Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: No Stranger

April 26, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

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

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

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Not Only

March 1, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not only for us. Also for everyone.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

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

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

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Welcome

May 18, 2025

Acts 11:1-13
John 13:31-35

Simon Peter had had some really good days. As I mentioned last week, the wave of hostility to followers of Jesus led by Saul had subsided when Saul, himself, became a follower of Jesus. That had allowed Peter to travel to Lydda where he’d healed Aeneas, then to Joppa where he’d raised Tabitha. If I were Simon Peter, I’d have been really excited. Safety. Healing. Resurrection. That’s a hat trick to me.

Not that Simon Peter would have heard of a “hat trick,” of course.

As Luke told the story in the book of Acts, those events led to another event, an event so crucial that Luke couldn’t tell it just once. Just to give you something to compare, Luke told the story of Aeneas’ healing in five sentences. He told the story of Tabitha’s resurrection in twelve sentences. He told the story of Saul’s conversion, the person we know as the Apostle Paul, in nineteen sentences. But this story? The story of Simon Peter’s visit to Cornelius, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the baptism of the household?

Sixty-four sentences.

What we read today is about a third of the text. One of the reasons it takes so much space in the book is that Luke repeated this story. He described it as a narrative, “as it happened,” and then he had people report on their dreams in the narrative, repeating a portion of what happened “as it happened,” and then we get this section in which Simon Peter reported on what happened to his fellow leaders in Jerusalem.

If you’re tempted to let this story glide by as if it weren’t important, Luke has put up a great big sign and has waved flags at you, saying, essentially, “Important story here! Do not pass it by!”

Kyle Fever writes at Working Preacher, “But this is not just repetition for repetition’s sake. Each time the acceptance of Gentiles is relayed a different aspect shines through, depending on the audience and particular situation. The constant remains, however, in that each telling focuses on God’s initiative through the Spirit and its effects.”

When he told this story to the church leadership, Simon Peter had already had time to digest these events. He’d had time to consider his vision in which God declared unclean foods clean. He’d had time to move past the shock of being summoned to visit a Roman centurion, an invitation that he might have expected to lead to his own arrest and crucifixion. Romans had executed Jesus, after all. He’d had time to absorb the warm welcome he’d received in Cornelius’ house, a welcome that actually included the centurion kneeling to him. He’d had time to feel relief that he’d found words to describe Jesus’ life, ministry, purpose, and meaning.

Most of all, he’d had time to reflect on the movement of the Holy Spirit among people who he had known, for a fact, couldn’t be moved by the Holy Spirit. Jewish men? Certainly. Uncommon, but if it was going to be anyone it would be God’s people, and, let’s face it, God’s men. Jewish women? Unlikely, but look, it had happened a couple times over the centuries, so they could cope.

Non-Jews? No. Not possible.

Simon Peter knew that. Tabitha’s friends had probably known that there was no relief from her death. Aeneas had probably known that there was no likely relief from his pain. Ananias had known that there was no way that Saul could change his ways. Saul had known that there was no truth to the message about Jesus.

Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong. That doesn’t change the shock of it, but when you know that something can’t be, how nice it is to discover that it can.

“When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, ‘Then God has given even to the gentiles the repentance that leads to life.’”

Six years ago Brian Peterson wrote at Working Preacher, “The church’s Spirit-led experience has brought new insights regarding things like slavery, racial equality and justice, women’s ordination, and LGBTQ dignity. Some of that may look obvious in history’s rearview mirror. Still, encountering the Spirit who is alive and pushing the church in new and astonishing directions can be frightening. However, the Spirit is not random or incoherent. The Spirit always pushes the church into greater practice of God’s love for all people of the world.

“This is a text about crossing borders. We know how contentious that can become! We put up walls, concrete or steel or metaphorical. It would have been more comfortable and seemingly safer for the early church to keep Cornelius and his Gentile household at arm’s length.”

Boundaries and borders, it must be said, have their uses. They are necessary. If you look at the simplest forms of life, those single-celled creatures we can see only through microscopes, they have a cell wall. Take away the cell wall, the creatures cease to exist. The reality of a boundary makes life itself possible.

We ourselves consist of somewhere around 30 trillion cells, give or take a few trillion. They’ve all got cellular walls to permit them to perform their different functions around the body. A red blood cell without a cell wall won’t carry oxygen anywhere. A skin cell without a cell wall won’t hold all the other cells in. Skin cells, in fact, are pretty remarkable for establishing a boundary that preserves the life of the other cells. During COVID we saw the results of a virus that could get around the skin barrier, and it wasn’t pretty.

Boundaries have a function.

Boundaries, however, are rarely absolute. A cell wall that won’t admit oxygen and nutrients is one that spells the death of the cell. I just talked about the way skin cells keep other organisms out, but it turns out there’s a bunch of organisms in the body already, and they do very useful things there. Research has shown that bacteria in the digestive tract actually help digest food. There’s plenty of germs that don’t help, but there’s also a lot that do, and our bodies don’t produce those bacteria. They’re with us for the ride.

Boundaries mean that we can have relationships of mutual support and benefit at the cellular level.

Boundaries mean that we can have partnerships at the human level.

Some years after Cornelius had his encounter with the Holy Spirit in Simon Peter’s presence, the Apostle Paul wrote that the Church is like Christ’s body, and like a body, it is made up of many parts, and the many parts aren’t the same, but they support one another. One part can’t do without another, he said.

It turns out that men can’t run the Church without women, though God knows we’ve tried and God knows how badly that’s usually turned out. It turns out that God has called gay men, lesbian women, and transgender persons into the community and into leadership, and God knows we’ve struggled as much or more as the Jerusalem council did at that. It turns out that Micronesians and Filipinos, Hawaiians and Fijians, and people from all the Pacific have been summoned by God.

Mitzi J. Smith reminds us that we do not fulfill God’s welcome without coming to terms with our failure to welcome. She writes at Working Preacher, “Many white brothers and sisters and some people of color deny that they ever perceive or treat people who are racially or economically different from themselves with bias. This is despite being entrenched in racialized, class-conscious institutions and traditions that presume people of color, women and others to be inferior. But the only way we begin to put an end to making distinctions between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is to learn to recognize and admit our biases and their impact on human relationships. Racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and other biased behaviors and thinking are not godly; they are motivated by fear of the other and not by love of humanity. ‘God shows no favoritism’ for one human being other another.”

“I truly understand that God shows no partiality,” said Simon Peter in Acts 10:34. He understood it then, but he knew he hadn’t understood it before. He had to learn to extend a welcome, and he had to keep learning it all his days.

Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “What proof do we offer the world of our discipleship? How do we wash the feet of our companions? How do we extend hospitality? How might we organize our local church for reaching out and creating a more inclusive and engaging community within? How do we show up when the world is looking for love?”

There’s our challenge. There’s our summons: to extend ourselves in welcome to those seeking a home for their spirit and healing for their souls.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric preaches from a prepared text, but he often improvises while preaching, so what you hear in the recording will not precisely match the text above.

The image is Saint Peter Baptizing the Centurion Cornelius by Jan Erasmus Quellinus – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59323889.