Dove Sermons

Sermons from Dove of the Desert UMC

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  • 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

  • The Sower Who Won’t Quit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    We are the dirt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    If you have ears, hear.

    Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • You Can’t Win With Some People

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Problem Isn’t the Messenger

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

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

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

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

    What Wisdom Actually Does

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

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

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

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

    The Hidden Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Invitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What We Do With This

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

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

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

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

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

    Come. Learn. Rest.

    Amen.

    Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Sermon for June 14, 2026

    Sent: The Prayer You Have to Live

    Matthew 9:35–10:8 (NRSVUE)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Let us pray.

    Lord of the harvest,

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

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

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

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

    Amen.

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Sermon for June 7, 2026

    What He Sees in You

    Matthew 9:9–13, 18–26 (NRSVUE)

    ———

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

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

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

    One thing after another.

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

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

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

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

    The Man at the Booth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Dinner and the Question Nobody Wanted to Ask

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Father Who Burst Through the Door

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

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

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

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

    The Woman in the Crowd

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

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

    And it is.

    Jesus stops. Turns. Sees her.

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

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

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

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

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

    The kingdom of God has no tiered waiting room.

    The House Where Everyone Had Given Up

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

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

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

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

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

    What Jesus Sees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The call is still going out.

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

    —

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

  • Sermon for May 24, 2026

    Sermon based on Acts 2:1-21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Now, about the Spirit itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    So here is where I want to land.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson