Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Connections

May 10, 2026

Acts 17:22-31
John 14:15-21

In Acts 17, Paul and Silas had been traveling hard for a while. They’d made a few friends in Thessalonica, which is toward the north of the Greek peninsula, but they’d also found a good few enemies who had stirred up the authorities against them. They’d gone to a nearby community, Berea, and made some more friends. Unfortunately those same enemies decided they hadn’t made enough trouble, with the result that their friends put Paul on a boat and sent him south along the coast to the great ancient city of Athens.

According to Luke, the likely author of Acts of the Apostles, Paul didn’t think much of Athens. “He was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Paul was from Tarsus, a city at a number of cultural crossroads. The Jewish community he grew up in would have been minority amidst worshipers of Greek, Roman, Persian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian deities. He’d been surrounded by idols all his life.

Well, he didn’t have to like it. He didn’t. He started to speak and argue, first in the synagogue (where folks would have shared at least some of his distress) and then in the public areas where the local philosophers liked to debate. They brought him to the Areopagus, the great square of news and discussion, and prepared to listen – and, I’m sure, to dispute.

Jeremy L. Williams doesn’t believe that Paul’s opening was all that conciliatory. He writes at Working Preacher, “Paul’s statement about the Athenians’ worship practices is certainly pejorative. It would not be unfair to translate his statement as saying that the Athenians are very superstitious (hōs deisidaimonesterous) in an unflattering way (Acts 17:22). They are so bad, to him, that they even worship what they do not know. He uses this as an entry point to launch his message.”

This is the same sort of behavior that led to Timothy insulting his judges beyond their tolerance in last week’s reading from Acts.

Most commentators read this opening differently from Dr. Wiliams, and Dr. Williams himself notes that however inauspicious the beginning, Paul’s sermon grew increasingly effective from there, even though he’d set a challenging task. He had set out to persuade them that a single Creator deity was concerned with human life and behavior, and had demonstrated that concern with resurrection from the dead. I’m not sure I can communicate just how strange that would have sounded to them. Matt Skinner writes at Working Preacher, “By referring to Jesus’ resurrection and implying that all people will likewise be raised from the dead, Paul steers the Athenians toward a notion of communing with the Divine that does not square with their presuppositions. To a crowd interested in the immortality of the soul (and an accompanying contempt for bodies and the limitations they impose), Paul preaches about a God who resurrects bodies. It’s a difficult thing for the Athenians to hear as good news. Why would people want to keep their bodies? It strikes them as icky.”

It was a challenge. He did not entirely succeed. “Some scoffed,” it reads in the very next verse, but also “others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’” Some even joined Paul, founding the Christian community in Athens.

Paul had helped them make connections.

The first connection was within themselves. They had very different notions about the roles of gods and goddesses, about the nature of good and evil, about the relationship between different groups of people. Dr. Williams observes, “Paul’s message about the Unknown God does not deny the Athenians’ wisdom nor does it call for a destruction of their ways of knowing. It acknowledges that from one, God made every family (ethnos) of humans to inhabit the face of the whole earth (Acts 17:26).“

Paul helped them make connections between the things they already knew and the things he was offering to them as new insight. They didn’t have to give up all they knew. They didn’t have to give up the tools with which they learned. They were invited to use those ways of thinking to re-examine what they’d concluded in light of new information.

As you may have noted when trying to teach someone something new, that’s frequently a difficult leap to make. But if you harangue someone with “You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong!” that almost never goes better.

With Paul’s help, they made new connections.

Then they made new connections with Paul, and with one another. Luke even provides us with the names of two of them – Dionysius the Areopagite and Damaris – probably because that man and woman were known in Christian circles. Dionysius and Damaris developed new relationships with this wandering preacher, with those who eventually rejoined him from Berea, with one another, and with those who later made a circle of friends into a growing community of faith.

They made connections within. They made connections with one another. I can only assume – but it’s a pretty good assumption – that they made new connections with God.

We are Paul’s heirs. We are the guides to connection for our generations. We are the ones who will help – or hinder – those who seek to learn, to connect, and to experience God.

“Our world, like theirs,” writes C. Clifton Black at Working Preacher, “is variously if sometimes stupidly religious. Now as then, Christianity faces attackers of all stripes: the sophisticated, the unthinking, and the powerful who are easily threatened. Anyone who considers idolatry dead in contemporary culture has not been paying attention to Wall Street and Madison Avenue, to Hollywood or Washington or Beijing.”

Or, I’d add, to those proclaiming various strains of Christianity, including but not limited to Christian nationalism and the prosperity gospel. As Dan Clendenin writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “At our worst, we Christians have isolated and insulated ourselves from our culture’s mainstream. We can be inward-looking, self-absorbed, self-important, and cloistered, instead of engaging people at our contemporary synagogue, agora or Areopagus… But at our best, Christians have followed Paul’s example of living, learning and sharing the gospel in the marketplace of ideas, in bars and board rooms as well as in basilicas, in university lecture halls as well as in church fellowship halls. In an outward, centrifugal movement modeled after Paul at the Areopagus, believers have engaged real people where they really live, work, and think, in order to gain a hearing for their ‘strange ideas’ about repentance, rebirth, and the resurrection.”

Should you find a spot near the Mo’oheau Bandstand and start preaching? I mean, if that’s where you’re called to, go ahead, but you may have noticed I don’t do that. Nor to Liliu’okalani Garden or Lincoln Park – though I have been known to join a march or demonstration downtown.

Where are you called to make connections?

For many of us, the first setting for relationships is our family – our siblings, cousins, and the extended ‘ohana of both kupuna and keiki. How do we help the people we love make a connection between something we both share as true, and something new that they, so far, haven’t accepted as true? How do we build the love between us into something that helps them find new understandings and act upon them?

Who can you help make a new connection?

Who can you help to a new relationship, one which involves them in a community? The obvious community to invite them into is this one – I mean, Jesus encouraged us to do just that two thousand years ago – but there are other communities that engage and support human beings as they find their full humanity. A service club? Go for it. An organization that relies on volunteers to do good things, like the Food Basket, Habitat for Humanity, HOPE Services, the Ku’ikahi Mediation Center, the Human Society. They’ll find work for you, and they’ll find connections for you, or for the person who needs connecting.

Join a musical ensemble. Audition for a play.

Who do you know who would benefit from those connections?

That’s probably a long list. Who are the first five? That’s more manageable. You can help five people make connections with other people, can’t you?

The goal, in the end, is to help people build their relationship with God – but you can’t skip directly there. It’s built on the connections we make in our brains, hearts, and souls. It’s built out of the connections we make with other human beings who affirm us in these understandings. It’s deepened when each of us take further steps toward the One in whom, as Paul quoted from a pagan Greek poet, “we live and move and have our being.”

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching from his prepared text. The sermon as preached differs from the sermon as prepared.

The image is St Paul Preaching at Athens by Raphael (1515) – Royal Collection of the United Kingdom, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1718078.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Making Connections

We know from experience that truth is not always obvious, and that plenty of people will try to deceive us. How did the Apostle Paul share his truth? By making connections.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the end of the seventeenth chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 17:22-31): Luke’s account of the Apostle Paul’s speech in the Areopagus, one of the great public centers of the city of Athens.

Paul began his speech by commending the Athenians on their religious practice, on their devotion and dedication to religion and to the Spirit. Specifically, he commanded the fact that they had a shrine to an unknown God. In the rest of his speech, the Apostle attempted to make a connection between this unknown God that they worshiped, and the God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ. He concluded his speech by saying that Christ’s resurrection from the dead was a confirmation of the love of this unknown God for all people.

This is one of the few extended evangelistic appeals that we find in the New Testament, which seems odd, but the New Testament was by and large, written by people who were already a part of the faith, for people who were already a part of the faith. That is true of the gospels. They were not written for neophytes, for people who were interested in Christianity. They were written for existing Christians to learn more about the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Likewise, the letters were written in Paul’s case mostly to people who already knew, and even when he wrote to strangers, he was writing to members of Christian churches.

This is one of the few times that we hear the words of an early Christian being addressed to a pagan audience. And what did he do?

He met them where they were, and he tried to bring them along a path that led to where he was.

He believed it was important for them to learn these things, and he chose a way that was as likely or more likely to be successful than other means. He helped them make connections between things that they already knew, and things that he hoped they would come to know and believe.

I keep saying that there are things at the heart and foundation of Christianity, and I can’t help saying that because it’s true. One of those things is connection.

Connection in the sense of relationship: Paul was hoping to build actual person to person relations with people in Athens and to build a community of followers of Jesus. To do so, he helped them to make connections within their own lives, things that were familiar, things that were comprehensible, in order that they might move towards things they had not yet experienced, not yet heard about, things that, in the end, are pretty much indescribable, but nevertheless, leads towards making that connection, and again a connection of relationship, between those people and God.

May we find ourselves making those same connections: person to person, ourselves to things that we do not yet know, and most of all, may we find ourselves always connecting to our God, our Savior, and the Holy Spirit.

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 Pastor's Corner

Pastor’s Corner: Things That Shouldn’t Be Said

September 24, 2025

Are there things that shouldn’t be said?

Some would argue that freedom of speech should be absolute. In the sphere of law, I tend to agree. Speech short of inciting violence or endangering people through falsehood should not be prosecuted in the courts.

Nevertheless, there are things I should not say. I shouldn’t share the numbers and passwords that access my bank account. I shouldn’t share my anger with someone unless I’ve made an earnest attempt to resolve it with them first, especially if I value the relationship. Basically, if I can anticipate consequences to my words that I don’t wish to suffer, those are good things to keep silent.

Then there are the ideas that aren’t worth sharing.

There are plenty of them. They range from the personal (“I am always right”) to the social (“My race is better than other races”). Such ideas are simply false in a world that doesn’t need any more lies. When these words become actions, people suffer. Sometimes they die.

I don’t think the people who believe such things should be silenced. But they shouldn’t be encouraged. They shouldn’t be rewarded. They should be opposed. Their ideas should be rejected. Their ideals should be repudiated.

There are things people shouldn’t say because they are harmful lies. There are things that just aren’t worth listening to.

Don’t listen.

In peace,

Pastor Eric

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Written in Heaven

Jesus sent seventy of his followers to teach and to heal. They came back rejoicing – but Jesus wasn’t sure they rejoiced in the right thing.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the tenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel (Luke 10:1-11, 16-20), in which Jesus sent out seventy of his disciples to teach, to heal, and to cast out demons; and the story of what they said when they returned.

Jesus had done something similar before. In Chapter nine, he sent out the Twelve to do the same thing. He gave them a pretty stringent set of instructions; He gave nearly identical instructions to the Seventy. When the Twelve returned, they came back with stories of success; when the Seventy returned, they said that even the demons were subject to them.

Jesus had a curious response to this. He said, “Do not rejoice that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” He didn’t say that to the Twelve. On the other hand, the Twelve are not quoted as rejoicing in their power over the other spirits of the world. But it does occur to me, as I listened to the responses of the Seventy, that there is something curiously missing in what they had to say.

They said that the demons had been subject to them, that is, that they had had power they did not anticipate. But where are the people that they helped? Where are the people who learned something from the stories that they told? Where are the people who recovered from illnesses and injuries? Where are the people who were freed from the domination of a malicious spirit?

They weren’t there. They weren’t in the story that they told (at least, not as Luke gives it to us in this account).

Jesus, I think, noticed that those people were missing. Jesus noticed very clearly that what they celebrated was their power. But it’s not about power, Jesus said.

I probably have liked it if Jesus had said, “It’s about the people you’re helping.” He didn’t say that, but he did pull them back from the exultation. It’s about the that primary relationship with God, he said. It’s about having your name be held precious in heaven.

The reason you went out, seventy followers, is because those other people’s names are also precious in heaven. You were sent out so that people could be freed, so that people could learn, so that people could heal. Rejoice that their names, that your names, that all names are held precious in the heart of God.

It’s not about the power. It’s about the people. It’s about those around us, and yes: It is also about us and the way that God loves 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: The Lord Needs It

March 24, 2024

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
Mark 11:1-11

On its face, this story in Mark’s Gospel is about Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. We’ve got the crowds shouting, “Hosanna!” which means “Save us!” we’ve got the humble animal, we’ve got greenery spread over the road, we’ve got a quote from Psalm 118 “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD,” and we’ve got the Messianic reference to King David.

Curious, isn’t it, that Mark spent more time on the colt than on the parade? As Carl Gregg observes in his blog on Patheos, “Mark spends more than half of those eleven verses detailing the odd procurement of Jesus’ donkey.” By my count, Mark gave seven verses to the colt and three to the parade. And one verse to going back to Bethany.

Mark, who never used two words when he could use one, spent a lot of words calling our attention to that donkey.

It’s true that the donkey was another Biblical allusion, this time to the prophet Zechariah, who wrote,

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
    Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you;
    triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
(Zechariah 9:9)

Zechariah was a prophet active as the exile was ending and after it had ended. He encouraged the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, since Solomon’s Temple had been destroyed decades before. With Jerusalem’s fall the House of David had also lost its monarchical power. Zechariah promised that the ancient line of kings would be restored.

When Jesus decided to ride a colt or a donkey that day, he knew some people would recognize the reference to Zechariah and see a declaration that the new king, the Messiah, had come.

Let’s be frank, however. It’s likely that very few got the reference. How many of you are that familiar with Zechariah? It was probably much worse in the first century when most people simply couldn’t read. The Romans wouldn’t have recognized it; I’m pretty sure they didn’t spend a lot of time with Jewish religious writing. But the religious leaders of the city, the scholars, at least some of the priests?

Oh, they got it.

Well, maybe one or two.

Amanda Brobst-Renaud writes at Working Preacher, “So often, we read the Bible as if everything is by necessity and design. Most of us do not expect to laugh, nor to be delighted. But this scene is hilarious! Jesus instructs his disciples to steal a colt. It may be effective to cast the story in modern terms to gain a sense of what is happening: ’Go into the city, and you will find there a car with the keys in the ignition. Bring it here. If anyone questions you, tell them “The Lord needs it, and we’ll bring it back right away, we promise.”’”

Because yeah. That’s gonna work.

But it did work. That’s the confusing part, and that’s the part Mark insisted that we linger with. “The Lord needs it” doesn’t sound like much of a reason to us. “Oh, you speak for the Lord, do you?” We wouldn’t accept that for a moment.

In the first century, there’s a possibility that the owners, or the neighbors (Mark didn’t make it clear who those bystanders were), thought that the pair of Jesus’ disciples were talking about, well, somebody important. Somebody official. Somebody they would have knelt to and called, “Lord.” In the vicinity of Jerusalem that could have happened a lot. Nobles, priests, Roman officials, Roman army officers, Roman soldiers: Any of these could pass through on the road from Bethany to Jerusalem at any time of day. Any of them might look at the steep road down the hill and then back up the hill into the city and think, “It’s time for something else to walk for me. Get me a steed.”

“The Lord needs it.” “Yes, Lord!”

But would Jesus’ disciples have looked like the retainers of a Roman or a noble or a priest?

That seems… unlikely.

“The Lord needs it.” “Oh. Well. OK. I’m sure it’s fine then. If you bring it right back.”

“The Lord needs it.”

It shouldn’t have worked, but it worked. But I’m also wondering… why did Jesus need it? This is the only time in the gospel accounts where Jesus, or anybody else, rode anything. When Jesus moved about, he walked. In fact, he made the same trip from Bethany to Jerusalem and back on his own feet the next day, and the next day, and the next day. Yes, Jesus needed the colt to match the vision of Zechariah, but let’s face it, there were plenty of prophecies Jesus didn’t fulfill. If Jesus wanted to provoke the religious authorities of Jerusalem that was a good way, but it took days of debate and argument to scare them enough to seek his life.

“The Lord needs it.”

We do not usually consider that Jesus needed anything. Jesus doesn’t need anything now. Christian theology has definitely evolved to a point of view that says God is self-sufficient.

But what does God want?

It’s bigger than obedience. If God wanted obedience there are better ways that what God has been doing. God could have made us to be incapable of mistakes, or of resistance, or of sin. Instead, God made us capable of choice.

God could have engaged with us as a constantly present judge, one like our mother who was always over our shoulder when we were young saying, “No, you can’t do that.” Weren’t we all grateful when our parents stopped doing that? And weren’t we who’ve been parents or caretakers for children when they grew to a point where we were willing to stop doing that?

God could have set up a set of consequences for sin and error that would entirely prevent us from trespass. When my children were young, they would do things that we thought were bad for them or for others, behaviors we wanted to prevent. The trick was to make the cost of doing those things higher than they were willing to pay. Do the thing I don’t want you to do? I take away a thing you want for a while.

As they grew, they’d get to a point where they’d decide, “Ok. I’ll pay that price.” So we had to change the consequence. They were always just ahead of us, as I’m sure you can imagine.

God could keep the prices for us at a level that we would never be willing to pay.

But God didn’t. Hasn’t. Doesn’t.

What does God want?

I think that God wants a real relationship with us. We’re made in the image of God, says Genesis. Is that a coincidence? Wouldn’t a deity eager for relationship create living beings that bear some resemblance? Wouldn’t that deity risk disappointment and even betrayal for honesty and trust?

“The Lord needs it.”

These few words open up something about the relationship between God and human beings that made the Incarnation almost inevitable. Throughout the centuries the Scriptures record God’s efforts not just to make us straighten up and fly right, but to think beyond ourselves, to consider the needs of others, to extend our compassion beyond our smallest circles. To put in the front of our minds, “My neighbor needs it.”

When Jesus needed the colt, he needed to show that the people of Israel did not need another monarch in the style of the ancient warriors. Jesus’ neighbors did not need another war, another rebellion, another head beneath a crown. Tragically, they got it about forty years later. Tragically, human beings still choose war and violence when they might ride humbly on a donkey.

“The Lord needs it.”

The Lord needs partners in the quest for peace. The Lord needs partners in compassion for the poor. The Lord needs partners in the feeding of the hungry, the sheltering of the homeless, the healing of the sick. The Lord needs partners in the forgiving of the sinners, the comforting of the grieving, the inspiring of the hopeless. The Lord needs partners who are willing to carry some of the load through the confusion of the cheering crowds and across roads strewn with greens.

The Lord needs us to do our part.

Mark – and Matthew, Luke, and John – utterly failed to report whether the animal made it back home. We’ll have to assume that Jesus’ disciples kept Jesus’ promise. Jesus’ disciples haven’t always kept Jesus’ promises, I fear, but I have hope for this one.

Can we fulfill Jesus’ promises? Can we fulfill Jesus’ command to love one another, and to love those around us?

Can we be the ones Jesus needs to take on our burden and carry it faithfully until we can lay it down?

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches. Sometimes it’s intentional. Sometimes it isn’t.

The image is Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem by Wilhelm Morgner – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=155912.