Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons, Uncategorized

Sermon: Fulfilling the Law and the Prophets

February 8, 2026

Isaiah 58:1-12
Matthew 5:13-20

In her blog, preaching Professor Alyce M. McKenzie tells a story about a skit she and some students presented one year, which featured her giving feedback to Jesus on the Sermon on the Mount as if he were a member of her preaching class. In the skit, she said, “You remember we learned earlier in the semester that every sermon needs to have one single focus and you are all over the map with this one — salt, light, not coming to abolish the prophets, breaking and keeping commandments. It seems almost like you put a bunch of short sayings together in a row. And one more thing — your final sentence: ‘Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Where is the good news in this sermon ending? It sets out an impossible goal and then tells listeners they’ll be in trouble if they can’t do the impossible.”

The punchline, she wrote, is that while she was marking things on the blackboard with her back to the class, “Jesus” beckoned the other students to follow and they left her alone in the room.

There is some truth, however, to her critique. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus wasn’t making things easy for anyone. To a people whose Scriptures told them about their ancestors repeated failures to live up to the standards of the Law and the Prophets, Jesus said, “Fulfill them.” That’s where the light came from. It’s the source of the salt. And, oh yes, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Now, we’ve been taught for years that the Pharisees and the scribes were the villains of the New Testament, and certainly by the time the Gospels were written there was a lot of dissension between the emerging Christians and the senior theologians of Judaism. To Jesus’ hearers, though, the Pharisees and the scribes weren’t bad guys, they were the tip top examples of what goodness meant. These were the people who seriously contemplated God’s law, who worked through the implications of the things the prophets had said. To exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees set the bar incredibly high. Dr. McKenzie properly called it an “impossible goal.”

“’No!’ we might say, ‘Jesus didn’t really mean that,’” writes Karoline Lewis at Working Preacher. She continues, “But what if Jesus did? What if Jesus’ intention was for us as disciples to imagine and live into a righteousness that makes the kingdom of heaven possible? If this is true, no wonder Jesus tells this to his disciples from the beginning. They will need the rest of the Gospel to make sense of and embrace such a request.”

Fulfilling the Law and the Prophets. Jesus first – his followers next. Jesus first – and then you and me.

The usual complaint is that the Law and the Prophets are hard to understand. Are they? Really? “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers,” wrote Isaiah hundreds of years before Jesus was born. Is it hard to understand that self-interest is a problem? Is it hard to understand that exploiting people, whether they’re your employees or your family or your neighbor is a problem?

Quarreling and fighting. Clearly problems. And then there are the behaviors that aren’t problems, that are precisely what God was calling for in the Law and repeating through the prophets: Loose the bonds of injustice. Don’t burden people. Don’t enslave them. Share your bread. House the homeless. Clothe the naked. Care for your family. “Then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”

Or as Jesus put it, “You are the light of the world.”

A light not to be hidden.

Eric Barreto writes at Working Preacher, “Jesus gives the central insight that lights don’t magically end up underneath bushels. The only way for our light to be covered is if we put a bushel over it. We can hear the incredulous tone in Jesus’ voice, ‘No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel’ (verse 15). Ridiculous! Jesus is clear: we are not victims inevitably doomed to being distracted and drained by the bushels of inferiority or self-absorption or fantasy. Bushels can only block out the light when we put them there.”

There’s a lot of truth to that. You and I are more than capable of hiding our light, not by being humble, but by seeing something to do and leaving it undone. Somebody else will do it, we might think. Or there just isn’t time (which might be true). Worst of all, I’m too important to do this simple thing.

I can also think of more than one way in which others drop baskets over our light. Plenty of people have suffered being discounted by others. It is, in fact, an all-too-common experience. You sometimes hear of it being done by family members, who’ll tell one of the ‘ohana that their work is bad, that their opinions are unwelcome, that they themselves are worthless. We’re also familiar with broader prejudices within societies, which usually qualify certain groups as worth less or even worthless: children, foreigners, people with a different hue of skin, women.

In the January 31st edition of “Letters from an American,” historian Heather Cox Richardson quoted 19th century US Senator from South Carolina James Henry Hammond, who in 1858 told his colleagues that all societies need a “mudsill” class to do the work and to benefit their betters. African Americans served that purpose in the pre-Civil War South, but the North, he said, had “the man who lives by daily labor…in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”

Senator Hammond’s words were literally a bushel basket meant to extinguish the light of the world. They have their echoes today. Do not mistake them. They will do what’s chemically impossible: cause salt to lose its taste. They will do what breaks hearts, families, and societies: hide the light.

When Jesus told us to let our light shine, he didn’t just mean, “Do nice things.” He meant, “See that the hungry are fed and the homeless housed. See that the oppressed are freed and the burdened relieved. Do not let the powerful say, ‘Sorry,’ and do nothing as if that took care of it. Do what John the Baptist did. Tell the powerful to repent for their sins.”

Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org:

If our fasting does not enable us to discern God’s will more clearly,
If our prayers do not stir us to address unmet needs around us,
If our blessings do not compel us to bless our neighbor,
If our sacramental rites do not move us to solidarity with the marginalized,
If our praise of the abiding of Creator does not lead to care and respect of all creation,
If our confession does not spur us beyond absolution to repair,
If our assurance of God’s grace does not lead us to extend mercy,
Then why would the Holy and Just God even participate in it?

Yet, if we remove the yoke among us…
If we seek justice, speak truth, and love abundantly,
If we embrace the immigrant among us,
If we make space and consideration for the ignored and isolated,
If we lend our voice for the persecuted, defamed, and disenfranchised,
If we stand up to corruption and bear witness to wrongdoing,
If we raise our voice and move beyond our discomfort,
Then we too may receive the promise of the covenant and the Holy One’s declaration of “Here I am.”

Remove the yoke.

Remove the yoke.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes from his prepared text as he preaches, both accidentally and on purpose.

The image is Study for the Sermon on the Mount, a preliminary study for the cycle of paintings in Loccum Monastery by Eduard von Gebhardt (before 1925) – Van Ham Kunstauktionen (SØR Rusche Collection – Eduard von Gebhardt, Auktion 25.02.2021), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103398414.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Fulfilled

Jesus declared that he had come to fulfill the law and the prophets – and it’s worth remembering what the law and the prophets had insisted upon.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 5:13-20), the continuation of the Sermon on the Mount. That began, as we heard last week, with the Beatitudes, that series of blessings. It continued with Jesus first saying to his listeners, “You are the light of the world,” and “The city on a hill cannot be hid…” “so let your light shine.”

Jesus then said that he had not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them. The ancient Law and the guidance of the prophets was still relevant hundreds of years after they had been driven or spoken to the people. And so it’s worth remembering some of the things that it says in Law and Prophets that I think do represent that true light that can be seen as it shines from a hill.

A lot of people will tend to tell you it’s all about idolatry, about worshipping foreign gods, and indeed, the Law and the Prophets were concerned with these. The Law and the Prophets, however, were also concerned with the way that we treat one another. Over and over again the Prophets raised the question: what is happening with the widows and the orphans? What is their condition?

It is the welfare of the most vulnerable in a society that measures how well it is following the directives of God. If the widows and the orphans are suffering, if the foreigner among you is oppressed, if people are cheating one another in the businesses and the marketplaces, if they are lying to one another: Well, that is a measure of a society that is failing to keep the word of God.

So many things we shortcut. I’m not talking about dietary regulations or things like that. I’m thinking about the ways that we kind of let things slide and not insist upon a real diligence in our own ethical behavior. Those are the kinds of things that Jesus was concerned about. Jesus always raised the bar. He increased the challenge.

So for us, I think, the question is not just how are the widows and the orphans doing, but how are those other people who fit into groups that are usually dismissed, disregarded, dishonored? How are they doing?

And if they’re not doing well, then we as a society are not doing well in fulfilling the will 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 Pastor's Corner, Sermons

Sermon: Whose People Are We?

January 25, 2026

Isaiah 9:1-4
Matthew 4:12-23

About 750 years or so before Herod arrested John the Baptist and Jesus returned to the region of his childhood, the Assyrian Empire attacked the Jewish nations of Israel and Judah. Judah, where Isaiah lived in the capital of Jerusalem, survived the invasion because an outbreak of infectious disease swept through the Assyrian army and forced them to abandon the siege of Jerusalem. Israel, however, the northern of the two nations, fell. It ceased to exist as an independent country. That land included the territories of the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali, an area we know better by its common name in Jesus’ day: Galilee.

Isaiah, catching his breath as the Assyrian armies retreated, spoke a word of hope to the survivors of Israel. He addressed a dwindling population. Unlike most empires of ancient Mesopotamia, the Assyrians actually resettled large groups of conquered people. Scholars have estimated that over 3 million were displaced over 250 years. The result is the disappearance of ten of the twelve tribes descended from Jacob. The “Ten Lost Tribes” lived on the lands conquered by the Assyrians.

Isaiah’s vision of a nation increasing in joy, freed from their burdens and restored to their homes, did not take place for those he addressed. Centuries later Matthew considered the way Jesus’ ministry had begun in the backwater region of Galilee and made the connection: in Jesus there was joy. In Jesus there was liberation. In Jesus there was light.

Matthew, and for that matter most of the Gospel writers and early Christians, might have preferred Jesus’ ministry to get a different starting point. Jerusalem. That was the spot. Right in the center of things. Luke, you may remember, told stories about the child Jesus in Jerusalem, once as a newborn and once as a twelve-year-old. The Jesus story led toward Jerusalem, but shouldn’t it have started there, too?

To some degree Jesus was “on the run” from the law. After his baptism, he seems to have spent some time – we don’t know how long – in the Jordan valley among those clustered about John the Baptist. Then John was arrested by Herod Antipas and, according to the first century historian Josephus, imprisoned at Machaerus on the east shore of the Dead Sea. Capernaum on the shores of Galilee was a fair distance from Marchaerus, but ironically it was still within the territory Herod governed. I don’t know if anybody was looking for Jesus except that somebody might have grabbed him off the streets on suspicion of being an associate of John the Baptist.

Jesus didn’t choose to hide. He began to bring healing to people. He began to speak to what were probably slowly growing crowds. He began to preach during synagogue worship. He brought them the exact same basic message that John the Baptist had: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

As Raj Nadella writes at Working Preacher, “The devil tried to coopt him. The empire tried to threaten him. But nothing seemed to deter him. Jesus withdrew into Galilee spatially but, missionally, he stepped right in the heart of the empire. He boldly stepped into a dangerous space so he can lead others to safety.”

He started with four fishermen, and he started as he went on: with an invitation. As Dr. Nadella writes, “The Roman empire relied on threat, coercion and enticements to recruit people into its military. The new kingdom, on the other hand, inspires them to participate in it.“

Jesus didn’t offer a $50,000 signing bonus. He offered a challenge.

He called it “fishing for people.” I wonder how Peter, Andrew, James, and John heard it. Fishing for fish meant long, backbreaking hours on tasks ranging from hauling nets to mending them, sailing boats and patching them. It meant a limited customer base, because the Romans controlled the fishing economy of Galilee. Through a combination of market control and heavy taxes, they kept the fishing families at a subsistence level and passed the fruits of their labor up the chain of wealthy landowners, nobles, and royalty.

Jesus clearly didn’t mean that. He doesn’t seem to have charged anyone for healing. He doesn’t seem to have asked a fee for preaching. He did accept the invitations of local religious leaders for dinner. He did accept the financial support of some who traveled with him.

As David Lose writes at Working Preacher, “…Perhaps we might re-imagine just what it is that Jesus is calling these first disciples to be and do: fishers of people. And that implies relationships. Jesus, that is, calls these first disciples into relationship — with himself, with each other, and with all the various people they will meet over the next few years and, indeed, the rest of their lives.”

Relationship. Not exploitation. Relationship. Not domination. Relationship. Not condemnation.

Relationship.

To my mind, that’s a different kind of fishing. These fishermen care for the fish. These fishermen recognize themselves as related to the fish. These fishermen realize that they, that we, that all of us are fish, each one looking for the safety of the school, each one looking for the guidance of the group.

And Jesus said, “Follow me.”

There are a lot of people who’ll encourage you to follow them, their ways, their values, and their commitments. Some of them you should probably follow. For the most part, parents are pretty reliable guides, though those of us who are parents know that we’re not perfect, and those of who’ve had parents know for sure that they weren’t perfect. Tragically, parents can fail dramatically and disastrously, and sometimes they do. It takes a lot of work by a lot of people to help the children recover and heal. It takes a lot of work by a lot of people for those grieving parents to recover and heal, too.

There are people in leadership roles and it should be good to follow them, right? Employers. Managers. Bosses. Those folks are imperfect, too. Richard W. Swanson describes a kind of boss that can’t be followed at Provoking the Gospel: “Managers who think of disruption as a management strategy want employees to be afraid that they will be fired… The only successful response is boot-licking.

“Have you ever worked for a manager like this?  I have.  They make the earth shake under everyone’s feet and they make the shaking unpredictable, chaotic.  I have worked for such managers.  It doesn’t turn out well.  Good ideas are hidden away.  Analytical critique is punished.

“…Do not confuse this disruption with the drawing-near of God’s Dominion.”

What did the drawing-near of God’s Dominion look like? In Matthew’s words: “…teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”

What it doesn’t look like is what we’re getting from national leadership, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s assault on Minneapolis. New Yok Times reporter Charles Homans, a child of that city, wrote about an encounter he witnessed on January 14th: “What was clear in person, seeing the scene outside of the frame, were the limits of this performance of power. The agents had no capacity to maintain order or much apparent interest in doing so. Their presence was a vector of chaos, and controlling it was not in their job description. All that was holding the crowd back, as far as I could tell, was the knowledge that an officer like these shot a woman a week earlier and that another shot a man up the street an hour ago. I left the scene that night certain it would happen again.”

This operation and those like it in Los Angeles, Chicago, and now Maine (Maine. Really.) reveal a couple of things about U.S. immigration law. First is that much of what is legal is wrong. A favorite tactic of ICE agents outside of these enforcement sweeps has been to apprehend people when they come to immigration court, dismiss their hearings, and deport them. Apparently that’s legal. If it sounds absolutely unfair, I agree with you. When people engage with the system, they should get a full hearing.

Recently agents detained a five-year-old to get his father to open the door for them, and both are now in custody in Texas. The pair have an active asylum petition. Is this legal? Frankly, I hope not, but I’m afraid that it is and it illustrates how cruel the law can be.

Some of ICE’s actions, however, are clearly illegal. An internal memo has been leaked asserting that officers do not require a judicial warrant to enter a home. A federal judge in Minnesota ruled on January 17 that they do after a man was removed from his home based on an administrative warrant, one not signed by a judge. And once again, the man arrested was actively engaged in seeking proper status, and guess what? The day after his release he was taken into custody again when he appeared for an immigration hearing.

Officials have made clear that the deaths of two people at the hands of ICE officers will not be investigated. That tells me that justice has been decided. Due process has become plain force. Do what we tell you or die.

“…Teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”

Our loyalty is being demanded. Our obedience is being required. Our compliance is being forced. These are not the ways of Jesus. These are not the acts of Jesus. These are not the voices of Jesus.

Whose people are we? We belong to Jesus and nobody else. When Herod threatened to arrest Jesus, do you know what he said? “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.’” Let us be Jesus’ people. Let us go our way and bring healing. Let us teach and proclaim good news. Let us finish our work against the forces of chaos, violence, and tyranny.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches, so the sermon as prepared does not precisely match the sermon as delivered.

The illustration is The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew by Duccio di Buoninsegna (between 1308 and 1311), part of the altarpiece in the Cathedral of Siena – 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=150337.

Rev. Eric Anderson Pastor's Corner, What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Peaceable Kingdom

Isaiah’s vision of an utterly peaceful world began with wisdom, compassion, righteousness, and peace. May we move toward it this Advent season.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the eleventh chapter of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 11:1-10). This coming Sunday is the second Sunday of Advent. The theme is peace, so it is entirely appropriate that the Isaiah reading is one of his accounts of the Peaceable Kingdom.

The wolf and the lamb lying down together. The lion eating straw like the ox. “And a little child shall lead them.”

Not surprisingly, Isaiah started with a description of what leadership would look like: that a shoot would emerge from the stump of Jesse, and that this new monarch would rule in a new and different way, with wisdom, with righteousness, with the fear of the Lord – that kind of reverent respect that, well, is frankly very uncommon amongst leaders of nations, now isn’t it?

The foundation of peace for the natural world, Isaiah said, was peace within the human world.

I can’t say that that is obviously true. If human beings ceased to make war upon one another, if human beings ceased to commit crimes against one another, if human beings abandoned violence forever, I’m afraid there would still be hunting in the forests and in the seas – at least until God changes the world. Nevertheless, Isaiah was absolutely right to seek out that first part of the vision rooted in peace amongst human beings. Because even if we can’t directly affect the peace of the rest of Creation, we can make peace amongst ourselves. We can choose wisdom over folly. We can choose compassion over violence. We can choose peace.

All too frequently, we choose folly. We choose violence. we choose war. All too rarely, we choose wisdom. We choose compassion. We choose peace.

In this Advent season, may we take a step, even a fraction of a step, towards Isaiah’s vision. Let us choose wisdom, righteousness, compassion, and peace.

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.