One that turned a blind eye to suffering. We absolutely know that voice.

Sometimes it sounds like fear of those who are different.

Sometimes it sounds like the need to feel powerful.

Sometimes it sounds like agreeing with what we hear in church— and living differently out in the world.

Salvation means discovering and acting upon the goodness God planted within us. Our souls are meant to come alive as we discover the power to become one with one another and with God. Our souls live in the genuine place within our hearts that is open for connection, yearns for community and restores life to ourselves by restoring life for one another.

That’s what Jesus means when he says “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.” We make the decision: will we care for others as ourselves, or will we put something else first? This is the gate where we meet Jesus.

Faced with this choice, Jesus the Good Shepherd truly saves us in a frightening and dangerous world. We will have moments in life where we have been forced apart from the Shepherd. We may not realize it. But whether it is in the spectacle of politics, the theatrics of war, the promise of power and might in which we sense our own power and might, each of us chooses at the gate where Jesus waits.

In a violent and cruel world, the voice of Jesus the Good Shepherd calls to us. God’s grace holds us as we untangle all that keeps us from responding. And if the 23rd Psalm speaks to us in these moments of doubt and fear, we would do well to remember this famous Psalm is an authentic lifeline to living a soulful life in a world of danger and darkness. Whether or not King David wrote these words of peace when he was a shepherd, we know the Hebrew text of the Psalm is lifting up the same kind of deeper, soulful connection Jesus names in Greek. It is language that means more than mere co-existence. Both texts emphasize a shepherd leading, not forcing. The rod and staff are tools of embodied care for the Psalmist. In John’s Gospel the shepherd’s own body becomes the means of protection.

Different imagery presents the same idea: care is not abstract—it is embodied, relational, and costly. It flows from the goodness God created in our hearts, but it is not without costs.

It cost the Beirutis helping Anthony Bourdain and his crew something to care for their visitors in a time of war. They chose risk. They chose to care for strangers even as war closed in around themselves and their families.

But in these life-threatening moments, they walked through the gate Jesus is talking about. Hosts took risks in war. They chose risk. They chose to care for strangers even as war closed in. I have benefitted from this care in times where my safety was at risk. I imagine you have had times where the kindness and care of others saved you, too. We might define it as “a God thing,” or “one of those God moments” where the right connection comes at just the right time.

Yet there is never a wrong time for a genuine, soulful connection. If genuine soulfulness was there for Jesus as He led people away from the religious authority and power of His day, the Good News, friends, is that this genuine soulfulness remains ours to claim today. We can always find our way back to it. God planted it in our hearts the moment God breathed life into us. The gates we choose instead - political, social, or otherwise - often lead us astray from the path where Jesus the Shepherd leads us. There are often thieves or bandits wanting to put this power of connection to work for purposes that aren’t holy or just. That’s when we discover what it means to “spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls,” as Thurman put it.

Powerful people know how to pull strings. It’s what they do.

But we must follow a different voice. Even as shots ring out in ballrooms and bombs fall around the world, even as we are compelled by threats to cut ourselves off from the rest of the flock, we can find our way back. The directions are simple, and they begin with asking ourselves what keeps us from welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoner and healing the sick. What keeps us from wanting for others what we enjoy for ourselves? Whatever keeps us from following in the way of Jesus, we’ve chosen the wrong gate. We’re listening to thieves and bandits who aren’t interested in God’s fundamental currency of human flourishing.

Even in times like these, may we find comfort in that the Good Shepherd is not far off.

The voice is not hidden.

It sounds like life being given.

It sounds like someone being seen.

It sounds like care, even when it costs something.

And if we listen closely—

beneath the noise, beneath the fear—

there is something in us that recognizes the voice of the Good Shepherd, calling us back to love.

Scripture

The first time I ever thought I was being shot at, I had just sat down for breakfast.

We were heading north out of Islamabad, bound for a displacement camp in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province—a place as remote as it is beautiful, and as lawless as it is rugged. Imagine the foothills of the Himalayas dotted with small village armies for hire.

Those small armies were often pulled into the orbit of the Taliban. The mountains along the Afghanistan border made for easy movement between war and refuge. In 2009, Pakistan responded with military force inside its own borders, and the violence forced millions of people to flee their homes.

War brings suffering—even when its intentions claim to be just.

And so we were there, trying to provide food, shelter, and care in the face of overwhelming need.

But first—we needed breakfast.

Our van stopped at a roadside gas station. The same yellow Shell sign you see here stood by the narrow road.

Our crew—maybe eight of us—filtered in, used the restroom, and took our seats.

Just as I began to wonder what I wanted in an omelette, we heard it:

Pop… pop… pop pop pop pop.

I dropped to the floor.

Breakfast had suddenly made me very vulnerable.

Travel has always required vulnerability. Eating does, too.

Scholars like Dennis E. Smith and John Dominic Crossan remind us that meals in the time of Jesus were not casual gatherings. They were boundary-marking events, where safety was never assumed. You didn’t eat with strangers unless you were willing to risk something. To share a table was to say: I will not harm you—and I trust you will not harm me.

Fellowship at table required the host to risk provision, safety, and honor. Guests risked dependence and exposure.

Anthropologists call this reciprocal vulnerability. Both sides are open to harm. But because walls must come down even to sit at the same table, that same risk creates the possibility for relationship.

And, just like traveling and eating, relationships require vulnerability.

In Luke’s telling of the journey to Emmaus, the disciples go through layer upon layer of vulnerability. They take the risk to travel to a village. They take a risk in responding to a stranger along the way. They walk and talk with Jesus—but they are kept from recognizing Him.

It is only when they reach the table, only when they risk trust so intimately, that everything changes.

“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.”

It is not until they are at the deeply vulnerable point of gathering at the table that Jesus is revealed to them.

We guard ourselves every day as we look into the world. We often think we see clearly. But the truth is — we do not perceive what we are not ready to receive.

When we are defensive, we become blind.

When we think we already understand, our hearts slow down.

When we are protecting ourselves from disappointment, we struggle to believe anything new.

And sometimes…even when something in us is stirring, even when our hearts are beginning to burn, we still do not recognize what is right in front of us.

The disciples don’t see Jesus until the layers of vulnerability are pulled back. The Disciples are deeply vulnerable. Deep in grief, they set out alone. Travelers in the ancient world were vulnerable—to robbery, deception, harm. And Jesus meets them there—not with power, but by listening.

He hears their story before revealing His own identity. And then He deepens the moment:

“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe…”

But it isn’t until they are at table together, breaking bread and trusting one another, that Jesus reveals His identity. Luke uses the same language here that Scripture uses when God reveals God’s self. God is revealed not in the projection of strength but in our laid-bare vulnerability.

The second time I thought I was being shot at, I had just made my bed in a tent in South Sudan. The distinctive rat-a-tat of an AK-47 forced me, again, to the ground.

The popping I heard at breakfast in Pakistan, and the unmistakable, memorable sound of an AK-47 near my tent in South Sudan, each turned out to be locals trying out guns they were considering buying.

There are Bubbas selling guns all around the planet, it seems.

I’ve hesitated to share these stories because in a world shaped by violence, we are tempted to see power as what saves us.

But that’s not the point. I was not heroic. I was vulnerable. Completely exposed. Afraid, and dependent on someone else to ensure my safety. In those moments, Jesus was revealed to me through others who made sure I knew that I was safe. A gas station manager who assured us everything was OK after checking on the gunfire in his parking lot. A South Sudanese aid worker who thought to make sure the visiting kwaja knew he wasn’t caught in a cattle raid, or another battle in a long civil war.

In a world where leaders of every stripe project strength through violence while claiming to make peace, the Emmaus story tells us something different.

Following Jesus requires vulnerability.

It means leaving behind the certainty of our judgments and walking into the unknown. It means encountering people who may not look like Jesus to us. It means sitting at tables far removed from power—trusting that Christ might meet us there.

We will find nourishment along the Emmaus roads we walk—in unfamiliar faces, in unexpected places. The moments when we are not in control, when we are most vulnerable, are how we find our way in following Jesus. God meets us at these bends in the road — not when we are strong, but when we are open. Laid bare, by choice or by circumstance.

We may hear the shots ring out.

We may be driven to the ground.

But we will only be able to see and to follow Jesus authentically when we are vulnerable, when we are in need, when we are willing to take a risk. Because as we walk life’s long road, it is only when we are vulnerable enough to receive Jesus that our eyes are finally opened.