Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Love Fulfills the Law

September 6, 2026

Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

In his commentary on Galatians, the fourth century theologian Saint Jerome told this story: “The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, ‘Little children, love one another.’** The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, ‘Teacher, why do you always say this?’ He replied with a line worthy of John: ‘Because it is the Lord’s commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.’**° He said this because of the Apostle’s present mandate: ‘Let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the household of faith.’”

Jerome wrote nearly three hundred years after John wrote the Gospel, so it’s hard to tell whether he’d preserved an authentic memory, or whether he’d preserved a story that reflected the way people thought of John. It certainly honored teachings of Jesus. We honored the “new commandment” Jesus gave at the Last Supper by calling the Thursday of Holy Week “Commandment Thursday” – “Maundy” is an English shortening of the Latin “Mandatum,” which means “commandment.” Jesus also spoke of love as the basis of the “greatest commandments.” As recorded in Mark’s Gospel: “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

This wasn’t a new idea. The Babylonian Talmud records this story about Hillel the Elder, who lived in the century before Jesus was born:

“It happened again that a certain stranger came before Shammai and said to him:
–‘I will become a proselyte providing you teach me the whole Torah while I’m standing on one foot.’
(Shammai) knocked him down with the builder’s rule in his hand.
(The stranger) came before Hillel, who made him a proselyte.
He told him:
–‘What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.
That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go, learn (it)!’”

I note that when Paul spoke of love as the fulfillment of the law, he used the negative form that Hillel had, avoiding doing harm. In contrast, Jesus used the positive form, love your neighbor as yourself.

So what is the good of law?

The Apostle Paul had, in fact, spent a good deal of the Letter to the Romans arguing that the Law of Israel had become a problem. When there’s a standard, he said, there’s not just the risk, there’s the likelihood that people won’t meet it. And when they don’t meet the standard, they’ve fallen into sin. Without the standard, there would be no transgression.

Paul argued persuasively that the Law had failed to prevent people from sinning – it’s an impossible argument to counter. No legal system has ever entirely prevented people from breaking the law. People make unintentional mistakes, such as not noticing that stop sign at the corner. People make uninformed mistakes, such as believing that those entering a traffic circle have the right of way rather than those in it. And people make deliberate decisions to break the law, passing in no-passing zones because they think it will save them time.

Mind you, most people follow traffic laws fully informed and faithfully. Law brings a basic order that’s really useful. Law also gets into the specifics of things. Like most of us on this island, I try to “drive with aloha,” and I’m glad for all the others who do. If we had no speed limit signs, however, I’d have more difficulty doing it. I wouldn’t know, necessarily, whether the road ahead was straight enough for high speeds, or whether around this next curve there is a series of small curves which I may or may not be able to navigate safely.

Not to mention the challenges of a traffic circle. It’s one thing to drive one with aloha, but if you’re driving with aloha, who goes first?

Despite dismissing the Law as a saving force, Paul definitely believed in offering specific guidance. Nancy Lammers Gross writes at Working Preacher, “In the event we are not clear about what the law of love looks like, even after the gifts for ministry and the disposition of love as described by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and alluded to in Romans 12, Paul spells out for us what is singularly inappropriate with regard to the law of love as we prepare for the return of Christ: Avoid reveling, which is excessive partying and wild behavior; avoid drunkenness, debauchery, and licentiousness, which may be taken as reckless indulgence in immoral behavior; avoid quarreling and jealousy.”

Indeed, Paul’s letters are full of lists of things to do and things not to do. If you’re looking for guidance in what to do, read Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, and so on. Paul happily told people what to do two thousand years ago, and people like me have been happily telling people what to do using his words ever since.

In the end, yes. Paul was right. Love does fulfill the law, at least as long as the law is dedicated to avoiding harm to the neighbor, as long as the law is dedicated to lifting up the neighbor. As we also know, that’s not always the case. Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “When Paul reflects on the second commandment in Romans 13, he writes, “’Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law’ (Romans 13:10). But I can imagine [Maria] Skobtsova having a fiery argument with him about this. She would say, ‘How can you sell love that short?’ She thought of love of neighbor as a ‘dangerous thing’ that immersed a person in the world and in its suffering, stopping short of nothing. Her life itself was a parable about this commandment and her deeply uncomfortable answer to the question: How do you love your neighbor as yourself?”

Maria Skobtsova was an Orthodox nun who hid Jews from the Nazis in occupied Paris, and died in a gas chamber in 1945.

Love does not just fulfill the law, it goes beyond the law.

Poet Wendell Berry died this week. For decades his work has inspired people of faith, so I’ll close with his words:

“I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.

           I have no love
except it come from Thee.

           Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind.”

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching. Sometimes he makes them without intending to. Sometimes He hope they’re improvements. The sermon as written does not precisely match the sermon as preached.

The image is Christ Taking Leave of the Apostles by Duccio di Buoninsegna (between 1308 and 1311) – Web Gallery of Art: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7922656.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: A Little Humility

The apostle advised his readers to do the will of God as best they could – but also to be aware that they did not, could not know everything.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the twelfth chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 12:1-8).

Paul wrote that we should present ourselves in our bodies as a sacrifice to the living God, by which I’m fairly certain that he meant that all our deeds, our actions, and our words ought to be done with some notion of fulfilling the will of God, at least as best we understand it. Paul followed that with a caution, not to think too well of ourselves, which is very much a temptation if we see ourselves as following and enacting the will of God.

It is, I think, some of the most honest advice that the Apostle Paul ever wrote in his letters. I’m pretty sure that his besetting temptation was, in fact, arrogance. The temptations to think that he knew more than he did, to proclaim more than he knew. You can see it in a number of places in the letters, both where the Apostle Paul recognized it and drew back from it, and the places where he didn’t recognize it and did it anyway.

That’s advice that is good for Paul’s time, for Paul. It’s advice that is good for our time, for us, for me.

First of all, to be cautious about what we claim to know, to be careful about the things that we say, to make certain that we identify our opinions as opinions, our faith as faith, and to maybe not declare it quite so firmly as established fact. By all means, bring out that which supports your opinions, but know also that there is far more to know than any of us can know.

And of course, that first point still remains an excellent challenge for all of us, to strive to do that which God has called us to do, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to love God with all our heart and soul and mind.

Romans twelve. Romans eight is, by far, my favorite in this letter, but there are good words here to guide us in each day of our lives.

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you are 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: Part of the Renewed Nation

Who is included in God’s vision of community? More people than we tend to think.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the fifty-sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah (Isaiah 56:1, 6-8).

Isaiah appears to have been an assembled work. There’s a lengthy section that is primarily the work of a prophet named Isaiah, who lived in Jerusalem in the 700s before Jesus. There’s also a lengthy insertion, which is literally copied from the book of Second Kings. And then beginning about chapter 40, we get another writer.

Isaiah scholars believe that this one appears to have been an exile in Babylon, so hundreds of years after the initial Isaiah. He brought different concerns, and he brought a different sense of God’s promises. This part of chapter 56 is concerned with the restoration of the nation, which had been conquered by the Babylonians in 587. And here in chapter 56, it’s very clear that Isaiah expressed God’s promise that the exile people would at some time be able to come home.

But would there be anyone with them?

This portion of chapter 56 is very clearly answering the question, “Could others then Jews become a faithful part of the restored nation?” God’s answer was a clear, unequivocal, “Yes.” Those who wanted to be a part of the community and who would act according to its rules and its standards and its laws: they would be welcome. They could come and sacrifice in the rebuilt temple of God, and their prayers would be heard.

I don’t need to tell anybody that these are fractious days, days in which division and separation is very much the way of things. If you look through the Scriptures, you will find plenty of support for the notion that we should be separating people into little bits and bobs of communities. But Isaiah heard from God that that was not how it had to be, and many years later, along came Jesus, who in a conversation with a foreigner initially rejected her plea for healing, for her daughter, but was persuaded, was persuaded, and let his power find its way to a sick little girl.

Which will we choose? Will we choose the fractures of division and embrace the ways of dissension, even hatred, or will we be persuaded as Jesus was, as Isaiah was, to welcome the stranger and celebrate with them, and all of us together be faithful to 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 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 What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Greater Grace

If God is for us, who can be against us? wrote Paul. I wonder if God is for all the people who have ever been and ever will be.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 8:26-39).

Unlike most of the other letters of Paul which have survived to become part of our New Testament, the letter to the Romans was sent to people that Paul had not yet met. Some of them he clearly had heard about. He clearly expected that they had heard about him. He planned to visit Rome on his way to Spain, so he wrote a letter to introduce himself and to ask for their help and support as he planned that great journey.

As a result, the letter to the Romans is more expansive than some of Paul’s other correspondence. Paul had more to say about the extent of his thinking and his theology. In his letters to the churches in Corinth and in Galatia, Paul focused more on specific concerns arising within those congregations. In his letter to the Romans, he was trying to describe who he was and how he thought and what he believed about Jesus. And so we have not just the longest of Paul’s letters, we have the one in which he had the most to say.

This section of the eighth chapter is just packed with Paul’s thinking about salvation and about God’s role, not just in creation, but in the extent of God’s love for creation. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” The God said that sent Jesus, the God who was willing to sacrifice Jesus, the God who was willing to let the human beings do what they wanted to Jesus, is a God who will respond with grace and with mercy.

In Paul’s thinking no power on earth could step between God’s mercy and those to whom God chose to provide it. Paul called them God’s elect and indeed that’s true, those whom God has chosen. I do wonder if we can assume that God chose a small number. Paul worked diligently to increase that number.

But if God sent God’s Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through him (as John, the gospel writer, later put it), well then how much of the world did God intend to save? And if there are no powers that can stand between God and God’s mercy, how many people will God preserve at the end of time?

I do think that I can’t entirely remove the possibility of condemnation for some. Between the freedom of God and the ability of human beings to make pretty catastrophic mistakes, I think that possibility is always there. I also think that God’s intent was, is and will always be, to welcome all humanity into that place of light and beauty and love that God has prepared. Jesus said, “In my Father’s house, there are many mansions, and I go to prepare a place for you.” How many mansions have been prepared for us and for those we know and for those we do not know?

The answer to that question lies in the gracious heart of 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 Sermons

Sermon: Undivided Heart

July 19, 2026

Psalm 86:11-17
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Psalm 86 is a song of an individual person. What I mean by that is that it wasn’t written to be said together in a big worship service, or chanted by a procession through the streets. It describes the spiritual place that one person was in thousands of years ago. It doesn’t tell us a lot – the writer wasn’t very specific about things – but that does help make it accessible to any of us. The themes of the poem are familiar to us, though the events which prompted its writing might not be.

The poet’s first concern was, well, concern. The very first words are: “Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.” The psalmist wrote from a “day of trouble.” They had opponents, they had enemies. “O God, the insolent rise up against me; a band of ruffians seeks my life, and they do not set you before them.”

The need for help is not just a common theme in the Psalms. It is a common reality in human life. Sometimes our need is the result of other people’s actions. We might be targeted for crime. We might be discriminated against in employment or housing. We might be suffering from an injury or illness which doesn’t just test our health but also our financial resources and the support of our family and friends. We’ve all been through a global pandemic, when a shortage of human contact made it even harder to endure economic hardship and the fear of dangerous disease.

We know what need is. We know what it is to pray out of our needs.

Curiously, the Psalmist did not just pray out of their need. There’s no shame in doing that; there are Psalms that really do concentrate on the cry for help. This writer, however, spent roughly as much time on a second theme as on their concerns and distress.

The second theme was thanks and praise.

“I give thanks to you, O LORD my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify your name forever.” A lot of the Psalms praise God. You could make a case that, in some way, they all do, but there are a good number that focus on praising God. About half of Psalm 86 praises God for being merciful and generous, for being great and powerful, for abounding in steadfast love.

We know what it’s like to pray in thanksgiving. We’ve enjoyed successes, we’ve received gifts, we’ve celebrated the beauties of the world. We’ve rejoiced at weddings, we’ve welcomed births, we’ve completed difficult things and received rewards. Out of these and more we pray with thanks.

This is a Psalm which simultaneously praises God’s goodness and seeks God’s aid in some pretty deep distress. It’s a Psalm that knows both pain and exultation, both sorrow and celebration. Which made one line really stand out for me:

“Give me an undivided heart to revere your name.”

In a Psalm that is divided between opposite themes, the writer asked for “an undivided heart.”

I think some people do have the notion that the life of faith is supposed to feel like one thing and one thing only. Once you’ve made the commitment, somehow your faith is supposed to keep you in a similar state of mind from day to day. A read through the Book of Psalms would tell you, to the contrary, that the life of faith is filled with different feelings. A read through one of the Gospels reveals that Jesus himself, though a remarkably consistent person, displayed a range of emotions and reactions on different occasions.

I’m not sure why anyone thinks that Christian faith means our internal life is supposed to be just one thing, but some do.

You don’t have to. At any rate, you don’t have to worry about it when you find that your mind keeps changing and your feelings keep changing from one day to the next. That happened to the prophets. It happened to the Psalmists. It happened to Jesus himself.

So how can this Psalmist call for a unified heart?

“Heart” means a lot of things to us. We think of the heart as the center of feelings. Unity of feelings is really unusual in human experience. It happens, but it happens relatively rarely and in pretty intense situations. I can think of a few occasions, mostly while driving, when the only emotion I was aware of fear. I can also remember times when I was overwhelmed with joy, to the point where other emotions simply weren’t present. That just hasn’t happened all that often, though, and frankly that’s a good thing. Overwhelming emotion is overwhelming. Even the most joyous moments in my life were better as moments than they would be as an ongoing reality.

I’ve also mentioned more than once that our feelings aren’t under our direct control. We can do things to influence our feelings – I’ve found that a good meal reduces my anxieties pretty effectively – but it’s really difficult to tell yourself, “I want to feel happy” and then actually do it. So the deepest understanding of the truth of God, for which the Psalmist prayed, isn’t going to give us a unified heart. We’re still going to feel what we feel, and most of the time that’s a mixture, isn’t it? A mixture of feelings about what’s right in front of it and the things on our mind and the things that linger, good and bad, in our memories.

Did the Psalmist actually mean a unified mind?

I don’t think so, and not just because of the use of the word “heart.” The whole Psalm argues against it, because it’s a Psalm about both need and praise. The Psalm itself is divided in mind.

How do we resolve the paradox of the unified heart in a divided Psalm?

Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “It’s not that we hold paradox; it’s that paradox holds us.   We are held in a deep place.  An ample place. A generous, sufficient, and roomy place. Though we might fear paradox, God does not, and it is in God’s soil that we are firmly planted.  We’re safe, even in the contradictions.  Messy and weedy for sure, but safe.”

In our understanding, but even more so in the use of the Psalmists and the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, “heart” was not just the seat of emotion. It was also a seat of decision: of loyalty. Of commitment. Of devotion. It’s one of the reasons that we use “heart” when we think about the way people come together in loving relationships – they’re rooted in emotion, but they go beyond that to commitment.

For the Psalmist, I think, the unified heart was able to bring together the needs and the thanksgiving, the feelings of fear and the feelings of joy, the reality of deprivation and the truth of God’s presence, into a foundational reliance upon God. That is, what connects need and praise is that we come to God with both.

Unlike emotion, that’s something that we can choose. We can bring our burdens to God for help and for comfort. We can bring our hurts to God for healing and for renewal. We can bring our uncertainties to God for guidance and for wisdom. We can bring our griefs to God for comfort and for resurrection.

And we can bring our successes to God for thanksgiving and for continuance. We can bring our celebrations to God for increase and for sharing. We can bring our joys to God for blessing and for remembering.

The unified heart is the one that knows that God cares about our joys and sorrows. The unified heart is the one that lifts the voice in praise and in petition. The unified heart is the one that waits in silence for God’s aid and for God’s smile.

Don’t worry that you feel different today than you did yesterday. Don’t worry that you think new things from day to day. Feelings will change, and I earnestly hope that you’re learning things as time goes on.

Do raise your needs to God; do raise your thanks to God. That is the practice and the commitment that makes a unified heart.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while he’s preaching, hopefully to improve it, and sometimes accidentally.

The photo shows a sculpture of a world being unified. Taken by Eric Anderson in South Korea in 2013.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Need and Praise

Psalm 86 pairs two of the most common prayers of human life: prayer arising from need, and prayer arising from thanks.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the second half of Psalm 86 (Psalm 86:11-17). The lectionary editors have chosen to begin this week’s reading with the words, “Teach me your way, O Lord,” that I may live in your truth. That is a wonderful thing for any of us to do and to pray: to seek from God the guidance and the leadership to shape our lives to mirror that of our God and our Savior.

Curiously, however, it is not the dominant thought of this ancient poem.

Psalm 86 is far more concerned with two other things. The first is a plea for assistance. The author (who is credited as David before the Psalm actually begins) the author says that he is beset with enemies, with a band of ruffians even. The other theme is a theme of profound thanksgiving. The author repeatedly raises praises to God for the things that God has done in the past.

Need and praise. These are the side by side dominant themes of Psalm 86.

I suggest that they can be and frequently are the dominant themes of our lives here in the 21st century. Some of our needs might be fleeting: the hunger we feel when we rise from sleep in the morning, something that we can satisfy with a breakfast. And then there are those whose hungers in the morning are not satisfied with a quick breakfast, but must linger until they find the resources to satisfy them.

There are other hungers that are also deep and enduring: the hungers of the Spirit, the hungers of the soul, the longing for those who have passed away, the longing for justice and for righteousness in a world that often seems to care very little. Need is our constant prayer.

And thanksgiving is also our constant prayer. For we do rise to a world that is filled with beauty. We rise to a world that is filled with human beings who do love one another —imperfectly, it must be said — but love is still the dominant experience of most of us in this world. And love can be the dominant experience for everyone in this world, because human beings can bring it and God always brings that love and grace.

Need and thanksgiving. These are our prayers yesterday, today and tomorrow.

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: We Are Not Farmers (Mostly)

July 12, 2026

Isaiah 55:10-13
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

I have only briefly been a farmer or a gardener. My parents decided one year to plant a small vegetable garden behind our house. It wasn’t a great location. Between hedges, a small garage, and fruit trees, it didn’t get much sun. The soil wasn’t terribly rich. And then there was the family of garden-loving rabbits that lived nearby. Nevertheless, we planted a garden, and my brother and I were allowed to choose one vegetable to plant. Me: I chose carrots.

I like carrots.

We were careful if not terribly skilled about it. We cleared away grasses, dug holes, carefully planted seeds, watered them, and did whatever else we were supposed to do to make things grow. It took time, of course, but gradually shoots appeared above the places we’d placed those seeds. Shoots also appeared in places we hadn’t planted seeds, because we weren’t very good at weeding. Shoots didn’t appear above all the places we’d planted seeds, for whatever reasons that seeds don’t grow, which may have included shade, poor soil, and rabbits.

As far as I can remember, I only ate one carrot from that garden. I wasn’t patient enough at that age to let them sit in the ground and grow. I don’t remember being all that impressed with that tiny carrot, but I did eat it. I certainly didn’t get the results of a hundredfold increase over what I’d planted.

Of course, you don’t get that with root vegetables.

I am not a farmer.

Most of us aren’t – with at least one of our families here at Church of the Holy Cross a notable exception. Our daily work doesn’t include planting, weeding, fertilizing, harvesting, and starting all over again. I would guess that at least some of you are gardeners, however, and hopefully more successful gardeners than I’ve been, and would recognize that there’s something peculiar about the sower in Jesus’ story.

He’s a very careless sower.

I carefully planted each carrot seed, leaving space between it and its neighbor so there was space to grow. I grant you that carrots and grains grow differently, but this sower seems careless at best. As Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Instead of carefully calculating how each and every seed is going to be planted and cultivated, the sower just scatters the seed on all kinds of different terrain. I can almost imagine the people around Jesus, many farmers themselves, all dependent on whatever the earth produces, puzzled and even laughing at Jesus’ depiction of the sower. What is this crazy person doing, scattering seed on ground that he knows won’t yield a harvest? Why bother?”

Even ignorant children like I was know that you keep the seeds away from paths and rocks and thorns. Why didn’t Jesus know that?

Well, of course he did.

When Jesus created his parables, he had a technique of starting with something ordinary, something straightforward, something with an ending you could anticipate. Then he introduced something unexpected, out of joint. It’s that moment in the story, that moment when the audience says, “Wait. What did you just say?” that Jesus used to make his point.

That’s why the sower is so careless.

Because we – meaning the followers of Jesus – are not farmers.

Farmers and gardeners have to focus on results. The resources of horticulture are sometimes scarce and often not under the farmer’s control. So they do the best they can to choose proper soil, to nourish the soil as best they can, to protect the growing plants from disease and low water and things that eat leaves. Farmers and gardeners have to concentrate on the sites and the soils that give them the best chance for a good harvest. They may seek to expand their available good soil by breaking up paths and moving rocks and cutting back thorns, but that’s a long-term investment, isn’t it? They don’t plant seed on that land until the hindrances have been removed.

That’s not how the followers of Jesus work. Because we’re not farmers.

The seed, which Jesus described as the Word, gets cast everywhere and anywhere. It shares with actual seed the characteristic that it grows – seeds grow into plants, the Word grows within the human soul to produce more loving, more compassionate people. The Word, which I think we have to understand as being more than simply speaking of God; the Word, which I think we have to understand as emulating God; the Word, which I think we have to understand as displaying the love of God, gets spread to everyone and anyone.

It doesn’t always take. As Elisabeth Johnson writes at Working Preacher, “One can find examples of each kind of response to the word in Matthew’s Gospel. There are many in Matthew’s story who ‘hear the word of the kingdom and do not understand’ (3:19), including the religious leaders who are antagonistic to Jesus’ ministry from the beginning. The crowds respond positively to Jesus, especially to his miracles of healing (9:8; 15:31; 21:8-9), yet turn against Jesus at the end and demand his crucifixion (27:15-23), leaving us to wonder whether they ever truly understood.

“The disciples themselves might be included among those who fall away ‘when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word’ (3:21; cf. 26:56b, 69-75). And the rich young man unable to part with his possessions (19:16-22) provides a stunning example of ‘one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing’ (3:22).”

What I have to emphasize here is that Jesus shared the Word, the invitation, the compassion, the love of God to all of them. More than once. Over and over. Yes, he ate with the sinners and the tax collectors. He also ate with the nice people, the good people, and some of them, I think, grew in the Word themselves. Others did not.

We are not farmers. Not when we’re sharing the Word and the love of God.

For one thing, how do we know what kind of person we’re sharing God’s love with? The ohi’a, I observe, grows in places that I would never imagine. So does the Word of God. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Who am I to tell God, the Creator of the earth and all that is in it, what ‘good soil’ looks like?  Who am I to decide who is worthy and who is not of the sower’s generosity?  Who am I to hoard what I have been so freely and lavishly given?  Who am I to look at God’s profligate blessing and call it waste?”

We are not farmers. We are disciples.

And the people with whom we share the love of God are not soil, they are people. You can change soil. Famers and gardeners create fertile soil from paths and rocks and thorns with time and effort. Ohi’a trees transform lava rock into fertile soil over decades.

You can’t directly change people – but people can and do change, and you can support them as they do. You can help them nurture the seeds of God’s Word, of God’s love, of God’s grace within them.

You do it by believing it will grow. What is packed hard may soften. What is stony may break apart. What is thorny may be draw aside. Who knows what impact our love and care added to God’s love and grace may have?

We are not farmers. We are disciples.

Debie Thomas continues: “How I wish that the Church — the Church across the ages, the Church across all cultures, denominations, and circumstances — were known for its absurd generosity.  How I wish we were famous for being like the Sower, going out in joy, scattering seed before and behind us in the widest arcs our arms can make.  How I wish the world could laugh at our lavishness instead of weeping in the wake of our stinginess.  How I wish the people in our lives could see a quiet, gentle confidence in us when we tend to the hard, rocky, thorny places in our communities, instead of finding us abrasive, judgmental, exacting, and insular.  How I wish seeds of love, mercy, justice, humility, honor, and truthfulness would fall through our fingers in such appalling quantities that even the birds, the rocks, the thorns, and the shallow, sun-scorched corners of the world would burst into colorful, riotous, joyous life.”

Absurd generosity. Like God’s. Like Jesus’.

Let’s do that.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches – intentionally and otherwise – so the sermon as prepared does not precisely match the sermon as presented.

The image is a Romanian icon of the Parable of the Sower, date unknown. Photo by Sulfababy of en.wiki – Wikipedia en inglés, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8662451.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Unusual Gardeners

If we planted fields and gardens the way Jesus’ sower scattered seed, it wouldn’t work well. But if we scatter God’s love that way, it might work very well indeed.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking that you might be wondering about the bandage. I did just have to have some skin surgery. It was minor and everything that needs to be removed is removed. You can expect that there will be a bandage (somewhat smaller as the weeks go on) on my brow for the next few weeks.

I am also thinking about the thirteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23). This contains one of Jesus’ best known parables, the Parable of the Sower. It also contains something that is a little less usual for one of Jesus’ parables, that is, an explanation.

Most of the time, Jesus let his stories stand by themselves. In this case, Jesus’ disciples wanted to know what he meant by describing someone who went out and scattered seed in the most unlikely of places. And in some of those places, the seeds simply could not grow or could not thrive. In other places, the seeds sprouted and produced astonishing yields.

Jesus compared the seeds to the Word of God. In some places, the Word of God is simply rejected or choked out. In other places, the Word of God finds fertile ground and bears much fruit.

I think that one of our roles as Jesus’ disciples is to take on that of the Sower. That is, to scatter the Word around. Now, if we were gardeners, and I am not one, but if we were gardeners or farmers, we would be careful about where we placed the seeds. We want each seed to have the best opportunity to produce a plant, to grow, to flower, and to bear fruit. But for the Word, for the grace of God, for the blessings of God, for the description of our loving God, well, for that, the guidance is different, isn’t it? The guidance is: describe the love of God to everyone, whether it seems like they might be thorny soil or rocky soil or good soil, whatever they are.

We will find out who they are by what happens when the Word tries to take root.

We scatter the words. We scatter the love of God. We proclaim the love of God. We display the love of God anywhere and everywhere, so that the love of God may grow around us and bear fruit.

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: Assignment Mercy

Jesus set his closest associates on the challenging assignment of bringing compassion to those who needed it so. We have the same assignment.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the end of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth chapters of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 9:35-10:8).

This section begins with Jesus’ observation that the people of the villages that he had met were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. There was more work to be done than he could do himself. He summoned twelve from amongst his followers, and he gave them power and authority.

He appointed them to be ambassadors of the movement, to go out and visit these other villages. There, he directed them, proclaim the good news that the realm of God is drawing near. Cast out the demons, heal the sick, and by the way, make no preparation as you go. Don’t save any money, don’t bring even any extra clothing.

It was, and it is, a tough assignment. I would argue that we as disciples today: we are the heirs of those twelve. We are still asked to do something about bringing the reign of God closer to being in the world. To do what we can for the sick, to comfort those who are pressed by evil spirits, and to assist those who are pressed by evil people. We continue in this long tradition of seeing what is wrong in the world, and bringing good news and good action to those who suffer to those in need.

Proclaim the good news that the realm of God is near. Bring healing and comfort and assurance, and you will be doing the work of Jesus.

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.