Dove Sermons

Sermon based on John 17:1-11

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

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

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

And this is the heart of Jesus.

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

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

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

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

That is a radical claim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s it. That’s the definition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

Sermon Based on John 14:15-21

Jesus never stops talking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I will not leave you orphaned.”

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

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

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

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

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

One more thing, and this is important too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are not orphaned.

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

Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson

Sermon based on John 14:1-14

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

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

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

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

One Heart

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Needs a Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip Still Wants More

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greater Works Than These

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We Already Know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Based on Luke 24:13-35

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

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

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

We had hoped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We had hoped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson

Sermon based on John 20:19-31

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

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

They locked the doors.

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

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

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

I think we need to consider why that is.

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

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

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

And then Jesus comes through the locked door.

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

And what were his first words?

Peace be with you.

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

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

Then he shows them his hands. And his side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But one of them wasn’t there.

Thomas.

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

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

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

My Lord and my God.

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

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

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

Jesus keeps coming back.

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

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

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

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

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

He is still saying it.

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

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

Mary wept at an empty tomb and heard her name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson

Sermon Based on Matthew 28:1-10

There is a moment in Matthew’s resurrection story that I keep coming back to, and it has nothing to do with the angel. It has nothing to do with the earthquake, the stone, or the guards flat on their backs like dead men.

It’s this: after everything — after the arrest, the beatings, the trial, the cross, the burial, the silence of Saturday — two women get up before dawn and walk to a tomb.

Their names are Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary.” That’s how Matthew introduces them. The other Mary. Which tells you something about how history treats women who show up and do the hard work. But they showed up. They showed up when the eleven men who had followed Jesus for three years were behind locked doors, terrified, trying to figure out what their lives were now. These women walked toward the grave in the dark.

Matthew doesn’t tell us exactly why they came. He says they came “to see” the tomb. The Greek word he uses — theoreomai — means more than a casual glance. It means to watch carefully, to observe with intention. They weren’t just going to pay their respects. They were watching. They were paying attention. They were the kind of people who had listened carefully when Jesus talked about what was going to happen, and they came to see if any of it was true.

I want to spend some time with that before we get to the earthquake.

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We are a people who have been through some things. I don’t need to itemize them for you. You came here this morning carrying the weight of whatever the last year has handed you, and some of you are carrying more than a year’s worth. Death has visited some of your homes. Diagnoses have landed. Relationships have broken. The news — the actual news, not the good news — has been relentless. And underneath all of it, there is this quiet but persistent question that most of us are too polite to say out loud in church:

Does any of this still work?

Is there really something on the other side of death? Is the kingdom of God actually breaking into the world, or is that just something we say to make ourselves feel better on Sunday mornings? Is the good news actually alive, or have we just gotten very good at performing a story we stopped believing somewhere along the way?

The two Marys asked that question with their feet. They walked to the tomb to find out.

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Matthew’s story of what happened next is the loudest resurrection story in the four Gospels. Mark’s gospel is spare and frightening. Luke is detailed and somewhat domestic. John is intimate and quiet. Matthew… is a seismic event — and I mean that literally.

The earth shakes. An angel descends from heaven, radiant enough to blind you, and rolls back the stone. Not to let Jesus out — Jesus is already gone. The stone is rolled back so that the women can look inside and confirm what has already happened. And then the angel sits on it. He just sits on the stone, like a man who has just moved a piece of furniture out of his way and wants to rest for a moment. Rome put that stone there. Roman soldiers sealed it with the authority of the empire. And the angel of God sits on it like it’s a park bench.

The guards, these trained soldiers, collapse like dead men.

Matthew wants you to feel the weight of what is happening here. This is not a quiet miracle slipping through the cracks of history. This is the world being rearranged. Every system, every authority, every power that put Jesus in that tomb is being exposed for what it is — temporary. Mortal. Already on the wrong side of history.

One of the commentaries I’ve been working through this week puts it this way: tyrants and empires devote endless energy toward maintaining the power to silence their critics. They know that nothing silences like death. But what happens when a ragtag group of resurrection-believers offers testimony in response to state-sanctioned execution? Matthew’s answer is: the earth shakes. The guards fall. The angel sits on the stone and waits.

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There is a theological word for this: euangelion. It means Gospel. Good news. But here’s something you may not know about that word — it wasn’t invented by Christians. It was a Roman word. In the Roman Empire, euangelion meant an announcement from the Emperor. An imperial proclamation. A declaration of Roman power and Roman peace. When Caesar had a victory, when he extended the empire, when he wanted the population to know that he was in charge and the world was safe because of him, that announcement was called euangelion — good news.

The first followers of Jesus took that word deliberately. They picked it up and aimed it back at Rome like a mirror. They said: here is the real good news. Here is the real announcement. The real power at work in the world is not Caesar’s. It is not the empire’s. It is God’s. And God’s power does not use crosses to silence people — God’s power raises the crucified from the dead.

That is what Easter is. It is a claim about who is actually in charge. It’s a declaration that death, which every empire and every tyrant and every system of oppression has always used as its final argument, does not get the last word. The last word belongs to God. And God’s word is this: He is risen.

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Now, I want to be honest with you about something.

That claim, that God’s power triumphs over death, can be hijacked. It has been hijacked. The church has a long and painful history of draping resurrection language over its own ambitions, using the authority of the risen Christ to bless its own agendas, its own empires, its own cruelties. If you have ever heard the gospel weaponized, if you have ever seen the resurrection used as a cudgel, you are right to be suspicious of triumphalist language.

But the response to a hijacked gospel is not a smaller gospel. The response is to look at who was actually there when the story began. Look at who showed up at the tomb.

It was not generals. It was not emperors. It was not the powerful men who ran the religious establishment. It was two women whose names history has half-forgotten, walking toward a grave in the dark because they loved someone who was dead, and they wanted to see.

The good news, from the very beginning, has been for people like that. It has been carried by people like that. It spreads not through imperial decree but through ordinary people who saw something that changed them and ran to tell someone else.

Matthew says the women left the tomb with fear and great joy. I love that phrase. Fear and great joy, together, in the same body, at the same time. Not one after the other. Both at once. Because that is what it feels like to be standing at the edge of something real. That is what it feels like when the story you have been telling yourself, the story where death always wins, where the tomb always holds, where the powers of the world always have the last word, starts to crack.

You are afraid because everything is changing. You are joyful because it is changing for the better. And you run.

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I think the church is at one of those moments right now.

The old maps don’t work the way they used to. The cultural arrangements that once made it easy to be a church — where Sunday was sacred, where Christianity was the default, where the building was the center of gravity — those arrangements are gone or going. And there is a version of the church that responds to that reality by getting smaller and tighter and more afraid, pulling inward, drawing lines, trying to seal the tomb of what used to be.

But Easter says the tomb doesn’t stay sealed.

Because the good news is not a program. It is not an institution. It is not a building or a tradition or a theological position. The good news is Jesus, alive and uncontainable, loose in the world, moving ahead of his disciples to Galilee before they even know which way to go.

This matters. Jesus doesn’t wait for the disciples at the tomb. He doesn’t wait in Jerusalem, the center of religious power. He goes to Galilee… to the edge, the margins, the place where fishermen worked and ordinary people lived, the place Matthew elsewhere calls “Galilee of the Gentiles,” the doorway to everywhere else. He goes there first and tells the women: go tell my brothers I’ll meet them there.

Which means the risen Christ is always already ahead of us. Always already in the neighborhoods we haven’t gone to yet, the conversations we haven’t started, the people we haven’t noticed. Our job is not to produce the good news or protect it or manage it. Our job is to follow it. To go where it is already going. To be, as the women were, witnesses… people who pay careful attention and then run to tell someone else what they’ve seen.

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Let me tell you about a man named Tom Wenzl.

Tom was a police officer. Over the course of his career, he arrested a couple named Kevin and Danielle Riley — separately, years apart — each time for drug offenses. Kevin and Danielle went to prison. Tom went on with his career.

And then Kevin and Danielle got clean. And they found their faith. And eventually they became licensed lay pastors of a small Presbyterian church in Washington state. And somehow, in the way that God seems to have a dark sense of humor and an unending commitment to making things whole, Tom Wenzl ended up at their church. Tom and Kevin became friends. Then Tom and Danielle. And on a Sunday morning not long ago, Kevin and Danielle stood in the water and baptized the man who had arrested them both.

Danielle said afterward: “Nobody is beyond resurrection.”

That is what the good news alive in the world looks like. That is the earthquake. Not the dramatic kind, but the slow, tectonic kind that rearranges the ground beneath your feet until you are standing somewhere you never could have imagined and you realize that God has been working on this for years.

---

Donald Juel, a New Testament scholar, once wrote something that has stayed with me this week. He was reflecting on the resurrection story and he said simply: none of the Gospels can really end the story of Jesus. The whole point is that it continues, and that its significance continues.

It continues in you. It continues in this community. It continues in every act of mercy and repair and witness and showing-up-before-dawn that happens in the name of this risen Jesus. The chain of announcement that began when two frightened, joyful women ran from a garden and told eleven confused men that the teacher was alive… that chain has not been broken. It runs through two thousand years of ordinary people who saw something true and told someone else.

You are in that chain. You are one of the links.

So here is the charge Matthew gives us, and it is the same charge Jesus gave the women on the road, and it is the same charge the angel gave them before that: do not be afraid. Go. Tell. He is going ahead of you.

The good news is not buried. It has never stayed buried. It is alive and loose and moving in the world, and it will not be stopped by Rome, or empire, or locked doors, or our own fear, or any of the other thousand things that try to roll a stone in front of it.

Go find where it is already going. And run to meet it.

The Good News Is truly alive in our world!

Jesus is risen.

Amen.

Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson

Sermon based on Luke 2:1-20

Good News, Right Here

There is something almost dangerous about how familiar this story is.

Luke chapter two shows up every year like a well-worn road. We know the turns. We know where the hills rise and fall. We know when the angels appear and when the shepherds enter the frame. We know when the music swells. And because we know it so well, we are tempted to let it pass over us the way background noise does—comforting, warm, but not disruptive.

Which is strange, when you really think about it.

Because Luke didn’t write this story to be safe.

Luke didn’t write this story to help us feel cozy for an hour and then go back to life unchanged.

Luke wrote this story for a community living under pressure. A community surrounded by empire. A community trying to figure out what it meant to say “Jesus is Lord” in a world where that phrase already belonged to someone else.

So maybe Christmas Eve is not about finding something new in this story.

Maybe it’s about recovering what we’ve learned to ignore.

---

A World Run by Caesars

Luke opens this story in a way that feels almost clinical.

“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.”

That line is doing more work than we usually allow it to do.

Caesar Augustus wasn’t just a ruler. He was a brand. His image filled cities. His name was stamped onto coins. His reign was celebrated as good news. Roman propaganda claimed that Augustus brought peace to the world. Order. Stability. Prosperity.

The Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, was held up as the great achievement of the empire.

But peace, as Rome practiced it, came at a cost.

Peace meant conquest.
Peace meant taxation.
Peace meant bodies crushed beneath efficiency.
Peace meant knowing your place.

The census wasn’t a neutral administrative task. It was how empire kept track of its people. How it extracted wealth. How it reminded everyone who was in charge.

And Luke wants us to notice that the story of Jesus begins right there—in the machinery of empire.

A pregnant woman and her fiancé don’t set out on a journey because it’s spiritually meaningful. They go because they are told to go. Because the empire has decided their bodies, their labor, their future matter only insofar as they can be counted and taxed.

Mary and Joseph are not heroic in this moment. They are vulnerable.

And that matters.

Because Luke refuses to tell the story of Jesus without telling the truth about the world Jesus is born into.

---

God at Work in the Middle of It

And yet… quietly, almost imperceptibly, Luke lets us know that something else is happening.

While Augustus issues decrees, God is keeping promises.

While empire rearranges lives, God is placing a child exactly where the story of Israel has been pointing all along.

Bethlehem is not a random dot on a map. It is the city of David. The place where God once chose a shepherd boy while a king still sat on the throne.

Luke isn’t saying the empire is unaware of what’s happening.

Luke is saying the empire doesn’t get the final word.

There is a deep, steady confidence in this story. No panic. No scrambling. No sense that God is reacting to Rome.

God is working through it.

The census that disrupts Mary and Joseph’s life also situates this child exactly where the promises say he belongs. The mechanisms of power unknowingly participate in something they cannot control.

And Luke lets that tension sit there.

God does not overthrow the empire that night.
God does not expose Augustus.
God does not interrupt the census.

God enters quietly, vulnerably, patiently.

Which may be one of the hardest things about this story.

---

The Birth Without Urgency

We have learned to tell this story with a sense of frantic urgency.

Mary rides a donkey.
Joseph pounds on doors.
An innkeeper shakes his head.
Everything feels rushed and desperate.

But Luke doesn’t tell it that way.

“While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child.”

That phrase suggests something settled, not panicked. They are already there. Already among people. Already within a household.

The issue is not rejection. It’s space.

The guest room is full.

So the birth happens where births often happened, in the family’s shared living space. Near warmth. Near watchful eyes. Near people who knew how to care for a newborn.

The manger is not a symbol of neglect.
It is a symbol of provision.

A feeding trough repurposed into a cradle.
A practical solution.
A sign that there was enough, even if it wasn’t fancy.

Jesus is born the way most peasant children were born. Surrounded by the ordinary materials of daily life. Wrapped, protected, watched over.

And there is dignity in that.

Luke does not romanticize poverty, but he refuses to treat it as shameful.

There is no apology in this story.

---

Who Gets the News First

If Luke wanted to impress us, he could have sent the angels to the palace.

If Luke wanted to make the story feel respectable, he could have chosen religious leaders or wealthy patrons.

Instead, the sky breaks open over a pasture.

Shepherds are working the night shift. Watching animals. Doing what needs to be done so life keeps moving.

They are not described as immoral or suspect in this story. They are simply people doing their work.

And they are trusted.

Trusted to receive the message.
Trusted to respond.
Trusted to tell the truth about what they see.

Which matters, because Luke is careful with who gets to be a witness.

The shepherds are given a sign—not something mystical or grand, but something unmistakably ordinary. A baby. Wrapped. Lying in a feeding trough.

They are sent to look for meaning where meaning rarely announces itself.

And they find it.

---

Good News in a Noisy World

The angel’s message begins with words we’ve heard so often they risk becoming background music:

“I bring you good news of great joy for all people.”

In Luke’s world, that phrase already belonged to Caesar.

Inscriptions from Augustus’s reign declared that his birth marked the beginning of good news for the world.

Luke knows that.

And Luke dares to say that good news has arrived again, but it doesn’t look like Rome.

This good news does not demand allegiance through fear.
It does not promise peace through dominance.
It does not rely on spectacle.

It shows up quietly.
It shows up vulnerably.
It shows up close enough to touch.

And that matters in a world drowning in information.

Luke is not interested in news that cannot be used.
He repeats the word “today” throughout the Gospel because faith is not abstract.

“Today this scripture is fulfilled.”
“Today salvation has come.”
“Today you will be with me.”

Good news matters because it speaks into the present tense.

Not someday.
Not eventually.
Not after everything is fixed.

Today.

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News You Can Trust

The shepherds don’t receive a roadmap. They receive one reliable detail.

A feeding trough.

And they keep looking until they find it.

In a world saturated with noise, Luke reminds us that good news must be trustworthy.

It must hold up under scrutiny.
It must guide people somewhere real.
It must not collapse when followed.

The shepherds stake their night on this message.

And it delivers.

Which raises a question for the church.

If people followed our news, where would it lead them?

Would it take them toward truth?
Toward compassion?
Toward reconciliation?
Toward life?

Or would it leave them lost, disillusioned, exhausted?

Luke seems to think that matters.

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News Worth Telling Again

When the shepherds see the child, they do what people do when something genuinely good happens.

They tell someone.

And the story ripples outward.

Some are amazed.
Mary holds it quietly, turning it over in her heart.
The shepherds go back to their work changed.

The story does not end with applause.
It ends with movement.

Which may be the most honest ending of all.

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Looking for What’s Missing

Luke’s story is full of intentional absences.

No innkeeper.
No barn.
No animals.
No frantic search.
No magi.
No royal entourage.

Luke invites us to notice what isn’t there.

And maybe to ask the harder question: who isn’t here?

Who is missing from our celebrations?
Who doesn’t feel welcome in the spaces where we proclaim good news?
Who is absent from our tables, our churches, our concern?

Because if the angels are right, if this really is good news for all people, then absence matters.

Luke’s story keeps pointing us toward the edges.
Toward the fields.
Toward the margins.
Toward people who rarely expect to be addressed directly.

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The Peace That Grows Slowly

The angels sing about peace on earth.

And the world does not immediately change.

Caesar remains in power.
The census continues.
Rome keeps building its roads and monuments.

Luke is not naïve.

Peace does not arrive fully formed.
It grows.
It works quietly.
It shows up wherever fear loosens its grip.

Peace looks like dignity restored.
Like power reimagined.
Like love practiced in places that don’t attract attention.

The child in the manger will grow into a teacher who eats with the wrong people, touches the untouchable, forgives what cannot be earned, and refuses to rule the way rulers usually do.

The song the angels sing is not a denial of reality. It is a promise about where reality is headed.

---

What This Means Tonight

Christmas Eve does not ask us to escape the world.

It asks us to see it differently.

It asks us to believe that God is present even when systems feel overwhelming.
That provision exists even when space feels tight.
That good news still arrives quietly, reliably, and close to the ground.

It asks us to listen carefully.
To tell the truth.
To look for meaning where we’ve been trained not to expect it.

And maybe, just maybe, to trust that peace begins smaller than we’d like, but deeper than we imagine.

So tonight, we stand with shepherds.
With tired parents.
With a baby who changes everything without forcing anything.

And we listen again.

Not because the story is new.

But because the world still needs it.

And so do we. Amen.

Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson

Sermon Based on Matthew 1:18-25

Most of the stories we tell at Christmas are designed to be gentle.

Soft lighting. Familiar lines. A predictable story arc that ends with a baby, a song, and a sense that everything is going to be okay. We like our Christmas narratives to reassure us, to settle us, to confirm that God shows up in ways that feel safe and sentimental.

The Gospel of Matthew does not cooperate with that impulse.

Matthew opens Christmas with tension. With law and consequence. With a man staring down the collapse of the future he thought he had secured. Before there is wonder, there is risk. Before there is joy, there is a decision that could cost someone their standing, their reputation, their sense of what righteousness even means.

Matthew’s birth story doesn’t begin in a stable. It begins in a crisis.

Which may be exactly why this story belongs to a congregation like ours, gathered not as holiday visitors but as people committed to walking together through the long, ordinary, complicated life of faith. Matthew tells this story not to create nostalgia, but to shape disciples—people who will have to decide what faithfulness looks like when God moves in ways we did not anticipate.

So before angels sing and names are given, Matthew invites us to sit with a question that still feels uncomfortably current

What do you do when doing the “right thing” no longer seems as clear as it once did—and God seems to be asking something else entirely?

That question isn’t answered in theory. It’s answered in the life of a man named Joseph.

Joseph’s Christmas

Matthew’s Christmas story belongs to Joseph. Which already makes it strange.

Joseph usually stands off to the side in our telling of the story. Necessary, but quiet. A background character. But, in Matthew, he’s the main lens. This is what Christmas looks like from the vantage point of a man who thought he knew how his life was going to go.

Joseph is engaged to Mary. And engagement in that culture wasn’t casual. It was legally binding. The first stage of marriage. Breaking it required divorce.

And before they live together, before the ceremony, before the future unfolds the way it’s supposed to, Mary is found to be pregnant.

Matthew tells us plainly: Joseph doesn’t know it’s by the Holy Spirit.

All he knows is that something has gone terribly wrong.

The law gives him options. Public accusation. Shame. Severe punishment. But Matthew tells us Joseph is righteous. And righteousness, at least at first, looks like mercy.

So he decides to dismiss her quietly.

That phrase matters.

Joseph is trying to do the right thing without destroying another person. He’s trying to hold justice and compassion together. He’s trying to obey the law while minimizing harm. He’s trying to walk away with integrity intact.

And then God interrupts him.

An angel comes to Joseph in a dream. And the angel says, in essence:
Your understanding is incomplete. This situation is stranger, deeper, and holier than you know.

“Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. What is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”

Which means Joseph now has a choice.

He can cling to the righteousness he understands…
or step into a righteousness that will cost him reputation, certainty, and control.

And Joseph does something remarkable.

He obeys.

No argument. No recorded words. No bargaining with God.
He wakes up—and he does exactly what he’s told.

Righteousness Reimagined

This is the first time Matthew uses the word righteousness in his Gospel. And it won’t be the last.

From here forward, righteousness will be redefined again and again—not as rigid rule-keeping, but as responsive faithfulness to what God is doing now, even when it disrupts what we thought God would do.

Joseph thought righteousness meant ending the relationship quietly.
God reveals that righteousness now means staying.

Joseph thought righteousness meant minimizing damage.
God reveals that righteousness now means absorbing it.

Joseph becomes the first person in Matthew’s Gospel to learn that God’s mercy often moves faster than our categories of justice.

And that’s uncomfortable.

Because Joseph risks becoming the very thing the law was designed to prevent: a man complicit in scandal. A man whose story doesn’t add up. A man whose obedience looks like failure from the outside.

Matthew is already teaching us something essential about discipleship:
Following God may require us to be misunderstood.

Adoption and Belonging

The angel gives Joseph one concrete instruction:
“You are to name him Jesus.”

In that culture, naming wasn’t simply symbolic, it was legal. It was adoption. It was lineage. It was identity.

By naming the child, Joseph claims him.

This is how Matthew solves the theological puzzle: How can Jesus be Son of God and Son of David? Through adoption.

Joseph isn’t Jesus’ biological father. But he is his real father. He gives Jesus a name, a place in the family, a place in the story. Through Joseph, Jesus is woven into the line of David—not by blood, but by faithfulness.

Which is fitting.

Because Matthew will go on to show us a Messiah who gathers people not by purity or pedigree, but by grace. Blind beggars. Foreign women. Broken families. Sinners and saints stitched together into something new.

The new creation doesn’t begin with perfect origins.
It begins with chosen belonging.

What’s in a Name?

The angel says, “You are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

Jesus—Yeshua—“The Lord saves.”

This wasn’t a rare name. Parents gave it to their children as a prayer. As a hope. As a protest against empire and exile and loss.

But Matthew sharpens the meaning: from their sins.

He’s speaking from Israel’s own story—where sin isn’t just individual failure, but communal brokenness. Systems bent out of shape. Leaders who exploit. People who forget who they are.

To be saved from sin is to be restored to right relationship—with God, with neighbor, with creation.

Which is why Matthew immediately adds another name.

“Look! A virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel.”

God with us.

Not God above us.
Not God waiting at the end of history.
God with us—inside the mess, the ambiguity, the fear, the unfinished plans.

Matthew borrows this line from Isaiah as a lens through which to see.

In Isaiah’s day, the nation was facing invasion. Anxiety was thick. Political alliances were crumbling. And the prophet said: A child will be born. God is still with you.

That child could be a sign of deliverance, or judgment, depending on how the people responded.

Matthew is doing the same thing here.

Jesus’ presence forces a choice. God’s nearness is never neutral. Emmanuel comforts—but Emmanuel also disrupts.

God With Us—Whether We’re Ready or Not

We tend to use “God with us” as a comfort phrase. And it is that.

But in Matthew, it’s also a claim about transformation.

God with us means the old age is passing.
God with us means the world is being remade.
God with us means things won’t stay the same.

The Spirit who hovered over the waters in Genesis now stirs life in Mary’s womb. This is creation language again. God is doing something new—not by escaping the world, but by entering it more deeply than ever.

And notice where God chooses to enter.

Not a palace.
Not a temple.
A household crisis.
A marriage on the brink.
A decision that could go either way.

The incarnation happens in the ordinary terrain of human life.

Which means we don’t have to look for God only in dramatic moments. Sometimes God shows up in decisions we’d rather not have to make. In conversations we hoped to avoid. In responsibilities we didn’t choose.

Joseph didn’t ask for this calling.
Mary didn’t campaign for this role.
And yet—this is where God’s new creation begins.

A Community Shaped by the Spirit

Matthew also wants us to notice the Spirit.

The same Spirit who animates Jesus’ birth will animate Jesus’ baptism.
The same Spirit who leads Jesus into the wilderness will sustain the disciples when they face resistance.
The same Spirit at work here will later be promised to the church.

Which means this story isn’t just about what happened then.
It’s about how God continues to work now.

The Spirit has a habit of showing up in places we wouldn’t expect.
In people we underestimate. In movements that don’t look impressive at first glance.

If God can begin the renewal of creation in an unmarried peasant woman and a confused carpenter, then perhaps God can work through communities like ours—imperfect, learning, often unsure.

The Courage to Stay

Joseph could have walked away.

No one would have blamed him.
The law allowed it.
Common sense supported it.
Self-preservation demanded it.

But Joseph stays.

He stays with Mary.
He stays with the child.
He stays with a story that doesn’t make him look good.

That might be the most important word for a church like ours in this season. Stay.

Stay present when things get complicated.
Stay faithful when obedience costs more than expected.
Stay open when God disrupts our plans.

Advent is not just about waiting—it’s about readiness. And readiness doesn’t necessarily mean having answers. It means being willing to act when God speaks, even if we don’t fully understand what’s unfolding.

Joseph didn’t get a roadmap. He got a next step. And he took it.

Creation Continues

Matthew’s Gospel begins with a holy creation, and it ends with a promise.

Jesus will tell his disciples, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Emmanuel at the beginning.
Emmanuel at the end.

God with us in birth. God with us in death. God with us in resurrection.
God with us in the long, ordinary work of discipleship.

Which means Christmas isn’t just something we remember. It’s something we live into.

The new creation has already begun. The Spirit is already at work. God is already with us.

The question Advent leaves us with is the same one Joseph faced:

When God moves in ways we didn’t expect, will we quietly step away…
or will we stay, name the child, and trust that God is doing something new right in the middle of our lives?

Amen.

Sermon By: Rev. Dave Wasson

Sermon based on Matthew 3:1-12

Like I mentioned last week, there’s a strange tension the Church deals with every December. On the one hand, the world is humming with joy: houses glowing, Christmas playlists running, kids counting down the days, and grocery carts full of sugar and butter like we’re all collectively training for the Great American Bake-Off.

On the other hand, the gospel lectionary hands us John the Baptist.
And John… does not match the décor.

There are no warm fireside vibes in camel hair and a leather belt. There’s no soft glow around locusts and wild honey. John steps onto the Advent stage with all the social subtlety of a brick. He looks like someone who hasn’t been inside a building in a decade and talks like someone who isn’t auditioning for “most inspirational quote” on Instagram.

And his first public words?
“Change your hearts and lives.” (or, in other translations he simply says, “Repent!”)
That’s the welcome mat.

His second line?
“You children of snakes!”
Which, to be fair, is not a phrase I’d recommend weaving into your Christmas cards.

Yet here he is, our Advent companion, shouting from the Judean wilderness, calling us to turn around, rethink everything, examine our lives. John doesn’t care if this feels festive. He cares if it feels honest.

And if Advent is really about preparing room for Christ… in our world, in our homes, in the quiet, unexamined corners of our own lives, then maybe John is exactly the person we need. Not because he’s warm and approachable, but because he names what we usually try to politely avoid.

John as Elijah: The Man Who Signals a Turning Point

Matthew goes out of his way, borrowing lines from Old Testament prophets… Isaiah, Malachi, Exodus, and echoing 2 Kings, to tell us that John isn’t just a quirky wilderness preacher. He’s Elijah 2.0. And that matters.

In ancient Israel, the prophet Elijah wasn’t remembered for being gentle. Elijah was the guy who walked straight into the king’s house and said, “You have forgotten God, and this is not going to end well.” He confronted power. He exposed injustice. He reminded Israel of who they were supposed to be when they’d drifted too far into who they preferred to be.

John shows up wearing Elijah’s uniform because Matthew wants us to understand the stakes.
This isn’t business as usual.
This isn’t seasonal sentiment.
This is a turning point.

When John appears, Matthew signals to the reader: “We’ve entered the moment the prophets warned us about. This is the day of the Lord. God is coming.”

And if God is coming, if the world is about to turn, then something in us needs to turn too.

Repentance Isn’t About Shame—It’s About Alignment

The word “repent” often gets tangled up in our heads. We picture someone yelling it on a street corner surrounded by cardboard signs predicting doom. But biblically, repentance, metanoia, is far less punitive and far more hopeful.

To repent is to turn.
To change direction.
To recognize when we’ve been walking one way and choose—intentionally, courageously—to walk another.

It’s not about beating ourselves up for the things we’ve done wrong.
It’s about waking up to the life God is calling us toward.

Repentance is not God wagging a finger. It’s God holding a door open.

John is inviting people to break away from the assumptions, habits, and cultural narratives that shape life in what scripture calls “the old age”—a world built around fear, scarcity, violence, exploitation, and competing allegiances. And he invites them to step into something better: the values of God’s realm—justice, mercy, generosity, peace, courage, dignity, wholeness.

John’s message is dramatic, yes. But beneath the fire and fury is a deep hope:
“The world does not have to stay as it is.”
“You do not have to stay as you are.”

Repentance is the doorway into transformation.

The Wilderness as Classroom

A funny thing happens when John starts preaching: people leave the city to go hear him. They walk out of Jerusalem, the religious capital, the place where everything sacred is supposed to happen, and they meet God in the wilderness instead.

The wilderness is where Israel first learned how to trust God.
It’s where the clutter and noise of civilization fall away.
It’s where there’s nothing left to rely on except God’s presence and provision.

John doesn’t preach in the shadow of the Temple.
He preaches where they can hear again.

It’s striking that Matthew tells us even the religious leaders, the Pharisees and Sadducees, wander out to see him. They’re curious. Maybe threatened. Maybe assessing whether this wilderness prophet is a problem to be solved or a movement to be taken over.

But John is not impressed.
“Don’t even start with me,” he says (I’m paraphrasing slightly).
“You children of snakes.”

This isn’t polite disagreement. This is confrontation.

And he isn’t calling them children of snakes because they’re Jewish, or because they’re religious, or because they’re leaders. He calls them that because they claim to speak for God, but aren’t living it.

Their faith has slipped into entitlement, “We have Abraham as our ancestor.”
Their identity has drifted into autopilot, “We’re the good ones. We’re the faithful ones.”
Their fruit, their actions, don’t match the trust they profess.

John’s point lands hard:
“Don’t tell me your heritage. Show me your life.”

It’s not about spiritual pedigree but spiritual practice. The kingdom isn’t inherited; it’s lived.

“The Ax Is Already at the Root”

John’s imagery gets even sharper:

“The ax is already lying at the root of the trees.”
Meaning: This is urgent. This matters right now.

John sees people, leaders especially, who are spiritually thriving in name only. They have leaves, but no fruit. And John, still channeling Elijah, says: “That’s not going to cut it anymore.”

We know this moment too well. We know what it’s like to maintain the appearance of health while something deep inside us is withering. We know what it feels like to be busy instead of whole, admired instead of honest, functional instead of flourishing.

John’s imagery is not about punishment, it’s about honesty.

An unfruitful tree doesn’t need shame; it needs intervention. It needs pruning. It needs turning. It needs to be reclaimed by the God who wants life for it.

And sometimes, the Advent invitation is simply this:
Are you willing to tell the truth about where you’ve stopped growing?
Are you willing to let God cut away what no longer gives life?

Baptism: A New Beginning

People flock to John because his message takes hold of them, there’s something true about his words that resonate in their souls.

So, they wade into the Jordan River, the same river their ancestors crossed when they entered the Promised Land for the first time, and they confess. They drop their pride. They name what’s broken. They let the cold water rush over them as a sign that they’re stepping into a different future.

John’s baptism is not Christian baptism. It’s not the sacrament we practice.
Instead, it’s a ritual of preparation, a turning of the soil, a clearing of the ground, so that something new can take root.

What John is doing is announcing a new Exodus. A fresh start for Israel. A clean slate for anyone willing to step into the river.

And then he says something stunning:

“I baptize with water those of you who have changed your hearts and lives. The one who is coming after me is stronger than I am. I’m not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

John is saying: “I can call you to change. But Jesus can actually change you.”

The Holy Spirit is the power of the new age breaking in.
Fire is the imagery of refining, burning away what’s false, illuminating what’s true, purifying what’s worth keeping.

The Hardest People to Change Are the Most Comfortable

One of the commentaries I read this week put it bluntly: repentance gets harder the more invested you are in the way things currently work.

If your life fits the world as it is, why change?
If the system benefits you, why question it?
If the status quo treats you well, why imagine another way?

That’s why John’s sharpest critique is aimed at the Pharisees and Sadducees—not because they’re villains, but because they are the people most likely to mistake comfort for faithfulness.

Most of us today aren’t too different.

Advent invites us to ask:
Where have we become too comfortable?
What assumptions do we make without questioning?
What narratives do we carry… about ourselves, about our neighbors, about the world, that need to be surrendered so something new can flourish?

Repentance isn’t a one-time experience. It’s a posture of readiness. It’s recognizing that God may break into our settled lives and say, “It’s time to learn a new way now.”

Preparing the Way Today

Some Advent sermons lean heavy into judgment. Others lean exclusively into hope. John forces us to hold both.

The message is hopeful because God is coming.
The message is urgent because we must be ready.

But let me name something we often miss: John is not only preparing people to receive Jesus. He is training us to prepare the way ourselves.

John is a model for the church.

We are called to be wilderness voices… clearing paths, naming truth, helping others navigate a landscape cluttered with competing narratives and exhausted souls.

Preparing the way looks like:

• Turning toward truth, even when the lie would be easier.
• Letting go of habits that numb instead of heal.
• Asking harder questions about our assumptions.
• Challenging the internal stories that keep us stuck.
• Opening our lives to the Spirit who still refines, still renews, still creates.
• Choosing practices that align us with the kingdom—not because we have to, but because we’re being drawn toward something better.

John reminds us that the Christian life isn’t inherited.
It’s lived.
It’s shaped.
It’s practiced.

Where the Sermon Meets Real Life

Maybe part of our Advent work is identifying the places where we feel the tension between who we are and who we are becoming.

Maybe for someone here it’s recognizing that anger has been steering the ship too long.
Maybe for someone else it’s admitting that fear is making too many decisions.
Maybe it’s a relationship that needs honesty.
Maybe it’s a habit that needs naming.
Maybe it’s a pattern that needs breaking.

Repentance is not what God demands before loving us.
Repentance is what frees us to receive the love that’s already pouring toward us.

John is not shouting to shame us. He is shouting because he sees what’s at stake. He knows what’s possible when people turn toward God with open hands and honest hearts.

The Promise at the Heart of All This

The loudest words in this passage are “change your hearts and lives!”
But the most important word may be “near.”

As in, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Meaning: God is already moving toward you.
God is already at work.
God is already breaking open a new future.
God is already stirring the waters.
God’s new world is already pressing into this one.

And the question John asks, thousands of years later, is still the right one:

Does your life make room for it?
Do your habits make room for it?
Do your assumptions, your attachments, your priorities make room for it?

Advent isn’t just about what happened in Bethlehem.
It’s about what’s happening now.
It’s about the God who still arrives, unexpected, unpolished, but unmistakably present, calling us to turn, to wake up, to prepare the way.

The world doesn’t get better by accident.
And neither do we.

But Christ is coming.
And that is reason for hope.

So maybe the question for this week is not:
“Do I feel joyful enough for the season?”
But instead:
“What fruit is growing on the tree of my life?”
“What needs to be pruned?”
“What needs to be nurtured?”
“What new thing might God be planting in me right now?”

John stands in the wilderness, announcing that a better world is breaking in.
And Advent invites us to step toward it…
honestly, humbly, courageously.
Because the same Spirit that rested on Jesus rests on us,
and the same fire that refines can burn in us,
and the same kingdom that drew near in his day draws near again today.

May we have the courage to turn.
May we have the wisdom to bear fruit.
And may we have the hope to believe that God is not done with us yet.

Amen.

Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson