Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Receive the Holy Spirit

May 24, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what does mark the Holy Spirit?

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

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

What else marks the Holy Spirit?

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

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

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

What else marks the Holy Spirit?

Forgiveness and inclusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that all the world might be saved.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

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

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

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Pentecost Power

The power given us by the Holy Spirit is purposeful: it helps us promote peace, extend forgiveness, and renew life.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1-21), because this coming Sunday is Pentecost Sunday.

Pentecost is an older holiday than Christianity. It was celebrated in Judaism for millennia before Jesus’ followers gathered in some place in Jerusalem to observe the day. We know that they began in some place together. Perhaps later in the day they planned to go worship in the temple. We don’t know. What we do know was that whatever their plans were, they were disrupted.

There was the sound of a rush of a mighty wind. There was something that played above their heads that others later described as looking like tongues of fire. They came outside and began to speak to people about God’s deeds of power in Jesus. And when they did so, they spoke in languages that were not native to them, languages that until that day they had not spoken.

Pentecost became, for Christians, the holiday which celebrates the gift of the Holy Spirit. And indeed it’s paired in the lectionary with the twentieth chapter of John (John 20:19-23), in which on the day of his resurrection, Jesus said to his followers, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

There is a lot that can be said and has been said and will be said about the gift of the Holy Spirit to the followers of Jesus. The Holy Spirit is literally the foundation of the church. We exist because the Holy Spirit gathers us and we continue to serve from the power that the Holy Spirit gives to us. But let’s be careful about what that power is.

When Jesus spoke to his disciples, he said to them, “Peace be with you.” So first of all, the power of the Holy Spirit is the power of peace.

Jesus also said, and later Peter would say in that sermon on Pentecost, the the power was the forgiveness of sins: not the power of condemnation, the power of restoration and belonging.

And it is the power of life and of resurrected life. The power of the Holy Spirit is what lifts us up when we are cast down, what gives us strength to continue doing what is good and right and true when we think we have run out. The power of the Holy Spirit is the power to take our bodies when we have laid them down at the end of our lives, pick them back up again in a grand resurrection, and restore us to one another and to God in the realm that is to come.

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

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: No Stranger

April 26, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

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

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

Rev. Eric Anderson Pastor's Corner, Sermons

Sermon: Have a Paddle

November 2, 2025
Isaiah 1:10-18

Luke 19:1-10

I’m mixing metaphors that, in my experience, get mixed fairly often. If you’re in trouble, you might be up a tree. Or up the creek. If you’re in a lot of trouble, you might be up a creek without a paddle. And if you’re having trouble getting your metaphors together, you might be up a tree without a paddle.

Zacchaeus might be one of those up a tree without a paddle.

He doesn’t seem like a likely person to be in trouble. Luke wrote that he was a chief tax collector and he was rich. Wealth is supposed to insulate us from trouble, isn’t it? If I’m pursuing wealth but I’m not really greedy, I’m probably trying to protect myself or my family from the things that poverty threatens, and poverty threatens a lot.

Wealth may insulate us from some kinds of trouble – even that’s not quite a guarantee, as some people can tell riches to rags stories – but there’s other trouble that wealth simply can’t protect us from. The wealthy get sick. They may struggle with relationships – arguing about money may actually raise the risk of broken relationships. Rich people may find themselves cut off from social supports.

That’s exactly what had happened to Zacchaeus.

Lis Valle-Ruiz writes at Working Preacher, “The plot is a (hi)story that repeats itself across places and times. It is the story of a person who belongs to an oppressed people by birth but joins the ranks of the foreigners/oppressors by trade, resulting in gain for the person and their family while contributing to the oppression of the community.”

Ironically, in Hebrew Zacchaeus means, “righteous.” I’m pretty sure that generated a lot of comment among his neighbors. He almost certainly started off fairly wealthy, because the Romans didn’t turn to poor people to become tax collectors, let alone chief tax collectors. He probably didn’t have much in common with or much to do with the poorer people of Jericho, which was most of them. In taking that position, though, Zacchaeus had taken a place that cut him off from most even of his wealthy neighbors. If a foreigner, a Gentile, entered your home it became ritually unclean. According to a saying preserved in the second century collection of rabbinic wisdom called the Tosefta, the same was true of tax collectors.

He may have been doing fine financially. He may have been doing okay with a very small number of his neighbors (and they were probably tax collectors, too). As far as the rest of the Jewish population of Jericho was concerned, he was up a tree without a paddle.

What do we do when somebody has built their own trouble? What do we do when they’ve cut themselves off from us? What do we do when they’ve planted the tree, watered the tree, fertilized the tree, profited from the tree, and then climbed the tree? What do we do when they’ve realized they’re up a tree without a paddle and have started to look for a way down?

What do we usually do?

Be honest. What do you usually do when somebody has made life difficult for others, even harmed others, has cut themselves off from you and from others, and suddenly announces that they’d like to come down?

If I could venture to guess, we react much the way that the people of Jericho reacted when Jesus called Zacchaeus down from the sycamore tree and invited himself for dinner. With revulsion. With suspicion. With rejection. “Leave him in the tree, Jesus. He got himself there. He chose it. It’s on him. He didn’t even bring a paddle.”

I am not talking about those who have planted and nurtured their tree and are still perched in it, merrily enjoying the fruits of their separation and abusing those below them. I’m not talking about those who have settled into their tree so they can throw things at the rest of us below.

I’m talking about the ones who have decided they want to come down from the tree. The ones who have made an effort to tell us they want to come down. The ones who, like Zacchaeus, have shown that they’re interested in reconciliation.

Now what do we do, we who may be at the bottom of the tree, although if we’re honest with ourselves we’re probably part way up our own tree, what do we do when somebody says, “I want to come down?”

If we follow Jesus, we help them get down. We guide them to place their hands and feet as they descend. We raise our arms to them to give them support and cushion what might be a slip or two. We say, “Let’s get together for dinner. And by the way. You’ve been up a tree without a paddle. Here. Have a paddle.”

Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “I know that even now, I hold people hostage to versions of themselves they’re striving to outgrow. I know that I refuse people the permission to change, because if they change, I will have to change, too. Likewise, I know that there are areas in my life where God is asking me to stand my ground and tell a new story about myself — a story my listeners might have high stakes in resisting. These are the places where I am tempted to retreat, to quit, to resort to a vision of humanity that is ordinary and mortal, not extraordinary and lasting.”

It’s not just Zacchaeus up a tree without a paddle. It’s you and me, isn’t it? We planted it. We watered it. We climbed it. We threw things at people from up there.

Jesus called us down. Jesus welcomed us down. Jesus told us he’d enjoy our hospitality.

Jesus said, with a smile, “Have a paddle.”

When somebody else wants to come down from their tree, well: “Have a paddle.”

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric writes his sermons ahead of time, but he tends to make changes while preaching. What you have just read does not precisely match what he said.

The image is Zacchaeus by Niels Larsen Stevns, 1864-1941. Retrieved from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54227 [retrieved November 2, 2025]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Niels_Larsen_Stevns-_Zak%C3%A6us.jpg.
Rev. Eric Anderson Pastor's Corner, What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Up a Tree

Jesus invited Zacchaeus down from the tree and into society. What do we do when others seek to come down from where they have climbed into trees?

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the nineteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel (Luke 19:1-10): Jesus’ visit to Jericho and his encounter with a tax collector named Zacchaeus.

I remember this story fondly from my childhood. I wasn’t a tall boy, and so I rather sympathized with Zacchaeus, who wasn’t tall either. He wanted to see Jesus, so he went and he climbed a tree. He saw Jesus. Jesus saw him, called him by name and he invited himself to Zacchaeus’ house for dinner.

I don’t remember whether I thought that that was odd at the time (it would have been odd to have somebody invite themselves to dinner in my hometown). I do know from reading this text and reading commentaries since then that it was very odd. You see, Zacchaeus was a tax collector not for local authorities, but for the Romans. That made him a collaborator with a hated foreign power. It meant that most people would have considered him to be something of a thief, and something of a traitor.

This may not have bothered him— the wealthy tend to hang out with the wealthy, after all —and he could afford the dissatisfaction, even the scorn, of most other people in the community. But apparently he treasured the respect of Jesus.

Jesus called him down from the tree.

When somebody’s up a tree in our lives, and when somebody wants to make a change, it’s so easy to look at them and say, “Well, get yourself down. Get yourself out of trouble. Get yourself right.”

And, indeed, we need to take responsibility for our own actions. We need to make the changes ourselves.

But when we are at the bottom of the tree, and watching somebody take those first hesitant moves toward the ground, can’t we help? Can’t we be among those who say, “That branch there, that will take you. Put your foot there. And move your hand to this other lower branch. I know you can’t see it, but it’s there. Give it a try. It will hold.”

And when they get down from the tree, can’t we be those who welcome with a warm embrace? And say, “I am so glad to be coming to your house to have you welcome me and I welcome you to the solid ground.”

The ground of goodness and mercy and community.

That’s why Jesus called Zacchaeus down, so that somebody who had separated himself from those around him could be reunited, and a part of that city for good, and yes, for God.

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

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Preparing Hearts

John the Baptist tends to disrupt our expectations of a festive preparation for Christmas, but his advice to those who came to him helps us prepare our hearts to receive Christ.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the third chapter of Luke’s Gospel (Luke 3:7-18). Each Advent we want to prepare for Christmas in a celebratory manner. Each Advent our expectations get blown away on the winds, because along comes the preaching John the Baptist.

Here in the gospel of Luke we also hear at John’s most famous and most pointed phrase: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” People came to John because they had a sense, not just that things were not going well, but that they themselves were not doing well. And John had some advice to them: advice which was clear and, frankly, fairly simple and straightforward.

He said to the tax collectors, collect only that which is necessary, which is required. Don’t line your pockets with extra demands. He said to the soldiers, be content with your wages. Do not extort more money from the people around you. And he set a standard for Christian sharing which we hold to this day: those who have two coats, give one away to someone who has none.

Honestly, Jesus was more demanding.

Still, I’m not eager to call anybody a brood of vipers. Yet I do ask: What are the simple and straightforward things that we should refrain from doing in these days? What are the simple and straightforward things that we should be doing that we are not? What is the equivalent for you of that extra coat in the closet, something that you can share with someone who is needy? What is the equivalent of extorted money that you are doing that you should not?

What are the things that you need to change, and thereby find a baptism of repentance, and thereby receive the forgiveness of sins?

These are not ways to celebrate for a festival, but these are ways to prepare to welcome the living Christ into our hearts.

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

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: God’s Children Now

April 14, 2024

1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36-48

“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”

Up to this point in the First Letter of John, the author – I guess we’ll call him John, although the name itself doesn’t appear in the book or in the other two books we call “letters of John” – up to this point, the author has called his readers “little children.” I think he intended it as a term of endearment, because he also uses the word, “beloved” to address his readers. In this moment, however, we’re no longer John’s children. We’re God’s children, and God’s children because God loved us and loves us still.

That’s a wonderful thing to hear.

It’s especially nice to hear after hearing, in the first chapter, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” That’s a somewhat subtle way of saying that if we say we’re sinless, we lie. John assures us, however, that God forgives sin through the advocacy of Jesus Christ. “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

Again, a wonderful thing to hear.

In the second chapter of 1 John, he writes about a conflict within the church, one that has apparently caused some people to leave. It’s not clear what happened or why they left, but John had no sympathy. “They went out from us, but they did not belong to us, for if they had belonged to us they would have remainedwith us.”

Having written that they “do not belong to us,” John wrote that “we” are God’s children. “They,” therefore, are not.

I’m afraid that conflicts in the Church have often looked like this. “We” are righteous and “they” are unrighteous. “We” are children of God and “they” are “children of the devil,” which John called “them” in the very next verse after our reading stopped this morning.

Nobody knows for certain when 1 John was written, but here we have it: within a hundred years of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Church was engaged in separating “Us” from “Them” and the “children of God” from the “children of the devil.”

I’m… pretty sure that that was not what Jesus had in mind.

It does seem that Jesus might have had something in mind around, oh, I don’t know, loving one another. John wrote about that a lot in this book, as it happens. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when heis revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” We will be like the one who loves us into becoming God’s children.

It’s a pity that we’re not there yet.

We weren’t there yet when John wrote, because otherwise his understanding of love might have kept him from labeling those who disagreed with him “children of the devil.” We weren’t there yet when Christian leaders in the first few centuries began calling themselves “orthodox” and others “heretics.” We weren’t there yet when major divisions in the Church took place in the five hundreds, and in the thousands, and the 1500s, and are we experiencing another transition now?

The biggest witness against the truth proclaimed by the Church is its division against itself. If we cannot love those who proclaim the resurrection of Christ as we do, how will we ever love anyone else?

It’s an awfully good question.

You see, I run into verse 6, “No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him,” and I ask myself: So do I know God? Do I know Christ? Am I God’s child?

Elisabeth Johnson writes at Working Preacher, “The nature of Christian hope is to live simultaneously in the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet.’ We are called to live into the future reality that God has promised. Perhaps this is the context in which to understand the following verses about sin (verses 4-7), which seem to contradict what the author has already said in 1:6-10. Whereas the author had affirmed in 1:6-10 that it is delusional for anyone to say that they are without sin, now he circles back to say that it is also delusional to think that we can abide in Christ and continue to sin as though nothing has changed.

“The purity of Christ that is to characterize believers is not some esoteric quality but is manifest in concrete acts of love.”

I think the purity of Christ that is to characterize believers is not some automatic quality. We have to conceive and achieve those concrete acts of love ourselves. We may have become God’s children, but we remain responsible human beings. A child, you may have noticed, makes their own decisions about things, which are sometimes at odds with the parent’s desires. These may happen because the child doesn’t know what the parent wants, or because the child isn’t paying attention to what the parent wants, or because the child wants something different from what the parent wants. It’s the same with Christians’ relationship with God. We sometimes do things and find out later that God wasn’t in favor. We sometimes do things carelessly, without thinking, and then slap our foreheads and say, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

And let’s face it, sometimes we know perfectly well that God wants us to act out of love and charity and compassion and we choose indifference, selfishness, or even hate.

I think those are the times that are hardest to acknowledge within ourselves and hardest to confess to God. “Oh, I didn’t know.” Well, yeah, I did. “I wasn’t thinking.” Well, yeah, I was. About myself and what I wanted. Yeah, I was thinking.

And most popular of all: “I was entitled. I was in charge. I was right.”

But entitlement isn’t about love. God is in charge. And was I, were you, are we really right when we act outside of love?

Those are hard to acknowledge to ourselves. They’re hard to confess to God.

“There is a genuine tension, both within the text of 1 John and within the experience of the church, regarding the reality of sin on the one hand, and life as God’s children on the other,” writes Brian Peterson at Working Preacher. “What is clear is that the author will allow neither self-delusions of sinlessness nor a casual acceptance of sin within the lives of God’s children…

“In our text, as further response, the author says that one’s actions really do matter. Being a child of God does not make all behaviors un-sinful for you. Sin within those who hope in Jesus is both a real possibility, and a profound contradiction. That contradiction is not to be glossed over.”

We live and strive and choose and act in the “already” and the “not yet.” We are God’s children – that is what we are – but we do not live, strive, choose, and act with the perfection of the One in whose image we are made, the One whose children we are. We aspire to it, and with each choice and action of our lives we strive to achieve that perfection. With each confession and repentance, we come closer to it.

As Janette H. Ok writes at Working Preacher, “We live into our beloved and begotten identity confident of the fact that God is not done with us yet. We commit ourselves again and again to doing what is right and loving one another, knowing that becoming more like the Father is a privilege of being called his sons and daughters—and that is what we are!”

There are no perfect ohi’a blossoms, and there are no perfect Christians. There is no perfect Church, and there is no perfect compassion within the Church. But if we feed one another, if we care for one another, if we extend that imperfect caring to those around us, we get closer and closer to this ideal that John imagined, wrote, and encouraged to those he called “little children,” “beloved,” and, yes, “children of God.”

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches. Sometime he decides to make them, and sometimes he just makes them.

Photo of an ‘amakihi and imperfect ohi’a blossoms by Eric Anderson.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: All the Chances

Although human beings are quite adept at choosing evil over good, wrong over right, shadow over light, God gives us every chance in Jesus of doing well.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the third chapter of John’s Gospel (John 3:14-21), the conclusion of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus. This section includes one of the most famous verses of the New Testament: “For God so loved the world that he sent his only son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” And I always think that that verse is incomplete if you do not include the verse that follows: “God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world but so that all the world might be saved through him.”

The thing is, is that what follows is Jesus’ commentary on the choices that people make when they are offered the chance to choose between what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, what is bright and what is shadow. People chose darkness rather than the light, Jesus told Nicodemus, because their deeds were evil.

It’s hard to argue that point in our contemporary world. it was hard to argue that point in the first century. Indeed, if Nicodemus tried to argue it (and he probably didn’t), John didn’t bother to record it. That closes John’s description of the encounter between those two significant teachers of the Law.

Isn’t it peculiar that human beings so often choose the evil over the good, that we choose the wrong over the right, that we choose the shadows, the night, rather than the light and the day?

So much of it arises from the simple selfishness. So much of it arises from self-aggrandizement. So much of it arises from greed. So much of it arises from privilege and power. Some arises from desperation, it must be said. Some arises from a constant sense of pain, and the desire to feel better. We choose the shadows rather than the places where there is light.

In Jesus, God made available to us the ability to make different choices, to stand in the sunlight rather than hide in the darkness, to choose the right and the good over the wrong and the evil. in Jesus, God offers us the ability to be forgiven for previous choices, and to follow someone who chose well at each opportunity.

It’s a peculiar thing that we should be given not just one chance but every chance to do well in our lives, with our lives, through our lives: to do well as Jesus did.

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.