Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: A Little Humility

The apostle advised his readers to do the will of God as best they could – but also to be aware that they did not, could not know everything.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the twelfth chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 12:1-8).

Paul wrote that we should present ourselves in our bodies as a sacrifice to the living God, by which I’m fairly certain that he meant that all our deeds, our actions, and our words ought to be done with some notion of fulfilling the will of God, at least as best we understand it. Paul followed that with a caution, not to think too well of ourselves, which is very much a temptation if we see ourselves as following and enacting the will of God.

It is, I think, some of the most honest advice that the Apostle Paul ever wrote in his letters. I’m pretty sure that his besetting temptation was, in fact, arrogance. The temptations to think that he knew more than he did, to proclaim more than he knew. You can see it in a number of places in the letters, both where the Apostle Paul recognized it and drew back from it, and the places where he didn’t recognize it and did it anyway.

That’s advice that is good for Paul’s time, for Paul. It’s advice that is good for our time, for us, for me.

First of all, to be cautious about what we claim to know, to be careful about the things that we say, to make certain that we identify our opinions as opinions, our faith as faith, and to maybe not declare it quite so firmly as established fact. By all means, bring out that which supports your opinions, but know also that there is far more to know than any of us can know.

And of course, that first point still remains an excellent challenge for all of us, to strive to do that which God has called us to do, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to love God with all our heart and soul and mind.

Romans twelve. Romans eight is, by far, my favorite in this letter, but there are good words here to guide us in each day of our lives.

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you are thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Great Gathering

August 16, 2026

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Matthew 15:21-28

Who’s in? Who’s out? Who’s us? Who’s them? Who gets the benefit of the doubt? Who gets doubted without benefits?

These are not new questions in the United States, as you well know. The history of Americans’ opinions of people from different national and ethnic backgrounds has some real ugliness in it, and some real bright points. We live far more companionably with people of different sexual orientations than I ever expected – I never thought I’d see legal marriage for LGBTQ relationships, and for now, at least, they’re both legal and generally accepted in many places.

It was once illegal for people of different races to marry in some US states; those prohibitions have crumbled. American immigration law is, I’m sorry to say, a horror show from its origins with the Chinese Exclusion Act, relentlessly racist and, in these days, enforced with cruelty that’s been encouraged at the highest level.

These questions are older than the Hawaiian Kingdom or the United States or any government of the world. The Book of Ezra describes the rebuilding of Jerusalem when the Persian Empire permitted Jewish exiles to return around five hundred years before Jesus’ birth. The exile lasted around seventy years – nearly three generations – so the people had learned to think of at least some of those around them as neighbors. As the children grew into young adults, they began to marry among these neighbors, even though intermarriage was discouraged. Ezra, a priest, announced that the non-Jewish wives would have to go back to their families’ homes in Persia.

If you want to read something heartbreaking, read the tenth chapter of Ezra. It not only says that those families were broken up. It lists them. By name.

Curiously enough, at near the same time another prophet took up the pen. His work ended up as part of the Book of Isaiah, which is a composite work of at least three different authors writing at different times, and also includes a few chapters of Second Kings. Chapter 56 is considered by scholars as the place where this post-exile writing starts. And how did this writer begin?

Thus says the Lord:
    Maintain justice, and do what is right,
for soon my salvation will come
    and my deliverance be revealed.
2 Happy is the mortal who does this,
    the one who holds it fast,
who keeps the Sabbath, not profaning it,
    and refrains from doing any evil.
3 Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,
    “The Lord will surely separate me from his people,”
and do not let the eunuch say,
    “I am just a dry tree.”
4 For thus says the Lord:
To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
    who choose the things that please me
    and hold fast my covenant,
5 I will give, in my house and within my walls,
    a monument and a name
    better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
    that shall not be cut off.
6 And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,
    to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord,
    and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it
    and hold fast my covenant—
7 these I will bring to my holy mountain
    and make them joyful in my house of prayer;

I read there some sections our lectionary editors omitted. The Torah did place limits on who could enter the religious assembly – a worship service, basically – which included men with injuries to their genitals. I really don’t understand why that should be relevant to anything, but then I don’t understand why a lot of things were considered relevant. Leviticus 21 bans someone who is blind from serving in religious leadership. Well, I’m rather pleased that we’ve discerned that that wasn’t a meaningful issue, given that my daughter Rebekah is blind and was ordained as UCC minister this year.

Human history around disability isn’t that good.

As Samuel Giere writes at Working Preacher, “Isaiah 56-66 returns to a basic question: With the diagnosis and the renewed promise both in view, what now? The first movement in this ‘what now?’ is Isaiah 56.1-8. It addresses the reality that God’s blessing spills over the boundaries assumed by God’s people — the insiders.”

At much the same time Ezra was breaking up families – which was not, in fact, required by the Law of the Torah – someone we’ll call Isaiah spoke another vision. He proclaimed God’s welcome not just in the city, not just in the community, but in the place of worship. He proclaimed God’s welcome not just for those foreigners who hadn’t been banned in the Law, he proclaimed it for eunuchs who had been banned in the Law. Isaiah envisioned a realm of God that was greater than the precincts of a Temple, that was wider than the walls of a city, that was more extensive than the boundaries of a nation.

Let it be a great gathering.

The great gathering did have qualifications. “Maintain justice, and do what is right.” This had been the refrain of Israel’s prophets for generations. As Joel B. Kemp writes at Working Preacher, “For the writers of Isaiah 56, admission into God’s community is contingent upon a few ethical (rather than ethnic) requirements.”

Here I invite you to a choice. The Bible was written by many people over hundreds, even over a thousand years. They didn’t believe the same things about the world as we do, and they didn’t believe the same things about the world as each other. They didn’t believe the same things about God as one another. As we’ve heard today from Ezra and from Isaiah, they could and did believe radically opposite things about what God considered right and good and proper at the very same time.

So we have a choice.

We can go with Ezra. We can choose an ethnic group or national heritage and hold that as the highest allegiance and the source of what is good and right. We can be Swedish or Norwegian or English (to start with my own background) or Japanese or Hawaiian or Chinese or Okinawan or American (whatever that means) or Micronesian or one of a host of identities. We can say, “I’m in, you’re out, and there’s nothing you can do about it as long as we hold the power to keep you outside.”

Ezra 10 says we can do that.

We can also choose to form a community made up of people of many ethnicities, many heritages, many backgrounds. We can choose to form a community made up of people we’d previously chosen to ignore or dismiss, like those with disabilities or like those with a sexuality different from our own. We can choose that, knowing that it’s the more difficult way. It requires discussion and debate and discernment about what is good, and right, and fit.

Isaiah 56 says we can do that.

Which will we choose?

So what did Jesus do?

He did… both. Which is awkward.

He refused to aid this Canaanite woman’s request to heal her daughter, and he did it with an insult that wounds us even in translation. He called her and her daughter dogs, and that was exactly as insulting as it sounds. And then, she turned the insult back on itself brilliantly: even the dogs eat the crumbs from the children’s table.

Jesus told her that his community would be Ezra’s community. Her reply reflected Isaiah’s community. She seems to have changed his mind. Suddenly the blessings he was bringing could be shared with those outside of Israel. Suddenly a new world had opened.

Expanding into that world became one of the most noteworthy features of the new Christian Church following his death and resurrection. New life for Jesus became new life for Jews and new life for Gentiles as well. Apostles like Philip and Paul began working with Gentiles to create new Christian communities around the Mediterranean. The foreigners were warmly invited into the Way of Jesus.

As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Right now, we are living through times so fraught and so tenuous, everything depends on exactly how good the Good News really is.  It’s not good enough if it’s good just for me, or for the people who look and think like me, or for the people I already happen to like and love.  Is it Good News yet for those dying of Covid?  Is it Good News yet for the starving and the incarcerated and the unemployed and the homeless?  Is it Good News yet for the people across the border?  Is it Good News yet for the people you’ve been conditioned all your life to ignore?

“If the answer is no, then we have work to do.  Remember, Jesus himself has gone ahead of us, widening the gates and throwing open the doors to welcome the voice of a despised foreigner.”

So there’s your options. A community which accepts some and denies many, or a community that welcomes as many as we can.

You can have either one and claim the Bible justifies it. It does.

I know which one I’d rather live in. Give me Isaiah, not Ezra. Give me Jesus – at least after he’d heard the wisdom of the Canaanite woman.

I’d like the Great Gathering, please.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric writes sermons in full, but he tends to make changes while preaching, some of which are intentional.

The image is Isaiah by an 18 century icon painter – Iconostasis of Transfiguration church, Kizhi monastery, Karelia, Russia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3235458.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Part of the Renewed Nation

Who is included in God’s vision of community? More people than we tend to think.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the fifty-sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah (Isaiah 56:1, 6-8).

Isaiah appears to have been an assembled work. There’s a lengthy section that is primarily the work of a prophet named Isaiah, who lived in Jerusalem in the 700s before Jesus. There’s also a lengthy insertion, which is literally copied from the book of Second Kings. And then beginning about chapter 40, we get another writer.

Isaiah scholars believe that this one appears to have been an exile in Babylon, so hundreds of years after the initial Isaiah. He brought different concerns, and he brought a different sense of God’s promises. This part of chapter 56 is concerned with the restoration of the nation, which had been conquered by the Babylonians in 587. And here in chapter 56, it’s very clear that Isaiah expressed God’s promise that the exile people would at some time be able to come home.

But would there be anyone with them?

This portion of chapter 56 is very clearly answering the question, “Could others then Jews become a faithful part of the restored nation?” God’s answer was a clear, unequivocal, “Yes.” Those who wanted to be a part of the community and who would act according to its rules and its standards and its laws: they would be welcome. They could come and sacrifice in the rebuilt temple of God, and their prayers would be heard.

I don’t need to tell anybody that these are fractious days, days in which division and separation is very much the way of things. If you look through the Scriptures, you will find plenty of support for the notion that we should be separating people into little bits and bobs of communities. But Isaiah heard from God that that was not how it had to be, and many years later, along came Jesus, who in a conversation with a foreigner initially rejected her plea for healing, for her daughter, but was persuaded, was persuaded, and let his power find its way to a sick little girl.

Which will we choose? Will we choose the fractures of division and embrace the ways of dissension, even hatred, or will we be persuaded as Jesus was, as Isaiah was, to welcome the stranger and celebrate with them, and all of us together be faithful to God?

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons, Uncategorized

Sermon: It’s Bigger Than You Think

July 26, 2026

Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

If you’ve been trying to count the Scripture passages I say are among my favorites, well, add another one. Or maybe I’ve already mentioned it. In any case, it’s true. This section of Romans includes some of the words that ring most true in my soul.

I’ve known what it is not to know what or how to pray because the sadness and the hurt go so deep. I’ve been in places where prayer itself has seemed impossible – although God had supported me through many stresses and trials, I simply couldn’t find not just words, but even a direction for prayer in the sorrow of my soul.

How important it is to know that in those profoundly disconnected times, the Spirit helped me in my weakness, interceding with groanings too deep for words.

Sometimes I became aware of that. Other times, I didn’t. It didn’t matter. The Spirit was there, groaning with me whether I knew it or not.

As Israel Kamudzandu writes at Working Preacher, “The inarticulate moans or groans of the Holy Spirit are not oriented to the human conscience but they are directed to God on behalf of a believing faith community… The reality is that human beings run out of words, especially in moments of sickness, death, hunger, poverty, and whenever life confronts us with pain.”

It doesn’t stop there for me. That next verse about all things working together for good for those who love God – well, I know there’s some problems there. Let’s face it, not all things work together for good period. There are plenty of people who do evil and seem to delight in it. There are storms and earthquakes and although they have no conscious intent to harm, harm they do. The history of these islands, going way back or staying recent, reveals both evil intent by human beings and evil impact by impersonal force or human accident.

But still. I read that verse with relief. Maybe everything doesn’t work for good, but God does. God doesn’t set the world into the courses of evil. God acts to mitigate the harm, to transform it into something else. When human hubris and arrogance crucified Jesus Christ, God brought forgiveness in Jesus’ own words and then resurrection in Jesus’ own life. If God was willing to transcend the rejection of God’s most precious gift, then what will God refuse to transcend?

I can’t think of anything.

As Erin Heim writes at Working Preacher, “In Christ, God does not meet our human violence with divine violence or retribution but, rather, takes on our human violence and overwhelms it with God’s self-giving love (8:32–34). In Christ, God promises to bring justice and wholeness through God’s overwhelming love. In Christ, God’s love has had the final word, and in Christ, the ending is sure.”

The question that has occupied a lot of Christians over the last two thousand years is: for whom is this ending sure? That is, once God’s love has had the final word, for whom has God spoken?

It’s a knotty problem.

The plain sense of the English translations with which we’re familiar uses the word “predestined.” A lot of theologians and Bible scholars have concluded, based on that word, that God has chosen some people to become Christians and to be saved in advance. Some theologians and Bible scholars have further concluded, based on this passage, that God has chosen other people not to become Christians and not to be saved. Among those who believed this were Augustine of Hippo and John Calvin. Calvin was one of the Reformation thinkers behind our own Reformed tradition. Our church was more influenced by Calvin than by Martin Luther.

Did the Apostle believe that some people were blessed ahead of time and some people were cursed?

I don’t think so. The reason I don’t think so is found in the purpose of Paul’s letter to the Romans in the first place. When he wrote the letter, Paul hadn’t visited Rome. He seems to have known something about the leaders there, and he seems to have known at least a little about conditions for the Christians in Rome. But he hadn’t been there, and… he planned to visit.

He planned to visit on the way to Spain.

Why was he going to Spain? For the same reason he’d toured around the cities of the Anatolian peninsula, modern Turkey. For the same reason he’d visited the cities of Macedonia and Greece. He was introducing the news that Jesus Christ had lived, had taught, had died, and had rose again for the blessing of humanity. He firmly believed that embracing that truth brought eternal life to those who did so. So he set out to bring that word to a horde of strangers he’d never thought to meet. He set out in journeys fraught with risk and hazard – in his Second Letter to the Corinthians he mentioned that he’d been shipwrecked no less than three times. Now he proposed to take the longest sea journey of his ministry from the eastern Mediterranean to the western.

That’s an enormous amount of effort for someone who believes that God has predetermined it all. If God has set it all out ahead of time, what difference do the actions of any human beings matter? God has set it. It’s determined. It’s done.

Paul couldn’t have believed that and done the things he did.

In Paul’s day, people believed in big powerful deities and in local gods whose influence was limited to small areas or whose concern was limited to particular nations. In contrast, Paul taught of a God who could exert power in many places, but who was concerned for and extending grace to people of many backgrounds, even every background. As Michael Fitzpatrick writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Class, race, sexual orientation, wealth, fame, gender, religion, marriage, political party — none of these categories by which we carve up humanity into various tribes counts for or against a person in the Kingdom.”

Paul’s travels and labors were in service of a first century quest for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Church of Jesus Christ and the Realm of God. “How much grace did God have?” people might have asked him. “It’s bigger than you think,” Paul would have replied. Paul did reply: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

It’s bigger than you think.

These are days of factionalization, of separation into my group and your group, of division between the “We’re entitled” and “You’re nots.” It’s not the first time in human history; it won’t be the last. Isn’t it obvious that such thinking feeds the violence of the automobile attack on a Pride parade in Berlin yesterday, or the wars in Iran, Palestine, Ukraine, and more? Doesn’t it buttress the fears of women who receive no justice when they are assaulted?

In contrast, Paul taught of a church in which male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free – the most significant categories of his day – no longer mattered. God’s grace was for all. Did Paul fully recognize the implications of his own thinking? I don’t think so. He was still a person of his time, as we’re people of our time, and there were limits to his imagination just as there are limits to our imagination.

God’s grace is bigger than we think.

Of all the things I try to teach you from this pulpit, of all the things I try to convince you of from this pulpit, of all the things I try to persuade you of from this pulpit, this is the one I most earnestly want you to remember, to believe, and to live from:

God’s grace is bigger than we think. It’s for you. It’s for me. It’s for them. It’s for everybody. It’s for the ones we don’t think it’s for. It’s bigger than you think.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric writes sermons in full, but he tends to make changes while preaching, some of which are intentional.

The image is usually known as “Earthrise,” taken by NASA/Bill Anders December 24, 1968 – http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a410/AS8-14-2383HR.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=306267.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Greater Grace

If God is for us, who can be against us? wrote Paul. I wonder if God is for all the people who have ever been and ever will be.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 8:26-39).

Unlike most of the other letters of Paul which have survived to become part of our New Testament, the letter to the Romans was sent to people that Paul had not yet met. Some of them he clearly had heard about. He clearly expected that they had heard about him. He planned to visit Rome on his way to Spain, so he wrote a letter to introduce himself and to ask for their help and support as he planned that great journey.

As a result, the letter to the Romans is more expansive than some of Paul’s other correspondence. Paul had more to say about the extent of his thinking and his theology. In his letters to the churches in Corinth and in Galatia, Paul focused more on specific concerns arising within those congregations. In his letter to the Romans, he was trying to describe who he was and how he thought and what he believed about Jesus. And so we have not just the longest of Paul’s letters, we have the one in which he had the most to say.

This section of the eighth chapter is just packed with Paul’s thinking about salvation and about God’s role, not just in creation, but in the extent of God’s love for creation. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” The God said that sent Jesus, the God who was willing to sacrifice Jesus, the God who was willing to let the human beings do what they wanted to Jesus, is a God who will respond with grace and with mercy.

In Paul’s thinking no power on earth could step between God’s mercy and those to whom God chose to provide it. Paul called them God’s elect and indeed that’s true, those whom God has chosen. I do wonder if we can assume that God chose a small number. Paul worked diligently to increase that number.

But if God sent God’s Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through him (as John, the gospel writer, later put it), well then how much of the world did God intend to save? And if there are no powers that can stand between God and God’s mercy, how many people will God preserve at the end of time?

I do think that I can’t entirely remove the possibility of condemnation for some. Between the freedom of God and the ability of human beings to make pretty catastrophic mistakes, I think that possibility is always there. I also think that God’s intent was, is and will always be, to welcome all humanity into that place of light and beauty and love that God has prepared. Jesus said, “In my Father’s house, there are many mansions, and I go to prepare a place for you.” How many mansions have been prepared for us and for those we know and for those we do not know?

The answer to that question lies in the gracious heart of God.

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.