Category Archives: sermons

Good News, Bad News, Good News

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Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Easter; Episcopal Church of the Ascension, Lafayette, Louisiana

Imagine with me for a moment what we might experience in the eschaton. 

It’s a big word, a theology-nerd kind of word, but brothers and sisters, it is also the orientation of our whole lives as Christians, and so eschaton is a word we ought to know and even a word we would do well to dwell on. Eschaton is a greek word that means “end.” It speaks of the last things, the ultimate things of God, the life together forever beyond here and now. That time when all things will be set right and every tear will be dried and peace will reign everywhere. 

That’s the eschaton. That’s heaven. What do you imagine it will be like? Who will you see there? What do you desire to do first? Try on the new crown made for your eternity? Bow down and kiss Jesus’ feet? Lay eyes again on your loved ones? Hug the necks of the people you admired in life but perhaps never even got to meet? There’s a story of a girl who asked a famous theologian if her dog would be present in heaven. He answered that if she needed that dog there in order for it to be heaven, then the dog would be just where she needed it. 

So, friends, I have good news, and bad news, and then some more good news. Are you ready? 

The good news is that for God, time isn’t linear, that even though for us, we experience one moment and then the next, and then the one after that, just one at time marching on till we die, God’s experience of time is bigger, more layered, to us – all mixed up. So even here and now, we humans, because of God dwelling in us, get moments and tastes of the eschaton, of eternity, of heaven. Perhaps you’ve had one or two. I remember the Sunday after my grandpa died; I had been there at his bedside and given him last rites an hour before he passed. He was surrounded by his four kids and his wife when he died on a snowy Monday morning in Minnesota. And six days later I was standing at the marble altar and as I led the congregation in the Lord’s Prayer right before communion, I heard my grandpa’s voice. I heard his familiar tones along with all the other voices, praying those sacred words. For a second it felt like I was among all the saints, standing in front of the throne of God, all of us worshiping and praying together. It was a time-outside-of-time moment. So the good news, brothers and sisters, is that though we find time to be a plodding march of present moments, sometimes eternity breaks in for a glorious span and reminds us that we made for more than common chronology. Heaven breaks in here and now, too. We are so privileged as humans, as temples of the living God, to experience such moments. 

So here’s the bad news. 

Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel lesson that he is shepherd of other sheep too. Sheep that “do not belong to this fold.” Jesus tells us that all the sheep of all his folds will be brought together at the eschaton, “I must bring them also,” he says. Everybody will be together for eternity in the great sheepfold in the sky. 

But I wonder if we’ll like those people. I sort of worry about the kind of people Jesus will let in to heaven. Will they, like sheep, be stinky? Will they, like sheep, be noisy? Will they, like real sheep, be a little thick in the head and exasperating? 

I can feel my body tensing up just saying these words! What will it mean, brothers and sisters, if Jesus is the shepherd of people who I think are not behaving well, or who have the wrong idea about what it means to follow the Good Shepherd, or who just don’t respect him the way he ought to be revered? 

The bad news is that we don’t get to choose. We don’t get to say who gets into heaven and who Jesus the Good Shepherd welcomes. We don’t even get to say here and now who God wants to be near to his presence. I suspect that there are people in this room today who don’t behave to believe the way we think they should, and even more there are people who God loves who aren’t here, but will be in the eschaton. But that all leads me to more good news. And that’s where we want to end up today. 

The good news is that we can start living with and loving those other sheep even now. We can get a leg up on heaven and have even more of those delicious moments I described at the beginning of the sermon when we seek out sheep of other folds, especially those that rub us the wrong way. 

The year between undergrad and divinity school, when I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, I led morning prayer once a week at a tiny little parish in Durham, North Carolina. Part of the requirement for the confirmation class was to serve the poor every week, too, and you know how I love efficiency, so I’d lead prayer on Wednesday mornings, and then stay after for the homeless breakfast they served every day of the week. The uncomfortable thing about the breakfast was that we were all expected to cook together, and then to sit down and eat together too. We had to sit next to the stinky, often mentally-ill, most likely male, people-whose-skin-tone-didn’t-match-mine. It was a different fold all together than my Duke University office with a window overlooking the iconic chapel. 

But let me tell you what happened to my heart that year. There was a man named Keith who I first met as a freshman in college. He begged at the highway exit to campus, and I always dutifully locked my doors as I came to the stoplight. I avoided eye contact. His sign said, “Hi, I’m Keith. I’m homeless. Please help.” 

Four years later, I sat across from Keith while we both ate plates of grits and hard-boiled eggs. I looked him in the eye. I passed the salt. We ate together and prayed together. I met Jesus again through Keith and through Slim and through Ethan, with whom I did the dishes. Jesus promises to be found among those who are hungry and thirsty and in prison. He has other sheep not of this fold. 

I’m sure Honey would be thrilled for an uptick in hands for outreach ministry, and perhaps that’s the call that Jesus has laid on your heart this morning. But I have another challenge, too. What about the person who dares to show up even here, under this roof with you, but that you complain about? What about the people in your life who are exasperating, who don’t behave the way you think they ought to, who might even be noisy when you think they ought to be silent? I wonder if God in Jesus Christ draws near to those people, and whether he might be calling you to graciously, lovingly, bearing-with-one-another-ly draw near to them, love them for who they are right now, too. Amen. 

Good Friday

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You notice, don’t you, the anniversaries of important events? Not just weddings and birthdays, but funerals, anniversaries of difficult diagnoses, the dates when tragedy struck or an accident happened. Our bodies remember, too. 

And so I find it’s not a surprise that Holy Week and especially Good Friday, feels heavy the world over. There’s a cosmic echo we just can’t shake, this ultimate tension that is imprinted on our internal calendars, on the time keeping of the whole world; we know in a deep part of us that something happened, something big, on this day. 

Today we remember and re-enact the pivotal moment of time. Two thousand years ago, today was an experiment. What would happen if evil killed God? What would happen if God didn’t use his God-power and just stayed, just died, along with us?

The love of God incarnate had never been tested this way. What would happen to the fabric of the universe? Would God’s love win? What would that winning look like? 

It didn’t look the way the disciples assumed, with swords and uprising and political revolution. It didn’t look like the Pharisees expected either, with peaceable conformity and cultural-convention-concerned movements. I wonder if it is the way that we suppose it is, either. I wonder whether the hints of resurrection in our own lives, whether the victory of God in our  midst, is in a form that we recognize and celebrate and follow. 

I’ll be honest, brothers and sisters. The odds aren’t in our favor. More often than not in Scripture, the people have it all backwards. More often than not in Scripture, the disciples get it all absolutely wrong. More often than not in Scripture, the prophets are murderd and the world turns away from the truth and the principalities and powers and contemporary victories are on the side opposite God. 

Indeed, in the end, on this day, Good Friday, the disciples abandon Jesus. Peter denies Jesus three times. At Golgotha, there were the women, and according to John’s account, himself as well. All like sheep had gone astray, each one to his own way, and he bore on himself the iniquity of them all. 

How could it be that winning, that victory, could look like death on a cross? This is not at all how it ought to have been. Power is security and luxury and leisure. These are the rewards for work well-done. That’s the lesson that the Pharisees took from the Old Testament, surely. But that’s not the message that Jesus bears. 

Jesus’ method is the same as his message, and the God revealed in Jesus Christ came to be with us. For thirty years, for 90% of his life, he spent his time just being. Growing up with friends and loved ones in Nazareth. Learning the family trade from Joseph his father. Going to synagogue and growing in wisdom and serving his community. He spent 9% of his life, those three years of itinerant preaching, teaching and healing – some call it his active ministry, but I wonder whether perhaps the whole of his life is an active ministry. And when he was in Jerusalem, when he was on the cross, he did the bit that only God could do, no human could endure the cross for our sake, but him. He stretched wide his arms upon the cross that everyone might come within the reach of his saving embrace. 

We see God’s love in this: no matter the cost, God in Jesus Christ stayed with us. Even when death came to pierce his hands and feet, Jesus would not abandon humanity. Even when he was ridiculed and striped and given the death of a criminal, Jesus did not call upon the powers at his disposal to save himself – because to do so would be to abandon his humanity, to pull the God card and not stay with us as his creation to the very end. 

On that Friday afternoon two thousand years ago, the world ended and we feel its echo, its grief, even today. Everyone wondered then: is this what winning looks like? Perhaps we still wonder today – is this all there is, is this what winning looks like? Our bits of grief rub up against this most grievous day, our pain at brokenness, illness, injustice, loneliness in our lives, is irritated and cracked open at Jesus’s sacrifice this day. Grief touches grief, and there is no day in the history of the world more full of grief than this one. The fears and sadness and wrongness of all the world is held by Jesus’ arms today. 

And back then, on that hill outside Jerusalem, even those who believed that somehow God would make good of this tragedy could not imagine how to come out the other side of this darkness. 

And maybe that’s you today. Maybe you wonder how you will come out the other side of this darkness. Maybe the way ahead is just pitch and obstacles and grief too deep for words. Here is the good news for you: God has been there, too. God is there with you now. God will lead you through this darkness and  oblivion because he has trod this path before and it does not scare him. He has overcome death and brought life, and he will do the same for you in whatever temporal battle you are facing today, and at the end of your own life, and at the end of the life of the world. 

God’s Voice

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Scripture Readings (1 Samuel 3, John 1:43-51) Epiphany 2, Year A

“You will see greater things than these.” Jesus tells his new disciples Nathanael in our Gospel reading this morning. Nathanael, truth be told, wasn’t expecting to see anything great at all, not least something great from somebody with as dubious an origin as Nazareth. His expectations are low. He doesn’t think he can be surprised by the quality of offering from this Jesus character. It sounds as if Nathanael was not expecting to hear from God. 

And it’s the same in our Old Testament lesson, “The Word of the Lord was rare in those days. Visions were not widespread.” I wonder, do we live in a time in which the Word of the Lord is rare? Do we expect to hear from God?

I wonder if we get confused or mishear God, too. The great prophet Samuel, who ushered in King David –  a man after God’s own heart! – didn’t recognize God’s voice when he called. Samuel’s mentor, the priest Eli, didn’t recognize God’s voice at first, either. They assumed it was just a bump in the night, less than something to be ignored, they assumed it was totally imagined, nothing at all. 

I wonder if we dismiss God’s voice. I wonder if we attribute the stirring of the Holy Spirit to be less than a bump or a coincidence, I wonder if we dismiss the call of God as indigestion or as totally imagined, nothing at all. 

What are we missing out on if we are dismissing God’s voice?

What are we suffering needlessly, because God has given us a way out but we are too focused on our expectations in order to listen to him? 

What difficulty might we avoid, what joy and peace might we have access to, what confidence and strength might we enjoy, if we were attuned to the voice of God?

In our Gospel reading, Nathanael does not immediately recognize God’s voice, either. When Jesus starts to reveal intimate details, Nathanael relents and realizes there might be more going on with this Jesus, that there might indeed be something good to come out of Nazareth. 

Even later in Samuel’s story, when he goes to anoint the future king David, David’s father Jesse thinks that God’s calling of David is so unlikely he doesn’t present this 8th son to Samuel. Can anything good come out of Bethlehem? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? What could God be about, calling people from these places, calling these types of people? Is that even God’s voice? Is this voice to be trusted? 

How do we know if a voice is God’s? How can we understand the call of God and follow it? How can we trust? 

One of the things that strikes me in the readings today is that all these people who are hearing from God involve other people in the call. Nobody is hearing God’s voice off by themselves and then acting on it alone. Samuel brings in his mentor, his priest, his father-figure Eli, to ask what to do and what’s going on.

 Is there someone in your life who you look up to, who you have experienced as wise? Maybe they’re somebody to sit with in learning and discerning God’s voice in your life. 

Both of these stories, too, show a sort of testing of spirits in different ways; God calls Samuel several times before he responds, and I wonder if you’ve experienced that, too. How God will put the same opportunity in your path a few times until you accept it. In the Gospel lesson, Nathanael hears about Jesus from Philip, he receives Philip’s testimony, but then he doubts, he famously wonders, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” 

It’s okay to question, to wonder, to doubt. God can handle our uncertainty. God is big enough to receive our questioning, God loves us enough to hold space for our wondering. The important thing in doubt and questioning, though, is sincere inquiry – I sometimes see “doubt” as a shield people use to avoid tough questions or examining their own assumptions. God is big enough to hold our doubts, but it’s disingenuous to just leave him carrying all our baggage. 

God longs for relationship, longs so much to be near to us that he came to be a human in order to be as close to us as possible, to enter our experience, to understand us and love us well, so how might we respond well to that kind of gesture, that sort of call? 

In each of these narratives, we see a sense of community discernment, we see an airing of doubt, and then finally, we see a resolution, a surrender and submission, an openness and an attitude of humble listening on the part of the person called. 

So whether you have a call on your heart today, whether you wonder if you’re hearing strange voices or you believe you have a Word from the Lord, or perhaps you’re straining to hear anything at all, what we can surely all do to prepare us for God’s voice is to adopt open ears and hands and hearts, ready to listen and to humbly receive. 

When I was 16, I went to a summer camp for theology nerds. I’d always been the most zealous for church of my parents’ children, I served on the worship team and in the children’s Sunday School. I loved to read books far beyond my depth when it came to matters of faith and philosophy (I infamously brought Aristotle on a spring break trip to Florida). When I came home from this summer camp, a very small voice suggested I be a pastor. It was a strange voice and a weird thing to say, and those around me dismissed the epiphany, just like Eli when Samuel came to him at first. 

So I wanted to be a religion professor, and that felt much more acceptable to me and to those around me – I wouldn’t actually be traversing that ground of being a woman in a world that had been ruled by men for millenia – though of course academia isn’t that much better! Near the end of my time in college, that voice came again. It reminded me how much joy I’d felt when mentoring young women in my sorority, and how it was the relationships and interactions that fueled me more than reading and regurgitating books. 

I still wasn’t sure about this voice, and thought maybe it meant I should be a college chaplain. That didn’t sound nearly so scary as being some kind of parish priest. But brothers and sisters, I remember the night I laid in my bed, much like Samuel, and the thought was placed in my head, “You will be a priest.” A few weeks after that, a dear mentor of mine wondered aloud to me whether my call was to blow hot air about women in ministry – which was my desired academic focus – or to just go be one. 

God’s call will keep coming, in different times and places and tones and harmonies, until each of us responds. This is true in our individual lives as well as our call as a worshiping community, and as a city, a nation, and a world. 

Openness, brothers and sisters. Being open to God’s voice sounding or looking different than we expected. Allowing our community to help form and inform us about how God is showing up. Allowing ourselves to be challenged and to re-examine our conceptions, which is itself humility. 

So this morning I leave you with the challenge and charge, especially as we celebrate this season of Epiphany, of revelations and of the flooding in of light to our lives: may we be open to the Holy Spirit’s call, may we be open-handed in our response, may God give us courage to humbly submit to his gracious will. 

Amen. 

“And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” (Mark 1)

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Can you imagine being eager to repent of your sins? Are you one who would have rushed into the wilderness, hopped in your car and high-tailed it to Cameron Parish, if you’d heard that some prophet had showed up there and was baptizing people? 

That sounds nice for other people. Maybe somebody else needs to go unburden themselves, but I’m okay right here. God can change a heart from anywhere, he doesn’t need me to go to Cameron parish or West Texas or Honduras to find salvation and listen to some fire and brimstone preacher. I can repent just fine right here in the quiet of my pew, without any histrionics or wailing or embarrassing outbursts. We have order – we are Episcopalians, for goodness’ sake.

But it’s not really about being Episcopalian or avoiding uncomfortable shows of emotion. It’s about fear, isn’t it? I wonder if we might be afraid of what God requires of us in judgment. 

Last week at the 8:30am service, Fr. Jake preached to open the Advent season, and he relayed a striking image from a C.S. Lewis novel that opened to us the way it might look when Jesus comes to judge and cleanse us. I think it might have looked different than we expected. 

So maybe that’s a good question to ask: what do we expect the exposing and purging of our sins to look like? 

Did any of you see the Anne of Green Gables with Megan Follows from the 1980s? (Who didn’t?!) There’s a scene where she’s a teacher trying to inspire her drama students to really get into playing Mary Queen of Scots, and she throws herself across the stage to cling to the skirts of whoever the other character is, maybe Queen Elizabeth the First, and yells, “Save me, sweet lady!” That’s one of the first images that bursts to my mind about begging for forgiveness. The debasing oneself, the physical and figurative lowering toward the dust. T

And we can easily imagine, too, the way that we might have experienced confession and punishment growing up – a stern voice saying, “well, tell me what you did wrong.” That hot, prickly feeling on your neck and back, maybe even bowing your head in shame and sadness in this expectant silence. Perhaps there were physical consequences too, privileges removed, or pain inflicted to help teach us a lesson.

Our world judges wrong in courtrooms, with testimonies and standing up alone in the truth or in sin. We are not so far removed, only a few hundred years, from pillories and the cutting off of ears or hands. 

Gosh, who would want to invite that kind of awful pain, and to be exacted from the Lord of Lords – the almighty one of ultimate power. What excruciating destruction he could bring to our lives! Surely it’s more than we could even imagine.

Yes, I would be one of those who would demur the invitation to go and be cleansed in the wilderness. I am not eager to have my sins nailed up next to me, or to have a scarlet letter sewn to my shirt, or to serve a sentence in a dank dungeon. Nobody really does, right? 

So I wonder if the exposing and purging of our sins for Jesus’ sake might look different than what we expect. I wonder if Jesus’s redemption and facing of our faults might be surprising in view of what the world teaches us that restitution looks like. 

Consider: back in the garden, when Adam and Eve had disobeyed, God sought them in the cool of the day. He didn’t come immediately the moment he knew they’d sinned. He didn’t stomp over and throw lightning bolts, he didn’t nail them up to a cross literally or figuratively, he didn’t even slap their behinds or waggle his fingers at them. With compassion and regret, he laid out the consequences of their actions; I get the sense that if it had been possible to ignore the price of their actions, he would have, but you see, they’d made a choice to not-trust God, and from that point, God still wanted to protect them as much as he could, and so the consequences provided a sort of boundary line to do what he could to keep them safe while being in the wide world. 

Later, we see in the Gospels how Jesus interacts with those who come to him with humility, knowing their sins. Often these are the people who society reminds of their shortcomings all the day long. But Jesus doesn’t pile on with the cultural expectations of shunning tax collectors and ignoring prostitutes. Those who recognize their imperfections, those who are humble about their sins, those who come to Jesus holding their sins out in front of them, are received how?

Jesus looks with compassion, Jesus takes time to sit with these people. Jesus gently wipes their tears and listens to their burdens and pronounces them forgiven. 

This isn’t the shunning or shaming we might expect. This isn’t the hot anger and lightning bolts that we often assume power will wield. This God revealed in Jesus Christ deals gently with those who recognize their darkness and who seek to heal from evil. And that’s the difference, isn’t it? I wonder whether the people who went out from Judea and all the surrounding countryside and who poured out from Jerusalem were the ones who knew they were already in darkness and already mired in the wilderness of sin. 

I wonder whether these people who sought John the Baptist and his cleansing in the river Jordan recognized that the trip to the wilderness was really not so much geographical as it was spiritual. And that they were, in truth, already there. 

Already in the wilderness. Already lost and parched. Already feeling heavy and burdened by the weight of their lives. Already wandering in guilt and regret. I wonder whether any of this feels familiar to you.

What we find in Scripture, not least in the prophecy from Isaiah this morning, is that this God, unlike rulers in the world or idols of ancient times, uses his great power when he’s doing good, not when he’s meting out consequences. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God of mercy, the prophet Hosea tells us, and when “he comes with might, and his arm rules for him, his reward is with him… he will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms.” This God is abundant in his power for mercy, for gentleness and nourishment, for forgiveness, for light and health and thriving and hope. 

The powers of this world are harsh and dark and full of punishment. The consequences are dire – the wages of sin is death – but the gift of God is eternal life. God’s kingdom, the ruling order that Jesus ushers in through the incarnation, is founded on the power of God’s love, not the power of pain or punishment or shame or evil. So as we approach God’s throne of grace, our confession of sin need not be fearful or defensive. We may rest knowing that the purging of our sins will hurt only in so far as it is hard to extricate ourselves from darkness, and that the love of God is a cleansing, healing salve to our sin-sick souls. 

Sermon for All Saints Sunday

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Revelation 7:9-17 + Matthew 5:1-12

Sitting down to write this sermon was the first time I’d spent any time at my desk since the first week of October. My monthly desk-blotter calendar was still showing “October” as I spread out my Bible and print outs. And I just couldn’t start writing. I texted Jordan, I texted Jillian, another friend who is also preaching this week called me and we talked. I even started a load of towels to strip in the bathtub. 

When I came back to my desk, I looked again at the calendar. As y’all may know, I spent a week of October, fully 7 days, in the hospital at Women’s and Children’s with Jacob who was battling RSV. He was baptized last year on All Saints Sunday, and as I’ve grown, I’ve found that our lives and experiences and feelings are cyclical. Is there a time of year that always feels heavier to you? Is there a season that brings up twinges or tickling in your chest, a joy or sentimental nostalgia? Sometimes I’ll even find on specific days that my body feels more achy or I have a headache that I can’t shake, and then I’ll realize that on that day 10 years ago my grandpa died or I graduated from college, or some other big event, happy or sad, took place and I hadn’t really recalled it, but some part of my body, my being, knew it was happening, and was even remembering the impact of that event on my life while my brain forgot it. 

I love that God made our selves so complex and so memorable that pieces of us will be sensitive to God’s movement even when our minds are oblivious. 

And so as I sat down to write this sermon, I realized, staring at that calendar, that my body and spirit needed a little acknowledgement of what had transpired in our family in the last month. So I got a pen, and I drew an arrow through the seven days that Jacob and I spent in a tiny room, hooked up to oxygen. I wrote, “Hospital” “Jacob in the Hospital” under the arrow, and then I just looked at the paper. I took a few deep breaths, I told myself “that was a big chunk of the month.” “That really broke up October.” “You didn’t think that would happen again this year.” 

And after a few more breaths – I love to think of breathing as a way to acknowledge the Holy Spirit, in both Hebrew and Greek the original languages of the Bible, the words used to name the Holy Spirit “ru’ah” and “pneuma” are words for breath, for breathing. After a few breaths, I rolled my shoulders, tore off the “October” page, and set down to read and write again. I felt better. It’s a way I was able to feel the bigness of what October had meant for our family, a way to give space for and honor the grief and fear and powerlessness and restlessness of that month. And then, a way to let it go. 

Y’all will know from your own experiences and your own lives, it’s not over, the feelings and grief of our hospital stay and of our child’s illness will come up again in some other way, spurred by something else, and it’ll be my work then to listen again, slow down and welcome the stirrings that pull at me. 

I tell you all this because we find echoes in today’s Scriptures, too, and we will each hear ripples that might slosh at us sideways in the liturgy today, maybe in the names prayed for and listed in our bulletins, maybe in the memories of baptisms-past, maybe in the way the light angles through the windows at this time of year. And I pray, my precious brothers and sisters, that when these stirrings pop up, whether they bring waves of joy or grief or headache or achiness or ease, that just as you welcome visitors into your home, you will welcome these movements of the Holy Spirit, that you will ask them to sit down and stay awhile, that you’ll have the courage to sit and listen and learn from these visitors that the Holy Spirit has sent to you. With that in mind, let’s turn to the readings for today.

“After this I, John, looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God.” 

I hear an echo from Babel here. Do you remember that story? Way back in Genesis, before Abraham, before Moses and all the prophets, God saw that people were putting themselves up as idols, as the center of the universe, and he made different languages and scattered the people to protect them from themselves. Of course a consequence of that has been our division and strife against each other tribe since. But here in Revelation, at the end of time, we read that it won’t be that way anymore. That people from every nation all tribes and peoples and languages will be gathered and oriented toward the real king, the true center of the universe, of all creation, which is God, and the Lamb, Jesus. This echo of grief, of division that’s written in our bones as humans, that longs for connection instead of misunderstanding and isolation, will be put right, will be overcome, only by God and through his grace. 

Later in that same passage, somebody tells John, the writer who is relaying this vision: 

“For this reason they are before the throne of God,

and worship him day and night within his temple,

and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;

the sun will not strike them,

nor any scorching heat;

for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,

and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,

and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Do you recognize that? Did those words stir in you? We hear here prophecies from Isaiah and from the Psalms. You may remember from Isaiah 4 the lines about being sheltered by the one on the throne; you may recall from Psalms 49 and 121 the promises that no one will hunger or thirst anymore; you may hear the echo from Isaiah 25 the vow that God will wipe away every tear from every eye. I wonder if you’ve had moments, or glimmers of these truths in your own life, a sort of little promise or little fulfillment of God’s goodness and grace as we still await God’s big overhaul of evil’s eradication from existence. 

Leaving the hospital surely felt like a little fulfillment, lying in my bed that night with all my boys under the same roof surely felt like a small grace and a moment to cherish and note and welcome into my house and listen to. *take a breath* Do you have those, too?

Then as we move to the Gospel lesson for today, those ladies in the Luke Bible study will have heard big echoes everywhere in these 12 verses. These passages are shared almost verbatim in Luke as here in Matthew, with a few notable adjustments. Y’all don’t have to be part of the Bible study for them to be familiar words, and maybe you remember another sermon you’ve heard on these words. Maybe you recall your momma quoting them as she instructed your behavior as a child. Maybe you feel unsettled, wondering what persecution for righteousness’ sake might require of you. 

God, in inspiring the composition of Scripture, intends for these echoes to poke at us, to reveal himself to us ever more deeply, to resonate on both deep intellectual levels and on levels in us that are too deep and hidden for words at all. Do you know that verse from Romans, about prayer and the Holy Spirit? “Likewise, the Spirit, helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” 

When our sighings are too deep for words, when our grief or echoes of love are too strong for us to stay standing, when our joy is too mighty to keep from splitting into a smile, may God the Holy Spirit help us in our weakness, in our fear or freeze in the face of such power so near us. May God the Holy Spirit intercede for us, drawing us along with him in prayer as we offer these echoes of holy stirrings back to God himself. May God give us courage to sit still with the memories that he offers us, may God be present with us – just as he promises he always will be through the cross – as we seek to learn what it is that God reveals to us about himself in our hearts, in our families, in our communities, and in our world. Amen.