Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Never Satisfied

July 5, 2026

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Some people – and apparently some birds, if my story has any connection to reality – are never satisfied. Serve them coffee and they’ll ask for tea. Serve them hot tea and they’ll ask for iced. Serve them iced tea and they’ll ask for coffee.

That’s fine, mostly. There are many ways in which I, personally, would like the world to be better than it is. I’d like my skin to be more resistant to ultraviolent light. I’d like the rain to hold off until I’m under a roof. I’d love to officiate at fewer funerals of friends and beloved members of this church.

On this day after Independence Day, I’d also like to see the Constitution’s goals of a more perfect union brought closer to fulfillment. I few years ago I read Jill Lepore’s These Truths, a history of the United States from 1492 to 2016. I came away with an appreciation of how often people had made significant gains in achieving a more just and egalitarian government – and how often those gains had been clawed away by succeeding generations, to be won again at a later time.

As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, paraphrasing the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In Dr. Lepore’s work, we also see that people keep trying to bend it back.

I don’t think anybody should be satisfied with bending away from the full inclusion of all people in the social and political life of the nation. I don’t think denying rights to people of color or to women should be tolerated. I think that LGBTQ+ folks should have every right that a straight person has. I think that any person present in the United States accused of misdeeds deserves proper process of law and reasonable bail.

If we look at this nation without rose-colored filters, we’ll see that we have not attained these things. There’s no reason we should be satisfied. There’s no reason we shouldn’t do the work toward achieving these goals.

But was that what Jesus was talking about two thousand years ago? A little bit, perhaps.

The issue wasn’t the organization or inclusive nature of government, which was organized against inclusion far more than that of the United States of America. The issue was how some people found ways to discount the similar messages of two dissimilar figures: John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth.

As Elisabeth Johnson writes at Working Preacher, “The problem with this generation, Jesus says, is that they listen neither to John nor to Jesus. John’s austere lifestyle led people to accuse him of having a demon, while Jesus’ habit of eating and drinking with sinners earned him a bad reputation (11:18-19). This generation finds reason to take offense at both John and Jesus and thus to evade the call of both.”

Ah, how little things have changed.

Some people are never satisfied, are they?

I swear this dissatisfaction comes from all sides. When the Church advocates for publicly funded support for the poor and marginalized, we get told to stay in our lane and stay out of politics. But then when the Church organizes to provide meals and shelter for the poor and marginalized, we get told we’re creating a public nuisance by having all these poor and marginalized people about.

The social services of the first century were nothing to aspire to, but at least the reality of poor people was accepted. In the twenty-first century, we have a bad habit of closing off spaces to the poor, in the curious belief that somehow if we can’t see them, they don’t exist, and we don’t have to worry about them, support them, or assist them any more.

Never satisfied.

A few weeks ago someone who goes by Pastor Brandon online posted a cartoon in which two figures hold this conversation: “Why don’t you preach more on sin?” “Okay, tell me your sin and I’ll try to preach a sermon on it.” “No, I mean, why don’t you preach on…” “Is that your sin?” “No.” “Well, why would you want to hear a sermon on someone else’s sin?”

That goes to the heart of it, doesn’t it? Each and every one of us, if we’re challenged by some element of the Good News, by some aspect of prophetic summons, by some vision that requires us to change, well. That’s when we start to discount the messenger. Or to rework the message. If we’re Christians, we can’t say that Jesus didn’t mean what he said. But we’re pretty good at changing the meaning of what he said.

To this day, I’m astonished that Christians in political power, from the first Christian Roman emperors to members of the United States Congress, draw a dividing line between the expectations of individuals and the expectations of civil authorities, as if a government run by Christians can start wars of conquest like the Crusades, commit savagery against designated heretics or Jews, or just simply refuse to aid the poor whose poverty has been exaggerated by the acts of other Christians. Did Jesus seek glory through power? Did Jesus gather wealth to himself? Did Jesus call for war and revolution?

No. But later Christians did. Contemporary Christians do. And they keep saying it’s consistent with the words of Jesus.

I started by saying that there’s no reason to be fully satisfied with the nation, and that we need to work for its improvement. I also say that there’s no reason to be fully satisfied with the Church. It has always needed improvement – witness the aggravated letters of Paul – and, so far as I can tell, always will.

Because at the heart of it all is the human talent for finding ways around the clear teaching of John and Jesus and those who echoed them well: we have work to do, obligations to fulfill. It may be a yoke that does not injure, but it is still a yoke and we have to pull. We pull in the presence of Jesus, who encourages, guides, and strengthens us, who saves our spirits and gives rest to our souls.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric prepares a written manuscript, but he does make changes while preaching, so the sermon as recorded is not an exact match to the sermon as written.

Photo by Basile Morin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64696618.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Written on the Heart

March 17, 2024

Psalm 51:1-12
Jeremiah 31:31-34

Ah, Jeremiah. Such a cheerful fellow.

Kelly J. Murphy writes at Working Preacher, “This is the prophet who cries, ‘Therefore thus says the LORD: See, I am laying before this people stumbling blocks against which they shall stumble; parents and children together, neighbor and friend shall perish’ (Jeremiah 6:21) and ‘Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!’ (Jeremiah 23:1). It’s no wonder that Jeremiah is often called the ‘Weeping Prophet.’”

All right. Perhaps not so cheerful.

Jeremiah lived through troubled times. At the beginning of his prophetic ministry, he experienced the reforms of King Josiah, which promised to bring the nation of Judah closer to its covenant with God. His hopes were dashed when Josiah died in battle and his successors abandoned the reforms. Each one received the gloomy judgement of the authors of 2 Kings: “He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, just as his ancestors had done.”

Jeremiah aggressively criticized the worship of other gods, the gods introduced by foreign nations, which had grown among the Israelites over the years. He wrote things like this:

As a thief is shamed when caught,
    so the house of Israel shall be shamed:
they, their kings, their officials,
    their priests, and their prophets,
who say to a tree, “You are my father,”
    and to a stone, “You gave me birth.”
For they have turned their backs to me
    and not their faces.
But in the time of their trouble they say,
    “Come and save us!”

– Jeremiah 2:26-27

Jeremiah didn’t just condemn idolatry. He condemned fraud and lies. He condemned the failure to care for orphans and the needy. He condemned greed among the elite. He stood before the Temple and asked if it had become a den of robbers. You might remember that Jesus said something similar about six hundred years later. Jeremiah warned that the inevitable result of this level of faithlessness and sin was the breaking of the nation’s covenant with God, and without God’s protection, the tiny nation would not survive violent encounters with the great empires of Assyria or Babylon, which hovered to the north, or with Egypt, which lurked to the south.

The nation did not survive.

In 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon besieged Jerusalem. King Jeconiah surrendered. The Babylonians took the king and a number of civic and religious leaders to Babylon in exile, including a member of the priesthood named Ezekiel. Ezekiel began writing his book of prophecy after arriving in Babylon.

The Babylonians put Jeconiah’s uncle, Zedekiah, on the throne. Ten years later, Zedekiah attempted rebellion, which Jeremiah also condemned. Zedekiah was wrong; Jeremiah was right. The city fell in 587 to the Babylonian army, the Temple was destroyed, and the nation of Judah perished.

It was the unimaginable calamity. The nation that God had founded and promised to protect died.

And Jeremiah’s message changed.

“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

The “Weeping Prophet” found and declared a new hope.

In the future, he said, there would be a new covenant.

It has to be said that this would not be the first new covenant between God and the descendants of Abraham. It wouldn’t even be the second. God restated the covenant with Abraham, made a covenant with the people through Moses and then had to make it again when it was swiftly broken. God reshaped that covenant as the nation chose to empower a monarchy and did it again when the portable tabernacle found a permanent home in the Jerusalem Temple.

In the context of the fall of Jerusalem, however, the announcement of this new covenant must have astonished its hearers. Wil Gafney writes at Working Preacher, “The passage ends with a commitment from God to forget their sin for all time. These words promised desperately-needed hope to the survivors of the invasion. The God of Creation would re-create them. The God of Exodus would embrace them again. The merciful, tender loving God would forgive all their sin and absolve them of the sins of their ancestors. The sin that led God to surrender Judah and Jerusalem to the Babylonians would be forgiven.”

Standing literally in the wreckage of their hopes, Jeremiah offered hope once more.

Nearly three millennia later, how do we understand this hope?

First, the exiles of Judah did return from Babylon – or at least, their descendants did, seventy years after their parents and grandparents were taken away from Jerusalem. I can’t say, however, that they experienced this promise of the law being written on their hearts. They continued to teach one another to know the LORD. We know this because they kept writing books about knowing the LORD, many of which became Scripture for Jews and for us. What do we use Scripture for? To teach about God.

As Terence Fretheim writes at Working Preacher, “Even from a Christian perspective this text has not been fully fulfilled. We still need to encourage others to ‘know the Lord.’ And the claim that ‘all know me, from the least of them to the greatest’ remains a promise for the future.”

It’s not hard to come to that conclusion. We organize our families, our society, and our nation around the assumption that people need to be taught to do what is right, and good, and fit. We spend the early years of children’s lives teaching them not to grab. We have organized educational programs, both secular and sacred, to teach children what we think they should know and to behave as we think they should behave.

Among adults, we devote a good deal of resources to discouraging certain kinds of behavior, primarily versions of theft and levels of violence. We empower people to determine what behaviors should be tolerated and what behaviors should be punished: legislators. We give other people the privilege to investigate forbidden behavior and to use force – which is otherwise prohibited – to stop people from continuing those behaviors: law enforcement. Further resources go to determining the truth or falsehood of accusations, and to applying consequences for engaging in forbidden behavior: courts and judges. Again, those consequences – imprisonment, primarily – are ordinarily forbidden behaviors themselves.

Would this be necessary among a people in whose hearts God had written the law?

Well. Maybe. Maybe not.

In Jeremiah’s day, he could point to specific elements of the covenant with God and say, “These things you’re doing violate the covenant.” In our day, we can do much the same. “You know what is right and wrong,” we can say, “and you’ve chosen what is wrong.”

Knowledge of God’s guidance, knowledge of God’s wishes, knowledge of God’s will doesn’t appear to be enough to prevent people from doing what God doesn’t want them to do. If it’s written upon the heart, would that make a difference? Wouldn’t you and I, with full knowledge of God’s direction, still need to decide for ourselves that we will do what is good, and right, and fit, and not do what is bad, and wrong, and unfit?

Of course we would. It’s no different from our situation now, when we have been taught what we know, and still have to choose.

Jeremiah’s new covenant reinforces God’s ancient commitment to the people of Israel, and by extension to the people of the Earth, not to fully abandon us even when we betray God’s trust. “I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” This caught the attention of the author of Hebrews, who connected Jesus’ supreme gift of forgiveness with this ancient promise. “What is imagined here,” writes Margaret Odell at Working Preacher, “is a resilient relationship of trust and mutuality, in which Israel responds to God from the heart, and God accepts Israel freely, with mercy and forgiveness. But what makes the new covenant possible is what had always been true but needed to be learned again. ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love.’ This love, suggests Jeremiah, is nothing new.”

The Scriptures contain abundant stories of people disappointing God, both individual people and entire societies. The Scriptures describe many times when God seems to have given up in disgust and walked away.

The Scriptures also assert that for each one of those times and many more times God has come back, started over, offered a new covenant, extended forgiveness, welcomed a new relationship. That’s been true for great big groups of people and it’s been true for individuals like you and I.

The law may or may not be written on our hearts. What you will find written there is the steadfast love of God, and it has not, will not, and cannot be erased.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric revises his prepared sermon while preaching. Sometimes it’s an improvement.

The image is The Prophets Jeremiah and Baruch (btw 1600 & 1639) by Rutilio di Lorenzo Manetti – Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=122066973.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Not So New Teaching

January 28, 2024

Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Mark 1:21-28

It probably won’t surprise many of you that I have read – more than once – J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous novel The Lord of the Rings. It will also fail to surprise you that I’ve seen the movies directed by Peter Jackson – more than once. You will probably nod sagely without surprise that I’ve watched them with the director’s commentary track turned on. There are reasons why my personal blog site is titled, “Ordained Geek.”

I can’t remember which movie it was, but in one of those commentary tracks Peter Jackson said, regarding a plot change he’d made from Tolkien’s novel, that “it was time for an action scene.” Well, OK. I remember enjoying My Dinner with Andre, which has no action scenes at all, but that’s not the movie he was making.

Writing at Working Preacher about this synagogue scene in Mark’s Gospel, Mark Skinner says, “Possessed by the Holy Spirit, fresh from successfully confronting Satan in the wilderness, preaching the reign of God, and now in the company of at least four followers, it’s time for Jesus’ public ministry to gather momentum. It’s time for a fight scene.”

I guess Peter Jackson’s sensibilities have deeper roots than I’d believed.

The first thing that strikes me about Jesus’ teaching in the Capernaum synagogue is… we don’t know what Jesus said. Mark wrote that Jesus taught, and left out a description of what Jesus taught. The best we can do is go back a few verses to Mark’s description of Jesus’ early message, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15)

Instead, Mark concentrated on the response of the listeners. They were astounded, but not so much by the message. “Repent!” is one of the most common messages of Israel’s prophets. You’re abusing the poor; repent! You’re failing to care for the widows and orphans; repent! You’re giving your loyalty to false gods; repent! Each of the prophets testified to this need for repentance with a sense of urgency and of necessity, as if the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near.

Not so new teaching.

Jesus presented it differently than his hearers were accustomed to. As D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindButLovingIt, “I don’t take this to be a harsh criticism of the scribes, as if their teaching were boring, wrong, or weak. In fact, my suspicion is that ‘teaching as the scribes’ is exactly what people expect in the synagogue – their teaching is a close adherence to the scripture, their authority is subordinated to the authority of Moses or the prophets, etc. The scribes’ teaching would be biblical teaching.”

I have to say that that’s how I was taught to preach and teach – to lay out ideas and information such that people – you – can develop your own ideas and theology. In the first century, the rabbis discussed things. Sometimes they argued things. They were not, however, interested in settling into a rigid, dogmatic final answer. It was Christians that settled into that pattern over the centuries that followed Jesus and the emergence of the Church. My training came out of a realization that such dogmatism had deprived most Christians of the opportunity to think and reason and believe for themselves.

It also came out of the reluctant admission that we, the ordained clergy, are not Jesus. We do not have the depth of his awareness. We have to rely on the fragmentary reports of his words and actions. In our preaching, I was taught, our job is to focus on the text of the Scripture itself.

That’s also a not so new teaching.

Then the shouting began.

How are we to understand this “man with an unclean spirit?” Did he have a mental health breakdown? Was it rooted in his body chemistry? Do we need to share the belief in predatory evil spirits with those of the first century? Heaven knows we don’t need to believe that to know that there’s plenty of predatory evil spirits rooted in human greed and power. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Sometimes our ‘unclean spirits’ take up residence in our holy places.  That is, we carry our destructive habits and tendencies right into our churches, our friendships, our families, and our workplaces.  Sometimes our demons — our fears, our addictions, our sins, and our compulsions — recognize Jesus first because they know that an encounter with him will change everything.”

Osvaldo Vena writes at Working Preacher, “Naming the demons is a way to recognize that they exist. We start with the big one, Unbelief: losing one’s faith in God, in life as a sacred force, and in our fellow human beings. It is the feeling that nothing can be done to solve our problems. Then, springing from this one, come the others in fearful company: homophobia, racism, sexism, classism, religious and ideological intolerance, violence at home and at school, poverty, militarism, terrorism, war, greed, extreme individualism, globalization, out-of-control capitalism, media-infused fear that leads to paranoia, and governmental manipulation of information. To name just a few.”

There are countless habits, ideologies, commitments, and actions that dehumanize life or, if you like, demonize it. They limit human freedom and potential, sometimes of an individual, and sometimes of entire populations. They sometimes get presented as necessities – we have to do things this way or it all falls apart – and occasionally as virtues. In an election year, be very aware of attempts to tell you that harming other people is necessary or right. Those are lies. Those are big lies. Those are the voices of the demons.

How I wish I had Jesus’ ability to say, “Be silent, and come out of him!”

How I wish I had Jesus’ ability to set those free who have been taken captive by malice and falsehood.

How I wish I had Jesus’ ability to break the chains that bind.

We’re still at the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel. We’ve heard about Jesus’ baptism. We’ve heard the foundation of his message. We’ve heard the call of his first four disciples. Now we’ve heard his first teaching in a synagogue – which turned out to be his first healing instead. I’d just like to point out that, despite it taking place on the sabbath in a synagogue, nobody protested that Jesus had broken the sabbath. Instead, they were just more impressed. I love these words from Melissa Bane Sevier on her blog, “Jesus turns and heals him, just as he will heal so many others of disease or disability. Then he turns back to his teaching. I’ll bet people listen a little more closely after that.”

I’d guess they did, even if the teaching wasn’t all that new after all.

Mark went on to describe a series of healings, because for Mark Jesus’ healing power deeply revealed who Jesus was. He could do these miraculous things – and more to the point he did them to relieve the pain and suffering of those around him. Jesus saw and heard, and he acted.

That’s also not such a new teaching, even if compassionate response to suffering is more rare than we’d like.

Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “Jesus reveals a boundary breaking God. We will see this all over Mark. Each and every boundary we try to put in place, we think is in place, even that which we perceive as impenetrable, God bursts through. Political, social, religious, ethic, racial, sexual, gendered, cosmic, even if we are honest, the final boundary we persist in thinking is beyond God’s ability to shatter — death.”

We cannot claim this to be a new teaching, even if it seemed like it to the worshipers in Capernaum. It’s been two thousand years since Jesus said and did these things, it’s been just a little less than that since Mark set pen to parchment. It’s a not so new teaching, that the realm of God is near and we are called to change our lives.

We are called to aid others in their quests for freedom: freedom from the habits, addictions, and assumptions that limit us as individuals; freedom from the ideologies and isms that set boundaries upon human potential; freedom from the unjust rule of powers and principalities that care for their own welfare and not for that of their people. We are called to put this not-so-new-teaching into daily practice in our homes and in our workplaces and in our community.

We are called to follow the example of Jesus.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the recording does not, and will not, match the prepared text.

The image is Christ Healing a Possessed Man in the Synagogue at Capernaum, an 11th century fresco in the bell tower of Lambach Abbey, Lambach, Austria, by an unknown artist – Scan aus: Rudolf Lehr –- Landes-Chronik Oberösterreich, Wien: Verlag Christian Brandstätter 2004 S. 79 ISBN 3-85498-331-X, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6633986.