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.

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.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Not Any of These

March 15, 2026

1 Samuel 16:1-13
Ephesians 5:8-14

I learned something new this week. I learned about “Dark dining.” This is a restaurant where you eat with all the lights off. The idea is to focus your attention on the tastes and scents of the food. Thinking about one of these restaurants, Biblical scholar Roger Nam writes at Working Preacher, “Without the crutch of vision, textures, flavors, temperatures, and nodes of taste are enlightened. It is amazing how the deliberate restriction of sight may enhance a dining experience!”

And that, says Dr. Nam, is the way Samuel found himself approaching the task of identifying God’s chosen successor to Saul, the first King of Israel. He continues: “I wonder how much our own sight blinds us to God’s wishes, and prevents us from truly experiencing God’s intent. Perhaps the occasional experience of blindness can remind us how the gift of sight may prevent us from seeing the heart of God… 1 Samuel 16 implores us that sometimes we only need to deliberately close our eyes to see what God wants us to see.”

“[Samuel] looked on Eliab and thought, ‘Surely his anointed is now before the LORD.’ But the LORD said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him, for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.’”

As you can probably tell from the beginning of the text, things were complicated in Israel. Samuel had anointed Saul as the first King of Israel possibly as little as two years before. God and Samuel hadn’t been enthusiastic about replacing the system of judges with a monarch, but the Israelites had been hard pressed by raids and military incursions from their neighbors, and the people demanded a reliable, consistent leadership. Samuel, at God’s direction, had chosen Saul. It wasn’t long, however, before Saul began to do things he wasn’t empowered to do, such as offer sacrifices, and he failed to do things he was supposed to do. Samuel confronted Saul about it and informed him that God had rejected him.

It seems from the Samuel’s concerns about his safety at the beginning of this passage, and the trembling question of the leaders of Bethlehem – “Do you come peaceably?” – that everybody knew that the King and the prophet were at odds.

What he was doing, of course, was setting up the nation for a lengthy civil war. That’s the best name for it. As you might remember, Saul and David worked as a team for several years. David even married one of Saul’s daughters. A day came, however, when the relationship fractured into open conflict. As Patricia Tull writes at Working Preacher, “Samuel secretly anoints him [David] as God’s chosen future king while Saul is still reigning, and for the next fifteen chapters, that is, most of the story, the conflict between the two kings Samuel has anointed, a conflict neither of them created, balloons from rivalry and jealousy to deadly hostility: the recognized king of Israel, who still had a following, periodically determined to destroy his hidden heir, who time after time eludes his grasp.”

King Saul: Not this one.

God guided Samuel to the sons of Jesse, a respectable resident of Bethlehem. Samuel asked to meet the young men one at a time, or at least the authors presented it as something of a parade, with each one “passing by” in turn. The first was the eldest, Eliab, and Samuel thought he looked like a likely candidate for king: tall and good looking. God chimed in, however, to say, “I have rejected him, for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”

If God told Samuel what was in the heart that disqualified Eliab, the story doesn’t say. We only know that Eliab got angry at David later on for asking an embarrassing question – which is, I’m afraid, the usual fate of younger siblings who ask questions that embarrass their older siblings. Was that it?

My guess is, probably not.

Eliab: Not this one.

Then son number two: Abinadab. And: Not this one.

Son number three: Shammah. Not this one.

After that the storytellers ran out of names, because four more young men were run by the prophet, and four more young men were rejected.

Not any of these.

But now Samuel was out of candidates.

It turns out there was one more, one whose utility as a shepherd outweighed the prophet’s request to meet all Jesse’s sons. That was David, of course. You’ve heard the story read, and you’ve heard it before. God told Samuel, “This is the one.”

Not any of these.

This one.

Why?

That’s the crucial question, isn’t it? We don’t know what God saw in the heart of Eliab or the other six brothers that disqualified them. We also don’t know what God saw in the heart of David to qualify him. What made him a good potential king? What made the others less good – we don’t actually know they’d have been bad – what made them less suitable candidates than the youngest of Jesse’s sons?

The closest we can come is to look at what David did after his anointing. What qualities did he show? What did his behavior say about what was in his heart?

The first virtue, I have to say, was compassion. The very next story, wrapping up this chapter, tells how David became a member of King Saul’s entourage. Saul suffered from some kind of mental health ailment, described as “an evil spirit.” Music soothed him, and the musician was David.

The story told in the next chapter of First Samuel is David and Goliath. There are a lot of things you can learn about David in that, but the first and foremost is that he was brave. There are a lot of ways to show courage. David displayed many of them.

Another virtue David displayed repeatedly was loyalty. His friendship with Saul’s son Jonathan is iconic. The two maintained a relationship even when King Saul sought David’s life. Further, David, even as a rebel, remained oddly loyal to Saul himself. There are two stories of David having the opportunity to kill King Saul, and refusing to “raise his hand against the LORD’s anointed.”

Finally, David showed a quality that Saul so lacked that it was what provoked God and Samuel to anoint him in the first place. David displayed a trust in God and a humility before God that clearly separated him from his predecessor. Saul assumed that his status as king gave him priestly powers. David routinely asked God about the things he should do. His relationship with God governed his decisions far more than Saul. David’s relationship with God was further recorded in the psalms he wrote. They reveal a trust and faith that even the storytellers of First Samuel could not fully describe.

What David did not possess, the virtue of the heart that God did not discern, was perfection. It would be nice if he had, because the stories of his reign would be different. But it’s also a relief, isn’t it? God isn’t looking for people who make no mistakes. God is looking for people who are brave, but not always. God is looking for people who care, but not for people who always know exactly what to do. God is looking for people who trust in God, but not people whose faith never falters.

God knows that people are people. God knows that people will fail from time to time.

What God wants is people who try, and try again, and try again.

What God also wants is for people not to be in positions where they cannot or will not fulfill their responsibilities. God wants the inclinations of the heart to be consistent with the roles they’re called to play. Those inclinations may change – that seems to have happened with Saul – but if they’re preventing someone from fulfilling their kuleana, it’s time to move on.

You and I might envy God that ability to see into the heart, but I’ll remind you that we are not so ignorant. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, the poet Maya Angelou said, “My dear, when people show you who they are, why don’t you believe them? Why must you be shown 29 times before you can see who they really are? Why can’t you get it the first time?”

May we be visible as people of good hearts the first time and the twenty-nine times after that. When God looks into us, may we not hear: “Not any of these.”

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes from his prepared text while he preaches. The sermon you just read is not precisely as he delivered it.

The image is David Anointed King by Samuel, Dura Europos synagogue painting (3rd cent.), reworked by Marsyas. Yale Gilman collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5107843.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Refreshment

March 8, 2026

Exodus 17:1-7
John 4:5-42

The best drink of water I’ve ever had in my life came from Thoreau Spring, a little pool of fresh water about 4600 feet up the slopes of Mount Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine. I was fifteen, taking part in a week long hiking trip in Baxter State Park with our church youth group. We’d had a rough day. We’d taken the wrong trail early in the day, and although we would end up where we intended to go, we were taking the long way across one of the shoulders of the mountain, which we hadn’t meant to do. We’d also misplaced one of our adult advisors, who we caught up with at our destination.

So there I was with a few other young people at the front of the pack as the afternoon was waning. We spotted the sign for the spring and turned off to it, even though we all had plenty of water in our water bottles. We fetched out our cups, dipped them into the water, and sipped.

It was heavenly.

We couldn’t stay long, because our other adult advisor called to us to keep going so we wouldn’t be hiking in the dark. It was a near thing. The sun had just set when the last of us arrived at camp. I’ve never regretted that stop or that sip, though. I’ve been thirstier. I’ve been hungrier. I can’t remember ever being more refreshed.

Jesus asked for a drink of water.

He asked it of a Samaritan woman, who was quite surprised to be asked. That might have been in part because of her gender, but it was in great part because he was Jewish and she was Samaritan. Samaritans and Jews shared a common heritage. Jews were descended from the citizens of the nation of Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem, ruled over by the descendants of King David until the Babylonian invasion about 580 years before Jesus’ birth. Samaritans were descended from the citizens of the nation of Israel, with its capital at Samaria, north of Jerusalem. Israel broke away from Judah after the death of Solomon and endured until the Assyrian invasion about 740 years before Jesus’ birth. Though the nation vanished, the people remained. Jews and Samaritans shared a belief in God; reliance on the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy; and even a belief in a coming Messiah.

As Sherri Brown writes at Working Preacher, “Although sharing the same founding history, they currently shared nothing else, including food, drink, or utensils..” I’d add one thing. They shared a deep resentment of the other.

Jesus asked for a drink. He asked to be refreshed by a person who, by usual expectation, couldn’t be expected to refresh him.

Jesus and this woman – John didn’t record her name, but she’s listed as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox church with the name “Photini,” which means “Enlightened One” – then had the longest conversation recorded between Jesus and any person in the four Gospels. It’s longer than the one Jesus had with Nicodemus in the previous chapter, one which, you might recall, leaves you wondering whether Nicodemus managed to catch up with Jesus or not. Personally, I think he did, but I think John left it vague on purpose.

In this conversation, however, Jesus got as clear as he ever got. This chapter includes the first of Jesus’ “I am” statements in John. You probably remember the others: “I am the bread of life.” “I am the light of the world.” “I am the good shepherd.” “I am the resurrection and the life.”

The “I am” statement here came in reply to Photini’s statement, “I know that Messiah is coming.” Jesus said, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

In the rest of the Gospel of John people argued about whether Jesus was the Messiah. Here in chapter four, Jesus told a Samaritan woman that he was. It’s a stunning moment, and so easy to miss.

Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “As theologian Barbara Brown Taylor points out, Jesus’s dialogue with the woman at the well is his longest recorded conversation in the New Testament.  He talks to the Samaritan woman longer than he talks to his twelve disciples, or to his accusers, or even to his own family members.  Moreover, she is the first person (and the first ethnic/religious outsider) to whom Jesus reveals his identity in John’s Gospel.  And — this might be the most compelling fact of all  — she is the first believer in any of the Gospels to straightaway become an evangelist, and bring her entire city to a saving knowledge of Jesus.”

Jesus asked for refreshment of the body.

The woman – I’ll keep calling her Photini, why not? – asked for something else pretty early in their conversation. She immediately brought up the religious significance of the well, which was attributed to Jacob, grandson of Abraham. When Jesus’ knowledge of her background revealed his power as a prophet, she immediately began to question him about theology. Yes, theology. She was less concerned with literal flowing water to ease her daily burden than she was about the appropriate worship of God.

Photini asked for refreshment of the spirit.

Oddly enough, it’s not clear whether Jesus got his requested refreshment of the body. It’s abundantly clear that Photini got her refreshment of the spirit.

“God is spirit,” Jesus told her, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

She left her water jar and went to fetch her neighbors.

As several commentators have noted, Jesus made no judgements about her. He simply spoke with her. He answered her questions, rapidly steering the conversation from day-to-day matters to spiritual topics. She followed him there, and I’d have to say she did it eagerly. The Orthodox have it right. She earned the name Photini, Enlightened One.

Jesus refreshed her spirit.

At the same time, Photini refreshed Jesus’ spirit. That eagerness, that engagement, that enlightenment nourished Jesus even more than the water. He told his disciples so when they urged him to eat something: “I have food to eat that you do not know about.”

She refreshed Jesus’ spirit.

That drink of water from Thoreau Spring high on a mountain decades ago refreshed me body and soul. That’s why I’ve never forgotten it. Photini refreshed Jesus in body and soul as well – I think I’ve got to assume she gave him a drink of water. That’s why we’ve never forgotten her. She went on to refresh her friends and family and neighbors. She invited them to seek even more refreshment in Jesus – and they found it.

As they did, they refreshed Jesus as well.

Refreshment sounds… trivial, doesn’t it? What do we get at refreshment stands? Ice cream. Candy. Snacks. The nourishment that some would tell us we don’t need.

The word “refreshment” is bigger than that, however, and the reality of refreshment is more necessary than that. Our bodies and our souls cry out for refreshment when they need something. Our stomachs rumble with hunger. Our mouths gasp for air with exertion. Our tongues dry up with thirst. Our spirits falter when there’s confusion, or deception, or abuse. When we meet our needs, we feel refreshed.

I think that makes refreshment a basic activity of the Christian life. It starts by making sure that I am refreshed in my body and in my soul. It starts by satisfying my actual needs for food and drink and shelter. It continues by meeting my actual spiritual needs through prayer and study and reflection and companionship in the journey. The first task of any Christian is to seek refreshment themselves.

Further, though, and it’s not much further because it’s the next thing, Christians refresh others. We refresh those who are near and dear, and we refresh those who are far and feared. A Samaritan woman refreshed Jesus, and he refreshed her and lots of other Samaritans. “Love your enemies,” Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. What is love for another but the willingness and the commitment to keep them refreshed?

The notion that Jesus, of all people, would ever summon his followers to holy war has always been the vilest of heresies. It’s false. It slanders Christ. Those who proclaim it may believe it, but they lie.

Refreshment is the way of Jesus. Refreshment for those around, and refreshment for those who seem like the other or the enemy. Refreshment for a world thirsting for compassion and renewal. Refreshment for our bodies and souls, for yours and for mine.

Refreshment with Jesus himself.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

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

The image is Jesus and the Samaritan Woman, from JESUS MAFA, Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48282 [retrieved March 8, 2026]. Original source: http://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr (contact page: https://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr/contact).

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Not Only

March 1, 2026

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

As he sat down to write his letter to the church in Rome – or perhaps as he stood to dictate it to the scribe, Tertius, who offers greetings at the end of the letter – the Apostle Paul had an agenda. He planned a trip to Spain. He had travelled a lot in the years since the risen Jesus summoned him to proclaim this good news. He hoped to go even further, to the place Clement of Rome, writing at the end of the first century, called “the farthest west.”

Along the way, said Paul, he wanted to visit the Christian community in Rome.

Unlike his other letters in the New Testament, Paul wrote this letter to people he didn’t know. He hoped for their assistance, I’m sure: a place to stay during his visit. He said he looked forward to preaching the gospel, so I’m sure he planned to do the same things he’d done in cities and towns across modern Israel, Syria, Turkey, and Greece. He wanted to meet people he’d heard good things of, names that had reached his ears across the Mediterranean Sea.

The Letter to the Romans was Paul on his best behavior, writing to strangers, trying to make a good impression.

Paul knew, and the Romans knew, that their church had had problems. A major one was that there’d been fights in the streets. The Emperor Claudius had banished Jews from the city of Rome on because of “disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus,” which most scholars interpret as dissension between Jews and Jews leaning into the new understandings of Jesus. The chances are very good that most if not all of the members of the Roman church had been shut out of the city, though it’s unknown for how long.

That probably wasn’t the Roman church’s only problem. Romans has sixteen chapters. The last chapter is a long set of greetings. Chapters twelve through fifteen contain a typically Pauline set of advice including, “Let love be genuine,” and “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” Except for his opening introduction, he gave the rest of the letter: his time, his consideration, and his considerable focused attention, to one question: What difference is there, if any, between God’s relationship with Christians of a Jewish background and God’s relationship with Christians of a Gentile background?

It was a knotty problem. As Dan Clendenin writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “In Romans 3:29 Paul asked a provocative question: is God the God of Jews only? Or is he not also the God of Gentiles? In contrast to every attempt to claim God as ours, and ours alone, Paul says that in Abraham God loves all people equally. In the famous words of this week’s gospel, God so loves all the world (John 3:16). Our tendency is to fear the other, to marginalize the strange, to dismiss all that is different from who and what we know.”

That’s true now, and it was true in the first century. Jews had long regarded their relationship with God as unique. God might have created the world, but had only entered into covenant with one group of people. On the other hand, Romans – especially those dwelling in the city of Rome – regarded themselves as the greatest people ever. Most people living in the Empire were not Roman citizens and lived under different laws. Roman citizens, for example, could be executed for treason but they could not be crucified.

The Roman church included both Jews and Romans. Some of the latter would have been citizens and some non-citizens, adding another layer of class distinction to an uncomfortable mix, with everyone wondering: How does God really feel about that person on the other side of the room?

That’s why Paul got so excited about a revolutionary idea: that a relationship with God could be established not by living in the right place, not by divine selection, not through ritual observance, but through faith. Anyone could make the decision to trust in God. Anyone. “For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (who is the father of all of us)…”

Not only for me. Also for them. Not only for us. Also for them. Not only for the select of Rome. Also for Spaniards. Not only for the Jews. Also for the Greeks. Not only for the men. Also for the women. Not only for today’s believers. Also for tomorrow’s believers. Not only for people of the “Christian” nations. Also for the people of the non-Christian nations. Not only for the rich. Also for the poor. Not only for the powerful. Also for the marginalized. Not only for the respectable. Also for the discounted. Not only for the Americans. Also for the Iranians. Not only for the Republicans. Also for the Democrats, and the Independents, and the Greens, and the Libertarians, and so on. Not only for the people who agree with me. Also for the ones who don’t.

Let’s face it. God gets along better, with more people, than I do.

As Lucy Lind Hogan writes at Working Preacher, “Paul had experienced God’s amazing, unbelievable, overflowing love and forgiveness. How could God, in Jesus Christ, have forgiven him for all the evil that he had done? How could God accept the one who had sought to murder the disciples of Jesus? Because that is who our God is. For Paul, justification by grace was a theological concept only after it had been a life changing, throw-you-to-the-ground, awe-filled experience. God had offered him new life, and he had believed.”

These are anxious days. Hold on to that core of trust and faith: God loves you just as much as Paul or anyone. God loves you.

God also loves us. And God loves them. No matter who “we” are. No matter who “they” are.

Not only for us. Also for everyone.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

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

The image is Saint Paul Writing His Epistles by Valentin de Boulogne (between 1618 and 1620) – https://www.mfah.org/art/detail/20223, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74425088.

Rev. Eric Anderson Pastor's Corner, Sermons

Sermon: Small Wisdoms

February 22, 2026

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11

I don’t remember the first time either of my children did something I had specifically told them not to do. I’m sure there was a first time. It’s been lost amidst all the other times. It’s one of the things my kids did as they grew – they knew that growing older meant shifting boundaries. Sometimes they’d test to see if the boundary had changed.

I remember that I didn’t do some things when they did something I had specifically told them not to do. I didn’t kick them out of the house, the way God sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. Mind you, I did kick them out of the house eventually, when they’d graduated from college. But that wasn’t a consequence of misbehavior, that was just a consequence of growing up.

So what small wisdom can we take away from the story of Adam and Eve? It’s unwise to listen to talking snakes – which we don’t have to worry about on an island that doesn’t have land snakes. It’s unwise to do things you’ve specifically been told not to do by God – that’s certainly true, but you probably knew that already.

What happens after you do the thing God specifically told you not to do? You lose Paradise. You no longer live in a pristine world. The world is not a perfect place any more.

The world is not a perfect place.

It’s wise to know that the world is not a perfect place.

When Jesus confronted his temptations, he already knew that the world was not a perfect place. He’d just been baptized by John the Baptist, who washed people in the Jordan River so that their sins might be forgiven. You don’t need baptism in a perfect world.

But baptism doesn’t change the reality of temptation. That’s another small bit of wisdom. It’s astonishing how many people have lived their lives with the conviction that because of their baptism (or something else baptism-like) they, and only they, were right. I struggle with that one all the time. I like to be right, I work to be right, I have a professional obligation to be much more right than wrong. Right?

If I let myself grow accustomed to being right, I’m at risk of shortcutting the work, or relying upon prior rightness to get me through changing conditions, or mistaking “I was right given what I knew” for “I was absolutely right,” because I probably wasn’t.

God’s call. Baptism. Participation in the church. Success in work. Contributing to the harmony of a family. Leading in a community. None of that sets temptation aside. It’s always there, and it leaps out when you least expect it.

“However we think of the devil,” writes Warren Carter at Working Preacher, “the figure’s presence in the Gospel personifies the vulnerability of human life and life in relation to God. No one, not even God’s anointed agent, is free from having their identity and loyalty tested.”

Jesus didn’t escape temptation. You and I aren’t going to, either. It’s an imperfect world, and we are subject to temptation.

Temptation looks like good things. That’s another small wisdom. Temptation isn’t just shiny distraction. Temptation looks like blessing. In the case of Jesus, the temptations look like things he did later on. As Audrey West writes at Working Preacher:

Jesus refuses in the desert to turn stones into bread to assuage his own hunger, but before long he will feed thousands in the wilderness with just a few loaves and some fish (Matt 14:17-21; 15:33-38), and he will teach his disciples to pray to God for their “daily bread” (Matt 6:11).

He refuses to take advantage of his relationship to God by hurling himself down from the heights of the Temple, but at the end of his earthly ministry he endures the taunts of others (Matt 27:38-44) while trusting God’s power to the end upon the heights of a Roman cross (Matt 27:46).

He turns down the devil’s offer of political leadership over the kingdoms of the world, and instead offers the kingdom of the heavens to all those who follow him in the way of righteousness.

I’ve always found the last temptation, the realms of the earth, somewhat odd. The devil offered political power to someone he addressed as Son of God. Think about that for a minute. The Son of God already has power over the nations of the earth. The devil offered him what he already had.

Similar things happened in the other two temptations. Jesus had the power to create bread. He could have called the angels to him – and when the devil had gone away, they came without his call.

Temptation offers what we already have.

Another small wisdom. Temptation offers what we already have.

Sometimes, what’s tempting about it is a relief from labor or effort to achieve it.

Or, the temptation is to lift ourselves out of our humanity into some exalted condition.

As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “These days, I read the story differently.  The devil doesn’t come to make Jesus do something ‘bad.’  He comes to make Jesus do what seems entirely reasonable and good — but for all the wrong reasons.  The test is a test of Jesus’s motivations.  A test of his willingness to identify as fully human, even as he is fully God.”

Another small wisdom: Temptation urges us to be something other than fully human.

Temptation also invites us to raise others up to more than human. Jesus’ last response to the tempter is to quote Deuteronomy 8: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” The devil has offered himself for worship, to be raised up above humanity and above whatever kind of being he is.

In addition, the offer to rule the nations ignored the people of those nations. What did they want or need? The devil didn’t ask. Those people weren’t important.

There’s a pair of small wisdoms: It’s temptation when you’re invited to raise someone else higher than human, and it’s also temptation when you’re asked to treat other people as unhuman.

That’s why all the “isms” – racism, sexism, homophobia, cultural imperialism, and so on – are so destructive. Each of them invites us to raise ourselves above other people by denying their full humanity.

Is there any small wisdom about resisting temptation? There is, but it’s hard. I wish it was as simple as reading Scripture and holding onto its directions – and that’s not simple. Plenty of faithful people well steeped in the Bible have fallen into temptation, myself included. I think the wisdom is, as best you can, try to resist temptation in company with other faithful, supportive people. Jesus did it alone, it’s true, and at some point in the process there’s nobody who can make the your decision for you. But Jesus did rely upon the religious tradition in which he’d been raised. He relied upon their recorded words and their recorded examples. He relied upon his relationship with God. He may not have summoned angels to him, but he trusted in their presence.

Jesus managed to resist temptation with those supports. Those might be enough for you and me. But as for me, I’m going to ask for more help if I possibly can.

There’s another small wisdom here that’s really uncomfortable. It’s the wisdom to find power in weakness, security in vulnerability. In John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost, he introduced the Son of God as a terrifying figure casting lightning bolts at the rebellious angels. There’s no sign of such a force in the Gospel accounts of the Temptation. A human, hungry Jesus faces a self-confident, more-than-human granter of wishes. It’s also uncomfortable to note that these temptations foreshadow the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry: bread that would represent his broken body, the nations triumphant over the Son of God, the Temple that gazed upon his crucifixion. As Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “True power is the mysterious path that Jesus walked. It comes with no guarantees. It is self-giving surrender, the strangest of paradoxes, and it leads to the cross.”

That’s a scary small wisdom.

It brings up one more small wisdom: that there really is resilience in the vulnerability, there really is strength in the weakness, there really is victory in the defeat. To quote an old hymn, there are angels hov’ring ‘round. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Sometimes our journeys with God include dark places.  Not because God takes pleasure in our pain, but because we live in a fragile, broken world that includes deserts, and because God’s modus operandi is to take the things of death, and wring from them resurrection.”

The world is not perfect. Temptation is real and we are vulnerable to it. Temptation looks like good things, not just shiny things. Temptation often offers what we already have. We may be tempted to lift ourselves above our humanity, or to set someone else as superhuman, or to regard others as subhuman. As best you can, find help to resist temptation. Find power in weakness. Remember that from death God brings resurrection.

Small wisdoms to bring us through temptation.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, sometimes on purpose, sometimes accidentally. The text as prepared does not exactly match the sermon as delivered.

The illustration is Mountain Landscape with the Temptation of Christ by Joos de Momper the Younger (btwn 1600 and 1650) / Sebastiaen Vrancx – Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15417048.

Rev. Eric Anderson Pastor's Corner, Sermons

Sermon: The Mountain

February 15, 2026

Exodus 24:12-18
Matthew 17:1-9

In his documentary on the Darkness of the Renaissance, British art critic Waldemar Januszczak said, “Mountains have a powerful effect on people. Mountains cloud your judgment. They heighten your emotions and intoxicate you.” He’s right. The vistas from mountains – and the views of mountains – go right to the feelings. You find your breath catching, and not just because of the altitude.

We live at the foot of two of the earth’s great summits. I grant you that I’ve lived here not quite ten years, and most of you have lived here much longer than that, but I put it to you: have you ever looked up at Mauna Kea on a clear day and not felt something? Can Mauna Kea ever make you feel… nothing?

They make me feel something. They catch me, heart and soul, every time.

But do they cloud our judgment? I’m less sure about that. I do know that a mountain makes me see things in a different way. That can be quite literal, when I’m at the mountain summit and seeing the world as I can’t see it from the mountain’s foot. It’s also emotional. There I am, feeling at the top of the world, and not just from lack of oxygen.

I can feel at one and the same time both the greatest of all living beings and one of the small creatures I can’t even see far down the slopes.

Mountaintops are powerful. That’s true. They bring us away from the day-to-day of human living. They show us grandeur that’s beyond us. At the same time they place this grandeur in the palms of our hands.

I suspect that Simon Peter, James, and John anticipated something like that when they climbed the mountain with Jesus. They looked to see the glory of Creation stretching out below them. They expected to gasp air in deep breaths after the exertion of the climb. They probably hoped to hear something new from Jesus, whom they’d just acclaimed as Messiah (and been scolded for misunderstanding what Jesus meant by Messiah) six days before. Top of the world.

They got more than they’d bargained for. Jesus glowed like the sun. The two greatest religious leaders of ancient Israel stood there with Jesus: Moses who’d freed the people from Egypt and delivered God’s Law, and Elijah who’d maintained the faith against hostile monarchs and been carried away to God without dying. The Messiah, people whispered, would be a prophet like Moses. The Messiah, people whispered, would be heralded by Elijah returned.

“It is interesting,” writes D. Mark Davis at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “that neither the transformation of Jesus, the appearance of Moses and Elijah, nor the bright light evoked fear in the disciples. Hearing the voice out of the clouds is what did them in.”

We don’t usually collapse at the top of a mountain – well, except to catch our breath from the climb. In fact, I usually find that the sight energizes me, lifts me up. I move about from place to place to take in the view in all directions. Mountaintops inspire. They rarely overwhelm.

Booming voices from clouds overwhelm. I’d have been overwhelmed. Without doubt. But as Rev. Davis says, all the strange and overwhelming things before that didn’t overcome them. Unusual? Yes. Unexpected? I wouldn’t have expected it. Frightful? No. I think there’s even a hint that, like the simple view from a mountaintop, the disciples found the experience inspiring as well as awe-inspiring. If I understand Peter’s offer to make shelters correctly, they were prepared to extend the inspiring experience, to learn more, to plan more, to prepare themselves for the work they’d undertake when they returned to the mountain’s foot.

Unsurprisingly, significant religious experiences in people’s lives tend to be called “mountaintop experiences.” Those experiences don’t have to happen on mountains. Plenty of them don’t. But like experiences on mountains, including most of the Transfiguration, they tend to inspire, not overwhelm.

Listen to that again. Most of the time, when God reaches out to someone, God doesn’t overwhelm them. God inspires them.

Mountaintop experiences aren’t necessarily visions of glory accompanied by angelic music and words of thunder. Mountaintop experiences are the ones that make a difference to your soul.

Mountaintop experiences are the ones that make a difference to your soul.

Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “…as long as I can remember, I’ve measured the depth and ‘success’ of my faith by the number of mountaintop experiences I can truthfully claim.  Have I ‘felt the Spirit’ in Sunday morning worship?  Has Jesus ‘spoken’ to me?  Have I seen visions?  Spoken in tongues?  Encountered God’s living presence in my dreams?

“Most of the time, the answer is ‘no.’  Which means I’ve spent most of my life feeling like a spiritual failure.”

Without commenting on the rightness or wrongness of the feeling – feelings, as I’ve noted before, happen whether they reflect external reality or not – I’ve never found Ms. Thomas a spiritual failure. Given how often I quote her in sermons, I’ve found her to be a significant spiritual guide. She’s described here a fairly widespread notion that spiritual success equates to overwhelming spiritual experiences. And… it doesn’t.

Spiritual success, I think, takes place when we pay attention to our experiences of God, whether they’re grand or subtle, and let them change our path.

As Audrey West writes at Working Preacher, “Then and now, the full meaning of a mountaintop experience may not become clear until after the return to the valley, after the passage of time. After they come down from the mountain, the disciples listen, as the voice has instructed: they hear Jesus’ parables, they hear his response to friends and foes, they hear his repeated references to the Son of Humanity.”

“Listen to him,” thundered the voice from the cloud. That overwhelmed Peter, James, and John, but it’s also the central theme of Matthew’s Gospel. Listen to Jesus. Each occasion of listening to Jesus is, to some degree, a mountaintop experience. It has the ability to transform us. It has the ability to redirect us. It has the ability to inspire us.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Are you inspired?

“Blessed are the peacemakers.” Are you inspired?

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Are you inspired?

“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” Are you inspired?

“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Are you inspired?

I know you’ve been inspired, somewhere, somehow, by something. Why? You’re here. I have plenty of illusions about myself, but I’m pretty sure you can find things to do on Sunday morning that you’d enjoy more than dreading one of my puns coming along. But you’re here. You made the time. You made the effort. Why?

You’ve been inspired. Maybe you’re hoping for some more inspiration, but you’ve already been inspired.

It doesn’t happen every day, as you know. As Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “This makes me think that perhaps the experience wasn’t given to the disciples so that they could cling to it. Perhaps it was given to them so that they could practice letting go. On the difficult path ahead, they are going to have to let go of Jesus again and again. Here they are asked to let go of even a vision so profound that it was called ‘transfiguration.’

“Maybe living with the coming and going of clouds incapsulates this lesson daily. ‘And thus I saw him and I sought him,’ Julian of Norwich writes. ‘And I had him and I lacked him.’ This isn’t something to mourn, she counsels, but is instead ‘the common working of this life.’ We glimpse God, and then God goes behind a cloud. In this way, we learn to love rather than cling.”

I’d add that we learn to love rather than puppet. We learn to love of our own initiative rather than depending on ongoing inspiration. We’re inspired for a moment. We’re changed in a moment. We move forward from there… and continue to learn, grow, change, and love in each place we go, no matter how far from the mountain.

As Maren Tirabassi wrote this week in a comment on ordainedgeek.com, “And so life-changing experiences are not really life-changing, just moment-changing and that always must be enough.”

It must, and it is. Those moments for each of you brought you to this moment. This moment may not inspire you that much, and if it doesn’t I apologize, since that is sort of the point of this exercise, but these moments, these experiences, they lead to new moments, new experiences, and if not all of them have the power of mountaintop moments, they all have power, they all give direction, they all inspire.

In these continuing moments, we follow Jesus. In these continuing moments, we love.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric writes his sermons ahead of time, but he makes changes while preaching, so the text prepared does not match the sermon as preached.

Photo of the summit of Mauna Kea by Eric Anderson.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons, Uncategorized

Sermon: Fulfilling the Law and the Prophets

February 8, 2026

Isaiah 58:1-12
Matthew 5:13-20

In her blog, preaching Professor Alyce M. McKenzie tells a story about a skit she and some students presented one year, which featured her giving feedback to Jesus on the Sermon on the Mount as if he were a member of her preaching class. In the skit, she said, “You remember we learned earlier in the semester that every sermon needs to have one single focus and you are all over the map with this one — salt, light, not coming to abolish the prophets, breaking and keeping commandments. It seems almost like you put a bunch of short sayings together in a row. And one more thing — your final sentence: ‘Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Where is the good news in this sermon ending? It sets out an impossible goal and then tells listeners they’ll be in trouble if they can’t do the impossible.”

The punchline, she wrote, is that while she was marking things on the blackboard with her back to the class, “Jesus” beckoned the other students to follow and they left her alone in the room.

There is some truth, however, to her critique. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus wasn’t making things easy for anyone. To a people whose Scriptures told them about their ancestors repeated failures to live up to the standards of the Law and the Prophets, Jesus said, “Fulfill them.” That’s where the light came from. It’s the source of the salt. And, oh yes, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Now, we’ve been taught for years that the Pharisees and the scribes were the villains of the New Testament, and certainly by the time the Gospels were written there was a lot of dissension between the emerging Christians and the senior theologians of Judaism. To Jesus’ hearers, though, the Pharisees and the scribes weren’t bad guys, they were the tip top examples of what goodness meant. These were the people who seriously contemplated God’s law, who worked through the implications of the things the prophets had said. To exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees set the bar incredibly high. Dr. McKenzie properly called it an “impossible goal.”

“’No!’ we might say, ‘Jesus didn’t really mean that,’” writes Karoline Lewis at Working Preacher. She continues, “But what if Jesus did? What if Jesus’ intention was for us as disciples to imagine and live into a righteousness that makes the kingdom of heaven possible? If this is true, no wonder Jesus tells this to his disciples from the beginning. They will need the rest of the Gospel to make sense of and embrace such a request.”

Fulfilling the Law and the Prophets. Jesus first – his followers next. Jesus first – and then you and me.

The usual complaint is that the Law and the Prophets are hard to understand. Are they? Really? “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers,” wrote Isaiah hundreds of years before Jesus was born. Is it hard to understand that self-interest is a problem? Is it hard to understand that exploiting people, whether they’re your employees or your family or your neighbor is a problem?

Quarreling and fighting. Clearly problems. And then there are the behaviors that aren’t problems, that are precisely what God was calling for in the Law and repeating through the prophets: Loose the bonds of injustice. Don’t burden people. Don’t enslave them. Share your bread. House the homeless. Clothe the naked. Care for your family. “Then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”

Or as Jesus put it, “You are the light of the world.”

A light not to be hidden.

Eric Barreto writes at Working Preacher, “Jesus gives the central insight that lights don’t magically end up underneath bushels. The only way for our light to be covered is if we put a bushel over it. We can hear the incredulous tone in Jesus’ voice, ‘No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel’ (verse 15). Ridiculous! Jesus is clear: we are not victims inevitably doomed to being distracted and drained by the bushels of inferiority or self-absorption or fantasy. Bushels can only block out the light when we put them there.”

There’s a lot of truth to that. You and I are more than capable of hiding our light, not by being humble, but by seeing something to do and leaving it undone. Somebody else will do it, we might think. Or there just isn’t time (which might be true). Worst of all, I’m too important to do this simple thing.

I can also think of more than one way in which others drop baskets over our light. Plenty of people have suffered being discounted by others. It is, in fact, an all-too-common experience. You sometimes hear of it being done by family members, who’ll tell one of the ‘ohana that their work is bad, that their opinions are unwelcome, that they themselves are worthless. We’re also familiar with broader prejudices within societies, which usually qualify certain groups as worth less or even worthless: children, foreigners, people with a different hue of skin, women.

In the January 31st edition of “Letters from an American,” historian Heather Cox Richardson quoted 19th century US Senator from South Carolina James Henry Hammond, who in 1858 told his colleagues that all societies need a “mudsill” class to do the work and to benefit their betters. African Americans served that purpose in the pre-Civil War South, but the North, he said, had “the man who lives by daily labor…in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”

Senator Hammond’s words were literally a bushel basket meant to extinguish the light of the world. They have their echoes today. Do not mistake them. They will do what’s chemically impossible: cause salt to lose its taste. They will do what breaks hearts, families, and societies: hide the light.

When Jesus told us to let our light shine, he didn’t just mean, “Do nice things.” He meant, “See that the hungry are fed and the homeless housed. See that the oppressed are freed and the burdened relieved. Do not let the powerful say, ‘Sorry,’ and do nothing as if that took care of it. Do what John the Baptist did. Tell the powerful to repent for their sins.”

Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org:

If our fasting does not enable us to discern God’s will more clearly,
If our prayers do not stir us to address unmet needs around us,
If our blessings do not compel us to bless our neighbor,
If our sacramental rites do not move us to solidarity with the marginalized,
If our praise of the abiding of Creator does not lead to care and respect of all creation,
If our confession does not spur us beyond absolution to repair,
If our assurance of God’s grace does not lead us to extend mercy,
Then why would the Holy and Just God even participate in it?

Yet, if we remove the yoke among us…
If we seek justice, speak truth, and love abundantly,
If we embrace the immigrant among us,
If we make space and consideration for the ignored and isolated,
If we lend our voice for the persecuted, defamed, and disenfranchised,
If we stand up to corruption and bear witness to wrongdoing,
If we raise our voice and move beyond our discomfort,
Then we too may receive the promise of the covenant and the Holy One’s declaration of “Here I am.”

Remove the yoke.

Remove the yoke.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes from his prepared text as he preaches, both accidentally and on purpose.

The image is Study for the Sermon on the Mount, a preliminary study for the cycle of paintings in Loccum Monastery by Eduard von Gebhardt (before 1925) – Van Ham Kunstauktionen (SØR Rusche Collection – Eduard von Gebhardt, Auktion 25.02.2021), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103398414.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Mountaintop Wisdom

February 1, 2026

Micah 6:1-8
Matthew 5:1-12

“Plead your case before the mountains,” wrote Micah some 750 years before Jesus was born, “and let the hills hear your voice.” He wrote about an imagined court in which God and God’s people each tried to make the case that they had kept the covenant, and that the other had broken it. The role of the mountains? They were summoned as judges.

It was Micah’s poetic way of inviting the people of Jerusalem, particularly the wealthiest and most powerful, to consider what God might think of the things they were doing. The prosecution’s opening statement really gets rolling in verses nine and following. “Can I tolerate wicked scales and a bag of dishonest weights?” Apparently merchants were defrauding their customers. “Your wealthy are full of violence; your inhabitants speak lies with tongues of deceit in their mouths.”

I grant you that we’re only getting one side of the case, but it doesn’t sound that hard for the mountains to judge, does it?

The covenant had been first delivered to the people on a mountain. The Temple in Jerusalem, where the people hoped their devotions would excuse their violence and fraud, stood on a mountaintop. God had set high standards from a high place. They didn’t seem to be playing out as intended down in the valleys.

Almost eight centuries later, as Matthew told it, Jesus ascended a mountain to speak to a gathering crowd who wanted to hear him. We’ve grown to call it “The Sermon on the Mount.” Its placement in the Gospel reflects Matthew’s belief that the best way to show that Jesus was the Messiah was to pay attention to what he said. Jesus’ words tell us who he was and who he is.

The first thing he did was to tell his listeners who they were. They were blessed.

As Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “You are blessed. You have to hear that on the front end. And note that being blessed is not just for the sake of potential joy, but also for the sake of making it through that which will be difficult. Again, these are Jesus’ first words to his disciples. We need to hear in each and every one of the Beatitudes what’s at stake for Jesus and for his ministry.”

You see, this is another mountaintop moment in the Scriptures. It has a pretty close relationship to the gift of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. It has its precursory echoes in Micah’s summons of the mountains to judge the people. It’s mountaintop wisdom, and the tragedy of mountaintop wisdom is just how often it stays on the mountain and doesn’t make it down into the valleys.

As Lance Pape writes at Working Preacher, “But if the Beatitudes are a description of reality, what world do they describe? Certainly not our own. ‘Blessed are the meek’ (verse 5), says Jesus, but in our world the meek don’t get the land, they get left holding the worthless beads. ‘Blessed are the merciful’ (verse 7), says Jesus, but in our world mourning may be tolerated for a while, but soon we will ask you to pull yourself together and move on. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’ (verse 8), says Jesus, but in our world such people are dismissed as hopelessly naïve.”

I think Dr. Pape has his finger on it: “hopelessly naïve.” Isn’t that what we hear when we assert the Beatitudes as truths? They reflect a better world, but we don’t actually live that way. Some say we can’t actually live that way. For instance, Stephen Miller, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, who told CNN interviewer Jake Tapper “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power… These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

That’s the valley. If you can forgive a Biblical reference in a sermon, that’s the valley of the shadow of death.

Is that where we want to live?

It’s where a lot of people have lived over the course of history. The Hebrew people lived in it when they were slaves in Egypt, when their nations were overrun by the empires of Assyria and Babylon, and when they were occupied by Rome in Jesus’ day. The feudal systems of Europe, Japan, and India left a lot of people in the valley of death. As Osvaldo Vena observes at Working Preacher, “Grief comes for all of us, but mortality rates were higher in the ancient world. Parents simply could not expect their children to survive infancy, let alone make it to adulthood. It was not a given. War, food and housing insecurity, and infectious diseases could cut a life short.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the aftermath of truly catastrophic world wars, nations and non-governmental actors strove to bring food, farming assistance, vaccination, and stable health care delivery to places on the earth that had lost child after child to the grinding effects of being poor. In 2010 I heard a United Nations official tell a UCC gathering that the end goal of these efforts was not far off. He could imagine an end to extreme poverty.

The mountaintop wisdom was in sight from the valley.

Mr. Miller and his ilk would drive it away, out of sight, obscured by clouds high on the mountain.

We need to bring mountaintop wisdom to the valley.

As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Jesus acts.  He doesn’t simply speak blessing.  He lives it.  He embodies it.  He incarnates it…

“This is the vocation we are called to.  The work of the kingdom — the work of sharing the blessings we enjoy — is not the work of a fuzzy, distant someday.  It is the work — and the joy — of the here and now.  The Beatitudes remind us that blessing and justice are inextricably linked.  If it’s blessing we want, then it’s justice we must pursue.”

Mountaintop wisdom.

Let’s bring it to the valley of death.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, sometimes on person. The sermon as delivered does not match the prepared text.

The image is The Sermon on the Mount by Fra Angelico (1437) – Copied from an art book, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9048898.

Rev. Eric Anderson Pastor's Corner, Sermons

Sermon: Whose People Are We?

January 25, 2026

Isaiah 9:1-4
Matthew 4:12-23

About 750 years or so before Herod arrested John the Baptist and Jesus returned to the region of his childhood, the Assyrian Empire attacked the Jewish nations of Israel and Judah. Judah, where Isaiah lived in the capital of Jerusalem, survived the invasion because an outbreak of infectious disease swept through the Assyrian army and forced them to abandon the siege of Jerusalem. Israel, however, the northern of the two nations, fell. It ceased to exist as an independent country. That land included the territories of the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali, an area we know better by its common name in Jesus’ day: Galilee.

Isaiah, catching his breath as the Assyrian armies retreated, spoke a word of hope to the survivors of Israel. He addressed a dwindling population. Unlike most empires of ancient Mesopotamia, the Assyrians actually resettled large groups of conquered people. Scholars have estimated that over 3 million were displaced over 250 years. The result is the disappearance of ten of the twelve tribes descended from Jacob. The “Ten Lost Tribes” lived on the lands conquered by the Assyrians.

Isaiah’s vision of a nation increasing in joy, freed from their burdens and restored to their homes, did not take place for those he addressed. Centuries later Matthew considered the way Jesus’ ministry had begun in the backwater region of Galilee and made the connection: in Jesus there was joy. In Jesus there was liberation. In Jesus there was light.

Matthew, and for that matter most of the Gospel writers and early Christians, might have preferred Jesus’ ministry to get a different starting point. Jerusalem. That was the spot. Right in the center of things. Luke, you may remember, told stories about the child Jesus in Jerusalem, once as a newborn and once as a twelve-year-old. The Jesus story led toward Jerusalem, but shouldn’t it have started there, too?

To some degree Jesus was “on the run” from the law. After his baptism, he seems to have spent some time – we don’t know how long – in the Jordan valley among those clustered about John the Baptist. Then John was arrested by Herod Antipas and, according to the first century historian Josephus, imprisoned at Machaerus on the east shore of the Dead Sea. Capernaum on the shores of Galilee was a fair distance from Marchaerus, but ironically it was still within the territory Herod governed. I don’t know if anybody was looking for Jesus except that somebody might have grabbed him off the streets on suspicion of being an associate of John the Baptist.

Jesus didn’t choose to hide. He began to bring healing to people. He began to speak to what were probably slowly growing crowds. He began to preach during synagogue worship. He brought them the exact same basic message that John the Baptist had: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

As Raj Nadella writes at Working Preacher, “The devil tried to coopt him. The empire tried to threaten him. But nothing seemed to deter him. Jesus withdrew into Galilee spatially but, missionally, he stepped right in the heart of the empire. He boldly stepped into a dangerous space so he can lead others to safety.”

He started with four fishermen, and he started as he went on: with an invitation. As Dr. Nadella writes, “The Roman empire relied on threat, coercion and enticements to recruit people into its military. The new kingdom, on the other hand, inspires them to participate in it.“

Jesus didn’t offer a $50,000 signing bonus. He offered a challenge.

He called it “fishing for people.” I wonder how Peter, Andrew, James, and John heard it. Fishing for fish meant long, backbreaking hours on tasks ranging from hauling nets to mending them, sailing boats and patching them. It meant a limited customer base, because the Romans controlled the fishing economy of Galilee. Through a combination of market control and heavy taxes, they kept the fishing families at a subsistence level and passed the fruits of their labor up the chain of wealthy landowners, nobles, and royalty.

Jesus clearly didn’t mean that. He doesn’t seem to have charged anyone for healing. He doesn’t seem to have asked a fee for preaching. He did accept the invitations of local religious leaders for dinner. He did accept the financial support of some who traveled with him.

As David Lose writes at Working Preacher, “…Perhaps we might re-imagine just what it is that Jesus is calling these first disciples to be and do: fishers of people. And that implies relationships. Jesus, that is, calls these first disciples into relationship — with himself, with each other, and with all the various people they will meet over the next few years and, indeed, the rest of their lives.”

Relationship. Not exploitation. Relationship. Not domination. Relationship. Not condemnation.

Relationship.

To my mind, that’s a different kind of fishing. These fishermen care for the fish. These fishermen recognize themselves as related to the fish. These fishermen realize that they, that we, that all of us are fish, each one looking for the safety of the school, each one looking for the guidance of the group.

And Jesus said, “Follow me.”

There are a lot of people who’ll encourage you to follow them, their ways, their values, and their commitments. Some of them you should probably follow. For the most part, parents are pretty reliable guides, though those of us who are parents know that we’re not perfect, and those of who’ve had parents know for sure that they weren’t perfect. Tragically, parents can fail dramatically and disastrously, and sometimes they do. It takes a lot of work by a lot of people to help the children recover and heal. It takes a lot of work by a lot of people for those grieving parents to recover and heal, too.

There are people in leadership roles and it should be good to follow them, right? Employers. Managers. Bosses. Those folks are imperfect, too. Richard W. Swanson describes a kind of boss that can’t be followed at Provoking the Gospel: “Managers who think of disruption as a management strategy want employees to be afraid that they will be fired… The only successful response is boot-licking.

“Have you ever worked for a manager like this?  I have.  They make the earth shake under everyone’s feet and they make the shaking unpredictable, chaotic.  I have worked for such managers.  It doesn’t turn out well.  Good ideas are hidden away.  Analytical critique is punished.

“…Do not confuse this disruption with the drawing-near of God’s Dominion.”

What did the drawing-near of God’s Dominion look like? In Matthew’s words: “…teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”

What it doesn’t look like is what we’re getting from national leadership, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s assault on Minneapolis. New Yok Times reporter Charles Homans, a child of that city, wrote about an encounter he witnessed on January 14th: “What was clear in person, seeing the scene outside of the frame, were the limits of this performance of power. The agents had no capacity to maintain order or much apparent interest in doing so. Their presence was a vector of chaos, and controlling it was not in their job description. All that was holding the crowd back, as far as I could tell, was the knowledge that an officer like these shot a woman a week earlier and that another shot a man up the street an hour ago. I left the scene that night certain it would happen again.”

This operation and those like it in Los Angeles, Chicago, and now Maine (Maine. Really.) reveal a couple of things about U.S. immigration law. First is that much of what is legal is wrong. A favorite tactic of ICE agents outside of these enforcement sweeps has been to apprehend people when they come to immigration court, dismiss their hearings, and deport them. Apparently that’s legal. If it sounds absolutely unfair, I agree with you. When people engage with the system, they should get a full hearing.

Recently agents detained a five-year-old to get his father to open the door for them, and both are now in custody in Texas. The pair have an active asylum petition. Is this legal? Frankly, I hope not, but I’m afraid that it is and it illustrates how cruel the law can be.

Some of ICE’s actions, however, are clearly illegal. An internal memo has been leaked asserting that officers do not require a judicial warrant to enter a home. A federal judge in Minnesota ruled on January 17 that they do after a man was removed from his home based on an administrative warrant, one not signed by a judge. And once again, the man arrested was actively engaged in seeking proper status, and guess what? The day after his release he was taken into custody again when he appeared for an immigration hearing.

Officials have made clear that the deaths of two people at the hands of ICE officers will not be investigated. That tells me that justice has been decided. Due process has become plain force. Do what we tell you or die.

“…Teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”

Our loyalty is being demanded. Our obedience is being required. Our compliance is being forced. These are not the ways of Jesus. These are not the acts of Jesus. These are not the voices of Jesus.

Whose people are we? We belong to Jesus and nobody else. When Herod threatened to arrest Jesus, do you know what he said? “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.’” Let us be Jesus’ people. Let us go our way and bring healing. Let us teach and proclaim good news. Let us finish our work against the forces of chaos, violence, and tyranny.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

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

The illustration is The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew by Duccio di Buoninsegna (between 1308 and 1311), part of the altarpiece in the Cathedral of Siena – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=150337.