title: The Transfiguration

themes: identity-of-jesus following-jesus idolatry mountaintop-and-valley readiness-watchfulness

scripture: Matthew 17:1-9

text:
**Scripture:** Matthew 17:1-9
**Series:** 2023

> A Transfiguration Sunday sermon (Matthew 17:1-9) on the eve of Lent that presses the question 'Who is Jesus?' rather than 'What does Jesus do for me?' The Transfiguration reveals Christ as fully God and fully human; without that, salvation, the kingdom, and mercy are empty. Moses and Elijah appear so they too may see and worship the God-man. Peter wants to stay on the mountain, but Jesus leads them down into the valley toward the cross, the same identity holding from transfiguration to resurrection. The deepest Christian question is not what you believe but who you follow, warning against idolatry and false paths that climb a mountain but never lead back down. God still gives signs of presence, less brilliant but real; we must watch for a sign and listen for a voice. Closes with Sufjan Stevens's song 'The Transfiguration.'

**Illustrations:** sufjan-stevens-transfiguration, jesus-quid-pro-quo, augustine-holy-desire, combed-wool-whiteness, emmaus-midwinter-moment

---

# February 19, 2023
## The Transfiguration

Six days later Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and brought them to the top of a very high mountain. He was transformed in front of them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as light. Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Jesus. Peter reacted to all of this by saying to Jesus, “Lord, it’s good that we’re here. If you want, I’ll make three shrines: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, look, a bright cloud overshadowed them. A voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son whom I dearly love. I am very pleased with him. Listen to him!” Hearing this, the disciples fell on their faces, filled with awe. But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Don’t tell anybody about the vision until the Human One is raised from the dead.” - Matthew 17:1-19

Who is Jesus? This is always the question that comes to me when I read the story of the Transfiguration. This moment in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, was not very important to me or my faith for a long time. It really wasn't until the Sufjan Stevens song, the Transfiguration, came out, that I started thinking about this moment in the life of Jesus. The early church spent a lot of time on the Transfiguration. Protestants, not as much. Not a huge emphasis. What is lost when we don't pay attention to the transfiguration is this question of who was Jesus?
Oftentimes, Jesus is instrumentalized into what he does for me. What does Jesus do for me?
If you do this, Jesus will do that and you're golden. Pray this way, you’ve got a friend in Jesus. Do these things, Jesus will do these other things for you.

The word made flesh does not offer us a quid pro quo. We see this with the transfiguration.

Lent starts this week. The last thing Jesus does before he turns his face to Jerusalem is to take some disciples up to the mountain to pray. Then the identity of Christ is revealed to them. This ‘who’ of Christ. That he is God and human. Fully, not partially.
Now, there have been hints at this earlier, in the gospels, but the transfiguration lays it out in the open and this matters so deeply for our faith. If God did not become man in Jesus Christ, then none of it really matters. We can't be saved. The kingdom of heaven isn't here. Mercy is a waste of time. Let’s eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.

Jesus takes his disciples and goes up to a mountain and prays. During that time, a great brilliance shines over him. In Greek, it is a whiteness of a woolen cloth that has been combed thousands of times. A great brilliance.
And there's a vision of Moses and Elijah present, as well. Why were they there? It seems kind of excessive. We need to linger on this moment.
We have this great revealing of God and Jesus Christ fully, not just the humble carpenter's son, but a brilliant vision of the presence of God, and then Moses and Elijah are there also.
I think Moses and Elijah are there not for the sake of Peter and John, but for their own sake. So that they too can see Jesus Christ, that this prophet is the God man. Maybe they also had to see him to believe him. So they, too, could worship him.

Peter then wants to build a house and stay up there. This is the preeminent mountaintop experience. It is transformational. They have encountered the living God and they want to stay in that moment. It is the walk to Emmaus moment. It is the midwinter moment.
It is conversion at it's fullest. They want to stay there. Peter wants to stay there, but Jesus rebukes him. They have to go down the mountain. They have to go into the valley of sorrow that leads to the cross. There's a great distance between transfiguration and resurrection, but the identity of Jesus is the same. Christ is God for us.
Do we live any differently knowing who Jesus really is,? That God in God's fullness became flesh in Jesus Christ. Does that change anything?

Peter, the eager disciple wanted to build a house and yet, soon enough, he was denying Jesus three times. Does it change anything?
The deepest question of the Christian faith is not what you believe, but who do you follow? Make sure you're following the right person. This is where the great challenge of idolatry comes in. There's lots of people who say they can save you. How do you know you're following the right one? There's lots of religions that say they can save you or say there is no salvation or say anything like that.
There's lots of people who say God is dead. Who say follow yourself. Some these paths lead up what feels like a mountain, but they do not lead back down. Christ reveals himself, offers a spiritual experience of overflowing praise, but then shows us a path to follow of humility, sacrifice, and service.

“The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire. You do not yet see what you long for, but the very act of desiring prepares you, so that when he comes you may see and be utterly satisfied.” He comes like a brilliant, transformative light. He comes like the poor and broken of the earth. We must be ready for both visions.

The disciples followed Jesus up the mountain. They saw a great sight and they heard a great sound.
The fact that Peter goes on to deny Jesus does not negate his experience of God. There, they have this experience that is overflowing, that cannot be contained. They see who they are following. They see God with us.

Jesus tells them not to share until after resurrection, which is how it comes to us. It shows us how Christ is revealed by a sign and by a voice. This sign, the lamb of God, offers us peace by showing us that God is here for us. It offers us encouragement as we go back down the mountain.

God shows us signs in our life of God’s presence. They may not be as brilliantly bright as the transfiguration, but they are there. In order to see them, we have to look for them. God is here for you. You are good enough. There is a valley still to cross, but God is here for you.

I'm gonna close with the song by Sufjan Stevens about the transfiguration. It's called the transfiguration. It tells the story directly and then lets us participate in that chorus. We may not be on a mountain anymore.
But we need to be ready to look for a sign. We need to be ready to listen for a voice.

>When he took the three disciples
To the mountainside to pray,
His countenance was modified, his clothing was aflame.
Two men appeared: Moses and Elijah came;
They were at his side.
The prophecy, the legislation spoke of whenever he would die.

>Then there came a word
Of what he should accomplish on the day.
Then Peter spoke, to make of them a tabernacle place.
A cloud appeared in glory as an accolade.
They fell on the ground.
A voice arrived, the voice of God,
The face of God, covered in a cloud.

>What he said to them,
The voice of God: the most beloved son.
Consider what he says to you, consider what's to come.
The prophecy was put to death,
Was put to death, and so will the Son.
And keep your word, disguise the vision 'till the time has come.

>Lost in the cloud, a voice. Have no fear! We draw near!
Lost in the cloud, a sign. Son of man! Turn your ear.
Lost in the cloud, a voice. Lamb of God! We draw near!
Lost in the cloud, a sign. Son of man! Son of God!


site: sermons

title: Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done, on Earth as It Is in Heaven

author: Wilson Pruitt

church: bee-creek-umc

themes: lords-prayer kingdom-of-god exile political-division transformation sermon-on-the-mount

text:
**Scripture:** Matthew 6:10; Romans 13:1-2; Matthew 5:3; Matthew 5:5
**Series:** 2023

> A Lenten sermon, part of a series praying through the Lord's Prayer, focused on 'thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.' Wilson argues that to pray for God's kingdom is an inescapably political act, surveying how America's kingless founders read Scripture (Romans 13, the flawed Old Testament kings, Moses as republican lawgiver). Using Archimedes' bathtub discovery as the governing metaphor, he claims the coming kingdom of heaven 'displaces' worldly kingdoms, institutions, and our own desires without erasing our will. The Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount show the concrete shape of that kingdom and how far we are from it. He closes by calling the congregation to let Lent displace their preconceptions, even their politics, and to be transformed to love, sacrifice, and give as Jesus does.

**Illustrations:** no-king-since-1783, hebraic-republicanism-founders, colonies-romans-13-revolution, archimedes-eureka-displacement

---

# March 5
## thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

We haven't had a king in this country since 1783. It has been a longtime since it has technically been a kingdom. We've used words like commonwealth, democracy, republic. Words that harken back to classical times.
Some of the great theorists who influenced the founding fathers of this country were not only great scholars of the classics of the Greek and Roman world, but also of the Hebrew Bible. The printing press and reformation allowed many more scholars to study Hebrew. They studied deeply the formation and governmental structure of the ancient Hebrew kingdoms and they called Israel under Joshua and Moses and republic. This took place, especially in the time of the English Civil War in the 17th century, the formative moment for that country and for ours. The Hebrew language revival made republican exclusivism possible by introducing into Protestant Europe the claim that monarchy could be a sin. King James I knew his Hebrew and Greek and the sections of the King James Bible he was most concerned with were 1 & 2 Kings and 1 & 2 Chronicles, or descriptions of the Pharaoh as a tyrant. These were lively debates, deeply influential on the founders of this country.

Today, we live in this country without a king. We also say, thy kingdom come, thy will be done.
In a world without the ancient monarchy, how should we understand Christ's kingdom?

## Series Intro
My friends, for this season of Lent, we are going to be slowly reading and praying through the Lord’s Prayer. These familiar (or unfamiliar words) are a radical call to seek God’s will in this world. And to understand God’s vision for ourselves and those around us. Today, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Anytime you mention kingdom, you mention politics. I don't think a lot of Christians like to talk about politics. It's pretty divisive. I mean, some churches are very into it, but they want to promote their own secular view of politics and use the church as a marketing mechanism. For that, Christ becomes a tool to further your worldly ambitions.
The history of the church has seen that many times. Modern people who are trying to promote values are no different. But to speak of a kingdom is to speak of politics. Politics is how people are organized. And in the 1760s and 1770s, people in the 13 colonies were really struggling with how they felt the best way to organize themselves would be.
There was a budgetary crisis in England. Parliament realized that the colonies were not being taxed as much as the people in England. So Parliament increased taxes. What happens every time taxes increase? People get mad. Nobody likes it. And so we have the story of many folks trying to be faithful to what they understand is true and good and they supported the king, and others tried to be faithful and true and they denounced the king.
And denouncing the king is a pretty radical thing. They had to deal with a lot of biblical arguments against revolution, especially Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 13, where it says:

 >Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

Some have said the founding fathers were disobedient to the Bible because they rebelled against the king. However, many preachers in the colonies found it easy to preach against the king by looking at the Old Testament. Many of them were the descendants of Puritans who had won the first part of the English civil war and then lost the second part. They had found refuge in the colonies.
There's plenty of biblical imagery about abusive tyrants and kings. It's a pretty unifying thread throughout the Old Testament. Pretty much all kings and rulers have flaws, deep flaws. I think Josiah is the only one who comes off pretty well. Even David has his great flaws. Solomon has his great flaws, Their children are nothing but flaws. There's not a lot to be said for these forms of government. When the founders looked to the Old Testament for inspiration they looked to Moses as the Law Giver and the original law as filled with Republican ideals. They saw a holy nation without a king.

And yet Jesus teaches people to pray, thy kingdom come, thy will be done in the Lord's Prayer. It's a political claim. It's not a religious one that you can hold onto and separate from the rest of your life. To pray God's will be done is a political act. I say this to be provocative because Jesus is being provocative here.

To call for the coming of God the Father's kingdom is to displace the politics of the world. This world is run on scarcity. There are limited resources and the people who possess those resources and control those resources have great power.
A good way for us to imagine the coming of the kingdom of God is to think back to the Greek mathematician, Archimedes. He was trying to measure the volume of an object. He couldn’t figure it out. And then he sat in a bathtub and watched as the water went up because his body and displaced the water.
And so in order to measure the volume of the object, he didn’t need to measure the object itself, but the volume of water that it displaced. That's when he jumped out of the bathtub and ran down the street naked, screaming, “Eureka. Eureka. I found it. I found it.” Displacement.

The coming of the kingdom of heaven displaces the worldly kingdom. The calling on the kingdom of heaven to come displaces the kingdoms that are already here. Whether or not they have a king or a governor or a president or a prime minister, they're displaced by the kingdom of heaven. They are not eternal.
There is no president in heaven. There are no senators in heaven. There are no mayors or governors or county judges. These are all positions and institutions dependent on our fallen world and the coming of the kingdom of heaven displaces them.

God's will displaces the will of the world, but it doesn't displace our will. This is the key to what is going on when we pray to God, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We ask God's will to merge and transform with our own, to displace the worldly desires of our hearts and to transform our own desires.

When was the last time that you witnessed the way you understand the world displaced? When was the last time you witnessed your worldly desires displaced by heavenly desires? That is the call of every time you pray the Lord's Prayer.
That is a radical call, an enormous call, as big a claim as anything you would make in your life. It is a call to a changed life.
Sometimes by repetition, we make this call ordinary and plain. We domesticate God's will to fit inside of our own self-conception. We domesticate God's kingdom fit inside the comfort level of the status quo.

The kingdom of God is not vague. It's concrete. We see what it looks like in the Sermon on the Mount. The Lord’s prayer takes place in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. And we see here in these words, what God's kingdom looks like in reality. We see how far away we are from it.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Do we feel like the poor in Spirit are blessed right now in our world? If they are not, we're not in God’s Kingdom.

Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.
Do we feel like the meek of being blessed right now?
Over the last 2000 years, many Christians tried to bring about the kingdom of heaven by bringing about their own kingdom and calling it Christian. This is not what Jesus is talking about.
To pray, thy kingdom come is to let go of ambitions of power and authority and offer to Jesus Christ all we have.

“Since we desire, power and autonomy—that is the essence of human pride—had Jesus exercised power first, we would have followed him only out of admiration for his power. We would have followed him, hoping primarily to gain a share of that power... are the logic of the cross is that victory goes not to the strong, but to the just, who submit to the justice, in power of God.”

To pray thy will be done is to let go of ambitions of self-righteousness and goodness apart from God. To pray on earth as it is in heaven is to pray that all of the cosmos be unified under the lordship of Jesus Christ. The Lord's prayer is a radical prayer.

My brothers and sisters, the season of lent, May you open yourself up to its power. May you seek to have your worlds displaced. May you seek to be transformed here and now. Come, Holy Spirit. Pray thy kingdom come thy will be done. It is a prayer of conversion and transformation. Pray that God be with you. Pray that the life of heaven may be the life on earth. The life on earth is not the standing period until heaven, but the life of heaven may be on earth.
May we love as Jesus loves. May we sacrifice as Jesus sacrifices. May we give as Jesus gives. May we see the destruction of the world as contrary to the will of God and work for God's justice in this place. May we not be satisfied in ourselves.

In this season of Lent, as we discern and pray as a church, may we pray God’s will be done consistently. May we be willing to look back again at our preconceptions and assumptions about what we think God is telling us to do and be open to heaven displacing our life on earth, even our politics. God is making all things new.

Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, may your kingdom come. May your will be done. May these words of yours be fresh and strange and transformative us for us this day, In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

method: authored, not translated

license_apparatus: CC BY-NC 4.0


title: Trinity Sunday

themes: trinity great-commission god-with-us letting-go-of-control us-vs-them god-is-love christology

text:
**Scripture:** Matthew 28:16-20; Luke 6:20
**Series:** 2023

> A Trinity Sunday sermon on Matthew 28:16-20 that uses a chain of analogies (mountain spring, fire, lover-beloved-love) to teach the Trinity as Father-source, Son-creek/flame, Spirit-flow/light. Wilson argues the Trinity is not marginal: without it Jesus has no power to save and is reduced to a nice moral teacher, and we are left in control of our own lives. A Triune God instead offers his whole self for, in, and with us, drawing us into the love between Father and Son. Turning to the Great Commission (commission as verb, 'sent with'), he shows the disciples are sent with two partners: each other and the Holy Spirit. Because God is Triune, we must surrender our mechanisms of sorting people into worthy/unworthy, liked/unliked; the body of Christ has no qualifiers. Letting go of control frees us to walk together into God's future.

**Illustrations:** mountain-spring-source-flow-creek, barton-springs-source, fire-spark-flame-light, warm-room-fireplace, lover-beloved-love, pesky-in-law, military-commissioning, cafeteria-sorting

---

# June 4
## Trinity Sunday

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus told them to go. When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted. Jesus came near and spoke to them, “I’ve received all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you. Look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of this present age.” Matthew 28:16-20

There are not a lot of mountain springs in Texas. They exist, but they are hard to locate. It is especially hard to locate the source. It's hard to locate the source of Barton Springs where that water comes up. We got the pool, we got the creek, but what is the precise location of the source of the water? One of my true joys of hiking in mountains is when you come across a mountain stream and you can follow it to its source. You have the source of the water, you have the flow the water, and you have the creek. These three things; they're all the same thing. If you take one away, the other two cease to exist. If you take away the flow, there isn't a source and the water disappears. If you take away the creek, the water dissipates and there is no flow. If you take away the source, there is no flow, no creek.
This is one of the ways the early church talked about the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God the Father is the source, God the Son is the creek, and God the Spirit is the flow, the connection between the Father and the Son, between the source and the creek.
The Son being the visible expression of the Father and the flow of water being what comes from the Father and the Son, or the procession. You may be more or less familiar with the concept of the Trinity. Yet it is not a marginal thing.
Without the Trinity, the Christian faith has nothing left. Without the Trinity, Christ has no power to save us. The Holy Spirit has no presence with us. The deeper we look into the Trinity, the deeper our faith can be,
As well, the Trinity can be a stumbling block for some. This three in one God, some Jews and Muslims called Christians Tritheists, saying that we believe in three gods.

I don't think this is the time to go into an intellectual deep dive into the metaphysics of the Trinity, but the message for today from the words of Jesus is that God is for us in Jesus Christ and with us, in the Holy Spirit. God the Father, the Creator, is for us, in Jesus Christ, and with us, in the Holy Spirit. All three are one God, not three parts. All three have power and unity.

We can come close to understanding through analogy. I already mentioned the analogy of water. Source, flow, and creek. All these analogies eventually break down, but they help us to align ourselves and to reflect in the direction of the truth about God. There is also an analogy of fire.

The analogy of fire is that there is the spark, the flame, and the light. Take away the light. There is no fire. Take away the spark. There is no fire. Take away the flames. There is no fire. The spark is not the flame. The flame is not the light. The light is not the spark, and yet they are all three fire. God the Father is the spark. God the Son is the flame God. The Spirit is the light by which we receive the Son and the Father. You can also make an analogy with fire and light and heat. God the Father is the fire. God the Son is the light. God the Holy Spirit is the heat. Many times, we feel the Holy Spirit as much as see it. We feel the heat of God's presence. We can feel the warmth because this is the nature of who God is.

Have you ever been cold to your bones and you step into a warm room. You move close to a fire place. You feel the warmth. Your fears dissipate. You relax. You are safe. This is the presence of God when the eyes of our mind become open to spiritual realities.

Another analogy for today has to do with love. The lover, the beloved and the love between the lover and the beloved. The lover is God the Father. The beloved is God the Son and the love between them is the Holy Spirit. The life of faith is being drawn up and included into the love between Father and the Son. This is what is offered in the Christian life.

We have all these analogies, but what does it have to do with me, pastor Wilson? It has everything to do with you. If Jesus is not God, Jesus has no power to save us. Without Trinity, Jesus has no power, he has no authority. Without Trinity, Jesus is a nice teacher. He gave some good morals. Maybe that's what you're looking for in faith. Maybe you wanna raise your family in the right way, looking for some good morals, and there's nothing more to it. You live in the right community, you think the right things, you vote for the right people, and it will all turn out alright.

We still keep God at a distance, like a pesky in-law. Maybe they come to town and buy dinner and are nice for a few days, but you need your space. A Unitarian God gives you space to be whomever you want to be. A Triune God desires to release you from sin and free you to love. Love means change. It is a change for your good, but we don’t always see change as good. If God is not Triune, sure Jesus can’t save us, but at least we are in control.

The Holy Spirit is the presence of God with us. We are included in God. The Father's love for God, the Son. You are included in the love of the creator of the universe. You don't need to stand on the sidelines of God's love. You don't need to stay in the shadows of God's love. You don't need to ignore God's love until Sunday comes along or fill out your checklist of all the things you need to do before you can feel loved and accomplished in this world.

On this day, God offers himself to you. Totally, not partially. The Holy Spirit is all God. It's not just a mode of God, it's not a part of God. It's not an agent of God. It's not an attaché of God or an ambassador of God. The Holy Spirit is all God and it's all offered for us, given to us.
The deeper we look into the Trinity, the deeper we find God's love for us. The more we avoid the Trinity, the more we're stuck with ourselves and what we like and what we want and how we wish the world would be.

All of our desires are a pale shadow next to the glory of God. We can choose to live in the shadows of self-satisfaction or humbly step forward under the light of God’s love.

The last part of the Gospel of Matthew is known as the Great Commission. We have a modern misconception of what the word commission means. We mostly hear it today with a voting commission or a transportation commission. Jesus doesn't say, I've got a great commission for you. The phrase was added later. We usually use commission as a noun, but here it is a verb. The military has it a lot closer to the Gospels than most of us. When they commission officers they use it as a verb. an officer is not appointed or passively placed. They are commissioned, they're sent with, that's what it means at its heart.
Missio, to send, Com, with, send with. In Matthew 28, Jesus doesn't just send, Jesus sends the disciples with a purpose and with a partner. The purpose is to go to all the people, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The partners are multiple. Partners are, first of all, each other. The Great Commission is a public pronouncement, not a private word to each of the disciples. You can't be a Christian alone or in isolation. You need others. Where do the others come from? This is the Trinitarian key. We humans like to sort ourselves based on preferences, convenience, amiability, relative likes and dislikes. We sort ourselves constantly. Kids are more open than grownups. They play with anybody, but kids still sort themselves. And as they get older, the sorting gets trickier. People sit at different tables in the cafeteria. Grownups are constantly sorting, “who are the people that are worthy of my time?” Well, that's a super selfish way to frame it, but I think that's a really honest one.
And at its worst, that is what church becomes. It becomes a place where we have sorted the people we like away from the people we don't like. But there's no space for Trinity there. There's no space for the great Commission. Jesus does not say baptize the people you like.”When in the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus says, blessed are the poor. Jesus doesn't say blessed are the righteous poor or the undeserving poor, but the poor. There are no qualifiers. There are no qualifiers on the body of Christ.
That second partner, after other people, is the Holy Spirit that draws the people together. And if we're going to listen to the Holy Spirit, that means we need to shut down our own mechanisms of sorting.
If we think God is Triune, we've gotta let go of that control. If we think God is not Triune, if the Holy Spirit is not God, if Jesus is not God, then sure, keep control, keep ownership over your life because Jesus doesn't even save you in that world.
But the amazing thing is that when we stop sorting, we are free. We don't need to live a life filled with the worry that we're seeing the right people at the right times. And we're not spending any time with the wrong kind of people, with the dirty people, with the impure people, with the unclean people. We can let that go because God is Triune. That is what Trinity is about. God and God's self is offering all of God's self for you and to you and with you.
Receive that presence. Let go of the desire for control and let us walk together into the future God has for you.

Let us pray,

Heavenly Father, we thank you for revealing the amazing mystery of Trinity, that you are  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You are for us, not against us. Help us in moments of confusion and doubt to lean more on you and less on ourselves. In the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


title: Who Is Jesus? The Transfiguration

themes: identity-of-jesus incarnation discipleship idolatry mountaintop-and-valley transition-to-lent

text:
**Scripture:** Luke 9:28-36; Matthew 17:1-9; Mark 9:2-8
**Series:** 2023

> A transcribed sermon on the Transfiguration preached on the threshold of Lent. The preacher centers the core question 'Who is Jesus?' arguing the event lays open Christ's identity as fully God and fully human, without which salvation, the kingdom, and mercy would be meaningless. He warns against instrumentalizing Jesus ('what does he do for me?') and frames the deepest Christian question as not what you believe but whom you follow, raising the challenge of idolatry amid rival saviors. Peter's wish to stay on the mountain, his later denial, and the descent toward the cross show that the encounter with God overflows and cannot be contained even by failure. He closes with Sufjan Stevens' song 'The Transfiguration' and the assurance that God is drawing near.

**Illustrations:** sufjan-stevens-transfiguration-song, peter-build-house-mountain, peter-denies-jesus-three-times, moses-elijah-worship

---

# February 19

Who is Jesus and what is art? These are the two questions that always come to me. When I read the story of the Transfiguration, this moment and Matthew, mark, and Luke was not very important to me and my faith for a long time. It really wasn't until the Sufian Steven song, the Transfiguration, when I looked at this moment again and again, the early trip spent a lot of time on the transfiguration.
Protestants, not as much. Not a huge emphasis when it's lost, when we don't pay attention to the transfiguration is this question of who was Jesus?
Oftentimes, Jesus is instrumentalized and to what does he do for me? What does Jesus do for me? If you do this, Jesus will do that and you're golden.
Then lint starts this week. The last thing Jesus does before turns his face to Jerusalem is take, take disciples up to the mountain to pray. Then the identity of Christ is revealed to them, this who of Christ that he is God and human.
Now, there have been hints at this earlier in the gospels, but the transfiguration that's laid out in the open and this matters so deeply
For our faith, if, if God did not become man in Jesus Christ, then none of it really matters. We can't be saved. The kingdom of heaven isn't here. Mercy is a waste of time.
Jesus takes his disciples and goes up to a mountain and prays enduring that time. A great brilliance shines over hemp, the great brilliance, and there's a vision of Moses and Elijah present as well.
Why were they there? Same kind of excessive. We need to linger on this moment. Again, we have this great revealing of God and Jesus Christ fully, not just the humble carpenter's son, but a brilliant vision of the presence of God, and then Moses and Elijah are there also.
I think Moses and Elijah are there not for the sake of Peter and John, but for their own sake so that they too can see the ethnicity of Jesus Christ, that this prophet is the God man, so they two can worship him.
Peter then wants to build a house and stay up there. This is the preeminent mountaintop experience. It is. It is transformational. They have encountered the living God and with the stay in that moment. It is the walk tous moment. It is the midwinter moment.
It is conversion and it's fullest. They want to stay there. Peter wants to stay there, but Jesus rebukes him. They have to go down the mountain. They have to go into the valley. I'm sorrow that leads to the cross. There's a great distance between transfiguration and resurrection, but the identity of Jesus is the same.
Christ is God for do we live any differently knowing who Jesus really is, that God and God's fullness became flesh in Jesus Christ. Does that change anything?
Peter, the eager disciple wanted to build a house and yes, soon enough, he was denying Jesus three times. Does it change anything?
The deepest question of, of the Christian faith is not what you believe, but who do you follow? Making sure you're following the right person. This is where the great challenge of idolatry comes in. There's lots of people who say they can save you. How do you know you're following the right one? There's lots of religions that say they can save you or say there is no salvation or say anything like that.
There's lots of people who say God is dead. Follow yourself.
Who
Do you the transfiguration. The disciples followed Jesus up the mountain who saw a great sight and they heard a great sound.
The fact that Peter goes on to deny Jesus does not negate his experience of God. There this experience that is overflowing, that cannot be contained.
I'm gonna close with the that song by Stevens. What about the transfiguration? It's called the transfiguration. It tells the story directly and then lets us participate in that chorus. We may not be on a mountain anymore.
Look, God is drawing near.


title: All Peoples and Creatures

church: covenant-umc

series: Creation

themes: image-of-god creation-care original-sin gods-unconditional-love

text:
**Scripture:** Genesis 1:24-28; John 1:15-18; Genesis 2:16-17; Genesis 9:3; Romans 8:35-39; Romans 3:23
**Series:** Creation

> A World Communion Sunday sermon in a Creation series pairing Genesis 1 and John 1. Wilson argues the image of God is not physical resemblance but a divine capacity (Augustine: memory, understanding, desire) to see, know, and love as God does—revealed fully in Christ. This capacity extends to caring for creation: dominion means stewardship, not tyranny, evidenced by the original vegetarian covenant. Using the extended metaphor of a photograph (always manipulated, always limited at its edges), he asks where the limits lie—of the image, of redemption, of God's love—and answers from Romans 8 that there is none: no point at which our sin or our 'No' is greater than God's love and Yes. Through original sin all are malformed (none are simply good people), but in Christ and baptism the image is restored.

**Illustrations:** del-rio-cave-paintings, icon-controversies, niepce-first-photograph, matthew-brady-staged-photos, photograph-aperture-edge, niles-crane-moral-luck

---

# October 1, 2023
## Genesis 1:24-28
## John 1:15-18

### All Peoples and Creatures
### World Communion Sunday

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind and the cattle of every kind and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
- Genesis 1:24-28

(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
 - John 1:15-18

Images have always been powerful to humans. Some of the first human records we have are images on the walls.
It is an astonishing thing to see. There are many places in the world you can go to see cave art. One I location like is in South Texas near Del Rio. Sentinel Canyon State Park is right on the Rio Grande. They're some beautiful cave paintings you can go see that are thousands of years old. These representations humans have made. It is astonishing.
Images have captivated people throughout history. For a long time in the church's history, the way to understand the language of image of God was an icon. An icon points us to God. Icons are painted in a flat way to remind us that they are not real. They become real by pointing our mind’s eye to God. Yet there's also been giant controversies over icons and images in the church for centuries. There was a crisis in the eighth century about icons. In the midst of this enormous transition from the ancient world to the medieval one, there was a controversy about Icons and whether they were idolatrous. In the 16th century, during the Reformation, this happened again. Churches from the Reformed tradition (like Presbyterian or Congregational) tore down icons and images of Christ as being sacrilegious. Today, some churches are full of pictures and images. Other churches could be at just a convention center because of the lack of religious decorum.

And then almost 200 years ago, humans started capturing images in a new way with photography. One of the earliest photos in existence is actually in Austin at the Harry Ransom Center. It is titled the Point de vue du gras. It was made by a French inventer named Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 in Eastern France near the community of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes. You can see it in the lobby of the Harry Ransom Center, though it is difficult to view. You have to look at it from an angle, but it's there.
Niépce’s associate, Louis Daguerre, expanded the possibilities of photography by inventing and promoting the Daguerreotype. By 1850, the world had changed and photography covered the globe.
Images from photography and film are powerful. They look like reality, but they're not reality. There's always a manipulation. Sometimes egregiously as in the case of photographers who prepare their subject matter. There was the Civil War photographer, named Matthew Brady, who had moved the bodies of the dead after the battle to a more composed location. But even if you do not touch your subject matter, photography and film are always manipulated because there's always what is not captured.
There's always what is just beyond the aperture. Everything outside of the view is gone. Or if someone turns away and you can't see their face, there's no way to capture the face is in the image again.

## Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on Creation, looking at Genesis 1 and John 1 together to understand more Christ’s presence in Creation, God’s power in creation, and the importance of creation for us today.
Today we're thinking about how humans were created in the image of God, and I want us to understand how this language of image is not straightforward forward.

We are not made in the image of God in the sense that we physically resemble God or even that we physically resemble Jesus. This is not the sense that we're going for, and we know this is true because God has no physical appearance. God has no material reality. There's no way we could resemble God materially. There are many lazy readings of this centrally important verse from Genesis that try to make humans materially similar to God, but this is a mistake.

Let us make humanity in our image.

In what image are we talking?

Augustine, the early church father, said that the image in which we are made is Triune. And the image is that we have memory, understanding, and desire. There's a lot of wonderful arguments in this direction, but I want us to hold onto this understanding of image in some way as a divine capacity. This is how we were made with a capacity to see God, to recognize God.
## John
In the passage from John, we have the gospel writer reflecting on how no one has ever seen God. It is only son himself, God, who is close to the father's heart, who has made him known.
Jesus is the one who reveals God to us. It is this capacity inside of us that is God's image. The image in which we were created is the capacity to understand, the capacity to will, the capacity to remember.
In this way, Augustine is right and we should understand who we are in this way. And it's not what we look like. It is not what we are physically capable of.
It's that we can see as God sees. We can understand that and we can remember that, but this capacity is not limited to us. It is expanded into a way of seeing other people and seeing the world around us.
Quickly, it expands to how we see the animal kingdom. This is a central point in Genesis 1. Humans are made following the creation of the rest of the living things. And then humans are given dominion over all of these creatures.
What does the bible mean by subdue and rule? It is not a straightforward thing. The same word for rule or dominion here is used throughout the Old Testament to refer to kings. Is God telling humans to be kings of the jungle? The quick reading would be, “I do what I want!” but that is not what God is saying here.
When we read the Bible and we come across unclear sections, it is important to interpret them with clear sections. We get clarity quickly with Genesis 2, when God says “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” This first covenant with Adam bides humans to be vegetarians. We see this because in Genesis 9, God expands the covenant with Noah to include animals and fish and birds as food.
So when God tells humanity to subdue and rule over animals, it is not in the sense of a tyrant but a care-taker, a steward.

In this sense, as well, we were made in the image of God. We can care for those around us who are not us. We can care for the birds and animals and fish and plants, not because of their use for us, but because they are a gift put in our care by the God who loves us.

Before humanity, God created by fiat: let there be. With humanity, God crafts: let us make...we have been crafted intentionally.

And yet, something is amiss.

In the brokenness of this world, this capacity has been malformed. This is what the early church called original sin. Original sin is not just the fact that bad people are out there. In fact, original sin never lets us use the excuse of bad people and good people. It is an excuse to talk about bad people and good people because it completely writes off a whole swath of humanity. Original sin doesn't let us do that. Instead we have, in the words of Paul, an understanding that all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. All of us. There's not a hierarchy of better people, worse people, all of our capacity to do the good on our own, to see the good on our own, to love on our own, has been malformed. Sometimes we accidentally do the good but that doesn’t make us good.

There is this episode of the old 90s sitcom, Frasier, about a psychiatrist in Seattle who has a radio call in show. In the episode, Frazier's dad, who's this gruff, manly man, retired cop, goes to a basketball game and his sons go with him. They know nothing of sports. His younger son, Niles, has his seat number called out by the emcee. So this incredibly geeky, un-athletic psychiatrist makes his way down the rows to the court below.
And just so I get my point across, Niles Crane is the least athletic human in the history of television. And yet, the ball goes in. And then he makes this huge deal about how awesome he was. But it wasn't skill. It was dumb luck. We could call it moral luck.
Sometimes we are morally lucky to do the right thing, to desire the right things. That doesn't mean we have not been malformed by sin for all of sin and fall short of the glory of God. Yet thanks be to God and Jesus Christ. We can be redeemed and made whole. It is God who does good in the world. And whether someone believes or not, when people do good it is God working through them.

Finally, I want to go back to this language of image and of the photograph and of the edges of the photograph. I want us to remember that every image is manipulated because there's always what is outside of the image. There is always a limit to the image.
What is the limit to how we're made in the image of God?
And what is the limit to Christ's redemption?
What is the limit to God's love?

This is precisely the moment when the metaphor falls apart because scripturally, there is no limit to God's love.
One of the ways the early church talked about redemption and salvation was restoration. The restoration of the image of God. This is one of the ways that the early church understood baptism. In baptism, we are restored to a state of grace because the malformation of sin has been washed away from us.
But let’s get real, how much sin can grace cover?
For this question, we must look at what we actually believe in.
There's no point at which our sin is greater than God's love. There's no point in which our No is greater than God's Yes, whether we are morally lucky or not, whether we grow up in the church, or we come to faith late in life.
Whether we fall away into the depths of doubt and despair, at no point os our No greater than God's Yes.
We see this fleshed out fully in Romans eight. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

It's a question about limits. What can separate us? What can keep us from God’s love?
Paul gives this beautiful list:
neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
So let us not put a limit on what God can do for us. Let us not self limit the Holy Spirit in our life. Let us not say, these are the parts of our life that cannot be redeemed. These are the sins I need to keep. That's unnecessary. It is wasteful. It is one thing to gain the whole world, but give up your soul. It is another to gain barely anything at all and give up your soul. It is one thing to give your life for your friend or your country. It is another to give your life for the power company. We don't need to sell ourselves short.
God offers himself for you. You are made in the image of God. You are offered redemption in the name of Jesus Christ who offered himself to become human and fleshed, as limited as us, so that we could be restored to see as God sees to be cleansed of all but love,
May it be so.

Let us pray,

Heavenly Father, thank you for your love which covers a multitude of sins. Help us to remember we are made in your image to love and sacrifice in this world. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen


title: Anoint the Dust

themes: creation anti-dualism baptism danger-of-nostalgia stewardship faithfulness-amid-trials christian-community

text:
**Scripture:** Genesis 2:4-9; John 1:29-34; 1 Corinthians 15:55
**Series:** Creation

> Second sermon in a Creation series reading Genesis and John together. Preaching Genesis 2:4-9, Pruitt frames the second creation account as a fresh-angle retelling (not a contradiction) of the first, focusing on humanity formed from messy, clinging 'dust' (apar/adamah). He reinterprets the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not as withheld good but as the deceptive lure of dualism—neat good/evil buckets that eliminate the need for faith. True clarity is found not in moral systems but in the person of Jesus Christ. Turning to John 1:29-34, he argues Jesus' baptism inaugurates the church and is pure grace (sola gratia), not a one-time soul-cleansing. Tied to a stewardship drive, he contrasts the lean, legacy-cost-free church plant with the dusty, debt-laden, beautiful legacy of Covenant UMC—and declares he is called to embrace the dust. God anoints the dust, sending Jesus made of the same dust to offer mercy and an unfinished church with room for all.

**Illustrations:** premarital-counseling-love-story, hebrew-genesis-illegible, parents-liquor-cabinet, good-bad-buckets, baptism-car-wash, church-plant-legacy-costs, forrest-gump-seat-taken

---

# October 15, 2023
## Genesis 2:4b-9
## John 1:29-34

### Anoint the Dust

>These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

>In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground, but a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground— then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
 - Genesis 2:4b-9

>“The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.””
John 1:29-34 NRSV
https://bible.com/bible/2016/jhn.1.29-34.NRSV

Whenever I have pre-marital counseling session, one of the first things I try to do is ask the couple to tell the story of how they met and fell in love with no input from the other partner. So one person starts, it doesn't matter who, and they say their side of the story. Usually, it's roughly similar, but there are always new things that come out when you have a different perspective on the story.

Today's reading from Genesis starts with a different perspective on creation.

The language is different than Genesis one. I know this not because I'm a great Bible scholar, but because I'm a really bad reader of Hebrew. I can read Genesis one and I can't read Genesis two. The language is so different that it is illegible to me without a lot of work.

Highlighting this difference doesn't mean a chapter is wrong or it's different or that scripture is wrong. But we can receive God's wisdom in a fresh way while reading Genesis two. How should we understand what God is doing here?
## John
The John passage has another big question for us with the baptism of Jesus. This is, on the surface, a confusing scene. Baptism is about the forgiveness of sins, but Jesus doesn't have any sin. Why is he being baptized? It is a very good question. Why are there two creation accounts? Why does Jesus get baptized? Why are humans made from the dust?

## Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on Creation, looking at Genesis 1 and John 1 together to understand more Christ’s presence in Creation, God’s power in creation, and the importance of creation for us today.
Today, Anointing the Dust.

Genesis 2:3 begins in a way that Genesis 1 could have started:

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up.

When we read earth in the Old Testament and the new, it is just as true to read it as land or ground. There is not a planetary conception in genesis 2. Genesis 1 offers us a cosmic account. Genesis 2 stays close to the land. We are not in the universal here but the particular. We are not in the sky but on the ground.

Other than the particularity, what is unique here is that humanity is made before vegetation, before animals, before birds, before any of it.
Again, this doesn't contradict Genesis one. It's not wrong. It's looking at creation from a different angle. And both of these have been given to us in scripture. They're gifts for us.

As the text continues, “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of the life.”

Humanity is formed of the dust of the ground. The word for man in Hebrew Adam is quite similar to the word for earth or land, Adama. The ground around which people live, the ground from which humans are created.

The word for dust is apar and could mean dust or dirt or plaster or even ashes. I really like this language of dust because dust is messy. It's annoying. Dust is dirty. It clings to things. Humans weren't crafted out of marble or granite or even limestone, but dust. It's messy and we get messy really quickly with dust.

Genesis two is famous for this creation of humanity out of dust, and also for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
What does that mean?
We make a lot of assumptions about this tree and about this forbidden fruit. One of those assumptions has to do with thinking that the tree is good and that God is keeping something from humanity. That's why it is forbidden. Kind of like when you were growing up and how you saw your parents' liquor cabinet.
It is forbidden. It is. It may be above the refrigerator, no one would ever suspect it's above the refrigerator, but you know, you can't go there. And there is of course, this adolescent desire for a lot of us. Once we find out what we can't do, we wanna do it.
But I don't think that that's what's going on here. And it doesn't make sense with the nature of God. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is more like a rotten fruit. It's a deception in itself.
God is not preventing us from gaining knowledge or protecting us from false knowledge, from lies, from dualism.
This bifurcation of good on one side and evil on the other. The story of salvation, the story of biblical history is that there's no dualism. It's all God. God overcomes, overwhelms, destroys death. O death. Where is th victory? O death. Where is thy sting? But it can be kind of messy to say this, you know, to say that the cross out narrates evil, overcomes it.
It's a lot cleaner and neater to just to have good and evil. You have good guys and bad guys, you put 'em in the buckets. You have good countries and bad countries. You have good states and bad states. You have good teams and bad teams. Let's just put 'em in the buckets.
But that's not what's going on here at all. We're tempted to fall into this trap, seeking what is nice and neat, seeking a system wherein we don't need to have faith in God. Because if we know what is good and what is not good immediately, where do we need faith in God?
If everything is clear and obvious, there is no space for faith. And then if we think we have it all figured out, whenever life goes sideways, we are lost. And life always goes sideways.
Instead, in the midst of the brokenness of the world, our clarity is not in our system of morals. It's not in our theology, but in the person of Jesus Christ and the love of God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
With baptism too, it can get kind of messy. Baptism seems like it should be the clearest thing of all. We baptize someone in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They're forgiven for their sins. They're good. We're done. That's not what happens. Like we all know people who've been baptized, who have turned away from God. Some people say the baptism didn't stick. Huge controversies over the years have taken place between different Christian traditions, over baptism, over whether babies can be baptized, whether you need to be an adult to be baptized.
I think there's also been misunderstandings about the baptism of Jesus.
We baptize babies in this church because it is a gift. Baptism is a gift. Sola gratia, only Grace. It is not a work. It is not something somebody can earn.
Baptism marks an entrance into a new relationship to other people and to God. And Jesus was baptized in order to inaugurate this system. It is the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament in the person of John the Baptist.
It's not a one time car wash of our soul, so that our soul will never get dirty again. Instead, baptism marks a gift, an entrance into the community of faith we call the Christian Church, where we each need each other. We're tied in the person and work of the Holy Spirit to grow in grace.
Serving, giving, loving, taking care of our neighbors, taking care of each other, taking care of what we are given. It is not always clean. It is not always easy.
When I was younger, I contemplated whether or not to become a church planter. I was asked to think about it, pray about it.
And so I thought a lot about church plants, what goes into them, why they exist, different things like that. One of the realizations that I had is that one of the big reasons to have a church plant is not to add vitality to bring new voices, new structures, things like that. It is that you get to cut out legacy costs: a church plant has no legacy costs. Legacy costs in the church can be large, they can be messy.
There are beautiful legacies in older churches, but there are also complicated ones. There's debt, there's underused facilities, there is a high H V A C bill:
There are people with very different experiences and expectations.
There are Also different visions about what the church should be about, what it used to be, about what it can be and where it is going. And it is not an easy thing to align those visions. A church plant usually has one vision and no legacy costs. They're able to stay lean.
I didn't feel called to that cleanness. I didn't feel called to cut away the past, to leave the legacy costs as somebody else's responsibility.
I felt called to embrace the history of the generations, even when it's dusty, to support people who have found their spiritual home in locations that need new paint or washed carpet.
52:22
We are continuing our stewardship drive this week.
If you weren't here last week, I hope you're able to grab a pledge card to support, to pledge your support of this congregation over the next year.
There is a legacy here at Covenant, a beautiful one. There are people whose lives have been changed. There are also powerful ministries going on right now that need support, that are impaired because of the debt, because of the repair timeline of the facilities. There is also a community outside our walls in need of grace and Jesus and love and new life and direction. There's opportunity there.
I hope you will join with me and, and stay in the dust to support what God is doing here to anoint the dust because that's really what God does at creation. God anoints the dust, blesses it. God didn’t say, “these people are too dirty for me.” Something we often say or think of others. No, God sent his son Jesus to be made of the same dust as us, to offer us life. To offer us a new family, a new community, not based on the judgment of good and evil, but mercy. This is the church. Baptism is our way into the church and at his baptism, Jesus blesses the water and creates the church.

The church we enter is not finished. I think of the beginning of Forest Gump, when Forest is getting on the bus for the first time. He tries to sit down, but the kid says, “can’t sit here: seat’s taken.”

No, the church is not finished. We have space for others and Christ has space for us.

May we support God’s legacy here. May we be unafraid of the dust of creation but instead give thanks for the life of faith which calls us out of the dust and into the light.

Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of life and gift of love. Thank you for giving us life in the midst of death. Help us to remember how you welcome us and to do the same for others. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


title: Christmas Eve: God Enters History

series: One offs

themes: incarnation god-uses-the-overlooked mary-says-yes you-are-worthy-already theotokos grace-as-gift

text:
**Scripture:** Luke 2:1-14
**Series:** One offs

> A Christmas Eve sermon on Luke 2:1-14 that opens with the surprising history of the AD/BC calendar to show our dating system was never built on evidence of Jesus's birth. The preacher dwells on the named Roman power-figures (Augustus, Quirinius) to argue that Luke deliberately roots the nativity in real secular history — yet God enters that history not through the consuls and governors who fill the history books but through unimportant people in an unimportant town: Mary, who had no pedigree, education, or status, and simply said yes. The message turns to the congregation: like Mary and the shepherds, they are called to be God-bearers and proclaimers of good news. Worthiness comes not from blood, job, children's schools, or a 401k, but from God's Spirit and grace, offered here and now. The closing exhortation is to receive the blessing, the grace, and the baby Jesus, and go forth in peace.

**Illustrations:** no-year-zero-calendar-history, quirinius-governor-of-syria, family-christmas-eve-luke-reading, tiktok-roman-empire-trend, charlton-heston-sword-and-sandal-epics, grad-school-wikipedia-pages, roman-defeat-in-germany

---

# December 24 (Christmas Eve)

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no place in the guest room. Now in that same region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”
Luke 2:1-14

There was no year zero. Jesus wasn’t born in year zero. After 1 BC is 1 AD. As well, this wasn’t the calendar system for years at the time of Jesus. Romans used the Roman calendar based on the founding of Rome. They followed the Julian calendar for months but dating the years was different. The Jews followed the Hebrew Calendar based on the founding of the world. The Greeks followed a number of calendars but a major one was the Olympiad which marked every Olympics every fourth year.

The first designation of Anno Domini, didn’t take place until the 6th century when a monk Dionysus Exiguus wanted to make a calendar for Easter but didn’t want to acknowledge the Roman Emperor, Diocletian, who had been a great persecutor of Christians.

Before that, Christians followed an Anno Mundi, or year of the world calendar similar to the Hebrew Calendar, dating every year based on its distance from when they thought the world was created.

The first designation of BC did not even take place until 1474 with the Carthusian Monk, Werner Rolevinck’s, History of the world from Creation to the Papacy of Sixtus IV.

All of this is to say that our calendar wasn’t designed around an historical understanding of the date of Christ’s birth. Intuitively, we might imagine with BC and AD that the dating system is based around empirical evidence of Jesus’s birth, but that is not the case.

The birth of Jesus marked something significant for history, though, and we see that in Luke’s Gospel.

Luke marks an important step in Christian history, for it lays out the entrance of the Jewish Messiah into secular or worldly history. Luke 2 begins with the emperor, Augustus, and the governor of Roman Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius.

Quirinius is one of the names that people read every year but never really think about. My family used to read Luke 2:1-15 every Christmas eve together after the church Christmas Eve service and this name always struck me as unique, but it took me a long time to really look into it.

Quirinius became governor of Syria in 6 AD and gave a census over Judea to prepare the area for Roman taxation. This is the time and reason which Luke gives for the return of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem and the location of Joseph’s birth.

Quirinius was born in 51 BC in Lanuvium, a village near Rome, to an unremarkable family. He moved up the ranks of the army and was elected Consul in 12 BC.

There was a trend on tiktok a few months ago, of wives or girlfriends asking their significant others how often they think about the Roman Empire. The most popular response was daily. Many men think about the Roman Empire once a day. I must confess that were I to have been I asked, that would also have been my response. If it is not your thing, the consul may seem like a strange thing, but it was an extremely important position. There were two consuls elected every year and they held enormous power. Once Augustus became emperor, the power of consuls wained slightly but it was still a very influential position. To be elected Consul was both a lifetime achievement and a military duty.

Once consul, Quirinius led a successful campaign against a rival nation in what is now Turkey. Upon victory, he was named tutor to Augustus’s heir.

Then in what we now call 6AD, after the banishment of Herod Achelaus and the collapse of the Herodic tetrarchy, Augustus named Quirinius governor for Syria. 6AD marked the transition from Roman Palestine being a client state ruled by a local warlord, to the area becoming an official Roman proctorate, with taxes and responsibilities therein.

It was this transition which demanded a census. Augustus never ordered a census for the whole world at the same time. The word in Greek translated as known world is based on the root of home, oikos, like economic, and could mean inhabited land. The total of the houses is another adequate translation. We often don’t dig into these names because the history of Christmas feels so far removed from our lives.

There's a certain way of hearing stories from the Bible and imagining them all as mythic. We imagine a sword and sandal past, like Charlton Hesston in the 10 Commandments or Ben-Hur, far different from our lived lives and experiences. Distant history, distant historical experiences are often hard for us to comprehend and understand.
Putting ourselves in the shoes of ancient Romans or ancient Jews is not a simple task.
The world has changed, but humans have not changed very much. We still hunger and thirst, we are still tired and happy and sad and jealous. People are born and people die.
What is so important about the Gospel of Luke in this passage is that we see the entrance of God's story directly into secular history, into world history. Quirinius and Augustus, and later Pontius Pilate, these are not Christian figures. They are Roman figures. They are named here, not because they are good or noble or virtuous, but because they are historical. They are the kinds of names we find in history books. They existed during a point in time when other humans existed.

Christmas is the celebration that the God of all creation, not partial creation, all creation, humbled himself to be born of a woman in a town southeast of Jerusalem. It was not an important place. She was not an important person. There were histories of important places and important people. Mary and Joseph, were not subjects of those histories.
Most of us will not enter the history books. There may be a few people here that have their own Wikipedia page. At one point at a party in grad school, I started making Wikipedia pages for my friends, and there was about a three minute lag before somebody flagged it and took it down. I think that they are a lot faster with flagging now, but still, most of us will not have our own Wikipedia pages. We will not be in editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica when the story of the 21st century is told. Our names will not be at the forefront.
Bethlehem never comes up in the history of Rome during the last days of the reign of Emperor Augustus, which is the period when Jesus was born. A woman named Mary and a man named Joseph do not come up in those stories. There's a great battle in what is now Germany where the Romans are defeated. That comes up a lot. Another one of Augustus's heirs dying comes up a lot.
Mary and Joseph, and the baby named Jesus do not. Quirinius comes up. He was a consol, a very important position. He was a tutor to one of Augustus's heirs. He was a governor in a province that had just become fully romanized. He was an important figure. God did not enter history through him.
God entered history through an unexpected way.
Mary doesn't have the best genetics. She doesn't come from the right people. She did not have the right education. None of that mattered.
God sought her and she said yes. She was offered a frightening responsibility. God offers the frightening possibility of bringing the divine image in the flesh into the world.
And Mary says yes to this.
At Christmas, we celebrate God becoming human in Jesus Christ. This moment of entrance in history where God's love and offering of life is opened up to all, where the shackles and chains of sin no longer hold total domination. It is a gift. It is a gift worth giving presents over. It is a gift worth celebrating, but it is not just a gift of the past.
God entered actual history through Jesus Christ, and God calls us to welcome him again. This day, God calls us to be God-bearers. This day, God calls us to announce the good news like the shepherds. This day, you may not feel like you are good enough to bear the image of God's son. You may not feel that you've done enough.
It may seem like a burden, gosh, so much to live up to.
Yet what bore Jesus Christ was not the will of Mary, but the Spirit washing over her and that spirit is here offered for you.
You can bear God's love in this world, not because of your blood, or who your parents are, or what your job is, or where your kids go to school, or how big your 401k is. None of that ultimately matters. It all goes to dust.
You are worthy already. You are loved already. You are good enough already. You are deserving not just of love and affection, but of purpose. You are deserving of a purpose and a mission in this world. You're deserving of it. God is offering it to you, not just in the past, not just in the future here and now.
Receive it. Receive the blessing, receive the grace, receive the baby Jesus, and go forth in peace.

Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, help us to receive your gift this day. Help us to let go of ourselves this day. Help us feel loved. Help us to offer love in this world without cost or price, as you gave love to us. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


title: Come and See

themes: original-sin faith-as-journey scripture-interpretation show-dont-tell answering-gods-call stewardship doers-not-hearers

text:
**Scripture:** Genesis 2:10-17; John 1:35-39; James 1:22-24; Leviticus 19:18; Deuteronomy 6:4-5
**Series:** Creation

> Finishing a series on Creation (Genesis 1 and John 1), Wilson preaches on the Tree of Knowledge and the rivers of Eden, refusing to assign intention to God and instead letting the text speak (exegesis, not eisegesis). The deep link between Genesis 2 and John 1 is geography: paradise is a concrete place, and Jesus says 'Come and see' to a home where he is staying. The call of Christ is geographic and three-dimensional, requiring movement; to stay put is to ignore the call. Drawing on James, the sermon urges being doers not hearers, and (via Mother Teresa and a Seinfeld bit) doing good for God's eyes rather than others'. He closes by tying this to Covenant UMC's stewardship campaign: show your support, don't tell, so the church can say to friends and family, 'Come and see.'

**Illustrations:** ut-poetry-workshop-substitute, show-dont-tell-writing, food-poisoning-knowledge, john-milton-paradise-lost, mother-teresa-do-it-anyway, seinfeld-rental-car-reservation

---

# October 22, 2023
## Genesis 2:10-17
## John 1:35-39
### Come and See

A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
 - Genesis 2:10-17

>The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.
- John 1:35-39

I was an English major at the University of Texas. In part, because I like to read. Also, because I wanted to finish college as soon as possible and I had some AP credits towards English that would let me finish the major quickly. I wanted to get a bachelor's in three years and that helped in the process.

I took poetry for my creative writing with a nice, old Canadian poet. One time, our instructor was away and another poetry teacher taught us. This other instructor had a different, more formal style. After you read your poem, you could not say a thing. So if someone heard something in your poem that you didn't intend to write, you couldn’t say, “well, I meant to say. blank].” You should have left it in the text, you should have put it in the poem. All that was there was the text on the page. The authorial intent didn't matter.
Funnily enough, this one time poetry workshop sub really effected how I read and understood the Bible. This was before seminary, before I'd really formally studied the Bible. I read it a lot, but in a different way. To talk about it crassly, the Bible was a way to supplement my prior knowledge of the Christian faith. That is, when I read the Bible, it functioned as supplementary material for what I had in my mind already about God, about Jesus, about salvation, about all these things.
I kept on trying to fit the Bible into the answers I had in my head.

After this class, I read the Bible in a different way: I let the page speak for itself. In seminary, I learned about this as the difference between exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis is letting the text speak. Eisegesis is putting our own meaning into the text.

When confusing things came up while reading the Bible, i wouldn’t dismiss them. I would use not my own cleverness to resolve anything, but other passages of scripture that I knew to try and clarify in this way, so that I'm always submitting myself to the scripture, never putting myself over the Bible.

Another thing I learned in creative writing was the adage: show don't tell. If you're writing a novel and you have a character who's sad, don't just say, I'm sad, show that they're sad. Do not treat the reader as if they're stupid. Engage them.
Or if, in a poem, you're trying to describe a complicated situation, don't tell the reader “This was complicated.” Show how complicated it was. If you can't show the complications, it really isn’t complicated.

I took this mindset to my understanding of scripture.  What is the Bible showing me, not just want is it telling me. What is the tree of knowledge showing us and why is it there?

## Series Intro
My friends, we are finishing our series on Creation, looking at Genesis 1 and John 1 together to understand more Christ’s presence in Creation, God’s power in creation, and the importance of creation for us today.
Today, the Tree of Knowledge.

This is one of those perennial questions that that comes up again and again and again. The forbidden fruit.
John Milton, for me, has shaped a lot of how I read this, but when I come to it again to come to it afresh and need to receive the scriptures, one thing about this passage that is often overlooked is the importance of rivers.
Not a lot of sermons on the rivers in Eden. There are two rivers that are famously named to this day. The Tigris and the Euphrates, which flow through modern day Iraq. There are other rivers, the Pishon, which the Rabbi Rashi says is the Nile, although Josephus calls it the Ganges. And the Gihon, which others call the blue Nile.
 Paradise is located at this confluence, at this source that is going to spread over the world. The place matters. The location of paradise isn’t random. It is concrete.

And Adam, the one made of the ground, is placed there. Adam is given a boundary, given, a limit.

”Eat of all that you want, all the trees that you want, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat.”

The text doesn't say, do not eat, but you shall not eat. Shall is one of those words that the King James translates in a way that obfuscates what is going on.
It happens in the 10 Commandments: thou shalt not murder. A better translation is: you will not murder. God doesn't say don't murder, but you will not murder. You will not eat of this tree. Why is the tree there?
## the tree
I spoke about this a little bit last week but it is worth spending a lot of time on it. Why is the tree in the garden? There has been a lot of speculation over the years about this tree. When we look at the text itself and let it speak to us, let it show us what it means, we cannot come to a conclusive answer for why the tree is there. We cannot put intention onto God.
We cannot claim that God is trying to tempt us or gate-keep us. As I mentioned last week, the tree could just be poisonous to humans but good to animals. There are other creatures who would have eaten the fruit of the tree. Poisons give you knowledge. Have you ever eaten anything toxic? You learn a lot about your body.
Just to be clear, if you've ever had food poisoning, it's like you become intimately familiar with all of the orifices of your body, with a lot of knowledge that is quickly gained in a recovery from food poisoning.
But again, this is pure speculation. What we have is the text and the reality of the situation and what happened from it. What God said and how Adam and Eve listened.

In the gospel of John, people are told about Jesus Christ, but it is not enough. Later in chapter one, Nathaniel is sitting under a bush and Philip comes up to him and says, the Messiah is here. He is from Nazareth, and Nathaniel says, what good ever came out of Nazareth? The response is, come and see.

One of the deep connections between this passage from Genesis and from the gospel of John is geography. Not who or what or why, but where. Where is paradise and where is Jesus? Paradise is a place. There are rivers and trees. Jesus is staying at a home. Come and see.
Where are you going? It is just as important of a question as who are you? Where are you going? Are you going to the place God said is poison or are you going to the home where Jesus is staying?

God gives humanity paradise. This garden of wonder. God tries to protect us from what could harm us in the garden. God gives us a place. Jesus calls us to a place.
It is easy to over spiritualize the life of faith, to put Christianity in a box so small that it can fit into your pocket.
But Jesus never does that. Even when Jesus talks about how the Torah is summed up in the Shema: Here, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and your soul and your mind. And likewise, he says, then quoting from Leviticus 19, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
These two things are not simple. Both demand geography, physical connection, and relationship.
We cannot earn salvation. It is by grace all the way down. But we have to remember that when Jesus calls someone, it means they need to move. To not move is to ignore the call. When Jesus calls someone in the New Testament, they never stay in the same place. They're always moving from here to there. Jesus himself rarely stays in the same place.
Jesus comes to us but also calls us to him. Jesus stays in our home but also calls us out of our complacency to come and see.

If we are staying in the same place, we have ceased to answer the call of Jesus Christ.
The call of Christ is geographic. It is three-dimensional. It's about how we live our lives.
At the beginning of the book of James, he makes a distinction between hearers of the word and doers.

>”But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.”
James 1:22-24 ESV

But in this, it is not about other people seeing us be doers but God seeing us. If we strive for visible piety, we will already have received our reward. Jesus explains this again and again in the sermon on the mount. If we are doing the word of God to gain the attention and affection of others, we are lying to ourselves about what we are doing. It is not about us and them. It is always between us and God.
Mother Teresa articulates it well in her great poem, Do It Anyway.

> People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.
Forgive them anyway.
>
> If you are kind,
people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.
>
> If you are successful,
you will win some false friends and some true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
>
> If you are honest and frank,
people may cheat you.
Be honest and frank anyway.
>
> What you spend years building,
someone could destroy overnight.
Build anyway.
>
> If you find serenity and happiness,
they may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.
>
> The good you do today,
people will often forget tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
>
> Give the world the best you have,
and it may never be enough.
Give the best you've got anyway.
>
> You see,
in the final analysis it is between you and God ;
it was never between you and them anyway.

It is not enough to say you believe; you need to show it. Not to the people around you, not to your next door neighbors. Not by putting bumper stickers on your car or like blasting Christian music, showing it with the lives you live, showing it with your support of God's Ministries.
It reminds me of an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry is trying to rid to car and he is, he's flown in to an airport and he, he, he got a reservation. He lands and they say, we're sorry, but we don't have your car.

Jerry : I don't understand. Do you have my reservation?
Rental Car Agent : We have your reservation, we just ran out of cars.
Jerry : But the reservation keeps the car here. That's why you have the reservation.
Rental Car Agent : I think I know why we have reservations.
Jerry : I don't think you do. You see, you know how to take the reservation, you just don't know how to hold the reservation. And that's really the most important part of the reservation: the holding. Anybody can just take them

Anybody can say they're a Christian. Anybody can say they follow Jesus.
It's the holding that counts. And it's not about dividing other people, it's about you and your own heart. It's about me and my own heart and how I respond to God's call on my life. How you respond to God’s call on your life. And whether we respond in the most limited way possible or the most abundant way, or even somewhere in between.
We are finishing our stewardship campaign here at Covenant United Methodist Church. Stewardship is not finished. It is a year long thing to take care of what God has given us. But the call today is simple and the pledge cards offer an opportunity. Show your support, don’t tell. Show your support so we can proudly say of the church to our friends and family, come and see.

Come and see God is here. Come and see where will this church be in the next year, in the next five years, in the next 50 years. Come and see what God is doing. Show don't tell.

Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, we thank you for calling us to come to you. Help us to answer your call. Help us to not stay in the same place but to grow in faith, hope, and love. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


title: Come to Me and Find Rest

series: Welcome

themes: rest-in-christ restlessness eternal-life distraction-and-busyness freedom-from-proving-yourself sabbath new-creation

text:
**Scripture:** Matthew 11:28-29; John 3:16; Matthew 5:48; Revelation 21:1-4
**Series:** Welcome

> A sermon on Jesus' invitation in Matthew 11:28-29 ('Come to me, all you who are weary... and I will give you rest'). Opening with the science of sleep and the 2019 Nationals' sleep consultant, the pastor distinguishes good rest from mere time in bed, then maps two biblical rests: the nightly rest that readies us to rise again, and the final eternal rest. Drawing on Augustine's restless hearts, he diagnoses the modern attention economy as a quixotic search for self in things and experiences, arguing our true end is not self-actualization but completion (teleion) in God. Eternal life, glimpsed in John 3:16 and Revelation's new heaven and earth, is radical transformation, not 'earth minus death'—and the goal of resting in Christ is to become fully children of God.

**Illustrations:** nationals-sleep-consultant, greinke-game-7, hrv-sleep-biometrics, augustine-restless-hearts, quixote-tilting-windmills, marathon-of-life

---

July 9 draft

Sleep is very important. In the last few years, many scientists have honed in on the importance of sleep and good sleep for athletic performance, mental performance, mental acuity.
In 2019, the Washington Nationals beat the Houston Astros in Game 7 of the World Series. I was, unfortunately, at that game and didn't understand why the manager pulled Zach Greinke at the time. He was pitching great and then the relievers proceeded to give up the go head run.
I'm gonna let that dog lie just a little bit.

Something that happened to the Nationals that year and one of the reasons why they performed beyond expectations is that they had a sleep consultant come in and radically transform the team Locker room and the hotel configuration on travel and the sleeping situations of all of the players in order to maximize sleep. They took away a lot of blue light, which can make people stay up longer. They taught them how to use sleeping masks and noise machine and put in some red bulbs in certain areas, because red light doesn’t ruin your night vision. .
When they got sleep, it was a good kind of sleep and the Nationals performed beyond expectation for the whole year, and when the time came, on the last game of the season, they were ready.

There are good kinds of sleep and bad kinds of sleep. You can lay in bed for nine hours and get a horrible rest. There are certain physiological factors that you can look at beyond just time and bed.
One is your, your heart rate, the lower the heart rate, usually the better the sleep. One is your respiratory rate. How many breaths are you taking during the night? A small change can make a big, big difference. There is also your heart rate variability, which is the microsecond difference in the rhythm of your heart rate. It is more of a recent biometric but there is a high correlation between your heart rate variability, or HRV, and the kind of sleep you get. We each have our own HRV. Some athletes are going at 120 ms. A good night of sleep is an HRV of 40ms. If your HRV is higher than your average, you probably got a good night’s sleep, even if you didn’t sleep as long. We’ve all had nights where we have got to bed on time but tossed and turned and didn’t feel recovered at all in the morning.

Beyond that, you can look at factors deep sleep, rim sleep, light sleep, et cetera. But those all these different factors and when you get enough sleep, high H R V, low respiratory rate, low heart rate, you ready to act and to do Jesus,

Jesus calls people says, Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.

It's one of my favorite lines in the Bible. It is a beautiful and evocative verse.
In scripture, there are multiple types of rests. There's not just one.
There's the rest of the night of sleep, of dreams, and our eternal rest, final rest. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus speaks about both forms of rest. The eternal rest we long for and the rest which gets us ready to rise again. Better, stronger, faster.

Saint Augustine, the fifth century bishop of Hippo in northern Africa said, in his Confessions, our hearts are restless until they rest in you or Lord. Our hearts are restless unless they rest in God. This sentiment describes so much our modern condition of restlessness, the condition brought about by the attention economy that's seeking our eyes, seeking our clicks, seeking our screen time on our phones, our social media, seeking our time when we go out the hottest restaurants, the best concerts, the best trips.
Always seeking. Yes, trying to find ourselves in things or experiences. And yet we will never find ourselves in a thing. Objects and status are ultimately unfulfilling. It is a quixotic quest. We are all on donkeys tilting at windmills and we're trying to find ourselves apart from who we are created to be. And in this sense, our final rest is in this moment of understanding, this moment of completion.
When we are where we need to be, when we are who we need to be with Jesus Christ. It is not self-actualization but completion. The word used in the New Testament is teleion. Telos. Complete. Sometimes translated as perfect. In Matthew 5:48; be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. The point is not be without mistakes but be complete in God. We are complete when we can fully rest in god.
This is what eternal life looks like in the scriptures. It's not like clouds and cherubs, but an eternity of praising God, our creator in the fullness of God’s light, which is all that is good. Everything good we have seen and understood and experienced is but a foretaste of the good that is found in Jesus Christ, and we can participate in that.
>Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
This is our final hope for our final rest.

John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. And this eternal life will not be a simple continuation of the status quo. Eternity is not earth minus death.

At the end of revelation, we see a new heavens and a new earth, and the new Jerusalem descending from the clouds, and all our tears will be wiped away. It is a radical transformation of the universe.

The Christian life is not just about our future but our present and our past. It is about it all. It is great to imagine rest in the future, but when you are in the middle of a marathon of life and there are still miles to go. Some of us our closer than others to our eternal rest, but we all will sleep tonight. That is the other sort of rest of which Jesus speaks.

I started off this message talking about some new tools and techniques that people use in order to maximize recovery for performance. These are tools used by professional athletes, combat sport, athletes, others in order to maximize their athletic potential.
The goal of rest for you in Jesus Christ is not to maximize your athletic potential, but to offer something more, to receive something more, to do something more, by truly being children of God in this world.

This the