Sermons – Church of the Holy Cross

May 31, 2026 Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Created

May 31, 2026

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
2 Corinthians 13:11-13

The first chapter of Genesis is not the Bible’s only account of Creation. There’s another one in Proverbs 8, in which the figure of Wisdom works alongside God in the building of the world. Probably the most famous additional text is the first chapter of John’s Gospel, which echoes both Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8. You’ll likely recall as well the second chapter of Genesis, which looks very much like another account of creation.

When I think about different ideas about Creation, I’m thinking theologically, not scientifically – Genesis was not written as a book to explain how the world works, it was written as a book to explain God’s interactions with the world. That’s one of the reasons Genesis’ editors, and those who assembled the collection of Bible books later, felt perfectly fine about including more than one account of Creation. It doesn’t worry me that Genesis doesn’t match the geological record, or that cosmological theories don’t line up precisely with the first chapter of John. I also don’t get excited that evolutionary theory sort of follows the order of sea life, plants, and then land animals in Genesis.

To me, it’s the theology that matters. As Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “The contrast with other creation accounts of the ancient world is significant and begins the biblical corpus. The Holy One creates not out of pettiness, spite, avarice, or violence. Creation brings order, diversity, and relationship. It flows out of the identity of the Creator. It is progressive from the beginning, and the stage of rest is yet another progressive step. Creation continues. Rest, by nature, is a pause from activity. Because the Holy One is Creator, creation never stops, it rests.”

What matters to me is that all of the Bible’s Creation accounts emphasize both God’s deliberate choice to make a world of living things, and God’s love for that created world. What’s the refrain of this first chapter of Genesis? “And God saw that it was good,” finally stated as “very good.”

You don’t have to believe in God’s creative action to believe that the universe has value. Some atheists do. Some believers in religions that don’t believe in a divine creation do. Christianity itself begins with the assertion that the world is good, that substance is good, that existence is good. The poet and hymn lyricist Brian Wren writes,

Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body for knowing the world,
sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,
feeling, perceiving, within and around,
good is the body, from cradle to grave…

There are human belief systems that simply don’t accept this. A number of ancient religions did not value the world because they believed it was a divine accident, a by-product of conflict between gods. Some strands of Christianity, I’m sorry to say, have overemphasized soul over body, and as a result have permitted abuses of human bodies and cultures as well as permitting destruction of natural resources and beauty. Some contemporary philosophies, both Christian and non-Christian, stress the primacy of human beings in the universe, and not only tolerate but encourage deforestation, mountaintop removal, and habitat elimination. Just last month an Environmental Protection Agency committee ended review of gas and oil drilling for impact on endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico. Have we already forgotten the Deepwater Horizon accident sixteen years ago? A deepwater well blowout spewed oil for four months.

I don’t think we’ve forgotten. I think there’s a different belief system at work, that says that if certain people benefit, other life on the plant can be disregarded and, if necessary, destroyed.

Whatever some people may think, that view simply isn’t consistent with Scriptural thinking and assertions. Many have stressed that people, in verse 28, receive dominion. OK. Does that imply that human beings can do anything they want? Are human beings who have dominion over other human beings allowed to do anything they want? Is that true of parents? Of community leaders? Of national leaders?

Is it true of pastors? Do you really want me to have unquestioned authority to do anything I want?

If you weren’t sure about that, I’ll help: the answer is no, you don’t. There are provisions in our church bylaws that set limits on the things I can do. There are provisions in the United Church of Christ that set limits on the things I can do.

When we look at dominion in Genesis, the one who exerts power over things is God, and what does God do with that power? God brings order to chaos. God brings light and shape and form. God brings life, and not just life: God brings a system in which life can sustain itself, and other forms of life.

If we assert that we have an unquestioned, unlimited dominion, then exert it in ways that destroy the living systems of God, we are not living out a divine commission. We are tearing at the environment that sustains our lives as well as those of other living things.

God values this world. If we follow God’s ways, we value this world. As much as the honu in the sea or the ‘io in the air, as much as the ohi’a on the mountainside or the paho’eho’e as it flows, we are God’s Creation, a manifestation of holy will and love. We are created.

As the twelfth century theologian Hildegard of Bingen wrote, “God says, ‘I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows. I gleam in the waters. I burn in the sun, moon, and stars. With every breeze, as with invisible life that contains everything, I awaken everything to life.’”

It’s the sixth day in which God declares all that has been made “very good,” and that is the day of the creation of the animal life of Earth, ranging from the creeping things – I think that’s probably the insects that we don’t like very much – to humanity itself, made in the image of God, “Male and female he created them.”

Male and female are… very good.

There are, again, different ideas floating around as to the relative value of male and female. History is dominated by the idea that men are worth more, that they are more reliable, that they are better trusted with power than women. It’s a curious idea. According to the FBI, people arrested for violent crimes in 2019 were 72.5% men and 27.5% women. Men in government have started nearly every war ever fought on this planet. Would women do better? I don’t know. I do think we’ve run the experiment long enough to say that it’s time to try something else to see how that works.

More to the point, this basic assertion demands that we accord full value and respect for the dignity of women. The claims of “complementarianism,” the idea that women are of equal value to men but that the two sexes are designed for different kinds of social roles, is simply sexism with a slightly softer texture. “Women, you have equal value to myself” is a meaningless expression when it’s followed by, “and because I’m a man, I’m in charge.”

The image of God does not depend on gender. It just doesn’t.

Humanity in God’s image also means that all people have value. Period. End of sentence. Someone of another religion has the same value as you or me. Someone of another nation has the same value as you or me. Someone of a different political party has the same value as you or me. Someone with power has the same value as you or me. Someone without power has the same value as you or me.

That means we can’t use distinctions within humanity to discount, devalue, or disenfranchise other human beings. Legal immigrants? Full value. Illegal immigrants? Full value. Dark skinned people? Full value. Light skinned people? Full value. Gay people? Full value. Straight people? Full value. Republicans? Full value. Democrats? Full value. Politicians? Full value. Teachers? Full value. Road repair workers? Full value. Incarcerated prisoners? Full value.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” I’d argue that he was right, but the basis is not just in the action of Christ, but in the creative work of God.

Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “We are all, Hildegard teaches, carriers of the divine light. We have interior gardens in which we cultivate these qualities of love, wisdom, and greening inside ourselves. And as love and wisdom flow through us, we participate in the greening of the world. We are, she writes, ‘so entangled with the strengths of the rest of creation that we can never be separated from them.’”

We come into Creation because of the love and grace of God. We come into a Creation already loved and graced by God. We come into a Creation in which we participate in the greening of the world. We come into Creation to celebrate, enjoy, and nurture other people, other creatures, the trees and shrubs, the very flowing fiery rock itself, because all of it, including ourselves, is very good.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the text he prepared does not precisely match what he said while preaching.

The image is Let There Be Light, An Illustration for The Story of the Old Testament by Shigeru Aoki – 「現代日本美術全集 7「青木繁・藤島武二」集英社、1972年, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47599953

May 24, 2026 Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Receive the Holy Spirit

May 24, 2026

Acts 2:1-21
John 20:19-23

There’s a reason why this morning’s story about the house finch guarding his treasure had him guarding… whatever it was. I think we have a similar problem with the Holy Spirit. We know it’s valuable. We know it’s important. We know it’s something to embrace. But…

What is it? When we receive the Holy Spriit, what do we receive?

It doesn’t help that we have two Scriptures offered by the editors of the Revised Common Lectionary for Pentecost with, shall we say, rather different ideas of how the Holy Spirit was given to Jesus’ disciples after his resurrection. The one we probably know better is the Pentecost account from Acts of the Apostles. Jesus had been raised but he had also departed, promising his followers the gift of the Holy Spirit. About a hundred and twenty of them kept close to one another in Jerusalem, and many if not all of them got together to observe the Savuot holiday together. Savuot was one of the three holidays that attracted Jews to Jerusalem in the first century, along with Sukkot in the fall and Passover earlier in the spring. In fact, the Greek name Pentecost stands for the fifty days between Passover and Savuot.

Whatever they’d planned – which was probably Temple worship at some point in the day – the Holy Spirit changed their plans with a rush like a violent wind, the signs of tongues on their heads, then speaking different tongues, and being so successful in proclaiming God’s inviting mercy that their community grew 2,500%.

As Margaret Aymer writes at Working Preacher, “The Holy Spirit proves not to be a quiet, heavenly dove but, rather, a violent force that blows the church into being (Acts 2:41–47). That church consists mainly of immigrants, people of different languages and cultures with different mother tongues (Acts 2:5, 9–12, 14). To these, the message goes forth: a message of the coming of the day of the Lord, full of heavenly portents and prophetic women, slaves, and men. But in the midst of the chaos of Pentecost rests an anchor: Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

In contrast, we have John’s account of the gift of the Holy Spirit. The setting is much different: the evening of Easter Day itself. Just a few of the disciples were gathered in a private, even locked space. As Cody J. Sanders writes at Working Preacher, “John’s scene is an intimate proximity of bodies and breath, fright giving way to peace, signs of death bespeaking new life, and a renewed mission for those whose world had seemingly come to an end.”

On the one hand: Close friends gathered alone. The gentle breeze of a human breath. A promise of forgiveness.

On the other hand: Close friends gathered, then driven out into the crowds. The roar of a mighty wind. And… a promise of forgiveness.

One of my convictions about the Holy Spirit is that the Spirit’s manifestations simply aren’t predictable. I recall Elijah’s journey to the mountain of the Law, where he found that the great events of wind, fire, and earthquake were not full of the Spirit, but the “sound of sheer silence” was. I recall that the Spirit visited Jeremiah when he thought he was too young and Mary when she was not a married adult. I recall that the Spirit came to foreigners, not just foreigners, to a Roman officer’s household, and that the Spirit transformed someone fully convinced that the Jesus movement must be ended.

There are so many others. The Spirit doesn’t do what I expect it to do, or what you expect it to do, or what Elijah, Moses, Jeremiah, Mary, Simon Peter, or the Apostle Paul expected it to do.

So what does mark the Holy Spirit?

I’d have to say that the first sign is probably disruption. There’s that unpredictability again, but it’s also because the Holy Spirit isn’t that interested in changing things that are good and right and true. The Holy Spirit intervenes when things are going badly, wrongly, and falsely – or at least when they could be substantially better. The Pentecost story from Acts is disruptive from start to finish, changing the little Jesus community’s plans not just for the day but for the rest of their lives.

John’s account is gentler, but it’s disruptive, too. This was Jesus’ first appearance to the disciples on Easter, and in John’s gospel it took two more visits to shake them out of the notion that they were going to go on with life as usual. When you hear Jesus say, “Receive the Holy Spirit” here, you should probably also hear what he said in the next chapter: “Feed my sheep.”

What else marks the Holy Spirit?

Jesus’ first words to his friends as he appeared among them was, “Peace be with you.” A mark of the Holy Spirit is peace.

If that seems inconsistent with disruption, Jesus spoke those words in the aftermath of state-authorized violence: his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. He lived, and we live, in an age where wars tragically rage among nations and within nations. By the time John’s Gospel was written, Roman armies had swept over the ground Jesus walked and destroyed the Jerusalem Temple.

I’d argue that the world needs some serious disruption to live in peace. As Angela N. Parker writes at Working Preacher, “Jesus has given us a double portion of peace to breathe again. Let us be Jesus followers that transform society instead of being fearful disciples who are holding our collective breath.”

What else marks the Holy Spirit?

Forgiveness and inclusion.

In John, Jesus’ final words were that his followers had been given the power to forgive. I grant you that’s a power you may not want. It’s too big for most of us. Personally, I’m concerned that if I’m responsible for forgiveness there are some people who definitely need it who aren’t going to get it.

Forgiveness is a simple concept. When somebody does something that brings harm to someone else, which might be another person, or God, or both, then that person is obligated to make things right. In religious terms, they have to repent, they have to make restitution, and they have to reform their future behavior. If they do that, if they apologize and try to correct the harm they did, the person they injured has the opportunity to forgive.

Human beings do that a lot. They do things, and then they say, “I’m sorry,” and they try to fix it, and the person they harmed says, “It’s all right.”

Part of our understanding about sin and forgiveness is that God gets involved. God doesn’t want people harming one another, so injuring another person is also a sin against God. When we apologize to the person we harmed, we also need to apologize to God.

Jesus was clear that apologizing to God alone is not enough. In the Sermon on the Mount, he told his hearers that when bringing an offering to God seeking forgiveness, they needed to first make things right with the people they’d harmed. It’s important to apologize to God, but Jesus made clear that that wouldn’t have any impact if there’d been no apology to the people involved.

The current affection for non-apology apologies, “I’m sorry if I offended anyone,” and the assertion that “God has forgiven me, so I don’t need to make things right with anyone else,” are both bad theology and bad for human relationships.

When Jesus told his disciples that they had the power to forgive, he told them that they had the power to help people through their repentance to others and come to repentance to God.

They still need to take the steps themselves, however. Forgiveness without repentance and restitution isn’t forgiveness. It’s just license. Permission to cause harm.

Simon Peter, in quoting from the prophet Joel, made clear that the gift of the Holy Spirit would lead to salvation. He made it clear that many of the restrictions people usually apply to human societies would not be honored by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit comes to young and old, men and women, rich and poor, respected and discounted.

The Holy Spirit comes even to you and to me, who would probably prefer less disruption in life, who would like peace but aren’t sure what a world at peace looks like, and who are somewhat anxious to hear that God pays attention to whether we forgive someone or not. The Holy Spirit comes so that we get shaken from our complacency, so that we no longer accept the violence and coercion so common in the world. The Holy Spirit comes to give us courage to forgive when people apologize to us, and help them find their way to their further forgiveness by God:

So that all the world might be saved.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes from his prepared text while preaching, so the sermon as written does not precisely match the sermon as preached.

The image is The Virgin Surrounded Twelve Apostles or The Holy Ghost Appears by the Master of the Crucifix of Pesaro, ca. 1380. Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11148957.

May 17, 2026 Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons, Uncategorized

Sermon: Suffering and Rejoicing

May 17, 2026

1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11
John 17:1-11

Suffering is one of the great questions confronting religion – any religion. Christianity, it must be said, doesn’t have as close a focus on it as other faiths. Christianity has much clearer answers to the questions of sin – we are forgiven through Jesus Christ – and death – we are promised resurrection in Jesus Christ. Buddhism, in contrast, concentrates on suffering and offers a pathway out of Samsara, the loop of lives in which people suffer.

It isn’t our prioritized concern, but Christians experience suffering and they think about it. “Suffering is a major theme in 1 Peter,” writes Jennifer Kaalund at Working Preacher. “The word is mentioned twelve times in this short letter. This repetition makes it clear that the audience is experiencing difficult circumstances. And yet the writer wants to remind them that they are not alone in their suffering.”

Nobody is alone in suffering, you know. Suffering is one of the shared experiences of the human condition. We don’t suffer all the time, thank God. But we all know what it is from experiences of hunger and thirst, injury and illness, failure and disappointment, pain and fear, loss and grief.

The easiest way to understand suffering is that if you’re suffering, you’ve done something to bring it on. It’s easiest because, let’s face it, it’s so often true. My parents used to tell a story about a camping trip we took when I was quite young, maybe two or three years old. My mother had been cooking on a camp stove in a cast iron frying pan, and little me walked over and grasped the hot handle. I don’t remember anything about this, but apparently they had to get me to a doctor, which was awkward because we were on an island without one.

You know and I know that we’ve done comparable things with rather more knowledge of the consequences than little Eric not understanding about hot frying pans. We’ve known something was hot. We’ve known it was going to hurt – sometimes hurt more people than us – and for whatever reasons we came up with at the time, we reached out and grasped the handle.

We saw lots of examples of this during the pandemic, people disregarding precautions, avoiding vaccines, even courting illness with dreadful consequences. A number of folks noted, aghast, that we are going to have to retire the phrase “avoid it like the plague” because, it seems, fewer people than you’d think actively avoid the plague.

Often enough, however, the easy explanation that somebody suffers because they did something to deserve it is plain wrong. Illness, including pandemic-borne illness, happens. It just happens. It doesn’t need any human intervention, knowing or unknowing, to make people sick. I see a dermatologist twice a year because my skin is vulnerable to sunlight. What did I do to create that condition? I was born. That’s it. No further intervention was necessary. I’m not going to change it with exercise, diet, or medication. I can decrease the risk of skin illness, but I can’t change the basic vulnerability.

Random suffering isn’t satisfying. It can’t be. People like life to have meaning, and when suffering becomes part of life, it should be meaningful. The simple truth is that sometimes it isn’t. It’s just suffering.

Early Christianity had to deal with a further example of suffering, and that was the crucifixion of Jesus himself. It could not be explained that he had deserved it – that wouldn’t work. And it could not be called simply random. Jesus himself had said it was meaningful, even necessary to his work. As time went on, other early Christian leaders also began suffering, frequently, as Jesus had, at the hands of the authorities. That wasn’t how things were supposed to work in a properly ordered world.

The world, clearly, was not properly ordered.

Dr. Kaalund writes, “[Jesus’] crucifixion was the result of an attempt to transform oppressive systems, to assert the importance of the lives of marginalized people, indeed, to challenge a worldview that suffering of the many was necessary for the pleasure of a few… We share in Christ’s suffering when justice is denied, when righteousness is not realized, and when the conditions for peace are elusive. So the author of the letter reminds the audience that they should not be surprised when they are standing for righteousness, fighting for justice, and are pursuing peace that they are met with obstacles and challenges. Jesus, too, was challenged in this pursuit.”

Dr. Kaalund illustrates two more sources of suffering. The first comes from the deliberate actions of other people. Some of these people harm others from outside the law – we call them criminals, and we have an entire structure of codes, enforcement officers, and processes to determine responsibility and to deal with their actions. Their actions bring a lot of suffering.

Some of the people bringing suffering, however, operate inside the law. Those were the people inflicting the “fiery trial” on the original readers of this letter. They were magistrates, city councilors, governors, possibly even the Emperor himself if First Peter was written during the reign of Domitian. Undeserved suffering has been inflicted by governments countless times over the centuries, and it has probably done vastly more harm than the operations of criminals, because they’ve got a lot more resources to do it with. Remember that Jesus’ crucifixion was legal. Peter and Paul’s executions were legal. Martyr after martyr died with the full assent of the law.

Slavery was legal. Keeping women from voting was legal. The death penalty for gay and lesbian people is legal in seven UN member nations. The Holocaust was legal. The family separations of the first Trump administration were, as far as the courts have weighed in, legal. And the chaotic sweeps that have brought so much suffering to American cities have been, with some contested exceptions, legal. Legal, and by inflicting so much suffering, horribly wrong.

First Peter raises a further source of suffering: suffering as the result of doing what is good, and right, and true. That was the experience of those enduring the “fiery trial.” They were trying to follow the ways of Jesus, and like Jesus, they were suffering. As Valerie Nicolet writes at Working Preacher, “1 Peter reminds us that what is at stake in the sufferings of Christ-believers is not so much what they believed but what they did. Because they believed that Christ was Lord, and not Caesar, they strived to establish communities marked by love and solidarity rather than by hierarchy and a system of patronage and debt.”

First Peter invites us to rejoice in our sufferings, some of the most bizarre advice given us in religious literature. He could do this because so much of the suffering his readers experienced was of that last kind, related not to their mistakes or random chance or prejudice but to their own diligence in following Christ. Suffering can be an affirmation that one is doing the right thing, and that is a source of rejoicing.

But as Jimmy Hoke writes at Working Preacher, “Exceptionalized suffering lacks solidarity with all who suffer… A critical approach to this passage in light of Christianity’s power to inflict systemic suffering demands rethinking whose suffering counts. Instead of moralizing what and whose suffering counts, this requires asking what it means to roar with solidarity for all who suffer.”

Can we come to aid those who suffer randomly, or worse yet, for their own actions? Of course we can. My parents swooped me off to a doctor when I grasped that hot pan. It’s what we do for children. There’s no reason not to do it for adults.

But what about rejoicing? Do we rejoice within our sufferings if they’re random, or self-inflicted, or more related to something we can’t control about ourselves than actual virtue?

We can, I think, rejoice within our suffering if not because of our suffering, because we are never alone in our suffering. We are all beneath the mighty hand of God, or as the old song puts it, God’s got the whole world in his hand.

We don’t rejoice because it hurts. We rejoice because we have God with us. We rejoice because we have more strength, more confidence, more commitment, than we would have otherwise.

And we rejoice because we know that though our road has led to suffering, it leads beyond it to a better and brighter day. “…The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.”

It’s a hope and a promise in which to rejoice.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric prepares a full text for his sermons, but he does make changes while preaching. The sermon as written and the sermon as presented are not identical.

The image is a carving of the mask of tragedy by Carl Milles in Stockholm, Sweden. Photo by Holger.Ellgaard – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4326478.

May 10, 2026 Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Connections

May 10, 2026

Acts 17:22-31
John 14:15-21

In Acts 17, Paul and Silas had been traveling hard for a while. They’d made a few friends in Thessalonica, which is toward the north of the Greek peninsula, but they’d also found a good few enemies who had stirred up the authorities against them. They’d gone to a nearby community, Berea, and made some more friends. Unfortunately those same enemies decided they hadn’t made enough trouble, with the result that their friends put Paul on a boat and sent him south along the coast to the great ancient city of Athens.

According to Luke, the likely author of Acts of the Apostles, Paul didn’t think much of Athens. “He was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Paul was from Tarsus, a city at a number of cultural crossroads. The Jewish community he grew up in would have been minority amidst worshipers of Greek, Roman, Persian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian deities. He’d been surrounded by idols all his life.

Well, he didn’t have to like it. He didn’t. He started to speak and argue, first in the synagogue (where folks would have shared at least some of his distress) and then in the public areas where the local philosophers liked to debate. They brought him to the Areopagus, the great square of news and discussion, and prepared to listen – and, I’m sure, to dispute.

Jeremy L. Williams doesn’t believe that Paul’s opening was all that conciliatory. He writes at Working Preacher, “Paul’s statement about the Athenians’ worship practices is certainly pejorative. It would not be unfair to translate his statement as saying that the Athenians are very superstitious (hōs deisidaimonesterous) in an unflattering way (Acts 17:22). They are so bad, to him, that they even worship what they do not know. He uses this as an entry point to launch his message.”

This is the same sort of behavior that led to Timothy insulting his judges beyond their tolerance in last week’s reading from Acts.

Most commentators read this opening differently from Dr. Wiliams, and Dr. Williams himself notes that however inauspicious the beginning, Paul’s sermon grew increasingly effective from there, even though he’d set a challenging task. He had set out to persuade them that a single Creator deity was concerned with human life and behavior, and had demonstrated that concern with resurrection from the dead. I’m not sure I can communicate just how strange that would have sounded to them. Matt Skinner writes at Working Preacher, “By referring to Jesus’ resurrection and implying that all people will likewise be raised from the dead, Paul steers the Athenians toward a notion of communing with the Divine that does not square with their presuppositions. To a crowd interested in the immortality of the soul (and an accompanying contempt for bodies and the limitations they impose), Paul preaches about a God who resurrects bodies. It’s a difficult thing for the Athenians to hear as good news. Why would people want to keep their bodies? It strikes them as icky.”

It was a challenge. He did not entirely succeed. “Some scoffed,” it reads in the very next verse, but also “others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’” Some even joined Paul, founding the Christian community in Athens.

Paul had helped them make connections.

The first connection was within themselves. They had very different notions about the roles of gods and goddesses, about the nature of good and evil, about the relationship between different groups of people. Dr. Williams observes, “Paul’s message about the Unknown God does not deny the Athenians’ wisdom nor does it call for a destruction of their ways of knowing. It acknowledges that from one, God made every family (ethnos) of humans to inhabit the face of the whole earth (Acts 17:26).“

Paul helped them make connections between the things they already knew and the things he was offering to them as new insight. They didn’t have to give up all they knew. They didn’t have to give up the tools with which they learned. They were invited to use those ways of thinking to re-examine what they’d concluded in light of new information.

As you may have noted when trying to teach someone something new, that’s frequently a difficult leap to make. But if you harangue someone with “You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong!” that almost never goes better.

With Paul’s help, they made new connections.

Then they made new connections with Paul, and with one another. Luke even provides us with the names of two of them – Dionysius the Areopagite and Damaris – probably because that man and woman were known in Christian circles. Dionysius and Damaris developed new relationships with this wandering preacher, with those who eventually rejoined him from Berea, with one another, and with those who later made a circle of friends into a growing community of faith.

They made connections within. They made connections with one another. I can only assume – but it’s a pretty good assumption – that they made new connections with God.

We are Paul’s heirs. We are the guides to connection for our generations. We are the ones who will help – or hinder – those who seek to learn, to connect, and to experience God.

“Our world, like theirs,” writes C. Clifton Black at Working Preacher, “is variously if sometimes stupidly religious. Now as then, Christianity faces attackers of all stripes: the sophisticated, the unthinking, and the powerful who are easily threatened. Anyone who considers idolatry dead in contemporary culture has not been paying attention to Wall Street and Madison Avenue, to Hollywood or Washington or Beijing.”

Or, I’d add, to those proclaiming various strains of Christianity, including but not limited to Christian nationalism and the prosperity gospel. As Dan Clendenin writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “At our worst, we Christians have isolated and insulated ourselves from our culture’s mainstream. We can be inward-looking, self-absorbed, self-important, and cloistered, instead of engaging people at our contemporary synagogue, agora or Areopagus… But at our best, Christians have followed Paul’s example of living, learning and sharing the gospel in the marketplace of ideas, in bars and board rooms as well as in basilicas, in university lecture halls as well as in church fellowship halls. In an outward, centrifugal movement modeled after Paul at the Areopagus, believers have engaged real people where they really live, work, and think, in order to gain a hearing for their ‘strange ideas’ about repentance, rebirth, and the resurrection.”

Should you find a spot near the Mo’oheau Bandstand and start preaching? I mean, if that’s where you’re called to, go ahead, but you may have noticed I don’t do that. Nor to Liliu’okalani Garden or Lincoln Park – though I have been known to join a march or demonstration downtown.

Where are you called to make connections?

For many of us, the first setting for relationships is our family – our siblings, cousins, and the extended ‘ohana of both kupuna and keiki. How do we help the people we love make a connection between something we both share as true, and something new that they, so far, haven’t accepted as true? How do we build the love between us into something that helps them find new understandings and act upon them?

Who can you help make a new connection?

Who can you help to a new relationship, one which involves them in a community? The obvious community to invite them into is this one – I mean, Jesus encouraged us to do just that two thousand years ago – but there are other communities that engage and support human beings as they find their full humanity. A service club? Go for it. An organization that relies on volunteers to do good things, like the Food Basket, Habitat for Humanity, HOPE Services, the Ku’ikahi Mediation Center, the Human Society. They’ll find work for you, and they’ll find connections for you, or for the person who needs connecting.

Join a musical ensemble. Audition for a play.

Who do you know who would benefit from those connections?

That’s probably a long list. Who are the first five? That’s more manageable. You can help five people make connections with other people, can’t you?

The goal, in the end, is to help people build their relationship with God – but you can’t skip directly there. It’s built on the connections we make in our brains, hearts, and souls. It’s built out of the connections we make with other human beings who affirm us in these understandings. It’s deepened when each of us take further steps toward the One in whom, as Paul quoted from a pagan Greek poet, “we live and move and have our being.”

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching from his prepared text. The sermon as preached differs from the sermon as prepared.

The image is St Paul Preaching at Athens by Raphael (1515) – Royal Collection of the United Kingdom, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1718078.

May 7, 2026 Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Rough Road

May 3, 2026

Acts 7:55-60
John 14:1-14

Philip Ruge-Jones writes at Working Preacher, “Back in the day, my seminary professors told us that our proclamation should recreate the effect in our own congregation that the Word had on its first hearers.” He goes on to suggest that the most faithful result of a sermon on the death of Stephen would be, in fact, that you do to me what Stephen’s audience did to him.

I’m pretty sure Dr. Ruge-Jones was joking.

You may be wondering why Stephen was executed at all. Who was he? Who were the people who covered their ears and with a loud shout rushed together against him?

Stephen was one of the first seven deacons, a position created in the Jerusalem church to distribute food among its members. That congregation had committed itself to sharing resources, and that meant that they purchased for everyone and then had to deliver it to everyone. Originally the apostles did all that work, but with the growth of the church and their desire to concentrate on speaking to new potential members, they expanded the leadership group and created this new role. The name “diakonos” (which we’ve rendered to “deacon” in English) was the word used for a table servant.

Stephen, at least, and one assumes his compatriots, didn’t just deliver food. He became well known for his words and “great wonders and signs.” This roused some in the city to formally charge him with blasphemy before the council of the Temple priests. His reply to their accusations was… Well, Stephen accused those sitting in judgment of participating in the murder of God’s prophets. “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You are the ones who received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.”

Stephen found himself on a portion of his faith journey that had turned into a rough road. Up to this point, though the Jerusalem authorities had been concerned about the growing movement of Jesus-followers, they had restrained themselves from major actions, lest they find themselves opposing something inspired by God. With Stephen before them, the mood had changed. It’s worth asking whether Stephen could have expected anything else but a death sentence from them. Luke’s writing suggests, I think, that Stephen’s own words inflamed their hostility so much that they abandoned the judicial proceedings and degenerated into a mob. Jesus, before a court that probably included a fair number of the same people, had not been judged guilty of blasphemy, but brought to the Roman governor for trial as a rebel.

You can read this as Stephen deliberately – or at least foolishly – aggravating his judges to the point they would act against his life. Did Stephen have a death wish? Is that likely to be true of the Christian martyrs who adopted Stephen as the model for their conduct before court after court for the next two and a half centuries? I don’t think so.

What I see in the stories of Christian martyrs is a common theme of a line they would not cross, an action they would not take, a word they would not say, or a statement they would not disavow. They didn’t all share the same line, though many shared one, refusing to recant their faith during the centuries of intermittent Roman persecution. Others refused to wed non-Christians and died for it. Others refused to kill, and died for it.

It’s worth asking: what is the line you won’t cross? What is the truth you will not unsay? What is the falsehood you will not speak, though your life depends on it?

Keep in mind that that may never be tested, and please God it never is. Keep in mind as well that you may not know what it is until it is tested. I am quite sure that if you’d asked Dietrich Bonhoeffer if he’d die for the principle that the Church has to maintain its truth against the dictates of national power, he’d have said, “Perhaps, but that will never happen.” But it did happen.

Where is your line? What is your truth? What will you refuse to do though your life depend on it?

Amy Oden writes at Working Preacher, “The prophetic gaze does not shy away from injustice, or gloss over transgression. The prophetic gaze does not avoid the painful truth. However, its eye is NOT focused on the transgressors. This may be counterintuitive for many contemporary Christians.

“Whereas so much of our own prophetic speech today is focused on ‘them,’ whoever the political or theological opponents are, Stephen’s prophetic gaze is not on the transgressors. Rather, Stephen’s prophetic eye is on ‘the heavens’ or, we might say, ‘the kin-dom’ or ‘the reign of God’ or ‘God’s life here and now.’”

Where is God’s line? Where is God’s truth? What will you refuse to do because your relationship with God depends on it?

Stephen had seen the suffering of the people of Jerusalem. His first task was to see that people could eat – when you have that job, you’ll meet a lot of desperately hungry people. He knew their rough road.

His determination to bear witness to their suffering and their hope set him on a rough road of his own – arrest, trial, and execution.

At the last, he glimpsed a vision of the rough road’s destination, and held to his truth, praying that God forgive his executioners and committing his spirit to Jesus as Jesus had committed his spirit to God.

May God keep you from rough roads, but if you find yourself upon one, may you follow it with courage, faith, greatness of heart, and a vision of the comfort at the road’s end.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching – sometimes intentionally, and sometimes accidentally. The sermon as prepared does not match the sermon as presented.

Mosaic of Saint Stephen at the Parish House of the Parish of St. Stephen, Amstetten, Lower Austria. Photo by DerHHO – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14965296.

April 26, 2026 Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: No Stranger

April 26, 2026

Acts 2:42-47
John 10:1-10

Chapters nine and ten do a lot of heavy lifting in the Gospel of John – that is, they are packed with event and import and tension and meaning. It’s not the most poetic writing in the Gospel – I think we have to say that “In the beginning was the Word” gets the poetry prize – but it is poetic. It’s got a lot of moving characters. John started with Jesus and his disciples and introduced a man who had been blind from birth, then brought in some of Jerusalem’s senior Pharisees and a gathering crowd. The healed man was questioned, his parents were questioned, Jesus was questioned.

As is usual in John’s Gospel, the story begins with a miraculous sign, continues through an extended discussion – which here is pretty much an argument – and leads to one of Jesus’ “I am” statements. Unusually for John’s Gospel, chapters nine and ten have one sign and at least two extended dialogues, but three “I am” statements.

Jesus said the first one before even performing the miraculous sign. “I am the light of the world,” he said, and then applied the healing mud to the man’s eyes. The second appears in the passage read just now: “I am the gate for the sheep.” That’s not so well known, though John Narruhn preached a great sermon about that a couple years ago and folks remembered it during Bible Study.

The third follows this passage right at the beginning of verse 11: “I am the good shepherd.”

That’s a lot of “I am” for one sign and a couple conversations. This passage is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Not everybody was up for it.

Jaime Clark-Soles writes at Working Preacher, “Here John showcases Jesus’ habit of conveying truth not propositionally, but poetically. Jesus carries on about sheepfolds, gates, thieves, sheep, and gatekeepers, strangers, and voices. After five verses he pauses and notes that they haven’t got any idea what he’s talking about (v. 6). So, what is an effective speaker to do at that point? Explain the figure of speech (paroimia)? Drop the use of metaphor? Apologize for using such elevated speech and dumb things down, put it all in simplistic terms? Maybe. But that’s certainly not what our Lord and Savior did. Rather, he again (v. 7, palin) throws out the same word-pictures. The whole Gospel of John is nothing if not a piling up of metaphors, figures of speech. How else are we to convey truth about God? What single image, what single word could suffice? Plain speech (parresia) is fine as far as it goes (see 16:26, 29) – but it can’t go far enough to ‘explain’ God.”

If you’re having trouble following, you’re in good company, because Jesus was trying to describe the indescribable, explain the unexplainable. I have a lot of sympathy. For the last couple weeks people have been saying to me, “You must be so proud about your daughter’s ordination.” I say yes, because I am.

“Proud,” however, is at one and the same time the right word and the wrong word. It’s too little a word to encompass all the love I have for Rebekah and her brother Brendan. It doesn’t quite include the satisfaction I have as a church leader to see a talented and capable person accepted into the ranks of leadership. It doesn’t begin to account for the fears I have for someone I love who will be disappointed many times by the likely failures of the church to fully appreciate her gifts, or that people will discount her for her gender, sexuality, her age, her disability, her ordination (yes, that counts against folks in some areas of life), or simply the fact that she’s blond. I’m her dad. I worry about those things.

There’s no word for all that. No one word. I just wrote 132 words and, you know what? Those didn’t do it, either.

So what can we tease out of all these words Jesus spoke in these ten verses of John?

The point of a sheepfold is to protect the lives of the sheep. Sheep can’t stay in an enclosure all the time – they’ll eat everything in sight pretty rapidly – but they’re safer from the overnight dangers in the sheepfold. It’s not perfect. Jesus warned of thieves and bandits, after all, some of whom trying to imitate a legitimate gatekeeper, and some of them climbing over the walls.

We’re familiar with that, aren’t we? We know the risks of burglars and of con artists, the ones who use threats of violence to extract things from us, and the ones who pretend to be someone trustworthy to tease our resources from us.

We know the suffering of people whose spouses or parents abuse them. We know the oppression of people whose governments decide that a group of people will not be protected, indeed will be abused, by the very ones who claim rightful authority. Christians have been an oppressed minority in some places at some times. The spectacle of Christians encouraging and participating in the abuse of people at the margins is a betrayal of everything Jesus taught and lived, and a moral injury to the Church.

Gatekeepers let sheep into the sheepfold, and out again to pasture. It’s a vital role. In the case of actual sheep, they don’t have the limbs to open a gate. Somebody has to do it for them. In the human world, plenty of people can function as gatekeepers, so the question really becomes: how do we know who to let in and let out? There’s an artist named David Hayward, a former pastor, whose work looks closely at this question, because let’s face it, the Church in many ages has been much better at closing the gates on people than opening them. In so much of Hayward’s art, the figure of Jesus embraces a sheep that has been rejected by the rest of the flock, who watch in confusion as Jesus comforts the one they discarded.

As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “’I am the gate.’ Not, ‘I am the wall, the barrier, the enclosure, the dividing line.’ Not, ‘I am that which separates, isolates, segregates, and incarcerates.’ I am the gate. The door. The opening. The passageway. The place where freedom begins.”

“The sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.”

Who will we trust to admit us to a safe sheepfold, and who will we trust to open the gate to a fruitful pasture? One whose voice we know, or whose form we recognize, or whose familiar touch wakes us from our sleep. Last week I spoke of recognizing Jesus as the one who feeds us. This week that’s still true – the gate swings open to the grasslands where the sheep graze.

We recognize Jesus also as the one who protects us: protects us from sin by teaching us good ways, by setting an example to follow, and most of all by forgiving us when we fail to follow lessons or example. Jesus protects us from death by opening a new gate to life. Jesus protects us from evil by giving us resources to keep it from taking over our hearts. I wish I could say that Jesus protects us from the evil acts of others, but Christian history abounds with martyrs who suffered, and so may we. When we maintain our sense of grace and refuse to let evil into our spirits, Jesus stands with us.

We recognize Jesus as one who welcomes more and more into the flock, into the sacred community. In verse 16 of this chapter, he said, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.” We know the voice of the shepherd and the gatekeeper because it keeps calling new people to join us. If we were to close the gate and bar it, if we were to stand upon the walls and defend them against any trying to join us, if we were to declare ourselves the be-all and end-all of Christianity, well. We would not be growing or thriving, would we?

Most of all, we would have replaced Jesus’ voice of welcome with our voice of rejection. At that point, can we call ourselves followers of Jesus at all?

Every gate on this campus makes a sound when it moves. There’s the ringing clang when it closes and shuts, and when it’s closed, small children have a more difficult time before running out into traffic, and that’s a good thing. There’s a bit of a squeal when it opens, and when it’s opened, we come in to worship, to enjoy a meal, to play a game, to comfort a grieving friend, to learn something new, or to make some decisions about the future.

That’s a voice of Jesus I recognize. As I recognize it in our words of welcome, and our efforts to protect or comfort our needy neighbors. There’s the voice of Jesus. No stranger to us at all.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric writes his sermons in advance, but he makes changes while preaching. The prepared text does not match the sermon as preached.

The illustration is The Good Shepherd by Henry Ossawa Tanner, ca. 1918 – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the National Gallery of Art. Please see the Gallery’s Open Access Policy., CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81324376.

April 19, 2026 Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: The Moment of Recognition

April 19, 2026

Acts 2:14a, 36-41
Luke 24:17-35

We come to this story on the third Sunday of the Easter season. We’re in a “move on” kind of place. Jesus rose two weeks ago, after all. Last Sunday we heard about events a week later – that’s convenient timing, isn’t it? So we’re ready for the next part of the story.

And today, the dear editors of the Revised Common Lectionary have brought us right back to Easter morning when uncertainty, anxiety, and fear dominated the minds of Jesus’ disciples. The Rev. Barbara Messner captured it beautifully in her poem “You on the Road to Emmaus” on her BarbPoetPriest blog:

Sometimes all you can do is
walk away:
away from the crosses on a hill
and a tomb whether empty or not,
away from your failures as followers
and the loss of your hope and purpose,
away from overwhelming emotion,
that sink hole of anger, grief and fear.
Rev. Barbara Messner

It’s worth remembering that, on Easter morning, Jesus’ closest friends didn’t expect his resurrection. The Gospel writers all report that Jesus had told them, not once but repeatedly, and that they simply didn’t get it. Every Easter account emphasizes what a deeply surprising event it was.

As we join Cleopas and his unnamed companion, they had left Jerusalem with an initial destination of Emmaus. As Katherine Shaner writes at Working Preacher, “Cleopas and his companion were likely very scared about their future. They had seen the brutality of which the Romans were capable. They were not the most immediate targets of this Roman cruelty, but they were attuned to the stories of those who were. They were probably trying to figure out what to do next.”

Emmaus probably wasn’t their ultimate goal. They may not have had one in mind. Just – get out of the city, away from the priests, away from the Romans.

Cleopas and his friend had stayed in Jerusalem long enough that morning to hear that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and some other women (Luke wasn’t clear about how many) had found the tomb open and empty. They’d heard that two figures in white (angels?) had told the women Jesus was alive. They’d even heard that Simon Peter had visited the tomb himself, finding no angels but also no body of Jesus.

Frankly, the likeliest possibility was that the Romans had decided not to let Jesus rest in peace. Desecration of corpses was one of the options for humiliating a defeated foe or condemned rebel – which was how they regarded Jesus. Most of Jesus’ male disciples disregarded the women’s account of angels. They called it an “idle tale,” according to Luke.

All in all, Cleopas and his friend were taking the smart road away from the city where an active campaign against Jesus was likely to start taking in his followers, too.

And then they met Jesus.

Christians reading Luke have spent the last nearly two thousand years trying to understand why Jesus’ two disciples didn’t recognize him. Greg Carey offers at Working Preacher, “I find it more compelling to believe it is the disciples’ expectations that prevents their recognition. This is not the context they expected for an encounter with Jesus.” Michal Beth Dinkler writes, “What if the disciples cannot recognize Jesus because their opinions are already fully formed? Like all humans, their assumptions shape what they talk about, and what they talk about shapes what they see.”

Honestly, I’m not sure it makes a difference. Biblical writers often mention that recognizing the risen Jesus is harder than you’d think. Luke himself, in the next portion of this chapter, wrote that Jesus’ appearance to his gathered disciples terrified them. They thought he was a ghost. Mary Magdalene imagined he was a gardener. The Apostle Paul, felled to the ground by a bright light, had to ask, “Who are you, Lord?”

I think that’s our experience as well. Recognizing the risen Jesus isn’t easy. The world is complicated and quick-moving. People raise up all sorts of things as good and condemn other things as evil. There are theologies that assert that God directly commands some wars, and there are theologies that claim that God condemns all wars. There are theologies that say that wealth and power are signs of virtue, and there are theologies that say that God prefers the poor. There are theologies that say only a few will be received into God’s realm, and there are theologies that say that everyone will be welcomed into heaven.

With such a range and so many possibilities in between, how do we recognize the risen Jesus?

For hundreds of years, Christians have celebrated a triumphant Jesus. Western art has often shown Jesus trampling demons beneath his feet. John Milton’s Paradise Lost opens with an account of a mysterious Christ figure defeating the legions of Satan. The Emperor Constantine, the first to be baptized a Christian (just a few days before he died, but he was), reportedly carried a shield marked with the Chi Rho, the first two letters of Christ, into the Battle of Milvian Bridge. Later on Christian rulers and even religious leaders would go into battle bearing Christian symbols. Bishops eventually encouraged the Crusades, which brought so much death and suffering to the Middle East and poisoned relations between Muslims and Christians to this very day.

Triumphant Jesus seems very curious to me, given that he went to his death without resistance. Triumphant Jesus seems very curious to me, given that the word “triumph” appears only three times in the New Testament, and never in reference to military success. James used it to write, “Mercy triumphs over judgement.”

I think there’s a better possibility in Christ the healer. For Mark the Gospel writer, Jesus’ power to heal and willingness to heal marked him as the Anointed One. It’s worth observing again that in Mark, Jesus instructed those who had been healed to praise God for it and not himself. The point was their wellness, not Jesus’ own reputation. Far more than triumph, I think you’re more likely to find the risen Christ when healing has taken place.

Then there’s Christ the teacher. “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures,” Luke wrote. All four of the Gospel writers made sure to emphasize the power, the wisdom, and especially the truth of Jesus’ teachings. They worked to support them with Scripture, sometimes as Jesus had done, and sometimes because they’d found those Bible references themselves. As a child of a Galilean village, Jesus grew up in an environment in which proper religious practice was based on knowing the Scriptures, considering the different ways they might be interpreted, engaging in spirited discussion of different ways to act based upon them, and choosing what you do and how you live based on those learnings and conversations. Honestly, shouldn’t Cleopas and his friend have recognized him right there? That’s what they were used to. That’s what they’d been hearing Jesus do. They even wondered at how they’d missed it. “Were not our hearts burning within uswhile he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”

That’s not what did it, though, was it?

Eric Barreto writes at Working Preacher, “For Luke, however, Jesus is most Jesus at a quotidian table, at an ordinary meal infused with significance because of the people gathered around the food. Jesus is there at this table but so also all the sinners and tax collectors with whom Jesus shared meals… So, it’s instructive that it’s not his teaching that open their eyes. It’s not his presence. It’s his sharing of bread with his friends. It’s his blessing of food. In this sharing of bread at an ordinary table, we catch a glimpse of Jesus’ transformative kingdom.”

The moment of recognition came when they were fed.

Our moment of recognition comes when we are fed.

Others’ moment of recognition comes when they are fed.

As Mahatma Ghandi said, “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”

I think it’s about more than the deep hunger of extreme poverty. I think that the setting of a meal, of a table, is one in which relationships get formed and strengthened – also, I grant you, it can be a place where arguments and conflicts get formed and aggravated. When we feed one another, we at least begin in a space of caring, of compassion, of love and sharing.

When Jesus broke the bread for his two not-so-observant friends that day, he broke through to their hearts. They knew their minds had been expanded. They knew their bodies would be satisfied. Now they knew also that the one who had done that was the One in whom they had hoped, alive again beyond hope, alive again beyond despair.

“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.”

May we always recognize Jesus at the table, in the breaking of the bread.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes accidentally.

The image is The Supper at Emmaus by an Anonymous Genoese painter, active in the second half of the 17th-century – Acervo de Obras de Arte Europeia em Coleções Brasileiras (Plus Ultra): info; image, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30310751.

April 5, 2026 Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Assumptions

April 5, 2026

Acts 10:34-43
John 20:1-18

It’s very difficult to get through the day without making decisions based on assumptions. Absent any reason to believe otherwise, I assume that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening, and I act accordingly. I assume that gravity will hold me to the ground and that when I breathe in, I’ll take in good air. I assume that water will satisfy my thirst and that eating will satisfy my hunger.

I have to say that those assumptions have held up pretty well over the years.

There are other assumptions that I tend to check. I’ll give a sniff to the package of grated cheese in the refrigerator before I add it to anything. Lately with our rather chilly mornings I’ve been checking the temperature outside before picking up a jacket – even though I feel somewhat cold in the house. It might be warmer outside; who knows?

Then there are the things I avoid making assumptions about. When driving, I take note of people’s turn signals, but you know what? I prepare myself for other drivers to do things they haven’t signaled. It’s not very trusting, I know, but it’s helped keep me from accidents. And anyone who has watched me with my keys has seen me tap my pocket – or reach into it – before I close a door that will lock. I always put my keys in the same pocket. But do I trust them to be there?

No.

On that first Easter morning, assumptions were front and center, as is common for human beings. Most of the assumptions were completely normal ones, things that we assume as well from one day to the next.

The first assumption was so human that John didn’t bother to name it. “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb…” John didn’t mention her reason, because he didn’t have to. We mourn at graves and tombs and columbaria whether the death was recent – like Friday – or years and years ago. Look over a cemetery sometime. Look at all the floral displays. Each one marks a visit in love and grief.

Mary Magdalene went to the tomb assuming that things would be as they’d been on Friday, and that was the first assumption to give way that morning. She saw the stone had been rolled aside. For the moment, she didn’t even look inside. She ran back to the place where some of the disciples were staying. She’d made an assumption, I think: she assumed that they could do something to help. It didn’t turn out to be a good assumption. They ran out to the tomb themselves, but once they arrived, what could they do? They looked inside. They saw the discarded grave cloths. One of them believed – though it’s one of the mysteries of this text what he believed – and then…

They left. Whatever Mary Magdalene had hoped for from the two men, she didn’t get it.

She was left now with, perhaps not an assumption, but a conclusion. Something was wrong. Beyond the terrible loss of Jesus’ life, now his body had disappeared. Someone who had been cruelly put to death could not even be left to rest in peace.

She looked into the tomb for the first time that morning, and found it, not empty as I’m sure she assumed, but occupied by what John described later as two angels in white. I’m sure she assumed that they were ordinary people, because she didn’t ask them anything. She just told them why she was crying.

Then the final assumption. Outside the tomb stood another person, a male figure in the morning light. He asked her who she was looking for – an important question. As Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “This is the third time this question has appeared in the Gospel, every time asked by Jesus. They are his first words to the first disciples, with the only difference being ‘what’ instead of ‘whom’ (John 1:38). To ask this question of Mary here takes the reader back to the calling of the disciples and implies that Mary, too, is considered a disciple.”

Of course she was wrong. It wasn’t a gardener. It was Jesus. In that moment of realization, so many assumptions came crashing down. In the normal way of things, the powers of the city leadership, the priesthood, and especially the Roman Governor should have been close to absolute. If they decided to execute someone and to further humiliate him after his death, they could do it. They did do it to people over and over again.

On that Easter morning, Mary found that the normal way of things wasn’t. The normal way of things had given way to something greater. Her assumptions had to be laid aside and left behind.

As Dorothy A. Lee writes at Working Preacher, “Mary does not reach the heights of faith without a struggle. This is a characteristic feature of John’s stories, in which faith comes through layers of misunderstanding. Step-by-step, the exemplary characters of the Gospel, including Mary herself, come to a spiritual comprehension of what is happening, moving from the material to the spiritual level. In this process, matter is not dismissed or set aside. On the contrary, the material is itself the means by which God in Christ is revealed, just as the flesh of Jesus in the incarnation radiates the divine glory (1:14).”

Her assigned task – to tell Jesus’ other friends and followers that he had risen – is the reason she has been called “the apostle to the apostles” for centuries. It’s worth noting that they don’t seem to have believed her. They had to make their own journey through misunderstanding.

On this Easter Day, what assumptions can we, might we, possibly even should we leave behind?

I think we might start by building on Mary’s assumption that that Sunday morning would be like any other morning. It was a uniquely heartbreaking morning, but familiar. We begin most of our days, even the heartbreaking ones, believing that they will be more or less predictable, that while they might bring some surprises, even those unusual things will fit within our basic expectations.

Perhaps we might consider each day as a potential setting for a miracle.

In a sense, miracles happen every day. On the worst day I’ve ever lived, I have been living, and life itself is miraculous. The natural world is resplendent with beauty of sight, sound, smell, texture, and taste. Human love, expressed through conversation in person or over the ether, fills the heart. Each day is filled with miracles.

But each day is also one in which God’s uniquely overwhelming love might make itself felt – any morning, any noon, any evening, any night. At any moment, we might find our hearts moved by something that is the compassion of God, the embrace of Jesus, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. At any moment, we might find ourselves surprised to find that death does not have the power we assume, that oppressive earthly authorities do not have the last word, that sin and evil cannot stand against the power of love.

What would it have looked like if Mary had come to the tomb on a day that could have included a miracle?

She might have viewed the moved stone with wonder. She might have fetched the disciples to join her in awe. She might have recognized the angels as angels, and she might have asked them, “What has happened?” rather than continuing to assume that she knew what had happened.

Finally, she might have recognized Jesus before he said her name. She might not have shown it – even in a mind ready for a miracle, I’d have probably been speechless – but when Jesus did say her name, when he did demonstrate that she was one of his flock, whose name he knew, when he called her, I’m pretty sure she’d have done exactly what she did.

Rush to embrace him.

What would it look like for us to see each day as a potential setting for a miracle?

I’m pretty sure we’d appreciate the daily miracles better – sunrise, sunset, sea foam, birdsong, mountains, flowers, and above all else the wonders of human companionship. Those are worth celebrating.

We’re also likely to approach the sadnesses and trials of our days with more hope. Pain and sorrow are real, but in any day God might just do something to comfort them. We still have to work to make things better, but we can do so confident of God’s aid.

Most of all, we live each day prepared to say, “I have seen the Lord,” I know that my Redeemer lives, I have heard my name, I have been held in loving embrace, I have a story to tell and to share from it.

Let today be one in which you celebrate the Easter miracle, and rejoice in the life of Jesus.

Let tomorrow be one in which you anticipate new miracles, and rejoice ever and always in the life of Jesus.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Regrettably, the sermon was not recorded this morning.

The image is an illumination on parchment by Unknown author (ca. 1503-1504) – This image is available from the National Library of Wales. You can view this image in its original context on the NLW Catalogue, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44920216.

March 29, 2026 Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons, Uncategorized

Sermon: Help Us!

March 29, 2026

Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 21:1-11

As Jesus rode the donkey – maybe two donkeys, according to Matthew – into Jerusalem, the crowds gathered and shouted. They quoted Psalm 118, a song of thanksgiving and, quite possibly, related to an ancient religious procession from the city entrance to the area of the Temple at the city’s summit. They also called “Hosannah to the Son of David!”

That was a pretty bold thing to say.

As D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “The word “Hosanna” is only found in the entry stories of the NT. The Greek term Ὡσαννὰ [Hosanna] seems to be a transliteration of the Hebrew הושיעה־נא [Hoshiana]. When הושיעה־נא [Hoshiana] appears in the OT, such as in Psalm 118:25, it was translated in the LXX as σῴζω [sodzo], “to save.”

Calling for help and aid doesn’t sound so bold, but calling for it from the “Son of David” was. “Son of David” was a royal title, indicating a legitimate claim to the traditional throne of Israel and Judah. It was just short of calling Jesus, “King Jesus,” and not all that short of it.

Bold.

It could well have been even bolder, because it wasn’t just the city’s residents in the city at the time. At JourneyWithJesus.net, Debie Thomas writes,

In their compelling book, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Last Days in Jerusalem, [Marcus] Borg and [John] Crossan argue that two processions entered Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday; Jesus’ was not the only Triumphal Entry.

Every year, the Roman governor of Judea would ride up to Jerusalem from his coastal residence in the west. Why? To be present in the city for Passover — the Jewish festival that swelled Jerusalem’s population from its usual 50,000 to at least 200,000.

The governor would come in all of his imperial majesty to remind the Jewish pilgrims that Rome was in charge. They could commemorate an ancient victory against Egypt if they wanted to. But real, present-day resistance (if anyone was daring to consider it) was futile.

When the crowds shouted “Hosannah! Save us! Help us!” to Jesus, they did so aware that the ones they wanted help against – the Romans – were present, armed, and prepared to bring violence just the other side of the city.

Help us!

A bold cry, or a desperate one, or sometimes maybe there isn’t much difference between desperate and bold.

Jesus chose an odd prophetic image to emulate with his donkey and colt. Jesus could have done things to look more like a traditional monarch. He might have sent his disciples to find a horse. He would have looked great on a horse. Everybody looks good on a horse – at least until it starts moving. After that it helps to know how to ride. It would have even matched a prophecy from Jeremiah rather than Zechariah.

If you want to look like a king, get a horse. Not a donkey.

They were bold and they were desperate, and they shouted, “Save us,” because even on a donkey Jesus was the best they had.

As D. Mark Davis writes, “I like how the word κράζω [kradzo] (cry out) is like an onomatopoeia, imitating the croak of a raven. It is used for both loud crowds and desperate people, like a woman crying out for help and Jesus crying out from the cross.”

Desperate people. A woman crying out for help. Jesus crying out from the cross. Matthew 27:46: “’Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”

Help us!

I don’t know for sure what that crowd wanted. As with most crowds, I suspect there was a good range. Some hoped for that royal Messiah who would cast out the Romans. Others probably hoped for a new religious, but not political, leader who would do something about the priests. I’m sorry to say that religious leaders aren’t always the best of friends to the people they’re supposed to serve, in the twenty-first century or in the first century. Some might have been shouting “Help us!” because of their individual needs: Healing for an illness or injury, a word of assurance for the hopeless, a gift of food for the hungry. I suspect as well that some joined the crowd and shouted and waved palms because people get caught up in that kind of excitement even when they don’t know anything about what’s going on. “Who is this?” they asked, and there’s always plenty who don’t bother to ask.

Help us!

I don’t know whether Marcus Borg and John Crossan are right that Pontius Pilate entered the city on the other side as Jesus entered on the near side. It would have required some knowledge and planning to time things that way – which, to be sure, Jesus was certainly capable of. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. The crowd would have contrasted the Jesus parade with the Pilate parade. They would have noticed the distinct lack of soldiers. They would have noticed the complete lack of marching drummers and trumpeters. They would have noticed the replacement of the warhorse with the donkey.

“Crossan notes that Jesus rode ‘the most unthreatening, most un-military mount imaginable: a female nursing donkey with her little colt trotting along beside her.’” (quoted by Debie Thomas at JourneyWithJesus.net)

I’ll help you, said Jesus in his choice of mount, but not quite as you think, and probably not quite as you expect, and more than you dare to hope.

I am depressingly conscious of the number of people crying out for help in the world today. Some of them are near: people on this island, O’ahu, and Maui picking up from the wreckage left by floods and high winds over the last two weeks. There is a national UCC emergency offering for that, by the way. Look for information on how to contribute to it in the Weekly Chime on Tuesday.

Others near us suffer from injuries or illness, from the pains of long-term disease, from the fogs and storms of mental illness. Some cope with grief, with feelings of failure, with the words of others telling them that they aren’t of much worth. Some cope with the oppression of violence, violence from those who claim to love them, or violence of those who are supposed to protect them. Let’s face it. Federal courts have clearly stated that a law enforcement agency of the United States is routinely abusing its authority, taking people into custody without due process of law, abusing those it has detained, and avoiding accountability before the courts.

If they do it in Minnesota and Maine, they’ll do it in Hawai’i.

Some of those crying for help are not so near. They live in some of the world’s poorest regions, vulnerable to famine or disaster. Or they live as a marginalized group of people in some of the world’s most oppressive nations. Those people might be identified by skin color, or by national heritage, or by sexual orientation. These people might simply be women.

Some of them are just people living in a place engaged in war. That includes the United States. The war has come home with grief for mercifully few families so far, but the only certain thing about armed conflict is that more families will grieve. It’s for certain that a lot more families are grieving in Iran, and most of them have nothing to do with the issues between the governments. That’s the great tragedy and the great immorality of war. Whatever the justice of the cause – and the American administration has made no coherent explanation answering the questions of just cause – the most just cause in the world inflicts horrendous suffering on innocents. During the Second World War, it’s estimated that twice as many civilians died as those in the military – and again, most of those soldiers and sailors and aircrew had nothing to do with the aggression of their governments.

There are a lot of people in the world crying, “Hosannah! Save us! Help us!”

Jesus, in the meantime, makes his way through our lives on a donkey, not a warhorse. Whatever the show on the far side of the city, the great gift is before us here.

How will he help? Not with military conquest. He didn’t do it in the first century. He’s not going to do it in the twenty-first century. Not with grandeur. He chose a donkey. Not with coercion. He didn’t force anybody to cheer him. Pilate almost certainly did.

The things that Jesus offers – nearness to God, richness of soul, abundance of life in this world and the promise of life eternal – just aren’t as grand or as compelling as the parade of Pilate. They don’t answer the cries of “Help us!” all that directly – but I ask you: if we all truly lived as Jesus calls us and as Jesus expects, would we be at war now?

I didn’t think so, either.

Help us, Jesus!

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes as he preaches – sometimes deliberately, and sometimes not. The sermon as he prepared it is not a direct match for the sermon he delivered.

The image is The Entry into Jerusalem by Jan Baegert (ca. 1505-1510) – Wuselig, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104993708.

March 22, 2026March 22, 2026 Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: The One You Love is Ill

March 22, 2026

Ezekiel 37:1-14
John 11:1-45

Someone you love is ill. What do you do?

You might well say, “I go visit them.” But is that what you do?

Don’t you think about it first?

Thinking is a good idea, because the people you love aren’t all the same. There are some who really do want you to rush over and comfort them. Hopefully you know who they are. Sometimes people tell you what they want, and sometimes they expect you to know. You’ve run into that before.

There are others, however, that really prefer to deal with their illness on their own as best they can. They might be very private people, or they don’t just don’t like someone around when they’re feeling bad. Some don’t want others to see them when they’re in their pajamas.

A few, of course, tell you that they’ll take care of themselves, thank you very much, and then expect you to turn up anyway. People don’t always tell you what they really want. You’ve run into that before.

After you think about the person who is ill, you think about what, if anything, you have to bring. You might think to bring food, and that means taking time to prepare or package it. You might think to bring a book to read or something out of your collection of CDs or DVDs – for the younger folks listening, those are antique devices to play music or videos. A memento. A stuffed animal. You may take some time to get things ready before you visit.

Let’s face it. You’re likely to think about how sick your loved one is. What do you think they actually need as opposed to whatever they may say they want? You have other obligations. When does your sick loved one become the next person you visit?

Jesus thought about it. “This illness does not lead to death,” he said. “Rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of Man may be glorified through it.”

It strikes me that it’s possible to be wrong and right at one and the same time. “This illness does not lead to death,” he said – but it did. Lazarus died. “This illness does not lead to death,” Jesus said, and in a very real sense it didn’t because it led beyond death. Lazarus lived.

If I listen to this as someone trying to decide whether to go visit a loved one who is ill, I sympathize with Jesus’ decision to stay put. The illness was not to the death. Lazarus had plenty of people around him to care for him. Jesus had time. Jesus also seemed to believe that the delay would make Lazarus’ eventual recovery even more a sign of God’s glory.

I have to say, he was right about that, too.

He waited two days, then announced that he was returning to Judea to awaken Lazarus. Or, well, awaken metaphorically. As he eventually informed his disciples, Lazarus had died. He would arrive too late to heal him from his illness.

But not too late to mourn with the others who loved him.

I got curious here, and I thought about days and travel times, and finally realized that however long it took Jesus to get there, the two day delay didn’t make a difference. When he arrived, Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days. If Jesus had left immediately on hearing he was ill, he would have arrived when Lazarus had been in the tomb for two days. Without a miraculous way of travelling, which I grant you isn’t impossible for a person who did miracles, the best he could do was arrive before the third day after which Jews believed revitalization of a dead person was impossible.

When Martha and Mary said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” there may have been some reproach, but it wouldn’t have been for a two day delay they knew nothing about. It was that Jesus hadn’t been there, couldn’t have been there, but where on Earth did they want him? There. It couldn’t happen and it didn’t happen.

That happens with us, too. Have you ever made the cold, hard calculation between visiting someone and attending their funeral? I have. I would guess plenty of people have. We do the best we can with phone and video applications, but we have limited time and resources for extended travel, don’t we? We want to be there, we ache to be there, but we have limits and we have to choose. Sometimes we choose to be there with those who grieve.

Jesus went to be there with those who grieve.

Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “When Jesus weeps, he honors the complexity of our gains and losses, our sorrows and joys. Raising Lazarus would not bring back the past. It would not cancel out the pain of his final illness, the memory of saying goodbye to a life he loved, or the gaping absence his sisters felt when he died. Whatever joys awaited his family in the future would be layered joys, joys stripped of an earlier innocence.”

Someone he loved had been ill. Someone he loved had died.

He came to weep. He came to comfort.

He also came to say something about who he was. “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Laura Holmes writes at Working Preacher, “Jesus proclaims ‘I am’ statements in 14 passages in John’s Gospel. Nowhere else does someone respond to the proclamation with a statement of belief. Martha not only says, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe,’ but she places that language of belief in the context of the Gospel’s proclamation about Jesus: Jesus is the Messiah (3:28; 4:26; 9:22, 35–38), the Son of God (1:34, 49; 3:16–18), ‘the one coming into the world’ (1:9; 3:31; 6:51; 8:23; 18:37).”

This is also an odd departure from other “I am” statements. Usually in John’s Gospel, Jesus performed a sign, then had conversation about it, and concluded with his own assertion of how the sign revealed who he was: “I am the bread of life.” “I am the light of the world,” and so on. In this case, Jesus said “I am the resurrection and the life” before he actually did the sign. As someone in Bible Study said this week, the chances of anyone paying attention to what Jesus said after this miracle were pretty small, so best to get the words in first. But it also gave Martha the opportunity to testify to her trust in Jesus before he validated that trust. It’s a stunning moment, really only matched by her sister Mary when she anointed Jesus’ feet with perfume in the next chapter.

Jesus heard. Jesus paused. Jesus learned. Jesus moved. Jesus assured. Jesus spoke. Jesus wept. Jesus called. Lazarus lived.

Someone you love is ill.

What do you do?

You think. That’s a good thing. You make choices. That’s a difficult thing. You act, and that may be a good and welcome thing, and it may be an ill-chosen and unwelcome thing – we’re well meaning but not perfect. If any of you have resurrection power, you’ve been quiet about it. I’ve been quiet about it because I don’t have it.

Whatever you do, you do it as a follower of Jesus, aware that even when Jesus looks late, there’s never a too late for Jesus. Martha dared to affirm her faith in a resurrection on the last day. Jesus did correct her somewhat, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Maybe that’s a useful correction for us as well:

As Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “We tend to focus on the resurrection that we situate for ourselves as a distant promise, our guarantee of salvation, our eternal life with God and Jesus in heaven. But what might it mean that Jesus is the resurrection and the life? That we are raised to life, not as future salvific existence, but to life right now, right here, with Jesus?”

It might mean that we worry less about two days delay. Jesus the resurrection and the life is with us, and with those we love.

It might mean that we treasure those phone conversations and video chats more. Jesus is the resurrection and the life for those of us at both ends of the wire.

It might mean that we approach death not with less sadness, but with more hope. Jesus is the resurrection and the life both for us and for those who have died.

It might mean that we live each day with more courage and with more joy. Jesus is the resurrection and the life, so that the beauty I celebrate today will be different and beautiful and worth celebrating tomorrow.

Jesus wept and called Lazarus to life in the same breath. Imagine what he does in one breath for you.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the sermon text does not precisely match the sermon as delivered.

The image is The Resurrection of Lazarus by Giovanni di Paolo (1425) – Walters Art Museum: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18833003.