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

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 What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Spirit of Truth

Jesus promised his disciples that the Holy Spirit would lead them into all truth. May we be wise enough to follow!

Here’s a transcript:

As we come to Trinity Sunday, I’m thinking about the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel (John 16:12-15), yet another portion of Jesus’ “Farewell Address to his Disciples.” In this section, Jesus promised them the gift of the Holy Spirit once again.

This time Jesus described it as the Spirit of Truth that would lead them into all truth. I hate to say it, but in the twenty-first century we have not valued all truth, have we? We live surrounded by half-truths. We live surrounded by outright deceptions.

Many of them take place in our entertainment. I’m not talking about, you know, fictional stories: I’m talking about the advertising that accompanies them. Their claims to make our lives better are, at best, exaggerated. At worst, they’re outright falsehoods. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve purchased over the years that simply have not lived up to the claims. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve purchased over the years that I’ve come to regret, for the waste of my time and effort and, yes, money, trying to make them work in the way they were claimed to work.

Sadly, we in the United states have come to believe that the leaders we elect lie to us and do so routinely. Sometimes we believe it’s only the opponents of our selected political party that lie to us, but in general we tend to say something like, “Well, politicians will lie.”

Jesus told his disciples that that was not an acceptable state of affairs. Jesus said that the wisdom of God, the work of the Holy Spirit, was the work of truth, is the work of truth. You and I do not need to accept lies. We need to insist upon truth. It is what we are due. It is what the Holy Spirit has come to bring us, or to lead us to.

So as you watch the advertisements, as you listen to the leaders, insist upon truth. And if you don’t get it, insist further upon truth. And if you still don’t get it, insist further upon truth.

It is, truth is, what the Holy Spirit will lead us to if we follow the Spirit’s guidance and take our steps along the way.

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: Spirit in Everyone

June 3, 2025

When the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost, it came to a much bigger group than expected.

Here’s a transcript:

This coming Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, so I’m thinking about the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1-21, Luke’s account of the first Christian Pentecost.

Pentecost is originally a Jewish holiday, so Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem were already gathered and prepared to celebrate God’s gift of the Law. As Luke describes it, there came the sound of a mighty wind. They saw something that looked a little bit like flames dancing upon their heads. Most importantly, they went out into the streets and started to tell the story of God’s love in Jesus Christ. They spoke that story in languages that they did not understand, but that countless others around them did.

When they were challenged about being drunk early in the morning, Simon Peter got up and quoted the prophet Joel that men and women, young and old, would see visions and dream dreams. Today, said Peter, these things have been accomplished before you.

In various places throughout the Scriptures it is said that God’s spirit is rare, selective, uncommon. It was the experience of the early Christians that God’s spirit was present, not just to some, but to all. To the young, who might be disregarded. To the old, who might be discounted. To the men (frankly, we tend to expect men, if anybody, to be filled with the Spirit). And to the women, who we still, to this day, tend to doubt whether they have the capacity to receive God’s Spirit.

Joel said they would. Peter said they did. The experience of the church for the last two thousand years says that they do.

Young and old, men and women, see visions and dream dreams.

It is the task of the Church to try to understand the visions and dreams. It is the task of the Church to discern the meaning of what our men and our women, of what our youth and children, of what our kupuna say that they have seen or dreamed. It is not the task of the Church to say through whom God will speak. God has made it clear but that can and will be anyone.

It is up to us to listen.

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: Children of the Spirit

January 12, 2025

Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Jesus made a pretty good journey to see and hear John the Baptist.

According to Google Maps, that’s about a 95 mile journey. They estimate it would take 35 hours to walk that distance. Jesus probably spent four days on the road. I would guess he was hot, dusty, and pretty uncomfortable when he arrived.

But he had to see John.

As I remarked during Advent, John the Baptist was a celebrity at the time. He was a rock star. He’d… made a splash.

Sorry about that one.

The point is that people came to see him. Some were probably the celebrity seekers who have to get close to the Big Name. John the Baptist, Governor Pilate, it didn’t matter. Go and see. Some were certainly the suspicious religious authorities, the people who get perturbed when unauthorized people start saying religious things. Remember that John promised forgiveness with baptism, and forgiveness was something that happened when you made sacrifices in the Temple. I’m pretty sure there were priests saying, “That’s not right.” So they were there.

Some were the folks who desperately wanted some sense of God’s forgiveness, who were aware they’d said and done things they shouldn’t. Some probably wanted to turn their lives around. Some probably intended to go and do the same things again. People are people, after all.

Quite a few, I imagine, felt a gap in their spirits and didn’t know why. Quite a few weren’t satisfied with life in their land. Quite a few felt the need for a big change. Maybe this John the Baptist would bring it. Could he be the Messiah?

It was a crowd full of people asking very different questions.

Among them stood Jesus. We don’t know what questions rolled around in his head. I think we know he felt the need for a change, because he went down to be baptized, and changed his life.

Dan Clendenin writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Jesus’s baptism inaugurated his public ministry by identifying with what Mark describes as ‘the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem.’ He allied himself with the faults and failures, the pains and the problems, and with all the broken and hurting people who had flocked to the Jordan River. By wading into the waters with them he took his place beside us and among us. Not long into his public mission, the sanctimonious religious leaders derided Jesus as a ‘friend of gluttons and sinners.’ They were right about that.”

Jesus’ baptism was marked by the presence of the Holy Spirit. All four of the Gospel writers described the Spirit descending “like a dove.” All four identified this moment as the beginning of Jesus’ teaching and healing ministry. All four mentioned the similarities between Jesus’ message and John’s. Not one said that Jesus ever baptized with water.

Jesus, after all, would baptize with the Holy Spirit.

Thought of as a dove, the Holy Spirit is a comforting presence, don’t you think? Doves make soft sounds. They don’t scream like mynas. They don’t fuss like finches. I agree that they don’t sing as sweetly as mejiro, but their gentle coo comforts.

The Holy Spirit means that we followers of Jesus are never alone. We don’t face the sorrows and struggles of the world unaccompanied. We don’t deal with sadness alone. We don’t bring our strength alone.

Is that different from anyone else? Honestly, I believe that God accompanies everyone, of every faith, and of no faith. Hopefully, we’ve been given a better understanding, and better understanding does mean that we should be better able to appreciate the Spirit’s presence, to rest upon the Spirit’s comfort, and to receive the Spirit’s support. I’m pretty sure that we Christians are as capable of closing ourselves off to the Spirit as any non-believer. I’m also pretty sure that when we open our hearts to the Spirit, we are filled to overflowing.

As Dan Clendenin continues, “Many malignant forces try to name and claim us. Baptism reminds us that first and foremost, above and beyond all other claims — however legitimate or oppressive — we belong to God. He knows and calls us by name.

“We don’t belong to our boss or the bank. We don’t belong to an abusive spouse or our addictive impulses. We’re not defined by sickness, success or failure. We don’t belong to the political propagandists or the advertising industry. We’re not the sum total of our poor choices, painful memories, or bad dreams.”

We are none of those things. We are children of the Spirit.

Around 850 years ago the abbess Hildegard of Bingen wrote:

O comforting fire of Spirit,
Life, within the very Life of all Creation.
Holy you are in giving life to All.

Holy you are in anointing
those who are not whole;
Holy you are in cleansing
a festering wound.

O sacred breath,
O fire of love,
O sweetest taste in my breast
which fills my heart
with a fine aroma of virtues.

O most pure fountain
through whom it is known
that God has united strangers
and inquired after the lost.

The Holy Spirit didn’t let either John the Baptist or Jesus alone. They were always accompanied by the Spirit – but they were also moved, led, driven by the Spirit. After his baptism, Luke wrote, Jesus “was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.” John the Baptist, as we know, didn’t preach in the towns. He baptized at the edge of the river, away from the cities and the villages. The Holy Spirit cares for us, but not necessarily for our comfort.

And… I should also mention the gap that our lectionary editors have left us in Luke’s account. You may have noticed that we jumped over verses 18, 19, and 20. Here’s what they say:

“And with many other words John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them.

“But when John rebuked Herod the tetrarch because of his marriage to Herodias, his brother’s wife, and all the other evil things he had done, Herod added this to them all: He locked John up in prison.”

It was an odd place to put that part of the story. For one thing, you could read it that John had been arrested before baptizing Jesus, which doesn’t match any other gospel account. I don’t think that’s what Luke had in mind. Instead, I think Luke meant to highlight the risks of following the call of the Holy Spirit.

As Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “The imprisonment of John reminds us of what happens to those who tell the truth, or, to those whose words we don’t want to hear. This will certainly be the case for Jesus. Hearing Jesus’ first sermon, the hometown folks want to throw him off a cliff. Jesus will be rejected by his friends, his family, his community before he even does anything.”

The Holy Spirit may lead us into places we do not want to be.

That might be into a public space, calling for change in the way we assist those without homes. It might be into a family conflict, where nobody really wants to listen to a peacemaker. It might be into advocating at work for people who will be affected by some action of the company but whose voices have not been welcomed. It might be to learn a new skill, one that doesn’t come easily, to make a home a little brighter.

It might be to take on a new message and purpose in life.

Melissa Bane Sevier writes in her blog, “Purpose is something that unfolds over time. It is rarely something we can fully grasp at any one moment, because we never know what new episode is around the next corner, outside our current vision. What new opportunity, or new problem or challenge, may present itself tomorrow? In our rapidly changing world, it’s rare that many of us will stay in one job for our entire working life, or live in one place, as many of our parents or grandparents did. How do we find our purpose when we have less rootedness?”

Jesus took over a month in the wilderness to discern his new purpose. None of us will find it in a moment.

We are Children of the Spirit. We are created by God and we are adopted by God. We are strengthened and comforted by God. We are led by God.

Jesus joined us in baptism by water. Jesus also joined us in baptism by the Spirit. May we follow the Spirit as faithfully as Jesus did, as the Spirit leads us in our own unique and blessed journeys.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric sometimes makes changes as he preaches. Sometimes he even intends to make them.

The image is the Baptism of Jesus by Anonymous (19th cent.) – http://www.auctions-fischer.de/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12348872.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Baptism and the Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit, so much a force at Jesus’ baptism, remains the source of Christian inspiration and power.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the third chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the baptism of Jesus (Luke 3:15-17, 21-22).

The lectionary jumps around just a little bit. We get a couple of verses from John the Baptist and then we skip just a couple of verses to get to the description of the baptism itself. They have something in common.

John told his listeners that there was one coming who was greater than he, who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And then in the description of the baptism itself Luke told us that the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus like a dove. Then came the voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.”

The connection, of course, is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit that John promised would be the baptism of those who followed his successor, the Holy Spirit who inspired Jesus himself.

The Holy Spirit remains not just a vital thought but a vital force in the Christian Church and in individual Christians to this very day. We understand the Holy Spirit as being not just an attribute of God, but a person of God in the Trinity. This is the One who gathers the Church together; this is the One who energizes and organizes the Church. This is also the One who inspires and guides and empowers individual Christians as they seek out their way of living out God’s call.

So the question is not, “Is there a Holy Spirit?” The question is, “How is this Spirit guiding you? How is the Spirit guiding me? How is the Spirit guiding us in the fulfillment of God’s will?”

Jesus… well, Jesus left the place of his baptism and spent quite a long time alone in the wilderness to try to figure that out. Only then did he begin his preaching ministry. So you and I we may very well need time to understand what God’s call is to us in this place and time.

But when we do understand it — when we accept it — then the Holy Spirit will be with us not to carry us, but to accompany us, to strengthen us, to renew us, as we do the work to which God has called us.

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: Everyone Knows It’s Windy

May 19, 2024

Acts 2:1-21
John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

Some of you are asking, “Pastor, did you really get your sermon title from a repeated line in the 1967 song performed by The Association, “Windy”? Some of you, as I say, are asking that. The rest of you have never heard of the song.

But the answer, as you’d probably guess, is “Yes.”

I’m afraid that that means that my sermon title is somewhat misleading. I always remember the story of Pentecost with that rush of a mighty wind, a sound heard by all the people of Jerusalem, a sound that brought them together into a crowd to meet the disciples-becoming-apostles as they emerged from their rented house. I always imagine that the crowd marveled at the sight of those, “Divided tongues, as of fire, [that had] appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”

Unfortunately for my overly imaginative memory, that’s not what Luke wrote. As far as we can tell, the sound of the wind happened inside the house, and only inside the house. The tongues “as of fire” (which implies that Luke didn’t know what they were, either) also happened inside. How certain am I of this? Well, pretty certain. Because when the crowd got a word in edgewise amidst all that the little group of Christians were saying, they didn’t comment on the wind. They had nothing to say about flames in the hair.

They talked about the miracle of the languages. That was what they’d heard. That was what impressed them. The fire and the wind… they missed them.

Nevertheless: Everyone knows it’s windy.

Luke made an interesting choice for that word we’ve translated “wind.” As D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “The word ‘wind’ (πνοῆς) has the same root as the word which is typically translated ‘spirit’ (πνεύματος) below. It could also mean ‘breath.’ This particular variation of that root only appears one other time in the Scriptures, in Acts 17:25, which says that God ‘gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.’” In making that choice, Luke aligned his description of the Pentecost event with the description of the Creation, when “the Spirit of God,” or “a wind from God,” or “the breath of God” – those are all sound translations from Hebrew into English of that phrase in Genesis 1 – moved over the waters. Jewish writers repeatedly used the word “ruach” – which means breath or wind or spirit – to refer to some of God’s activity, which included the inspiration of prophets to speak God’s word.

So if the sign is a mighty wind, a mighty breath, a mighty spirit, well, everyone knows it’s windy.

The Spirit chose an interesting day to manifest. Fifty days after the celebration of Passover, the “pente” of “Pentecost,” the city had filled with visitors again for another holiday, this time Shavuot. It’s described as a wheat harvest festival in Deuteronomy. By the first century, it also commemorated God’s gift of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, which was, you’ll recall, strongly associated with wind and fire. To the little group of Jesus followers in Jerusalem, numbering around 120 or so, the association would have been immediate and clear. God is doing something as new and dramatic as the gift of the Law.

Everyone knows it’s windy.

That’s why the Holy Spirit received so much attention in the writings of early Christians. The Apostle Paul spoke of it repeatedly, using the phrase “Holy Spirit” five times in Romans alone. The reading from John’s Gospel today tries to explain the gift of the Holy Spirit to Christ’s followers. Of all the gospel writers, Luke really emphasized the Holy Spirit, using the phrase more than twice as often as any of the others, and in the book of Acts, he wrote “Holy Spirit” forty-two times.

Luke wanted everyone to know it’s windy.

Do you know it’s windy?

Do you know that God hasn’t left us abandoned and on our own with the recorded memories of Jesus and the early thinkers of Christ’s Church as our only guide? Do you know that the Holy Spirit was not just the gift of the early Church, but also the not-so-early Church, the medieval Church, the Renaissance era Church, the pre-modern Church, the modern Church, and now the post-modern Church? Do you know that light and truth are not the exclusive possession of those long ago, but potentially accessible to you and I right now? Do you know, to use the UCC phrase, “God is still speaking”?

Do you know it’s windy?

There is some justice to Karl Marx’s critique that religion is the opiate of the people. The problem with the Holy Spirit of God is that, well, it’s not controllable. It tends to rile things up. It disrupts our customs and conventions. Worst of all, it tends to tell us we’ve got things wrong just when we were certain we were right.

The section of the Prophet Joel that Simon Peter used to explain what was happening is one of those disruptive declarations. As Frank L. Crouch writes at Working Preacher, “All flesh — boys and girls, young and old, free and slaves — whether they be women or men — are graced with the Spirit’s direct connection to the prophecies, visions, and dreams of God (vv. 16-21). This was institutionally unsettling back then and is institutionally resisted today. In this story, God shows no regard for our structures, hierarchies, or status quo.”

I won’t claim to be utterly charmed by our structures, hierarchies, and status quo, but I’ve got to admit that I know how to live in them. I don’t know how to live in their replacements – even the replacements I yearn for.

The problem is that putting God in a box not only doesn’t work – since the Holy Spirit tends to burst out of boxes like, well, like the rush of a mighty wind – not only doesn’t it work, it produces actual harm. In her novel Shirley Charlotte Bronte wrote, “Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. … In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies … All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”

Isn’t that just what we’ve done with our attempts to domesticate God? When… everyone knows it’s windy?

But why do we want to stay in the box, with our masked Death of a God, anyway? As Melissa Bane Sevier observes in her blog, the disciples inside the house were missing the festival of the harvest in the streets. There was a party outside and they were missing it. She writes, “The church isn’t the church if it stays indoors. Set down your donut and go find the baklava.”

That’s a comparison that works for me. I like donuts, don’t get me wrong. But I love baklava.

Christ’s Church is not supposed to be a collection of Gloomy Guses and Gabrielles sitting off in a room by themselves. As a confirmed introvert, I see the attraction of that. As a Christian pastor, I can’t affirm it. Because I know it’s windy.

Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “There is no way to overstate how much we need to gather as God’s people right now and ask the Holy Spirit to instruct us, shape us, remake us, and commission us.  We need fresh languages of bridge-building.  We need new words to rekindle love.  We need the wind and fire of God to challenge our complacencies, reset our priorities, ease our anxieties, and move us out.”

We are unlikely to be subject to the rush of a mighty wind (except the trade winds, of course). We are unlikely to see something that looks like flames but probably isn’t dancing on our heads. We are unlikely to speak other people’s languages without a great deal of work and study.

We are likely to feel the promptings of the Holy Spirit. We are likely to be challenged by the words of the Scriptures, which may not speak to us now as they did the first time we heard them. We are likely to be inspired by the example of other people, particularly when they do something unexpected, like, oh, say, the rather comic Simon Peter, the one who said so many foolish things to Jesus, the one who denied him on the night Jesus needed him most, when someone like Simon Peter stands up and quotes Joel (Joel?) in an improvised sermon to a crowd of people and leads them to believe.

Because yes: Everyone knows it’s windy.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric frequently departs from his prepared text. Sometimes he intends to. Sometimes he doesn’t.

Photo of wind shaping clouds on Kilauea by Eric Anderson.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: A Mighty Wind

Jesus’ disciples would have recognized the sound of a mighty wind as a sign of God’s Spirit. We need to be attentive to the intervention of the Spirit in our lives.

Here’s a transcript:

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

As Luke tells the story, Jesus’ followers remained in Jerusalem following his resurrection. Fifty days after Passover, the Jewish calendar celebrated another holiday known as Sukkot (correction: Shavuot) in Hebrew but known by the name Pentecost or “fifty days” in Greek to show its relationship to Passover fifty days before.

We now celebrate it forty-nine days after Easter Sunday. We don’t carry it into the Monday.

While they were there, gathered together in some room (a large enough for a fair group of them), they heard the “sound like the rush of a mighty wind and it filled the room where they were meeting.” Wind has long been associated with the movement of God. In fact, go back to the very first couple verses of Genesis and you will find that the spirit of God, the “Ruach Adonai,” the breath of God, the wind of God (“ruach” means all of those), moved over the waters.

So this sound of a mighty wind, well, those gathered followers of Jesus would have associated that with the presence of God’s Spirit.

That sound, and whatever was happening within them, drove them out of the room, out of the building, out into the streets where lots of people had gathered in order to celebrate the Pentecost holiday, and there they began to speak. And now the Ruach Adonai, the Spirit of God, had a new effect. They spoke in languages that they did not understand, but the people visiting from elsewhere did. “Are not these all Galileans? How is it that we hear them, in our own languages, speaking of God’s deeds of power?”

In our day, we are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge the presence of the Holy Spirit. There are theologies that say that the Spirit no longer intervenes in human life. there are theologies that say that God, having given us instruction and given us guidance and given us Christ, has let us go on to follow the directions we’ve been given and to accept the forgiveness that we’ve been offered. I don’t think those are right.

I think that the Spirit of God, that mighty wind, continues to be with us today. Not everybody directly experiences it. Those first disciples heard it in the room in which they were meeting. They didn’t bring the wind out into the streets with them. What they brought was the word about the wind. They brought the testimony about the Spirit. They brought their witness about the mighty acts of God.

It is upon us to be attentive to the movement of the Spirit in our live — because it may not always be as grand and unmistakable as the sound of a mighty wind — to be attentive to the movement of the Spirit in our lives, and then to bring that experience to others — out into the streets, if you will — so that they too may know about the mighty acts of a gracious 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.