Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons, Uncategorized

Sermon: Better than the Bible

June 21, 2026

Genesis 21:8-21
Romans 6:1b-11

What could be better than the Bible? Yes, that title is deliberately provocative. If we’re honest with ourselves and others, however, it’s true that the Bible is an uneven work of literature. The first time I read through the Bible, I didn’t read it exactly through. Jeremiah ends with the relentlessly depressing accounts of the fall of Jerusalem and the tragic early days of Babylonian occupation, and then I read the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which is even more depressing.

I had to take a break. I had to read something with a happy ending. So I read the Gospel of Matthew. Then I went back to resume my progress through the Bible with Ezekiel.

It’s also true that your tastes may favor some parts of the Bible over others. Those who like poetry may gravitate to the Psalms or the Song of Songs. History fans might prefer First and Second Samuel and First and Second Kings, or in the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles. If you want to hear about Jesus’ work as a healer, read Mark. If you want to hear some of your favorite parables, read Luke. If you want to hear Jesus say, “I am…,” head over to John.

I suppose if you’re a fan of genealogy, you’d enjoy those long family lists in Numbers, but you’d be a rare person.

A lot of people read the Bible for wisdom, guidance, and models for their own decisions and actions. The Bible is full of advice, even more advice than I’m happy to give you. Some books are dedicated to giving advice. The writers of Proverbs (it’s a collection, so there were a lot of them) and Ecclesiastes have plenty of guidance for you. And then there’s the Apostle Paul, whose willingness to tell other people what to do has informed many generations of Christians.

One of the models of faith for generations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims is Abraham. He trusted God enough to move to a new place, and he believed God’s promise of descendants. We also revere his wife Sarah. She laughed at the promise, it’s true, but she also lived and fulfilled it.

Which makes this story even harder to take. Because Abraham and Sarah act horribly here.

Ishmael, Hagar’s son by Abraham, existed because Sarah insisted upon it. Believing that she would not have a child of her own, she forced her slave to have her husband’s child. As Vanessa Lovelace writes at Working Preacher, “Ishmael’s birth would also have brought Sarah esteem, since ancient Near Eastern surrogacy laws granted her the right to raise the child as her own. With the birth of Isaac, however, Ishmael’s status changed—from Sarah’s legal son and Abraham’s firstborn heir to the son of a slave woman.”

Sarah was not willing for her son to share Abraham’s inheritance with any other child, and especially not to be second in line to Hagar’s son. Commentators have tried to soften her position for centuries, but the text is clear: “the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” It was about the transmission of wealth and the family name. My son, not her son.

An understandable feeling, I suppose. But acting upon the feeling to condemn Hagar and Ishmael to death?

I don’t care whether it was legal by the standards of the time. I don’t care whether the social mores of the time embraced it. I don’t care.

It was wrong. Dead wrong. Horribly wrong. Sinfully wrong.

And that is what I mean by “better than the Bible.” Abraham and Sarah are heroic figures in many ways. They are archetypes for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

But at this moment, we have to be better than the Bible.

This story gets me angry because Abraham and Sarah decided to dispose of Hagar and Ishmael. Before Isaac’s birth, Abraham had pleaded with God, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!” But now the boy was disposable. The mother was disposable. Once members of the family, now they were disposable.

Disposable people. Disposable people.

That’s why I get angry.

The problem with Abraham and Sarah’s treatment of Hagar and Ishmael isn’t that it’s exceptional. It’s that it’s been echoed so many times by so many people in so many cultures over so many centuries. On this weekend following Juneteenth, I have to raise the world-wide practice of slavery. For millennia, some people have insisted that some other people have had to follow their instructions, do their work, bear children to those they insisted on, and live where they said. Under some codes, enslaved people lived or died at the will of those who held them in bondage.

These were literally disposable people.

The Law of the Hebrew Bible, I regret to say, mitigated the evils of slavery without eliminating them. Slavery of Hebrews had to be time limited, and enslaved people could not be abused or their possessions stripped from them. But still: disposable people. Though slavery is illegal in every country in the world today, the International Labour Organization found in 2022 that 28 million people endure forced labor and another 22 million are forced into marriages – just like Hagar.

That’s why we’ve got to be better than the Bible.

The Bible both warns against national leaders who abuse their authority and praises them. God warned the Israelites through Samuel against the appointment of a monarch. Saul proceeded to demonstrate the accuracy of the warning. At God’s direction, Samuel anointed David to displace and succeed Saul, and everybody celebrated. Well, not everybody.

I can’t help noting that David spent more time in power than Saul, and had more time to demonstrate the abuses of kings. Ask David’s wives and concubines. Ask his sons, two of whom rebelled against him. Ask Bathsheba. Ask Uriah.

When national leaders abuse their power, they create disposable people. Sometimes they’re the women they want to abuse. Sometimes they’re the foreigners they want to eject. Sometimes they’re the political opponents they want to subdue. Sometimes they’re people with a different skin color. Sometimes they’re people who are attracted to people of the same gender. Sometimes they’re people who are women.

If you want to justify any of these abuses — anti-immigrant, political imprisonment, racism, heterosexism, sexism — you can do it from the Bible. Sexism and heterosexism are easy. Racism? Yes, you can justify that. The Bible is rife with anti-foreign sentiment. It’s harder to make the case for imprisoning your political opponents, because a number of the prophets turn out to have been the political opponents of the monarchs, but if you work hard enough, you can do it.

You can justify disposable people.

That’s why we’ve got to be better than the Bible.

Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “This is an astonishing story to find amongst the accounts of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis. It follows not the perspective of the householders, but the perspective of the slave. Not the ones who are awaiting their destiny to be fulfilled by God, but the one who is collateral damage along the way. Hagar is the archetypal mother of every person who has ever been exiled, who has fled violence, both domestic and governmental, every person who has found themselves shunned, discarded, trafficked, forgotten.”

In Hagar, we hear from the disposable people.

It turns out they’re not disposable.

Amanda Benckhuysen writes at Working Preacher, “Our chosenness as people of faith does not mean that we have a corner on God. It does not mean that God’s love and care is limited to us. What is striking about Isaac and Ishmael is that God makes the same promise to them both. They would each become a great nation. They would both experience God’s presence and blessing.”

Hagar and Ishmael were not disposable.

We are not disposable. It’s the foundational assertion of Christianity, that God has no desire to discard any of the souls that God has placed upon the Earth.

The people who aren’t us are not disposable. Whether they’re male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free (to borrow from the Apostle Paul), they are not disposable. Whether they agree with us or with someone else, whether they’re gay or straight or bi or trans, whether they’ve committed a crime or been accused of one, whether they’re demonstrating against abortion or against ICE raids, no people are disposable.

No people are disposable.

That’s why we’ve got to be better than Abraham and Sarah. Better than the Bible.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches – sometimes intentionally, and sometimes accidentally – so the recorded sermon does not precisely match the sermon as written.

The image is Hagar and Ishmael by Robert Loftin Newman – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57365865.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Assignment: Mercy

June 14, 2026

Exodus 19:2-8a
Matthew 9:35-10:8

Jesus’ travels through Galilee disturbed him. D. Mark Davis, writing at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, translates verse 36 as, “Yet having seen the crowd he was wrenched with compassion about them that they were having been harassed and tossed aside like sheep not having a shepherd.” Then he writes: “This verse is chock full of strong language. Jesus’ reaction is not just a sweet feeling of kindness, as if he just saw a flock of cute baby lambs. It is a visceral reaction, as the definition of σπλαγχνίζομαι suggests. I think it reads best as a gut reaction, something like ‘furious compassion.’”

“Furious compassion.” You’ve had that feeling, haven’t you? That’s the feeling when you see that somebody has been misled or abused and you’re not only concerned for them you’re angry on their behalf.

People feeling furious compassion tend to tell others about the feeling. They tend to gather people to witness and understand what’s happening. They tend to organize them to do something about it.

That’s what Jesus did. From a larger group of followers, he selected twelve to take on roles not just as learners, but as leaders. He selected twelve to take on the same work that he had been doing. It was no small commission. “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.”

Every bit of that charge is laden with challenge. The easiest part seems to be first part: proclaim good news. Good news. Who could object to people proclaiming good news?

Well, the first people who object to good news are usually the people who are benefiting from the bad news. They’re the ones setting the rules that protect their wealth and power from the ones without wealth and power. They’re the ones who accused Jesus of healing people’s demons with the power of demons. They’re the ones who eventually got him executed as a rebel – since when you tell people the good news that God is in charge, not the people who say they’re in charge, it is a rebellious act.

Jesus wasn’t done. “Cure the sick” – I’m afraid that’s not one of my skills. “Raise the dead” – I can’t do that. “Cleanse those with a skin disease” – I can put a bandage on it. “Cast out demons” – maybe I can; I’ve never tried. “You received without payment; give without payment” – how ironic is it that tomorrow is payday?

Matthew only gave us Jesus’ side of the assignment here, but my goodness. The disciples must have been saying something along the lines of, “Who me? No way.”

If they said it aloud (Matthew didn’t tell us), I’m pretty sure Jesus said something like, “Yeah, way.”

Christian discipleship – the Way of Jesus – is Assignment: Mercy.

As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Go and proclaim the good news of the kingdom. Go and cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons. Go and touch. Go and heal. Go and resurrect. Go and make peace. Go and render believable the compassion of God.”

Assignment: Mercy.

As our myna hopefully learned this morning, mercy doesn’t have to be grand and glowing. Mercy begins with basic consideration. Mercy welcomes others to join in the feast. Mercy steps in to decrease the temperature of a dispute. Mercy. Is attentive to everyone’s safety.

During this weekend’s ‘Aha Pae’aina, called together with the theme of building bridges, there were more than a few exhibits of basic mercy. We greeted one another warmly, with hugs and smiles and aloha spoken and unspoken. We feasted together – my, how we feasted. I’m not sure when I’ll have room to eat anything else again. There were items of disagreement on the agenda, and we addressed them with respect and consideration for the people on either side of the question. And if I can summon up a personal example, while delivering my workshop I froze my feet in their places for a minute or two, because a nine-month old baby was crawling around next to me and I was not going to step on her fingers.

Mercy is also bigger than that. I kept my feet still to avoid hurting a baby. Why can’t the nations of the earth keep our militaries still lest they harm the infants of another nation? Why are we told that it is a virtue to use force ruthlessly and mercilessly? Why are we told that we don’t have the courage to take territory from another nation, instead of being told that our sense of morality prevents us from taking territory from another nation?

Jesus had the opportunity to start a war. When he was arrested, somebody swung a sword. Jesus could have screamed, “Attack!” Instead, Jesus said, “Enough of this,” and healed the injured man.

Assignment: Mercy.

During this ‘Aha, Conference Minister the Rev. Dr. David Popham told me something I hadn’t known – he knows plenty of things that I don’t, of course. He mentioned that Hawai’i has been closely followed by the disaster response people in the UCC and the Disciples of Christ. We’ve been through a lot, for sure: the 2018 Puna eruption here, the fires on Maui in 2023, this year’s series of Kona low storms. He joked, in fact, that sometimes they would call him and tell him things that he didn’t know, which was probably because the local people who would call the Conference were still busy dealing with the situation in front them, while those whose professions it is to assess disasters were communicating with our national church staff.

The point is that we have friends. We have neighbors who meet the definition Jesus provided to “Who is my neighbor?” Do you remember? “Who is my neighbor” was the question that launched the story of the Good Samaritan – and the neighbor was the one who showed mercy.

Assignment: Mercy.

All right. Have I made that point enough? How are you going to fulfill your assignment?

You do it with everything you’ve got. Yes, that’s a big ask. Yes, it’s a lot to give. And in some instances, yes, it’s not going to be enough.

Assignment: Mercy is a call to stay attentive to the small mercies, to the politenesses, the sharings, the protections. None of us can possibly be aware of everything going on around us, but if we can we can look right and left before crossing the street, we can look right and left to see what’s going on with our neighbors. It’s a call to ask about needs and not assume them. A person in a wheelchair may appreciate some assistance from you on a streetcorner, but they also may not. Be vigilant, and let your vigilance include the simple politeness of asking, “How are you doing?” followed, perhaps, by, “What do you need?”

Assignment: Mercy is a call to stay attentive to the big mercies, to the relief from systemic oppression and suffering, from the prejudices of social pressure and the discrimination of unjust law. Assignment: Mercy is a call to remind the world that war simply isn’t the Way of Jesus, no matter what awful things the Church has said to the contrary in the past. Assignment: Mercy insists that people be held accountable for the harms they bring to others, that they be held accountable through an open and transparent process of law, and that those in power shall have no special influence in the adjudication of the crimes of which they’re accused. Assignment: Mercy further calls us to bring people into society as well as we can, to make sure that neither habit nor desperation are major forces to drive people to criminal behavior.

Assignment: Mercy is a call to show that a loving God has had a powerful and positive influence on our lives. It is a call to testify to the grace that God has demonstrated in the world: in Creation, in guidance, in wisdom, in the poetry of the Psalms, in the restoration of distressed people, in the birth, life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in the activity of the Holy Spirit from the first century to the twenty-first.

At this point, I am sorely tempted to parody the opening of an episode of Mission: Impossible. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to show God’s mercy to a hurting world. If you are caught or captured in this mission, God will not disavow, but will celebrate your actions.

Actually, you want to be caught at this. Let everybody see. Let everybody know. You have accepted: Assignment: Mercy.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes as he preaches, so the sermon as prepared does not precisely match the sermon as delivered.

The image is Christ Sends Apostles out in Pairs by anonymous (1573) – https://www.centraalmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/2474-de-uitzending-van-de-twaalf-discipelen-anoniem-noord-nederlands, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80163482.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: God Desires Mercy

June 7, 2026

Hosea 5:15-6:6
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Do you remember the Pushmi-Pullyu from Doctor Dolittle? The fictional animal (I repeat, fictional) had a body like an antelope or a llama, with a head at both ends and with two pairs of legs and feet that pointed in the same direction as the head and neck above them. According to author Hugh Lofting, the two heads allowed one to eat and the other to carry on a conversation without being rude.

Nevertheless, I can imagine that the two heads didn’t always agree, and I can imagine that that would have been remarkably awkward.

Religion and spirituality have a pushme-pullyou dimension – all religions, as far as I can tell. On the one side, we’ve got the impulse toward a direct relationship with God. People do a lot of things to build that and maintain it. We pray by ourselves. We worship with others. We place art with religious themes around us. We perform certain rituals that we believe God has asked us to do, which includes our practice of Holy Communion, by the way. We dedicate ourselves to furthering that primary relationship.

The other dimension is to do things that we believe God has asked us to do in relation to other human beings. It’s been widely claimed, with pretty good justification, that the “golden rule” of treating people as you’d like to be treated is part of every religious tradition. That’s hard to prove, but check out the Wikipedia article on the Golden Rule sometime. Researchers have found it in a lot of faiths and cultures.

When asked about the Greatest Commandment, Jesus first quoted Deuteronomy 6, which says “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might.” Jesus then followed up with a reference to Leviticus 19: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

There’s the pushme-pullyou again – Jesus didn’t say doing both at once was easy. But he did seem to think there were priorities.

Jesus appeared to have an odd reputation among his fellow rabbis. They paid attention to him. They respected him enough to invite him as a special guest when he visited their villages. He also puzzled them, sometimes quite a lot. Why would a respectable religious leader and teacher summon a tax collector to follow him? I suppose it’s nice that the man abandoned the disgraceful, collaborationist work, but make him an associate? I mean, eat with him?

Quite aside from ritual uncleanness, that’s gross.

How many people have never been invited to your table because something they’ve done or said or represented is, to you, gross?

For myself, I don’t know. I’ve lost count.

It made a huge difference for Matthew. As Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “He is sitting, literally, at the table of his unhealthy and degraded identity as tax collector. Toward him walks the ‘source of life’s fullness.’ The English writer, Jeannette Winterson, says that many great stories begin this way. Once upon a time, there was a person in circumstances that weren’t all that they hoped for. And then there was an encounter. In a moment, the bare facts of what is changed to what if, the expansion of possibility.”

It made all the difference in the world.

Jesus’ rabbinic colleagues were right to be leery. Let’s get that straight. They were following guidance from Law and Prophets that emphasized personal piety and practice to maintain faithfulness to God. They were praying, fasting, worshiping, and resting on the Sabbath. They were doing, frankly, things that we should be doing.

But that’s just one side of the pushme-pullyou.

Remember the other side? Love your neighbor as yourself.

Centuries before, the people of Israel, the northern of the two nations which had split after the death of David’s son Solomon, heard an earnest and, let’s face it, rather troubled prophet named Hosea try to remind them that their national practice of worship and ritual was not enough to maintain the covenant with God. Whatever they did during the week to treat others badly, they firmly believed that their piety won them forgiveness. “Let us press on to know the LORD;” Hosea quotes them as saying, “his appearing is as sure as the dawn; he will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth.”

But what about the other side of the pushme-pullyou?

“I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,” Hosea wrote, quoting God this time, “the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

Centuries later, Jesus quoted Hosea quoting God to those who asked about hanging out with all these sinners. “Go and learn what this means,” he said: “’I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’”

If you’ve been listening really carefully, you may have noticed that those quotes don’t match. “I desire steadfast love,” it says in Hosea; “I desire mercy,” it says in Matthew. The reason is that the Hebrew word Hosea used, “hesed,” doesn’t have a one-to-one translation in English or in first century Greek. It means steadfast love, and it means mercy, and it means loyalty, and it means grace.

Commit to steadfast love, mercy, loyalty, and grace to those around you, said Jesus. That’s more important than prayer and fasting and worship and resting at the right time.

God desires mercy from us for them.

It’s also true that God desires mercy from them to us. Personally, I don’t have as much control over the way other people treat me as I’d like. Like you, I’m relying on that foundational teaching of the Golden Rule in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Taoism, Yoruba, and a host of faiths whose names I’ve never heard to guide their adherents into care, compassion, and mercy for their fellow travelers on the road of life.

Look hard enough at any religion, look hard enough at Christianity, and you’ll find justification to treat other people badly. In Christianity it isn’t that hard, to tell you the truth (I suspect that’s true in plenty of other faiths as well).

Before you pull out that excuse, however, remember Hosea and Jesus and a lot of other Biblical writers, all of whom insisted that God desires mercy from us and for us.

Mercy. It’s more powerful than all the pious actions we might do.

Mercy.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes from his prepared text as he preaches – sometimes he means to do it, and sometimes he doesn’t.

The image is The Calling of Matthew by Jacob van Oost (1641) – Photograph from the original painting, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41538332.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.