Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: One Silver Coin

September 14, 2025

1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10

For me, it’s not about coins. It’s about keys. If you want to observe frantic me, hide my keys. I will go through everything and then some to find my keys. I know this from painful experience. I’ll mention that most of the time when I’ve misplaced my keys, it’s because I’ve put them in a pocket other than where I usually put them.

That’s not to say that I haven’t been obsessed with coins. I studied and performed a certain number of magic shows as a pre-adolescent and teen. My very first paying job, in fact, was as a magician for a fair. One of the illusions I worked on for a long time was the classic one of pulling coins from the air and dropping them in a container.

I may be giving something away here, but I couldn’t really pull coins out of thin air. If I had, it would have been a lot simpler collecting the coins needed to make it a really impressive illusion. For months I badgered friends and relations for half-dollar coins, paying in nickels, dimes, and quarters (and the occasional dollar bill if I got lucky) to accumulate the proper hoard. I had quite a collection by the time I got busy with other things and stopped performing.

The coins ended up going toward my first (and last, actually) ten-speed bicycle.

So what is the worth of a silver coin? It’s the value of a crowd-satisfying illusion. It’s the value of feet circling to get tires rolling.

What is the worth of a human being?

“Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” (Luke 15:1-2)

There are people who are worth eating with, and there are people who aren’t worth eating with. We all know this. Some people raise the level of the conversation, or they fill the room with laughter. They may bring comfort to people who are sad, or they be so appreciative of what they’re served that it brings a smile to the faces of the hosts. Other people drag a party down. They’re constantly insulting people, or they get into arguments. They don’t seem to notice other people’s feelings, or, heaven help us, their sense of humor leans toward puns.

The scribes and the Pharisees weren’t precisely thinking of that, though they certainly worried about social scandal. In the Roman Empire of the first century, lots of people wouldn’t have been welcome at a table, because if you were a member of some class of people, there would have been other classes of people you wouldn’t eat with. Emperors ate with monarchs and senators, not with slaves. For everyone, there was someone who was…

Less than human.

Not worth as much as I am.

Not worth a single silver coin.

Of all humanity’s sins, this is the one that troubles me the most: when we come up with some reason that I (or we) are better than some individual you, or a collective you. I’m better because of who my parents were. I’m better because of my education. I’m better because of my appointed position. I’m better because I’m male. I’m better because of who attracts me. I’m better because I can hear without aid. I’m better because I can run faster. I’m better because I’m white.

I’m worth a lot.

You’re not.

Quite aside from how delusional all that is, it’s a direct contradiction of Genesis’ assertion of the nature of humanity.

“So God created humans in his image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27)

We’re created in the image of God. How can anyone be worth more than that?

How can anyone be worth less than that?

How much is a human being worth?

E. Trey Clark writes at Working Preacher, “…what is surprising is that when the lady finds the coin, she chooses to spend it, and likely the rest of her money, on throwing a party with ‘her friends and neighbors’ (15:9). The picture is even more outrageous than the modest shepherd’s celebration. God is a God who celebrates finding the lost, without restraint.”

To Jesus, a human being is worth a cheer that echoes across the heavens. “There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

It’s worth noting that both the missing sheep and the lost coin are already part of the flock and the household. God’s flock and God’s household are bigger than we think they are. We tend to put constraints on them, thinking that it’s the people like us, right? “Like us” might be members of the family, or our cultural group. They might be part of our church or political party. “Like us” might be any of those reasons that we thought we were better than others.

In Jesus’ stories, the lost sheep was part of the flock already. The lost coin was there in the house. In Jesus’ stories, the flock and the house are big. All people are those sought by God.

All people are those sought by God.

What is the worth of a human being? To God, each one of us is a silver coin, or a pearl of great price.

What is the worth of a human being to us?

Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “Most interpretations of this text emphasize the divine love of Jesus, and while that is certainly present, it may be the human love of Jesus that is most note-worthy in the teaching moment. Jesus prefaces the parables with the question, ‘Who among you….’ This phrasing invites his conversation partners and the audience to place themselves in the narrative, not just as substitutes for God, and not only to evoke their empathy for the Holy One’s compassion. The question challenges them to adjust their attitudes because the actions Jesus describes reflect the expected behavior of any human being.”

Every era in history has lived with the sin of “I am greater than you because…” Ours is no different in that way, but we are seeing it expanding, and we are seeing people of influence and power endorsing it. Let me be clear. I do not believe in the use of violence against people who encourage racial prejudice, who empower men against women, who seek to oppress LGBTQ people, who would turn away the tired and the poor at the borders. No violence. No death. Why? Because they are made in the image of God. They are worth a silver coin. They are pearls of great price. No death.

Nor would I silence them. I would repudiate their ideas. I would reject their policies. I would revive the communities that they have been suppressing. I would lift up the value of every human being and insist upon it in law, culture, and community. Frankly, I would see their ideas and ideals lost and forgotten.

I would follow Jesus in valuing every human being as much as a lost sheep, as much as a silver coin. I would follow Jesus in singing with the angels every time a person finds the love of God.

I would be a human being of worth myself.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes to his prepared text while preaching, so you will find that it sounds something different to how it reads.

The image is A Parable – The Lost Coin, by Hochhalter, Cara B., from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59056 [retrieved September 14, 2025]. Original source: Cara B. Hochhalter.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Summer Fruit

July 20, 2025

Amos 8:1-12
Luke 10:38-42

As I remember the home in which I grew up, I recall two paintings – prints, actually – that adorned the walls. One was a mother and child. The other was a still life of a bowl of fruit. Summer fruit.

Well, actually, it was apples and pears, which in New England are early autumn fruit, but let it pass.

To all of us in the household, it was a colorful illustration of sweetness, of family, of nourishment, of hospitality.

So to me, a basket of summer fruit is a peculiar way to open Amos’ fierce denunciation of the powerful people of ancient Israel. I’m not the only one to find it strange. Pamela Scalise writes at Working Preacher, “The bounty of sweetness from pomegranates, figs, and grapes, the value of olive oil and wine, the long years of care and cultivation to bring fruit-bearing trees and vines to productivity—all these associations with summer fruit anticipate a good word of blessing. God’s word through the prophet, however, announces the end.”

God – or Amos, because it’s clear that part of an ancient prophet’s role was to choose the human words with which to express what they’d heard from God – had a reason to start with fruit that isn’t apparent to us, because we’re reading this text in translation. As Tyler Mayfield writes at Working Preacher, “…the image is likely chosen primarily to create a wordplay in the original Hebrew. The word for ‘summer fruit’ is qayits, and the word for ‘end’ is qets. The prophet uses similar-sounding words to craft a message.”

As a fan of puns, I approve this message.

I also have to point out, along with other commentators, something that every one of us know who live in this climate. If you leave a basket of fruit out for very long, bad things happen, at least from our point of view. From the point of view of the fruit flies it’s not so bad, but few of us enjoy the sight or smell of rotting fruit on the kitchen counter.

Amos’ readers knew that just as well, and Amos’ readers would have been able to make the connection to the national reality of ancient Israel 750 years before the birth of Jesus. Dan Clendenin writes at JourneyWithJesus.net: “He lived during the reign of king Jeroboam II, who forged a political dynasty characterized by territorial expansion, aggressive militarism, and unprecedented national prosperity. The citizens of his day took pride in their misguided religiosity, their history as God’s elect people, their military conquests, their economic affluence, and their political security.” In other words, the nation itself resembled a basket of summer fruit: Ripe. Fragrant. Tasty. Nutritious.

The nation’s prosperity and power, warned Amos, was also the sign of its end, the hidden decomposition that would spread until the color faded, the fragrance fouled, the flavor soured, and the nutrition turned to poison. Why? Because the nation’s riches were founded on exploitation of its citizens.

4 Hear this, you who trample on the needy,
    and bring to ruin the poor of the land,
5 saying, “When will the new moon be over
    so that we may sell grain,
and the Sabbath,
    so that we may offer wheat for sale?
We will make the ephah smaller and the shekel heavier
    and practice deceit with false balances,
6 buying the poor for silver
    and the needy for a pair of sandals
    and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”

7 The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob:
Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

Thanks in part to the authors of First and Second Kings, we tend to remember that the primary sin of the ancient realms of Israel and Judah was the worship of foreign gods. When you read what the prophets wrote in their own time addressing the immediate concerns, they did raise that problem. Amos did just that in verse 14 of this very chapter.

But. To Amos, that was secondary.

As Dr. Mayfield writes, “The people’s offense has almost entirely to do with how they treat each other. It’s ethical. Amos 2:6–8 makes this clear:”

If you haven’t memorized Amos 2:6-8, here it is:

6 Thus says the Lord:
For three transgressions of Israel,
    and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,[c]
because they sell the righteous for silver
    and the needy for a pair of sandals—
7 they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth
    and push the afflicted out of the way;
father and son go in to the same young woman,
    so that my holy name is profaned;
8 they lay themselves down beside every altar
    on garments taken in pledge;
and in the house of their God they drink
    wine bought with fines they imposed.

To punish these kinds of sins, God announced the destruction of the nation. If that seems harsh, it was. The reality was that God didn’t have to do anything to destroy the ancient realm of Israel. It was destroying itself. The metaphor of the summer fruit was a pun on the end, but it also reflected the not-yet-seen degradation of the nation itself based upon the misbehavior of the most powerful. When those in authority abuse their citizens, when those in power discount the needs of the community, when those of wealth extract more wealth for themselves from those who have the least, those societies cannot stand. They will crumble. They will fall.

The nation of Israel to which Amos prophesied fell about 730 years before Jesus was born, probably about the same time Amos himself died. It fell before the invading army of an enormous empire. Other nations, including its neighbor Judah, survived that great invasion.

But in the northern kingdom of Israel, the basket of summer fruit had fully decayed.

You know, I’d kind of like to stay away from the basket of summer fruit that is the United States of America. I’d like to choose the better part of Jesus, to attend to what he said, and to rejoice in the reassurance of his presence. That’s partially what my sabbatical was about. To soak in the goodness of God.

But then along comes Amos, and I can’t tune him out. As Dan Clendenin writes, “Amos delivered a withering cultural critique.  He describes how the rich trampled the poor. He says the affluent flaunted their expensive lotions, elaborate music, and vacation homes with beds of inlaid ivory. Fathers and sons abused the same temple prostitute. Corrupt judges sold justice to the highest bidder, predatory lenders exploited vulnerable families.  And then religious leaders pronounced God’s blessing on it all.

“Does this not sound strangely familiar?”

Of course it does. Of course it does. In the wake of Congressional decisions to reduce taxes on the wealthiest and increase the burdens of the poor, it sounds very familiar. In the wake of countless people whose refugee petitions were abruptly dismissed and found Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers waiting in the court hallways to whisk them away, it sounds very familiar. In the decisions to end foreign aid programs while flexing military might, it sounds very familiar.

These choices place the nation on the path of decay. Of degradation. Of rot. These choices imperil the social contract that makes the nation function, that brings people to their jobs every day, that underlies their obedience to basic laws, that helps them trust in the integrity of juries and judges. These choices will inevitably degrade the efficiency and reliability of police forces, the military, and the other public servants who maintain our roads, inspect the food supply, and make sure our medications are safe and effective.

These choices link the prosperity of summer fruit with the heartbreak of the end. These choices do not need God to bring catastrophe in punishment. These choices make their own catastrophe.

Israel’s rulers did not listen to Amos 2700 years ago.

We will need to be loud indeed for our leaders to listen to us now.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes from his prepared text while preaching the sermon, so what you read here will not be identical to what he said while preaching.

Photo by Eric Anderson.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: God’s Children Now

April 14, 2024

1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36-48

“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”

Up to this point in the First Letter of John, the author – I guess we’ll call him John, although the name itself doesn’t appear in the book or in the other two books we call “letters of John” – up to this point, the author has called his readers “little children.” I think he intended it as a term of endearment, because he also uses the word, “beloved” to address his readers. In this moment, however, we’re no longer John’s children. We’re God’s children, and God’s children because God loved us and loves us still.

That’s a wonderful thing to hear.

It’s especially nice to hear after hearing, in the first chapter, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” That’s a somewhat subtle way of saying that if we say we’re sinless, we lie. John assures us, however, that God forgives sin through the advocacy of Jesus Christ. “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

Again, a wonderful thing to hear.

In the second chapter of 1 John, he writes about a conflict within the church, one that has apparently caused some people to leave. It’s not clear what happened or why they left, but John had no sympathy. “They went out from us, but they did not belong to us, for if they had belonged to us they would have remainedwith us.”

Having written that they “do not belong to us,” John wrote that “we” are God’s children. “They,” therefore, are not.

I’m afraid that conflicts in the Church have often looked like this. “We” are righteous and “they” are unrighteous. “We” are children of God and “they” are “children of the devil,” which John called “them” in the very next verse after our reading stopped this morning.

Nobody knows for certain when 1 John was written, but here we have it: within a hundred years of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Church was engaged in separating “Us” from “Them” and the “children of God” from the “children of the devil.”

I’m… pretty sure that that was not what Jesus had in mind.

It does seem that Jesus might have had something in mind around, oh, I don’t know, loving one another. John wrote about that a lot in this book, as it happens. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when heis revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” We will be like the one who loves us into becoming God’s children.

It’s a pity that we’re not there yet.

We weren’t there yet when John wrote, because otherwise his understanding of love might have kept him from labeling those who disagreed with him “children of the devil.” We weren’t there yet when Christian leaders in the first few centuries began calling themselves “orthodox” and others “heretics.” We weren’t there yet when major divisions in the Church took place in the five hundreds, and in the thousands, and the 1500s, and are we experiencing another transition now?

The biggest witness against the truth proclaimed by the Church is its division against itself. If we cannot love those who proclaim the resurrection of Christ as we do, how will we ever love anyone else?

It’s an awfully good question.

You see, I run into verse 6, “No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him,” and I ask myself: So do I know God? Do I know Christ? Am I God’s child?

Elisabeth Johnson writes at Working Preacher, “The nature of Christian hope is to live simultaneously in the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet.’ We are called to live into the future reality that God has promised. Perhaps this is the context in which to understand the following verses about sin (verses 4-7), which seem to contradict what the author has already said in 1:6-10. Whereas the author had affirmed in 1:6-10 that it is delusional for anyone to say that they are without sin, now he circles back to say that it is also delusional to think that we can abide in Christ and continue to sin as though nothing has changed.

“The purity of Christ that is to characterize believers is not some esoteric quality but is manifest in concrete acts of love.”

I think the purity of Christ that is to characterize believers is not some automatic quality. We have to conceive and achieve those concrete acts of love ourselves. We may have become God’s children, but we remain responsible human beings. A child, you may have noticed, makes their own decisions about things, which are sometimes at odds with the parent’s desires. These may happen because the child doesn’t know what the parent wants, or because the child isn’t paying attention to what the parent wants, or because the child wants something different from what the parent wants. It’s the same with Christians’ relationship with God. We sometimes do things and find out later that God wasn’t in favor. We sometimes do things carelessly, without thinking, and then slap our foreheads and say, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

And let’s face it, sometimes we know perfectly well that God wants us to act out of love and charity and compassion and we choose indifference, selfishness, or even hate.

I think those are the times that are hardest to acknowledge within ourselves and hardest to confess to God. “Oh, I didn’t know.” Well, yeah, I did. “I wasn’t thinking.” Well, yeah, I was. About myself and what I wanted. Yeah, I was thinking.

And most popular of all: “I was entitled. I was in charge. I was right.”

But entitlement isn’t about love. God is in charge. And was I, were you, are we really right when we act outside of love?

Those are hard to acknowledge to ourselves. They’re hard to confess to God.

“There is a genuine tension, both within the text of 1 John and within the experience of the church, regarding the reality of sin on the one hand, and life as God’s children on the other,” writes Brian Peterson at Working Preacher. “What is clear is that the author will allow neither self-delusions of sinlessness nor a casual acceptance of sin within the lives of God’s children…

“In our text, as further response, the author says that one’s actions really do matter. Being a child of God does not make all behaviors un-sinful for you. Sin within those who hope in Jesus is both a real possibility, and a profound contradiction. That contradiction is not to be glossed over.”

We live and strive and choose and act in the “already” and the “not yet.” We are God’s children – that is what we are – but we do not live, strive, choose, and act with the perfection of the One in whose image we are made, the One whose children we are. We aspire to it, and with each choice and action of our lives we strive to achieve that perfection. With each confession and repentance, we come closer to it.

As Janette H. Ok writes at Working Preacher, “We live into our beloved and begotten identity confident of the fact that God is not done with us yet. We commit ourselves again and again to doing what is right and loving one another, knowing that becoming more like the Father is a privilege of being called his sons and daughters—and that is what we are!”

There are no perfect ohi’a blossoms, and there are no perfect Christians. There is no perfect Church, and there is no perfect compassion within the Church. But if we feed one another, if we care for one another, if we extend that imperfect caring to those around us, we get closer and closer to this ideal that John imagined, wrote, and encouraged to those he called “little children,” “beloved,” and, yes, “children of God.”

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches. Sometime he decides to make them, and sometimes he just makes them.

Photo of an ‘amakihi and imperfect ohi’a blossoms by Eric Anderson.