title: Recognized by His Scars: The Power of Pardon

series: Easter

themes: forgiveness holy-spirit resurrection the-wounds-of-christ doubting-thomas mercy-as-transformation

text:
**Scripture:** John 20:19-29; John 20:3-4; 1 John 1:1
**Series:** Easter

> The risen Christ, recognized by his scars, breathes the Holy Spirit on the disciples and gives them a transforming power of pardon that must never be cheapened into a worldly forgiveness which shields abusers and keeps things the same.

**Illustrations:** recognized-by-scars-not-face, jesus-through-locked-doors, wesley-sophie-hopkey-communion, not-a-mutant-serum, jesus-turning-over-tables

---

# April 27

The disciple Thomas is such a rich and vibrantly brilliant figure in the Bible. He is such a shining figure of that sometimes people forget what Jesus is saying when he first went to see the disciples.

This is the evening of resurrection. The only disciples in the gospel of John who have seen Jesus, at this point, were the women who had gone to the tomb, and Peter and John, who awkwardly raced there.

“Peter and the other disciple left to go to the tomb. They were running together, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and was the first to arrive at the tomb.”
John 20:3-4 CEB
https://bible.com/bible/37/jhn.20.3-4.CEB

For the rest of them, they are scared. There's a lot of violence going on in the community. The disciples of Jesus are afraid. They are afraid of what is going to happen to them. And then Jesus appears in a somewhat supernatural way. The doors are locked and Jesus gets in. I guess he could have climbed through the window. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. If he can rise from the dead, sneaking into a room isn’t a stretch.

Whatever the case, Jesus appears to them and says, Peace. Jesus was speaking but speaking wasn't enough; he had to show the wounds in his hands and on his side. They don't hear what Jesus has to say until he shows the wounds; that's when the disciples knew it was him. They did not recognize his face, they recognized his scars. Let’s say that again. It's very important. They did not recognize his face. They recognized his scars.

Then Jesus goes on and says to them, Peace be with you. The father has sent me, so I am sending you.

Okay, this is where we start to get all wonky. I mean, Jesus appearing through locked doors is kind of wonky, but at first glance, what is even wonkier is that Jesus doesn’t send the disciples here. He says, as the father sent me, I am sending you. He tells them he's sending them but he doesn't send them. He breathes on them. He gives them the Holy Spirit that lets them forgive the sins of any. This power also lets them hold back forgiveness, which is another thing that is confounding. All of this happens before we get to Thomas.

Now, maybe the disciples are just so excited from seeing the scars and knowing that their Rabbi and friend is alive that they don't pay attention to the other things.

But we, today, in the season of Easter, have the distance of time to be able to look at the scripture, to read it, and to try and figure out a little bit of what is going on, which comes back to this question of forgiveness and mercy and the presence of the Holy Spirit. This is a great power that Jesus is giving his disciples, the power of pardon. They give mercy to whom they give mercy, and they withhold mercy to whom they withhold mercy.

Well, the first part sounds good. The second part doesn't sound as good. It doesn't sound good because, if we think about the disciples, or really anybody having that incredible power and using it for their own gain, it is quite unsettling.

To take an example from Methodist tradition, John Wesley was a priest in the Church of England. He was a missionary to the colony of Savannah He spent a lot of time and had a lot of morning walks with the niece of the most important businessman in the colony named Sophie Hopkey. They spent a lot of time together.

After a while, John doesn't propose and Sophy ends up marrying another guy. John gets all flustered and he doesn't give her or her new husband communion. He withholds it. He says that she's lying and that she needs to be honest because she had told John that she wouldn't get married and then she got married so she lied to him. It's quite a power move.

It can be tempting to think about people using the power Jesus gives his disciples like John Wesley used his authority, but that would be divorcing the power of forgiveness from the presence of the Holy Spirit. You're separating it from that presence. The Holy Spirit is the full extent of the power. The disciples weren't injected with a mutant serum that gave them superhuman abilities of forgiveness or non-forgiveness. The Holy Spirit entered their lives in a new way, to forgive the sins of others, to forgive the ways people have strayed from God, strayed from their family, strayed from themselves.

Jesus isn't talking about the forgiveness of someone who sins against me.

True mercy, true letting go, true offering up to God is a powerful gift. It can really only come from the Holy Spirit. And I think the discernment of whether to forgive or to withhold is about trust in the Holy Spirit. It is about offering mercy to the ones who are seeking it; not to those who are not.

Mercy is a means of conversion, transformation, of changing the path, of being on another road and it can be cheapened, but cheapening it does not cheapen God or the Spirit. Often our imagination needs to be transformed in order to see the possibilities of forgiveness: forgiveness of others forgiveness of ourselves.

In the season of Easter, we need to be open to that transformation. If Jesus rose from the dead, maybe we can forgive that person in our lives. Forgiveness is not about covering up abuse or sugar coating abuse. If Jesus rose from the dead, maybe we can forgive ourselves.

And this power of pardon, of mercy, of forgiveness, that Jesus gave the disciples, this is the sending that Jesus speaks about. Mercy is active. It goes places. It changes things. Mercy is not about the status quo. The status quo is not forgiving. The status quo is eye for an eye. The status quo is the path of destruction. The status quo is living for the expectations of others. The status quo twists the divine gift of forgiveness into a way to maintain power structures and forms of abuse that would make Jesus turn over tables. Worldly forgiveness keeps things the same. It is a lie that deceives and keeps people in structures of abuse. The way we can tell the difference between the lie of worldly forgiveness which tells people to forgive their abusers but has no word for abusers, and heavenly forgiveness. The Holy Spirit offers something more than the world. Heavenly forgiveness transforms. If it is not transforming and converting, it is not the action of the Holy Spirit. If it is keeping things the same way, it is not the action of the Holy Spirit.

The disciples receive the power of mercy when they see the scars of Jesus because they did not recognize his face. He had changed through resurrection and they would change.

So we get to Thomas. When Jesus is talking to Thomas about blessed are those who don’t see and yet believe, he's not comparing Thomas to the disciples. He's comparing Thomas to us. This is about you and me.

Have you believed because you have seen me? He says, blessed are those who have not seen him yet have believed.

We, 2000 years later, are offered a chance to believe without seeing. Jesus is talking about us. But Jesus is also not taking away are senses. The goal is not for us to irrationally believe.

We are also given the chance to see the scars of Jesus, to touch the scars of Jesus. What John says at the start of his first epistle.

>“We announce to you what existed from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have seen and our hands handled, about the word of life.”
1 John 1:1 CEB
https://bible.com/bible/37/1jn.1.1.CEB

We are blessed when we believe without seeing, we are also given the chance to see the scars of Jesus today, and in that, we, like the apostles, are given the power of forgive through the Holy Spirit.

It's a mighty thing. It's a powerful thing for the Holy Spirit to be with us. It is not a trivial thing to receive Jesus in the brokenness of this world. And to be specific, we see the wounds of Jesus in the broken of this world. You see the wounds of Jesus in the brokenness around us, of our neighbors, of our friends, of ourselves: we see the wounds of Jesus, but we also see that they have been healed and he is risen. Death did not defeat him. The wounds do not defeat him. Even when they lock the door to keep everyone out, Jesus comes into the room and says peace. Even when we lock out everyone from our life, Jesus comes in and says Peace. He shows himself by his wounds. He gives himself through the spirit.

May we not be afraid to show ourselves by our wounds. May we not be afraid to give ourselves by the Spirit. May we not be afraid to forgive. May we not be afraid to seek forgiveness. May we not be afraid to live like resurrected people even today. We are not alone. God is with us.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


site: sermons

title: Remember and Be Thankful

author: Wilson Pruitt

church: covenant-umc

themes: baptism remembering-the-dead infant-baptism holy-spirit the-gospel christian-community truth-telling

text:
**Scripture:** Luke 3:15-22; Acts 8:14-17; 1 Corinthians 13:12

> Because baptism is God's gift naming us his beloved children, we are called to remember it together as a community and live thankfully and truthfully, undefined by our past.

**Illustrations:** hot-stove-memory, bluey-vs-citizen-kane, noah-dove-flood-end, remember-through-others

---

# January 12, 2025
## Remember and Be Thankful

Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. - Acts 14-17

As the people were filled with expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
So with many other exhortations he proclaimed the good news to the people. But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison.
Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  - Luke 3:15-22

We don't only remember the good things; memory doesn't function in that way, and that is a good thing. Let's think back on our lives and our experiences as if we only had positive memories. If that were the case, we would keep making the same mistakes over and over again. If you forgot about the time you touched the hot stove or pulled the cake out of the oven without gloves on, you would do it again. And again.

The gospel accounts of Jesus Christ are memories. They are memories inspired by the Holy Spirit. They are memories inspired by God, but still memories. They are not contemporaneous accounts of the life of Jesus. There wasn't a reporter following Jesus along, asking pointed questions from time to time. That book would be very different. It wouldn't be a gospel. A gospel is a genre of literature begun after the life of Jesus. There are four real examples of gospels. There are other attempts. There are many of what we call “gnostic gospels” written by this sect called the Gnostics, who had a very complex set of beliefs mostly around this idea that there was a secret knowledge that Jesus imparted (a Gnosis in Greek) and that you have to have received this secret knowledge in order to believe properly and be saved. The most famous example of which is the gospel of Thomas, but there's also the gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Peter, and many others.

For Christians, there are only four examples of gospel. They are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They come from the word good news. They share the good news of Jesus Christ. The good news that God has become human in Jesus Christ, and offered his life for the world. The good news that death did not defeat him and this gift of life is offered to you this day.

The gospels are intriguing and complex texts that human nature often cuts and parses in bits, even when we don't intentionally mean to. The reading from Luke today is a good example of this. The lectionary actually cuts out the middle section about Herodias and Herod and John the Baptist. The arrest of John the Baptist is mentioned in Matthew, Mark,and Luke. In Mark, the gospel writer goes into gruesome detail about the decapitation of John and how his head is served on a platter. Luke just mentions the arrest and the crazy situation of Herod and his wife and his daughter.

In this description of the baptism of Jesus Christ, in the middle of things, is this note about Herod about John going to prison. Chronologically, it doesn't make a lot of sense. We have this description of John baptizing people and describing what it's going to be like when Jesus comes. Then, seemingly out of the blue, the text talks about the arrest of John, then just as quickly, we jump back to the Jordan River. John, oddly enough, is not mentioned here in the baptism. And so if we see this as a straight modern history, it makes no sense. We should be okay with saying that. It makes no sense. Again, the chronology is way off. How could John be in prison if he's baptizing Jesus? It doesn't make sense. So if we read it as a modern history, it fails, but it is a mistake to read it in that way. It's like watching an episode of Bluey and judging it as if it were Citizen Kane: there is a different genre going on.

John the Baptist was a holy man. He spoke truthfully, even when it did not benefit him. I think that's what Luke is trying to point out here. John spoke truthfully about the coming of Jesus, even when it didn't benefit him. It would have benefited him to be like, “Yeah, I AM the Messiah. Bow down to me.” But he didn't.
In the same way, it would have benefited John the Baptist to shut his mouth about Herod's relationship with his brother's wife Herodias, but he doesn't. He doesn't act in that way and he is punished for it. In Mark, he loses his life because of it. In a world of lies there are consequences for telling the truth.

There is one unique, objective truth of God's love and power for us, but we look through a glass darkly, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13. We don't see it clearly. We must be humble with God's truth and humble with our memory of God and God's love for us. We must be humble when we think about baptism.

Baptism has led to many conflicts over the centuries. churches have split over baptism, wars have been fought over baptism. Many debates still rage on about the definition of baptism. Not every tradition baptizes infants. This tradition does. We baptize children because we believe baptism is not a choice or an act of will, but a gift from God that we receive. It is a present to be baptized by water and the spirit, to receive, on a personal level, the words that came from heaven, you are my child. The beloved, with you I am well pleased.

If you were baptized, God made this very claim about you. you are my child. The beloved, with you I am well pleased.

These words can be hard to remember when we think about those memories we would rather forget, those experiences we'd rather forget, those mistakes of our past, even the mistakes of today or those times when we do not feel included in God's family. The memory of baptism, like all Christian memory, should not be isolated to ourselves. Luke gives us a hint towards this when he says, now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized.

The baptism of Jesus was a communal affair. He wasn't baptized in this isolated manner. He was baptized together with others. So often, the image is of Jesus standing alone in the river, but that's not the picture that Luke paints. Luke paints this image of Jesus among a group, a crowd. He doesn't even say that Jesus was the last one baptized. It's when all the people were baptized (including Jesus), and Jesus was praying, the heavens opened, the sky opened, the spirit took on a bodily form, the spirit looked bodily like a dove and came down.

The Spirit descends in bodily form like the dove that so long ago announced the ending of the flood and so gives honor to the body that is one with God.[^1]

The flood of sin is over. There is hope now. The new creation has begun.

On the Sunday after Christmas, we celebrated the circumcision of Jesus, when Jesus was included into the covenant of Abraham. Last week, we celebrated Epiphany, when the world understood that Jesus was the son of God with the coming of the magi. and today at the baptism of Jesus we see the ordination of Jesus as well as his baptism. He has been ordained, he has been ordered for this way of life. It's the beginning of his adult ministry is his baptism. He is marked in a different direction. The gospels each spent little time before the baptism. This is when things get going. But all that before time mattered and impacted and affected him. Your past impacts you and affects you, but your past does not define who you are. Remember the words that came from heaven, you are my child. The beloved, with you I am well pleased. , and be thankful.

If you were baptized in the Methodist tradition, you were baptized with the words, I baptize you in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit.

We see the trinity in the baptism. We have the visible God in Jesus, the all powerful in the voice from heaven, and the spirit between the father and the son.

Christ is baptized, not to be made holy by the water, but to make the water holy, and by his cleansing to purify the waters which he touched. For the consecration of Christ involves a more significant consecration of the water.

For when the Savior is washed, all water for our baptism is made clean, purified at its source for the dispensing of baptismal grace to the people of future ages. Christ is the first to be baptized, then, so that Christians will follow after him with confidence. - Maximus of Turin

 If you don't remember your baptism, if you were baptized, like me, as a child, you remember it with the people who were there with you. The people who loved you. You remember through them and that is how faith works as a Christian. We remember through each other. We remember for each other. Our baptism is a claim of God on us. It is also a claim for us on one another. We are now in each other’s business because we have been called by the one God for this.
When we are low, our brothers and sisters in faith remember for us these words. When you are sick, share it. It is not a burden on us to hear of your hardship. We are called together, not as automatons. Sad news doesn’t bring us down like it does the world. Sad news brings us together because Christ is Lord.

When we are high, when we are above and everything is working out, we remember together the humility of Jesus for us. The humility of the truth-speaking of John the Baptist and the consequences that he faced by speaking the truth. He lost power in this world, but he gained power in heaven. Don't be afraid to lose power in this world by being true to who God has created you to be. You don't need to build up more storehouses. You are already loved. You are  already forgiven. If you have not been baptized, I would love to talk to you about the opportunity to receive the greatest of gifts. And if you have been baptized, this day, may you remember your baptism and be thankful. Even a little drop washes the whole body because Jesus Christ has opened the way for us.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[^1]: Gregory of Nazianzus

method: authored, not translated

license_apparatus: CC BY-NC 4.0


title: Sanctification

series: The Way of Salvation

themes: sanctification justification wesleyan-general-rules means-of-grace holiness reconciliation theology-of-the-body

text:
**Scripture:** 2 Corinthians 5:16-20; John 17:10-19; Colossians 1:21-23; Galatians 3:28; Romans 3:23; 1 John 1:1; Matthew 25
**Series:** The Way of Salvation

> Sanctification, not the dramatic moment of justification, is the ongoing Spirit-enabled work of being made holy through embodied, neighbor-serving lives shaped by Wesley's General Rules and the means of grace.

**Illustrations:** hobbit-family-reading, gandalf-no-heroes, tolkien-somme, rivendell-good-days-untold, tolstoy-happy-families, groundhog-day, scrooge-conversion, dylan-serve-somebody, wesley-general-rules, wwjd

---

# Sanctification
## February 16

## 2 corinthians 5:16-20
## John 17:10-19

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we no longer know him in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. - 2 Corinthians 5:16-20

All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth. - John 17:10-19

We are reading the Hobbit again as a family. I read a few times as a kid and then we read it together during the first days of the pandemic. It is a lovely story to read in chunks. It is also filled with a number of wonderful insights about human existence. Unlike most fantasy novels that were inspired by it (including the Lord of the Rings), the Hobbit isn’t as focused on plot as it is character and understanding.

Early in chapter 1, Gandalf the Grey, the great wizard who sets up the great adventure, explains why they shouldn’t directly into the lonely mountain and face the dragon straight on. Tolkien writes:

	>That would be no good,” said the wizard, “not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply lot to be found.”

The story was written in the aftermath of Tolkien’s experience in World War I at the Battle of the Somme, where 19,000 English men died on the first day of the battle, July 1, 1916. The full scope of the Somme included over 3 million beligerants and a million casualties on both sides. For Tolkien, no heroes could be found, which is why a hobbit, a small person in stature and ambition, would be the surprising hero of his tale. There is not much fighting in the book, despite what the movies may have shown.

Another moment that I love is from Chapter 3. They are about to cross the enormous Misty Mountains, and the dwarves with Gandalf and Bilbo stop at Elrond’s house, known as Rivendell in Lord of the Rings, but the Last Homely House in the Hobbit. Tolkien writes:

>“Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway. They stayed long in that good house, fourteen days at least, and they found it hard to leave. Bilbo would gladly have stopped there for ever and ever-even supposing a wish would have taken him right back to his hobbit-hole without trouble. Yet there is little to tell about their stay.”

Good times are not as dramatically interesting as struggle. As Tolstoy wrote to start Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Justification is a dramatic moment of conflict and change. Sanctification often gets lost because the changes are gradual and, like in Tolkien, it is not much to listen to. It is not as compelling a story over thanksgiving dinner how you are becoming a better person. Not many laugh lines.

Justification is a dramatic moment. The conversion experience on the mountain top. Paul on the side of the Damascus road. It is a climax of most stories. The lost sinner turns their life around. Bill Murray in Groundhog Day who goes from a super selfish weatherman to a giving person. Or Scrooge in any version of a Christmas carol. In fact, Bill Murray again in Scrooged.

What happens after the mountain top, after the conversion, it is not as dramatically interesting. You also can’t contain in the length of a movie.

A number of Christian traditions focus on Justification, on conversion. The mountaintop is the preemenent moment. Everything else is a shadow. What about the day after the mountain top?

The bible doesn’t end on the mountain top? The Bible goes on. Everything after the Gospels looks at this “what happens next?” question. The gospels themselves are filled with this what happens question. Our reading from John is a good example of this.

The section of John between the last supper and the betrayal of Judas is often referred to as the Farewell discourses. Jesus is saying goodbye to his friends. Jesus is trying to explain what has happened and what will happen. Chapter 17 is near the end and Jesus says this prayer:

> Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.

Being sanctified in truth is the process of sanctification, made possible by God’s grace. Sanctification means being made holy.

Holiness has a bit of a bum rap in the south. We have these phrases, “Holier than thou” or “sanctimonious.”

These, in fact, are terms used to separate people. The Bible is used as a form of social control to abuse others and keep them in line. As well, when people feel uncomfortable about someone’s kindness, they can throw sanctimonious at them so that they can feel better about themselves.

Holiness and sanctification is about being set aside, but it is about setting aside our hearts not the people in our lives. What happens after you turn your life around? What happens after you encounter or reencounter Jesus Christ? You can’t fast forward to heaven. In fact, if you do that, you miss out on the gift Christ has given you.

The kingdom of Heaven is here. That is what Jesus says again and again. In the midst of this broken world, there are vestiges of God’s grace and mercy and kingdom. What Jesus is pointing out in John 17 is what Bob Dylan will get to in his song, “You Gotta Serve Somebody.” It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

That’s it. Who are you serving with your life today?

Not what experience of God have you had?

No, who are you serving? Sanctification gives us a way to understand how to serve God continually. How to wake up each day to make the decision to follow Jesus, as the old hymn goes.

And it matters because there are stakes involved. The Christian faith is not just about a moment of conversion and then a life of coasting. No, we can turn away from God. That free will was given at our creation. As Paul writes in Colossians 1

21. And you, once being alienated and hostile in thought in wicked works,
22. now he has reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and blameless and without reproach (ἀνεγκλήτους) before him,
23. if indeed you continue in the faith, established and firm, and not being moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard, having been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, of which I, Paul, have become a attendant (διάκονος).

Continuing in the faith. That is the challenge and the joy. That is sanctification. Being made holy. Set apart by God.

And this is where we can get into trouble. From whom are we being set apart. Is holiness about separating Christian’s from others?

As Paul would say, by no means.  μη γενοιτο. Paul uses this a lot and it is closer to hell no than by no means. It is the strongest refutation possible.

In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul has this beautiful account of how

>in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.

But it doesn’t end there because reconciliation is not just about us but others. As Paul continues,

>So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God.

Holiness is not about us and them. As we talked about last week in Romans 3, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And Galatians 3, He says this in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Holiness is about the already and the not yet. Those who are reconciled to God and those who will be. We have a place in this, but we need examples.

The biggest example we have is the life of Jesus. This is our lodestar in the christian faith. Jesus did not separate himself from sinners but ate with sinners. He healed the sick. He walked among the lepers, the dirtiest people who could contaminate by their very presence. Sanctification doesn’t mean living a life different from Jesus. In fact, it means living more like Jesus. Spending more time with the people Jesus spent more time with.

The way to be established firm in our faith is to live it out. For faith is not to be just a head thing or a heart thing. John’s First Letter begins not with what we think or feel but what we see and what we have touched.
>We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life[^1]

The interior life matters but it is not all of our life. Jesus came to earth in a body. The Christian faith has always centered on bodies. One of the chief differences in the early church between Christians and other groups that claimed to follow Jesus had to do with their understanding of the body. Is the body good or bad. Some groups saw the body as inherently sinful. Christians held the body as holy because God came to us in a body. Jesus was touched and seen before he was heard. Before he preached, before he healed, before he rose again, he was touched and seen. Matthew 25 shows us how to touch and see Jesus today.

I think the best way to convince someone of faith is not through apologetics or rigorous argument, but offering a chance to touch and see Jesus through service. To give of yourself gets you outside of yourself and once you are outside of yourself you can start to receive grace in a new way.

Touching and seeing is also important for the Christian life.

Sanctification is about a faith lived out. This is how you are established and firm in the faith, as Paul said. Sanctification is about the reality that Christianity does not stop the moment you encounter Jesus. In many ways, that is the moment that it truly start. The mountaintop is not the climax of faith but the beginning. Justification is not the climax of faith but the beginning.

The old tag line, what would Jesus do, can be helpful. That would be one rule of faith. What would Jesus do? It is a guideline to follow when you don’t know what the best course of action should be.

John Wesley had three General rules that I find more helpful because they are more concrete.

First, do no harm. We start by making sure we aren’t currently in a state of harming our neighbor. If we have been saved by the blood of Jesus. If you realize you are forgiven by God, we start living for people beyond ourselves, and we have to start that by making sure we aren’t hurting anyone around us.

Second, do all the good you can. Not just some of the good. All of the good. You do it. Not someone else. It is not your neighbor’s job to love their neighbor. If you claim Jesus as Lord, it is yours.

Finally, follow the ordinances of God. This is an awkward, 18th century phrasing that some have paraphrased as “stay in love with God.” I don’t like the paraphrase because it is passive. The point is not to stay but do. Act. Give. Serve. Love. Share. Follow the ordinances of God means, worship, pray, serve, give, do these concrete things. John Wesley calls them the means of grace. We believe that God works in a myriad of ways, but also that God works through these specific ways and that we should not avoid them. In fact, we should do all we can to do them as much as we can.

Sanctification is not about earning salvation, it is about what we do after we receive it. How should we live? How is God in our life? How can we be established and firm? How does God sanctify us in truth? By living out God’s truth together.

If you do not have faith, may you try serving another. Trying touching and seeing before you believe. If you do, may you trying growing in faith, expanding your heart.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[^1]: 1 John 1:1


title: Show Us the Father

themes: holy-spirit trinity new-creation stewardship discipleship

text:
**Scripture:** Acts 2:1-4; John 14:8-17; Genesis 11:1-9; 1 Corinthians 12

> Pentecost sends the Spirit not merely for conversion but for transformation, so that the whole of our ordinary, everyday time is redeemed and given over to God rather than hoarded.

**Illustrations:** jewish-friends-shavuot, passover-wine-hungover-friend, tower-of-babel-reversal, multilingual-congregation, azusa-street-pentecostalism, peter-too-early-drunk, selling-ordinary-sales-pitch, restaurants-dishwashers-ratings, living-on-a-mountaintop, cant-be-half-pregnant, church-storm-damage-insurance

---

# June 8
## Pentecost
## Show us the Father
### Acts 2:1-4
### John 14:8-17

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. - Acts 2:1-4

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, but if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you. - John 14:8-17

Growing up in College Station, I had a number of friends who were Jewish. They celebrated Passover and Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah and those were the visible holidays. I had a friend who in middle school had too much Passover wine and like came to school hungover the day. And that was my memory as a kid. My friends didn't talk about celebrating Pentecost, the festival of weeks: Shavuot. It is the day to celebrate the handing of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai.

It is one of the three great pilgrimage days for Judaism. That is Passover, Sukkot (the festival of booths), and Shavuot, when all Israelites who were able were required to make the trip to Jerusalem. With the destruction of the second temple, 37 years after the death of Jesus, pilgrimages were no longer mandatory. This is why my friends growing up didn’t make a big deal about Shavuot, but it was a big deal at this time.

This is why people are in Jerusalem at Pentecost. This is why the disciples are in Jerusalem at Pentecost. They are there for a specific reason that, for Christians, becomes transformed through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

There's a lot of things we can talk about with Pentecost. The law of Moses was given at the first Pentecost. The grace of Jesus shared at the second.

It is an incredibly rich day. We also have kind of a reversal of the Tower of Babel. Whereas at Babel, in the book of Genesis, humans try and build this tower to touch God. God destroys it and scatters the people across the world and causes different languages so that people can't understand each other. At Pentecost, the people are drawn together. They can understand each other through the Holy Spirit. The tongues at Pentecost are not the speaking in tongues of a Pentecostal service. It's that when I speak English and Alina speaks Hungarian and Younee speaks Korean and Alexander speaks Spanish, we all understand each other. When we're speaking our languages, we comprehend each other; the translation is through the Spirit.
Instead of speaking in tongues being a separate thing and a misunderstood thing, it is a way to be fully understood, yet also fully be yourself. That's the power of it. You don't have to let go of yourself to communicate. You don't have to let go of your native language to share, to worship, to give. How amazing is that?

When you say Pentecost nowadays, it often connects with the Pentecostal tradition. A type of Protestantism, which has expanded around the globe, and continues to be the fastest growing. Pentecostalism came out of the Wesleyan movement, came out of the Methodist movement.

You can trace the revival at Azusa street in Los Angeles, where Pentecostalism was born, to Methodism. And again, the speaking in tongues. The works of the Spirit of Pentecostalism comes more from First Corinthians than it does from the day of Pentecost. But that tradition is here as well.
You have the disciples gathered together, unsure of what to do next, and then given a mission. Peter and the other disciples are given a mission. And Peter is offered the opportunity to preach the good news to a crowd that has been swaying and moving in erratic ways. So much so that people think that they're drunk. And Peter's argument why they're not drunk is because it's too early in the morning for people to be drunk.
Which most likely shows that Peter has not experienced a lot of drunks in his life, to think that 9am is going to stop an alcoholic from drinking.
In the text from the Gospel of John that I read, Jesus is talking about sending the Advocate, the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, to be with the disciples, to be with us.
But first Philip asks, “Lord, show us the Father.” And Jesus responds in a frustrating manner, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

Christian Pentecost is about the Holy Spirit, but it's also about the Trinity and about who God is. Trinity is not just a term for people going to seminary or academics. It is about the reality of who God is and who God is for us. That in Jesus we see the Father, and through the Spirit that was sent by the Father and the Son, we are able to see Jesus and know God the Father's love for us. And these three are one.
Jesus is God, the Father is God, the Spirit is God. They are not separate actors in this world. They are not separate agents in this world. The Spirit is sent at Pentecost not just for conversion, but transformation, so that people can follow the Son, see the Father, share the Spirit, so that their time can be transformed.

This is really what I want to hone in on today: this question of time and this language of time. In the Christian calendar, the longest season of the year is called ordinary time.
Ordinary time covers everything from today, Pentecost, all the way to the first Sunday in Advent, which is November 30th this year. It is 24 weeks.
Sometimes it's longer. This year it is 24 weeks.

And the weeks are designated after Pentecost, the third week after Pentecost, the sixth week after Pentecost, the 19th week after Pentecost.
Advent sets in motion the beginning of the Christian year. And we have this kind of dramatic up and down of Advent and then Christmas and then Epiphany and then Lent and then Easter. And it's just like boom, boom, boom, boom, banger, banger, banger, banger. And then we are left with ordinary time.

Some of you have had careers in sales and you can probably imagine what it would be like to sell something that is called ordinary.
“Hey, Mr. Smith. Yeah, I'm just call and I got something for you. I think you're gonna really love it. It is ordinary.”
We usually don't want to buy something that's ordinary. We usually don't want to do something that's ordinary. We want to think about what we're doing as extraordinary. When we're looking at restaurants in which to eat, most of us are not drawn to the three out of five star restaurant that is ordinary. When we're looking at which dishwasher to buy, we don't think, oh, I don't know, what Wirecutter said is just too good for us. We need to get the one on the bottom. We need to get the two star one. We need to get the ordinary one, not the best.

What is the deal with the Christian faith naming half of the year as ordinary. What it comes down to is truthfulness. There's a truthfulness in naming this time as ordinary. Mountaintop experiences are lovely. But have you ever tried to live on a mountaintop? It is challenging. Mountains are exposed to really heavy weather events. Storms come so fast on the mountains, you gotta go down the mountain to live.

What Pentecost is trying to show us and what Jesus is trying to say in John 14, in the sending of the Holy Spirit, is that God has called us to new life. God has saved us, not for the mountaintops, but for the ordinary, for the everyday, for living our lives right where we are in new and transformed ways.

Pentecost is about how you get up in the morning, what you do after you wake up, how you drive to work, how you go to your appointments, how you call your family, how you eat your meals, how you treat your neighbors, how you deal with your finances, how you relax in the afternoons, how you plan your trips, how you spend your time volunteering, how you give to your church, how you give to things that matter to you?
If Jesus Christ saved you, he saved all of you, or he saved none of you. I've never been pregnant. Just, you know, going to confess that to people. But one of the aspects of pregnancy is that you can't be half pregnant. There's no partial. Nobody can be kinda pregnant.
And I think a lot of times Christians try to be kinda saved, kinda loved by God, kinda forgiven. You know, it's good to be a part of a church. It's good to feel good and feel included. But there may be some days when you think, “oh man, are you asking a lot, Jesus.”
The answer is yes. Jesus asks a lot. Jesus also gives a lot. We are not alone. If our time has not been redeemed, if our time is not in the process of being redeemed, we're only kind of saved.
And I'm not saying if you're kind of saved, God isn't going to save you or love you. The real issue is: what are you doing right now? How are you living right now? An amazing gift has been offered to you. Are you using it? Or are you putting it in the storehouse? Are you wasting it?

Christ has offered his life for you and offered a new way of life, not as a totalitarian dictator ordering you to do such and such, but that we all have an opportunity, through the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ, to live into Christ's new creation and new kingdom.

This is why the Spirit was sent at Pentecost. This is the opportunity we are all given. And it impacts all of our time. It impacts the mountaintop experiences.
It impacts the stories we like to tell about funny things we've seen or experiences we've had. It also impacts the stuff we don't talk about with others. It impacts how we do our taxes. It impacts how we plan for our retirement or live into our retirement. It impacts all of these things. There's grace in the midst of it. But don't leave the blessings of God aside because you want to cling to the expectations of the world. There are blessings too manifold to be described in serving, in giving, in sacrificing.

Don't build storehouses for your stuff, for your things when you can share it. Saving up for a rainy day when the rain is falling around you. The rains a few weeks ago hit the church hard. We had an AC unit go out, the internet going out, and a lot of water get in the building which is going to take a lot of money to remedy. Well, we saved a little for it and is going to hit harder than that. And insurance for churches has gone insane the past few years so that the only insurance we could get had $100,000 deductible. The summer is usually a down season in giving and we need your support in this time because challenges keep coming. We also need your time.

Don't build storehouses for your time when you can give it. An hour given for others is an hour sanctified. Doing something different shows that your life is different and your life can be different today.

New life is offered this day. The spirit of fire has descended receive it. You are loved.
You are forgiven. Now accept it. Seek it. If you don't understand, seek me out. Talk to me. Talk to Pastor Brenda. God has offered new life for you.
This is a new day. What used to be ordinary and boring has been transformed. This new ordinary, this Christian ordinary, is a life of vibrancy and sacrifice every day in all that we do. Because Christ has offered himself for you.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.


title: Symbols and Signs

themes: signs-and-symbols non-judgment love-of-neighbor kingdom-politics wesleyan-general-rules discernment false-messiahs

text:
**Scripture:** Luke 21:5-8; Isaiah 12:1-6; Judges 12:5-6; Matthew 12:38-40

> Jesus refuses to give us signs for predicting the future or for sorting insiders from outsiders, and instead, through the Holy Spirit, the church, and the Wesleyan General Rules, calls us to stop judging and simply love our neighbor now.

**Illustrations:** aggie-12th-man, aggie-symbols, grandfather-john-huebel, reading-to-preschoolers, this-little-light-of-mine, augustine-vestiges-footprints, shibboleth-jordan, political-shibboleths, sign-of-jonah

---

# November 16, 2025
## Symbols and Signs
## Isaiah 12      Luke 21:5-8

You will say on that day:
“I will give thanks to you, O Lord,
    for though you were angry with me,
your anger turned away,
    and you comforted me.
Surely God is my salvation;
    I will trust and will not be afraid,
for the Lord is my strength and my might;
    he has become my salvation.”
With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say on that day:
“Give thanks to the Lord;
    call on his name;
make known his deeds among the nations;
    proclaim that his name is exalted.
Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously;
    let this be known in all the earth.
Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion,
    for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.” - Isaiah 12

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”
They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them. - Luke 21:5-8

Symbols are very evocative. I grew up in College Station, Texas, right by Texas A&M University.

Hook 'em.

And there's a lot of symbols at A&M. Some of you are Aggies and you went through all of that. One of the first symbols they teach you about is the 12th man.
Unlike for the Seattle Seahawks, the 12th man was a real person,

> On Jan. 2, 1922, the heavily outgunned Texas A&M football team was facing the top-ranked Centre College Praying Colonels in the Dixie Classic in Dallas. E. King Gill, an Aggie basketball player and former member of the football team, was up in the press box helping reporters identify players on the field below.

>The Aggies found themselves plagued by injuries, and their reserves dwindled with every play. As Texas A&M Coach Dana X. Bible looked across his rapidly emptying bench, he suddenly remembered that Gill was in the stands.

>Bible waved Gill down to the sideline and told him to suit up. Gill ran under the bleachers and put on the uniform of injured running back Heine Weir, who had been knocked out of the game in the first quarter.

>Gill returned to the sideline, where he stood ready to play for the entirety of the game in case the 11 men on the field needed assistance. This earned him the title of "12th Man." When the last play was run, the Aggies found that they had pulled off one of the greatest upsets in college football history, winning the game 22-14. And Gill remained standing, the only player left on the team’s bench.

Today, the 12th man is a symbol of the Aggie fans themselves, they're not just cheering on their team, they are ready to go in to the game when called for.
There's a lot of other symbols at A&M: there is the century tree, the Aggie ring. Reveille. My grandfather, John Huebel, graduated from A&M in 1940. So he was a student the last and only time A&M won a national championship.

Aggie symbols help Aggie’s deepen the relationship with the university but also with each other: symbols like the Aggie ring, help them recognize other Aggie's in the wild.

A lot of life is filled with symbols, active symbols that deepen our understanding of places and locations. The Bible is filled with symbols, stories with extra meanings, stories with meanings in which you can go deeper.

People have been over-interpreting the Bible for centuries, taking a word here and turning it into a 600-page treatise. Sometimes the symbol is thick enough for that, sometimes it's not. What's interesting about symbols that I wouldn't know if I didn't read Bible stories to three, four, and five-year-olds twice a week, is that little kids aren't really great with symbols. Kids aren't wonderful with metaphorical language.

Tell them the story about Noah's ark and they are there for it. Tell them the story about the wise man who built a house up on a rock and they'll think about the rock and the storm, but the extra level that Jesus is teaching in that moment isn’t there. They can sing “This little light of mine.” But not make the leap to being light:

At some point in our development, we begin to look for signs and symbols. Symbols go from being unimportant to extremely important. Metaphors become important. Milestones in the literal sense of stones that mark the miles of our path to let us know that we are going the right way.

## Gospel
In our Gospel text, the signs and symbols that Jesus is speaking of here is for a sign that the temple will be thrown down.
A warning sign that something cataclysmic is about to happen. And Jesus says there's not going to be one guys; it is going to happen before you realize it. But there will be people who claim they know. There will be people who act like a sign, who act like a symbol. Beware of them. Beware of them.

Jesus doesn't offer us a faith without signs. Again, he uses symbolic language over and over again. The parables are filled with symbolic language. The Sermon on the Mount is filled with symbolic language, metaphorical language.
Jesus isn't saying that our future is bad, but that it is going to be different from what we expect. We each have signs and symbols in our own lives that let us know how we are doing, signs like maybe our bank account, our retirement account, calls from our children, presents at Christmas, a raise, a commendation, signs that mark that we are going on the right track.
These are not the signs of the kingdom of heaven, and this is what Jesus is saying.

The kingdom of heaven marks a radical departure. It is going to have different signs, but we should not be looking for them. They are not going to help us predict what is to come.

Jesus says at one point, "Look for the sign of Jonah." This is to predict Christ's death and resurrection. It is confusing in this it only is understandable retrospectively. That's what Jesus offers you:, symbols that we will understand retrospectively, we will understand by looking back, which means we need to look back.

We don't need to live looking back. We don't need to live in the past, in the suffocating world of nostalgia, but we need to be able to look back, to see how God has moved in our life, to see the symbols of God's movement so that we can be affirmed in where we are today.

St. Augustine would talk about vestiges of the Trinity throughout Scripture, and throughout our life. A vestige, vestigium in Latin means footprint. The footprints in the sand. That's another way to see the symbol of God present and alive, like footprints in the sand that we glimpse, and then is blown away by time, by weather, by events.
A footprint can be destroyed by the tide coming in, by the wind blowing it off, by a rainstorm, but also by another person stepping in it or kicking it over. That doesn't mean we didn't see it. We hold onto these vestiges by faith. Our tradition offers us vestiges throughout history, holy people who have lived holy lives that are possible for us because of faith, because their holiness, their specialness is not because they were special, but because God was in them. And that same God can be in us. That same God is in us.

Signs help us mark a way, but they also mark other people as safe or unsafe. In the book of Judges, there is a strange passage about signs for people.

>And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not pronounce it correctly.

A shibboleth is a phrase used to test if someone is in the right group with you or if they are outside of the group. We all do it, consciously or subconsciously. I do it with saying hook ‘em horns. Aggies do it with gig ‘em.

Christians do it a lot. For most of us, unfortunately, when you meet someone who says they are Christian, we might think to ourselves: Are you the good kind of Christian or the bad kind of Christian? And depending on what group you’re in, your definition of good Christian and bad Christian is going to be different. Especially today with the hyperpolarization of politics that make most everything, even religion, downstream of politics. A shibboleth is often who you voted for.

Jesus, though, should make all of us uncomfortable. Jesus is not apolitical, he just follows the politics of the kingdom of God, which is a radically different politics than any human kingdom or nation or state. Jesus never calls his followers to set into law the politics of the kingdom of God, but to practice them here and now in the midst of the world. And this is why Jesus is dissmissive of signs of the future destruction of the temple. It is a dismissal of the signs of whether other people around us are in the in-group or the out-group.

Jesus tells us not to judge others in the specific way of not marking good christians from bad christians. As well, of not marking people as deserving of mercy or undeserving of mercy.

When Jesus tells us not to judge others, what is implied there is that we should instead love them. Love them not because they deserve it. Love them, especially when they don’t deserve it. We should see what is ours as theirs. Nor should we look for signs in how they behave, what they say, what they look like, where they’re from.

When we look at other passages of the Bible, Christians have often taken the challenging words of the Sermon on the Mount and the other teachings of Jesus that commend us to follow the way of the kingdom of God now as ideals that are impossible. Jesus never says that they are possible on our own. Every Christian will fail on his or her own. We need the Holy Spirit. We need the church, each other. The church is an attempt to live into God’s call Forrest now together. To not over interpret the future, to not over interpret the boundaries of who is included in God’s love, but to proclaim mercy, grace, love: to proclaim it and live it.

Let us not wait for a sign to love our neighbor. For that is what the Pharisees are getting at. They are looking to signs for the future as a way to avoid loving the neighbors in our midst. Jesus knows that and not only tells us to live another way. He shows us and he gives us the tools to do so.

In the Methodist tradition, we have a set of General rules to guide a life. Rules like ruler not rules like no speeding.

1. First, do no harm. Before we know what we should do, we should make sure we are not currently harming anyone. The ends do not justify the meeting.
2. Second, do all the good you can. Not all the good, but what you were able to do. Through prayer, discernment, and Christian conversation, we discern what all we can is. For most of us, unfortunately, it is more than we are currently doing. The point is not to murder our self with good works, but to realize that our life has been blessed with an amazing gift and it is an honor to serve others. Each of us, wherever we are in our life, has been given this gift and we should not let that gift go to waste.
3. Finally, to follow the ordinances of God to do the things God tells us to do m: love our neighbor, pray, for those who persecuted us, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, worship together, come to communion, pray together, converse as Christians, fast, give. three simple rules.

Jesus doesn’t make signs for us to follow, but he helps us in how to live as children of God today. As we move toward the holidays, may all your family and personal traditions move you towards loving your neighbor and loving your God. May you give thanks to the Lord.

In the name of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


title: The Bible

themes: scripture-interpretation biblical-authority humility means-of-grace scripture-reading

text:
**Scripture:** 2 Timothy 3:14-17; Luke 14:7-14; John 21:25; Genesis 32:24-30

> The Bible is neither a dictated text to be read with a single unchallengeable interpretation nor a buffet to pick from at will, but a gift and a means of grace to be received humbly and interpreted together through love of God and neighbor.

**Illustrations:** bible-nursery-song, can-opener-toilet-brush, quran-dictation, jefferson-bible, wedding-banquet-host, charlie-proverbs-class, luther-swaddling-clothes, mary-vs-jacob-wrestling, augustine-love-rule, covenant-bible-window

---

# September 7, 2025
## The Bible
## 2 Timothy 3:14-17	Luke 14:7-14

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have known sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. - 2 Timothy 3:14-17

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”  - Luke 14:7-14

![](attachments/Bible.17305e9008cc481796fe7e0abec23471.jpg)
There's an old children's nursery song that goes

>the b i b l e. Yes. That's the book for me. I stand alone on the word of God, the b i b l e. Bible.

Some of you may have learned this. Some of you may have not, but the kind of idea of the Bible here has shaped much of our imagination.

Fare warning, I am about to get word-nerdy on you, but I feel like Jesus affirms word nerds in that he is the word made flesh, but you have been warned.

Part of the challenge in talking about the Bible is that we are taught to see the word Bible as a title. Many of us take this for granted when it's just not the case. Bible comes from Biblion which means book.

And saying scripture isn't much better. Scripture is writing in Latin. Scripture follows a Latin etymology whereas Bible follows a Greek etymology.

We can get even more confusing when we think about this passage from second Timothy three where the author writes

 all scripture is god breathed or inspired.

 The scripture referred to here is entirely what we now call the Old Testament. The author of Timothy is not referring to what we call the Bible, the holy scripture. The list of canonical biblical books wasn’t finalized until the middle of the fourth century.

This doesn’t even get to the way the Bible has been used against itself. How do we see the Bible as the word of God in 2025?

## Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on the stained glass windows at covenant with the Bible. It's the last in the first series of gifts of God to us.
We even have this biblical quotation. From second Timothy

>All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

Scripture is inspired, it is also useful. In some ways, calling it useful feels a bit of a let down. A can opener is useful. A toilet brush, things of that nature.

Of what use is the Bible for us?

It is useful for teaching, for correction, for training in justice and equipping the people of God.

I think it's important when we talk about the Christian scriptures, what we call the Bible, we understand it as a library of holy texts that have been passed down to us through secret tradition, which by faith we read as inspired by God. This library of texts that is filled with different genres, different eras, different languages. This library of holy writings is different from the holy texts of other religions in the world. Most especially here, the Quran of Islam.
The claim of the Quran is that it was the words of the angel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed without any changes. It is a transcription. It is not inspired by God. It is dictated by God.

There isn’t a great interpretative tradition to the Quran like there is for Judaism and Christianity, and even Buddhism, because there is far less ambiguity about the meaning of the text. The Quran says it. Muslims believe it. That settles it.

There are two great ways to misread the Bible. One is to read it as if it were the Quran, as if it were dictated by the angel Gibreel to the prophet over 23 years.

The other great error is to read the bible à la carte, or what I like to call the Bible Buffet; to find what we like, to discard what we don't like. The principle example of this is the Thomas Jefferson Bible, where Jefferson cut out all the parts of the Gospels he didn’t like or want to deal with anymore.

Both of these errors are false, and both bring us away from who God is and who God is revealed to be in the holy scriptures.

This gets us to our gospel reading for today. Jesus gives the parable of the wedding feast.

>When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

I want us to think about ourselves as the host.  Who do we seat in the place of honor of biblical authority? One temptation is to seat at the place of honor the interpretation of the Bible we're most comfortable with and to declare that inspired by God. When people talk about the literal meaning of the Bible, most of the time they're not talking about the letters themselves, which is what literal means. Instead, it is a specific interpretation that cannot be challenged. It's still interpretation, but the point of it is that you can't challenge it. And there's still metaphor. There's still typology going on. It's usually a much more metaphorical reading of the Sermon on the Mount and a much more direct reading of passages in Paul and Leviticus and instructions about the body. People who claim a literal interpretation don’t sell all their possessions to follow Jesus.
But we don't need to delve too much into that.

So this is one tempting reading. The other temptation is to read the bible à la carte. The one we put in the place of honor is ourselves. We put ourselves in the place of honor because we are the ones who choose. We're the ones who pick. This is also an error and destructive.

So we have these two errors that function as the main errors of traditional and progressive Christianity, respectively. The traditionalist error has a fixation on one reading of scripture in contradiction to even the scriptural text itself. And the progressive error is an à la carte reading of Scripture that passes up uncomfortable passages.

 I don't compare these two temptations in order to claim that I have the true third way of reading the Bible without error. I also make errors in my reading of Scriptures. This is the principal reason to read Scripture together. On my own, I make a lot more errors. On your own, you make a lot more errors. One of the joys of reading the Bible together is that we don't just read it with the people in the room, but with the whole history of interpretation.

For example, Charlie's proverbs class is coming up. You all should know that Charlie does so much research on the Book of a Bible that he's going to be teaching. So much of the background, and all these details. Charlie doesn't have the final word on the biblical text. God bless him. Neither do I, neither to you. The Bible is a gift, beyond our capacity and control. But it is also a gift that is within our capacity to know, to connect. We read the Bible based on our own experiences in the past of the Bible. Based on how our parents talked about it or our first adult experiences in face. Sometimes it can feel like work and not very useful.

You may think to yourself, “Pastor Wilson, I don't know if I really want to read the Bible. I just kind of want to do a devotional that tells me what I should think.”

Now, I understand that there are seasons of all of our lives where we are just done, and we've got no capacity to think. The Bible is not work. You are not being graded. The Bible is a gift. It's a gift of life for us. Sometimes it is complicated. Martin Luther said, it is the swaddling clothes in which we find the baby Jesus. The swaddling clothes, I imagine, were pretty dirty, but they held the greatest of gifts.

Near the end of the Gospel of John, John says that if all the actions of Jesus were written down, it would fill up all the books in all the world. But these were written down so that we might have life abundant. They were written down for life.

You don’t have to go to seminary to lead a Bible class at Covenant. We could really use more opportunities to dig into the strange new world of the Bible where life is offered to us all. If that might a possibility for you, please let me know. Maybe on Sunday morning during spiritual formation, or another night during the week. The Bible is a gift to share. The more we read it together, the more we can embody God’s love found there.

I want to end today in a quick primer of how to read the Bible as the word of God, not as the Quran or the Bible Buffet.

The first thing to do is to admit that there are easy parts of the Bible to interpret and difficult parts of the Bible to interpret. Sections that are challenging. If we let the text speak to us, if we let the words speak to us, they challenge us. If we don't let the text speak, if we use someone else's reading, or if we ignore it, it's not challenging. That's why people fall into these traps, because it's not a challenging way. They don't want to be challenged.

Thing's in this life worth doing are worth struggling for, and meeting God is worth struggling for. Sometimes reading the Bible feels like sitting at the feet of Jesus, like Mary. Other times it feels like Jacob wrestling with the angel, wrestling all night. And that is okay? It doesn't have to be easy. The whole thing doesn't have to be easy. But we should interpret the hard passages through the easy passages, stuff that makes the most sense to us. You use that as our foundation to read the other sections. Another rule comes from St. Augustine. He says that we should read the Bible with the love Commandments in mind: love of God and love of neighbor. We read a passage and ask ourselves, where is the love of God here? Where is the love of neighbor here?

When you come into this holy place and see this window, may you remember that the Bible is a gift but reading the Bible is a habit, a practice, a means of grace. The word of God is not limited by our preconceptions of it. Like in the parable, we should place ourselves at the end of the table and read the Bible with humility. Receive not order. Listen not dictate. Seek and we will find.

In the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.


title: The Birth of Jesus

themes: incarnation second-coming readiness-watchfulness prayer generosity kingdom-of-god

text:
**Scripture:** Luke 12:32-40; Isaiah 11:1-6; John 3:16; Ephesians 6:10-18

> Because the incarnation marks God's unconditional 'yes' and Christ will return at an unexpected hour, believers should live ready now by praying for what they truly desire, serving their neighbors, and giving away the possessions that weigh them down from the heavenly kingdom already given.

**Illustrations:** stained-glass-nativity-window, shelf-stable-advent-calendars, knowing-the-hour-set-an-alarm, paths-painted-with-fake-gold, prayer-is-throwing-up-to-god, mccabe-distractions-sinking-ships, king-ralph-heir-to-england, bezos-70-billion-inheritance, wipe-dust-off-shoes

---

# August 10, 2025
## The Birth of Jesus
## Isaiah 11:1-6	Luke 12:32-40

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
    and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
    the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
    the spirit of counsel and might,
    the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see
    or decide by what his ears hear,
but with righteousness he shall judge for the poor
    and decide with equity for the oppressed of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
    and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist
    and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
The wolf shall live with the lamb;
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
- Isaiah 11:1-6

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
“Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night or near dawn and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.

“But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
- Luke 12:32-40
![](attachments/Nativity.3fe63195692e495695b8476c92e05797.jpg)

Jesus was not born on December 25. It's the day we celebrate the incarnation of Jesus. It is not Jesus's birthday. Jesus's birthday could have been today. Birthdays weren't a big deal in Israel, at the time of Jesus. Families didn't celebrate birthdays. The Romans did but Jews did not.

I love the season of Christmas. I love Christmas Eve. I love these celebrations. I love the lights and the carols, but we need not forget about the birth of Jesus in August.

We are going to continue our series on the Stained Glass Windows at Covenant. In today's window, there is a manger signifying the birth of Jesus, the incarnation of God, that God is with us.

In our passage from Isaiah, there is a beautiful messianic text preparing us for Jesus. The passage from Luke is a little different. There's a very important concept going on here about the time of Jesus' return. A concept which has everything to do with Jesus' birth.

In the Church Calendar, the season before Christmas is called Advent. It's one of those seasons that has been almost completely secularized in that every object imaginable has its own advent calendar. They don't actually follow Advent, though. For instance, this year, Advent starts on November 30th. There's not a single Advent calendar for sale that will start on November 30th. They want the products to be shelf stable so that they can sell their whiskey advent calendar this year and next year and the next year, so they all start on December 1st.

During advent, we prepare for the second coming of Jesus by remember our preparations for the first coming of Jesus.  Advent means to come. And this is where there have been a lot of debates over the years among Christians. When is Jesus Christ going to come again? When will the world end? When is revelation going to happen?

The funny thing for me is that so many seem to ignore the explicit words of Jesus by asking these questions again and again. Our Gospel reading for today explains everything.

 If the owner of the house had known of what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. The Son of Man is coming at an hour that you do not expect. If you knew the time and the hour, you would simply go to sleep and set an alarm and then wake up, right? If you know that Jesus is gonna come back next Tuesday, you might live differently today. Maybe there are some things you really want to do and you can get that out of the way, and then seek mercy.

But if you don't know when Jesus is going to come, you should live right now as if he's going to come at any time. Really. The point is: why waste your time living the life of destruction.

Because it is tempting, that is why. It seems good. It looks good. There are paths painted with fake gold that seem like the best way to live, but they tear us apart from our community, from our neighbors, from our families, from our God, from our selves.

When we cling to harming our neighbor, we cling to lies. To break this cycle, this is why Jesus came to begin with. This is why a shoot came out from the stump of Jesse where a branch grew out in its roots, because we, humans, were clinging so tightly to our lies.

The birth of Christ marks the yes of God for us. God is saying yes to you. Unconditionally. The conditions are on our part, not on God's. As John writes in his gospel, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.”

The birth of Christ is part one of the solution to the problem of sin. The opportunity of reconciliation with God, and among people. We are the ones, though, that can put up barriers between God and ourselves. We're the ones who put up barriers between each other. It's not easy. We have to start, person by person. We have to start neighbor by neighbor.

The birth of Christ represents the encounter of the second person of the Trinity with the world, the creation, which he spoken into existence. How are we going to respond to that encounter? Are we going to be dressed for action and have our lamps lit? Are we going to be ready to love our neighbors? Ready to worship our God, ready to pray? Ready to serve? Ready to give?

I want to talk about those three ways of being dressed for action First, be ready to pray. There are a number of ways to pray. The most important thing is to do it. I have a teacher who used to tell me, prayer is like throwing up to God. You just put it all out there; let go of self-consciousness. God sees all anyway. If we can pray in an intercessory manner, we can pray about specific things.

>But when we pray to God, the very prayer we send forth makes us intimate with Him, inasmuch as our soul is raised up to God and converses with Him in spiritual affection, and adores Him in spirit and truth.

We can pray following the armor of God and Ephesians 6, we can pray following the Lord's prayer. There are many patterns to prayer that we can follow, but even when we follow a pattern, many of us are concerned about distractions. As Herbert McCabe says,

>People often complain of “distractions” during prayer. Their mind goes wandering off on to other things. This is nearly always due to praying for something you do not really much want; you just think it would be proper and respectable and “religious” to want it. So you pray high-mindedly for big but distant things like peace in Northern Ireland or you pray that your aunt will get better from the flu–when in fact you do not much care about these things; perhaps you ought to, but you don’t. And so your prayer is rapidly invaded by distractions arising from what you really do want–promotion at work, let us say. Distractions are nearly always your real wants breaking in on your prayer for edifying but bogus wants. If you are distracted, trace your distraction back to the real desires it comes from and pray about these. When you are praying for what you really want you will not be distracted. People on sinking ships do not complain of distractions during their prayer.[^1]

We start praying with what we actually desire, not what we think we should desire. Prayer is not a posture or a performance, but the presence of God. Being ready for action is longing for that presence now.

Next, we should be dressed for action with service. This is another thing Jesus did in his life, he served people, he healed people, he cared for people. Not everyone. Jesus wasn't a maximalist. Sometimes he left places. He told his disciples. "If you are not welcome, wipe the dust off your shoes. move on. But do something beyond yourself. Be dressed for action, not to justify your sins, but to draw you closer to God. Find a way to serve and even if you're busy. There are times and there are ways. And if you want to talk about it, I am always available.

Finally to give as Jesus starts this passage, "Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

We have been given a kingdom. If tomorrow, you get a letter that you're the next heir to England, like John Goodman movie, “King Ralph,” You're the long lost heir, and you're about to inherit. Like, King, how much of your stuff are you gonna take with you to Buckingham Palace? Really? Or you find out that Jeff Bezos just left you $70 billion. What of your current house are you really bringing with you?

Jesus says that we have already been given a kingdom. It is yours now. Not a worldly kingdom, glitzy and golden, but a heavenly one, directly connected to our future with God. Giving what we have now is a measure of living into the kingdom. Because we just don’t need all the stuff. And it weighs us down. Worry about our things keeps us from God and from our neighbor. Worry about our future keeps us from God and from our neighbor. Let us be dressed for action through our gifts.

The birth of Christ began a new relationship between God and the world God created. We can reflect and pray and serve and give in response to it all through the year. Every time we enter this holy space, may this window remind us of God’s great gift for us, and the opportunity to respond made possible through God’s grace.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[^1]: Herbert McCabe, God, Christ, and Us, p. 8


title: The Calling and the Called

themes: vocation-and-calling assurance-of-salvation methodist-history identity-in-christ anointing-at-bethany

text:
**Scripture:** Luke 4:14-21; Nehemiah 8:8-10; Isaiah 61:1-2

> True Christian calling flows not from career, success, or ability but from the prior assurance of God's love, which precedes and grounds our purpose—as shown in Jesus's prophetic anointing and in John Wesley's journey from duty to a heart strangely warmed.

**Illustrations:** wesley-preacher-family, susanna-samuel-amen-quarrel, glorious-revolution-1688, jane-austen-rectors, oxford-holy-club, galen-methodist-insult, wesley-georgia-failure, moravians-storm-ship, peter-bohler-conversations, aldersgate-heart-warmed, nehemiah-structural-engineer

---

# January 26, 2025
## The Calling and the Called
### Nehemiah 8:8-10
### Luke 4:14-21

So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. Then he said to them, “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord, and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”  - Nehemiah 8:8-10

Then Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding region. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
>“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
     because he has anointed me
    to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
    to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” - Luke 4:14-21

You have entered a United Methodist Church this morning. The history of the church connects deeply to this biblical understanding of calling which we find in Luke and in Nehemiah. God has worked throughout history and to ignore that history is to ignore the workings of God. History is particular, not general. This church and tradition has a particular history of calling.

To get to that history, I need to talk about John Wesley.

Wesley was the son of a preacher who was son of a preacher. His mother was a granddaughter of an even more famous preacher. It was the family business. John's older brother, Samuel, was also a preacher. His young brother, Charles, was also a preacher.
In the early 18th century, Anglican priests were not as wealthy as they would be during the time of the regency and Jane Austin novels, (when girls wanted to marry a nice rector with a good pension) but they had a distinct class position in society which allowed them to be educated at a much higher rate than other people.
John spent the first years his life in Epworth, a village in the north of England, mostly being raised by his mother. His father was often off to London or busy with his studies. His mother and father had an interesting relationship that had to do with British history.

In 1688, the King of England, James II, had fled after an army landed from the Netherlands. It's described as the glorious revolution, but it was an invasion. The Dutch had beaten England in two wars over the past 50 years. And then they just took over the country. William, the Prince of Orange, became King William III. He had some English blood going back a little bit, but the rightful king was James and James never abdicated the throne, he fled an invading army.

This was a very important point for some people because they had made a promise to King James. They may not have liked him very much, but they made a promise to him in the name of God, and they felt that if they went against that promise, they'd be going against God.

Susanna, John's mother, was one such person. She felt that she couldn't pledge support for King William because she had already pledged support for King James.

The biggest fight John’s parents, Samuel and Susanna, had was about the king. Susanna didn't pray Amen after Samuel lifted a prayer to the king's health. They didn't talk to each other for a week after that night. This is the household where John was raised.
His mother was very well read. She pushed him continually. The letters to his mother are very intriguing and insightful and there is interesting theology going on with Susanna. She is not just regurgitating what other people tell her, but thinking deeply about what it means to believe in God, to follow God, to pursue God, and to raise her children to do so.
John soon goes off to boarding school, and ends up at Christ Church, Oxford, not quite sure what he is going to do with his life. John was very proficient in Greek and Latin and logic and he stayed on at Oxford as a tutor at Lincoln College. He had to be ordained to do so and for that as much as any reason he received Holy Orders.

This was about the time his younger brother, Charles, came to Oxford. Now, Charles had a slightly different mindset than John had had. He was a little more social and willing to make friends with people. John was a little more of a stick in the mud. If you were going to have a beer with one of the Wesley brothers, it would definitely be Charles.
Charles had made some friends at Oxford and they were trying to figure out what it would mean to follow Jesus in Oxford, England in the 18th Century. To help them all, Charles remembered that he had someone he really respected who was living in Oxford and that was his brother John. And so John was invited into the group.
John talked with the friends and they decided together that they should meet regularly and share about what God was doing in their life. They didn't create this form of discipleship. It was a mishmash of a few different religious movements, they kind of mishmash a few different movements, but they honed in on it. They put theories into practice. They didn’t wait around to help others. They went ahead and started to live a Christian life right where they were. The called it the Holy Club.

This is when they are first accused of being Methodists. A Methodist was an insult that went back to classic antiquity. It had to do with ancient medicine. The most famous ancient doctor was Galen. And Galen had a very specific view about what kind of person could be a doctor. The Methodists were a rival medical school and they had a different view. They thought anyone could be a doctor if they were trained in a certain way.  They followed a certain method during insult. This is the crux of the insult.
“You guys are Methodists. You think anybody can be a Christian.”
I mean, they were already visiting folks in prison. They were already spending their time giving to the poor instead of going to the drinking houses. They didn’t separate who was worthy to follow Jesus and who wasn’t.
And so instead of being insulted by this name, they took it on.
“Sure, we're Methodists. We believe that God loves everybody and we believe that we need to respond to God's love diligently, studious, methodically. We don't need to waste our calling.”

Though at this point, for John, God’s love and God’s calling was still kind of distant. He was more about duty. He was teaching at Oxford. He would preach every once in a while. He would administer holy communion every once in a while, more out of a duty than a calling.
The first real calling he had was when he met James Oglethorpe and went to Georgia. He felt like he was called to convert the Native Americans in Georgia.
And that calling totally failed. I mean, he barely met any Native Americans first of all when he was in Georgia. Second, he managed to have everybody in the colony hate him. He was arrested for libel after refusing to serve communion to a lady who got married to someone else. He basically fled the colony in which he thought he had been called. The situation didn't really work.

John got back to England. He was still unsure about what to do and he ran into a man who had known the people he had been on the boat with. Now, one of the more profound experiences of his life was the boat over from England to Georgia. And there had been this great storm and
John thought he was gonna die. He had never experienced anything like it. He was scared. There were people who were praying and singing hymns in the midst of the storm. And he thought to himself, what do they have that I lack? It was a group of Moravians.
When he got back to England, he met another Moravian, who was also on his way to the New world. This man was named Peter Bohler. Bohler and Wesley had these long conversations over many days and John was stunned by this man's faith, by his striving for his faith,  by his confidence in God's love, by his assurance of faith.
And so then, at the end of May, John is going to evening prayer at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. He goes to a society meeting right off of Aldersgate Street, which is this road right next to St. Paul’s, and he hears a reading from Martin Luther's Preface to the Letter of the Romans.

John Wesley wrote that he left the society meeting a changed person. In his language, my heart was strangely warmed. I felt that I, even I, was loved by God.
Soon after that, the Methodist movement expanded across England and Wales, then Ireland and North America, then the rest of the world.
At one point the Methodist denomination was the second largest in the world. It was the largest in the United States. It still is significant. The Methodists, though, started splitting off in 1816 and there have been off shoots ever since.

Quantitative assessment is not a measurement of a tradition's efficacy. That is, the largest body is not the most true or best.

The question, really, is of your heart. It's a one of one thing. Has God reached you? And I relay this history of Methodism to look at this text from Luke and from Nehemiah with a concrete understanding of calling.

The way we use calling today is so often connected with career, with externalities. We see Nehemiah, he is called to rebuild the temple. It is a more relatable calling. Especially if you are an engineer. Nehemiah really could be the patron saint of Structural Engineers, but this is not the case with Jesus, that's not what's going on here in this calling of Jesus. He claims the mantle of the prophet:

>“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
     because he has anointed me
    to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
    to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

This is what assurance is. Assurance is this theological concept that is an understanding that God's love reaches even to me. God's love reaches even to you. For some of us this may not be a challenge. They’re like, of course God loves us, but others may feel unlovable at times. And here at this juncture, it is important to say, know that you are loved.

As well, the spirit of the Lord is upon you for a purpose. Purpose comes after assurance. We can also be living into the purpose God has for us from before we're even aware of it. This is one of the things the Methodist movement really points out.

The holy club, John and Charles' friends meeting together in Oxford, visiting the imprison, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, praying, worshiping together, fasting together. They did all these things before they were assured of God's love. They were called to do it but they didn’t understand why or what it meant. Others called them fools. Others called them Methodists. But they still loved their neighbors and prayed together.

Some of you may feel a sense of calling in your life. You may have had that moment where you understood what you were supposed to do. I think the better sense of calling is not what you're supposed to do, but who are you supposed to be. They go together, but they're not the same. Because there always comes a point in all of our lives when we can’t, we really just can't do it anymore. We can't do it like we used to. That doesn't mean we're no longer called. You can never retire from God’s calling on your life as a child of God. Calling is not about productivity or ability. God's calling on our life is not about our physical abilities or our effectiveness in the world, but about the amazing reality that the God of all creation has seen us, has seen you and loved you, forgiven you, and given you purpose. And our purpose comes out of that. Don't take it for granted, but our purpose, what we do, how we live, comes out of that amazing reality.

The God of all creation who offered Jesus to save us from our sins, offers us life this day. You are assured of that life. You are promised that life. Live into the promise, to the calling of God. Seek out God’s calling. Start by serving and the purpose will follow.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.