Dove Sermons

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  • The Sower Who Won’t Quit

    A Sermon on Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

    Picture the scene. Jesus walks down to the shore of the Seas of Galilee, probably looking for a little room to breathe, and the crowd follows him anyway. It happens so often in Matthew that you start to wonder if Jesus ever got five minutes alone. This time the crowd is so large that he has to get into a boat and push off from the beach just to have enough distance to be heard and enough space so he’s not trampled. Everybody wants a piece of him. And what does he do with that moment, with all those expectant faces looking back at him from the shoreline? He tells them a farming story.

    Not a miracle. Not a takedown of the religious leaders who’ve been dogging him. A story about dirt.

    I think that tells you something about how Jesus teaches. He doesn’t reach for the dramatic. He reaches for something everybody in that crowd has seen a thousand times… a man walking a field with a bag of seed slung over his shoulder, throwing it out by the handful. Half the men listening to him had probably done exactly that themselves that spring. Jesus takes the most ordinary image available and loads it up with the weight of the entire kingdom of God. That’s the kind of teacher he is. He doesn’t need special effects. He needs a farmer and four kinds of dirt.

    So here’s the story: a farmer goes out to sow, that is, to throw seeds out across the ground in the hopes that something will grow. Some seed lands on the path, hard-packed from foot traffic, and the birds show up before it even has a chance to settle into the ground. Some seed lands on rocky ground with just a thin skin of soil over the stone, and it shoots up fast. It looks great for about five minutes… and then the sun comes out and burns it off because there’s no root system underneath to draw up water.

    Some seed lands among thorns, and the thorns, which were already established and already had the advantage, choke it out before it ever gets a fair shot. And then some seed lands on good soil, and it produces, this is the part that should surprise us, a hundredfold, sixty, thirty. That is not a normal yield. Any farmer in that crowd would have laughed at those numbers, because nobody gets a hundred-to-one return on a wheat crop. Jesus ends the story with a line that’s like a nudge in the ribs: “If you have ears, hear!”

    Later, away from the crowd, Jesus explains what the story means to his disciples. And here’s the detail that catches me every time I read it: even though he calls it the parable of the sower, his explanation barely talks about “the sower” at all. He goes on and on about the ground. The path. The rocks. The thorns. The good soil. Which tells you where the real emphasis of this story is meant to land… not on the guy throwing the seed, but on us.

    We are the dirt.

    I want to walk through those four patches of ground, because I think most of us have lived in all four of them at different points in our lives, sometimes in the same week.

    First is the hard path. This is the heart that’s been walked on so many times it’s gone hard. Maybe it’s cynicism. Maybe it’s just exhaustion. You’ve heard enough promises, enough hype, enough people tell you God’s going to show up and fix things, and it hasn’t happened the way you needed it to, so you’ve built a hardness over your heart that nothing gets through anymore.

    The word of the kingdom hits that ground and just sits there, exposed, until something comes along and picks it clean. Jesus doesn’t soften this one. He says the evil one comes and snatches the word away before it ever gets a chance to take. That’s a hard thing to hear, but it’s honest. Some hearts have been hardened by real wounds, and it’s not our job to shame anybody for that. It is our job to notice it in ourselves and refuse to let it become permanent.

    Next comes the rocky ground. This is the person who hears the gospel and lights up immediately. Sign them up, they’re all in, they’re posting about it, they’re telling everybody how their life has changed. And then trouble shows up, because trouble always shows up when you commit to something real… and they’re gone. No roots. The enthusiasm was genuine, it just never had anywhere to sink down into.

    You’ve seen this pattern outside of church too, and it’s worth naming because it’s the same mechanism. A couple years back a fitness challenge called 75 Hard tore through social media; two workouts a day, a strict diet, a gallon of water, no days off, for seventy-five straight days. People went all in overnight.

    But exercise scientists have pointed out the obvious flaw: your body doesn’t get stronger during the workout, it gets stronger during the recovery afterward. Cut out rest entirely and you’re not building anything, you’re just piling up fatigue until you break down. Most people who started it didn’t finish it. That’s rocky ground in a gym instead of a field; explosive growth with nothing underneath it, and the first real strain finishes it off. Fast growth without depth is not the same thing as faith. It just looks like it for a while.

    Next come the thorns. This is the one that hits closest to home for most of us in this room, if I’m being straight with you. This isn’t the hard heart or the shallow heart… this is a deep, decent, well-established heart that’s just… full. Jesus names the thorns specifically: the worries of this life and the seduction of wealth. Not evil things, necessarily. Just competing things. The mortgage. The kids’ schedules. The retirement account. The next promotion. None of that is bad on its own. But it’s all growing in the same plot of ground as your faith, and it’s already got a head start, and it will win the fight for nutrients if you let it.

    There was a survey out this year that put a number on this for us. The average American now spends the equivalent of 96 days a year actively worried about money, nearly a quarter of the calendar, just sitting in low-grade financial dread. Almost one in ten described themselves as being in a constant state of panic just trying to cover rent and groceries. That’s not a character flaw. That’s just what it feels like to live here right now. But worry and faith are competing for the exact same soil, and worry has a serious head start on most of us. The gospel doesn’t die a dramatic death in this heart. It just gets slowly outcompeted by a hundred other things that are individually reasonable and collectively suffocating.

    And then there is the good soil. The seed that lands here doesn’t just survive, it produces an obscene amount of fruit. A hundredfold. That’s not the reward for trying hard. That’s grace showing up in soil that was ready to receive it.

    Now here’s where I want to push a little further than the parable does on its surface, because I don’t think this story is meant to leave you sorting yourself neatly into one category and calling it done. Soil isn’t a fixed identity. Ground can change. Hard ground can be broken up. Rocky ground can be cleared. Thorny ground can be pulled back, even if it takes years of steady work. That’s not wishful thinking on my part, that’s just how actual soil works, and Jesus knew that better than any of us, because he grew up around farmers his whole life.

    So if your heart feels hardened right now, that’s not a life sentence. If your faith has always sprouted fast and died fast under pressure, that doesn’t mean you’re incapable of depth, it might mean you need to slow down and let some roots actually form before you go announcing your commitment to the world. And if you’re standing in a field of thorns right now; busy, successful, stretched in fifteen directions, and feeling like your faith is technically alive but barely breathing, I’d ask you to consider what needs to get pulled. Not everything growing in your life is bad. But some of it is crowding out the one thing that was supposed to be central.

    Here’s the piece of this parable that I think we overlook too quickly, though, because we get so focused on grading our own soil. Look again at how the farmer actually operates. This is not a careful, efficient farmer optimizing his yield. This is a man throwing seed onto a path, into rocks, and among thorns, knowing full well what’s going to happen to it. No competent farmer plants that way. It’s wasteful. It’s borderline reckless.

    And that’s exactly the point. God is not stingy with the gospel. God does not sit back calculating which hearts look promising enough to be worth the investment before deciding to sow. The word of the kingdom gets thrown at hard hearts and rocky hearts and thorny hearts just as freely as it gets thrown at good soil, knowing that a lot of it isn’t going to take.

    That should tell you something about the character of the God we’re dealing with. He is not rationing grace based on your odds of success. He’s scattering it everywhere, on all of us, all the time, regardless of what kind of ground we’ve currently got. The failure rate in this story is not a flaw in God’s method. It’s the cost of a generosity, a love, that refuses to be selective.

    If you want to see that kind of reckless sowing happening right now, not just in a story from two thousand years ago, look at what’s been happening in the burn scars up in Los Angeles. When the wildfires tore through Altadena and the Palisades last year, they didn’t just destroy houses. The soil itself came out contaminated; lead, arsenic, even cyanide from everything that melted down.

    A toxicologist told one family who lost their home to never set foot in their own garage again. That is about as dead as ground gets. And yet, in the middle of that wreckage, some families started making what they call seed bombs, wildflower seeds packed into little balls of soil and clay, and throwing them out across the burned, poisoned lots. Not because the odds were good, but because they weren’t going to let ground that looked finished stay that way.

    Get this, months later, poppies and lupine are coming up out of that ash. Nobody who understood the soil report would have bet on that. That’s the sower in this parable. That’s God, honestly; refusing to write off ground that everybody else has already given up on.

    I think I’ll be reminded of this now every time I’m with somebody going through something brutal… a marriage falling apart, the bad news nobody saw coming, a kid who’s walked away from everything they were raised to believe. It would be easy to look at some of those situations and think the seed is just never going to take root there. Too much rock. Too many thorns.

    But here’s the thing… I’ve watched God work in exactly that kind of ground more times than I can count. The farmer doesn’t quit on hard ground. He keeps throwing seed at it, season after season, because he’s not finished with it yet, and neither is the harvest.

    That’s grace. Not a reward for good soil. A gift to all soil that had no business producing anything.

    Now, one more thing before we close, because I don’t want us to walk out of here thinking this story is just about receiving. Remember, the disciples got a private explanation of this parable because they were going to become sowers/farmers themselves. That’s us too. We don’t just get to evaluate our own dirt and call it a day. We are called to go throw seed on other people’s ground, including the hard path and the rocky patch and the thorny field, even when the odds look bad, even when we can predict some of it won’t take. That’s uncomfortable, because it means loving people and speaking truth into their lives without any guarantee of a return on the investment. But that’s exactly how the sower in this story operates, and if we’re following him, that’s how we’re called to operate too.

    So here’s my challenge to us this week, and I mean this practically, not as a spiritual metaphor floating three feet above your actual life. Take an honest look at your own soil. Where’s it hardened? What needs to be broken up? What’s growing that’s crowding out the one thing that matters most? And then, because none of us gets to just tend our own garden and ignore everybody else’s, ask who in your life needs somebody willing to throw seed onto ground that looks unpromising. Somebody who’s given up. Somebody whose faith burned bright and died fast. Somebody so buried in thorns they haven’t thought about God in months.

    Go be a sower. Throw the seed anyway. Some of it’s going to land where you least expect it, and when it does, it won’t produce thirty percent or sixty percent return. It’ll produce a hundredfold, because that’s what happens when the seed is the gospel and the ground finally gets ready to receive it.

    If you have ears, hear.

    Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • You Can’t Win With Some People

    Matthew 11:16–19, 25–30 (NRSVUE)  |  July 5, 2025

    There is a moment in this passage where you can almost hear the exhaustion in Jesus’s voice. Not defeat… Jesus is never defeated, but the particular weariness that comes from doing the right thing, and watching people find a reason to dismiss it anyway.

    He has just answered a question from John the Baptist’s disciples: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” For context, John is in prison. His certainty has been shaken. So he sends his followers to ask Jesus directly. And Jesus answers not with a credential or a title but with evidence; the blind see, the lame walk, the poor hear good news. Then, after praising John as the greatest prophet who ever lived, Jesus turns to the crowd and unloads something that reads less like a sermon and more like a man who is genuinely frustrated.

    “But to what will I compare this generation?” he asks. And then he gives them an image that is almost comic in how accurately it describes human nature: children sitting in the marketplace, yelling at each other because nobody will play the right game. One group pipes a happy tune and nobody dances. The other group wails a funeral song and nobody mourns. You can’t win. No matter what you do, someone has a complaint.

    Then Jesus makes it specific. John the Baptist came with fierce intensity; fasting in the desert, calling people to repentance, living on locusts and wild honey… and they said he had a demon. Jesus came eating and drinking, welcoming tax collectors to his table, accepting an invitation from a sinner without hesitation… and they called him a glutton and a drunkard. They described him, notably, by the company he kept.

    Two completely different approaches to ministry. Two completely different men. Same rejection.

    The Problem Isn’t the Messenger

    It would be easy to read this as a story about hypocritical religious leaders, and honestly, the Pharisees are not far from view here. Matthew makes it fairly clear throughout the gospel that the “they” doing the grumbling is a specific group, not the whole population. The crowds, Matthew tells us repeatedly, are generally drawn to Jesus. They are astonished at his teaching. They follow him out into lonely places. The critics tend to be those who have the most invested in the current arrangement of power.

    But if we stop there, we let ourselves off too easy. Because this passage isn’t just a historical indictment of first-century Pharisees. Jesus uses the phrase “this generation” in a way that carries a longer shadow than one century. This is the same generation, in spirit if not in blood, that mocked Noah. That built a golden calf while the commandments were still being written. That heard prophet after prophet and found reasons to dismiss every one of them. The problem isn’t which messenger God sends. The problem is a disposition, a hardness, that has decided in advance not to be moved.

    We know this disposition. We live in its era. We have reduced every complex moral question to a team sport. Pick your side. Dismiss the other. And when someone refuses to fit neatly into your category, when they’re too orthodox for the progressives and too compassionate for the conservatives, you do what this generation did to Jesus. You describe them by their associations. You find the label that lets you stop listening.

    Jesus saw this clearly. He understood, as Matthew’s gospel makes plain, that the issue was not really about him at all. The issue was about what people were willing to see. And to see truthfully requires something that comfort and certainty tend to erode. It requires wisdom.

    What Wisdom Actually Does

    Jesus closes the first section of this passage with a line that can slide past us if we’re not careful: “Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” It sounds almost like a shrug. Like Jesus is saying… time will tell. But it’s actually a profound claim that reaches deep into the Jewish tradition he inherited.

    Wisdom, in the Hebrew scriptures, is not primarily an intellectual category. It’s not about how much you know or how well you argue. Wisdom is the capacity to perceive what is real; to see past the surface of things to what is actually happening. Proverbs describes Wisdom as present at the creation of the world, bringing order out of chaos. The book of James says godly wisdom is “pure, then peaceable, gentle, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality.” Wisdom makes you see more clearly, not just think more cleverly.

    And here is the thing Jesus is pointing to: wisdom is not demonstrated by arguments. It is demonstrated by fruit. By what actually happens when it is applied to the world. John’s ministry bore fruit. People repented, people changed, people got honest about their lives. Jesus’s ministry bore fruit. The sick were healed, the marginalized were welcomed, the weary found rest. You don’t judge a tree by the labels someone else puts on it. You judge it by what it produces.

    This is a standard we should be willing to hold ourselves to. What is the actual fruit of our theology? What does it produce in people’s lives? Does it make them more merciful, more honest, more free? Does it give rest to the weary? Or does it add weight to people who are already burdened? Wisdom is not vindicated by how sophisticated our arguments are. It is vindicated by what it does in the world.

    The Hidden Things

    Then comes a striking turn. Jesus breaks into prayer… or something that sounds like prayer, right in the middle of his teaching. “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.”

    This is either one of the most subversive thing Jesus ever said, or the most comforting, depending on where you stand. The people who were supposed to understand, the educated, the theologically trained, the ones who had devoted their lives to studying God… they missed it. And the ones nobody expected to understand, the poor, the uneducated, the children, the people on the margins… they got it.

    Jesus is not anti-intellectual here. He is not saying that education is bad or that thinking carefully about faith is a mistake. He’s making a more specific point: the things of God are not primarily revealed through the accumulation of expertise. They are revealed through humility and openness, what he calls being like an infant. Infants do not come to experience with a predetermined conclusion. They are vulnerable. They receive. They trust.

    Here’s what I’m thinking. The danger of expertise, in theology or anywhere else, is that it can quietly become a defense against being changed. You learn enough to feel settled, and then the learning becomes a fortress rather than a door. The Pharisees were not stupid men. They were brilliant men who had used their brilliance to build a system that insulated them from the very God they were studying. And so God walked right past them and sat down with fishermen and tax collectors and women nobody had bothered to educate.

    There is a pastoral word here for the church. The people in our congregations who are most likely to encounter God afresh are often not the ones who have the most theological vocabulary. They are the ones who still come to faith with some vulnerability intact. The new believer who hasn’t yet learned to argue about everything. The person in crisis who has run out of their own resources. The child who simply believes because they haven’t been taught not to. The stranger who has nothing to protect.

    Jesus is telling us something important: if you want to see what God is doing, look where the humble are. Look at the margins. Look at the people who don’t have the luxury of being comfortable with their certainty. They often see what the rest of us have learned to look past.

    The Invitation

    And then, after all of that, after the frustration and the rebuke and the prayer, Jesus turns and does something unexpected. He invites.

    “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

    These are probably the most well-known words in this passage. They show up at funerals and at ordinations, in moments of grief and in moments of new beginning. And they deserve the weight they carry. But I want to make sure we don’t read them so sentimentally that we miss what Jesus is actually saying.

    First, notice who he is talking to. He is not offering rest to people who have gotten comfortable in the faith. He is not talking to the Pharisees who have everything arranged to their satisfaction. He is talking to people who are worn down. People who are carrying something heavy. And in the context of Matthew’s gospel, these are not just spiritually tired people, these are people who have been crushed by systems. By religious leaders who laid heavy burdens on people without lifting a finger to help carry them. By a world that treats certain people as expendable. By the grinding weight of trying to survive in a society that was not built with you in mind.

    This is a sociological statement as much as a spiritual one. Jesus’s Beatitudes… blessed are the poor, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, are the backdrop to this invitation. He is promising rest specifically to the people who have known the least of it.

    Second, notice what he asks in return. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.” A yoke is a working implement. It is not a vacation. Jesus is not promising you a life without effort. He is promising you a different kind of effort, one that is shared, one that is oriented toward something worth doing, one that does not grind you down to nothing.

    In the rabbinic tradition of Jesus’s time, the “yoke of Torah” referred to the life of obedience to God’s law. It was a serious commitment. What Jesus is offering is not the absence of commitment, it is a commitment to him, to learning from him, to walking the path he walks. And he says two things about this yoke that we should meditate on. He says he is gentle and humble in heart. And he says the yoke is easy and the burden is light.

    This is almost scandalous if you take it seriously. The way of Jesus, which includes self-denial, sacrifice, love of enemy, radical generosity… is described as easy? Not because it requires nothing. But because a life properly ordered around God and neighbor is less exhausting than the alternative. The alternative is a life spent protecting yourself, managing your image, maintaining your position, keeping the right people out. That life is genuinely heavy. The life Jesus offers, for all its demands, produces rest. It produces the kind of peace that the apostle Paul later describes as passing understanding.

    What We Do With This

    This passage puts a mirror in front of us. And the question it asks is not primarily about the Pharisees or the religious leaders of the first century. The question is about us.

    Are we playing the game of the marketplace children, finding reasons to dismiss what God is doing because it doesn’t fit the categories we’ve established? Have we become so invested in our version of the faith that we’ve stopped being able to learn from it? Are we carrying burdens; personal, institutional, cultural, that Jesus never asked us to carry? And are we offering rest to the people around us, or are we adding to their weight?

    Jesus is not hard to find in this text. He is in the same place he always is, with the people who are honest about their need. He is at the table with the tax collectors, frustrating the people who think they have God figured out. He is praying thanks to a Father who delights in revealing himself to people who weren’t expecting it. And he is standing with his arms open to anyone who is tired enough to stop arguing and just come.

    The wisdom of God does not always look like what we expected. John looked like a wild man. Jesus looked like a party guest. Neither of them fit the template. And yet their deeds were unmistakable — healing, freedom, truth, love, a table wide enough for everyone.

    That table is still set. The invitation is still open. And wisdom, as always, is vindicated by what it produces in a life.

    Come. Learn. Rest.

    Amen.

    Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Sermon for June 14, 2026

    Sent: The Prayer You Have to Live

    Matthew 9:35–10:8 (NRSVUE)

    I’m convinced Jesus is tired. You can feel it in the text. He has been going town to town, village to village… teaching, preaching, healing. Matthew gives us this sweeping summary in 9:35 that sounds almost like a travelogue: “Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness.” That’s a full sentence and an even fuller life. Behind every word in that verse is a person with a name and a wound. A man whose legs don’t work. A woman who has been bleeding for twelve years and is too ashamed to ask for help out loud. A father who grieved his daughter’s death this morning.

    Jesus keeps moving. He doesn’t stop because the need doesn’t stop. And when he finally pauses long enough to look out at the crowd pressing in around him, something happens inside him. Matthew uses a Greek word, splanchnizomai, to describe it. It means his gut wrenched. His insides moved. This isn’t polite concern or professional compassion. This is visceral. This is the kind of feeling that bends you over a little. He looked at the people “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,” and it hit him somewhere deep.

    The word Matthew uses for “harassed” in the original Greek is graphic too. It means beaten down, torn apart, thrown to the ground. Some translations try to soften it. I’m not sure that they should. These are people who have been broken down by the systems and powers around them; religious, economic, political… and then left on the side of the road. Rome is standing on their necks. The religious establishment has handed them a list of rules they can’t keep, and offered them very little mercy when they fail. They are exhausted. They are lost. They have nobody looking out for them.

    Jesus sees that. Really sees it. The compassion he feels is not passive. It doesn’t let him stand at a comfortable distance and feel sorry. It moves him forward.

    “The harvest is plentiful,” he tells his disciples, “but the laborers are few.”

    That image lands hard. A harvest that isn’t gathered is a harvest that rots. There is urgency here. Not the panicked urgency of someone who has lost control, but the focused urgency of someone who knows what time it is and what needs to happen. The fields are full. The need is right in front of them. But there’s nobody there to do the work.

    And here is where Jesus does something rather amazing. He says, “Therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” Pray. Ask God to send workers. And before the disciples have finished the sentence, before the amen has left their lips, Jesus calls them together and sends them out.

    They are the answer to the prayer he just told them to pray.

    Let that marinate for a second. Jesus doesn’t tell them to pray and then wait for someone else to show up. He tells them to pray and then looks them in the eye and says, “You. Go.” The prayer and the sending are almost simultaneous. There is no gap between petition and commission. The disciples discover, maybe for the first time, that sometimes when you ask God to do something, God’s answer is to hand it back to you.

    Then Matthew does something interesting. He slows way down and lists the soon-to-be-sent-out by name.

    Simon, called Peter. Andrew his brother. James and John. Philip and Bartholomew. Thomas and Matthew the tax collector. James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus. Simon the Cananaean. Judas Iscariot.

    There’s a reason Matthew lingers here. These names are not incidental. They are the twelve most ordinary men you could possibly assemble. They represent virtually every social and political tension of their day held in one small group. Matthew collected taxes for Rome, which made him a traitor in the eyes of most of his neighbors. Simon the Cananaean was almost certainly a Zealot, part of a movement that wanted to violently overthrow Rome. These two men probably despised each other before Jesus called them. And Jesus puts them in the same room and sends them out together.

    Peter is here (The man who will deny Jesus three times before sunrise on the worst night of the story). Judas is here… the man who will hand Jesus over for thirty pieces of silver. Jesus knows who they are. He knows what they’re capable of and what they’re not. He calls them anyway. He sends them anyway. He gives them authority anyway.

    One of the scholars I read this week working with this passage makes a strong case: in Matthew’s Gospel, the list of names doesn’t appear in isolation. It appears as a charter, an introduction to an apostleship that is born in the movement from the Father to the Son and now out into the world. These aren’t just names on a roster. These are people whose very identity is being reshaped by the mission they’re being sent into. They are becoming who they are by going where they’re sent.

    And notice what they are sent with! Authority. Real authority. Authority over unclean spirits, over disease, over the forces that diminish and destroy human life. Jesus doesn’t send them empty-handed or on their own strength. He gives them something to work with.

    “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.”

    That is a remarkable list. Every item on it represents a category of person who has been pushed to the margins. The sick were often blamed for their own illness, seen as evidence of sin or divine disfavor. The dead, well, contact with death made you ritually unclean. Lepers were legally required to announce their own presence so others could get away from them. Those with demons were feared and avoided. Jesus is not sending his disciples to the powerful and the comfortable. He is sending them directly toward the people everyone else has written off.

    And he tells them: “You received without payment; give without payment.”

    The grace that has been given to them, freely, without condition, without earning, is the same grace they are to extend. They are not brokers of God’s favor. They are conduits. What has flowed into them is meant to flow through them and out into the world.

    Here’s where we should be honest with ourselves, because this text won’t let us be anything else.

    We are those disciples. Not in a metaphorical, inspirational-poster kind of way. I mean structurally, literally… Matthew writes this passage with his own community in mind, and by extension, every community of faith that has gathered around Jesus since.

    The language Matthew uses to describe what the disciples are sent to do mirrors almost exactly the language used to describe what Jesus himself does in verse 35. Teach. Proclaim. Heal every disease and every sickness. The work Jesus does becomes the work they do. The work they do becomes the work we do.

    To be a disciple of Jesus is, eventually, to become an apostle of Jesus. The word “apostle” simply means “one who is sent.” You don’t get to be a disciple indefinitely without getting sent. At some point, the prayer you pray becomes the assignment you carry.

    Think about the prayers you bring here. We do this every Sunday. We name the places where it hurts. We pray for the sick and the grieving. We pray for a world that seems to be coming apart. We ask God to show up in the hard places. Those are real prayers. They matter. But every now and then, God’s answer to that prayer is to look back at us and say, “I’m sending you.”

    That is uncomfortable. I know it. You know it. There is a reason Jesus says the laborers are few. It’s not that the need is hard to see. It’s that showing up costs something. It asks you to bring your time, your energy, your emotional weight to someone else’s pain. And pain is something most of us, when given the option, will walk around.

    But here’s what the text won’t let us escape: Jesus did not walk around it. He walked into every city, every village. He looked at the crowd and let their suffering land on him, in his gut, in his chest, in whatever it is that makes us human. And then he moved.

    “As you go, proclaim the good news: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’”

    The kingdom of heaven does not arrive by announcement alone. It arrives in the arrival of people who are willing to carry it into the places where it is needed most. The kingdom shows up when someone sits with a person who is dying and doesn’t look at their watch. It shows up when a congregation fights for affordable housing in its neighborhood instead of protecting its parking lot. It shows up when someone recovering from addiction is welcomed at the table instead of whispered about in the lobby. It shows up when the sick are cared for, when the isolated are found, when the person carrying a weight too heavy to bear alone discovers they don’t have to carry it alone anymore.

    This important work has been showing up in a quiet but remarkable way across the country over the last few years, in churches that have started paying off their neighbors’ medical debt. Not symbolically. Literally. By partnering with a nonprofit called Undue Medical Debt, congregations purchase bundled debt from collection agencies for pennies on the dollar and then simply forgive it. A United Methodist congregation in Michigan raised $15,000 and retired more than $2.2 million in debt for families in their community. Letters arrived at people’s homes, people who had been losing sleep over bills they couldn’t pay, and the letters said: this is gone. You don’t owe it anymore.

    Think about what that is. That is a church deciding that the prayer “thy kingdom come” means something on a Tuesday, in someone’s mailbox, in the form of a debt that no longer exists. That is disciples who prayed and then became the answer to their own prayer.

    And sometimes the kingdom shows up in ways nobody planned. A church in Tennessee paid off $8 million in medical debt for nearly 4,000 households across seven counties. One of the letters went to a man who was not a Christian, but an atheist whose son happened to attend the church. When the letter arrived telling him his medical debt was gone, he called his son, genuinely confused. “Your church just paid off all my medical bills,” he said. “Why did they do this?” And his son got to answer that question.

    That is what “the kingdom of heaven has come near” sounds like when it lands on someone’s doorstep. Not a pamphlet. Not an argument. A debt, cancelled. A burden, lifted. A question the gospel could finally walk through.

    Hear me on this, Jesus is not describing a program here. He is describing a way of being in the world. A posture. An orientation toward the person in front of you and the need they carry.

    The twelve sent out in this text are a wildly imperfect collection of people. There is a traitor among them and a man who will fold under pressure at the worst possible moment, and several others whose names we barely remember. Jesus sends them anyway. He gives them authority. And the kingdom moves forward through their obedience.

    We are not so different from them. We are an imperfect collection of people who have gathered around Jesus and are trying to figure out what it means to follow him. Some of us are carrying wounds we haven’t shown anyone. Some of us are further along in faith than we let on. Some of us are holding on by our fingernails and hoping no one notices. Jesus sees all of that. And he still calls us by name. He still looks us in the eye and says, “Go.”

    The harvest is plentiful. The laborers are still few. But you are here. And you were not called by accident.

    Let us pray.

    Lord of the harvest,

    We see the need. We feel the weight of it, if we’re honest. The people around us who are harassed and helpless. The burdens too heavy to carry alone. The places in this city where the light hasn’t reached yet.

    We have prayed these prayers before, asking you to send someone, to fix something, to show up somewhere. And we mean them. But we know what you do with prayers like that. You often hand them back to us. You look at us and say, “Go.”

    So we’re asking you, again, for the courage to mean what we pray. Give us eyes that see what you see when you look at the crowd. Give us the gut-level compassion that doesn’t let us stay comfortable at a distance. Give us the willingness to be the answer, imperfect, ordinary, insufficient on our own, but sent, and therefore enough.

    The kingdom is yours. The harvest is yours. We are yours. Send us.

    Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Sermon for June 7, 2026

    What He Sees in You

    Matthew 9:9–13, 18–26 (NRSVUE)

    ———

    There’s a kind of day most of us know well. You wake up with a plan. Maybe a short list, maybe a long one. You’ve got things to do, people to see, problems to solve. And then, somewhere around 9 a.m., the day starts making its own decisions. An unexpected phone call. A crisis that lands in your lap. Someone who needs something you weren’t prepared to give. By the end of the day you’re exhausted, not from what you planned, but from everything that showed up uninvited.

    That’s the kind of day Jesus is having in Matthew 9.

    And it didn’t start here. Before this chapter even opens, Matthew has already shown us Jesus healing a leper, calming a storm, casting out demons, and restoring a paralyzed man. He has barely taken a breath. And now, in these few short verses, we get another rush of encounters; a tax collector at his booth, a dinner interrupted by critics, a grieving father who bursts through the door, a woman reaching from behind in a crowd, a dead girl lying still in a house full of mourners.

    One thing after another.

    You might look at that and think Jesus needed a better system. A scheduler. An assistant. Somebody to manage the calendar.

    But I don’t think that’s the point. I think Matthew is showing us something about the way Jesus moves through the world… what he pays attention to, what he won’t walk past, who he refuses to write off. And if we’re paying attention, it starts to look less like a chaotic day and more like a theology in motion.

    Before we go further, consider this: In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national public health crisis, and the data behind that declaration is sobering. According to a Gallup poll, one in five American adults reports feeling lonely every single day. The Surgeon General’s own report described millions of people across this country as feeling “isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” Not occasionally. Not just during the holidays. Every day. One in five. Look around this room and do that math.

    That’s the world Jesus is walking through in Matthew 9. And it’s the world we’re walking through right now. The faces are different, but the hunger to be seen, really seen, not just noticed, is exactly the same.

    The Man at the Booth

    So, Jesus is walking (he’s always walking in this gospel) and he passes a tax collector named Matthew, sitting at his collection booth. And he just… looks at him. Calls him. “Follow me.”

    That’s it. No background check. No interview. No probationary period.

    Now, we have to understand what a tax collector was in first-century Judea. This wasn’t the IRS. These were men who had essentially sold their loyalty to the Roman Empire, collecting money from their own people and skimming off the top for themselves. They were considered traitors. Religious outcasts. The kind of person decent folks crossed the street to avoid. The kind of person other Jews wouldn’t sit with, eat with, or acknowledge in public.

    And Jesus walks straight up to this man and says, “Follow me.”

    What did Matthew see in that moment? We don’t know exactly. Maybe he’d heard about Jesus. Maybe he hadn’t. What we do know is that something in that invitation cracked something open in him. Because he got up. Immediately. He didn’t ask for time to think. He didn’t negotiate. He left his booth, left the whole apparatus of his former life, and followed.

    Here’s something I’ve been thinking about this week: Jesus didn’t call Matthew because Matthew had already cleaned himself up. He didn’t call Matthew because Matthew had potential that was obvious to everyone. In fact, everything about Matthew’s social profile said he was the wrong choice. Jesus called him anyway. And the call itself was what made Matthew capable of answering.

    Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a whole book about this… the German title was just one word: Nachfolge. It translates to “following after.” The Germans understand the word to mean “discipleship.” The four-word title, familiar to most Americans (the Cost of Discipleship), was a later addition to the English translation. Jesus calls Matthew to “follow after” him (nachfolge). And for Matthew, standing up from that table was his yes.

    I’m learning this; God never calls us to something without first calling us away from something. Matthew left that booth. Abraham left his homeland. Peter and Andrew left their nets. You cannot get to what God has next for you while you’re still holding onto what God is calling you away from. And the hardest part isn’t always the bad thing you’re leaving. Sometimes it’s a perfectly legitimate thing, a good thing, a comfortable thing, that is simply no longer the most important thing.

    The call doesn’t care how legitimate your current commitments are. It just asks: is there anything more important than this?

    Dinner and the Question Nobody Wanted to Ask

    So Matthew gets up and follows, and the first thing he does is throw a dinner party. His house. His crowd. Tax collectors, sinners, people the religious establishment had a file on. And Jesus sits down at the table with all of them.

    The Pharisees don’t come inside. They stand at the edge and ask the disciples: “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

    It’s a fair question. By the religious standards of the day, what Jesus was doing was genuinely scandalous. Table fellowship was loaded with meaning. Who you ate with said something about who you were, what you stood for, whose community you belonged to. The Pharisees weren’t just being snobbish… they were asking a real theological question. Why is a rabbi doing this?

    Jesus hears them and answers directly: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

    That phrase, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”, is a quote from the Hebrew prophet Hosea. And Jesus is essentially saying: you have been so focused on the mechanics of religion that you’ve missed the whole point. God was never primarily interested in your ritual precision. God was interested in your mercy. Your willingness to move toward the broken instead of away from them.

    And then this: Jesus says sinners are like sick people. Not moral failures deserving punishment, sick people who need a doctor.

    That reframe matters quite a bit. When you look at someone else’s sin as a wound rather than a crime, you respond differently. When you look at your own sin as a wound rather than a crime, you respond differently. Mercy becomes the reflex instead of judgment. And Jesus is saying that mercy, not ritual, not sacrifice, not doctrinal precision… mercy is the thing that actually draws people toward God.

    But here’s something easy to miss in this passage. Jesus doesn’t go after the Pharisees the way we might expect. He doesn’t shame them. He challenges them. “Go and learn what this means”, he says, but he doesn’t throw them out of the story. He’s as willing to be present to their question as he is to the dinner guests at the table. The ones who think they’re righteous are just as much in need of Jesus as the ones everyone knows are sinners. They just don’t know it yet.

    The Father Who Burst Through the Door

    While Jesus is still mid-conversation, a leader of the synagogue, a man of standing, a man with a name and a reputation, comes into the room and falls at Jesus’s feet.

    His daughter has just died. He believes, and this takes real faith to say out loud, he believes Jesus can bring her back. “Come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.”

    Notice, Jesus doesn’t ask for qualifications. He doesn’t quiz the man on his theology. He gets up and goes. Just like Matthew got up and followed Jesus, Jesus gets up and follows this man. There’s something important in that symmetry. Jesus doesn’t just call people to follow him; he models what it looks like to follow the urgent need in front of you. He goes where the crisis is.

    On the road to the ruler’s house, the crowd presses in on all sides. And in the middle of that crowd, something happens.

    The Woman in the Crowd

    She has been bleeding for twelve years. Twelve years of being considered ritually unclean. Twelve years of being excluded from worship, from community, from normal life. Twelve years of isolation that went so deep she probably stopped expecting anything to change.

    She doesn’t come to Jesus directly. She doesn’t call out to him the way the ruler did. She comes from behind, through the crowd, and she reaches for the fringe of his robe, just the hem, just a touch, believing that even that will be enough.

    And it is.

    Jesus stops. Turns. Sees her.

    “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”

    She didn’t ask for an audience. She barely asked for acknowledgment. She was aiming to stay invisible, to take what healing she could get and disappear back into the crowd. But Jesus doesn’t let her stay in the shadows. He sees her. He calls her daughter. He names what she did as faith… real, legitimate, powerful faith.

    Think about the weight of that word: daughter. Not “woman.” Not “the unclean one.” Not even just “you.” Daughter. It is relational. It restores her to a family, to belonging, to the community of God’s people that had excluded her for more than a decade.

    Her healing wasn’t only physical. Her whole life opened back up.

    There’s a pattern worth noticing in these two healings, the ruler’s daughter and this woman. They stand at opposite ends of the social order. One is connected, respected, known by name in the community. The other is nameless, marginalized, invisible by necessity. And Jesus responds to both of them with the same full attention, the same compassion, the same willingness to stop everything else and be present.

    The kingdom of God has no tiered waiting room.

    The House Where Everyone Had Given Up

    So, Jesus arrives at the ruler’s house. There are already flute players outside… the hired mourners, the people whose job it was to mark the finality of death. The crowd knows it’s over. And when Jesus tells them the girl isn’t dead but sleeping, they laugh at him.

    They had done the math. They knew what death looked like. They were sure.

    Jesus sends them outside. He takes the girl by the hand. And she gets up.

    Matthew doesn’t dwell on it. There’s no dramatic description of the moment. The girl gets up. That’s the whole sentence. But that simplicity might be the point. For Jesus, giving life back to someone is, not trivial, but natural. It’s what he does. It’s what he came to do.

    The people who were laughing moments earlier spread the news throughout the district. The ones who were most sure nothing could be done became the ones who couldn’t stop talking about the fact that it was.

    What Jesus Sees

    Here’s what I keep coming back to in all of this. In every encounter, Matthew at his booth, the dinner guests nobody wanted to claim, the desperate father, the woman in the crowd, the dead girl, Jesus sees something that nobody else is looking for.

    He sees past the label to the person. He sees past the reputation to the need. He sees past what’s finished to what’s possible.

    Matthew’s whole religious and social world told him he was beyond calling. Jesus called him anyway. The woman’s whole life had told her she was beyond healing. Jesus healed her anyway. The mourners were absolutely certain that death had the last word. Jesus walked into the room anyway.

    This is not optimism. This is not Jesus being a positive thinker. This is something more powerful and more costly than that. This is Jesus deciding, over and over again, that the person in front of him is worth everything he has to give. And then giving it.

    The question the text keeps pressing on us is this: what do we see when we look at the people around us?

    Do we see the tax collector, or do we see the man who hasn’t been told yet that he’s going to change the world? Do we see the unclean woman, or do we see the daughter God is about to call by name? Do we see the commotion and the mourners and the obvious impossibility of the situation, or do we see a girl who just needs someone to take her hand?

    And one more layer to this: sometimes we are not the ones doing the seeing. Sometimes we are Matthew, sitting at the booth we’ve built around our own shame, waiting for someone to look at us without flinching. Sometimes we are the woman at the edge of the crowd, hoping that even the smallest contact with something holy might be enough to change things. Sometimes we are the one lying still in the room while everyone around us has moved on to mourning.

    There’s a man in New Mexico named Matthew Pettit. He’ll tell you himself that his story includes a long history of addiction, criminal behavior, and more jail and prison time than he cares to count. By every social metric, he was the kind of person people had already written off. Written off by the system. Written off, probably, by some people who shared his last name. And then, a few years ago, someone made a different call. Instead of another prison sentence, he was given the opportunity of a treatment center. A second chance… or maybe more accurately, a first real chance.

    He didn’t waste it. Today, Matthew Pettit is a first-generation college graduate, finishing his bachelor’s degree in Social Work. He advocates for formerly incarcerated people, helps others find their way back into their communities, and has worked to restore voting rights for people the system had essentially told to disappear. He describes that turning point this way: “That second chance didn’t just change my life; it gave me purpose.”

    His name is Matthew. He got up from his booth. He’s still following.

    That’s not a metaphor. That’s what happens when someone decides to see another person the way Jesus sees… not as what they’ve done, but as who they still might become.

    Jesus is still walking. He is still looking. He still sees what nobody else is willing to see.

    The call is still going out.

    The only question left is the same one it’s always been: will you get up and follow?

    —

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Sermon for May 24, 2026

    Sermon based on Acts 2:1-21

    There is a question tucked in the middle of this story that I want to pull out and hold up for us, because it is the question everything else hangs on in this story. A crowd gathers outside a house in Jerusalem. They hear wind they can’t explain. They see fire they can’t name. They hear ordinary people; working-class Galileans, mostly, speaking in languages they were never taught. And somebody in the crowd says what everyone is thinking: “What does this mean?”

    That is the question of Pentecost. The crowd isn’t debating whether or not it was happening. They’re standing right in the middle of it. The question is meaning. What does this mean?

    And I think that’s worth considering, because that is usually our question too, not whether God is at work, but what in the world God is doing. We can be standing in the middle of something extraordinary and still feel disoriented, still feel like we’re missing the plot. The disciples had just watched Jesus die, then come back, then disappear into a cloud forty days later. And now this. You can forgive them, and the crowd, for needing someone to make sense of it.

    Let me set the scene a little, because the details are important to understanding the context.

    It’s Shavuot, what the Greek-speaking world called Pentecost, which just means fiftieth, because the festival lands fifty days after Passover. It’s one of three pilgrimage festivals in Judaism, and Jerusalem would have been packed. Jews from across the known world had made the journey; from North Africa, from modern-day Turkey and Iran and Iraq, from Rome. The text says they were from every nation under heaven, and Luke goes out of his way to make that list feel exhaustive. These are not tourists. Many of them are immigrants who have settled in Jerusalem with their foreign-born accents and their memories of other places.

    This was not a small, quiet moment. This was the city at maximum capacity.

    Shavuot itself was a harvest festival, rooted in the agricultural calendar… you bring the first fruits of the harvest and present them to God in anticipation of the full harvest to come. But by the first century, it had taken on another layer of meaning. It had become the day that commemorated God giving the Torah to Moses at Sinai. And here is where things get interesting: the description of what happens in Acts 2; the wind, the fire, the overwhelming presence of God… those images echo Sinai. Exodus 19. Smoke, fire, the mountain trembling. God showing up in ways that are loud and physical and impossible to ignore.

    Luke knows exactly what he’s doing with these echoes. He wants you to hear Sinai in this story. Because what happened at Sinai was formative. It wasn’t just rules handed down, it was the moment a group of liberated slaves became a people. It was the moment God said: I am with you. Here is who we are together.

    Pentecost is a new Sinai. The Spirit is the new Torah. The community being formed here is being established by the presence of God, not by ethnicity or geography or social standing.

    Now, about the Spirit itself.

    We have a tendency to domesticate the Holy Spirit. We make it soft. We imagine something gentle… a dove, a whisper, a warm feeling in the chest. And the Spirit can be those things. But Acts 2 is not that story.

    Luke uses two words that make this distinction. The wind comes suddenly; the Greek is aphno. And it comes violently, biaios. This is a force that fills the whole house and will not be contained. And then fire, not one flame but individual tongues, resting on each person in the room.

    The disciples didn’t walk calmly out the front door to give a press conference. They were blown out. The Spirit is what launched them from that upper room into the streets, and it is what gave them words when they got there.

    Maybe there’s a lesson in that. The Spirit’s work can be outward. Pentecost begins in seclusion and ends in public proclamation. The Spirit didn’t gather people into cozy rooms to celebrate their own experience. The Spirit sent people out to speak to a world that is standing outside asking, What does this mean?

    So Peter stands up… and I want to stop here and reflect on who Peter is in this moment.

    This is the same man who, weeks earlier, told a servant girl he had never heard of Jesus. Three times. By a fire. He was scared, and he ran from what he knew to be true.

    Now he is standing in the street, in front of a crowd of thousands, and he opens his mouth and speaks with authority. Something has clearly changed. The Spirit is the difference. Not Peter’s courage. Not his study habits. The Spirit.

    And what does he say? He starts with a text from the Hebrew scriptures. He reaches back to the prophet Joel, who wrote his words in the middle of an agricultural catastrophe; locusts devouring everything, darkness settling over the land, the people crying out. Joel’s message was this: even in the wreckage, God is not finished. There is a day coming when God’s Spirit will not be the exclusive property of kings and priests and prophets. It will be poured out on all flesh.

    Peter stands in the street and says: This is that! What you are seeing right now, this is Joel’s prophecy landing. The Spirit has come today.

    Here is the thing about Peter’s use of Joel…

    Peter doesn’t quote the text exactly. He adjusts it. In the original Joel, the opening phrase is “After these things”, a vague, future-pointing phrase. Peter changes it to “In the last days.” Is he misquoting the prophet? I don’t think he is. I believe he is interpreting him. He is saying: the future Joel was pointing toward? We are living in it now.

    And there’s another change. Peter adds a line at the end of verse 18: “and they shall prophesy.” He says it twice; once about sons and daughters, once about his slaves, male and female. The Spirit is given so that all kinds of people will prophesy. That is the point.

    Prophecy, in this context, is not about predicting the future. It is truth-telling. It is looking at the world, looking at your moment in history, and naming where God is at work. Where we, through the Spirit, are at work. It is interpretation. It is the work of making meaning out of the chaos, the work of saying, here, right here, this is where God is moving.

    And here is what Peter insists: that work is not the exclusive property of clergy or scholars or experts. It is poured out on all flesh. Young and old. Male and female. Those who have power and those who don’t. The Spirit is not a respecter of credentials.

    Joel is explicit about who receives this outpouring; daughters, sons, old men, young men, enslaved men, enslaved women. The Spirit doesn’t name the wealthy. It doesn’t name the patriarchs or the powerful, because the prophet is making a point: the ones history tends to overlook, the ones whose voices get drowned out, the ones who are chronically invisible… they are the ones standing front and center in this new thing God is doing. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Everyone means everyone.

    Let me say something about that community, because Acts 2 isn’t just about what happened to the disciples in that house. It’s about what happened after, what kind of people they became.

    The chapter ends with a description of the community that emerged from Pentecost, and it is remarkable. They devoted themselves to learning. To prayer. To breaking bread together. They held things loosely, sharing what they had with those who had need. And they kept showing up.

    That is the fruit of the Spirit’s outpouring. Fellowship. Generosity. Presence.

    The question the crowd asked, “What does this mean?”, gets answered in the long run not just by Peter’s speech, but by what those people did next. The meaning of Pentecost is a community that takes the Spirit seriously enough to let it change how they live together.

    There is a line from the writer Margaret Atwood that struck me as fitting for this passage.

    “When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness… It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.”

    That is often the human condition. We almost never know what something means while we’re in it. We’re asking What does this mean? from the middle of the moment, and the answer is usually not available yet.

    But that crowd outside the house in Jerusalem got something rare. Peter stood up in the middle of it… and gave them an interpretation. The Spirit, he said, is what makes that kind of meaning-making possible. The Spirit gives people the capacity to look at the confusing, overwhelming present and say: God is here. This is where we are in the story. Here is what it means.

    That is prophecy. And according to Peter’s reading of Joel, that is the gift given to all of us.

    So here is where I want to land.

    We are a community that has received the Holy Spirit. That is the claim of the church, found in this text. And if that claim is true, then we are not just consumers of meaning, we are makers of it. We are people equipped to look at the world, look at our neighborhood, look at this moment in history, and ask the questions: Where is God in this? What is God doing? What does this mean?

    These are the types of questions we should be sitting with right now, as Dove of the Desert, in 2026. Asking, “What does this mean?” as a real church made of a real people who are really choosing to try follow the path of Jesus. We, together, make up a community and we, together, have some real decisions in front of us. What does it mean to be Dove of the Desert United Methodist Church in 2026?

    I believe that churches that lean into these types of questions grow, because answering  them honestly is a sign that you are still alive, still willing to be led by God somewhere you haven’t been before. Answering these kind of questions mean that you still trust that the Spirit of God leads us forward. The alternative is to rest on what we’ve built, protect what we have, and slowly become a museum of what God once did here. That is a choice. And Pentecost tells us it is the wrong one.

    That is all prophetic work. And it doesn’t belong only to the people who have been to seminary. It belongs to the teacher who walks into her classroom every morning and decides to treat her students with dignity and respect. It belongs to the person who has been around long enough to have dreamed their share of dreams, who can say to a younger person: I’ve seen God do this before. It belongs to the young person who looks at the world and sees possibilities the rest of us have stopped expecting. It belongs to the person on the margins, the one who has every reason to be skeptical, who nevertheless keeps persisting.

    The Spirit was not poured out on a small committee. It was poured out on all flesh. That means everyone.

    The world is still standing outside asking What does this mean? And we are still the people who are supposed to have something to say.

    Not because we have all the answers. Peter didn’t have all the answers. The prophecy of this community is always a collective work. No single voice has the whole picture. That is by design. The Spirit distributes the gift widely precisely because the work of interpretation requires all of us, our different vantage points, our different life experiences, our different ways of paying attention.

    But the Spirit has come. The wind blew. The fire landed. And the question is still what it has always been:

    What does this mean? And what are we going to do about it?

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Sermon for May 17th, 2026

    Sermon based on John 17:1-11

    It’s after the meal. The bread has been broken, the cup has been passed, and Judas has already slipped out into the night. Jesus has been talking for chapters reassuring, preparing, promising. And then, without warning, he stops talking to them and starts talking for them. He lifts his eyes toward heaven and prays. Out loud. With every one of them sitting right there, listening to every word.

    Think about that for a moment. This is not the Garden of Gethsemane scene from Matthew or Mark, where Jesus goes off alone, falls on his face, and prays so hard he sweats while the disciples fall asleep. This is a table. A meal. These are people who have spent three years together, and now their rabbi, their teacher, their friend, is praying over them in plain hearing. Every word meant for God’s ears is also falling on theirs.

    What does it do to you to overhear someone pray for you? Not talk about you… pray for you. There is something deeply intimate about it. It strips away every performance. When someone prays for you, you hear what they truly believe about you, what they actually want for you. You hear their heart.

    And this is the heart of Jesus.

    He opens with a word that speaks to the moment: “Father, the hour has come.”

    In John’s gospel, “the hour” is a phrase you hear from the very beginning. At the wedding in Cana, Jesus says, “My hour has not yet come.” When the crowds try to arrest him, we’re told, “no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come.” Over and over, that phrase appears as a kind of waiting — a slow build toward something enormous. And now, at the table, Jesus says it plainly: the hour has come.

    He is not running from it. He is not bargaining or asking for a different path. He is, in fact, asking for what is about to happen… the betrayal, the trial, the cross, to be understood for what it really is. He asks that in the horror of what’s coming, God would be made known.

    That is what glory means in John’s gospel. Not brightness or spectacle or divine fireworks. Glory is the way God gets revealed to human beings. It is what happens when the invisible God becomes visible. And Jesus is saying: what you are about to witness, this thing that looks like failure and defeat and death, is actually the moment when God is most fully made known.

    That is a radical claim.

    We have a complicated relationship with the word “glory.” It tends to call up images of power… thunderclouds, armies, gold, triumph. The Psalms are full of it. The prophets can barely contain it. And there are certainly moments in the gospels where divine power is unmistakable. At the transfiguration, Jesus shines like the sun. At the resurrection, the stone rolls back. At the ascension, he is lifted into the clouds.

    But in John’s gospel, the glory of Jesus is focused on something different. John gives us the first sign of Jesus’ glory at a wedding in Cana, where Jesus quietly turns water into wine… not to impress anyone, but because a family would have been humiliated without it. And John gives us the last great sign of Jesus’ glory before the crucifixion when Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb because two sisters were devastated by grief.

    In both cases, what’s being revealed is not just power. It is the direction in which that power moves. It moves toward people. It moves toward need. It moves toward love.

    And when we get to the cross, which is what this prayer is anticipating, John makes no mention of the earthquake, no tearing of the temple curtain, no saints rising from their tombs. The other gospels use those signs to frame the crucifixion as a divine event. John doesn’t. Because in John’s gospel, the cross itself is the glory. The cross is what God looks like when God stops being abstract and starts being present in the specific, costly, unreserved love of a man dying for the people he loves.

    “It is finished,” Jesus will say from the cross in John 19. The Greek word for “it is finished” is tetelestai, the same root as the word used in this prayer when Jesus says he has “finished the work” God gave him to do. The cross is not a detour from the mission. It is the central component of it. It is the moment the glory lands.

    In the middle of this prayer, Jesus gives us one of the simplest definitions of eternal life in all of scripture. He says: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (17:3)

    That’s it. That’s the definition.

    He’s not speaking about a destination. Jesus isn’t offering an afterlife benefit package. It’ not even an escape plan from this world into some better one. Eternal life, as spoken about in this prayer, is knowing God. It is being in relationship with the one who made you, through the one who revealed him, Jesus Christ.

    Now, when John’s gospel uses the word “k-n-o-w,” it does not mean what we usually mean by it. It is not intellectual. You cannot know God in the sense Jesus means here by passing an exam or reciting the right words. In the world of the Gospel of John, to “know” someone is to be bound to them. It is the knowledge that comes through proximity, through faithfulness, through love over time. Again, it’s about relationship.

    It is the knowledge a parent has of their child. It is the knowledge a person has of a friend they’ve kept through grief and joy and years. It is experiential, relational, and ongoing.

    Which means that eternal life, the kind Jesus is talking about, is already available. It starts now. Not when you die. Now. The moment you begin to know God, you have begun to live the life that does not end.

    We have too often used “eternal life” as a way of tolerating the present; as if this life is just the waiting room, and the real thing starts later. But Jesus is saying something almost exactly the opposite. The life of abiding in God (there’s that word abiding again), of knowing God, of being caught up in the love between the Father and the Son… that begins at the moment of faith. You are not waiting to live. You are already living it, if you are in relationship with God.

    There’s a strange phrase in verse 2 that deserves attention. Jesus says that God has given him “authority over all people”; the word translated into people here in Greek is sarkos, which is broader than just human beings. It is the word for creaturely, embodied, finite existence. Everything that has flesh. Everything that lives and breathes and is mortal.

    The scope of that statement is staggering. And the purpose of that authority is not control, it is to give life. Authority over all life, in order to give eternal life. The power Jesus holds is not the power to dominate. It is the power to restore. The power to bring into relationship what had become estranged.

    And the object of that restoration is not just us. It is the whole created order… all creation, that God loves and refuses to abandon.

    There is another moment in this prayer I want to home in on. Toward the end of this section of text, Jesus says: “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world.” (17:11)

    He is already speaking in the past tense about something that hasn’t happened yet. He is so certain of what is coming, so completely surrendered to it, that from where he stands in prayer, the cross and resurrection and ascension are already done. And the disciples, the ones sitting right there at the table, are already alone.

    They don’t know that yet. They don’t know what the next 72 hours are going to look like. They have no previous example to learn from for what’s coming. And Jesus knows that. And he prays for them anyway. He prays not just for the eleven at the table, but, as the prayer continues, for everyone who will come to believe through their witness… which is to say, he prays for us.

    He prays that we would be protected. That we would be unified. That we would know the love the Father has for the Son, and that this love would live in us.

    What does it mean to know that Jesus prayed for you? Not in theory. In fact. At a table, on the last night before his death, with everything on the line; he prayed for you, in the sense that he prayed for all who would come after. You were on his heart before you existed. How does that make you feel? What does that stir in you, that Jesus would pray for you?

    The prayer ends, at least in our lectionary passage, with this: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”

    The unity Jesus prays for is not institutional. He is praying that the love between the Father and the Son… that original, eternal, life giving love that existed before the world was made, would be the same love that holds us together as his people.

    That is a different kind of unity. It is not agreement on every principle. It is a shared center. A common life. A love that does not require everyone to be the same, but does require everyone to be bound to the same God.

    And here is where this prayer becomes our commission rather than just our comfort.

    Jesus is no longer in the world. The incarnation has done its work. The Word became flesh, walked among us, died, rose, ascended. And now, according to Jesus himself — “they are in the world.” We are in the world. The mission continues, but the primary agent of the mission has changed. We are not waiting for Jesus to come back and do the work. We are the people sent to do the work while we wait.

    That is not a small thing. That is the whole center of Pentecost, the reason the Spirit was sent, the reason the church exists at all. Remember from two weeks ago, Jesus said in John 14, “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” Greater works. He meant that. He was not being symbolic. Jesus prayed that we would work and live together in a spirit of love.

    When Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina in the fall of 2024, it left the city of Asheville without running water for 53 days. Roads were gone. The infrastructure that held a community together was simply not there anymore. But something else emerged in its place.

    A ministry called Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry, an interfaith organization supported by over 300 congregations of nearly every denomination, happened to have just moved into a new building with a large warehouse they hadn’t yet figured out what to do with. Within days of the storm, that warehouse became the only functioning distribution hub in the county, with churches of every stripe showing up together to work. Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, LDS volunteers… all of them side by side, hauling supplies and clearing debris.

    One man who grew up in Asheville and was cutting through fallen trees was interviewed and said it simply: “We may have our feuds, but when something like this happens, all of that goes away”. One of the churches that joined in to help was a brand new church plant whose official launch had been scheduled for that same month put out a statement that said: the storm postponed our launch, but it couldn’t stop us from being the church and loving our city.

    That is what Jesus is praying for at that table. Not that we would agree on everything. That we would show up together when it matters.

    So what does this mean for us? It’s a call to unity, to come together around a shared love of God and vision for the world around us. We are placed in this time and place to be the salt of the earth, that is, to be people on this earth who make a difference in the lives of others who are hurt, heartbroken, or heavy burdened. We come together, forming the body of Christ, so that the world would know what resurrection really means for us all.

    The resurrection is not the conclusion of the story. It is the beginning of ours as we live into this prayer.

    Most of us will not face anything like what those disciples faced. We will not watch our teacher get arrested. We will not scatter in fear on the night everything falls apart. But we live in the same basic tension they lived in… caught between the world as it is and the world as God intends it, between the love we know in Jesus and the hostility that love often meets in the world.

    And on the ordinary days; the tired days, the days when the mission feels too big and we feel too small… this prayer is still being prayed. The Jesus who prayed at that table is the same Jesus who, in the words of Hebrews, “always lives to make intercession” for us. The prayer did not end at that table. It continues.

    You are still in the world. And you are still being prayed for. Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Sermon for May 10th, 2026

    Sermon Based on John 14:15-21

    Jesus never stops talking.

    That is not a complaint, just an observation to connect us with what we read here last week. Last Sunday we were in John 14:1–14, and the lectionary hit the brakes at verse 14. However, Jesus did not. He kept going. He had more to say… because the disciples needed more to hear.

    Like I mentioned last week, this segment of scripture is traditionally called the Farewell Discourse. Chapters 13 through 17 of John’s Gospel are Jesus’ last extended conversation with his closest friends before his arrest. He is talking with people who are about to lose the most important relationship of their lives. And he knows it. He knows they don’t fully know it yet… but they will. So he is preparing them. He is trying to build up something in them before he goes, something that will hold them when everything else comes apart.

    And right here, in verses 15 through 21, Jesus introduces for the first time in John’s Gospel a sustained portrait of the Holy Spirit.

    That timing of this revelation is important. John has not ignored the Spirit. There are earlier references. But this is the first time Jesus sits down and explains who the Spirit is, what the Spirit does, and why it matters that the Spirit is coming. He saves this for the end. He saves it for the moment when his friends are most afraid of being left behind.

    I think there’s something worth sitting with in that.

    Before we get to the theology, let’s consider the very human moment playing itself out here.

    Again, like I said last week, the disciples are scared. Not in a vague, existential way. They are scared the way you get scared when someone you depend on tells you they are leaving. Jesus has been saying it for a while now. “Where I am going, you cannot come.” “I am going to prepare a place for you.” The words are tender, but the message is clear: departure is coming.

    We know this feeling. Most of us have sat with someone we loved; a parent, a mentor, a friend, and felt the ground shift beneath us when we realized they wouldn’t be there forever. Or they were already gone. And we asked the question we don’t always say out loud: How do I do this without you?

    The disciples are asking that question. How do we keep the faith, keep the commandments, keep the movement alive when the person who made all of it make sense is no longer physically present? That is the question Jesus is answering here.

    Jesus begins in a place that can sound more transactional if you aren’t careful: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

    Read it fast and it sounds like he’s making a deal. Love me; prove it by following the rules. But that’s not what Jesus is doing here. He is describing the shape of love, not setting up a contract.

    Genuine love is not passive. It is not a feeling you tend privately while the world does what it does. Love, in the framework Jesus operates in, moves. It acts. It takes on a direction. And the direction he keeps pointing toward is the same one he’s been pointing toward throughout John’s Gospel… toward God, toward the neighbor, toward the stranger, toward the person the world has decided doesn’t count.

    The greatest commandment, the one that holds everything else together, is this: love God and love your neighbor. That’s it. That’s the whole architecture. When Jesus says “keep my commandments,” he is not handing you a rulebook. He is describing what love looks like when it has somewhere to go.

    This means the Christian life is not fundamentally about intellectual agreement with a set of doctrines. It is about a kind of love that produces a certain kind of life. When Jesus says “keep my commandments,” he is fusing together love of God and love of neighbor. The two are inseparable. You cannot claim one and ignore the other.

    If love is alive in you, it will show up somewhere. That’s not a burden. That’s just the nature of the thing.

    Then Jesus makes a promise. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.”

    The Greek word he uses is paraklētos. It’s a Greek word that doesn’t have a clean single-word English equivalent, which is why your Bible might translate it as Advocate, Comforter, Helper, or Counselor — and all of those translations are partially right. The root meaning is simply someone called to your side. Someone present with you.

    In the ancient world, a paraclete was the person who showed up when you were in trouble; in the courts, in the community, in a crisis. Not to observe from a distance, but to stand with you, speak on your behalf, and help you navigate what you couldn’t navigate alone.

    Did you notice? Jesus calls the Holy Spirit another Advocate. That word, another, is carrying more weight than it might appear. It means there was already one. Jesus himself was the first Advocate. The Spirit continues the work that Jesus began, without replacing Jesus. The Spirit doesn’t show up after Easter to fill a vacancy. The Spirit shows up to make the living, present Jesus accessible to every person in every generation who never walked the roads of Galilee.

    This is the theological center of the whole passage. For the disciples standing in that upper room, Jesus was accessible in a physical, embodied sense. They could see him, touch him, hear his voice. After the resurrection and the ascension, that kind of access ends. But something more expansive begins.

    The Spirit of truth becomes the means by which the living Jesus is real and present, not just to twelve people in first-century Judea, but to people in Glendale, Arizona, in 2026. To every person who has ever tried to follow Jesus without having met him in person…  which is all of us. The Spirit is how the relationship stays alive across time and distance.

    Think about what it means to fall in love with someone. You can’t do it in the abstract. You can’t fall in love with an idea. Real love requires an encounter, a presence, a being who is actually there. Faith in Jesus works the same way. John’s Gospel insists that faith is a relationship with a living person, not a memorial to a historical figure. For that relationship to be real… genuinely real, not metaphorical, Jesus has to actually be present. And the Spirit is how that presence is made known.

    This is not mysticism without content. This is the logic of the gospel: because Jesus lives, because he rose, because he ascended to the Father… the Spirit can make him present everywhere, always, without limit.

    Jesus makes an interesting distinction here. He says the world cannot receive the Spirit of truth, because the world neither sees nor recognizes it.

    When John uses the word “world” this way, he doesn’t mean the planet, or people in general. He means a particular posture toward God… the posture of alienation, of self-sufficiency, of organizing your life as though God is absent or irrelevant. That posture is what makes the Spirit invisible.

    The Spirit isn’t hiding. The Spirit is present and active and moving. But to be encountered by the Spirit requires a certain openness, what the tradition calls faith, or repentance, or turning. You cannot remain entirely closed to God and simultaneously experience the presence of God. Not because God is keeping score, but because you have to be capable of receiving what is being given.

    Here is my personal pastoral note: many people in our culture are trying to live full lives on purely horizontal terms. Meaning derived only from relationships, achievement, consumption, experience. And those things have some value, they are not nothing. But there is a kind of aliveness the Spirit offers that purely horizontal living cannot produce. The world cannot receive it, not because the world is beyond reach, but because receiving it requires a change in direction. It requires turning toward something other than yourself.

    The good news is that this turning is available to everyone. The Spirit is not reserved for the religious elite or the theologically sophisticated. The Spirit is the Advocate who shows up for anyone who is willing to stop running the other way.

    And then Jesus says something that is the emotional center of the entire passage.

    “I will not leave you orphaned.”

    That word, orphaned, is not accidental. It names the deepest fear. Not just grief, not just loneliness, but the particular vulnerability of being left without a parent. Without covering. Without someone to whom you belong.

    In the ancient world, the stakes of that vulnerability were even higher than they are today. An orphan didn’t just lose a parent… they lost position, protection, identity, belonging. To call someone an orphan was to name their exposure to the world.

    Jesus looks at his disciples and says: That is not what you are. That is not what you will be.

    The promise of the Spirit is fundamentally a promise about belonging. You belong to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. That belonging is not contingent on your performance. It is not revoked when you fail. It is not dependent on your having figured everything out. It is a relational reality that the Spirit seals and sustains.

    We live in a culture with an epidemic of orphanhood, not necessarily in the legal sense, but in the spiritual sense. People who are deeply uncertain whether they belong anywhere, whether anyone is actually for them, whether the universe is indifferent or hostile to their existence. The church should have something definitive to say to that condition. Not a program. Not an optimistic slogan. But a word rooted in the actual promises of Jesus: You are not orphaned. There is a belonging available to you that death itself cannot take away.

    One more thing, and this is important too.

    We are in the season after Easter. The tomb is empty. The resurrection has been proclaimed. And a lot of folks in the church seats are quietly asking a question they might not know how to name: Now what?

    They came to Easter. They heard the good news. And now it’s a few Sundays later and life is pretty much what it was. The mortgage is still due. The relationship is still hard. The baggage of life is still something they carry. And if the resurrection is the whole story, if that’s the summit, then it can start to feel like a peak you visited once that doesn’t change the terrain you live in every day.

    But the resurrection is not the summit. It is not the destination. It is the door.

    Jesus is pointing his disciples, in this passage, toward something they do not yet have language for. He is telling them that the empty tomb is a beginning, not a finale. That what God is doing in the world through the Spirit is larger and longer than a single Sunday morning.

    Pentecost is coming. The Spirit is coming. And the Spirit is not a consolation prize for people who missed the resurrection. The Spirit is the presence of the risen Jesus, active and available and moving in the world right now. Today. In this room. In your life.

    The resurrection says: death does not win. The Spirit says: now live like it.

    Jesus ties all of this together with a word that the Gospel of John uses over and over: abide.

    “He abides with you, and he will be in you.”

    Abide is not a dramatic word. It doesn’t describe a peak experience or a crisis moment. It describes steady presence over time. It describes what happens when a relationship goes deep; when it becomes part of the structure of your life rather than just an occasional visit.

    The Holy Spirit abides. That means the presence of God is not something you have to manufacture, or achieve, or maintain through heroic spiritual effort. It is given. It is already there. The question is whether you are paying attention to it, whether you are living in the direction of it, whether you are allowing it to shape the way you love.

    Keep the commandments; love God, love your neighbor. Not to earn the relationship, but because love, when it’s real, always moves toward the other. And as you do, you find yourself held by something larger than your own effort. Accompanied by a presence you did not generate. Belonging to a family you did not build.

    You are not orphaned.

    That is the promise. The Spirit is how it’s kept. Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Sermon for May 3, 2026

    Sermon based on John 14:1-14

    The scripture we just read also gets read at a lot of funerals. And that’s for a good reason. It’s one of the most comforting things Jesus ever said. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” Those words have covered a lot of grief. They have held a lot of people in the hardest hours of their lives.

    But here is the thing. Jesus did not say these words at a funeral. He said them at a dinner table, to a room full of people who were very much alive and very much afraid. He was not addressing the recently bereaved. He was addressing men who had just watched one of their own slip out into the dark to betray him. Men who had just been told that their most confident member, Peter… loud, blustering, rock-solid Peter, was about to fall completely apart. Men who had been told that Jesus himself was leaving and that where he was going, they could not follow.

    The ground was shifting under their feet. Everything they had counted on for three years was coming undone in a single evening. That is the room Jesus is talking to. That is the moment these words were born into.

    Which means this passage has a great deal more to say to us than where we go when we die. It has something to say to us about right now, about what it means to follow Jesus in a world that does not always hold still.

    One Heart

    Jesus opens with something that is easy to miss in most English translations. He says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” The word “hearts” sounds plural, like he is addressing each individual’s personal emotional state… your heart, and yours, and yours. But in the Greek, the word is singular, καρδία (Kardia).[1] “Do not let your heart be troubled.”

    He is speaking to a group of people, using a plural “you,” but referring to a single heart. Your collective heart. As in: you people share one heart, and right now that heart is in danger.

    That is a striking thing to say. It is also a necessary thing to say, because what is about to happen, Judas gone, Jesus arrested, Peter denying him three times, the disciples scattering… all of that is the story of a community coming apart at the seams. And when a community comes apart, hearts get troubled. The singular fractures into many, and people go their separate ways into fear and isolation and regret.

    Here, Jesus is not just offering comfort. He is calling them back to their shared identity before it disintegrates. He is saying: stay together. You are one body, one community, one heart. Do not let the chaos of the next few days convince you that you are on your own.

    That word lands differently for us than it might for people who only hear this text at memorials. If we are honest, we know what it is like to sit in a church, or in a family, or in a community, where fear has started to pull people in different directions. Where something has shifted and people are uncertain and the ground does not feel as solid as it used to. Jesus has something to say to that moment. Stay together. You have one heart. Do not let it be troubled.

    Thomas Needs a Map

    Jesus goes on to tell the disciples that he is going to prepare a place for them, and that they already know the way. Thomas, to his credit, says exactly what everyone else in the room is probably thinking: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

    Thomas is not being dense. He is being honest. Jesus is speaking metaphorically, and Thomas is asking a literal question. He wants an address, a road map, a GPS coordinate. Give us something concrete to work with.

    And Jesus responds with what is arguably the most quoted — and most misused — sentence in the Gospel of John. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

    That sentence has been turned into a hammer. It has been wielded as a threat; accept Jesus on our specific terms or be excluded from God forever. It has been used to build walls, to sort people into saved and unsaved categories, to baptize all manner of religious exclusivity.

    But read that sentence where it actually lives. It is the middle of a farewell dinner. Jesus is not issuing a decree about world religions. He is answering Thomas’s anxious question. He is saying: you do not need a map, because I am the way. The destination and the directions are the same thing. I am both. You already have what you need.

    This is a word of comfort and assurance, not a word of judgment. The scholars of the early church called the followers of Jesus “people of the Way.” Not people who had the correct doctrine about the Way. People who were walking in it. People who had taken up the life and manner of Jesus, the path of discipleship, the way of living, and were trying to embody it in the world.

    When Jesus says “I am the way,” he is not drawing a line around a parking lot and telling you who gets to park there. He is saying: look at me. Watch how I live. Watch how I treat people. Watch where I show up and who I eat with and what I defend and what I refuse. That is the direction. Walk that way.

    Philip Still Wants More

    Thomas gets his answer and sits down. Then Philip raises his hand. “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”

    There is something almost endearing about Philip here. He has been with Jesus for three years. He has watched Jesus feed thousands of people with a handful of loaves. He has seen blind men see and dead men walk. And still he is saying: just show us God and we will be content. Give us one undeniable, unambiguous vision of the divine, and we will ask for nothing else.

    It is worth noting that the Greek word Philip uses, “satisfied”, is the same word he used earlier at the feeding of the five thousand, when he told Jesus that six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for the crowd. Philip is a man haunted by scarcity. He keeps calculating what is sufficient, what is enough, whether there will be enough to go around.

    And Jesus, with what reads like barely contained exasperation, says: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

    This is the whole of Jesus’ mission, named plainly. He has not come to establish a religion or found an institution or give us a manual for moral living. He has come to show us what God is like. Every time Jesus healed someone who wasn’t supposed to be healed, every time he ate with someone who wasn’t supposed to be eaten with, every time he refused to condemn and instead extended mercy… he was showing us the Father. The character of God. What God cares about. What God loves.

    If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. That is the claim. It is an enormous claim. It is also a clarifying one, because it means we do not get to invent a God who endorses our exclusions and validates our violence. The God we see in Jesus is the one who kneels on the floor and washes dirty feet. The God we see in Jesus is the one who says “neither do I condemn you” before the woman has had a chance to clean herself up. That is the Father we are looking at when we look at Jesus.

    Greater Works Than These

    Jesus closes this section with something that is hard to hear without flinching a little. “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”

    Greater works than these. Greater than healing the blind. Greater than raising the dead. Greater than feeding thousands. It is a remarkable promise. And if we are honest with ourselves, it is a promise that is awfully hard to square with most of our experience of church.

    Part of the problem is that we have imagined “greater works” means spectacular works — miracles performed on demand, dramatic visible interventions, the kind of thing that makes the news or trends on social media. We keep waiting for that version of greater, and it does not show up, and so we quietly conclude that either Jesus was exaggerating or we are somehow failing.

    But the mission Jesus is entrusting to his disciples is not primarily about spectacle. It is about presence. It is about making the Father known the same way Jesus made the Father known — by showing up where people are suffering, by refusing to write people off, by embodying the character of God in plain, ordinary, sometimes invisible ways.

    There is a boy in Omaha, Nebraska named True. He is a third grader who loves baseball and riding his bike around the neighborhood. He is also a kid who was born with only one functioning chamber in his heart… a rare and serious condition that, a generation ago, would likely have been a death sentence. He has had five open-heart surgeries and ten cardiac catheterizations. He is, by any measure, a remarkable kid.

    But here is the part of his story that I want to get to. In January of 2022, True was four years old. He was in a pre-op room at Children’s Hospital in Nebraska, alone, about to go into a heart procedure without a single family member by his side, because he was in the foster care system. His anesthesiologist, a doctor named Amy Beethe, walked in to meet him and found him sitting there… small, scared, by himself.

    She made a phone call. She learned the hospital had been struggling to find a foster family for True because his medical needs were so complex. Almost as an afterthought, the social worker asked if Dr. Beethe might know of anyone. She didn’t know that Dr. Beethe was a licensed foster parent.

    Dr. Beethe called her husband. They said yes. Within weeks, True was home with them. Not long after, he was adopted. The Beethe family then went further; they adopted True’s biological sister, helped find homes for four other siblings, placing two of them with another Children’s anesthesiologist, one with Dr. Beethe’s sister, and one with her husband’s brother. Six kids, scattered by hard circumstances, pulled back into a network of people who simply refused to let them disappear.[2]

    Now. Was that a miracle? There was no dramatic healing, no visible sign, no moment where the crowd gasped. It was a doctor doing her job who noticed a scared kid alone in a room, and then chose to do something about it. It was a family saying yes when saying yes was going to cost them something. It was a community of people; doctors, social workers, extended family, weaving themselves together around children who needed them.

    That is what greater works looks like. Not a spectacle. A choice. A presence. A willingness to see someone who is easy to overlook and refuse to walk past them. The Father, made known. Not in a flash of light but in a pre-op room in Omaha on a Tuesday morning in January.

    And collectively, that shared singular heart again, the community of Jesus doing those works in a thousand places at once, across two thousand years? That is greater than any one miracle. That is the mission.

    What We Already Know

    Here is what I want you to take home from this passage. Not the comfort of heaven, though that comfort is real and good and we should hold it. But something more immediate.

    Jesus says to his disciples, in a room full of fear and confusion and the beginning of grief: you know more than you think you do. You know the way. You have seen the Father. You have one heart. Do not let it be troubled.

    That is not a command to get your emotions under control and project confidence. It is an invitation to trust what you have already received. To trust that the way of Jesus, the way of mercy and presence and refusing to let people disappear, is the actual way. Not a way. The way.

    And it is a call to stay together. Because the singular heart Jesus is addressing only functions as one heart if the community holds together. Peter’s catastrophic failure, three denials before dawn… happens when he is isolated, when he has drifted away from the people who share his heart. He is restored in John 21, and he is restored in community, surrounded by the people who know him and love him and refuse to let his worst night be the last word about him.

    That is what this community is. That is what we are called to be for each other and for the world around us. People of the Way. People with a singular heart. People who have seen the Father in Jesus and are trying, imperfectly, persistently, together, to make him known.

    Do not let your heart be troubled. You know the way. You have known it all along.

    “I am the way, and the truth, and the life… Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” — John 14:6, 9

    [1] https://biblehub.com/interlinear/john/14-1.htm

    [2] https://www.childrensnebraska.org/health-hub/trues-story-heart-care-and-adoption

  • Sermon for April 19th, 2026

    Based on Luke 24:13-35

    I’ve sat in hospital waiting rooms with families packing up the things they brought with them to the ICU. The empty coffee cups, the phone chargers, the extra change of clothes they never used. And at some point, almost always quietly, almost always to no one in particular, someone in that family says it. “We had hoped…” And then they go to the car.

    There is a phrase in that experience and in today’s Bible story that I can’t get away from this week.

    That phrase is a simple verb. But it carries more weight than almost anything else in this passage. Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem… away from the empty tomb, away from the chaos of Easter morning, away from the story they can’t make sense of. A stranger falls in beside them and asks what they’re talking about. And Cleopas stops walking. Just stops. Stands there, bewildered that anyone could be in or around Jerusalem and not know what has just happened. And then he says it.

    We had hoped.

    We had hoped. Past tense. In Greek, (ɛ̌ːl.píz.do.men)[1]. It can also be translated as we expected, or we believed. We had hoped. The action of hoping had started, and it carried on for a good long while, and then, somewhere between the arrest and the cross and the sealed tomb, it ran out. They had hoped that Jesus was the one to redeem Israel. They had staked everything on it. And now here they are, shuffling down a dusty road, doing what grieving people do: trying to walk it off.

    I want to reflect on that verb we had hoped before we rush past it toward the happy ending. Because here’s what I know about you, and about the people sitting in the seats around you right now: some of you walked in here today carrying a “we had hoped.” A marriage you believed God was in. A doctors visit that came back wrong. A career that you invested in and believed would last through your retirement. A child you raised in faith who walked away from it. A prayer you’ve prayed so many times the words have gone smooth like river stones, and heaven still feels quiet. You had hoped.

    The hoping didn’t start small… it was real, sustained, the kind of hope that carries you through years. And then something happened, and now you’re walking away from Jerusalem, trying to figure out what to do with the wreckage of what didn’t come true.

    Luke doesn’t rush past this moment. He doesn’t wave it away. He gives us Cleopas standing in the road, speaking a phrase that every grieving person recognizes on contact. We had hoped. You’ve said it. Maybe you’ve said it this week.

    But let’s go back to the story. So, who are these two people on the road to Emmaus?

    We know the name of one of them, Cleopas. That’s it. He shows up here and nowhere else in the New Testament. He’s not one of the Twelve. He’s a disciple from the wider circle, one of hundreds of people who had followed Jesus, believed in him, built their lives around the idea that something was finally, actually happening in the history of Israel. The other person with him… we don’t even get a name. Some scholars have suggested it might be his wife (Mrs. Cleopas, maybe?). We don’t know.

    What we do know is that they are on a seven-mile walk from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. And as they walk, they are doing something the Greek makes clearer than our English translations: they are not just talking. They are examining the evidence together. They are turning the facts over, looking at them from every angle, trying to reason their way to some kind of understanding. These are not superstitious, simple-minded people who believed because they didn’t know better. These are people wrestling hard with the facts in front of them.

    The gospel of Luke is full of this. Mary debates the angel. Jesus questions the teachers in the Temple. The disciples on this road are thinking people in a crisis of faith, and Jesus doesn’t rebuke them for thinking. He walks with them in it.

    I think this is important because a lot of people have been told, sometimes by the church itself, that doubt is the opposite of faith, that questions are a sign of weak belief, that a real Christian just trusts. But here is the risen Jesus, walking seven miles with two people who are auditing the evidence and coming up short, and he doesn’t leave them. He joins them. He engages every question they have. He takes their crisis seriously.

    There is something deeply pastoral about the way Luke tells this. Jesus honors the conversation. He takes the long road with them, not the short one.

    Here’s another detail worth reflecting on. When Jesus joins them on the road, they don’t know who he is. Luke tells us their eyes were “kept from recognizing him”. Luke doesn’t fully explain it. Maybe their grief was so total that they couldn’t see past it. Maybe the risen body of Jesus was different enough that recognition required more than a glance. Maybe God, in some strange mercy, wanted them to come to faith through the conversation itself before the reveal.

    Did you notice this: they describe Jesus to Jesus. They give him a summary of his own life, his own death, their own hope and disappointment, and they don’t know who they’re talking to. It’s an ironic moment. The very person they’re grieving is the one walking beside them. The one they had hoped in is listening to them explain why they had stopped hoping.

    Cleopas even calls him a stranger — uses the Greek word paroikos,[2] which means something closer to a foreigner, a migrant, an outsider.[3] The risen Christ appears to them as the other, the one who comes from somewhere else. And what’s interesting is: they don’t turn him away. Despite their grief, despite the fact that they have no idea who this person is, they invite him in. They say, “Stay with us. It’s getting late.” That hospitality, offered in the middle of their own devastation, is what changes everything.

    And so they sit down to eat. Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them.

    I imagine the words are almost identical to the words at the Last Supper. Luke wants you to hear that echo. He wants you to feel the resonance between that upper room table and this ordinary roadside dinner table. Jesus is doing the most Jesus thing he ever does: it is feeding his friends at a table.

    Robert Karris, a scholar who spent his career in Luke’s Gospel, wrote that in Luke, Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.[4] That’s not an exaggeration. Eating in Luke is a theological act. Jesus is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard… which is to say, he ate with everybody, broke every social boundary at the table, welcomed people who had no business being at the table together. And here, in this house in Emmaus, he does it again.

    And that’s when their eyes open. Not during the Scripture lesson on the road, as rich as that was. Not when he explained Moses and the prophets. It’s the bread. It’s the breaking. It’s the ordinary, intimate, physical act of sharing a meal. It’s building relationships.

    I think Luke is telling us something here that is easy to miss in a culture that has made worship primarily intellectual. The resurrection is not just a theological proposition you reason your way into. It is something you encounter, in the Word, yes, but also in the waters of baptism, the bread, the cup, the touch of another person’s hand, the gathered company of regular people who are also carrying their own imperfect-tense verbs. Jesus becomes known in the breaking of bread.

    This is why the table carries significance. This is why we come back every week. Not just to hear, but to receive. Not just to think, but to be fed.

    Now here’s the thing I want to be careful about, because it would be too easy to set up their disappointment as a neat spiritual problem with a clean answer.

    Cleopas and his companion had hoped that Jesus would redeem Israel. They meant it literally, politically, concretely. They wanted Rome gone, out of power. They wanted the kingdom (and authority) of Israel restored. They wanted the suffering of their people to be over. And Jesus didn’t do that, not in the way they expected. The professor who wrote one of the commentaries I read this week says he sometimes tells his seminary students: “If Jesus was the Messiah, he wasn’t very good at it.”[5] Which is deliberately provocative, but it points at something important. Jesus confounded every category people had for what a Messiah was supposed to do.

    And the risen Jesus, walking that road, doesn’t deny their disappointment. He doesn’t tell them they were wrong to hope for what they hoped for. He reframes it. He puts their story inside a larger story… a story in which suffering and glory are not opposites, in which crucifixion is not the end of God’s action in the world but a move within it. The Messiah had to suffer these things before entering his glory. That’s a hard concept. It doesn’t make the pain smaller. But it insists that the pain is not the last word.

    That is the work of the church when someone is carrying pain. You don’t deny the trauma. You don’t rush to the silver lining. You walk the road with them. You help them, slowly, carefully, begin to see their story inside the larger story of what God has been doing all along. That takes time. It takes presence. It takes bread at a table together.

    The story ends pretty quickly after that. As soon as their eyes are opened, Jesus is gone. And these two people, who were walking away from Jerusalem in grief, now turn around and walk back. Seven miles, in the dark, because they cannot keep this to themselves. They get to Jerusalem and find the eleven disciples already gathered, already saying it: “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon.” And Cleopas and his companion add their own testimony: he was made known to us in the breaking of the bread.

    There is something instructive about that. The church, from its first days, has been a community gathered around a testimony, a story that we tell. People who had their own encounters with the risen Christ, who recognized him in the breaking of bread, who turned around and went back to tell someone else.

    You are here today because somewhere in the chain of that testimony, someone told someone who told someone who eventually told you. And whatever your “we had hoped” is, whatever imperfect-tense grief you walked in with, you are invited to this same table where he has been making himself known for two thousand years.

    We had hoped.

    Maybe some of us still do. Maybe today is the day the bread gets broken and something shifts. Maybe it takes longer. But the road to Emmaus tells us this: he comes alongside people who are walking away. He takes the long road. He stays for dinner.

    And he is known in the breaking of the bread. Amen.

    [1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%A0%CE%BB%CF%80%CE%AF%CE%B6%CE%BF%CE%BC%CE%B5%CE%BD

    [2] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-luke-2413-35-11

    [3] https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/paroikeo

    [4] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-luke-2413-35-9

    [5] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-luke-2413-35-9

    Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Sermon for April 12, 2026

    Sermon based on John 20:19-31

    The Gospel of John tells us when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear.

    I want us to sit in that sentence for a moment. The disciples had heard it by now. Mary Magdalene had told them, breathless and wide-eyed, that she had seen the Lord, resurrected. The tomb was empty. The grave clothes were folded. The stone was rolled away. The story was getting out. And what did the disciples do with that news?

    They locked the doors.

    That is often the human response to the impossible. We lock the doors. We pull the blinds. We huddle together in the dark and try to figure out how to survive what is happening to us.

    And if you think that instinct belongs only to first-century disciples hiding from Jewish or Roman authorities, consider this: a survey released just this past year found that 42% of all Americans believe the U.S. economy could completely collapse[1] someday… not slow down, not struggle, but collapse entirely. The researchers who analyzed the data described us as a country that is “objectively wealthy, subjectively terrified.” That phrase stopped me cold. Because that is exactly the room John is describing. People who, by any measurable standard, have immense reason for hope, and yet are terrified behind locked doors anyway.

    The resurrection had been announced, and these men and women, the very people who had walked with Jesus, eaten with him, watched him heal and teach and feed crowds with a handful of food, they were still afraid. Still paralyzed. Still behind locked doors.

    I think we need to consider why that is.

    John tells us it was fear of the Jewish authorities. That is accurate and specific, but underneath that political fear was something deeper. You see, these disciples had failed Jesus. Peter had denied him three times in the firelight of a courtyard while Jesus was being interrogated and beaten. The rest of them, all except John, had scattered. When the moment arrived, the real moment, the one that mattered… they were gone. And now Jesus was reportedly alive again.

    Think about what that means from the inside. If the man you abandoned, the man you denied, the man you ran away from… if he is suddenly alive and walking around, the last person in the world you want to see is him. Because you know what you did. You know how you failed. And you are terrified that the resurrection is not good news for you. You are terrified that what comes next is the reckoning.

    So they lock the doors. They lock them against the authorities. They lock them against the future. And maybe, just maybe, they lock them against Jesus himself.

    And then Jesus comes through the locked door.

    John says it simply, without fanfare, without explanation. Jesus came and stood among them. He did not knock. He did not wait. He did not send word ahead. He did not require that they get themselves together, settle their doubts, or process their shame before he would show up. He just entered.

    And what were his first words?

    Peace be with you.

    Shalom. Peace. Well-being. The wholeness and flourishing that only God can give. That word, shalom, is not just the absence of conflict. It is a Hebrew concept loaded with the idea of everything being as it should be, of justice and prosperity and human dignity restored, of people living fully within the covenant of a God who keeps his promises.

    When Jesus says “peace be with you,” he is pronouncing a blessing that cuts straight through the fear and shame these disciples are carrying and says: you are not condemned. You are not abandoned. You are not defined by your worst moment. You are loved by God.

    Then he shows them his hands. And his side.

    This is Jesus, flesh and blood, the same Jesus who was crucified, the marks still in his hands and side. John is making a point here. The resurrection does not erase the cross. The wounds are still there. The marks of what happened on Friday do not disappear on Sunday. But now they mean something different. Now they are not evidence of defeat. They are proof that the one standing in the room has been through the worst the world can do and come out the other side.

    John says that Jesus “breathes on them”. It is a strange, peculiar detail. It seems John is reaching back to Genesis, to the moment when God breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being. This is a new creation moment. Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into his frightened disciples, and something new begins. The same God who breathed life into dust at the beginning of all things is now breathing new life into a community that had every reason to believe it was finished. The church, the sent people of God, is born in that breath.

    And then Jesus says something that carries enormous weight and has been wrestled with for centuries. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

    John’s Gospel has a particular understanding of sin. Sin in John is not primarily a moral category, it is not simply the list of wrong things you have done. In John, sin at its root is unbelief. It is the refusal to receive the revelation of God in Jesus. It is the turning away from the light.

    And what Jesus is sending his disciples to do, what he is sending us to do, is to make that revelation known. As people encounter the living Jesus through those he sends, they are freed from unbelief, from the darkness, from the alienation from God. If we fail to bear witness, people remain stuck. The stakes are that high. The mission is that serious.

    Jesus then tells them, As the Father has sent me, so I send you.

    This is the turning point of the whole passage. The disciples came into that room as frightened, failed, hiding people. Jesus came through their locked door and turned them inside out. He sent them, not despite their failure, or after they had cleaned themselves up, or once they had demonstrated their worthiness. He sent them. Right there. Right then. From their locked room, into the world.

    But one of them wasn’t there.

    Thomas.

    I think we may have done Thomas a disservice over the centuries. We have made him a cautionary tale, a spiritual second-class citizen, the patron saint of stubborn doubt. Doubting Thomas, right? But look at what Thomas said. When the other disciples told him they had seen the Lord, he said: unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.

    That is an honest, genuine response. And here is what the text shows us: every single one of the disciples required something. Mary required Jesus to call her name. Peter and the beloved disciple required a look inside an empty tomb. The disciples in the locked room required Jesus to show up physically and display his wounds. Not one person in this story believed on the basis of someone else’s testimony alone. Thomas is not an outlier. He is a representative. He is the face of every human being who has ever said: I need more than a second-hand story.

    The story goes on. John tells us that one week later, Jesus comes back, again. The doors are still locked, by the way. A week has passed, and the disciples are still behind locked doors. Thomas was not the only one still uncertain. Jesus comes and he goes straight to Thomas. He offers him exactly what he asked for… the hands, the side, the invitation to touch. Thomas doesn’t even need to take him up on it. The text nowhere says Thomas actually touched the wounds. Jesus shows up and speaks, and that is enough. Thomas falls to his knees and speaks the highest confession in the entire Gospel of John.

    My Lord and my God.

    My Lord and my God. The whole Gospel of John has been building to this moment, the Word who was in the beginning, who was with God, who was God, and it takes the guy we call “doubting Thomas” to finally say it out loud.

    Jesus responds with a blessing. He doesn’t say, Thomas, you should have known better. He says: you believe because you have seen. Blessed, or also translated, happy, are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

    The way of Thomas, the wrestling, the demanding, the refusing to accept secondhand faith, is not a lesser path. It is just another way that real people, honest people, get from doubt to belief. Jesus showed up for Thomas. Jesus did not shame him. He did not leave him out. He kept coming back.

    Jesus keeps coming back.

    That is the promise hidden in the structure of this story. One week after Easter, the disciples are still in that locked room. Still afraid. Still uncertain. And Jesus comes again. He keeps showing up… not because they have earned it, not because they have finally gotten their act together, but because that is who he is. The wounds are still there. The peace he speaks is still the same.

    John tells us at the end of this passage that everything he has written, all of it, has been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name. This book, this testimony, this witness passed down across two thousand years of church history, has been written for those of us who were not in that room. For those of us who have not seen the wounds. For those of us who are still, if we are honest, sometimes hiding behind locked doors of our own.

    So, what are the locked doors in your life? What rooms are we hiding in… individually, as families, as a congregation? What fears have made us pull the blinds and hunker down, become more focused on security than on the mission Jesus has called us into?

    Because here is what this text promises: Jesus cannot be stopped by our locked doors. He comes anyway. He comes speaking peace into the places we are most afraid. He breathes the Spirit into our tired, anxious, grieving, doubting selves. And then he sends us… not after we’ve figured it out, or once we’ve conquered our fears, but right now, right here, still shaken, still uncertain, still carrying our wounds. As the Father sent him, so he sends us.

    The early church was born in a locked room among frightened people who had failed their teacher. And Jesus breathed on them anyway. He said peace anyway. He said go anyway.

    He is still saying it.

    He comes to us in word and water, bread and cup. He comes in the gathering of his people week after week, not wanting any of us to miss out on what he is offering. He comes not to confront us with our failures but to meet us inside them, show us his wounds, and call us by name.

    Thomas demanded proof and got it, and gave us one of the most powerful declarations in all four Gospels.

    Mary wept at an empty tomb and heard her name.

    The disciples cowered in a locked room and received the breath of God.

    And we, who have not seen and yet are here, who are perhaps not sure and yet keep showing up, we are exactly the people this Gospel was written for.

    Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.

    A gift, spoken across two thousand years, landing right here.

    May we receive it. May we unlock the doors. And may we go. Amen.

    [1] https://www.webpronews.com/the-collapse-anxiety-why-nearly-half-of-americans-now-fear-a-total-economic-meltdown/

    Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson