Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Great Gathering

August 16, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human history around disability isn’t that good.

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

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

Let it be a great gathering.

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

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

So we have a choice.

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

Ezra 10 says we can do that.

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

Isaiah 56 says we can do that.

Which will we choose?

So what did Jesus do?

He did… both. Which is awkward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d like the Great Gathering, please.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

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

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

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons, Uncategorized

Sermon: It’s Bigger Than You Think

July 26, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t think of anything.

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

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

It’s a knotty problem.

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

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

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

He planned to visit on the way to Spain.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s bigger than you think.

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

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

God’s grace is bigger than we think.

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

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

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

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

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

Rev. Eric Anderson 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 What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Never Too Late

Jesus arrived after Lazarus had died. It’s a hard moment – Jesus shared the grief – but it turned out that he was not too late, because he was and is the resurrection and the life.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the eleventh chapter of John’s Gospel (John 11:1-45), the resurrection of Lazarus.

It is a wonderful and uplifting story. It demonstrates that the power of Jesus was not limited to day-to-day life, but extended beyond life and was, in fact, a power over death. It features perhaps the deepest of Jesus’ “I am” statements: “I am the resurrection and the life.” It offers and reassures the promise of eternal life and resurrection for us all. It’s a marvelous story.

It also contains some truly troubling elements. It is this event that persuaded some of the leadership to seek an occasion where they could arrest Jesus and have him executed. That’s a harsh element of the story.

It is also a story that is marked with grief: the grief of Lazarus’ sisters Martha and Mary. Each of them expressed their faith in Jesus, but each of them also say something along the lines of, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Onlookers say the same thing. If Jesus had been there in time — and John made clear Jesus might have been there in time — Lazarus would not have died.

What explanation we’re given, and it’s not much, is that Jesus saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate his power over death, to demonstrate that he had authority even beyond the veil. It’s not a satisfying explanation. I don’t think it even satisfied Jesus, who stood outside the tomb of Lazarus and wept.

What are we to say? I think we are to take our lead from Jesus’ own tears. We are the followers of one, we are the worshipers of a God, who knows our grief, who has shared our sense of loss. We believe in a God, we trust in a God, who knows how we have felt, who has felt what we have felt.

And whatever we might think or feel about the timing of Jesus’ arrival, it has to be said that for Jesus it was not too late. Yes, he might have prevented Lazarus from dying, and yes, there was some grieving that happened, and grief he participated in, but there was no such thing as being too late for Jesus. Illness was no barrier to him, death itself no barrier to him. There is no such thing as too late for Jesus in our lives.

And there is that marvelous “I am” statement. “I am the resurrection and the life.”

We trust in One who is not the agent of death, we trust in One who is not the agent of suffering, we trust in One who is the agent of life and renewed life.

“I am the resurrection and the life.” And this is the one in whom we trust. This is the one we follow.

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

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Mountaintop

Jesus and three of his disciples had a mountaintop experience of God’s presence and love. Can we bring our mountaintop experiences into our troubled times?

Here’s a transcript:

This Sunday is the last one before the beginning of Lent. That makes it Transfiguration Sunday, so I’m thinking about the seventeenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 17:1-9), Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Transfiguration.

Jesus went up a mountain with his three closest friends: Peter, James, and John. While they were there, Jesus began to glow with some kind of inner light. Two other figures joined them on the mountain that they recognized as Moses and Elijah. Simon Peter offered to build some shelter and prolong the moment. A voice from a cloud, however, said that “This is my beloved son: Listen to him.” A moment later, the cloud was gone, the light was gone, Moses and Elijah were gone, and Jesus was saying to Peter, James, and John, “Get up, and do not be afraid.”

The Transfiguration of Jesus is a mystery. It has been a mystery since those first three disciples experienced it (alongside Jesus, of course). It was a mystery to them as they continued to follow him through Galilee and on to Jerusalem. I’m sure it was a mystery to those that they first told about it after Jesus’ resurrection. It was a mystery to Matthew, Mark, and Luke as they recorded it in their Gospels. And it’s been a mystery to all the rest of us over the centuries who have read it and sought to understand it — especially to those of us who have to preach about it.

We usually call significant religious experiences “mountain top experiences” based, in part, on this example from the Scriptures (there are other examples in the Scriptures as well). Mountains tend to be places where people have significant religious experiences, but they can have them in other places.

The point is that great epiphanies, great revelations of the heart and mind of God, are rare. We, most of the time live with the guidance we receive from Scripture, or from what we’ve been taught, from the example of other people around us. It’s not that common for a voice to sound from a cloud and say, “This is my beloved son: Listen to him.”

But most of us have something like that in our lives, some moment faith touched us more deeply than it had before, some kind of mountaintop experience unique to each one of us.

Hold on to the mountain top experience. Remember to bring its assurance down into the valley, not because the mountaintop experience makes you right about everything else, but because the mountaintop experience reminds you of the ever-present grace and love of God.

The first thing that Jesus said to his friends after that overwhelming experience was, “Do not be afraid.” Friends, I think that is what mountaintop experiences are for. When we’re down in the valleys and things are not going well, we can recall what we experienced that went so deep.

And in that memory we do not need to be afraid.

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

Rev. Eric Anderson Pastor's Corner, What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Out of Joint

It’s not uncommon to feel “out of joint” with God. What to do then? Hang on.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the thirty-second chapter of Genesis (Genesis 32:22-31), the well-known story of Jacob wrestling with an angel — or perhaps with God.

I’ve read this story many times. I’ve preached on it many times. I’ve probably thought about it many more times. What strikes me on this reading is, in fact, that portion where the man struck Jacob. The text simply refers to Jacob’s wrestling opponent as “a man,” at least until the end of the story when it’s Jacob who concludes that he had been wrestling with God.

At one point in the wrestling “the man” concluded that he was not winning and so he struck Jacob on the hip and put it out of joint. At that point, Jacob was beaten, but he wouldn’t let go until the victor blessed him.

I am also, I think I’d have to say, accustomed to wrestling with God. Most pastors will tell some story about wrestling with their call, and any of us, clergy or lay, at some point in our lives, we found ourselves in a place where we believed that God might have something in mind for us, and it wasn’t necessarily what we had in mind for ourselves.

And so we wrestled with God.

I think that metaphor of a hip out of joint is an apt one. Jacob was already out of the joint. He had been out of joint with his family. He had been out with joint with the family into which he married. He had been out of joint with God. He had been out of a joint with himself. In this wrestling match, that blow from God was a symbol that matched everything that he had been through and everything that he had done, and there he was out of joint with others, with himself, with God.

You know, I can’t think of any better advice than to follow Jacob’s example at that moment, when he realized how out of joint he was, and that there had come a time when he would not prevail: not with all of the trickery, not with all of the falsehoods, not with all of his con man skills. He would not prevail, so he held on.

He held on to God and asked for a blessing.

His blessing was to get a new name, one that meant “the one who strives with God;” and he named the place with the Hebrew phrase that means “the face of God.”

“Israel:” “the one who strives with God.” “Peniel:” “the face of God.”

When you’re in that wrestling match with God and you have realized that you are, in fact, out of joint, hold on. Not to “win,” but to receive God’s blessing for that moment. And in that blessing and in the light of that face, you can go on to follow God’s way… even if you might find yourself moving awkwardly as you do.

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