Dove Sermons

Sermons from Dove of the Desert UMC

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  • Restore

    Genesis 33:1-17 · John 21:1-19 (NRSVue)

    Sermon for October 11, 2026

    Jacob has not seen his brother in twenty years, and the last thing he heard was that Esau planned to kill him. Esau had his reasons. Jacob took the birthright and then lied to their blind, dying father to take the blessing. Then he ran.

    Now he is coming home, and word arrives that Esau is riding out to meet him with four hundred men. So Jacob does what Jacob has always done: he works the angle. He sends more than 550 animals ahead in waves, goats and sheep and camels and cattle, each herd with a servant coached to say, “A gift from your servant Jacob.” He is doing math. How much does it cost to make twenty years go away?

    We know this kind of math. It is one of the oldest money stories there is: whatever is broken, enough money can fix it. Send the gift. Pick up the check. Write a bigger one this year and feel square with God.

    Then Jacob walks out in front of his family, bowing to the ground seven times, braced for the worst. And Genesis says, “Esau ran to meet him and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.”

    Esau ran. The one who was robbed does the running.

    Then he looks at all that livestock and asks what it was for. Jacob tells the truth: to find favor with you. And Esau says, “I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.”

    We usually read this as Jacob’s story, and it is. But Jacob is no hero in this chapter. The man who heals this family is the one who was cheated. Esau has spent twenty years becoming someone who can say “I have enough,”. That way of thinking does what 550 animals could not. A man who has enough can’t be bought. He is also free to forgive, because he no longer needs to collect.

    Restoration here cannot be purchased. It is given, and by the person with every right to withhold it.

    Jacob then insists that Esau keep the gift anyway. Our translation has him say, “Please accept my gift.” The Hebrew word is berakah, which means blessing. It is the same word used for what Jacob stole from their father’s bedside. Jacob is saying: take my blessing. He is handing back, as well as he can, the thing he took.

    The animals are the same animals. An hour ago they were a bribe. Now they are a blessing, because Jacob has already been received. He says so: “To see your face is like seeing the face of God, since you have received me with such favor.” The money comes after the grace, and it means something different there.

    That is the difference between a payment and an offering. A payment tries to settle the account. An offering comes from someone who found out the account was already settled.

    I wish the story ended there, but it goes on. Esau says, travel with me. Jacob says, go on ahead, I will catch up with you in Seir. Then he goes in the opposite direction and goes to Succoth, builds himself a house, and stays. He was embraced an hour ago and he is already hedging. The night before, God gave him a new name, and he is still acting like the old one.

    So restoration is real… and it is unfinished. Jacob does not “get fixed” in a single afternoon. God keeps the promise anyway. If you have come back to God more than once about the same thing, you are in the right story. You’re in good company. You are welcome here.

    Now go to the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

    Peter has his own history. On the night Jesus was arrested, Peter stood in a courtyard warming his hands and said three times that he did not know the man. Jesus has since been raised, and Peter has seen him. But nothing has been said about that night, and Peter does not know what Jesus thinks about him now.

    So Peter says, “I am going fishing.” It is the job he had before any of this started. When life gets difficult, we often go back to what we know. The others go with him. These are professionals, on their own lake. They work all night and… catch nothing.

    At daybreak a man on the beach calls out (They don’t know it’s Jesus yet) and tells them to cast the net on the right side of the boat. They do, and they cannot haul it in for the weight. One hundred fifty-three large fish.

    It is tempting to stop here, especially in stewardship season. Trust Jesus and the nets fill up. But the catch is not where the gospel story is taking us. When they reach the shore, Jesus already has fish on the fire, and bread. He did not need their catch. Breakfast was already made.

    John gives one detail about that fire. It is a charcoal fire. The Greek word is anthrakia, and it shows up exactly twice in the New Testament: here, and in the courtyard where Peter stood warming his hands while he denied Jesus (in John 18). John wants us to smell that smoke and remember.

    Jesus brings Peter back to the scene. Same fire, and the same number of questions as denials. “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He asks three times, and the third time it hurts. John says so. Restoration that never touches the wound hasn’t restored much.

    But look at what Jesus leaves out. He asks for no explanation and sets no probation. He takes no fish as payment. Like Esau, he is the wronged one, and he is the one who made the first move. He asks about love, and each time Peter answers, Jesus gives him work. “Feed my lambs.” “Tend my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.”

    For Peter, forgiveness arrives as responsibility. Jesus restores him by trusting him with what Jesus loves most. Earlier in this Gospel, Jesus called himself the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. Now he hands that work to the man who failed him, and tells him it will cost him his life too. Then he says what he said at the very beginning: “Follow me.”

    Put the two reunions side by side.

    In both, someone comes carrying what he did. In both, the wronged party gets there first, with an embrace or with breakfast. In both, the old way of settling things is refused. Esau turns down the livestock, and Jesus has no use for the fish.

    And in both, the restored man ends up giving. Jacob gives his blessing back. Peter gives the rest of his life. Neither of them is paying. They give because they have been received.

    This is where four weeks have been heading. We remembered the stories about money we were handed. We released what had a grip on us. We reimagined what an economy looks like when God designs it. Restoring is the part where it touches the ground.

    So here is a word about the pledge card you will fill out this year. It will not buy you anything. It cannot make God love you more or make up for a bad year, and it does not reserve you a better parking spot or seat in the sanctuary. That account is closed, and you did not close it. Jesus has already made breakfast.

    That leaves the question he asked Peter. Do you love me? Then feed my sheep.

    The sheep have names. They are the kids in our classrooms on Sunday mornings and the family in our neighborhood that comes up short at the end of the month. They are the people we will bury this year, and the people sitting beside them. Feeding them takes hands and hours, and it takes money. What you give becomes food for somebody else. That is how a restored person handles money. They quit using it to feel safe or to feel forgiven, and they feed people with it.

    Most of us will do this the way Jacob did, with a new name and old habits, and a detour toward Succoth now and then. God kept faith with Jacob anyway, and he kept faith with Peter. He will keep faith with you.

    Esau said it first: “I have enough.” People who can say that have something to give.

    Follow him. Feed his sheep.

    Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Reimagine

    Mark 12:38–44; Leviticus 19:9–10; 25:8–12 (NRSVUE)

    Sermon for October 4, 2026

    It’s week three of our stewardship series, and we’ve come to the story of the widow’s offering. You know where this is going, right? A poor woman drops her last two coins in the offering box, Jesus talks about her, and your pastor is supposed to say, “If she can give everything, surely you can give a little more.”

    Well… I’m not preaching that sermon this morning. I don’t think Mark wrote this story to make that point.

    Look at where Mark sets this story. Just before the widow walks up, Jesus is teaching in the temple. He says:

    “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

    They devour widows’ houses. The Greek word is katesthiō, to eat something down to nothing. Mark has used it once before, in chapter four, for the birds that swoop down and eat the seed off the path. Jesus told us who those birds are: Satan. Mark is drawing a straight line from the powers that oppose God to religious professionals who look perfectly respectable in the marketplace.

    Historians give us some idea how that devouring worked. Scribes handled legal affairs. Some charged widows for services they were forbidden to charge for. Some mismanaged estates. In some cases they took the house itself as payment. All of it was done by men who prayed long and well in public.

    But back to the text. Mark writes this next, “He sat down opposite the treasury and watched.” Jesus takes a seat and watches the system do what it does.

    The Mishnah, an early written collection of Jewish tradition, describes thirteen collection chests in the temple, each shaped like a shofar, a ram’s horn, with a flared mouth at the top narrowing down to the box below. Picture a heavy purse of coins pouring down a brass horn. People could literally hear the big gifts being donated.

    Then a poor widow drops in two lepta, the smallest coins in circulation. Together they would buy about a handful of flour, enough for one small loaf of bread. Falling down the brass horn, they would barely have made a sound.

    Jesus calls his disciples over and says she has put in more than all the rest. Now notice what he leaves unsaid. He never says “good for her.” He never says “go and do likewise.” He says the rich gave out of their abundance, and Mark’s verb there describes an ongoing condition, a surplus still waiting for them when they get home. She gave out of her poverty, and now she has nothing.

    Hold that next to what Jesus said three sentences earlier. They devour widows’ houses. And here stands a widow, emptied out, putting her last coins into an institution run by the very people he just warned you about.

    The painfully ironic part? The temple treasury was supposed to be one of the ways Israel kept its promise to care for widows. The money was meant to flow toward her. Instead it’s flowing away from her, and the machine keeps clanging along as though nothing is wrong.

    So is Jesus praising her or grieving over her? Both.

    It would be easy to make her a prop, the timid little woman creeping out of the shadows. Mark says nothing of the kind. Picture her walking up with her back straight and giving, with dignity, to a God she trusts more than the men who currently run the building. That’s what makes the scene so hard to watch. Her faith is real. The system receiving it is broken.

    Now it gets uncomfortable. Nobody in this room wants to be the scribe. We all want to be the widow. Here Jesus asks his disciples to consider whether they sit a lot closer to the robes than to the two coins.

    One commentator called it the “soft prosperity gospel” that lives in most of us: the quiet assumption that people who are doing well are probably doing something right. That the nice neighborhood is full of nice people. That the biggest givers must be the most faithful ones.

    So let’s be careful here. The scribes earn Jesus’ warning through status and self-importance, and that disease shows up in every group that gets a little power. It shows up in clergy, too, and I’m the one wearing “the robe”. Churches have been putting names on plaques and giving big donors the best seats for a very long time.

    So what do we do? Well, the word this week is Reimagine, and for that we go back to Leviticus, because God already drew up a better economic design.

    “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God.”

    Do you see when this command kicks in? It’s planned out before the harvest. The farmer doesn’t haul everything into the barn, count it, and then decide whether he feels generous. The mercy is built into the field. It’s already there when the sickles come out.

    Nine verses later, in the same chapter, God says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” When Jesus names the second great commandment, he’s quoting Leviticus. And in Leviticus, loving your neighbor looks like leaving your field unfinished on purpose, for the poor, the immigrant, the person most in need.

    Then comes chapter 25, the Jubilee. Every fiftieth year, debts were canceled, land went back to the families who had lost it, and people sold into debt slavery went home. The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew word yovel, the ram’s horn.

    “Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the Day of Atonement.… And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.”

    The word for liberty is deror, release, the idea of something set loose to run free. Did you know, Those words from verse 10 are cast into the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia? This country rang a bell that quotes Jubilee. We just never got around to the debt part.

    So this morning we have two trumpets. In Mark, a row of horn-shaped chests clangs out who gave the most. In Leviticus, a ram’s horn sounds across the whole land to announce that debts are gone and everyone can go home. The first horn makes the powerful louder. The second sets everybody free.

    And on what day do the Jubilee horn sound? It gets sounded on the Day of Atonement. God forgives first, and then the people release each other. Release flows downhill from grace.

    Did Israel ever fully practice Jubilee? Scholars argue about that. Maybe they didn’t. But the Scriptures put it in writing so nobody could claim they didn’t know what an economy built on God’s justice looks like.

    So what does reimagining look like for us?

    First, reimagining how we give. Leave the edges. The law in Leviticus asks its modern readers whether we’ve packed our budgets so full, right to the very edges, that we have nothing left to share. I know what the edges look like for a lot of us: a mortgage, a loan, monthly bills, daycare, braces, a car with 140,000 miles on it. I won’t pretend the margins are wide. But God’s command in Leviticus doesn’t ask for what’s left over. It asks you to plan the edge before the harvest. This text challenges us to decide first, and let the rest of the budget make room.

    Next, Reimagine why giving matters. Some of you are in a season when you can give more. Some of you are in the widow’s season: a layoff, a divorce, a medical bill that swallowed the savings. If that’s you, hear me clearly. You don’t owe this church your last two coins. In God’s economy, we look out for each other. That’s what the Temple Treasury was supposed to be for. That’s what the edges of the field were for.

    If you’re one who can give, if you can provide the edges of your field, this is one of the reasons why your giving matters: so nobody has to empty themselves out to belong. We stop the cycle of making the widow give the last of herself. We make the Temple Treasury do what it what supposed to do all along; take care of the needs of the widow and those most in need. 

    Finally, Sit down and watch. Jesus sat across from the temple treasury and watched the system work. Do the same with the systems you touch; at work, at school, in the marketplace. Notice the patterns and ask how it lines up to the economy of God that we encounter in the Bible.

    In his hometown synagogue, Jesus stood up and read from Isaiah that he came “to proclaim release to the captives… to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” That’s Jubilee language. Then he went to Jerusalem and sounded that second trumpet with his whole life.

    Two horns sound in this story. One announces who matters most. The other announces that everyone is free. We get to choose which one this church sounds like.

    Amen.

  • Remember

    Exodus 16:1-18 | Luke 22:1-23 (NRSVUE)

    Sermon for September 20, 2026

    Every one of us is walking around with a money story. For many of us, it gets handed to us in a hundred small moments; a parent’s face when the mail comes, a whispered argument through a bedroom wall, the relief or the shame in someone’s voice at the grocery store checkout. We each have a story of spending and saving that has influenced us and how we think about money in our lives.

    This morning we’re starting a series about that story… yours, mine, ours as a congregation, and we’re starting with remembering. This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, and it’s not remembering as a slideshow of the good old days. We want to do remembering as excavation. We’re going to dig down to the money story underneath our money story, and we’re going to hold it up next to God’s.

    So let’s go to the wilderness.

    The Israelites are six weeks out from Egypt. Six weeks removed from four hundred years of slavery. That kind of generational trauma cant just be shrugged off. There’s pain and scars from years of constant subjugation. And now, in a moment of fear, they say want to go back to Egypt. Back to their slave masters because they can’t handle the unknown they now face.

    Slavery comes with a schedule. You know where your food is coming from. You know what tomorrow looks like, even if what it looks like is misery. Freedom doesn’t come with a schedule. Freedom in the wilderness comes with empty hands and an empty horizon, and the text tells us, “the whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron” (Exodus 16:2). Six times in this chapter, some form of that word “complain” shows up.

    And notice what they say. They don’t say, “we’re a little worried about the food supply.” They say, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread” (16:3). That is more than a hungry stomach talking. That’s a scared soul rewriting history.

    Egypt becomes, in their memory, a banquet; conveniently forgetting the whip, the brick quota, the Hebrew midwives ordered to kill baby boys. Fear does that. Fear will edit your own past into something more comfortable than the truth, if it means you don’t have to sit in the discomfort of trusting God with what comes next.

    And again, notice: God doesn’t scold them for complaining. God hears them. And God does something almost absurd in its simplicity. God makes it rain bread.

    In the morning, the ground is covered with something nobody has ever seen. Thin, flaky, like frost. And the people turn to each other and ask the only question that makes sense: “man hu?” That’s the Hebrew, two small words that mean, roughly, “what is it?” It’s not a rhetorical question. Nobody has a name for this stuff yet. Turns out that question, “what is it?”, becomes the name.

    Manna. The bread that fed an entire nation through forty years of wilderness is named, permanently, after the fact that nobody could explain it. Every time an Israelite mother handed her child breakfast for the next four decades, she was saying, essentially, “here’s your daily miracle we still don’t have a category for.” God’s provision doesn’t arrive labeled and tidy. It arrives strange sometimes, and we’re invited to take it anyway.

    Now here’s where the text gets specific in a way that we should take note of, because it’s aimed straight at how we think about money. God gives instructions: gather only what you need for the day. Don’t hoard. And Exodus tells us what happens next. “Those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each needed” (16:18).

    Some tried to keep the leftovers overnight anyway, and it bred worms and stank by morning. The math of God doesn’t work the way our math works. There’s no advantage to hoarding manna. There’s no interest rate on trust. Walter Brueggemann calls the alternative, the compulsion to grab more than you need out of fear there won’t be enough tomorrow, “the endless rat race for sufficiency.” God’s economy in the wilderness runs on a different rule entirely: enough, distributed, every single day, for everybody.

    That’s God’s money story, where everyone is provided for. Ours tends to run on scarcity; take all you can, as fast as you can. Theirs was built on daily, repeated, inconvenient trust that the bread would be there each day for everyone.

    Hold onto that, because now we’re going to walk into an upper room in Jerusalem, and we’re going to watch what happens when a human money story, a story of fear protecting itself, collides head-on with Jesus at a table.

    Luke tells us the religious authorities were looking for a way to kill Jesus, “for they were afraid of the people” (22:2). Really, this whole plot against Jesus boils down to power. Power, afraid of losing its grip, will do almost anything to protect itself. That’s not a first-century Jewish problem. That’s a human problem. It’s a boardroom problem. It’s a church-committee problem. It’s a problem that lives in your chest and mine anytime we feel something we love slipping away.

    Into that fear steps Judas. Luke doesn’t waste time speculating about Judas’s psychology. The text simply says, “Satan entered into Judas” (22:3), and Judas goes to the chief priests to discuss how he might betray Jesus. And what do they offer him? Money.

    Silver changes hands, and a member of Jesus’ own inner circle, one of the twelve, someone who had eaten at Jesus’ table for three years, agrees to sell him for cash. Here is money doing what money has always been capable of doing in a fear-driven story: becoming the currency of betrayal.

    And then, and here’s the surprise in the story, Jesus sits down at that same table and feeds Judas anyway.

    Luke is precise about the order of events. Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, gives it, “This is my body, which is given for you” (22:19). Only after that do we learn Judas is sitting right there, hand on the table, already having agreed to hand Jesus over. Jesus knew. He fed him anyway.

    The same host who had spent three years eating with “the wrong kind of people”, who was mocked for the company he kept at dinner, extends that same hospitality to the one man in the room actively plotting his death. Grace, at that table, isn’t a reward for good behavior. It’s simply what Jesus does with bread.

    Here’s where I think the manna and the table meet. In the wilderness, God gave bread that couldn’t be hoarded, that was, on purpose, enough for everyone: no more, no less. In the upper room, Jesus gives bread that can’t be earned, that is, on purpose, for everyone at the table… even the one whose money story was actively running on fear and betrayal that very night. Both stories tell us the same thing about who God is: God’s provision was never dependent on our having proven ourselves worthy of it first.

    So what do we remember this morning?

    We remember that our fear-stories about money (the ones that whisper there won’t be enough, that we’d better grab and hold and hedge and hoard) are old stories, as old as a desert full of frightened former slaves. We remember that those stories, left unexamined, can lead us to do with our resources exactly what Judas did with his hands: use them to protect ourselves, even at the cost of what we claim to love most.

    And we remember that God’s answer to that fear has never once been a lecture. It’s been bread. Strange bread we don’t have a name for, falling every single morning, exactly enough. Broken bread, handed even to the betrayer, before the betrayal is finished playing out.

    This is where our own money stories start to get rewritten. We do that by asking the same question the Israelites asked, standing over ground covered in something they’d never seen: What is it? What is this provision in front of me/us? And are we all truly being provided for?

    What is this trust I’m being invited into, one day at a time, with no guarantee I can see past tomorrow?

    You don’t have to answer that question today. You just have to be willing to ask it, and to keep showing up at the table where the provision keeps getting handed to you, whether you’ve earned it or not.

    Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Stop Counting

    Matthew 18:21-35 (NRSVUE)

    Sermon for Spetember 13, 2026

    Peter thinks he’s being generous.

    “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” He’s not fishing for the minimum. Seven is Peter’s idea of going above and beyond. Seven is the number you throw out when you want the room to nod and say, “Wow, Peter, that’s really something.” Seven seas. Seven days in a week. Seven loaves that fed a crowd of thousands with baskets left over. Seven is a number a man can hold in his hand, count on his fingers, and feel good about himself when he’s done counting.

    But Jesus takes that number and detonates it. “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” Some manuscripts render it seventy times seven. Either way, the math stops being the point. You cannot keep a tally at that scale. Jesus isn’t handing Peter a bigger number to count to, he’s telling him to put the calculator down and walk away from it altogether.

    There’s a reason Jesus reaches for that number. Back in Genesis, a man named Lamech, a few generations removed from Cain, brags to his wives that he’s killed a young man for merely striking him, and then boasts that if Cain gets sevenfold vengeance, he’ll take seventy-sevenfold (Genesis 4:23-24). Lamech is proud of his math. He’s built a whole philosophy of retaliation on it: hurt me a little, I’ll destroy you a lot, and I’ll do the math in public so everybody’s clear on the terms.

    That’s the worldview Jesus is standing in front of when Peter asks his question. But here, Jesus takes Lamech’s formula for vengeance and hands it back as a recipe for mercy instead. The exact same number, aimed in the opposite direction. Where Lamech used seventy-seven to keep score against the men who’d wronged him, Jesus uses it to erase the scoreboard for the people who’ve wronged us. That’s Jesus taking one of the oldest grudges in Scripture and running it in reverse.

    Then he tells a story to make sure nobody misses his point.

    A king decides to settle accounts with his slaves, and the first one dragged in front of him owes ten thousand talents. If you want a modern number, a single talent was worth about fifteen years of a laborer’s wages. That being the case, ten thousand of them isn’t a debt… it’s a fantasy. It’s more money than existed in most ancient economies combined. Matthew picked the highest currency unit and the highest number his listeners would recognize and multiplied them together on purpose. Nobody in that room has ever seen ten thousand talents. Nobody ever will. This man owes a debt that he cannot work off. He owes a debt that doesn’t exist anywhere outside the pages of a parable, and Jesus wants you to feel the absurdity of that number.

    So the servant does the only thing left to do. He falls on his face and begs for time. “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” Everybody in the room knows that’s a lie. There is no version of his life, or his children’s lives, or his grandchildren’s lives, in which that debt gets repaid. He knows it too. He’s not negotiating terms. He’s begging for a stay of execution and hoping something turns up.

    That’s when the king does something nobody in that room expects. He doesn’t extend the timeline. He doesn’t restructure the loan. He cancels it. All of it. Gone. The man walks out of that throne room owing nothing, and he knows, he has to know, that he did not earn that. Nobody earns their way out of an unpayable debt. He got a gift he didn’t have a single legitimate reason to receive.

    But there’s more to this parable. That same servant, fresh off the best news of his life, walks outside and runs into a man who owes him a hundred denarii. A denarius was a day’s wage. A hundred of them is real money, four or five months of work for a laborer, but set next to what he was just forgiven, it’s a rounding error. It’s pocket change. And the second man says almost the exact same thing the first one said to the king: “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.” Same plea. Same posture. Same words, nearly.

    And what does the first forgiven servant do? He has this indebted man thrown in prison.

    Sit with that for a second. This isn’t a man who forgot he’d been forgiven five minutes ago. This is a man who watched the king write off a debt the size of a national treasury and then, before the ink is dry, decided that mercy was a currency he’d rather keep for himself than spend on somebody else.

    Something has already curdled in him. Maybe it’s fear. Maybe he’s terrified of ever being that exposed again and he’s grabbing for control any way he can find it. Maybe it’s the simple, ugly math of a person who’s spent their whole life clawing their way up a system built on extraction, and old habits reassert themselves the second the crisis passes.

    Or maybe… and this is the uncomfortable one, maybe some part of him has already rewritten the story in his head, so that walking out of that throne room debt-free feels less like something he received and more like something he pulled off.  

    Whatever’s happening in him, the other servants see it and they’re horrified. Notice what they do next. They don’t confront him directly. Just one story earlier in Matthew, Jesus laid out exactly how conflict inside this community is supposed to work; go to the person, then bring witnesses, then bring it to the church. That’s the process. These servants skip every step of it. They go straight to the king. Maybe they’re scared of the man. Maybe they know they don’t have the standing to hold him accountable themselves. Either way, the process Jesus just spent time establishing gets abandoned the moment it’s actually needed, and the king has to become the accountability the community couldn’t produce on its own.

    The king calls him back in, and this time there’s no dropping to the knees, no last-minute pardon. “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” And then the king hands him over to the torturers. The Greek word is basanistēs, the men whose job is inflicting pain until the pain produces payment, until he can pay back everything he owes. Which, remember, is a debt that cannot be repaid.

    And then Jesus looks at his disciples and says the line that turns this from a story into a mirror: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

    We get nervous around that verse, and I understand why. It sounds like it’s threatening to undo everything the parable just spent all these verses establishing about grace. But I don’t think Jesus is contradicting himself. I think he’s telling you something true about what forgiven people are supposed to become.

    Grace that never moves through you isn’t grace you’ve actually received, it’s grace you’re still holding at arm’s length, admiring like a gift you never bothered to open. The king’s mercy was never meant to end with that one servant. It was meant to start a chain reaction. Every person in his debt was supposed to feel the ripple of what happened in that throne room. Instead, the ripple stopped at one man’s front door, and he slammed it.

    Here’s where I want to interpret the parable carefully. We hear “forgive as you’ve been forgiven” and we quietly want to cast ourselves as the king; generous, patient, extending mercy to the people who’ve wronged us, waiting to see if they’ll get it right. But I don’t think that’s the role Jesus hands us in the parable.

    We are the first servant. Every one of us. We are the ones who walked into the throne room owing more than we could ever repay, and walked out clean because somebody decided to absorb the cost instead of collecting it.

    Peter, the man asking the question, is going to deny Jesus three times before the week is out and abandon him at the exact moment loyalty would’ve cost him something. He has no idea, standing there proposing his generous number seven, how much forgiveness he’s about to need himself. None of us do, until we do.

    There’s a story from the Old Testament that plays out in a similar way. The prophet Nathan walks into King David’s court and tells him about a rich man with countless flocks who steals the one lamb belonging to a poor neighbor rather than touch his own herd. David, the man who took another man’s wife and had that man killed to cover it up, hears the story and burns with rage. “The man who has done this deserves to die!” he says, before Nathan says four words that stop him cold: “You are the man.”(2 Samuel 12) David could see injustice with total clarity right up until the moment it was pointed back at him. That’s not a flaw unique to David. That’s most of us, most days. We’re fluent in outrage over debts owed to us and strangely forgetful about the ones we’ve already had canceled.

    I think that’s the real point that this parable is trying to impress on us. It’s not that we’re incapable of mercy. We hand it out plenty of times, when it costs us nothing. The trouble starts the moment somebody owes us something we actually feel the absence of. That’s when the old system reasserts itself, the one built on ledgers and leverage and getting what you’re owed. We start acting like people who never walked out of that throne room debt-free in the first place.

    We live inside systems built the same way that ancient world was, designed to keep score, to extract what’s owed, to reward the people who collect and punish the people who forgive. Forgiveness has never been the path of least resistance in any world, ancient or modern. It runs against the grain of how the world organizes itself. Which is exactly why Jesus doesn’t ask his disciples to practice it occasionally, when it’s convenient. He tells them to stop counting altogether, because a community that’s still counting hasn’t actually understood what it received.

    None of this means forgiveness erases accountability. The king doesn’t pretend the debt never existed. He absorbs it. There’s a difference. Communities throughout time that have done the hard work of both truth-telling and forgiveness, naming exactly what was done, refusing to cover over it, and still choosing to release the debt rather than extract payment for it forever… they know that mercy and justice were both required. Forgiveness that skips the truth isn’t forgiveness. It’s still avoidance.

    But avoidance isn’t our real temptation, is it? Ours is simpler. We know exactly what was done to us. We remember it in detail. And we decide the debt is ours to hold onto, ours to collect on whenever we get the chance, regardless of what’s already been forgiven in our own account.

    So here’s the question this text leaves us with, and it’s not “how many times.” Jesus already answered that one; enough times that you lose count (which was the whole point of the number he chose). The real question is what you’re going to do with what’s already been forgiven in you.

    Ten thousand talents kind of forgiven. A debt with more zeroes than you could work off in ten lifetimes, wiped clean, no fine print, no repayment plan, nothing you did to deserve it.

    Somebody’s standing in front of you right now holding a hundred denarii, small by comparison (real by any other measure). Now you get to decide whether the mercy that saved your life is something you actually believe, or just something you’re grateful somebody else practiced on you once.

    Stop counting. Start paying it forward. That’s the whole sermon.

    Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • A Body For You

    1 Corinthians 11:23-26 (NRSVUE)

    Sermon for September 6, 2026

    Did you know 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 is the earliest written account we have of the night before Jesus died? It’s older than Mark. Older than Matthew. Older than Luke. Paul is writing in the early 50s C.E., telling a young church in Corinth something they’ve heard him teach before, and he’s doing it in language that’s stripped down to its most basic elements. Just the bread, the cup, and the words.

    Paul says he handed on what he received about the night Jesus was “handed over.” That’s the same word, twice, in the Greek: paradidomi. Our English translations don’t always pick up on that wordplay, translating one instance as “handed on” and the other as “betrayed,” which lets us collapse the whole story onto Judas’s betrayal.

    Judas is in the story, of course. But Paul elsewhere uses this exact word, paradidomi, to describe God handing Jesus over for the world (Romans 4:25; 8:32), echoing the prophet Isaiah (53:6, 12b). So, right out of the gate, Paul has already told us something important: what looks like a betrayal from ground level is, from above, a gift being given away on purpose.

    Nobody stole this from Jesus. He was handed over, and he handed himself over. That’s the whole meaning of the gospel in summary.

    It also helps to remember what kind of meal this was. This is a meal during Passover, which means the bread on the table was unleavened, baked in a hurry, because the night Israel left Egypt there was no time to wait for dough to rise. Every year the Jewish people ate that bread again to remember that God moves people out of slavery fast, decisively, without waiting for permission. So when Jesus takes bread on this night and calls it his body, he’s picking up Israel’s oldest story of deliverance and saying: this is happening again, right here, in me. New exodus. New freedom. Same God.

    Now, why is Paul repeating a teaching for them? Well, because he is upset. 1 Corinthians 11:17-22 confirms that Paul is upset about something specific: how the church is eating together. Or rather, how they aren’t.

    Picture it. There were no church buildings yet in the first century. Believers in Christ are meeting in homes, and usually one of the wealthier members is hosting. They’ve got the space, so everybody gathers there. But by the time the day laborers and the small shopkeepers can get away from work and walk across town to join the gathering, the host and their higher-status friends have already received the bread. Already had their wine.

    The people arriving last, the ones with the least social capital to begin with, show up to find the bread used up and the wine gone, and they stand there, in front of everyone, empty-handed, while their already-fed neighbors watch. Paul tells them: this is not the Lord’s Supper. You can call it that, but it isn’t.

    Those people who ate early? They weren’t bad people. They probably thought they were being considerate. In that culture, inviting poorer people to a meal without the ability to reciprocate could be its own kind of insult. So the “normal” thing, by the manners of their world, was to keep your circles separate.

    Eat with your own kind. That’s how every dinner table in the Roman Empire worked, split by class, by ethnicity, by status, no exceptions. The Corinthian Christians were just copying the world’s table manners into the church’s most sacred meal, and calling it worship.

    Which is ironic, because that’s exactly what Jesus didn’t do. He ate with tax collectors. With sinners. With people who had no business being at a respectable table. One New Testament scholar puts it bluntly: Jesus basically died because of how he ate. His table was a standing threat to a world organized by who’s in and who’s out, and Rome eventually decided a table that welcomed everybody needed to be stopped.

    Which brings us to the words of blessing themselves. “This is my body that is for you.” Not just given; for you.

    FOR YOU!

    Jesus’s whole ministry was a body positioned (or, we could say handed over)  for other people, spent on their behalf, serving them, loving them. Now that same “for-ness” gets handed to a loaf of bread so it can be handed to us, one broken piece at a time, generation after generation.

    “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” Paul’s reaching back to Jeremiah (31:31-34) here, to God’s old promise that someday the law wouldn’t just be written in scrolls, it would get written on the hearts of people. That meant knowing God became something every person, from the least to the greatest, simply had access to. There is no hierarchy of who gets God and who doesn’t. That’s the covenant Jesus is starting at this table, and it’s the exact covenant the Corinthians were side-stepping every time they let the order of that meal work like the order of the world.

    “Do this in remembrance of me.” It means something closer to re-member, to put the body back together. Not just recall a memory, but to reassemble something that’s come apart. That’s the double edge running under this whole passage that goes through verse 34: discern the body. Discern the bread as Christ’s body, broken for you, and discern the church as Christ’s body too, gathered at that same table. Which means the person who showed up late and hungry is not a complication to your worship. They are a part of your worship, a member in the body.

    I don’t think we get to walk away feeling superior to the church in Corinth after reading this text. Every culture throughout time built its own version of that early Corinthian table, its own quiet sorting of who gets fed first and who gets left standing. Ours runs on different lines than theirs did, but the instinct is the same old one: protect your circle, let the rest fend for themselves.

    There’s an old African proverb; when elephants fight, the grass suffers. Those in power clash, and it’s always the ones with no power who get trampled. Paul would recognize that proverb instantly. I think it’s the point he’s trying to make.

    So what’s the move, for Corinth or for us? I don’t think it’s a clever new idea, but an old one, older than Corinth’s bad habit. Long before any of us needed correcting, God had already decided how this table would work, and the church doesn’t get to improve on it. It is written into what it means to be United Methodist. Our own theology of this table says: the invitation to this meal comes from Christ, not from us. This table belongs to Christ, not to the church, which means we don’t get to decide who’s respectable enough to sit at it.

    Our tradition welcomes anyone who comes forward wanting to receive. Nothing should hold you back from what Christ offers you. Not your background. Not your past. Not your doubts. Age doesn’t disqualify you. A disability doesn’t disqualify you. Not having your belief system  sorted out doesn’t disqualify you either. John Wesley went so far as to call this meal a “converting ordinance”, meaning you don’t have to arrive with your faith all figured out to come to this table. Sometimes the figuring-out happens because you came.

    I wish my Dad would have received communion. As far back as I could remember, he never took part in it. He would go to worship services often. He spent time reading his Bible throughout the week. He even prayed regularly. But for some reason, communion was a bridge too far for him. At one point, I just asked him straight up, “Dad, why don’t you take communion?” His answer was simple: he hadn’t earned it.

    He felt as though his personal sins disqualified him from the realm of folks who did take part in it. He even used a bible passage a justification as to why he wouldn’t do it. If our reading today went one more verse, we’d get to 1 Corinthians 11:27, where Paul writes, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord.”

    But this “unworthy manner” Paul writes about was never a verdict on the person eating. Paul spells out exactly what he means by it two verses later: failing to discern the body… forgetting that the person next to you belongs at this table just as much as you do. It’s a warning about how you treat each other, not a background check on your soul.

    So my Dad’s whole theology around communion was pulled from one verse, out of context, aimed as a weapon against himself. He never felt worthy enough, and he let that guilt drive him from a holy moment that was meant for people just like him.

    So today, I think about my Dad. Chances are, he’ll never hear this. But someone in here might. Someone in here might not feel worthy, and I want you to hear it from me; this isn’t about worthiness, this is about love. This is about receiving a blessing from Jesus, a holy moment of divine presence, a covenant that he will keep until the time comes when we all receive the gift in full.

    And that promise is that you do not live this life alone. The spirit of God abides in us and lives among us. It’s life with the Holy Spirit. We go to live as transformed people in the world, together. We hand ourselves over to the holy and good work around us.

    “The grace we receive at the Lord’s Table enables us to perform our ministry and mission, to continue his work in the world—the work of redemption, reconciliation, peace, and justice (2 Corinthians 5:17-21)” (This Holy Mystery, Page 10)

    This is my body, given for you, so that your body can be handed over for whoever shows up last, whoever can’t pay you back, whoever the world already decided doesn’t belong.

    Nobody gets left behind at this table, and nobody eats alone. Do this, in remembrance of him, until he comes again.

    Amen.

  • Who Do You Say

    Christus Pantocrator – Artistic representation of Jesus Christ God, the second divine Person of the Most Holy Trinity (Cathedral of Cefalù, c. 1130.)

    Matthew 16:13-20 (NRSVue)

    Sermon for August 23, 2026

    Don’t skip the first half of verse 13.

    It’s the part we always rush past to get to the good line, the question; “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” We want to get there fast, because that’s the question with the theology in it. But Matthew doesn’t start the scene there. He, (like last week) starts it with a place: “Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi…” (16:13). If you skip that part, you skip a major plot point of the scene.

    Going to Caesarea Philippi was a calculated move by Jesus. This was territory that used to belong to the Israelite tribe of Naphtali. It was an old, holy piece of the Promised Land. Then Rome got hold of it. Augustus handed the region to Herod, who built a marble temple there in honor of the emperor.

    When Herod died, his son Philip took it over, expanded it, and renamed the town after himself and his patron: Caesarea of Philip. Caesar’s city. A shrine to the pagan god Pan sat carved into the rock face above a spring. Greek inscriptions to a whole shelf of pagan gods still mark the cliffside today. Add in the trade routes running through; Tyre to the west, Damascus to the northeast, and you’ve got a city that ran on money, empire, and religion, all working the same machine.

    If you want a modern picture, don’t think small-town corner market. Think K Street in Washington, D.C. Think the marble halls where lobbyists in thousand-dollar suits and dresses trade favors for influence, where every conversation is really about power, and power is the only god anybody actually worships.

    That’s where Jesus chose to ask the question. He could have asked it in some quiet Galilean village where the stakes were low. Nope. In Caesar’s own showroom. And that fact influences everything about what happens next. Location sets the intensity. Jesus knew exactly where he was standing when he asked his disciples to say, out loud, who they believed he was.

    Before he gets there, though, it’s worth remembering what just happened a few verses earlier, because it tells you what kind of mood the disciples are already in when they arrive. The Pharisees and Sadducees had come at Jesus demanding a sign, trying to trap him into something they could use against him, and Jesus had answered with a warning: “Watch out, and beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (16:6).

    The disciples, half-listening as usual, assumed he was scolding them for forgetting to pack bread. He wasn’t talking about bread. It was a metaphor; yeast works its way through a whole batch of dough quietly, invisibly, until the entire loaf is overtaken. Jesus was warning them about religious teaching that looks spiritual on the surface but has no love working through it. He was warning them about having a tradition kept for tradition’s sake, positions defended out of pride, a public performance of holiness with nothing underneath it.

    That warning is still going through the disciples’ brains when Jesus turns to them in Caesarea Philippi and asks what, exactly, they believe. The order of events is not coincidental. He’s just told them to watch for religion that’s gone hollow. Now he wants to know if their own faith has any substance to it.

    So, Jesus starts with a survey. “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And the answers come back: John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. What do those answers have in common? Every name on that list belongs to a dead man.

    Powerful men, all of them, yes. They were men who stood in front of kings and told them the truth whether the king wanted to hear it or not. They spoke truth to power, even in the face of danger. But all the same, dead. The crowd’s best guess is that God has reached back into the grave and sent someone back for round two. It’s not a bad answer. It says something right; that whoever Jesus is, he belongs in that lineage of people willing to risk their very lives for God’s word.

    Survey now over, Jesus turns the question on the twelve men closest to him. “But who do you say that I am?” (16:15). Peter. Nails It. We should cheer for him when he confesses, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (16:16)!

    Bold Peter, the one who gets out of the boat, the one who always talks first and thinks later, finally has his big moment. Give the man credit. He’d been there for the healings, the two feedings, the night on the water when Jesus caught him by the wrist. He’d invested more hours with Jesus than anybody else it seems. Surely all that field experience is what pays off here. Surely Peter earns this one, right?

    Except Jesus says otherwise, and he says it directly to Peter’s face: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (16:17). Flesh and blood. That phrase covers everything Peter has going for him; his eyes, his ears, his memory, his instincts, years of accumulated firsthand experience. Jesus names all of that and then rules it out as the source of this confession. Whatever just came out of Peter’s mouth didn’t come from being the best disciple. It came from someplace Peter didn’t manufacture and can’t take credit for. This is a gift landing on him, not a status he earned.

    Some of us were raised to think faith is a subject you get good at; read enough, pray enough, serve on enough committees, and eventually you’ll have earned your way to solid conviction. Peter’s confession suggests otherwise. He didn’t out-study his way to the truth. It was given to him. Which means that same grace lands on the newest person in this room today exactly the way it lands on the person who’s read every book on the Gospel of Matthew ever written. That’s prevenient grace, if you want the technical term; God’s love, showing up before you ever go looking for it.

    So Peter names him Messiah, straight from a revelation by God in Heaven. It’s a big moment. Then Jesus continues his blessing this way; “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (16:18). In Greek, Jesus is making a small pun; Petros for Peter, petra for rock. It’s interesting wordplay, but there’s more underneath the hood.

    There’s a detail you can’t see by reading our English translations alone: petra is a feminine noun, and it agrees grammatically with another feminine noun in the same verse, ekklesia, the word we translate to “church.” Peter’s name and the word “rock” don’t line up the way English makes them sound like they do.

    Scholars and the Church itself have debated for centuries exactly what “the rock” is; Peter himself, or his confession, or the moment of revelation. Let me state clearly how well I know that my study of this passage will not settle a fight that old. But the grammar at least opens the door to a possibility worth considering: the foundation of the church isn’t a personality. It’s the truth Peter just spoke, freely given, freely spoken. Peter is the first to say it. He is not the reason it’s true.

    While preparing for the sermon this week, I read an article that brought up the movie Vantage Point from 2008. It’s not one of my favorites, but a clever piece of filmmaking. It’s a movie about an assassination attempt, told over and over from the perspective of a different character each time, the same fifteen minutes rewound and replayed until you’ve seen the whole event from every angle. No single witness in that film has the full picture. Only the audience does, because we get all the angles stitched together.

    Caesarea Philippi works the same way when it came to Jesus. The crowd has a vantage point; some guesses built from rumor and reaching for the past. The Pharisees and Sadducees have theirs; suspicion and a demand for proof. And the disciples have theirs, which for eleven of the twelve amounts to silence. Only Peter speaks. But he speaks truth while standing in the land of earthly power, influence and conquest.

    So, here’s a question for all of us sitting in this sanctuary this morning. Jesus wants to know what you, from wherever your vantage point is this morning, will say about him. Remember, Peter’s answer, “Messiah, Son of the living God”, was a title loaded with political dynamite in a city built to honor Caesar. To call Jesus “anointed one” in the shadow of Caesar’s temple was to say, out loud, that Rome’s emperor was not, in fact, the highest authority. Jesus asks an allegiance question to his disciples. Whoever answers that question honestly is choosing where their ultimate loyalty lives, with the empire that currently holds power, or with the God who outlasts every empire.

    Back to the story. Here’s what the confession costs you: naming him doesn’t leave you a spectator.Jesus follows the blessing of Peter with authority that sounds almost administrative; “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (16:19). Binding and loosing were rabbinic terms for a real job… a rabbi would decide what’s permitted, what’s forbidden, and how the community lives together.

    This is much more than some generic blessing, and I believe it was meant for more than just Peter. It’s Jesus handing his followers the responsibility to decide, in real time, in their own communities, how the kingdom of heaven touches the ground, how it arrives. We do the binding and loosing by the choices we make, out there, in the real world, outside of the safety of our sanctuary. Like on a Thursday at 4pm. Or 4am.

    Later in this Gospel we’ll learn how Jesus describes part of that assignment; Whatever you do for the hungry, the stranger, the prisoner, the one with no clean water, you have done for me (25:44-45). Binding and loosing is about how we treat the people with the least. Again, Jesus’ words: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (25:40). That’s what binding and loosing looks like.

    The story here in chapter 16 ends with Jesus delivering a command that sounds odd until you remember where they are currently standing. Jesus sternly orders the disciples to tell no one that he is the Messiah (16:20). So what is Jesus’ move here?

    Well, he’s refusing to let his identity get hijacked into a campaign slogan in a city built entirely on campaign slogans. Peter had the right answer, but the right answer spoken in the wrong place becomes just another piece of political theater, and Jesus wanted no part of Caesarea Philippi’s particular specialty. The real proof of who Jesus is was never going to be a press release. It was going to be a life lived fully. Their lives, binding and loosing, lived out in a way that made the claim credible before it ever needed to be said out loud.

    So here we are, generations after this story was first passed down. Many of us here call him Messiah, and we’ve received the blessing of Christ. That blessing includes the responsibility to bind and loose. In today’s language? We make decisions based on Jesus’ teachings, and we try to live those teachings out. We try to love our neighbor (22:39) (and yes, even our enemies (5:44)). We know what it means when he teaches, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (20:16)

    Jesus is repeatedly calling for his followers to care for the least of these, the ones on the margins, for the ones who need advocates, the ones who need stood up for… and those who need simple human recognition, and maybe a meal.

    A number of you today have brought in food to help support a ministry that literally provides hungry people sandwiches. Thank you for that! That’s the blessing of binding and loosing lived out among us. We’ll do it again next week at our Fifth Sunday Food and pet supply drive. We’ll continue to support organizations like Family Promise, Justa Center and Habitat for Humanity, and others who help those unhoused neighbors of ours who need to get back on their feet again.

    Our Missions committee just gave financial support to two Cooling Centers (Wesley UMC and Phoenix Rescue Mission) in the valley this summer. These cooling centers are saving lives. Providing an actual oasis in this broiling heat is an act of mercy, and it honors the dignity of the people who are finding refuge within them.

    So let’s keep that up. Let’s not grow tired of doing good. Let’s be the people of Jesus, transformed by his life as well as his sacrifice. He is our Teacher, and he sends us out to love God, our neighbor and ourselves. He is our Messiah, because he came to save us from what this world offers. The Caesarea Philippi of our day will tell us that the only way to a proper life is through the collection of power and influence. But Jesus offers another way; a way of grace and mercy for all of God’s creation.

    “Who do you say that I am?” That gets answered in the everyday binding and loosing of our lives. May they know we follow Jesus by our love.

    Amen.

    Sermon By: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Crumbs Enough

    Christ and the Canaanite Woman, 1784, by Jean-Germain Drouais. Musée du Louvre.

    Matthew 15:21–28 (NRSVue)

    Sermon for August 16, 2026

    So, a woman comes running toward Jesus, shouting. That’s how this story starts, if you follow the action instead of the geography. This is a Canaanite woman, on her own turf, chasing down a rabbi from another people’s religion, because she’s heard he can help her daughter. But back up one verse, and you’ll find out why she had the chance to do that at all: Jesus had crossed a border and come to her.

    The story tells us Jesus “went away” into the district of Tyre and Sidon, using a Greek verb, anachōreō. In Matthew, that word is reserved for moments when someone crosses a border that is significant. This is the same word that gets used when Joseph and Mary flee into Egypt with the baby Jesus. Jesus isn’t just passing through. He has left reasonably-safe Israelite ground and walked onto Gentile/foreign soil, and the woman who meets him there is about to test exactly how far that crossing goes.

    Make a note of what this story calls her. It doesn’t call her Syrophoenician, which is the more neutral, geographically accurate term that the gospel of Mark uses in that version of this same story. The Gospel of Matthew calls her a Canaanite. That word had been dead for centuries as a live ethnic label… nobody’s passport said Canaanite in the first century.

    Matthew reaches back into some of the oldest layers of Israel’s story to pull that word out and pin it on her. Canaanites are the people Israel was supposed to have driven out of the land. They are, in the collective memory Matthew’s readers carry, the enemy from the founding story. Matthew wants you to feel the weight/significance of that word “Canaanite” before the woman says a single line.

    So this desperate, foreign woman approaches Jesus shouting… but what she says is remarkable! “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Now let’s stop and ask how she knows to say that. According to Matthew, Jesus hasn’t done a single miracle in this region. There’s no record of him teaching there. And yet this woman, this outsider, this Canaanite, this woman, who by every category, should not recognize Jesus at all, greets him with exactly the right title. Son of David. It’s the same title blind men use in this Gospel when they want healing. It’s messianic language. It’s specific. Meanwhile, remember back in chapter 14, the disciples have just watched Jesus walk on water and all they can manage is “Truly you are the Son of God”, which is true… but Peter won’t get around to calling him Messiah until chapter 16. This Canaanite woman is ahead of the curriculum. From the outside looking in, this woman has figured out something very important.

    There might be a reason for that. If we look Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, back in chapter 1, you’ll find two Canaanite women listed among all those fathers begetting sons. There’s Tamar, and there’s Rahab. (also in the genealogy is Ruth, but she was a Moabite (so still an outsider), and Bathsheba as well, but she has historically been considered an Israelite). These Canaanite women, according to Matthew, are literally Jesus’s ancestors. So, when this woman kneels in front of him and essentially calls him kin, she’s stating a fact Matthew already told us and wants us to remember. Her people are already in his blood.

    But get this… Jesus doesn’t answer her. Not a word. I’m not going to try to explain it away, because too many sermons on this text spend too much energy trying to get Jesus off the hook. He is silent. He just is.

    And into that silence, the disciples do what frightened people in a position of institutional comfort do, they ask for the noise to stop. “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” Did you notice they don’t ask him to heal her daughter? They ask him to make her go away. It’s crowd control, not compassion.

    Jesus’s answer to them, not to her, is this: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” It’s sharp, but he’s being straightforward with his disciples. That has been the shape of his mission this whole Gospel. When he sends the Twelve out in chapter 10, he tells them explicitly not to go to Gentiles or Samaritans, but to the lost sheep of Israel. Jesus is being honest about his assignment. The trouble is here, knowing your assignment and mercy toward the person in front of you are not always the same thing, and this text makes us sit in that tension and asks us to wrestle with it.

    So the woman goes a step further. She comes closer and kneels in front of Jesus, a gesture Matthew uses elsewhere only for people who recognize a king, or who need a healing they know only divine power can grant. The magi kneel. A leper kneels. A ruler kneels, begging for his daughter’s life. This woman kneeling in front of Jesus, begging for her daughter’s life, is doing exactly what those before her did. Her posture is a confession of what her words already said: this one, Jesus, has authority.

    And, wildly, Jesus’s response to that posture is the hardest line in the story: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Now look, I’m not going to soften that by explaining that first-century Greeks kept household pets and maybe he means it more gently than it sounds. He calls her a dog. There is real scholarly disagreement about how sharp that word lands, but there’s no version of this sentence where it lands as a compliment. Jesus, in this moment, is drawing the same line his culture had drawn for him his whole life; insider and outsider, children and dogs, us and them.

    But then the story takes a dramatic turn, and it turns on the woman, not on Jesus. She takes the insult and works inside it. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” She takes his word and turns it, reframing the idea of who is included, who is welcomed at the table. Fine, she says. Call me a dog. But remember, even the dogs get to eat the scraps at the table. You don’t have to reclassify me to feed me. You just have to admit there’s enough.

    That’s the whole argument: that there is more than enough coming off that table to reach me too. She’s not asking Jesus to abandon his mission to Israel. She’s telling him his mission has more power in it than he’s accounting for, enough for the house of Israel, and crumbs left over that are still strong enough to throw a demon out of her daughter.

    And it appears that Jesus changes his mind. Suddenly Jesus is now focused and talking directly to her. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” This is the only time in the entire New Testament that phrase, “great is your faith”, gets used. Contrast that with the gospel of Matthew, which has spent previous chapters having Jesus call his own disciples “you of little faith,” over the storm, over the water, over the bread.

    The disciples, who have every advantage; proximity, teaching, years of on-the-job training… they keep coming up short on faith. The one person in this Gospel who earns the word “great” attached to it is a woman with no training, no standing, and a slur just thrown at her, who simply refused to believe there wasn’t enough mercy to go around. Her daughter is healed in that instant, the story tells us. He doesn’t even wait for her to get home to confirm it, the way Mark’s version does. The healing happens the moment the argument is won.

    So how does this uncomfortable story about Jesus connect with us? Well, we can find one connection by looking at our own church history. In 1956, the Methodist Church’s General Conference met in Minneapolis and voted to grant women full clergy rights. It was one sentence added to the Book of Discipline, extending every paragraph governing ordained ministry to include women as well as men. This year, 2026, marks the seventieth anniversary of that vote.

    The first woman to receive full ordination wasn’t even in the country when it happened. Her name was Maud Keister Jensen, and she had spent thirty years as a missionary in Korea. By 1956 she’d already been ordained a local deacon, then a local elder; already taught theology at a seminary; already been evacuated from her ministry twice during wartime and gone back both times. Years earlier she’d applied for full ordination through a conference in New Jersey, and the bishop there wouldn’t approve her. A different conference, in Central Pennsylvania, finally did, but only as a local elder, not as a full member with a vote or a guaranteed appointment. Then, two weeks after the 1956 vote, on May 18th, that same Central Pennsylvania conference admitted her into full connection, including her as a fully ordained elder; in absentia, because she was still on the other side of the world doing the work nobody had yet given her full standing, or permission, to do.

    Notice what didn’t change that day. Rev. Jensen’s ministry didn’t change that day. Her thirty years of faithful ministry in Korea didn’t change. What changed was the church’s willingness to finally call what she’d already been doing by its right name. Historians of that vote say it this way: the decision didn’t create women’s ministry in the Methodist tradition, it recognized ministry that had already been faithfully happening for decades. For me, that’s the Canaanite woman’s whole argument, aimed at an institution instead of a person. There was already enough in the mission to include her. The church just had to catch up with what God was already doing.

    I want to be real with you about what makes this text hard to preach. I get it. We want a Jesus who is the hero of every single verse… and this story won’t give you that. Jesus starts this encounter drawing a boundary, and ends it dismantling one, and the woman is the reason the boundary moves.

    That, for me, is worth meditating on. I think this story is asking us hard questions about inclusion, generosity, and mercy. I do think this story tells us something true about how God’s mercy actually expands in this world; not magically, not without friction, but through people who show up at the borders of life and refuse to leave, standing up for one another, seeking justice and mercy for all of God’s creation.

    Because look at what surrounds this story. Just before it, Jesus has told the Pharisees that nothing that goes into a person defiles them, it’s what comes out of the heart that matters. Just after it, Matthew tells us Jesus healed a great crowd and then fed four thousand people, and this time nobody checks whether they’re the right kind of people to be fed.

    The Canaanite woman’s crumb becomes a preview of the loaf. And by the time this Gospel ends, on a mountain in Galilee, Jesus tells his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations, not just the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but everyone. The boundary that gets tested in Tyre and Sidon is the same boundary that gets erased on that mountain. This woman didn’t just get her daughter healed. She previewed the ending of the whole book.

    So here’s what I want to leave you with. If you’ve ever stood outside a door that other people’s tradition, or comfort, or fear kept closed to you, you have an ancestor in this woman. I believe God sees you and loves you and includes you. The woman in this story didn’t wait for permission to be worthy of inclusion. She worked with what she had, took an insult and turned it to her advantage, and kept insisting there was enough mercy in the house to reach her too.

    And, conversely, if we’re the one standing inside that door, contented, orthodox, sure (or at least comfortable) of our assignment in life… this story is asking us, me included on this, the same question it asked Jesus; is our understanding of who belongs at the table big enough for the God we actually serve? Because the “crumbs” off this table turned out to be enough to cast out a demon. Imagine what the whole loaf can do. Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • I Am. Don’t Be Afraid.

    Photo by Cpl. Daniel Garcia, 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit — U.S. Marine Corps photo, Public Domain (DVIDS)

    Sermon for August 9th, 2026

    Matthew 14:22-33 (NRSVUE)

    There’s a book that came out a while back called If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat. Good title. Catchy. And it captured, better than almost anything else out there, how most of us have been taught to read this story. Peter had guts. Peter had faith. Peter did the one thing none of the other eleven were willing to do… he swung his legs over the side of that boat and he walked. Heck, John Welsey himself wrote his commentary on this text in 1754 with the same viewpoint! And the sermon that usually rides in on the back of that reading goes something like this: keep your eyes on Jesus, don’t look at the wind, don’t look at the waves, and you too can do the incredible.

    I’ve preached some version of that sermon myself. Maybe you’ve heard it a dozen times. There’s nothing hurtful about it. Courage matters. Faith that stays seated and never risks anything isn’t much of a faith at all.

    But here’s the problem. When the story ends, and Peter and Jesus climb back into that boat soaking wet, the other disciples don’t slap him on the back. Nobody says “way to go, man, almost had it.” They fall down. And they worship. Not Peter, but Jesus. The hero of Matthew 14 was never the guy who got wet. It was always the man who came walking across the water like he owned the place. Because he does.

    So before we go further, let’s set the scene, because context tells you almost everything you need to know about why this story unfolds the way it does.

    To remind us about where we were last week, Jesus has just heard that his cousin is dead. Not a natural death. Herod had John the Baptist’s head cut off and served on a platter at a party. That’s the news Jesus is carrying when this chapter opens. And what does he want? What any of us would want. Space. Quiet. A place to grieve a man he loved.

    He doesn’t get it. The crowds find him anyway. And instead of sending them away, Jesus does what he always does, he has gut-level compassion on them, he heals their sick, and by the end of the day he’s fed five thousand families with a sack lunch. Ministry doesn’t wait for us to be ready for it. Anybody who has ever stood up to preach a funeral the same week they buried their own family member knows exactly what I’m talking about.

    So Jesus finally gets his moment. He sends the crowds home. And then, look closely at the verb here, he makes the disciples get into the boat. Some of your Bibles will say “made them get in.” The word behind that is a strong one. It means to compel, to force, to give no option. This was not “hey guys, why don’t you head out ahead of me.” This was Jesus putting them in that boat the way a teacher slides a pop quiz onto your desk. You didn’t ask for it. You’re not ready for it. It’s happening anyway.

    And then Jesus goes up the mountain, alone, finally, to pray. To grieve. To rest. Jesus doesn’t apologize for needing that time. He doesn’t pretend the crowd’s needs outrank his own soul. He goes and he’s quiet with his Father, and only after that does he come down to find his friends.

    Meanwhile, out on the water, things have gone bad. Matthew doesn’t just say the boat got tossed around. The word he uses, and hold on for this one, basanizomenon (bah-sah-nee-ZOH-meh-non), is the same word he uses a few chapters earlier for demonic torment. This wasn’t a little chop on the lake. This was a boat being worked over. Hour after hour, in the dark, arms burning, ropes slipping, nobody sleeping. By the fourth watch of the night, that’s somewhere between three and six in the morning, these men have nothing left. Every skill they have as fishermen, every trick they know for handling a boat in weather, has already been spent. They are done.

    That is exactly the moment Jesus shows up. Not before the storm. Not to prevent it. In the middle of it, when they’ve run out of themselves.

    He comes walking on the water. And they don’t recognize him. They think he’s a ghost, and they scream. Which tells you something… after everything they’ve seen this man do, feeding thousands, healing the sick, they still don’t expect this from him. Grief and exhaustion, I’ve noticed, tend to strip away our capacity for wonder. When you’re that tired, even a miracle looks like a threat.

    So Jesus says three things to them, and it’s worth slowing down here because this is the center of the whole passage: he says, “Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.”

    That middle phrase, “It is I”, most of our translations smooth it over. “It is I.” “It’s me.” Perfectly reasonable English. But the Greek is bare. Ego eimi. Just, “I am.” No object. No predicate. He doesn’t say “I am your teacher” or “I am your friend.” He says the same two words God spoke out of a burning bush to a shepherd named Moses who was hiding out in the desert with a murder charge on his record. “I AM WHO I AM. Tell them I AM sent you.”

    And there’s more. In the book of Job, God asks Job a question out of the whirlwind. God asks… have you ever walked the recesses of the deep, have you ever gone where the springs of the sea begin? The implied answer is no. Only God has walked there. Only God tramples the waves. That’s language for the Creator, for the one who set the boundaries of the ocean before the earth had a name.

    So when Jesus walks out across the Sea of Galilee at three in the morning and says “I am,” Matthew isn’t just telling you a nice story about a man doing something extraordinary. He’s telling you exactly who’s in the boat with you. This is the same voice from the bush. This is the same authority that walked the deep before there was a Peter to sink into it.

    And that’s where Peter, being Peter, opens his mouth.

    “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”

    Now, like I said… I know how we’ve been taught to hear that line. Bold Peter. Faithful Peter. The one disciple willing to take the risk. But look at that phrase again… “if it is you.” That exact construction shows up three other times in Matthew, and none of them are flattering. The devil uses it in the wilderness: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” The high priest uses it at Jesus’s trial: “If you are the Messiah, tell us.” The men mocking him at the cross use it too: “If you are the Son of God, save yourself.”

    Every single time somebody in this Gospel says “if you are,” they’re not asking a sincere question. They’re issuing a challenge. They want Jesus to perform, to prove himself, to put on a show that settles the matter on their terms instead of trusting the terms he’s already given them. What if Peter isn’t stepping out in humble faith here? What if Peter is testing the very one who has just finished testing him with a storm? What if he wants to walk on water not because Jesus told him to, but because he wants a demonstration?

    And here’s grace for you. Jesus lets him come anyway. “Come.” One word. No lecture first, no warning. Because that’s who Jesus is. He doesn’t wait for our motives to be pure before he extends his hand.

    So Peter gets out. He walks. For a few steps, gravity forgets he exists. And then he notices the wind, and he’s afraid, and he starts to go under, and he cries out three words that are, frankly, the best theology in this whole story: “Lord, save me.”

    Not “Lord, help me try harder.” Not “Lord, strengthen my focus.” Just — save me. That’s the whole gospel in three words. That’s every prayer any of us has ever prayed worth praying.

    Jesus reaches out immediately and catches him. No hesitation. And then he says something that gets read as a rebuke or punishment but might be closer to a compassionate diagnosis: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” Not “why did you fail my test,” but why did you doubt the one who is already, right now, holding your hand.

    They climb back into the boat together. And the moment Jesus is back with the others, not off doing something spectacular alone with Peter, but back with the whole crew… the wind simply stops. And the men in that boat do something Matthew has not recorded them doing before in this entire Gospel. They worship him. “Truly you are the Son of God.”

    Highlight that phrase in your Bible. Write it down, because Matthew wants you to remember it. He only uses it one other time in the whole book, at the foot of the cross, when a Roman centurion watches Jesus die and says the exact same words: “Truly this was the Son of God.” The storm on the lake and the darkness over Golgotha are bound together by that one confession. What the disciples figured out on the water in the middle of the night, a pagan soldier figures out watching Jesus breathe his last. This man is who he says he is. And the salvation he offers isn’t only from drowning. It’s from everything that would otherwise drown us for good.

    So here’s what I want you to walk away with this morning, and it’s not “get out of the boat if you’re bold enough.” That’s a fine motivational poster, but it’s not what Matthew is giving us.

    What Matthew is handing us is this: Jesus is Lord over the storms you didn’t choose and the ones he compelled you into. He is present in your exhaustion, not just your triumphs. He shows up at the fourth watch, not the first… which means if you’re still waiting on him at three in the morning, you are not off his radar. You are exactly where this story says he meets people.

    And notice… the miracle worth savoring here isn’t that a man walked on water for a few seconds before he sank. If Jesus is who he says he is, walking on water is no bigger a stretch for him than you walking up a flight of stairs. The miracle is that a boat full of exhausted, grieving, frightened men looked at this soaked, ordinary-looking rabbi climbing back over the side and recognized, right there in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, that God’s own Son was standing in front of them.

    Most of us are not going to be asked to walk on water this week. Most of us are going to be asked to keep rowing.

    You want a picture of what that looks like? Look at what happened in Venezuela this summer. Two horrific earthquakes hit within a minute of each other in June, magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, and by the time the ground settled, over a thousand people were dead and thousands more were buried under what used to be their homes. Fairfax County, Virginia’s search and rescue team was on a plane within two days to Venezuela. Los Angeles County, California sent seventy-one more behind them, with six dog teams, and eighty-four thousand pounds of gear. For ten straight days those rescue teams worked that rubble in shifts, no real sleep, digging by hand where the machines couldn’t reach.

    They pulled a mother and her nine-month-old out alive. They freed a father and his son who’d been trapped under a collapsed building for four days. Nobody filmed the whole thing for a highlight reel. Most of it was slow, and dark, and unglamorous, hour after hour of listening for sounds of life under concrete. When they finally flew home, the Venezuelan government handed them their flag and said thank you. That’s the whole story. Nobody got out of a boat to walk on water. They just stayed in the storm until the job was finished.

    To stay in the boat with people as a connected community; through weather we didn’t ask for; believing that the one who compelled us into this thing in the first place, hasn’t left us to figure it out alone. That’s not a lesser calling. Peter got a few seconds of spectacle and then needed rescuing. The rest who stayed in the boat got to watch Jesus walk the deep and then sit down among them, soaking wet, fully present, still Lord.

    So if you’re in a storm you didn’t pick; a diagnosis, a grief, a classroom or a career or a marriage that’s taking on water faster than you can bail, hear what Jesus said to men who had nothing left to give: Take heart. I am. Don’t be afraid.

    He’s not calling you to be Peter this week. He’s calling you to keep your hand on the oar, to stay with the people he’s put in the boat with you, and to trust that the wind stops the moment he climbs back in. Not because you were brave enough, but because he is who he says he is.

    Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

    I_Am_Dont_Be_Afraid_SlidesDownload

  • Bread in the Wasteland

    Sermon for August 2, 2026

    Matthew 14:13-21 (NRSVUE)

    John the Baptist is dead.

    He’s dead because a teenage girl danced well at a party, and a drunk, morally bankrupt king made a stupid promise he was too proud to break. John’s head ends up on a serving tray, carried out like the next course at a birthday party gone sideways. The last great prophet of Israel, the man who baptized the Son of God in the Jordan River, is killed because he told the truth about a corrupt family’s sex life and it made the wrong people angry.

    That’s it. That’s the whole reason he’s dead.

    There’s no grand theological showdown here. No cosmic battle of good versus evil playing out on a worthy stage. It’s petty. It’s senseless. That’s hard for us to handle, because we want tragedy to at least mean something. We want to be able to trace a line from cause to consequence and find some shred of logic in it. John doesn’t get that. He gets a sword in a dungeon and his head on a platter.

    The story tells us that when Jesus hears the news, he gets in a boat and withdraws to a deserted place, by himself. One verse. That’s all we get of his reaction. Scripture isn’t big on narrating people’s interior lives, it doesn’t stop to tell us Jesus was gutted, that he sat somewhere and stared at nothing for an hour, that his hands shook. But we don’t need it spelled out. We know what it means when a man gets in a boat alone after hearing his cousin was murdered for sport. He’s not going sightseeing. He’s going somewhere to grieve, because he’s human, and because the same evil that took John is coming for him too, and he knows it.

    If we let ourselves believe Jesus sailed off that day dry-eyed and unbothered, we’ve stopped believing he was actually a man. That’s an old heresy with a Greek name, Docetism, the idea that Jesus only appeared human, that underneath the skin he was untouchable, unshaken, running on some higher operating system the rest of us don’t have access to. Don’t buy it. The human Jesus in this text has just lost someone he loved to senseless violence, and he needs to be alone with that.

    But as we see, he doesn’t get to be alone with it. He doesn’t get time to grieve. Life hits him with something else. The crowds hear where he’s headed and they beat him there on foot, walking around the shoreline while he’s still crossing the water. So Jesus steps off the boat, still raw, still grieving, and there they are. Waiting. Needing things from him.

    He would have every right to turn around and get back in the boat. Who of us here would blame him? But that’s not what happens. Matthew tells us he sees the crowd and he’s moved with compassion for them. The word “compassion” in our mouths today is soft, almost sentimental.

    That’s not what’s happening in the Greek. We’ve already come across this word in Jesus’ ministry recently, when we were in Matthew 9 back in June. That word, again,  is splagchnizomai; it’s a gut word. It means something twisted in his stomach. It’s visceral. Jesus is standing on the shore, still grieving internally over John, and the sight of these hurting, harassed people hits him like a physical blow, and he moves toward them anyway.

    Most of us don’t operate that way. Most of us, when we’re wrecked, pull inward. We protect what little bandwidth we have left. And there’s nothing wrong with that as a general rule… grief needs room. But Jesus shows us something here that ought to unsettle us a little: his compassion for others didn’t wait for his own pain to resolve first. He ministered to the crowd’s wounds while his own wound was still open. He healed the sick straight through the afternoon, and only as the sun starts dropping does anybody mention food.

    That’s when the disciples show up with their very reasonable, very practical suggestion: it’s late, we’re in the middle of nowhere, send these people to the villages to fend for themselves.

    I don’t think the disciples are being cold here. They’re doing the math. They’re being responsible. They see the size of the crowd, they see the size of the problem, and they conclude, correctly, that they don’t have the resources to solve it. Most of us would’ve said the same thing.

    Yet Jesus doesn’t send anybody away. Instead, he turns the problem right back on the twelve men who just handed it to him: You give them something to eat.

    Their response is simple and true. We have Five loaves. Two fish. That’s it. That’s what we’ve got. It’s not even a joke. It’s an admission of just how far short their resources fall from what they’re facing. If you’ve ever stood in front of a hurting world with what feels like nothing in your hands, you know exactly what that moment feels like.

    Five thousand men, plus women, plus kids, babies, all of them… Matthew doesn’t even bother giving us the real number. That’s an enormous task to undertake. Just ask our hospitality team what it takes to get prepared for a gathering of 100 people…

    Now check this out, because this story is doing something underneath the surface here.

    Matthew didn’t set this scene in a field by accident. He specifically calls it a deserted place, erēmos in the Greek, meaning “the wilderness”. And every Jewish ear listening to this story in the first century would have heard an echo the second that word landed: this is Exodus language. This is the same word used when God tells Pharaoh, “let my people go, that they may worship me in the wilderness.”

    The story in Matthew tells us the crowd get to Jesus’ location “on foot” (by walking) and that exact phrase shows up in the Greek Old Testament exactly twice before this: once when Israel walks out of Egypt after the first Passover, and once when Moses reminds God that there are six hundred thousand people on foot who are going to need to be fed. Then at the end of our passage, Matthew gives us that count, “…about five thousand men, besides women and children”, which is almost a direct echo of how the exodus generation gets counted in Exodus itself.

    Do you notice how this story is not being sloppy with it’s details. It’s building to something. The story wants you to see Jesus standing in the wilderness, surrounded by a hungry crowd who followed him on foot, and think: this is the new Moses. This is round two. God fed his people bread from heaven in the wilderness once before, and now here’s Jesus, doing it again, with his own hands.

    But, and this is the reality of the situation, Israel’s exodus ended with liberation. As the story goes, Pharaoh’s army drowned in the sea. The people walked out of slavery into freedom. That’s not how this new version goes. John didn’t get freed from Herod’s prison. He got beheaded in it. And a few chapters from now, Jesus himself will stand in front of another political power broker, not Herod this time, but Pilate, and he won’t get delivered either. He’ll get a cross. The exodus imagery is here, but the ending has been rewritten, and rewritten in blood.

    This is where the story challenges us. Because it means Jesus is very deliberately telling us: don’t expect this story to look like Egypt. Don’t expect God’s people to simply walk out of trouble unscathed while their enemies drown behind them. Sometimes the prophet loses his head. Sometimes the Son of God loses his life. The wilderness feeding isn’t a promise that evil gets defeated before it costs anybody anything. It’s a sign that God is present and generous and provides… even while walking straight through the valley, not around it.

    And notice where this feast is happening. This gospel story wants you to remember what just happened two paragraphs earlier: Herod’s birthday party. A banquet thrown by a king, full of wine and dancing and power plays, where the guest of honor’s death is served up like a course on a platter. That’s one kind of table. It’s built on status, fear, and control, and it ends with a man’s head on a plate.

    Then Jesus throws his own banquet. No palace. No wine list. No guest list based on who matters. Just a hillside full of ordinary, hungry, sick people who followed him because they had nowhere else to go, and five loaves and two fish that Jesus takes, blesses, breaks, and hands to his disciples to give away. Two banquets. Two kingdoms. One kills to protect its power. The other feeds until everybody’s full and there’s still twelve baskets left over.

    That language… take, bless, break, give, isn’t accidental either. Flip ahead to Matthew 26, the night before Jesus dies, and you’ll find almost the exact same verbs: Jesus takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to his disciples, and says, “This is my body.” The wilderness meal and the Last Supper are talking to each other across the pages of this Gospel. Every time we come to this table on a Sunday morning and break bread together, we are standing in both stories at once. The hillside and the upper room, the wilderness and the cross, scarcity turned into abundance, and abundance poured out as sacrifice.

    Here’s what I want you to notice about how the food actually gets distributed, though. Jesus doesn’t snap his fingers and make five thousand plates appear out of thin air. That would have been cool, though, right? He doesn’t set up a buffet line and tell everyone to come get their own. He takes what little the disciples have, and he hands it back to them to distribute. The miracle happens through human hands. Tired hands. Uncertain hands. Hands that just told him thirty seconds earlier that they didn’t have enough. God’s abundance in this story doesn’t bypass the church. It runs straight through us.

    That should mess with us a little, because it’s tempting to read this story and walk away thinking, “Well, that’s nice. Jesus can handle it.” And he can. But that’s not the point this story is making. The point is that Jesus takes our inadequate five loaves and puts them to work anyway, and he asks his people to be the ones who carry the food from his hands into the hands of everyone who’s hungry.

    That was true then. It’s true now. If you’re waiting on bread to fall from the sky before you’ll believe God cares about hungry people, you’re going to be waiting a long time, because most of the time, God’s plan for feeding the hungry has always run through people willing to hand out what little they’ve got.

    And we should let that convict us a little, because we are, by and large, a well-fed room. According to the World Food Program, something in the neighborhood of one out of every nine people on this planet doesn’t have enough food to live a healthy, active life. That’s not an abstraction. That’s kids who can’t concentrate in school because their stomachs are empty. That’s families making impossible choices between rent and groceries a few miles from where we’re sitting right now. If Jesus can feed five thousand-plus people with a sack lunch, the question worth sitting with isn’t “why doesn’t God do something about hunger.” It’s “why do we assume that’s someone else’s job.”

    There’s a piece of this story that I think I’ve missed almost every time I’ve preached it, and it’s this: after everybody eats their fill and the leftovers get gathered into twelve baskets, the story just… ends. No applause. No crowd chanting his name. The Gospel doesn’t tell us anybody was amazed.

    Compare that to John’s version of this same event, where the crowd tries to grab Jesus and crown him king by force because, let’s be real, free bread is a pretty compelling political platform. Jesus has to run from them. But in Matthew, nothing. Silence. It’s almost like nobody noticed what had just happened.

    I think that’s this Gospel’s way of telling us this story was never really about the bread. It’s not a magic trick meant to impress anybody. Feed people, and they’ll worship whoever’s feeding them, right up until the bread stops coming, and then they’ll turn on you just as fast. Bread alone was never going to be enough to hold anyone’s loyalty, and Jesus knew it.

    So he feeds the crowd, really feeds them, until they’re stuffed, with baskets to spare, and then he lets the story end without fanfare, because what he’s actually offering runs deeper than a full stomach. He’s not trying to become the bread king. He’s trying to become the Bread of Life. There’s a difference between a Savior who gives you what you want and a Savior who gives you what you actually need, and this story wants us walking away from this hillside hungry for the second thing.

    So here’s where that leaves us. This isn’t a tidy story about God fixing everything neatly. John still lost his head. Jesus is still headed for a cross. The wilderness is still the wilderness; chaotic, unpredictable, a place where evil shows up uninvited and takes what it wants. But in the middle of all of that, moved by gut-level compassion, Jesus takes whatever’s in front of him, five loaves, two fish, a wilderness/a wasteland full of hurting, hungry, ordinary people, and turns scarcity into more than enough.

    That’s still how this works. You bring what you’ve got, even if it looks laughably small next to the need in front of you. You hand it to Jesus, and you put it to work. Nobody in this story waited around for a bigger miracle before they started passing out bread. The disciples moved with five loaves still in their hands, not knowing yet if it would be enough. That’s the move. Stop measuring what you don’t have and start moving with what you do, because God has a track record of blessing the little that gets put in play. Five loaves fed a hillside. Whatever’s in your hands this week is enough to start.

    Amen.

  • God With Us, Off Season

    Sermon for July 19, 2026 – Matthew 1:18-25

    Alright, let’s start with a confession. Preaching this text in July feels a little strange, right? I mean, there’s no decorated tree up here on stage with me. Nobody’s fighting over parking because their cousin is in town. The kids aren’t dressed like shepherds. It’s a hundred degrees outside, and we’re talking about a baby born under a star.

    But here’s what I’ve come to believe about this strangeness: it can actually be a gift. Because when we read this story in December, we already know how it ends. We’ve got the manger in our peripheral vision. We’ve got “Silent Night” queued up in our heads before I finish the first sentence. The story is wrapped in so much familiarity that it’s hard to hear it as news anymore. It’s just… Christmas. It can become background noise for a season we already know how to run.

    So today, out of season, I want us to consider what Matthew is doing in these eight verses. Because Matthew is not simply telling us a birth story. He’s making an argument about faith, obedience, and how we respond in life when things go sideways.

    Here’s the first thing worth knowing, and it’s a detail most of us miss because it doesn’t survive translation. Matthew opens his Gospel with the words “the book of the genesis of Jesus Christ.” That word, genesis, is the exact word used to title the first book of the Bible in the Greek Old Testament (called the Septuagint) that Matthew and his community would have read. He uses it again right here in verse 18: “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.”

    Same word. Genesis. Beginning.

    So what’s Matthew doing here? He’s telling you, right up front, that something on the level of creation itself is happening in the story of this Jewish peasant girl in a small hill town. A new Genesis. God is doing again what God did in the beginning; speaking into chaos and calling forth something new.

    That’s a huge claim to make about a couple who, as far as the record shows, had no money, no political standing, and, as we’re about to see, no small amount of scandal attached to their names. God’s new beginning doesn’t start in Rome, in the halls of religious power, or among people with the wherewithal to pull it off. It starts in the mess of an ordinary betrothal that’s about to fall apart.

    So, let’s talk about what “engaged” actually meant in first-century Judea, because our English translations undersell it. When Matthew says Mary was “engaged” to Joseph, he’s describing something much more binding than what we mean by the word. In the first century, this was a legal contract. A betrothal, usually arranged by the families, could only be dissolved through divorce. Mary and Joseph were, for all practical and legal purposes, married. They just hadn’t come together as husband and wife yet. That step, the wedding feast, moving into the same home, was still ahead of them, sometimes as much as a year out.

    So picture Joseph’s situation. He is legally bound to a woman he has not yet taken as his wife, and word reaches him that she’s pregnant. He knows the math. He knows it isn’t his. In that culture, under that law, there is exactly one conclusion a reasonable man draws: Mary has been unfaithful.

    And here’s where Matthew does something interesting. He calls Joseph righteous, right here, in the same breath that Joseph is planning to divorce his pregnant fiancée. Not righteous despite his decision to end things. Righteous, in the text, right alongside it.

    I want to sit with that for a second, because it cuts against how a lot of us were taught to read this story. Joseph isn’t righteous because he’s furious and demands justice. He isn’t righteous because he lets it slide and pretends nothing happened. He’s righteous because he tries to do the most merciful thing available to him within a system that gave him very little room to be merciful at all. The law entitled him to expose her… to make a public example of her, with consequences that could have been fatal. He chooses instead to end it quietly, privately, protecting her as much as he legally can while still doing what he believes he has to do.

    That’s a man trying to hold together justice and mercy with the limited tools he’s been given. And before God ever speaks a word to Joseph, the story in Matthew wants you to know: this is a good man, doing the best he knows how, in an impossible spot.

    Then God interrupts him.

    An angel shows up in a dream and tells Joseph three things: First, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife. Second, the child is from the Holy Spirit, and finally, and this is the part I want you to catch, name him.

    That final instruction is important. In that world, the man who names a child is the man who claims that child. Joseph has no biological stake in this baby whatsoever. But when the angel tells him to name the child Jesus, God is asking Joseph to do something legally and socially decisive: to step forward, put his name on this child, and raise him as his own son. That act is what makes Jesus, legally and promise-wise, a son of David… because Joseph, not Mary, carries that royal bloodline. Jesus is God’s Son by nature and Joseph’s son by choice. Both are true, and Matthew needs both to be true for the rest of his Gospel to work.

    I want you to notice what obedience costs Joseph here. It’s not a small ask. Joseph has to walk back into a small town, take a visibly pregnant woman as his wife, and let every single person who does the math draw their own conclusions about what that means for his character and hers. He is choosing public shame over private (and legally sound) separation, because an angel told him the truth was stranger and better than the story everyone else would assume.

    That’s not a passive man. Whatever quiet the text gives Joseph, and he never says a word out loud in this whole passage, his obedience is loud. He gets up. He does it. Verse 24 says it plainly: Joseph did as the angel commanded.

    I think about the men in this room, the fathers, the grandfathers, the husbands, the ones carrying responsibility for people who are depending on you. Joseph is not a hero because he felt something. He’s not remembered because his heart was in the right place. He’s remembered because when the word of God contradicted his own plan… a good, reasonable, defensible plan, he laid his own plan down and obeyed anyway. That’s costly. That’s the kind of faith that doesn’t get a single line of dialogue in scripture, and yet without it, there’s no Christmas story at all.

    The angel tells Joseph the child’s name before the child ever draws breath: Jesus. In Hebrew, Yeshua, meaning “God saves.” It was a common enough name in that era. Lots of Jewish parents named their sons some version of “God saves,” because they were living under Roman occupation and praying, hard, for God to do exactly that.

    But this child’s name isn’t just hopeful. It’s a job description. “He will save his people from their sins” (v. 21). And I want to push back gently on something a lot of us assume when we hear that line. We tend to hear “sins” and think immediately of our own personal moral failures… the private stuff, the things we’d never say out loud in this room. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete, and it’s a fairly modern, individualistic way of reading an ancient, more communal word.

    Matthew’s readers would have heard “save his people from their sins” against the backdrop of exile, the whole story of Israel being carried off to Babylon because the nation, collectively, had abandoned justice and covenant faithfulness. Sin, in that frame, isn’t just what you did on a Tuesday you’d rather forget. It’s the corporate, structural, generational mess a whole people can get tangled in. The systems, the injustices, the corruption of power that Israel’s own prophets spent centuries calling out.

    That means the salvation Jesus brings isn’t just a private transaction between you and God, settled and filed away. It’s social. It’s political, in the true sense of that word, concerned with how people live together. It’s cosmic. Jesus didn’t come only to fix what’s wrong in your heart. He came to fix what’s wrong in the world your heart lives in, the greed, the exploitation of the vulnerable, the systems that grind people down. That should change how we hear “salvation” every time we say it around here.

    Matthew closes his argument with a quotation from the Hebrew scriptures, Isaiah 7:14: “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, God with us.

    Scholars have spent a long time working through the Hebrew word behind that verse. In the original Hebrew, that word seen in Matthew as virgin is Almah, which simply means “young woman,” not necessarily virgin. See, originally Isaiah wasn’t predicting a miraculous birth eight centuries out; he was giving King Ahaz a sign, in his own moment, that God had not abandoned the people of Judah in the face of an Assyrian threat. Matthew, reading the Greek translation of Isaiah that used the word Parthenos, virgin, takes that ancient promise and reads it forward, seeing in Jesus the ultimate, once-for-all fulfillment of everything Isaiah had only glimpsed.

    That’s an interesting enough note, but I don’t want us to get stuck arguing linguistics and miss the point Matthew is actually making. “God with us” is not primarily a comfort verse, even though we love using it that way, especially at gravesides, in hospital rooms, and in the hardest moments of people’s lives. That comfort is real, and nobody can ever take it away from us. But Matthew means something bigger. He puts “God with us” in the very first chapter of his Gospel, and then, turn all the way to the last verse of the whole book of Matthew, Jesus says it again: “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew bookends his entire Gospel with that promise. It’s not simply a footnote. It’s the frame the whole story hangs on.

    God with us means God has entered the actual mess of human history… betrothals gone sideways, reputations at risk, occupied territory, corporate sin, ordinary families trying to figure out what faithfulness looks like when the plan they had gets interrupted. God didn’t wait for the mess to get cleaned up first. God moved in.

    So why does any of this matter to us on a hot Sunday in July, when Christmas is five months away in either direction?

    Because I think we’ve let the season do our theology for us. We save “God with us” for December, wrap it in lights, and pack it away with the ornaments in January. But Matthew didn’t write this as a seasonal decoration. He wrote it as the foundation his entire Gospel stands on. If Emmanuel is real, it’s real in July too. It’s real on a random Tuesday when your plans fall apart and you don’t get a dream or an angel; you just have to decide, like Joseph did, whether you’ll trust that God is present and working even when the situation makes no sense and doesn’t reflect well on you.

    Some of you are living a Joseph story right now. You had a plan… reasonable, responsible, defensible, and life handed you something you didn’t ask for and can’t fully explain to the people around you. Maybe it’s a crisis. Maybe it’s a job that ended. Maybe it’s a kid who’s struggling in ways you never saw coming, or a marriage carrying more weight than it was built for. You are standing exactly where Joseph stood: holding a good plan in one hand and an unexpected, unwanted interruption in the other, trying to figure out which one is actually from God.

    Here’s what this text tells you. God doesn’t usually ask us to have all the answers before we obey. Joseph didn’t get a full explanation up front on the virgin birth. He got one dream, one instruction, and a decision to make in the morning. Faithfulness looked like getting up and doing the next right thing, in public, at real cost, trusting a word from God over the story everyone else was going to tell about him.

    This is a church with lots of educators, with lots of people who value getting the facts right, who want their faith to be intellectually honest and not just emotionally comfortable. Good. Wrestle with the Hebrew, ask what almah really meant to Isaiah, take seriously that Matthew is doing sophisticated theological work here, not just reporting facts. That kind of rigor honors God. But don’t let the wrestling become a substitute for the decision Joseph had to make. At some point, knowing the text well enough has to turn into trusting the God the text is pointing to.

    Because here’s the heart of the matter: the God who moved into an unwed mother’s story, who interrupted a righteous man’s reasonable plan, who took on a name that meant rescue before he’d said a single word… that God is not seasonal. He is not waiting for December. He’s with us now, in whatever mess July has handed you, asking the same thing he asked Joseph: will you trust me enough to get up and do what I’ve asked, even when you can’t fully explain it to anyone watching?

    That’s Christmas. Any month of the year.

    Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson