title: Field Hospital

themes: eating-with-sinners mercy-not-sacrifice church-as-field-hospital christian-unity we-are-all-sinners

text:
**Scripture:** Matthew 9:9-13; Galatians 3:28; James 1:27; Hosea 6:6
**Series:** 2023

> Preaching on Matthew 9:9-13, Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners, Wilson argues that Jesus deliberately sought out real sinners, not just the socially marginalized but those who harmed others. The Pharisees' error was thinking sin too strong and God too weak, treating the church as a fortress for the saved. Drawing on James 1:27 (unstained by the world) and Galatians 3:28 (all one in Christ), he contends purity means engagement, not separation, since separating ourselves is what stains us and divides the world. Using John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony as a model of prideful, division-producing religion versus Pope Francis's image of the church as a field hospital, he calls the congregation to offer mercy not sacrifice, caring for the wounded among them because they too are sinners and that is where Jesus is met.

**Illustrations:** jesus-as-your-wayward-child, winthrop-city-on-a-hill, pope-francis-field-hospital, field-hospital-conflict-zone

---

# June 11, 2023
## Field Hospital

As Jesus continued on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at a kiosk for collecting taxes. He said to him, “Follow me,” and he got up and followed him. As Jesus sat down to eat in Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners joined Jesus and his disciples at the table. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard it, he said, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do. Go and learn what this means: I want mercy and not sacrifice. I didn’t come to call righteous people, but sinners.” - Matthew 9:9-13

Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. This is really important. Sometimes, though, these actions are presented in a way that Jesus ate with the good kind of sinners, not the bad kind of sinners.
Thinking about it in a different way. If Jesus were your son or your daughter, I'm not putting you in the position of God the Father, I just wanna use this thought experiment about how we think about other people. So Jesus is your son, and he is hanging out with the wrong kind of kids. He’s hanging out with the kids that stay up late, that disobey their parents, that break the law, that are doing drugs you haven't even heard of. He's hanging out with those people. If your son or daughter were hanging out with the wrong crowd, how would that make you feel? If your partner were staying out late with the wrong crowd( and we all have the wrong crowd in our mind) if they were staying out late with the wrong crowd, how would that make you feel?
When Jesus is talking about sinners, it's not a metaphor. Jesus went out to help those who are in need of God. Those who had broken communion and covenant with God, not just the people whom society had spit upon, but the people who had spit upon society, who had separated themselves from society, who had harmed others, who had hurt others. It is entirely understandable that people would be offended by the actions of Jesus.
The Pharisees are being extremely rational here in Matthew nine. Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? It's like a neighbor coming up to you: why does your daughter hang out with tax collectors and sinners?
Not the good kind of sinners. The ones who commit the hard sins, the bad sins. Why does your son hang out with tax collectors and sinners? The disciples don't respond, but Jesus does. “Healthy people don't need a doctor, but sick people do. I didn't come to call righteous people but sinners.”

I think, today, many of us have this idea of sin that sin is too powerful. Sin is too tempting, it is overwhelming. We cannot let anyone we care about be exposed to the idea of sin or else they are lost to us forever. The problem with the Pharisees is that they thought sin was too strong and God too weak. They thought being a tax collector was so strong that nobody could reach that person anymore. They thought that the actions of sinners was too strong and all the could do was corrupt others. Sinners had broken communion with the people and with God, and the only good left for them is to die in peace.
That's what the Pharisees thought. That's honestly what many of our churches today act like. We want to talk about sin and that's fine on a very personal level, but churches and christians also talk about bad people the way Jesus never does. Jesus never calls people good or bad. He does divide up the righteous and the sinners, but here he goes to the sinners instead of the righteous. When Jesus calls someone righteous, it is tongue-in-cheek. He is referring to someone who thinks that they are righteous, and he did not come for them. Yet most Christians don’t follow this logic. To them, the church is seen as this fortress for the saved in the midst of the horrors of this world. This is a very pagan idea.

Some may point to James 1 to back up this idea. James has this great line about what true religion is. True religion is serving widows and orphans in their need and keeping itself unstained by the world. But the question is: what does it mean to be unstained by the world? It's not keeping oneself away from the world, but keeping oneself unstained by the world.
To answer the question, we have to look at the life of Jesus. How did he keep himself unstained by the world? He did so by by serving, by loving, by spending time with sinners and tax collectors, by eating with sinners and tax collectors, by calling sinners and tax collectors to follow him, by seeking out those who are sick in their soul and offering mercy, offering a new life.
In fact, if we look at the life of Jesus, the way to be stained by the world is to keep ourselves away from others. The way to be stained by the world is to keep ourselves away from sinners .
The irony, of course, that we are all sinners. If you try to keep yourself pure by staying away from the wrong kind of people, you are in fact staining yourself by the world. This is what the world does. It divides us. It divides us again and again and again. It divides us by race, by class, by income, by neighborhood, by school, by education, by language. It divides us again and again and again. It divides us by manners and background and mental health and parental support. It divides us again and again and again. It divides us by the good guys and the bad guys.
In Christ Jesus, there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male and female. We are all one in Christ Jesus. As Paul says in Galatians.
How we are one matters.

When the pilgrims came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th Century, John Winthrop sought for their colony to be like, in the Sermon on the Mount, a city upon a hill whose light would shine across the world about the possibility of God's life in the world.
And yet, the Massachusetts Bay colony did not shine the light of Christ but the light of division. It was founded by people who refused to be united in faith back home and then came to this world and refused to admit even the humanity of the indigenous peoples around them. For instance, the  Massachusetts colony would've been destroyed were it not for a smallpox outbreak in like 1638 that they saw as a sign of God's favor. 40% of the indigenous people around them died from smallpox. This was a sign of God's favor on the colony. Sermons were preached praising God for the death of the savages.
Healthy people don't need a doctor, but sick people do. Go and learn what this means. I want mercy and not sacrifice. Jesus quotes Hosea the prophet in Matthew 9. The sacrifice spoken of here is the sacrifice of the temple. Mercy is what we offer to our brothers and sisters. Sacrifice is about my purity. Mercy is about community.
I think John Winthrop offers one model of what it means to be the church, to be the followers of Christ, to trumpet our own righteousness, and to be like a city upon a hill, out of pride and not humility, to invert the language of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
Another way to be the church is to be a field hospital. Some of you are veterans and served this country well or have veterans in your family who have served. A Field Hospital is the first line of care in the midst of a conflict zone. A field hospital can't do everything. They can care for the people most wounded and they are present in the midst of conflict.
Pope Francis used this language right after he was elected Pope in a letter, and I have been drawn to it ever since then.

>The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds...And you have to start from the ground up.

The kingdom of God is not a castle far away to be kept clean and pure, but a field hospital, and we care for sinners because we are sinners, because we are not any better than anyone else.
We care for sinners because that's what Jesus does and that's where we meet Jesus. And if we don't want to do what Jesus did here, if we don't wanna meet Jesus in the faces of the sinners and tax collectors, why on earth would we think we would enjoy heaven or life everlasting? If we don't want to be with God now and praise God now in the midst of this world, if we're not willing to do that even if it is with the wrong people, why would we think we would wanna do it eternally?

The care of the church for sinners does not come from the pastor or staff but from you. You are the church. Take care of the wounded in your midst. Let others take care of your wounds. Walk with each other and offer others space to walk with you. Hold close to God’s love. Offer mercy, not sacrifice. Offer hospitality, not self-righteousness.

Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, in your wisdom you came into the world as a child. You meet us where we are, not where we’d like to be. You meet others where they are, as well. Help us to be open to your movement in the broken people of this world. Help us to see your light in others and care as you care. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


site: sermons

title: Forgive Us Our Trespasses

author: Wilson Pruitt

church: bee-creek-umc

themes: lords-prayer forgiveness mercy sin-as-missing-the-mark justice-and-righteousness spiritual-discipline works-of-piety

text:
**Scripture:** Matthew 6:12; Psalm 23:1-3; Matthew 6:9-13
**Series:** 2023

> A Lenten sermon in a series praying through the Lord's Prayer, focused on 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us' (Matthew 6:12). Pruitt reframes trespass not as violating private property nor sin-in-general, but as straying from our path and causing others to stumble, drawing on greenbelt walking imagery and Psalm 23's 'paths of righteousness.' Noting righteousness equals justice in Hebrew and Greek, he presses the radical claim that mercy is conditional: we cannot expect God's forgiveness while withholding our own. Citing John Chrysostom on the inseparability of prayer, fasting, and mercy, he calls the congregation to offer mercy and forgiveness before seeking it, closing with prayer and an original verse.

**Illustrations:** tripping-your-child, greenbelt-trail-walks, children-no-trespassing, trail-manners, distracted-podcast-walk, seven-figure-debt-freedom, childhood-kjv-memory, chrysostom-prayer-fasting-mercy

---

# March 19
## Forgive us our trespasses

One of the greatest differences between the older King James translation of the Lord's Prayer and a more contemporary one is with this line, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And for contemporary translations, it's forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who have debt against us. A few weeks ago, I preached sermon basically on this, about the forgiveness of sins in regards to the Apostles’ Creed and how one way of understanding sin, especially in the New Testament, is as a debt to God and, and the stakes of that. That is, when you have a debt against someone, it's not a minor thing. If it is a large debt, it's a pretty major thing. If you are seven, eight figures in debt, it changes how you need to run your organization.
When that debt is gone, there is an amazing feeling of freedom.
I think that there is lot to be said about the accuracy of that translation of debts. especially when you look at the Aramaic that Jesus would have said that in Aramaic, the word for sin is literally the same word as debt, but the older familiar translation forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, is also important and valid and helpful for us to understand what is going on here in the Lord's Prayer

## Series Intro
My friends, for this season of Lent, we are going to be slowly reading and praying through the Lord’s Prayer. These familiar (or unfamiliar words) are a radical call to seek God’s will in this world. And to understand God’s vision for ourselves and those around us. Today, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Trespass is a crime most of us understand. Especially if someone says, “No Trespassing.” It is going on to someone's property without their permission or approval.
It is something that is hard to teach children. You tell them, “don't go through that person's yard.”
“Why not?”
“We don't know them.”
“Well, what's the worst that can happen?”
“Well, in Texas there are a lot of bad things that can happen. Trespassing gives you cause to defend your property.
So in the Lord's Prayer, we say, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Forgive us God for the times we stray from our property. As we forgive those who stray onto our property.
Now, private property is not a major issue in the Bible. Familial property is important. The land that goes to the family is important, but it's because it's familial. It's not not private. You can't do whatever you want with your land. It is not really yours. It is owed to the generations after you by the promise of God.
I don't think it is entirely helpful for us to focus so much on property as this fixed thing when we think about trespass in the Lord's Prayer. Instead, I want us to think about the path we are on. That is, we are all on a path. We are all on a journey. We are all on a road to where we are going.
I really enjoy going on walks. The Hamilton Green Belt or the Green Belt right by Serene Hills, the canyon lands trail.
When there is green space filling my eyesight, I feel better. When I go and walk and follow a path, my soul is at rest. Sometimes I stick to the path the entire time. Other times, I may see something that's interesting and move off. Sometimes it's unclear whether or not the ground I'm walking on is a path made for humans or a path made by deer. Many times, when I'm walking in the local area, there other people who pass me by. Sometimes they bump into me: Most of the time they make space for me. I make space for them. We talk about this a lot with the boys, about having trail manners. How important it is to be courteous to those around us whenever possible; to stop in order to let them pass. Most of the time, people stop when I pass. People I come across in the trailer almost always decent and sometimes it doesn't happen. Sometimes they don't stop. Sometimes their path runs right into my path or my children's path.
Sometimes my path runs right in to them. My mind is elsewhere. I might be listening to a podcast, practicing a sermon; focusing on something that is not the immediate present. I stray from my path and I trespass into theirs. I bump into them. They bump in to me. Our lives are like our journeys. Sometimes we follow the path as God has laid out for us perfectly. Sometimes we stray and we get in the way of others and sometimes we cause them to stumble.
I think this is how we should understand trespasses. It's not just straying onto someone else's private property. It's not just sinning in general. It's acting in a way that causes another to stumble and fall.
When someone trips you and you fall, it is really frustrating. It's really aggravating. Like why did you do that as a grown up? It is confusing. Why would anybody do that? Does it make any sense?

The radical thing that Jesus teaches in the Lord's prayer is that there's a sense in which mercy is conditional. The mercy we receive is conditional on the mercy we give. It's all conditional on the mercy we get from God, the absolute mercy and justification through the blood of Jesus Christ.
And we cannot expect anything from God if we are not willing to offer mercy to others, to those who have trespassed against us, to those who have strayed on our path, to those who have even tripped us up.
And to the parents who are here, you know how difficult mercy is for those who have tripped up our children. That might be one of the tallest orders of the life of faith.
I think it is in fact impossible apart from grace. I think there's one sense we should understand the Lord's prayer as aspirational. We seek to be like this. We seek to forgive like this, especially if we're not there yet.

Lord, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those we trespass against us.
Forgive us for the times that we have strayed from your Holy Word as we forgive others.

The language of straying and following often brings us back to the language of shepherds and sheep.

Psalm 23 and the Lord’s Prayer are the first sections of the Bible I learned as a child. There are many similarities between them. They are filled with images and power over a brief length of verses. As well, the King James version holds pride of place in my imagination.

>The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Righteousness is a powerful word in the Bible. In Scripture, when we read righteousness, it also means justice. In Hebrew the word is Tsadoq, in Greek it is Dikaiosune. Righteousness and Justice are the exact same word. He leads me in the path of righteousness. He leads me in the path of justice.
We pray in the Lord’s Prayer, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. I think we should understand our trespasses as those times we have strayed in the path of righteousness, when we have strayed from the path of justice. And God’s justice is not just about these discreet actions we may or may not have done against people in life. Have we have been following our shepherd along the path of righteousness or have we not?
Ultimately, the question comes down to our own response to God and our willingness to respond to God. And that is the radical claim of the Lord's Prayer. It's not about other people and what they do and what they don't do. It is first, second, and third about God and us.
The father of all creation desires relationship with us. The father of all creation desires us to seek His kingdom. God, the Father of all desires us to seek our material sustenance in God and when we don't seek God's will in God's kingdom, when we don't seek our material sustenance and our spiritual flourishing in God, when we stray from the path of justice and interupt the path of others, we need to seek forgiveness as a part of how we forgive others.
And it's not a one to one equivalent. If someone hasn't trespassed against you in the last week, that doesn't mean you're golden. For mercy is not this qui pro quo. That is, it doesn’t work like I'll forgive his sins so that God will forgive mine. It is about this journey and seeking God's will and our consistent and constant reminder that mercy is a two-way street and we must give it as much as we seek it.

This should be especially apparent to us during the season of Lent.

Lent is a season full of prayer. People read devotionals more in Lent than in any other time of the year. It is also a season of fasting. Many churches exhort the people to give something up for the season. The early church added a third component to Lent: mercy.

John Chrysostom said,
>Prayer knocks at the door, fasting obtains, mercy receives. Prayer, mercy and fasting: these three are one, and they give life to each other.

>Fasting is the soul of prayer, mercy is the lifeblood of fasting. Let no one try to separate them; they cannot be separated. If you have only one of them or not all together, you have nothing. So if you pray, fast; if you fast, show mercy; if you want your petition to be heard, hear the petition of others. If you do not close your ear to others you open God’s ear to yourself.

>When you fast, see the fasting of others. If you want God to know that you are hungry, know that another is hungry. If you hope for mercy, show mercy. If you look for kindness, show kindness. If you want to receive, give. If you ask for yourself what you deny to others, your asking is a mockery.

>Let this be the pattern for all men when they practice mercy: show mercy to others in the same way, with the same generosity, with the same promptness, as you want others to show mercy to you.

In this season of Lent, may you hold close to God's path of righteousness. When you pray or you fast, also hold true to mercy. May you hold close to God's path of justice and in that may you offer mercy before you seek mercy. May you offer forgiveness before you seek forgiveness. May you give more slack than you get. May you treat others better than they treat you, not because you are great or special, but because God is great and special and holy and offers you life eternal in Jesus Christ.

Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the amazing gift of mercy. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Let us never be too proud to share mercy and the name of the Father and the son of it, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

Forgive us
As we forgive others
We can’t expect a thing
If we don’t forgive our brothers

Help us Lord to see
Forgiveness starts with me.

Jesus gives us
Grace to love each other.
Jesus us forgives us
His mercy is utter

But help us Lord to see
Forgiveness starts with me.

method: authored, not translated

license_apparatus: CC BY-NC 4.0


title: Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

themes: lords-prayer need-vs-want trust-in-god bread-of-life fasting materialism-vs-meaning

text:
**Scripture:** Matthew 6:11; John 6:26-35; Exodus 16:4-30; Exodus 3:5
**Series:** 2023

> A Lenten sermon in a series on the Lord's Prayer focused on the petition 'Give us this day our daily bread.' The pastor bakes matzah live while preaching, tying the unleavened bread of Passover and the Exodus to the prayer's claim that God, not our own effort, provides our material sustenance. He distinguishes need from want (illustrated by his picky child and the wilderness manna), frames Lenten fasting as freeing us from being defined by our desires, and moves from bread as material gift to the deeper meaning in John 6, where Jesus declares himself the bread of life. The aim: a changed vision that receives food as gift and longs for God as for daily bread.

**Illustrations:** making-matzah-while-preaching, sourdough-starter-wild-yeast, passover-exodus-flight, picky-child-at-bedtime, manna-in-the-wilderness, augustine-restless-hearts, restless-scrolling-switching-hobbies

---

# March 12
## Give us this day our daily bread.

This message is going to be a little different and unusual because I'm going to make bread while I preach. A specific kind of bread. Matzah. Matzah is the bread of Passover. It is unleavened bread, which means there is no yeast used to make it.
Over the last few thousand years, the specific rules for make Matzah have been refined.
There are only two ingredients to Matza: flour and water. More than that, the flour and water cannot sit for more than 19 minutes before the dough goes in the oven or else it ceases to be Matzah. There is yeast all around us. This is how sourdough starters come about. If you leave flour and water out for a few days, the yeasts will grow and smell and you will have a sourdough starter that can make your bread rise without any commercial yeast. Commecial yeasts are monocultures, one kind of yeast. Natural yeasts have tons of variety. And even after a short while, they will come into the dough and give it leaven. So we have to be quick.
Matzah comes out of the Exodus story. The Hebrew people were slaves in Egypt. God met Moses at the burning bush, and said, Take off your shoes, for the land you are standing on is holy ground. It's the first time the word holy takes place in the Bible.

Then God sends Moses back to Faroh to tell Pharaoh, let my people go. Then the plagues en sue. Finally, the last plague takes place with the death of the firstborn. All the Hebrew people are saved because they listen to God and paint their doors with lambs blood, so death does not enter; it passes over them and then Pharaoh finally says yes to Moses and the people go. They take what they can. They plunder the Egyptians, but they don't wait around for the bread to rise. They take it still in dough form.
And every year at Passover, Jews celebrate the feast of the unleavened bread. A Passover Seder is a retelling of the story of freedom with a number of elements, the two central ones being the matza and the wine, but it's really
The matza.
When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, give us our daily bread. He's talking about real things (hold up the bread).

## Series Intro
My friends, for this season of Lent, we are going to be slowly reading and praying through the Lord’s Prayer. These familiar (or unfamiliar words) are a radical call to seek God’s will in this world. And to understand God’s vision for ourselves and those around us. Today, Give us this day our daily bread.

Bread has a pretty bad wrap. Nowadays, a lot of diets tell people not to eat bread. There are gluten intolerances in this world. There's celiac disease and things like that, which affect people in serious ways. But most of the people do not have celiac and bread is still blamed for a lot of things.
Bread is calorically dense, which is great for growing populations. Not great if you're trying to limit the calories you're consuming on a day to day basis. Jesus says, give us this day our dear bread. Jesus teaches us to pray for our material sustenance, which is a pretty radical thing for him to do. There were jobs in the ancient world. People labored in fields or fished in the sea, or collected taxes or were soldiers or all of these sorts of occupations. And Jesus is telling those people to never take their jobs for granted.
And the prayer is not just about spirituality, but materiality and the things that matter in our life.
Give us this day, our daily bread. Give us Lord what we need to survive. It's a very humbling thing to earnestly pray. Give us our daily bread. Because when we say that, it means that we are not the ones to provide it.
I know there are a lot of successful people in this church who've earned a lot over these years who have been compensated for their effort. Yes, to pray the Lord's Prayer, the basic Christian prayer, is to say that all of that doesn't come
from me. My material wellbeing is not the result of my efforts.
## Need vs. Want
Jesus also teaches us to make this distinction between what we need and what we want. Those are always two different things. Sometimes at night before bed, our youngest will say, “I'm hungry. I'm hungry.”
I'll say, “would you like an apple?”
“No.”
“Would you like an orange?”
“No.”
“Would you like some carrots?”
And then I’d  say to him, “you're not hungry. You're picky.”
Then he admits, “I'm picky. I would like these things.” At least he's being honest.
Most of us though, with what we consume in our lives, claim necessity when it most often is really just what we want.
It is an act of faith to ask God for daily Bread. It is an act of faith to be satisfied in what we need.
In the wilderness, the Hebrew people cried out to God. They were hungry and God responded and gave them manna. He gave manna enough for a day.
And then on Fridays he gave them a double portion so they wouldn't have to gather on the Sabbath. On the seventh day. On Saturday. Yet
People still tried to gather more and accumulate more. But the extra rotted away. God always gave them exactly what they needed..
Give us this day our daily bread.
Give us this day what we need to flourish in you, Oh Lord. It may be bread. It may be fish, it may be all sorts of things.
Remember, our future with God is full of feasting. The disciples of Jesus were criticized again and again because they were always so happy and drunk and partying. Pharisees came to Jesus and said, “why are your disciples not frowning like the rest of us.
Jesus said, “the bridegroom is here so we  celebrate. There's time for fasting. The season of Lent gives us an opportunity to fast, to control our desires, to remember that our desires do not define us. We're not made by what we desire.
Fasting is not about dropping a few pounds, but remembering that the things of this world that we want do not define us. It's not just the bad things. Those are easy to name and let go of. We also have an amazing way to distort good things, to make idols of them and conflict with Christ. Give us this day our daily bread, oh Lord, is a claim of faith. That God is the one who provides what we need.
And if we seek God, we will be satisfied. Maybe that's at the table of the Lord. Maybe that's in service to the Lord.
St. Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Oh Lord.” In this world, that is often the condition in which humans find ourselves. We’re restless. So many people are restless. Our children, our neighbors are restless. They're looking for the next thing. And they're switching hobbies. They're switching sports. Trying to find something that can hold their attention. They're skimming Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. They're looking for answers. They're looking for meaning. Ultimately, they're looking for the lamb of God who gives us our daily bread.
We need to ask for it. We to not go through the motions. We need to not repeat words. We need to ask for it. Our Father in heaven give us this day
Our daily bread. We have to ask for it again. Yesterday's bread is not going to feed us today. Tomorrow's bread is not going to feed us today.
Seek Jesus for your material bread. Then seek Jesus for your spiritual source. If we skip the material, we can’t take seriously enough the spiritual. The material has testable consequences. The spiritual is easier to lie to ourselves about, but the material hits directly at our pride. To believe God gives us our sustenance is to let go of the lie that it all comes from our unique strength and ability, our risk taking in this world.

When we have seen our daily bread as material, we are ready for the deeper spiritual aspect revealed in John 6.
John 6 gives us the story of the feeding of the Five thousand. It also gives an explanation to the story. Jesus walks on water and the next day the crowd finds him and asks about the food again.

>“Jesus replied, “I assure you that you are looking for me not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate all the food you wanted. Don’t work for the food that doesn’t last but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Human One will give you. God the Father has confirmed him as his agent to give life.” They asked, “What must we do in order to accomplish what God requires?” Jesus replied, “This is what God requires, that you believe in him whom God sent.””

>“They asked, “What miraculous sign will you do, that we can see and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, just as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat.” Jesus told them, “I assure you, it wasn’t Moses who gave the bread from heaven to you, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. The bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said, “Sir, give us this bread all the time!” Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
John 6:26-35 CEB

Our ultimate future and end is living face to face with the bread of life without hunger or thirst. In our world today, we still have hunger. We still have thirst. We still get cranky when we don’t eat. We are still picky.

In our world today, we still deceive ourselves into thinking we are the providers. We still deceive ourselves into thinking God is only about the spiritual realm and not the material.

Jesus says I am the bread of life. He also says, do this in remembrance of me. Eat this. Drink this. We are made from dust and we have needs for this dust made bodies. We are looking for answers and meaning and when we truly find the bread of life, we don’t have to look any more. But we still have to pray for our daily bread. That need doesn’t stop. Jesus teaches his disciples to rely on God for everything. That is impractical. It only makes sense if Jesus really rose from the dead.

To pray for our daily bread is to pray that our vision of the world changes so that we see food as a gift and spiritual food as the greatest of gifts. A changed vision that doesn’t seek tomorrow’s bread but todays bread. Tomorrow has worries of its own. Today, let us seek the bread of life.

In this season of lent, may you fast even for one single meal to feel that hunger. In hunger, your desires become consuming. By faith, you realize those desires need not control you. By faith, you also realize that your hunger can be directed towards God. Long for God as you long to eat and you will be satisfied so that you will never be hungry again.

Seek the bread of life. Seek the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, Give us this day our daily bread. Give us what we need. Satisfy us with what we need. Humble us with your mercy so we can better under stand your true gifts. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


title: Holy Conferencing

themes: holy-conferencing spiritual-formation early-church-community methodist-history discipleship vulnerability living-the-story-not-just-believing

text:
**Scripture:** Acts 2:42-47; 1 Corinthians 1:18; Matthew 18:20; Matthew 5:5
**Series:** 2023

> Preaching on Acts 2:42-47 as part of an Easter series on the early church's question 'What do we do now?', Pastor Wilson frames 'holy conferencing' as the holy storytelling and shared life of the gathered church. He argues that naming Acts 2 (or the Sermon on the Mount) as too perfect or unachievable sells short God's grace, since Scripture is meant to transform us into the beloved community, not offer impossible ideals. Drawing on early Methodist history (Wesley's traveling preachers, women preachers, the 1744 conference agenda and ground rules), he calls Bee Creek UMC to the vulnerable, uncomfortable work of showing up, meeting, and sharing life together around Jesus Christ rather than around shared affinities, living the story rather than merely believing it.

**Illustrations:** whole-brain-child-name-it-to-tame-it, tell-the-story-of-your-fears, dull-word-conference, dorothy-day-dont-call-me-a-saint, sermon-on-the-mount-unachievable-ideal, adam-bede-dinah-morris, 1744-conference-agenda, golf-pickleball-kiwanis-rotary, trusting-a-person-with-your-children

---

# May 7, 2023
## Holy Conferencing

The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the community, to their shared meals, and to their prayers. A sense of awe came over everyone. God performed many wonders and signs through the apostles. All the believers were united and shared everything. They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them. Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved. - Acts 2:42-47

Storytelling has an amazing capacity to excite us and draw us in. When you're around a great storyteller, it's really fun and interesting. Jokes function a lot in this way. A joke is a form of storytelling. Storytelling isn't just stories of your life, it's stories in general.
I've never felt like a good storyteller. It's always one of those things that if I feel like I have a good story, I can tell a good story. But if I don't have a good story, it's hard to tell one. It's hard for me to tell a story about most of my everyday life unless something interesting happens. It's like, “Well, I went to the office, called some people back, wrote some emails, read the Bible, worked on a sermon, worked on another sermon, had some lunch.”

Something that's come to my attention recently is the impact that storytelling has on our brain and how, when we tell stories, especially when we tell stories about ourself, it actually effects our brain. We've been reading this book called The Whole Brained Child, which has been interesting. One of the ways it talks about storytelling is in a moment of crisis, when your child is having a tantrum experiencing fear, to get to the point of letting them tell their story, encouraging them to tell the story. In the telling of the story, a child is able to calm down and integrate their brain. They are able to integrate their emotional brain with their rational brain. The authors use this memory tool, Name It to Tame It, in order to help parents remember how important storytelling and words are for our own self-understanding.

It shouldn't have been such an insight to me because this is also something I tell people as pastoral advice who are going through a crisis. “Tell the story of your fears.” Either write them down or, share with a trusted friend because our fears are always greater in our head. When we speak them out, they're manageable. Not just manageable in the sense that we can make a list of steps to address all our fears and accomplish those achievable goals. But sometimes we are able to get to the point where we realize we're not afraid. You don't need to be afraid anymore.
In Acts 2, after Peter's great sermon and the conversion of thousands, the church gathered together, they shared everything, and they started to live a new story. They told the story of Jesus again and again. They were not afraid. They started to live a new story with Jesus and with each other. And they started to share that story. This is what holy conferencing is.
## Series intro.
In the season of Easter, we're going to take the time to look through the beginning of the Book of Acts where the disciples are left with the question:What do we do now?
For Bee Creek United Methodist Church, that is the season that we are in: What do we do now? And as we worship together over the next few weeks, I want us to be praying and thinking through and responding actively to God's movements as we not only ask this question, but answer this question, what do we do now?

Today, Holy Conferencing.

Sharing the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is an exciting thing. Conferencing is not an exciting thing. There are very few things in life that sound more dull than a conference, at least to me. Maybe some of you have had really positive experiences of conferences. I have not. I've been to conferences. There is a conference I attend pretty much every year, annually, and it's called an annual conference. The United Methodist Church is organized around these conferences that happen annually instead of a diocese or presbytery in the Presbyterian Church. We have an annual conference that meets once a year for the business in order of the church. It is a dull word: conference.

The word “Conference” comes from confer, to confer together. Church’s have had councils and synods and conferences all throughout history. Conferencing at its best comes back to this moment in Acts 2. The disciples were gathered together. They were sharing everything every day. They met together in the temple and ate in their homes.
They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone and needed them.
Now, one of the ways we often preach about this passage is that this is the pinnacle of the church. And it's been downhill from there. They had all their stuff together here at the end of Act 2 at Pentecost. It's great. Everyone's sharing everything. And then it all starts to fall apart. And that the history of the church is this downhill trajectory from May of 33 AD until this day.
Now, I think that there's some fair points to be made in that, but we miss out on the substance of what's going on here in Acts two by dismissing it as being too perfect.
Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement, once said “don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed too easily.” She is currently in the process of being canonized by the Catholic church and so it seems a strange phrase at first. “Don't call me a saint. I don't wanna be dismissed too easily.”

But when you designate someone as a saint or something as holy, it separates that person from you and their life becomes something that you can never achieve. This happens a lot with the Sermon on the Mount. People preach or talk about the Sermon on the Mount as this unachievable ideal. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who mourn. Turn the other cheek. Who is good enough to do this?

At the moment we name it unachievable, we've already sold ourselves short of God's grace and power in our lives.
The Bible is not there to give us unachievable ideals. Everything is achievable or else it wouldn't be there. All the messages and sermons of Jesus are offered to us not to give us impossible aspirations, but to transform us into the body of Christ and the beloved community where we sacrifice and share together.

The reading for today in Acts 2 also gets to issues of political economy and how society is organized that I am not going to address today, but it is there.

The point for today is this holy conferencing of the people gathered together. This is holy storytelling together. This is the holy sharing in the life of the church. This is a holy willingness to talk to each other about what God is doing and to learn from those experiences and from each other.
None of us are experts. We are all students together. The word disciple means student. To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to be a student. To admit that you have things to learn, that you don't know everything.
It's impossible to teach anybody anything if they think they already know everything. They are shut off. If you feel like you've already got everything you need to know in life, then you are a closed book.
One of the great powers of the Christian faith is to come in the face of people who have shut themselves off from change and show that radical change is possible through grace, not through efforts. Sharing stories is a part of that change because people are drawn in by stories. People are connected by stories. Sports are great because they give us a story to share with each other.

## Methodist History
During the early Methodist movement, after Aldersgate, after John Wesley started preaching, he started sending out people to preach in different areas. Local pastors is the term that we would use today. Lay speakers who hadn't gone to Oxford or Cambridge, but had experienced God's grace and were willing to share about it. Wesley sent out women to preach, a radical scandal that was stopped by the church after he died. The reality of female methodist preachers is shown best in the George Eliot novel, Adam Bede, where the main character, Dinah Morris, is a female Methodist preacher who shares the Good News of Jesus Christ.

With all these preachers, men and women, Wesley would try to gather them together at least once a year to talk through what they had done.
Here are some of the questions on the agenda from one of the first annual conferences (1744)

1. Doctrine
	1. What do we meet for?
	2. To consider before God:
		1. What to teach?
		2. How to teach?
		3. What to do? i.e., doctrine, discipline, and practice
	3. Are we justified by faith alone?
	4. What is justifying faith? Assurance, or…
	5. How is faith made perfect by works?
	6. What is sanctification?
	7. What is the Church of England? How are we of it? How far do we defend it?
2. Discipline
	1. Is field preaching lawful? Expedient?
	2. Where shall we preach?
	3. Do we not undertake too much, and thereby do less than we might?
	4. E.g. Are nor more sinners converted when we stay a month in Newcastle than by us preaching in any new place?
3. Practice
	1. How far is it lawful to bear arms?
	2. Can we unite any farther with Mr. Whitefield? With the Moravians?
	3. Is any conference with either advisable?

They also laid some ground rules for the conference.

- That all things be considered as in the immediate presence of God;
- That we may meet with a single eye, and as little children which have everything to learn;
- That every point may be examined from the foundation;
- That every person may speak freely whatever is in his heart; and
- That every question proposed may be fully debated, and bolted to the brain.

The structure offered a way to tell the stories of ministry and include each other in the whole story of the movement of God.

It is a lot easier to go alone than to work together. When someone does something you don’t like, it is easier to move away than confront them. It is much easier to not meet than to meeting. Meeting together takes time. Meeting together as a church opens us up to the reality of the humanity of each other. We err. We sin. We say things we shouldn’t. We don’t live up to the example of Christ.

Before we come to the table, we confess our sins. Christians are unique in this. We think we should share even after we sin, even after we harm. Our communion is greater than our individual moral standing because it is not based on our individual moral standing. It is based on Jesus Christ.

If we gather for any reason other than Jesus Christ, we cease to be the church. We become a social club that has a different story. Golf clubs have a different story. Pickle ball and Kiwanis and rotary have different stories. We gather not because of who we are and what we like, but what God has done and what God will do. God calls us to be a part of the greatest story. This story is more than just a story. It transforms us if we don’t push it away.

The Bible is the story of God’s loving interaction with creation and the people of Israel. Through the cross of Jesus Christ, we have been grafted on to this story and we can live this story. The christian faith is not just about believing in a story, but living in a story.

It is one thing to believe that something is true. It is another to live it.

It is one thing to say that you trust a person. It is another to put your children’s lives in their hands. It is one thing to say that you believe in God. It is another to live God’s story. Doing the things of God. Feeding the hungry. Clothing the naked. Caring for widows and orphans. Healing the sick. Doing the things that Jesus did again and again. Sharing life with people who make you uncomfortable. Sharing life with sinners.

Do we believe in God enough to be uncomfortable for God?

Christ gathers together his body, the church, to do these things together. We have a resource in each other if we are able to act in faith together. We are not limited by time and space because where two or three are gathered together, Christ is there. Not where 200 or 300 are gathered, but two or three.

We can share life together. Like the early church. Like the early Methodists. It starts by meeting. It starts by greeting and staying in relationship with each other. We then get to sharing and mercy and love and commitment and discipleship, but the first step is showing up.

God offers a chance to be a part of a new story. And even when we are scared, when we tell this story, there is peace.

It is a vulnerable thing to tell a story. What if people don’t like it? What if its not entertaining? In that space of doubt is the opportunity for faith. As Paul says, the message of the cross is foolishness to the Greeks, but to those who are being saved, it is the power of God.

Let us encourage each other to share this life together and let us look forward to what God is doing here, even if we may look a little foolish.

Let us pray,

Heavenly Father, your Spirit was present in the early church, gathering the people together to be of one mind. May your Spirit be present with us this day so that we may be of one mind in you, living out your story together. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


themes: communion-of-saints apostles-creed legacy-and-witness discipleship holiness great-commission

text:
**Scripture:** Exodus 3:1-6; Hebrews 12:1-2; Matthew 28:18-20
**Series:** 2022

> Continuing a series on the Apostles' Creed, this sermon expounds 'I believe in the communion of the saints.' A saint is simply one who is holy and set apart, not a Catholic honoree. Using Exodus 3—where God names himself the God of the living Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and Hebrews 12's cloud of witnesses, the preacher argues that the Christian community is not limited by time and space: we commune really with those who came before and will influence those who come after. This is a two-way street and a blessing, not a burden. Believing it means accepting the responsibility to be a witness and role model, fulfilled through the Great Commission (Matthew 28): discipleship, sacrament, and proclaiming good news rather than merely plastering 'Jesus fish' on everything. The closing call presses listeners to consider their legacy, whom they are discipling, and how their life proclaims the gospel, since the burden is a life of no impact.

**Illustrations:** lone-ranger-tonto-we, ten-commandments-film, bob-dylan-serve-somebody, after-the-bucket-list

---

# January 15
## I Believe in the Communion of the Saints

“Moses was taking care of the flock for his father-in-law Jethro, Midian’s priest. He led his flock out to the edge of the desert, and he came to God’s mountain called Horeb. The LORD’s messenger appeared to him in a flame of fire in the middle of a bush. Moses saw that the bush was in flames, but it didn’t burn up. Then Moses said to himself, Let me check out this amazing sight and find out why the bush isn’t burning up. When the LORD saw that he was coming to look, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” Moses said, “I’m here.” Then the LORD said, “Don’t come any closer! Take off your sandals, because you are standing on holy ground.” He continued, “I am the God of your father, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God.” Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.”
Exodus 3:1-6 CEB

There's an episode of the Lone Ranger where the Lone Ranger and his trustee sidekick, Tonto, are riding their horses and they suddenly find themselves surrounded by Native Americans who are yelling with spears and guns raised. And the lone ranger says, “Tonto, what are we going to do about it?
And Tonto says, “What do you mean by we, kemosahbe?”

This is an important and unexamined question in almost any context, especially in the context of the church. What do we mean by we?

## Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on the apostles creed, that historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.

Today, I believe in the communion of the Saints.

First off, we need to be clear about the word saint. Saint means holy. Saint means set apart. Saint doesn't mean Catholic or belonging to an approved, big list. A saint is someone who is holy; they are sanctified in some way. They are revered as holy.

The communion of the saints, on the other hand, has had a few meanings over the years. Some see it as the current church. Others as all those who are currently in the presence of God.

Some make this distinction between the church militant and the church victorious. The church militant is the church in the world, struggling against the brokenness of sin, the forces of wickedness and evil temptation versus the church victorious, the church in the presence of God, those who have passed before us to life eternal. These are not the same.

Does the communion of the saints include those who have already died or are the saints only those currently living? This question is pertinent to a lot of scripture. Hebrews 12 is a great example.
>“So then, with endurance, let’s also run the race that is laid out in front of us, since we have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us. Let’s throw off any extra baggage, get rid of the sin that trips us up, and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter.”

a cloud of witnesses, in Greek, really, a cloud of martyrs. Since we are surrounded by this cloud of martyrs, we should continue to run the race.
And like with the lone Ranger and Tonto, there are two ways of being surrounded. One, you're surrounded by allies who uplift you; the other, you're surrounded by enemies. They threaten you. What are we left with? What should we do?

In Exodus 3, God meets Moses in a burning bush. A voice speaks out to Moses. Most of the movie The Ten Commandments takes place before this moment. But we're in just chapter three of Exodus. All of that stuff happened in two chapters. It is just a preface to this essential moment.
Moses. Moses, Take off your shoes. For you are standing on holy ground. On ground that is different. On ground that is set apart, not ground that is stuck up. It is set apart.
I am the God of your father's Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
Those three names, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Those names come back later. “I am the God of your forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God of the living. Jesus makes this point well. God doesn't say I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but I am the God. They are living still. They're living with God. And to be a part with God is to be a part of the God of the living, not the dead.
The communion of the saints is this radical faith claim that our community as Christians is not limited by time and space. We are in communion with those who have come before, not just in idea but in actuality, in a real presence.
God was with us through those who came before and we in turn will be with those who come after us. This can be an intimidating thing. The influence of your life does not end at the end of your life.
You will continue to impact people in concrete ways, not just in metaphor. In actuality, you make a difference. To say, I believe in the communion of the saints is a two-way street.
It is to believe in the communion of those who've come before. As well, it is to believe that God will use us for those who come after.
We are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses. This is a word of encouragement. We are also witnesses to others in this great cloud. You are a witness to others.
And you will impact their faith journey. You will impact their experience of eternity. The pressure is on. How many of you have been a part of a baptism in the church and completely forgotten that experience?
Do you remember how many of those promises you have made? Do you remember that this is part of the community of the saints?

What is the impact of your life after you die when you depart to be with the Lord, God willing. What is the legacy you'll leave behind? People talk about their bucket list. What is your after-the-bucket list? What have you done to impact others after you die? Who have you served? What have you given? What will you give?

To believe in the community of the saints is a two way street. To believe that God is the God of the living, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the saints in your life who have showed you what it means to be holy and good and loving.
But is also that God calls you to be a saint, to be set apart, to live set apart, not on your own strength, but on God's. And yet to not shirk that responsibility. To be a Christian is to be a role model. You cannot be a Christian without it.
To receive the grace of Jesus Christ, to receive the mercy of forgiveness, is to accept the responsibility of witnessing to that in how you live your life. How you treat people, how you speak or don't speak. How you use social media or don't use social media. There's not one square inch of this world where Jesus is not Lord.
And there's not one square inch of our life where Christ's lordship can be hidden if we see him as Lord. Now, this doesn't mean that you need to plant the Jesus fish everywhere.

Should we just have Christian political parties? Christian websites? Christian news? Christian universities? Christian auto body shops? The question is serious and must be asked.

It is answered with the Great Commission from Matthew 28

>“I’ve received all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you. Look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of this present age.”

This is what we are committed to. This is what makes us set apart and holy. This is what the saints in our lives have done. It isn’t Jesus fishing everything. It is discipleship. It is sacrament. It is proclaiming the good news.

Who are you discipling? You don’t need a formal discipleship relationship to be discipling someone. As Bob Dylan says, you gotta serve somebody. It may be the devil. It may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Who are you leading to Baptism? You are leading people either towards God or away from God. There are no neutral positions.

How are you proclaiming good news? With your deeds? With your words? With neither? You are proclaiming news in your life. Your life is making an impact?

How we live matters and impacts the people around us. And we must accept that responsibility and walk with faith and a grace that God will be more revealed through our lives.
Because not only are we surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses, we can be a part of it. And that is a blessing, not a burden. It is a blessing to be a part of the crowd of witnesses. This is a blessing to be a part of the communion of the saints, but it is an act of faith.

God is the God of the living; time and space do not limit this connection. May you remember that Christ has offered you an opportunity to transform the lives of others.
This is a grace, a gift. It is not a burden. The burden is a life lived for yourself. The burden is a life of no impact. The burden is a life of no legacy. What is your legacy? How are you living now for that legacy? How are you giving now for that legacy? Is there something that you need to change?
How you live, what you give, what you do to further honor God? Is there something that is holding you back from realizing that you are a witness to others, that you are are a role model, that you are included in the Us of God and that we are a part of what God is doing, so let's do it boldly.

Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the saints who have showed us how to love and follow you. Help us to to bring saints for others. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Children’s Message, love the Lord the with all your heart


title: I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church

themes: apostles-creed church-universal marks-of-the-church baptism us-vs-them methodist-history

text:
**Scripture:** Exodus 19:5-6; Ephesians 4:1-7; Ephesians 2:14-22
**Series:** 2022

> Part of a series on the Apostles' Creed, this Epiphany Sunday sermon unpacks the line 'I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,' clarifying that 'Catholic' means the whole/universal church, not the Roman institution. Tracing the church's roots from God's covenant with Israel (Exodus 19) through Christ breaking down the dividing wall (Ephesians 2), Pruitt argues that in Christ there is no longer an in-group and out-group. He then expounds the four marks of the church from Ephesians 4—one baptism, one faith, one Lord, one hope—and uses a digression on Methodist history (the name's origin in the Oxford Holy Club) to show the church belongs to everyone. Believing in the Holy Catholic Church means trusting Christ to be at work beyond what we individually see or judge.

**Illustrations:** elementary-school-cool-kids, methodist-name-holy-club, methodist-circuit-method, hymnal-catholic-asterisk, church-as-corporation

---

# January 8
## I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church

“So now, if you faithfully obey me and stay true to my covenant, you will be my most precious possession out of all the peoples, since the whole earth belongs to me. You will be a kingdom of priests for me and a holy nation. These are the words you should say to the Israelites.””
Exodus 19:5-6 CEB

I love to hear my kids talk to each other about elementary school. Two things they talk about often are crushes, who has them, and the cool kids. It is amazing that wherever there is a school, there is a set of cool kids. How you define them varies from place to place, but it is fairly universal that some kids are more popular than others. Some kids, it seems, are more favored than others by the teachers and staff. There are in-groups and out-groups.

When it comes to the church in the world, is the church an in-group or an out-group or neither?

## Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on the apostles creed, that historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.

Today, I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.

The word Catholic is quite weighted in our language today. This is one of the more confusing lines of the creed to modern ears. Do we mean “I believe in the Catholic Church”, capital C, with the Pope and bishops and unmarried priests?

Quite frankly, no. The word Catholic is not a proper noun referring to a single entity. It is an adjective referring to something that is basically universal.

It comes from the Greek Katholikus which is the preposition kata, meaning ‘about’ and olos, meaning ‘whole.’ About the whole. It was two words later turned into one word.

In the old Methodist hymnal, there is an asterisk by ‘Catholic’ in the Creed, to let people know that it means universal. So why shouldn’t we just translate it as universal? Wouldn’t that be less confusing?

The main reason is that if Jesus is the word of God, the word made flesh, words matter particularly to Christianity. Catholic doesn’t quite mean universal. It doesn’t mean everywhere. It means the whole of a thing; the whole of the church in places and nations. The statement of belief in the creed is that there is a church set apart (the meaning of holy) that is whole in some way.

In our world today filled with denominations, it is hard to imagine the church as a whole. It is worth remembering that denomination just means name. Every generation, people get fed up with denominations, in a totally understandable way. Denominations have baggage and legacy costs. There are complicated histories and legacies that can sometimes seem to get in the way of the life of faith. Legacy costs like pensions and histories and rules from long ago.

The history of the United Methodist Church is long and complicated. The church is a few years older than the United States of America. The US Constitution was finally ratified in 1788. The first Methodist conference in the US was in 1784. The world has changed a lot since that time. The country has changed a lot.

The Methodist Church has changed. In the early 19th century, Methodism was the largest church in the United States. Growth happened faster and easier because when Methodists planted a church, they didn’t need a one-to-one ratio of pastors to churches. The circuit method allowed one pastor to plant multiple churches. Methodists were on the frontiers not the big cities. They were provincial churches, not downtown churches.

One of the most confusing things about Methodists is why the name stuck. Why call yourselves Methodist? It started as an insult. Even today, it sounds like an insult. It started as a high-falootin’ Oxford insult. Charles Wesley was meeting with some fellow undergrads at Oxford. They were trying to be holy. They started a club. The holy club. They asked Charles’s older brother, John, to help them structure their time and John gave them a series of 22 questions and commended them to serve others more. They were called Methodists not because they were methodical. It goes back to an Ancient Greek conflict between different medical schools. The followers of Galen thought that medicine was restricted to a select few. You had to be of the right family to be a doctor. The Methodists thought that anyone could be a doctor with the right training. The church in England had a distinct class system of those who could be holy and those who could be not. The Holy Club thought everyone deserved the opportunity to seek God fully and to pursue their faith, that is why they were called Methodists. God could transform anyone’s heart and everyone should have the opportunity to seek a heart transformed.

Now, the name is confusing. It has a legacy. Like the word Catholic in the creed. It may seem like it would simplify things to change it. But the question for us should always come back to Scripture.

Our first understanding of the church comes from the people of Israel. Abraham is called to the promised land by faith. Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and his brothers, they are all called together by faith and end up, eventually, in Egypt and in bondage. Yet it in is in their escape from bondage that the people of Israel are truly formed.

Exodus 19, that we read earlier, declares God’s covenant, God’s promised relationship with Israel clearly.

>So now, if you faithfully obey me and stay true to my covenant, you will be my most precious possession out of all the peoples, since the whole earth belongs to me. You will be a kingdom of priests for me and a holy nation. These are the words you should say to the Israelites.

God covenants to this particular people in order to bless the whole world. The rest of the Old Testament, unfortunately, is the story of the disobedience of Israel. Over and over again, God blesses the people. The people spurn the blessing. God sends judges or prophets. The people spurn them, too. Consequences ensue. The people return to God. The process starts all over again.

The Messiah, the anointed one of God, breaks this cycle by completing the cycle. The purpose of the covenant is for the coming of the Son of God into the world. And now the promise and the blessing is no longer exclusive to a single nation but offered openly to the whole earth which belongs to God, as it says in Exodus.

Today is Epiphany Sunday. Or more officially, the mystery of the manifestation of Our Lord, Jesus Christ to all people.”

The day when we celebrate the coming of the magi or wise men to visit Jesus. They are the first gentiles to acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ. They bring gifts to honor him.

We celebrate that in Christ the church has been opened up to all. There is no longer an in-group and an out-group. There is no longer a cool kids table in the cafeteria. There is no longer need for conflict, as Paul says in Ephesians 2. It is a long passage but super important.

>“Christ is our peace. He made both Jews and Gentiles into one group. With his body, he broke down the barrier of hatred that divided us. He canceled the detailed rules of the Law so that he could create one new person out of the two groups, making peace…As God’s household, you are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. The whole building is joined together in him, and it grows up into a temple that is dedicated to the Lord. Christ is building you into a place where God lives through the Spirit.”
Ephesians 2:14-22 CEB

God is building. Not God has built. God is building, active, continuous. God is building you into a place where God lives through the Spirit.

Two chapters later, Paul clarifies the call of what it means to be the church.

>“Therefore, as a prisoner for the Lord, I encourage you to live as people worthy of the call you received from God. Conduct yourselves with all humility, gentleness, and patience. Accept each other with love, and make an effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit with the peace that ties you together. You are one body and one spirit, just as God also called you in one hope. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all. God has given his grace to each one of us measured out by the gift that is given by Christ.”
Ephesians 4:1-7 CEB

We have here the four marks of the church. One hope, one Lord, one Faith, one baptism. The church is found where these four things are found. I am going to take them in reverse order.

One baptism. This Sunday, as well as Epiphany, we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord and so it is a fitting day to think about baptism. The church has one baptism. Not two or three. Baptism is not an individual act. Baptism is dying in Christ’s death and rising in Christ’s life. Baptizing twice is a claim contrary to Ephesians. The Bible itself never gives clear instructions on preparation for Baptism or requirements for baptism. We have examples of baptism. The baptism of Jesus. The baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch. The baptism of various families as a whole, including children. The different traditions of baptism come after the Bible. What Paul is saying here is that there is one baptism because God is one and whenever you were baptized it counted because it was about God and not you. Baptism is our entry into the church not by our will but God’s.

One Faith is the next mark of the church. We have come to understand this through the Creeds. We will say the apostles creed after the message. Our faith is in the Triune God, not another God. The church has this one Faith, not multiple faiths. The faithfulness of Jesus Christ has saved us, offered us mercy and forgiveness and new life and a new way of life. This is part of being the church. Living a new way of life marked by one Faith. Living by faith and not by sight. Living in a way that only makes sense because Christ is risen. That is what it means to be the church.

One Lord is the next mark. The church is under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The church serves Jesus Christ. You cannot serve both God and mammon. The church proclaims the reign of God. The church is the place where Jesus is seen as Lord and we are not. Authority comes from God and not from us. Where the reign of God is proclaimed, not the reign of me or you or whomever we want.

The last mark is one Hope. Baptism is how we enter the church. One Faith is what we believe. One Lord is who we are and whose we are. One hope is where we are going. Our hope is in the ultimate Justice of God. God will make all things new. The brokenness of this world will be redeemed.

The church is not a gathering of convenience. Our belief is not even in individual churches but that there is a church set apart as a whole that Christ is building. Christ has opened the church, his own body, to us all. We are under the Lordship of Christ, the judgment of Christ in this in-between time after resurrection but before our final hope.

It takes faith to believe in the Holy Catholic Church. It takes faith to believe in the presence of the body of Christ beyond those whom we individually judge. A lot of churches today function like corporations. They serve their shareholders/members. It is transactional. To believe in the Holy Catholic Church is to believe in Christ acting beyond what we see. It is to believe that Christ is acting in places we don’t see but trust.

As Paul says in 2 Corinthians, we are not peddlers of God’s word, but people of sincerity. It would be easier to peddle the word of God. To spin into palatable, consumable chunks.

Again, the story of Israel is the story of the faithlessness of man and the faithfulness of God. The story of the church is the story of the faithlessness of man and the faithfulness of God. Our faith is not in ourselves or institutions or abilities but in Jesus Christ our Lord who seeks us when we are lost, who finds us when we don’t want to be found, who heals us when we are sick, and who calls us together despite ourselves to be the hands and feet of Jesus in this world.

Let us pray,
Gracious God, in Jesus Christ, baptized by John in the Jordan, you came to share our life and deliver us from sin and death. As we are baptized with water pour out your Holy Spirit upon us to make us your beloved children; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.


title: I Believe in the Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting

themes: bodily-resurrection apostles-creed eternal-life theology-of-the-body grace-not-merit new-creation

text:
**Scripture:** Isaiah 25:6-9; John 3:16; Romans 6:23; Romans 6:5; Romans 10:9; 1 Peter 1:3-5; Luke 23:43; Philippians 1:20-26; 2 Corinthians 4:1-9
**Series:** 2022

> Concluding a series on the Apostles' Creed, the sermon argues that the early church and the creeds emphasized bodily resurrection, not disembodied souls ascending to heaven. Drawing on Isaiah 25's feast and other physical biblical images, Wilson insists our bodies matter to God, grace (not works) saves the whole person, and that resurrection life has already begun now, even amid Bee Creek's discernment conversations.

**Illustrations:** coffee-shop-evangelism, party-that-never-gets-old, group-chats-vs-hugging, special-forces-training, elysium-olympus

---

# February 5
## I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

“On this mountain, the LORD of heavenly forces will prepare for all peoples a rich feast, a feast of choice wines, of select foods rich in flavor, of choice wines well refined. He will swallow up on this mountain the veil that is veiling all peoples, the shroud enshrouding all nations. He will swallow up death forever. The LORD God will wipe tears from every face; he will remove his people’s disgrace from off the whole earth, for the LORD has spoken. They will say on that day, “Look! This is our God, for whom we have waited— and he has saved us! This is the LORD, for whom we have waited; let’s be glad and rejoice in his salvation!””
-Isaiah 25:6-9 CEB

When I was in high school, i was studying at a coffee shop, and a man came over to my table and asked me; “if I died right then, where I would go.” I said, “I hope!I would go to heaven.” We ended up having a nice conversation about God and church and life. I don’t usually like that confrontational form of evangelism, but the question is valid in its own way, even if the method is not.

What happens after you die? My hope is to be with God through the sacrificial blood of Jesus Christ. Heaven is a short hand for that. Christians all over the world believe in heaven, but the language of heaven was surprisingly limited in the early church.

The apostles creed talks about heaven in two places. At the very beginning, when God creates everything. And in the middle, when Jesus ascends to heaven. Heaven is not mentioned at the end of the story. This is not a mistake. The same goes for the two other early creeds, the Nicene and Athanasian. They don’t mention heaven as a place you go to when you die. It is just not there.

Instead, we have the resurrection of the body. The Athanasian Creed says, “ At his coming all people will arise bodily.” The Nicene Creed says, “and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” And the Apostles Creed says, “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”

The near total focus of the early church was on bodily resurrection. It wasn’t on spirits ascending to heaven after they die. It was that this flesh will be healed and made whole and holy for all eternity. Heaven as the resting place of those who die, to early Christians, would sound like Elyssium or Olympus or another pagan cosmological afterlife location.

Yet over the last 1700 years, the primary Christian vision of life after death is not one that comes from the Bible but from cultural imagination.

What do we do with this? The Bible talks about heaven, but heaven is not the important thing or the dogmatic thing. What does it mean to believe in the resurrection of the body.

## Series Intro
My friends, we are finishing our series on the apostles creed, that historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.

Today, I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Amen.

The Bible talks about eternal life on a number of occasions. We have great passages like John 3:16:  God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.” Or Romans 6:23 - The wages that sin pays are death, but God’s gift is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

1 Peter 1 says “You have been born anew into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. You have a pure and enduring inheritance that cannot perish—an inheritance that is presently kept safe in heaven for you.” Jesus is in heaven, but it says nothing of where we go. Peter continues, “Through his faithfulness, you are guarded by God’s power so that you can receive the salvation he is ready to reveal in the last time.”

Jesus also tells the thief on the cross, today I will see you in paradise. The language of paradise is material in the bible. It is the language of the Garden of Eden. It is not the language of an ethereal place with clouds.

The history of why contemporary christians speak more of going to heaven than bodily resurrection is a long story with an excessive number of tangents from which I don’t believe I could ever return. My hope is not to tell this story, nor paint a picture of an either/or, that is, either going to heaven or bodily resurrection.

My hope is to point out that the Bible and the early church had a certain emphasis on the bodily nature of eternal life that has a deep impact on how we treat our bodies and our world. And how we treat other people.

The Bible talks about resurrection and eternal life in a number of places and it gives us a number of images. These images are almost universally physical. Isaiah 25 is my favorite version of this.

>On this mountain, the LORD of heavenly forces will prepare for all peoples a rich feast, a feast of choice wines, of select foods rich in flavor, of choice wines well refined.”

So we have wine in the resurrection, doubly so. I don’t know how Teetotalers read this passage, but it is there.

The new creation is a party that doesn’t get old. That’s the image I hold onto. Imagine the best party you’ve ever been to, but it doesn’t get old. You don’t get tired. You don’t get bloated. Conversation is never boring. The music is always fresh.

A party without bodies is not a party. Group chats are fun. They are not the same thing as celebrating. It is one thing to face time with a family member. It is another to hug them tightly.

There is never a point in the Bible when our bodies don’t matter. Our will matters. Our heart and spirit matter, but our bodies also matter.

Our future with God is not just as disembodyed spirits freed from the shackles of this world.

“Because if you confess with your mouth “Jesus is Lord” and in your heart you have faith that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” If you confess that Jesus is Lord, you are not saved from your body, your body and your soul and everything about you is cleansed. It all goes back to Easter and resurrection. As Paul says earlier in Romans: If we were united together in a death like his, we will also be united together in a resurrection like his.” - Romans 6:5.

To say, I believe in the resurrection of the body is to believe in Christ’s resurrection but that Christ’s resurrection also points to the possibility of our own. To believe in life everlasting is not just to believe in something in the future but that that future has already begun and we can be a part of it.

To believe in the resurrection of the body is to believe in what the Bible says about our future. A christian’s hope is not simply consolation for the pain of this world. As if the brokenness and sin of this world is simply a testing ground to see who is good enough or not to make it to the next level. Sometimes faith is presented in a way similar to Special forces training.

The life of faith is not simply a series of qualifying tests to see if we have what it takes for our heavenly reward. Humans have an amazing ability to sneak in works-righteousness by any means necessary. Grace is such a radical thing.

But even more radical is the notion that our future with God is not just in the future. Our life and our bodies can already begin to be healed and redeemed. And we need our bodies. We are not ourselves without our bodies. They are not simply prisons in which our real self is trapped. There are other religions that believe that. Not Christians of the Bible.

Alas, we are stuck in this tension because our bodies show the fallenness and brokenness of this world. It seems to be simpler to forsake our bodies and this world.

In Philippians, Paul articulates this tension:

>It is my expectation and hope that I won’t be put to shame in anything. Rather, I hope with daring courage that Christ’s greatness will be seen in my body, now as always, whether I live or die. Because for me, living serves Christ and dying is even better. If I continue to live in this world, I get results from my work. But I don’t know what I prefer. I’m torn between the two because I want to leave this life and be with Christ, which is far better. However, it’s more important for me to stay in this world for your sake. I’m sure of this: I will stay alive and remain with all of you to help your progress and the joy of your faith, and to increase your pride in Christ Jesus through my presence when I visit you again.[^1]

Notice he is talking about his body in this: “I hope with daring courage that Christ’s greatness will be seen in my body.”

As well, we are in this world for the sake of others. Our bodies, our spirits, our minds, they are not made for ourselves and our own benefit. God saves us for a purpose. In baptism, we die in Christ’s death in order to rise in Christ’s life.

That life of a party that does not go old. That life of praise and love where our hope is found in Christ and not ourselves. In Christ’s word, and not our own preferences or experiences.

in 2 corinthians 4 Paul lays this out for us plainly.

>This is why we don’t get discouraged, given that we received this ministry in the same way that we received God’s mercy. Instead, we reject secrecy and shameful actions. We don’t use deception, and we don’t tamper with God’s word. Instead, we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God by the public announcement of the truth...

>But we have this treasure in clay pots so that the awesome power belongs to God and doesn’t come from us. We are experiencing all kinds of trouble, but we aren’t crushed. We are confused, but we aren’t depressed. We are harassed, but we aren’t abandoned. We are knocked down, but we aren’t knocked out.

To say “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” is to believe not only in the resurrection of Jesus, but your own resurrection. Christ is making all things new, including you and your body and our neighbors and their bodies.

God will save you and heal you to share in praise and love eternally, the treasure of Divine love we will renew and remake the dust of which we were made.

This is our hope. The creed begins with the beginning of everything and God’s power there. The creed ends with our ultimate hope, not in ourselves, but in Christ’s resurrection that points to our own future.

And that future of life abundant is offered now. The light that shines in the darkness is shining still. It is shining here. In the midst of the discernment conversations at Bee Creek,

I believe in the resurrection of my body. This body of mine will be made new. These broken joints. These sin stained hands. These eyes and skin and hair. Because I believe in the resurrection of Christ’s body. He rose from the dead in flesh and sinew and bone.

I believe in the resurrection of this body. God is doing great things here

Life after death is more than a continuation of the status quo. It is our broken bodies being remade and resurrected.

Let us pray,

>Heavenly Father, may your resurrection inspire our hope in new life here and now. May our faith be in your transformation and not in our own. May our life be in your image and not our own. Help us to live boldly into your new creation and abundant life this day. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[^1]: Phil 1:20-26