Curved Inward: Why Spiritual Growth Was Never Meant to Be a Solo Project

It is back-to-school season, and if you have spent any time near a Target on a tax-free weekend recently, you already know what that means. Parking lots that look like a scene from a disaster film. Carts overflowing with folders and glue sticks. And somewhere in the chaos, a parent shutting the back hatch of an overstuffed SUV with the quiet, triumphant relief of someone who has just crossed a finish line.

But before the school year even begins, most of us have already done something else. We sat down with a planner, a spreadsheet, or a color-coded calendar and built out the fall. Soccer practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Guitar lessons on Wednesdays. The travel team. The thing your child begged to sign up for in May and is now dreading in August. We have optimized. We have scheduled. We have tried, with every tool available to us, to make the chaos manageable.

And here is the thing worth noticing. That impulse does not stop at the calendar. We optimize our mornings, our workouts, our routines, and yes, even our faith. We download the app for the morning scripture reading. We queue up the podcast for the commute. We leave the book on the nightstand with every intention of finishing it. And all of it, every single piece of it, is something we can do entirely alone.

That is where a very old theological idea becomes remarkably relevant to a very modern problem.

Augustine first named it, and Martin Luther picked it up and carried it into his lectures on the book of Romans. The Latin phrase is incurvatus in se. Curved in on oneself. Luther used it to describe what happens to the human heart when sin takes hold. Not always through dramatic rebellion or obvious cruelty. Sometimes it happens quietly, gradually, through a slow inward bend where even the good things, even the noble things, even our faith, start turning back toward ourselves.

The troubling part is how invisible it can be. You can read the right books, follow the right routines, and show up every single week to worship and still be curved inward. Because presence alone is not the finish line.

Paul understood this. In Romans 15, verses one through seven, he writes to a church in Rome that has no attendance problem. This congregation is packed with people who care deeply, who show up faithfully, and who hold very strong convictions about what it means to live a righteous life. One group refuses to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols. The other group says an idol is nothing and eats freely. One group treats certain days as holy. The other says every day belongs to God equally.

Both groups are present. Both groups are engaged. And both groups are using their time together to make their case, defend their position, and convince the other side they are wrong.

Paul calls one group strong and the other weak, not because one is trying harder, but because one has the freedom of conviction to act without a troubled conscience and the other does not. And his correction is not aimed at their theology. It is aimed at their orientation. He writes that the strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please themselves. The word he uses for please is the same word you would use for satisfying your own appetite. His point is sharp and simple. Stop building your participation around your own preferences and start building it around what actually serves the person sitting next to you.

Then in verse seven, he brings it all together. Welcome one another, he says, just as Christ has welcomed you.

That is not a suggestion for the highly motivated. That is the actual shape of what it means to follow Jesus in community.

And yet, the culture we live in pulls hard in the opposite direction. We have built an entire economy around personal optimization. We want the sermon that speaks to us but does not challenge us too sharply. We want the worship style that moves us in exactly the right ways. We want the community that agrees with us and does not push back too hard. We want faith on our own terms, discipleship on our own schedule, and spiritual growth that fits neatly around everything else we have already decided matters.

What we end up with is something that looks a great deal like a subscription service. Something curated around our preferences that we can cancel whenever the season changes or the cost gets too high.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, put it as directly as anyone ever has. There is no holiness but social holiness. Not private holiness that happens to occur near other Christians, but holiness that only happens because of other Christians. Because they see what you cannot see in yourself. Because they carry what you cannot carry alone.

This is not a minor footnote to the spiritual life. It is the architecture of it. You cannot sanctify yourself. You cannot form yourself into the likeness of Christ through sheer personal discipline, one good habit at a time, alone in your house with an app open and headphones in. That is not a moral failure. It is simply not how this was designed to work. A faith left entirely to your own management will, as Luther warned, eventually curve back toward you. There is no way around it.

So here is the honest, uncomfortable, and ultimately freeing truth that Romans 15 keeps pressing toward. Somewhere around you right now, there is someone whose faith needs you. Not your opinion. Not your correction. Not your perfectly optimized advice. Just your presence, your willingness to show up and stay, curved outward instead of in.

The difference between spectating and participating is not effort. It is orientation. It is the daily, inconvenient, schedule-disrupting decision to welcome one another the way Christ has welcomed you.

That is not a productivity hack. It is not a three-step plan. It is a way of life. And it requires showing up, not just for yourself, but for each other.

Participation Required: A 5-Day Bible Reading Plan and Devotional Guide

Day 1: The Danger of the Inward Curve

Reading: Romans 15:1-7 — Paul urges those with strong convictions to bear with those who are weaker, prioritizing the building up of neighbors over personal satisfaction, grounding this call in the example of Christ who did not live to please himself.

Devotional: It is possible to show up every week and still be entirely curved inward. The believers in Rome were not absent or lazy. They were present, convicted, and confident — and still failing one another. Their certainty had quietly become the center of their faith rather than the person sitting across from them. This is the subtle shape of a self-directed faith: not rebellion, but a slow, almost invisible turn inward where even our devotion becomes something we curate for our own comfort. Ask yourself today not whether you showed up, but whether your showing up served anyone other than yourself.

Reflection Questions:

In what areas of your faith life have your own preferences quietly become the priority?
Who in your community might need your presence more than your opinion?

Day 2: Community as the Crucible of Formation

Reading: Hebrews 10:24-25 — The author of Hebrews instructs believers not to neglect gathering together, but instead to stir one another toward love and good works, especially as the day of Christ's return draws near.

Devotional: Spiritual growth was never designed to be a solo project. The writer of Hebrews does not suggest gathering as one option among many. It is presented as essential, not because attendance itself is holy, but because you cannot be stirred toward love by someone who is not there, and you cannot stir someone else if you have withdrawn. The people around you in a faith community are not a backdrop to your personal spiritual journey. They are the actual means by which God forms you. The friction, the difference, the inconvenience of other people — that is not a problem to be managed. It is the point.

Reflection Questions:

What has kept you from full participation in your faith community, whether physically or emotionally?
How might God be using the people around you — even the ones who challenge you — as instruments of your formation?

Day 3: Social Holiness and the Shape of Christlikeness

Reading: 1 Thessalonians 5:11 — Paul calls believers to encourage one another and build each other up, framing mutual edification not as an occasional act of kindness but as an ongoing communal practice.

Devotional: John Wesley insisted there is no holiness but social holiness. He did not mean that private prayer is worthless. He meant that the kind of person Christ calls you to become cannot be produced in isolation. You need people who see what you cannot see in yourself. You need someone to carry what you cannot carry alone. You need the weight of another person's need to pull your attention away from your own. The optimization culture we inhabit tells you that self-improvement is a personal project. Scripture tells you that becoming like Christ is a communal one. You were not made to develop your faith in a room by yourself with headphones in.

Reflection Questions:

Who in your life speaks honestly into your blind spots?
What would it look like to intentionally invest in someone else's spiritual growth this week?

Day 4: Welcome as an Act of Worship

Reading: Romans 15:7 — Paul instructs believers to welcome one another in the same manner that Christ has welcomed them, grounding the act of mutual acceptance in the grace already received and directing it toward the glory of God.

Devotional: Welcome is not a hospitality strategy. According to Paul, it is an act of worship. When Christ welcomed you, he did not wait until you had the right theology or the cleanest record or the most convenient schedule. He welcomed you as you were, at cost to himself, for the glory of God. Paul now asks you to extend that same welcome to the person next to you — not the person who agrees with you, not the person who makes community feel easy, but the person whose differences make you want to quietly withdraw. That welcome, offered at the cost of your own comfort, is participation in the life of God.

Reflection Questions:

Is there someone in your community whose differences have caused you to quietly pull back?
What would it cost you, practically, to welcome that person the way Christ has welcomed you?

Day 5: Curved Outward, Sent Together

Reading: Philippians 2:3-5 — Paul urges believers to do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but to consider others as more significant than themselves, looking not only to their own interests but also to the interests of others, with the mind of Christ as the model.

Devotional: The sermon series is called Participation Required, and by now the reason is clear. Faith that curves inward — however sincere, however disciplined, however well-read — eventually serves only itself. The mind of Christ, as Paul describes it in Philippians 2, is oriented entirely outward. It empties rather than accumulates. It considers rather than dismisses. It looks to the interests of others not as an afterthought but as the primary posture. This does not come naturally. It is not the product of a better morning routine or a more efficient schedule. It is the slow, costly, communal work of being formed into something you could never become alone. That work begins when you show up — not just in body, but bent outward, toward the person beside you.

Reflection Questions:

Where in your daily life is the inward curve most visible — your schedule, your relationships, your faith practices?
What one concrete step can you take this week to orient your participation in community around the needs of someone else?

Well, good morning, friends.

My name's, good morning, good morning.

My name's Mitchell.

I'm the senior minister here at First United Methodist Church of Dallas, and if this is your first time worshiping with us, welcome.

We are delighted, really delighted that you're here, and we hope you come back.

 and worship with us in the weeks to come.

And it is a big Sunday for us as a church.

You know it's a big Sunday because we have balloons.

And anytime we have balloons, that means something important is happening.

It is back to school season.

Amen.

All right.

And seriously, there is nothing, and I mean literally nothing, that lets you know that DISD starting is just two sleeps away from

 then going to Target on a Saturday.

This past Saturday, I snuck away.

We'd already done all the school supply shopping, but I was there to try to find some sports cards and totally forgot it was tax-free weekend.

 And it was incredible how difficult it was to find a parking spot.

I swear I saw a woman crying tears of joy as she shut the back hatch of her oversized SUV, thinking about reduced grocery bills now and finding some peace between like 8 a.m.

on Tuesday and when she sits down at her desk for work.

And don't get me wrong.

 I love summer.

I really do.

It fits my personality well.

The slower mornings, the lack of a schedule, the way everybody in this building seems a little more relaxed for about 10 weeks.

But by the time August rolls around, we are ready for the routine to come back.

I am.

The backpack's all being packed.

The lunch is being made.

And

 The color-coded calendar on the refrigerator that we pray will bring tranquility to our lives.

And that calendar, that has my attention, I think our attention,

 this morning because somewhere between the last day of school and the first day of school, most of us did this thing.

We sat down maybe with a spreadsheet, maybe with one of those planners that have stickers.

I don't know what it is for you, but you built out your fall schedule and you have soccer practice on Tuesday and Thursdays, guitar lessons on Wednesday, the tutor's schedule.

Then you have like a travel team maybe for one of your kids' sports.

 And then you have that thing your kid begged you to sign them up for in May, but now they are dreading it in August.

That's real.

To parent in 2026 is actually to work as hard as you can to optimize your household.

 To be a grandparent is probably to giggle a bit at how hard your child is working to optimize their household, but we do optimize our kids' extracurriculars like we're building out their resume already for college instead of raising a 10-year-old who mostly just wants to play in the backyard.

 And this isn't just a parent thing, okay?

It's not a sermon about just parenthood, because I think we've all fallen victim to this cycle in some ways.

We optimize our mornings.

We optimize our workouts, or at least we try to.

We optimize our vacations and our routines.

And I know that many of you optimize your doctor's appointments week in and week out.

 And look, I do want to be careful here because I'm not about to stand up here and tell you that wanting good things for yourself is inherently bad or wanting good things for your family is bad.

It's not.

But I do think it's worth naming what's happening underneath all this optimization because we live in a moment that is rather obsessed with getting better.

Getting faster.

 Getting more efficient.

Did you know that AI can write your email for you now?

Trust me, I read a lot of AI written emails.

It can plan your meals.

It can apparently tell you the fastest route to raise an emotionally healthy child.

 You have to ask it the right way, but eventually it will come out with some pretty good suggestions.

And I say that not as some aspiring Luddite, because the AI boom in 2026, it's really, it's not new.

Well, I mean, it's new, it's new technology, and it may destroy the entire world, but it's just the newest tool in a very old project of optimization.

We've been trying to optimize ourself

 Since long before anyone could ask ChatGPT a question, walk into any bookstore and it proves my point, you'll find an entire wall dedicated to becoming a better version of yourself.

 better parent, better leader, better spouse, five habits, seven principles, 15 steps to the best life ever.

Somewhere in that pile is probably a few books about becoming a better Christian too, written like it's some sort of productivity hack.

And none of that in and of itself is evil, by the way.

Some of it is genuinely useful.

And I've read some of those books and I've tried some of those habits and I failed at most of them, but it's not because the advice was bad, right?

 But here's the thing that I've come to notice about really all of it.

The calendars, the obsession with getting everything just right, the self-improvement, almost all of it is aimed inwardly.

It's about my growth.

My kid success.

 my schedule tightened up, my life upgraded or leveled up.

There's an age-old theological phrase for this, actually, centuries old.

Actually, Augustine used it first, and then Martin Luther picked it up and ran with it while he was writing his lectures on the book of Romans, which we're going to get to here in a second.

The phrase is incurvetus in se, which simply means curved in on oneself.

 Luther used it to describe what sin does to the human heart.

It doesn't always look like rebellion or cruelty.

Sometimes it just looks like a slow inward curve where even the good things, even the noble things, even our faith start bending back towards ourself.

We can optimize our schedules.

We can improve our parenting.

We can read the right books.

We can download the right apps and still end up exactly where we started.

 curved inward, facing ourselves.

 And I don't think most of us are like avoiding this sort of spiritual growth necessary to bend our attention back outwards.

I think a lot of us have quietly built a version of it that never requires anyone else.

An app for your morning scripture, a podcast for the commute, a book that's on the nightstand that you've been meaning to finish.

All of it is real, some of it is good, and all of it is something you can do entirely alone.

 which is exactly the tension we're going to sit in for the next few weeks.

We're calling this series Participation Required, and here's why.

Because I think for all of us, but especially for young families in this room, church has quietly become one more optional item on an already impossible calendar.

 Not because you don't love God, not because you don't want your kids to grow up in a faith community or become spiritually nurtured, but because everything in your life right now is asking you to choose the most efficient use of your time, the most efficient use of your Sunday morning.

And church doesn't always win because the math isn't mathing.

It just, there's not enough hours in the day.

And over these next four weeks, we're going to look at what actually, what it actually means to show up.

Not just physically, like being present, although...

 There is something to that.

But to participate in something that was never designed to be optimized in the first place.

Church was never designed to be optimized.

Curated.

Faith was never meant to be done alone.

We're going to talk about being sent out in week two.

In week three, we're going to talk about...

 believing one thing and doing another.

And then in week four, we're gonna end with a story of a fig tree that's really strange and good, it's good.

But we start here with an inward curve of the heart.

In a letter that Paul wrote to the church in Rome, believe it or not, this church never had an attendance problem.

And so we're gonna get into it.

Romans 15, verses one through seven.

This is what Paul is telling this community.

 We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak and not please ourselves.

Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor.

For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness

 By steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope, hope being a really big theme for Paul in this book.

 In verse 5, he says, may the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another in accordance with Christ Jesus so that together you may with one voice glorify God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, welcome one another, therefore just as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God.

 for the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

Will you pray with me?

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer.

For you are the one who calls us to bend our gaze outward, help us to see, to live in a way

 that truly honors you.

Amen.

Now, if you had only heard this passage once, you might assume that Paul is writing to a church full of people that have checked out.

 weak faith, strong faith.

It sounds sort of like he's talking about spiritual effort, like some of them are trying hard and some of them aren't.

But that's not what's happening here in chapter 15.

The church in Rome that Paul is writing to, the church is not lazy.

They're not a lazy church.

It's not empty on Sundays.

If anything, they have the opposite problem.

 The church is packed with people who care deeply, who show up every week, who have very strong convictions about what faithfulness looks like.

The trouble is that they've split into two camps, two competing camps.

One group believes you shouldn't eat meat.

There was sacrifice to idols because in their world, that's basically all the meat.

And so they're sticking to vegetables.

The other group says that's ridiculous.

An idol is nothing.

Meat is meat.

Eat what you want.

 One group treats certain days as holy.

The other says every day belongs to God equally, so why bother making one off from the rest?

Paul calls one side the strong side.

It's not a football term, just how I wrote it in my sermon.

Paul calls one side the strong side and the other side weak.

 Not because one group is trying harder, but because one side has the freedom of conviction to do whatever they want, and the other side's conscience won't let them.

And here's, I think, what's easy to miss.

Both groups are fully participating in the life of the church.

Nobody's skipping worship over this.

They're showing up every single week and using their time together to...

 fight, to make their case, to convince the other side they're wrong, to defend their own practice as the right one.

They are the most engaged and opinionated present congregation you could imagine, and Paul still has to write them a letter about failing one another.

 which tells you something important right out of the gate, showing up and just participating or showing up and just being present, that's not the actual finish line.

I mean, it helps, but that's not the finish line.

Because what we know is that you can be in this room every single week

 of your life and still be doing exactly what Paul is correcting here.

Because look at what Paul actually asked for in verse one.

We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.

That word please, it's the same word you'd use for satisfying your own appetite.

Paul isn't asking the strong to change their theology.

 He's asking them to stop building their participation around their own preferences and start building it around what actually serves the person next to them.

 That's the whole point of the passage.

Not attendance, rather an embodied faith.

A faith that begins to shift from inwardly focused to outwardly experienced because here's Luther's fuller description and it's worth, I think, reengaging with it and not just sort of depending on my shorthand.

Martin Luther said, our nature is so deeply curved inward

 curved in on itself, that it doesn't just bend the ordinary things of life toward our own satisfaction.

It bends even the good gifts of God.

It bends even our religion.

Even our faith becomes something we use for ourselves, something we enjoy on our own terms.

And we do it so instinctively that we don't even notice that we're doing it.

 And if we read Romans 15 again, the strong believers in Rome aren't unfaithful and they're not lazy.

If anything, they're theologically confident, sure of their freedom, sure they're right.

And Paul's entire correction is that their certainty, their certainty has curved them inward.

Their faith has become about being right.

 about their own liberty, about their own comfort with the practice instead of about the person sitting across from the table from them who sees it differently.

And that is what a curved faith looks like up close.

It doesn't look like absence necessarily.

It looks like a fully committed person who has quietly made their faith all about themselves.

And that's not just a first century problem.

 We live in a culture that has built an entire economy around personal optimization and becoming better, and the church is not exempt from this.

We want a sermon that speaks to us, but not too loudly.

We want a worship style that moves us, but only in the right ways.

 the service time that fits our schedule, the Sunday school class with people that we like, and a group of folks who already agree with us

 and won't push back too hard, folks who make us comfortable, we have without really meaning to started treating our faith like a subscription service, something curated entirely around our own preferences.

And the good news is we can cancel it anytime we want with no long-term commitment required.

We essentially come in and out of church life

 based off of the seasons that we're in and the preferences in which, I don't know, the preferences being met or not.

And into that, I think Paul says something that lands, well, it's rather offensive in its simplicity.

And I'll say it very clearly here.

Paul says, serve your neighbor, not yourself.

 And this right here, this idea of serving someone else over yourself is a challenge modernity doesn't love because we're drawn to partial participation.

We want the parts of faith that are convenient and none of the parts that cost us anything.

We want community on our terms, discipleship on our schedule, spiritual growth that fits neatly around everything else we've already decided matters.

 We would much rather be a spectator on the sidelines than someone who participates.

And Brene Brown says the same thing about courage, right?

That people in the stands never have to risk anything.

They just get to have opinions about those who are in the arena.

 But there is no version of this that Paul offers halfway.

He's not asking the strong to tone it down a little bit or the weak to just sort of loosen up.

He's asking both sides to frankly be all in.

 not on their own preference, but on each other.

And in verse 7, we kind of get the heart of it.

Welcome one another, Paul says, just as Christ has welcomed you.

And that's not a suggestion for the highly motivated.

That's the actual shape of what it means to follow Jesus in community, which brings me back to the truth.

I think this whole series is going to keep circling

 back to, so I should say it as clearly as I can right at the start, right here.

And Anna, this is what should go on the Instagram slide, okay?

Spiritual growth does not happen in isolation.

 It does not happen in isolation.

It cannot happen in isolation because you cannot sanctify yourself.

You cannot form yourself into the likeness of Christ through sheer personal discipline.

It cannot happen.

 You can't form yourself into a follower of Christ, one good habit at a time, alone in your house with your app open and your headphones in, and that is not a moral failure on your part.

It's just how this whole thing works.

We were never designed to develop ourselves in isolation.

 and you cannot spiritually form yourself

 Doing this thing alone, you just can't.

John Wesley, and if you've been here for more than a few weeks, you've probably heard me say this before, put it as sharply as anyone ever has.

There is no holiness but social holiness, not private holiness that happens to occur near other Christians, holiness that only happens because of other Christians, because they see what you cannot see in yourself, because they carry what you cannot carry alone.

 because your faith left entirely to your own management, I hate to say this, Martin Luther was very right on this, will eventually curve back towards you.

There is no way around it.

When you live your life in isolation, your world begins to curve back inwardly.

So I don't know exactly how we solve for that.

 I don't know how to fix that.

I certainly don't know exactly what that looks like for you this week.

I'm not going to stand up here and give you three steps to fix it by Friday because if I had those steps, I'd put it in a book and sell it to you.

But honestly, I don't think it works that way.

There's no quick fix here.

There's no three things you can do to sort of begin paying attention to others.

 And I don't think it's easy because if it was easy, Paul wouldn't be insisting on this as much as he does.

So while I don't know how we address this in this moment in time, I will leave you with this.

And this I absolutely believe to be true.

Somewhere in this sanctuary right now, somewhere in this room, there is someone whose faith needs you.

 needs you to show up, to care, to be present, and they don't need your opinion.

They don't need your correction, just your presence, curved outward instead of in.

 Welcome one another, Paul says, the way Christ welcomed you.

May we actually have the courage to be curved that way, to be oriented that way toward each other and through each other toward God, even when it is inconvenient or doesn't fit nicely into our schedules or makes us uncomfortable, because that is the difference between spectating and participating in

 And friends, the world needs a lot more participation these days.

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

Good morning, friends.

It's good to see each and every one of you.

And if you're a guest this morning, what a, if you're a first-time guest, what a time to join us as we conclude the book of Joshua together in our band series.

 Yesterday, Elan and I did something that we don't often do.

I can't remember the last time I did it, actually.

We dropped the kids off.

We went on a date.

That's not the last.

We do that more often than not.

But we dropped the kids off early and went to a 9 a.m.

showing of The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan.

 which I recommend you go and see the movie.

The film's incredible.

And I love seeing a movie in the morning because there's no one there to judge you for whatever you decide to eat.

I got a box of Raisinets and ate them all to myself, and no one judged me.

Well, Eli judged me, but it wasn't because I was eating something at 9 a.m.

It was because I chose to eat a box of Raisinets.

Apparently, they're not very popular.

 But I like a good Raisinette.

So we're sitting there in the Angelica at Marking Bridge Station.

 And as I took my seat, I was really thinking that I was about to watch three hours of sea monsters and sea gods and Matt Damon looking both buff and weathered on the beach, which he does look very buff.

He looks great in the film.

And I thought that I was just sort of in for a good flick.

 I also got something far more powerful because I think the way that the film's shot and the story's told, there are these incredibly complex layers to everything and it really has made an impact on me.

I've been thinking about it a lot because there's a stretch in the film where Odysseus finally essentially tells the truth

 tells a truth about what happened at Troy.

And it's not like the version that exists in the songs that are being sung or the myths or poems that are being shared.

It's not the one where Odysseus is like the clever one or the patient one or the heroic one.

 Towards the end of the film, we see Odysseus tell the real version of the story.

And without spoiling how Nolan gets you there, I'll just say this.

Somewhere in this on-screen confession, the thing that had been guiding

 Odysseus, through the whole film, the wisdom he trusted, the voice that he leaned on for the journey, and essentially the essence of human relationships and the moral ethics that are needed for communities to flourish, all of it is destroyed during the siege of Troy.

None of it, none of those things survive to what he's confessing to doing.

 And you watch this man sort of lead with courage and conviction in the film and win a war.

And in the midst of that winning, losing something else entirely.

And never really gets it back.

 No doubt Homer's Odyssey is timeless, and Nolan does a fantastic job with this story, I think.

Nolan doesn't actually try to solve for the uncomfortableness of Homer's truth.

You just sit really in the wreckage of it.

And I can't stop, like I said, I can't stop thinking about the movie.

I dreamed about it last night, and...

 And I also can't help but see the connections between Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey and what we've been wrestling with over the past three weeks.

We're in this series about a violent conquest and the God who supposedly commanded this violent conquest

 And I'm now finding the truth of Joshua is also as old as humanity itself.

The things we do for power ultimately leave a path of destruction far beyond what we can ever imagine.

 Three weeks ago, I told you a story and I told you that I also didn't have a bow for this book.

Like I don't have a nice way for us to like pick it up and feel comfortable with the book of Joshua.

And I'm still not sure the book is redeemable, but I said the story itself, the story of God, scripture contains, widens as the book goes on.

And really throughout scripture, we see a widening of who God is.

 And then it moves really from a God who commands destruction in the very beginning of Joshua to a God who dies rather than destroy anyone.

And I asked you to sort of trust that narrative art, trust the shape of who God is, the identity that we sort of

 think of when we think of being followers of Christ and trust that there is a way for us to coexist in the midst of this book being in our scriptures.

And so this morning we're going to start looking at the shape, the broader shape, the arc of the book as it relates to who we are and who God is.

After last week's sermon, right at the end, I said that the last word in this book is really not about conquest or violence, that it's really about mercy.

 That mercy shows up right in the middle of the violence.

And I've been thinking about that promise that I made to you all that we would get there, the promise I made last week, wondering if I could actually make good on it.

Because sometimes, sometimes

 Preachers like myself we make promises at the end of a sermon that we're not sure we can actually like cash like we can't We can't really fulfill the promises we make and so We say hopeful thing on our way out the door and then have to go figure out what we meant by that Turns out that I did mean it when I said it last week but we're gonna have to walk through some strange territory in the book to get there including remembering

 this story i told in week one about a woman and a baby that i said no to and i'm not going to retell that story but i want you to keep that woman in the back of your mind so the book the book of joshua starts off in chapter one with the command uh to god's people to to be strong and courageous every place the soul of your feet treads i have given you that's sort of the promise the command

 Don't wander to the right or to the left.

If you stay on the path that I have laid out before you, if you follow my commandments, I will deliver to you the promised land.

And by the time we get to the end of the book, chapter 24, there's an old man, Joshua, near the end of his life, and he gathers everybody together,

 and doesn't command anything from them.

It simply invites them to make a choice.

Choose this day whom you'll serve.

That is not a small shift from chapter one to chapter 24.

That is a completely different posture from the God we met three weeks ago.

Something happened in the middle of this book to move it from a command to an invitation, from certainty to choice.

 Remember, we talked about the word harem in week one, which is devotion to God essentially through total annihilation or destruction.

That the violence we see in Joshua is an act of worship itself, total destruction set apart for God through annihilation.

Nothing is to be plundered or to be kept or stolen.

There's nothing to be left standing.

 That word governs most of this book.

Violence is an act of worship.

It guides the justification for the things written about in Joshua.

But there's another word hiding in the same chapters as harem right next to it, sometimes in the very same verse.

And it says actually almost the opposite thing.

It's chaya, to let live or to spare.

 We look at where these two words actually sit.

Joshua 6, verse 17, they actually sit right next to each other in the same verse.

The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to destruction.

Only Rahab shall live.

 Not two different chapters written by two different hands centuries apart.

We are in one verse.

And so whoever wrote that sentence held both words in his mouth at the same time.

And remember then what kind of book this is.

We talked about it in week one.

This isn't a battlefield manuscript.

It's not written after the siege.

It's a document that's been assembled generations later, likely finished in exile.

 God's people have been exiled.

And that's where most of Joshua, if not all of Joshua is written.

And it's put together by people trying to answer one question under enormous pressure, who are we?

Who are we now that everything that has made us who we are has been taken away?

That's not a context that rewards nuance.

 It's not a context that appreciates uncertainty.

When you're sort of fighting to hold on to your identity, your national identity together, when you're working to hold that together from a distance, the story you tell yourself tends to get cleaner, not messier.

The lines get sharper.

The heroes get more heroic.

The enemies get less human.

 That's what identity under threat does to a story almost every time.

Which makes it strange that whoever shaped this book left a crack in the narrative.

They had every reason to sort of sand it down and polish the story up and make it really, really clear, cut Rahab out of the story or make her a footnote or move her exception somewhere.

 quieter, where it wouldn't sit two words apart from a command to destroy everything.

But for some reason, they didn't.

Someone editing this text generations after the fact, still trying to convince a scattered people that their God is a God who keeps promises, let mercy stand right next to annihilation.

 And that I think is uncomfortable for me because it's unexplained and it's sort of unresolved.

And I don't think though it's an accident or sloppy editing.

That's not what's happening here.

I think it means whoever kept telling this story couldn't quite bring themselves to let total annihilation be the only word left standing.

 Even while they're building a case for who God is and whose side God is on, they left in the one line that complicates the whole case, and the crack shows up in the actual siege of Jericho.

Now, before we read the text, we can appreciate...

 sort of what we're reading about by thinking through the wall itself, not the walls that we made out of like construction paper for VBS, but most fortified cities looked a lot like this.

There was sort of an outer wall, really there's a retaining wall and an outer wall and between the outer and inner wall, there was this space and many people lived in between the outer and inner wall.

 It's well documented.

Archeology has done a good job of sort of uncovering not only Jericho, but a lot of cities in this age where this type of wall was common.

And it's in this outer wall that Rahab had a home that probably butted up right next to the wall because the text says that there's this woman that lived

 essentially inside the wall.

And Joshua chapter two says, now then, since I have dealt kindly with you, Rahab is speaking to the Israelites through a window, swear to me by the Lord that you in turn will deal kindly with my family.

Give me a sign of good faith that you will spare my father and my mother, my brothers and sisters and all who belong to them and deliver our lives from death.

 Rahab's a Canaanite.

She runs, by every plain reading of the text, a brothel.

She is, according to the category set up in chapter 1 and in Deuteronomy 7, exactly the kind of person Israel was told to show no mercy to, make no covenant with them.

 Show them no mercy.

That was the command, essentially word for word.

And here she is negotiating a covenant through a window, asking for exactly the mercy the text said wasn't on the table to begin with.

And she gets the answer she's hoping for.

The spies tell her to tie a scarlet cord in that same window, the one she's been asking mercy for.

 for mercy, through when the attack comes.

And that cord is the only thing, the only thing standing between her household and the Israelite sword.

Not a weapon, not a wall of her own, a piece of cloth hanging out a window and a promise she has to trust two men she just met.

 actually mean what they what they're saying and what we read in chapter 6 verse 17 is that the city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live because she hid the messengers we sent the city and all that is in it is devoted to destruction only Rahab shall live both total destruction and mercy in the same sentence and

 One exception into the command before a single wall falls, not after but before, and this crack in total annihilation gets built into the ban itself.

And it isn't a quiet exception either because this has to be then said aloud to everyone that is about to siege Jericho.

 Before the battle to the entire camp, everyone marching toward that wall already knows one household is exempt.

The categories are cracking then in public.

And it's not some private footnote scholars found centuries later.

The text...

 then expands this crack in verse 25.

But Rahab the prostitute with her family and all who belonged to her, Joshua spared.

Her family, the text says, has lived in Israel ever since because she hid the men Joshua had sent as spies to Jericho.

 She lived in Israel ever since, not as a footnote, not as a curiosity mentioned once and then sort of forgotten.

She actually becomes a much larger part of the story permanently because in the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew's genealogy generations later names her in the family line that leads to Jesus.

 The category that was supposed to be absolute, insider and outsider, devoted in those who are destined to be destroyed, couldn't actually hold.

It cracked in chapter two of the book of Joshua and it never really closed back up.

I want to be careful here though, because it'd be easy to sort of take the story of Rahab and then try to paint the entire book in a much better light.

 to make this into a nicer story than it actually is.

But this isn't the text apologizing for itself.

Genocide is still written about in the book of Joshua.

Almost everyone is said to have died inside the walls.

Rahab's survival doesn't erase any of that.

I mean, the book clearly talks about genocide.

 What it does is something I think more subversive though, this story of Rahab, and I think a bit more honest.

It shows us that even the people who wrote this violence into scripture, who believed God commanded this violence, couldn't quite bring themselves to close the door all the way.

Somebody let mercy through the crack, and once it's through, it creates an alternative narrative.

There's actually a second story like this one.

It's Stranger.

 And honestly, a bit funnier, if you can find humor in the book of Joshua.

In chapter 9, we read about Gibeon.

When the inhabitants of Gibeon heard that Joshua had what they had done to Jericho and to Ai, they on their part acted with cunning and went and prepared provisions and took worn out sacks on their donkeys and wineskins, worn out and torn and mended with worn out patch sandals on their feet and worn out clothes.

 And all their provisions were dry and moldy.

And they went to Joshua in the camp of Gagal and said to him and to the Israelites, we have come from a far country.

So now make a treaty with us.

 They lied, essentially.

They lied, straight up lied.

They dressed themselves up in old clothes, brought moldy bread, pretended to have traveled from far away when they lived right down the road, and talked Israel into a covenant under false pretenses.

And Israel, without checking...

 story out or hesitating or conversing with God who clearly giving some pretty significant commands just took their word for it and swore an oath and we read but all the leaders said to the whole congregation we have sworn to them by the Lord

 the God of Israel, and now we cannot touch them.

This is what we'll do to them.

Let them live so that wrath may not come upon us because of the oath we swore to them.

Let them live.

Show mercy.

The same word as Rahab.

And notice the reasoning.

Israel doesn't spare the Gibeonites because they suddenly develop compassion for the outsider.

 They spare them because they had made a promise to them.

And even a promise obtained through deception still binds them.

The oath that they made outweighs the deception.

And that's remarkable on its own, but it gets remarkable centuries later because after Joshua died, centuries later, Saul violates the covenant that's made with Gibeon.

And the text says judgment fell on the entire nation because of it.

 A promise made to outsiders under false pretenses in the middle of a war still held that much weight generations later.

The Gibeonites don't just then sort of survive one afternoon in Gogol.

They get permanently grafted into the story, protected by an oath God, God's self apparently expects Israel to keep long after everyone involved in swearing it is dead.

 This idea of harem, right, said there should be nothing left standing.

Total annihilation as devotion to God.

But ahaya, this idea of mercy, kept showing up anyway in a prostitute's window and in a pile of moldy bread.

And the text lets it stand.

Now, here's the part in the sermon where we stop, have to...

 kind of have to stop talking about them and start talking about us.

Because, I mean, most days I don't picture myself as someone on the outside, outside the walls of Jericho.

I picture myself inside the walls of Jericho, safe, with the wall doing exactly what walls are for.

 I've spent most of my life on the side of the wall that gets to decide who is worth saving.

I have a great job, just a great job.

I live in a great neighborhood.

I attend the best church.

And all of it is sort of stacked up like sandbags around my life.

 in an attempt to protect me, to preserve the life I'm trying to create.

And my life is pretty well protected.

I don't have to ask for mercy often because mostly I don't need to ask for mercy.

But as I've wrestled with this text,

 the past few months.

That is a true thing about me, that I spend a lot of my time organizing the sandbags around my life, but that's probably not the truest part of me.

Because I'm not the one holding the sword, but there are moments in my life where I am dangling a cord out of a window.

I'd like to think that's not true, but it is true.

 I am the one hanging something out the window, hoping somebody with more power than me decides to let me live anyway.

Places where I know exactly how thin my own defensible reasons would sound if somebody actually pulled them apart, where the only thing standing between me and the wall coming down is somebody else's mercy, not my own righteousness.

I mean, that's what the woman I said no to essentially offered me, right?

 She showed me mercy.

The woman I was sitting across the table at the coffee shop 11 years ago, when I told her no, that I would not baptize her son, she wasn't asking me to agree with her.

She was just asking me to let her become a part of the story.

And I said no.

And I had my reasons, and my reasons were tidy and theologically justifiable.

And they were wrong.

 And somehow, through the cracks in my own righteous wall, this woman still showed me grace.

 And here's what I think happened to this book and maybe to God's own reputation.

Because somewhere between chapter 1 and chapter 24, a God who spares a prostitute and a nation of liars gets picked up by people looking for permission.

And permission is exactly what they take from it.

This idea of total annihilation becomes a weapon before mercy ever gets the chance to be the point.

 We saw that happen last week in the text and we watched as it allowed or helped us get an entire continent.

And we see how it's played out in the Supreme Court case and on the land some of us are sitting on right now.

The truth is before mercy can ever become the true point of the book, the violence, the biblical mandate,

 becomes the headline and the book gets hijacked.

And that's a real hijacking because it has not only happened, it is still happening today.

 But a hijacking only works if there's something underneath it worth stealing.

You don't like counterfeit currency that nobody wants.

And I think what got stolen and what got twisted into conquest and permission and land grabs dressed up as a divine providence was never actually the God this book is trying to describe.

 Rather, quietly, God is best defined as the one who let mercy through a window in chapter 2, and God's people spent the next 22 chapters unable to fully take that back.

 So before we let the weaponized version of Joshua be the last word, I want to go and look at the book and how the book itself ends right at the very end because I said that the story widens and we see that in chapter 24.

Now, therefore, revere the Lord and serve him.

Joshua is old in age and this is what he's saying to his people.

 serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness, putting away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the river and in Egypt, serve the Lord.

Now, if you're unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you'll serve, whether the gods of your ancestors served in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living.

But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord."

 Choose.

That's the word doing most of the heavy lifting in this passage.

And it's not the word we started with in chapter 1.

It's not command language.

Be strong, courageous, keep the law, don't turn right or left.

This is invitation language.

Joshua doesn't order the people to stay faithful.

Joshua lays the whole history out, the good and the ugly parts both, and hands the decision back to them.

Choose.

 Choose this day.

A book that opened with a God who draws absolute lines ends with a leader who can only ask people to choose freely.

Something got loose in the middle of this story, and I don't think it's an accident that it happened right where Rahab and the Gibeonites happened.

You cannot let mercy in through the crack of the wall and expect the wall to work the same way afterward.

We read on, so Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God.

 And took a large stone and set it up there under the oak in the sanctuary of the Lord.

Joshua said to all the people, see this stone shall be a witness against us.

For it has heard all the words of the Lord that he spoke to us.

Therefore, it shall be a witness against you if you deal falsely with your God.

 This word witness then is not a monument to victory.

Joshua doesn't set up a stone to celebrate what they've conquered.

He sets up a stone to testify against them if they break their word again.

The book ends then not with triumph, but with a warning stone of what happens if you break the covenant.

And an open choice, which is a really strange way

 A really strange note for a conquest narrative to end on.

Unless you already know, mercy got loose somewhere in the middle of it and never really fully, was never able really to be pulled back.

So here's my actual bow on this series.

Three weeks late and probably not fully tied.

Nothing was supposed to survive unless

 And something did.

The story widens, not because God apologizes for chapter one and not because we get to walk out of here today feeling like maybe we resolved something.

It widens because mercy, once it shows up, cannot stay contained.

It shows up in a woman the law said to destroy, in a nation that lied its way into survival.

And by the last chapter, it has changed the very voice of God from command to invitation.

 That's not just a loophole.

I think it might be the whole entire gospel.

Hiding inside maybe the most indefensible book in all of our scripture.

So the question for us as we end this series, the question that I think this book leaves us with is what will you keep choosing?

 Choose this day and then presumably choose again tomorrow and the day after that, the way Joshua asked an entire generation to do standing under an oak tree with a stone as their only witness.

Who do we choose to serve?

 Because we started this series saying we would stay with this text, stay troubled with this text, wrestle with this text, not look away.

And I still believe that that's the right posture to take when we engage with really difficult scripture.

But I also believe with everything in me that the same book that unsettled us maybe in week one...

 really all the weeks, all three weeks, the same book that has unsettled us is the one that hands us this ending, a stone, a choice, and a God who would rather give us a choice than command us to be faithful.

Choose this day whom you'll serve.

As for me, in this house, we will serve our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the one who

 shows us mercy, the one who chooses death over violence.

May the gospel be proclaimed loudly then from this place.

Let us pray.

God, in a world where violence grabs the headlines

 In a world where violence happens and is never written about, may we trust that you continue to make all things new.

And that your mercy and grace is not an accident, but it is a way of life.

May we have the courage to believe that.

May we have the faith to proclaim that.

 And most importantly, give us the strength to carry that message out into a broken and hurting world.

Because the world is in need of mercy and of grace.

May we be a church that shows that to all people.

May we look for those who are dangling cords outside of their window.

And may we offer peace

 as the world continues to proclaim violence.

It's in your son's name we pray.

Amen.

When the Bible Becomes a Weapon: Wrestling With the Book of Joshua

There is a moment in the book of Joshua that should stop us cold. It comes right at the beginning, in the very first chapter. God speaks to Joshua and tells him that every place the sole of his foot will tread has already been given to him. The land stretches from the wilderness to the great river Euphrates. It is a sweeping, total promise. Go and take what is yours.

For centuries, that passage did not stay inside a book. It climbed out of the pages, got read aloud over wagon trains, and sent caravans of settlers moving toward land that already had people living on it. Revival preachers stood before frontier crowds and offered those verses as a blessing, a divine send-off. Pack the wagon. Load the gun. God has already given this to you.

The troubling part is that nobody had to twist the words to make them fit. They just read the text plainly and believed it was still speaking to them.

That is the uncomfortable truth we have to sit with when we open the book of Joshua. It is not just an ancient war story. It is not just a complicated piece of historical literature from a distant time and place. It is a text that has been picked up, sharpened, and used as a weapon against real people, some of whose descendants are still alive today. And if we are going to read it honestly, we have to read it as exactly that.

A Mirror, Not a Manual

The book of Joshua contains some of the most brutal passages in all of Scripture. Entire cities destroyed. Twelve thousand people killed in a single battle. The text repeats the phrase with an almost numbing consistency: no survivor, no one remaining, no one left who breathed. These are not peripheral details. They are the point of the narrative.

There are scholarly ways to soften this. Ancient warfare rhetoric often exaggerated body counts. The Hebrew concept of herem, the total destruction devoted to God, carries theological nuance that gets flattened in translation. All of that may be true. But none of it changes what happened when later generations picked this book up and read themselves into it.

The book of Joshua was never meant to be a template. It tells the story of a specific people, at a specific moment, receiving a specific covenant. It is a one-time promise to a people who had been enslaved, who had wandered for forty years, who had finally crossed a river. It is not a formula for any nation to replicate.

And yet that is precisely what happened. Colonizers read themselves as Israel and cast the people already living on the land as the new Canaanites. Once that swap is made, everything downstream feels justified. The violence stops looking like conquest and starts looking like divine inheritance. Spanish and English colonizers wrote this logic into their charters and preached it from ships before they ever made landfall. The same shape appears in the founding mythology of the United States, in Apartheid South Africa, and in the doctrine of discovery, a set of fifteenth-century church decrees granting Christian nations religious permission to claim land from non-Christian peoples. That doctrine was cited in a United States Supreme Court ruling as recently as 2005.

This is not ancient history. It is Tuesday afternoon.

The Forgetting Moses Warned About

There is a passage in Deuteronomy 8 that deserves to be read alongside Joshua. Moses stands before the people before they ever cross the Jordan and delivers a warning. He tells them that when they have eaten their fill, built fine houses, and multiplied their wealth, they will be tempted to say that their own power and the might of their own hand got them everything they have. He tells them not to forget the Lord their God.

The Hebrew word behind that warning does not mean a passive slip of memory. It is covenant language. It means to abandon, to neglect, to act as though something never happened in the first place. Moses is not worried that Israel will simply lose track of a fact. He is worried they will choose to live as though the wilderness never happened, as though the manna was never necessary, as though they built all of it themselves from nothing.

For forty years, the people had lived on manna. Every morning, whatever appeared in the dew was what they had to eat. No harvest to plan around, no granary to protect, no inheritance to pass down except the story of a God who kept feeding them one day at a time. That is a strange kind of formation. An entire generation raised without the ability to say, I built this. I earned this. I stored this away.

And then, the day they crossed the Jordan and ate something they could claim credit for, the manna stopped. Quietly. Without ceremony. It simply ceased.

Moses saw it coming. He told them exactly what would happen before they ever moved. And they fell into it anyway.

The reason is not that they were uniquely bad at following God. The reason is that power corrupts, and then it rewrites history. That is not an ancient problem. It is the oldest logic of every empire that has ever sought expansion, dressed up in the language of providence.

The Good News in the Mirror

There is good news here, even if it is smaller and softer than we might want. The book of Joshua has never been hidden. It has been sitting in our Bibles the whole time, uncomfortable and unedited, refusing to let us pretend that faith has clean hands.

A God who allows this kind of book to remain in Scripture without softening it is not a God primarily interested in our comfort. That God seems far more interested in our honesty.

When we read Joshua as a mirror rather than a manual, we begin to see clearly what people do when they convince themselves that God is on their side in a land dispute. Not what people did, past tense, safely behind us. What people do, present tense, right now.

The resurrection of Christ was not found in the absence of violence. It was found in the midst of it. That is the shape of the gospel. And it means that the hard work of staring into an uncomfortable mirror is not the end of the story. It is where the real story begins.

you

 Good morning again, friends.

It's good to be with you all.

My name is Mitchell.

I am the senior minister here at First United Methodist Church of Dallas.

And if you're a guest worshiping with us, once again, we're delighted to have you here.

Yeah, we're back in our band series, and we're spending some more time focused on the book of Joshua.

 which is a book in the Bible.

It is.

I know many of us have maybe not read that, read it all that closely.

But it is a book in the Bible, and it is an awkward book.

It's a book that's difficult, I think, to make sense of.

 And last week, on sort of the first week of this series, we wrestled with a simple question, what do we do with a God who seems to command conquest and violence as an act of obedience?

And that in and of itself is a very difficult question to have to sit with all week.

But that's like,

 One question, I think the harder question is what do we make of the human response to that?

 What does it mean that we as a people have not just sort of read this book, but then used this book to do extraordinarily damaging things for centuries?

And that's a harder question, I think, for us this week.

And that's where we're headed.

And so I'm just going to get straight into it.

I want to start by just reading something to you.

It's the very first chapter of Joshua.

 And I want to sort of just read it aloud and let's just sit with it.

So starting in verse 2.

Moses, my servant, is dead.

Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people into the land that I am giving to them.

 Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you as I promised to Moses.

From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites of the great sea in the west shall be your territory.

Very first few verses in the book of Joshua.

 For a long stretch in American history, this has been the sermon.

That's it, really, the whole thing.

Nobody added any commentary to it because, well, we didn't really need to.

 In the 1800s, while this country was pushing west, while the United States government was forcing native nations off of the land that they had lived on for hundreds of years, revival preachers, frontier preachers, some Methodists, Wesleyan, stood in front of wagon trains, caravans, frontier people,

 stood at camp meetings on the night before the caravan was to leave, and read out loud Joshua 1, 3.

Every place the sole of your foot will tread, I have given you.

That was the send-off.

That was the blessing, the prayer over the frontier caravan.

Pack the wagon, load the gun,

 God has already given this to you.

Your responsibility is to go and take it.

 The troubling thing is that nobody had to even twist the words in Joshua to make sense of it.

That's the part I think that should bother us the most when we pick up this book.

Nobody bent the text into shape or manipulated the text.

They just read it plainly and believed that it was still talking to them.

 And I get it, I do, because I grew up thinking that this book was simply one big adventure story, you know, in Sunday school or vacation Bible school.

There are trumpets in the walls of Jericho.

They come tumbling down.

There's a general named Joshua, a general who never loses a battle, never loses a war.

 Felt boards in Sunday school classes would depict this really well.

There was even that catchy song that had a good beat that we would sing with great enthusiasm.

And nobody in those rooms when I was a child told me that those same verses, the same story in Joshua got read over wagons headed toward land that already had people living on it.

Someone

 a long time ago decided which parts of this story we tell children and which ones we don't.

 So here's where we're gonna start this morning.

Not with what Joshua meant 3000 years ago in some ancient land dispute, most of us will never fully untangle.

We're gonna start with Joshua and really what has been made of Joshua

 ever since on this continent, on this country, in this state.

Some of it is not far away from where we're sitting right now.

The challenge is with difficult texts like Joshua, as you all know, is admitting to ourselves that we are not just studying some old war story or some myth or some history that happened

 Thousands of years ago, the challenge with wrestling with difficult texts is realizing that we're studying actually not just a book of the Bible, but we are studying a weapon.

We're studying a weapon.

 One that got picked up and sharpened and used on real people, some of whose descendants still live in the state, in the city, some of whom might be sitting closer to the sanctuary than we'd even really like to admit.

 And before we try to dismiss it or spend too much energy pointing fingers at bad theology and revival preachers from 200 years ago, I think we have to be level-headed and honest because using Scripture as a weapon is not a dead habit.

This is not something that Western Christianity has grown out of.

 People are still doing this right now.

Today, somewhere, I promise you this, somebody somewhere in this country today is reading Joshua from the pulpit and using it to talk about who belongs here and who doesn't.

Who this land's for and who it's not for.

Whose nation this is and whose nation it's never supposed to be.

 What we're wrestling with then is not ancient history, it's really just Tuesday afternoon in 2026.

And Christian nationalism cloaked in the faithfulness of certain strands of evangelical Christianity is indeed on the rise and that should scare us because last week while we sat with the hard opening chapters of Joshua, the command, the violence, the word harem, right, the

 notion of total, complete destruction as a devotion to God with no exceptions.

We didn't try to explain it away.

We didn't try to make God look nicer than the text actually says God looks.

We said that the full story of who God is though isn't finished being told in these opening chapters.

That the character of God gets revealed over the long arc of Scripture, not in one book, not in one command, but in

 But that the book of Joshua was indeed problematic.

We said that.

That was last week, the hard unresolved.

And I think, you know, that's where exactly it needed to land.

But this week, the challenge is we're not asking what God did in the story.

We're asking what we as a people have done with this story.

And that should scare us.

 We're asking what we did with it and why understanding that is key if we're going to provide an alternative witness to the world.

 Because here's the thing about a weapon.

It doesn't matter how it was forged if you don't scrutinize the people who picked it up and used it and how many times they used it and for what they used that weapon for.

Because there's little doubt that the book of Joshua has been used to justify violence in the name of Christ.

There is very little doubt about that.

And the justification is actually rather easy to do because the book of Joshua

 Joshua is so clear about violence being a divine mandate, like here in Joshua 8.

When Israel had finished slaughtering all the inhabitants of Ai in the open wilderness where they pursued them, and when all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai.

 and attacked it with the edge of the sword, the total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was 12,000 people.

All of odd.

Total annihilation.

Genocide.

Genocide.

 Here it is in chapter 10.

Joshua took Makeda on that day and struck it and its king with the edge of the sword.

He utterly destroyed every person in it.

He left no survivor.

 Verse 40, so Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negev and the low land and the slopes and all their kings and he left no one remaining but utterly destroyed all that breathed as the Lord God of Israel commanded.

The next chapter, chapter 11, and they put to the sword all who were in it, utterly destroying them.

There was no one left who breathed and he burned Hazer itself with fire, 12,000 people

 no survivor, no one remaining, no one who left breathing.

I'm not going to explain that away this morning.

I'm not going to tell you that it reads worse in English than it does in the Hebrew, or that ancient warfare rhetoric exaggerated body counts, or any of the other things scholars might say to you to make you feel a little better about the fact that Joshua is in our Bible, because some of that may...

 will be true.

There are ways to academically make sense of Joshua, to soften it, but it doesn't really matter this morning.

What matters this morning is that these words, this specific language, no survivor, no one remaining, no one left who breathed, did not stay locked inside some ancient book.

 Somebody picked it up, somebody read it, and somebody believed that it was still speaking to them and used it then as permission.

We see this actually unfold over and over again, but the question I think remains, why?

Why are we so susceptible to using permission?

 violence and using violence in the name of Christ, why does that happen over and over and over in our history?

Why is using this book as a justification for conquest, as permission for violence, as a mandate for genocide so appealing?

Why is the weapon picked up time and time again?

To get to that answer, hopefully, maybe, why is

 We have two texts this morning, and they are somewhat strange pairing.

And then we're going to look at a long, ugly history of what got built on top of the verses we just read.

But first, Joshua 5, verses 10 through 12.

While the Israelites were camped in Gogol, they kept the Passover in the plains of Jericho.

On the day after the Passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land.

 Unleavened cakes and parched grain.

The manna then ceased.

The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land.

And the Israelites no longer had manna, but ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.

 Deuteronomy 8 says, take care that you do not forget the Lord your God by failing to keep his commandments and his ordinances and his statutes, which I am commanding you today.

That's what Moses is saying.

When you have eaten your fill and you have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied,

 And do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God.

Do not say to yourself, my power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.

But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.

This is what Moses is saying to the people before they enter

 into Canaan before they crossed the Jordan.

And the key word in this text in Deuteronomy is the word forget.

That's the word for us.

The text says, do not forget the Lord your God.

In English, forgetting sounds rather passive.

 It sounds like something that just happens to you, like it's an infliction, like you misplace your keys, you forget a name, nobody blames you for it unless you're me.

That's because I have a habit of forgetting things quite often, like this morning I couldn't find my keys.

But that isn't actually what the text is saying.

 The Hebrew word behind it is shekal.

And it does not carry that same innocence because it's covenant language.

It doesn't mean that your memory just slipped or you have a bad habit of misplacing things.

It actually means that you neglected something.

Abandoned it.

 acted as though it never happened in the first place.

Scripture never treats this kind of forgetting that Moses is talking about as an accident.

It treats it as a choice, sort of wearing the mask of memory loss, maybe in the translation, but it is indeed a choice.

So when Moses says, do not forget the Lord your God, he's not worried that Israel will simply lose track of a fact.

Moses is worried they will choose to live as though the wilderness has never happened.

 that the manna that God provided them had never happened.

That it was never necessary in the first place as though they built all of this themselves from nothing with nobody's help.

That is not forgetting by accident, that's rather forgetting on purpose and it's exactly what happens next and it has consequences because the manna stops.

 on the day they eat from the land.

Not before, not as punishment, just the day they no longer needed it, it stopped showing up.

Now think about that.

For 40 years, manna has been provided to God's people.

For 40 years, every day they would wake up with nothing stored, nothing saved, nothing they could point to and call their own provision.

And every single morning, whatever showed up in the dew of the morning was what you had to eat.

That was

 No harvest to plant around, no granary to protect, no inheritance to pass down except the story of God.

That was the only thing they had to pass down.

Generations, right?

 A story of God who kept feeding them one day at a time, whether you deserved it or not, whether you complained about it or not.

And by their own account, they complained about it rather constantly.

That is a strange kind of formation, if you think about it.

An entire generation raised without the ability to say, I built this, I earned this, I stored this away for later.

And the day they crossed the Jordan River,

 The day they cross it and eat something they grew themselves or stole from the inhabitants of the land, something they can claim credit for, the free bread from heaven just quietly ends.

No more manna.

Moses saw this coming.

Moses stood there before they even crossed the river and told them exactly what was going to happen.

 You're gonna get the land, you're gonna build houses, you're gonna eat well, and the day you do, you're going to start telling yourself a story, a different story, a story that is centered on you doing this, your power, your own hand.

That's the phrase that Moses puts in their mouth

 before they've even said it.

He knew the outcome before they ever moved across the Jordan.

Moses knew what was going to happen to God's people.

So here's my honest question for the week one that I don't have an answer for.

If the warning was so clear in Deuteronomy, and it was so evident that this was going to happen to the people if they cross the Jordan, why do they still fall into the trap if they know the shape of it?

Why are they still constantly falling into this

 trap and i don't think that the answer is that israel is uniquely bad at following god

 I think the answer is that we're really not any better at it, that it's what it means to be human.

Power corrupts and then rewrites history.

The book of Joshua tells the story of a very specific people though, and this is a challenge for us because at a very specific moment, Joshua is unfolding, receiving a very specific covenant.

It is not a template.

The book of Joshua is never meant to be a template.

It's not a formula.

 that any nation should pick up and run with.

It's a one-time promise to a particular people who had been enslaved and wandered for 40 years and finally crossed a river.

And yet, that is not how it has gotten read over centuries.

Somewhere along the way, other nations, centuries later, started reading themselves into this story, seeing themselves as Israel.

They cast themselves as the chosen people.

 and cast whoever was standing in their way on the land they wanted as new Canaanites.

And once you make that swap, once you see yourself as the chosen people of God and everyone who opposes you as the new Canaanites, everything downstream just seems justified.

 The violence stops looking like conquest and starts looking like a divine inheritance.

This is how a book about one people's crossing one time became a license for hundreds of years of crossings that were never theirs to make.

 Because the logic in Deuteronomy 8, the logic of my own hand got me this, is not ancient logic.

It is the exact logic of every empire that seeks expansion and power.

Take the colonization of the Americas.

Spanish and English colonizers did not quietly absorb this logic by accident.

They wrote it into their charters.

 They preached it from ships before they ever made landfall, land that was already lived on, already farmed, already named by the people standing on it.

That land got called empty, got called wilderness, called a promise waiting to be claimed because the men doing the claiming had convinced themselves they were reading their own story in an old book about someone else's conquest, but they believed it was their story.

The same logic shows up in

 Apartheid South Africa where scripture was used to justify a legal system of racial separation as though God had ordained the boundaries somehow.

It shows up in the founding mythology of this country.

A chosen people finding a promised land that already had people living on it.

Same shape, just different centuries.

And this isn't just history.

It's not like we've just moved on.

 We're not just looking backwards.

The doctrine of discovery is a set of decrees from the 15th century written by the church, church decrees that gave Christian nations religious permission to claim land that was not theirs.

As long as the people living there weren't Christian.

That's not just history.

It's not just a museum piece.

It's not something we just sort of grew out of.

 Because in 2005, in the United States Supreme Court, our Supreme Court cited the doctrine of discovery in a case about the Onoda Indian nation trying to reclaim ancestral land in New York in 2005.

Some of us were already like grown adults with kids in this church when that ruling came down.

 It's not ancient history.

That is a legal argument rooted in Christian theology, rooted in books like the one we're reading together right now that shaped a Supreme Court decision within my lifetime.

So here's where I have to stop pointing at other people's history and really turn towards my own because this is the truth.

 I, Mitchell Boone, I benefit from the land, from the stability, from a country whose whole shape was formed by this exact conquest logic.

I did not build the ground that this sanctuary sits on.

I did not build or till the land.

I did not clear it, did not fight for it, did not pay whatever price was paid for me to inherit.

It is simply obviously mine.

I drive to a house I own.

 on a street with a name I've never questioned, in a city built on a removal of people that I was never taught about in public schools.

And if I'm honest, most days, most days I don't think about any of it.

 The land just is what it is.

It's mine, ours, normal.

My kids will grow up the same way I did, assuming the ground under them was simply always going to be theirs.

That is exactly the forgetting that Moses warned us about, not the dramatic kind, the quiet kind, the kind that doesn't feel like forgetting because it just feels like normal life.

And honestly, I don't know what to do with that.

 And if you do, I'd love to buy you a cup of coffee.

And I'd be lying to you if I acted like this was only sort of a philosophical problem, a historical problem, because right now in this country, there are Christian leaders standing in pulpits and in front of cameras telling people that America is indeed a chosen nation.

 That this land was providentially set aside for a particular kind of people, and that reclaiming political power is indeed a holy mandate.

It's not a metaphor that they're borrowing from.

That is Joshua's logic, word for word, just wearing a flag instead of a robe.

 When faith gets fused to national identity and national identity gets fused to who is allowed to belong here, we are not looking at a new idea.

 It's not a new idea.

We're looking at the oldest one in this book, just being draped in patriotism.

But the good news is, and there is some, even in the midst of this series and this week, the good news is a bit smaller and softer, but it is good news.

The good news is that this book has never been hidden from us.

It's been sitting in our Bibles the whole time, available

 Uncomfortable, but also refusing to let us pretend our faith somehow has clean hands.

And a God who lets this type of book stay in scripture unedited is not a God that's interested in our comfort as a source of discipleship.

God seems more interested in us being honest.

So the good news is when we pick up this book and we begin to wrestle with it and we're honest about what has been done in the name of this book,

 we can begin to redeem it because it is clear once you read it, that it is not a manual for how we are to behave as Christians.

It is not a manual for how we're to behave.

It's not a mandate for how to form a nation.

Nothing in these pages in the book of Joshua is instruction for how we as faithful Christians should treat people.

There's nothing in it that should be instructive for us.

 And that has to be said, unfortunately, plainly because for centuries, people have read it exactly that way.

And the violence from that reading is not hypothetical.

It really has happened to people.

But instead of the book of Joshua being read as a manual, we need to read it as a mirror.

It's a mirror, one that shows us, us, uncomfortably, clearly what people do when they convince themselves God is on their side in a land dispute.

 Not what people did past tense, safely behind us, what people do present tense.

Because the mirror doesn't stop reflecting just because we'd rather look away from it.

So that is why we're reading the book of Joshua.

That's why we're staring into the mirror.

We read it the way you'd read a warning label.

Not a blessing.

It's a warning label.

 And we ask every time this text gets picked up, whose hand is holding it and what are they about to do with it?

 And next week we get to read it forward, not just backward.

Next week we're going to meet Rahab and the Gibeonites, people the conquest narrative says should have been erased and instead somehow they end up inside the story, inside the family, inside the promise of Scripture.

That's not a resolution for us today.

 It's not supposed to cancel out what I just said, but it means that the last word in this book is not actually conquest.

It's mercy.

And it shows up right in the middle of violence.

So as we wrestle with a difficult text, may God bless our commitment to not looking away from uncomfortable stories in our scripture.

 Because the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of Christ, the entire gospel story is not found in the absence of violence.

The resurrection story of Christ is not found in the absence of violence.

It is found in the midst of violence.

And that is good news for us for today and the days that follow.

Let's pray.

 Gracious and loving God, bless our wrestling with the text like Jacob who wrestles with the angel.

May we have confidence that you bless hard, faithful work.

Help us to see your story in spite of the tinted glasses we often wear, and may you continue to bless us as we trust that your gospel

 is incompatible with seeing other people as less than.

May we expand the boundaries and the tables that we participate in, and may we trust that your grace is sufficient for all the failings that have come before, to all the failings that will happen from this moment on.

May your forgiveness wash over us so that we may approach

 our life, our world, our community, as an opportunity to share your good news that love wins.

It's in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I pray.

Amen.

5-Day Bible Reading Plan and Devotional Guide

Wrestling With the Word: Scripture, Power, and the Call to Honest Faith

Day 1: The Danger of Forgetting

Reading: Deuteronomy 8:11-18 — Moses warns the people that abundance can breed a dangerous self-sufficiency, where individuals begin to credit their own strength for blessings that were never self-made.

Devotional: Forgetting God is rarely dramatic. It does not usually announce itself. It arrives quietly, dressed as normalcy, as routine, as simply the way things are. Moses warns the people before they ever cross the Jordan because he knows that comfort is a more effective eraser than suffering. Suffering tends to drive people toward God. Abundance tends to drive people toward themselves. The Hebrew word behind "forget" carries the weight of abandonment, of choosing to live as though a story of dependence and grace never happened. Examine your own life today. Where has abundance quietly rewritten your story of dependence into a story of self-sufficiency?

Reflection Question: What provisions in your daily life have you stopped recognizing as grace?

Practical Application: Write down three things you depend on daily that you did not build or earn on your own. Spend time in prayer naming them as gifts rather than achievements.

Day 2: When Scripture Becomes a Weapon

Reading: Matthew 4:1-11 — In his account of the temptation of Jesus, Matthew records that even the adversary quotes Scripture, demonstrating that the words of God can be lifted and used in service of destruction rather than liberation.

Devotional: The most dangerous misuse of Scripture is not always the obvious one. It is not always a crude distortion or a wild misreading. Sometimes it is a plain, straightforward reading of a real text, applied to a context it was never meant to inhabit. Jesus himself faced this in the wilderness. The words quoted at him were real words from real Scripture. The problem was not the accuracy of the quotation. The problem was the purpose it was being made to serve. Before we pick up any text, the honest question is not only what does this say, but what am I about to do with it, and whose interests does that serve.

Reflection Question: Have you ever used a Scripture passage to justify something that, on reflection, served your own comfort or power more than it served others?

Practical Application: Read a familiar passage of Scripture today and ask yourself honestly who benefits from the most common interpretation of it, and who has historically been harmed by it.

Day 3: The Mirror We Would Rather Not Hold

Reading: James 1:22-25 — James describes the person who hears the word but does not act on it as someone who glances in a mirror and immediately forgets what they look like, walking away unchanged.

Devotional: A mirror is only useful if you are willing to look into it long enough to see something true. The same is true of Scripture. The book of Joshua is not a comfortable read. It was not designed to be. It contains violence, conquest, and language about total destruction that cannot be softened without dishonesty. But a God who left those pages in our Bibles unedited seems less concerned with our comfort than with our formation. Honest engagement with difficult texts is itself a spiritual discipline. Looking away is always easier. Staying with what is uncomfortable, allowing it to ask hard questions about our own complicity, is where transformation begins.

Reflection Question: What difficult passage of Scripture have you avoided or explained away because it asked too much of you?

Practical Application: Choose one uncomfortable text from the Old Testament this week. Sit with it. Do not immediately seek a commentary to soften it. Ask first what it reveals about human nature, including your own.

Day 4: Mercy Inside the Violence

Reading: Joshua 2:1-14 — Rahab, a Canaanite woman living in Jericho, shelters Israelite spies and declares her trust in the God of Israel, becoming an unexpected figure of mercy and inclusion within a narrative dominated by conquest and destruction.

Devotional: The conquest narrative says Rahab should not have survived. By the logic of the surrounding chapters, she falls into the category of those who were to be utterly destroyed. And yet she does not. She appears in the genealogy of Jesus recorded in Matthew 1. She is named in Hebrews 11 among the great examples of faith. She is cited in the letter of James as a model of faith that acts. God's mercy in Scripture has a persistent habit of showing up exactly where the dominant narrative insists it has no business being. The people the story says should be erased are often the ones the story cannot finish without. That is not an accident. That is the character of God refusing to be contained by human systems of inclusion and exclusion.

Reflection Question: Who are the people that your community's dominant narrative says do not belong, and what would it mean to recognize them as central to the story rather than peripheral to it?

Practical Application: Identify one person or community that is often treated as outside the boundaries of belonging in your context. Take one concrete step this week to acknowledge their dignity and presence.

Day 5: The Gospel in the Midst of Violence

Reading: Romans 8:35-39 — Paul declares that nothing, not hardship, not persecution, not the powers of the present age, is able to separate those who are beloved from the love of God made known in Christ Jesus.

Devotional: The resurrection of Jesus did not happen in a peaceful setting. It happened in the aftermath of a state execution, carried out by an empire that used religion to justify its power and violence to maintain its order. The good news did not arrive after the violence was cleaned up and the powerful had been made accountable. It arrived in the middle of all of it, insisting that love was more durable than empire, that mercy outlasted conquest, and that the last word had not yet been spoken. This is the witness the church is called to offer, not a faith that waits for the world to become safe before it speaks, but one that speaks precisely because the world is not safe and the gospel is not finished.

Reflection Question: Where in your own life or community do you need to trust that the last word has not yet been spoken?

Practical Application: Write a brief prayer or statement of commitment that names one place where you will choose to act as a witness to mercy rather than a bystander to power. Return to it each morning this week.

Wrestling with the Uncomfortable: When Scripture Draws Hard Lines

There's a particular text message we all have sitting unread on our phones. You know the one. Maybe it's from a relative, maybe an old friend. Every time you pick up your phone, that little red notification badge stares at you, and you tell yourself: Not today. I'll get to it later. You can't bring yourself to delete it, but you can't quite open it either. So it just sits there, waiting.

The Book of Joshua is Christianity's unread text message.

The Setup: A Nation at the Threshold

Joshua picks up immediately where Deuteronomy ends. Moses has just died, barely in the ground, and suddenly Joshua—Moses' longtime assistant, the guy who carried the bags up the mountain and waited at the bottom—finds himself leading an entire nation. He didn't ask for this promotion. Forty years of wilderness wandering stretch behind him, and an entire nation's future looms ahead. The man he learned everything from is gone.

That's not really a promotion. It's a burden.

And the deal Joshua gets handed is deceptively simple: Keep the law, get the land. The first chapter of Joshua lays it out clearly: meditate on the law day and night, don't turn from it to the right or left, and you'll succeed wherever you go. Obedience in, blessing out. It's a transactional theology that feels remarkably familiar to modern ears.

For the first several chapters, it works exactly that way. Jericho falls. Ai falls. The land starts changing hands. Through obedience, God fulfills promises. If this were the whole book, we could wrap it up neatly: faithful leader, conquered land, God keeps promises, the end.

But that's not the whole book.

The Word We Can't Translate Cleanly

There's a Hebrew word woven throughout Joshua that doesn't translate neatly into English: herem. You'll sometimes see it rendered as "devoted" or "dedicated" or "set apart"—words that sound almost sacred, almost gentle. Which is exactly why they're misleading.

Herem means to ban something completely in devotion to God by destroying it. Not giving it away. Not setting it on a shelf as an offering. Wiping it out. Cities, livestock, people—all of it consecrated to God through total annihilation.

Most ancient warfare aimed to plunder. You conquer a city, take what's valuable, haul it home. Herem flips that on its head. Nothing is kept. Nothing gets sold. Nothing survives to be claimed by human hands because the claiming belongs to God alone. This isn't violence for gain. It's violence framed as worship.

And that's what makes it so hard to sit with.

The command in Deuteronomy 7 is chillingly plain: "When the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy."

No ambiguity. No poetic distance. Just the command.

The Mirror We'd Rather Not Look Into

It's easy to pick up Joshua and say, "Wow, that's awful. I can't believe ancient people thought that way." Easy to project all our discomfort onto a distant culture and move on with our day.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: every single one of us already knows how to do a smaller version of this every day.

We don't call it herem. We don't stand at borders with armies. But we draw lines constantly. Who's in and who's out. Who's safe, who's family, who gets the benefit of the doubt. Who gets held at arm's length until they prove themselves.

We don't beat war drums, but we make guest lists. We leave comments unsaid. We decide who gets invited back and who doesn't. We call it boundaries or wisdom or "just knowing our people." And from the inside, it always feels reasonable. It always feels justified.

That's what should unsettle us—not that ancient Israel drew lines, but that we recognize the impulse so easily.

Consider the mother who once asked a pastor to baptize her son. She wasn't ready to join the church herself, but she wanted this blessing for her child. The pastor said no. He could justify it—baptism is covenant, the church makes promises, doctrine and polity lined up neatly on his side. A defensible no. A theologically sound no.

Four years later, that same pastor stood watching his own son get baptized, watching grandfathers speak an identity over the child that he did nothing to earn or deserve. And in that moment, it hit him: he had denied another mother and son the exact same thing his family was receiving. He drew a line, said no, had good reasons for where he drew it. And a woman and baby ended up on the wrong side.

He doesn't know her name anymore. Doesn't know what happened to her son, whether he grew up in the church, whether anybody ever did for him what wouldn't be done that day. That not-knowing carries its own weight.

Living in a Season of Line-Drawing

We're living through a time that rewards drawing hard lines. Turn on the news, scroll for five minutes, sit at a family dinner table. Plenty of people will tell you exactly who belongs and who doesn't. Who counts as a real American, a real Christian. Who's inside the story of this country and who's just an obstacle standing in the way.

And Joshua has been picked up before by people who called themselves faithful and justified line-drawing in disastrous ways. Land taken in God's name. Nations conquered in covenant's name. Whole peoples treated as obstacles between somebody else and a promise they believed was theirs alone.

This isn't ancient history we can safely ignore. This is a pattern we're still living out.

The Human Book

Most scholars believe Joshua was compiled generations after the events it describes, likely finalized during the Babylonian exile. This isn't a battlefield transcript. It's closer to people rewriting their origin story generations later, under threat, wrestling with a desperate question: Who are we when everything that made us who we are has been taken?

Imagine being a scribe in Babylon, far from anything familiar. Your job is to keep telling your people who they are when every visible sign of who they were has been stripped away. No temple, no king, no land. Just stories.

That doesn't excuse the violence. The command still says what it says. But it changes what kind of book we're holding. This is also a people telling themselves why they mattered, why God hadn't abandoned them. The anxiety underneath isn't so different from the anxiety underneath much of our own line-drawing: fear of disappearing, fear of losing what made us who we are, fear dressed up as certainty because certainty feels safer than grief.

That doesn't make it right. But it does make it human.

The Question We Must Ask

Where in your life have you already decided who is in and who is out? Where have you drawn lines, othered people, created categories of belonging that leave someone standing outside?

We can pretend Joshua isn't in our Bible. We can bend over backwards explaining it away. But neither is the faithful option. The most faithful thing we can do is stay at the table with a text that unsettles us, refuse to leave it unread or sand it down into something easier to swallow.

Because the truth is, until we find ourselves in this story—until we recognize the human impulse to draw lines and declare some people worthy and others not—Joshua will remain something we rarely engage with.

And here's the hope: we follow Jesus, who is the antithesis of this. Jesus constantly crosses lines. Touches those seen as unclean. Invites the shut-out to the dinner table.

The work ahead isn't easy. But as we do the honest work of naming our own line-drawing, grace shows up. Abundant grace. The kind that helps us become better, more faithful people—the kind that teaches us to erase lines rather than draw them.

5-Day Devotional: Wrestling with Hard Lines

Day 1: The Weight of Our Boundaries

Reading: Deuteronomy 10:17-19

Devotional: God shows no partiality and executes justice for the orphan and widow, loving the strangers by providing them food and clothing. Yet how often do we draw lines that contradict this divine character? Today, examine the boundaries you've created around your life, your church, your community. Are they born from wisdom or from fear? From protection or from prejudice? God calls us to love the stranger because we too were once strangers. Before we can wrestle with ancient conquest narratives, we must acknowledge our own daily conquests—the subtle ways we decide who deserves our welcome and who doesn't. Confession begins with honest recognition.

Day 2: When Good Theology Hurts

Reading: Matthew 23:23-28

Devotional: Jesus confronts religious leaders who got the theology right but the heart wrong—tithing their spices while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness. We can defend our positions with flawless doctrine while leaving wounded people on the wrong side of our lines. The pastor's story of refusing baptism haunts because it reveals how easily righteousness becomes rigidity. Today, ask yourself: Where have I prioritized being right over being loving? Where has my theological certainty cost someone their dignity? Jesus didn't abolish boundaries, but He consistently crossed them to touch the untouchable. Our theology should make us more merciful, not less. If it doesn't, something is wrong.

Day 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Reading: Luke 18:9-14

Devotional: The Pharisee told himself a story about who belonged in God's presence and who didn't. He was the hero; the tax collector was the obstacle. We all narrate our lives, deciding who plays which role in our personal stories. The Israelites, writing Joshua during exile, were doing the same—constructing an origin story that made sense of their identity when everything else was stripped away. What stories are you telling yourself about why certain people don't belong at your table? What narratives justify your exclusions? The tax collector's prayer—"God, be merciful to me, a sinner"—disrupts our neat categories. It reminds us we're all beggars at God's table, none more deserving than another.

Day 4: Jesus Crosses the Line

Reading: Luke 7:36-50

Devotional: A woman deemed unclean enters a Pharisee's home and anoints Jesus' feet. Every boundary of that culture said she shouldn't be there. Jesus not only allows it but defends it, rebuking the host who drew the line. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus consistently touches lepers, eats with sinners, speaks to Samaritans, and welcomes children—all people kept outside by someone else's lines. This is our model. Where Joshua describes conquest and exclusion, Jesus embodies welcome and inclusion. Today, look for one line you've drawn and ask: Would Jesus cross this? Who have I excluded that Jesus would embrace? Following Christ means constantly examining our boundaries against His radical hospitality.

Day 5: Living in the Tension

Reading: Romans 15:1-7

Devotional: Paul calls us to welcome one another as Christ welcomed us. Not after we agree. Not once we're comfortable. Now, in our differences, bearing with one another's weaknesses. Wrestling with difficult Scripture like Joshua doesn't mean resolving every tension or explaining away every problem. It means staying at the table when we'd rather leave. It means refusing easy answers that protect our comfort. The faithful response isn't to ignore Joshua or to justify it, but to let it unsettle us enough that we examine our own capacity for othering. Christ's welcome of us—while we were yet sinners—sets the standard. May we extend that same costly, uncomfortable, boundary-crossing grace to others.

United dramatic.

 Good morning, friends.

It is really good to be with you all.

My name is Mitchell.

I'm the senior minister here at First Year.

United Methodist the Church of Dallas.

And if you're a guest worshiping with us, once again, welcome.

We're delighted that you are here.

We hope you come back and worship with us again in the future.

And it is...

 Really good to be back with you all after a few weeks away.

I was able to take some time to travel, to attend a few World Cup games, and to try and work on plans for worship for 2027.

It was not as productive as I had hoped, but I am rested.

 I am rested and I am grateful for both the time away and the opportunity to be back in the pulpit.

And I first want to say thank you to Joe and Anna, Elizabeth and Roy.

It's a gift, really.

It's a gift to be able to leave and not worry about the pulpit when I'm away.

 Their work with Recoloring the Bible series was great, and while I'm often the one you see in the pulpit or behind a music stand, they continue, I think, to remind all of us that we've got an incredible staff here at the church, and we've got some fantastic preachers, and so I'm really grateful.

Of course, as you know, there's this particular feeling, I think, within the church, especially a downtown church during the summer, the choir.

 Takes a break, well-deserved, no doubt.

Some of you all, many of you all,

 Not you, because you're here, but many of us scatter and head to the lake or the mountains or wherever you people go in July.

The whole rhythm of this place loosens up a bit, hence why I'm wearing this fun shirt and not my robe.

This is no doubt my favorite season to preach in because it gives us permission to do something that we can't always do during the season of

 Lent or the season of Advent, it gives us permission to sit just inside one book for several weeks and not rush anywhere else.

No candles to light, no liturgical calendar telling us what comes next.

 Just us and a text and a few weeks to actually wrestle with it.

And every summer around here it's becoming a tradition at this point.

I guess it's a tradition.

Four years in a row, is that a tradition?

I don't know.

Maybe not in the scope of.

 things here at First United Methodist Church of Dallas.

Four years is just a blip on the radar, but four years of my life, that's a tradition.

Four years running now, we've done a series called Band, which is great because each year we grab a book of the Bible that gets overlooked or misused or just plain avoided, and we spend a few weeks in it together.

If you remember...

 I know many of you do.

In 2023, we were in the book of James, and we talked specifically about our response, the human response to God's grace in our life.

In 2024, we read everyone's favorite summer book, the book of Job, where we talked about suffering.

And last year, we did

 the book of Revelation and talked at length about how much harm bad theology can do in the world.

And so that's sort of where we were at.

And this year, we are continuing this series with the book of Joshua.

 Now, every single time we've done this series, somebody finds me afterwards and says to me, Mitchell, I have never heard a preacher preach on that, which I'm not sure is a compliment, but it is sort of a common response.

 I'm not sure I've ever heard a preacher preach on that.

And and so I know that there are going to be moments in this series with the Book of Joshua that are going to be challenging for us.

They may be new for us.

It'll be an opportunity for us to

 to really wrestle with a text.

And the reason we're doing Joshua this year, which is far more ambitious than I think I realized when I chose it last summer, is because it is a book in the Bible that we are often trying to avoid.

It's sort of like...

 The one text message you may receive from someone that you just leave on your phone like unread, I don't know how quick you all are to respond to every text message, but there are these times when someone sends me that one message, maybe it's in a group chat or from a friend, and you know it's there, and every time you pick up your phone, you sort of debate on whether or not to open it.

 That little red notification badge on the message app is just sort of staring at you.

And you tell yourself, not today, I'll get to it later.

Maybe it's from a relative.

Maybe it's someone you used to be close with and things got complicated and you can't bring yourself to delete it or reply to it or even bring yourself to open it.

So it just sort of sits there, unread, waiting.

That's the book of Joshua, okay?

So it just kind of sits there and we don't really engage with it.

We don't really read it.

 We sort of just move right past it.

And so today we're going to open it.

So I want to do some quick orientation to the book itself.

Nobody knows exactly who wrote Joshua.

It's not a single author sitting down with a pen.

It's part of a larger collection.

 It's shaped and shepherded by different hands over time and we kind of look at it as a book that sort of got carried and copied and edited across generations before it looked like the book you are holding today.

 It's important to also note that the earliest material of this book, of the book of Joshua, was probably compiled, put together in the seventh century under King Josiah.

But it was edited and added to, adapted, curated over several decades after that first source material.

 The book we actually have in our current form was finalized much later than the seventh century.

And most of the book was sort of put into place in the sixth century during the Babylonian exile, which means that this isn't some sort of day of account of war.

It's a story.

 The book of Joshua is a story that got told and retold by people a long way downstream from the events themselves.

And here's maybe the most important part.

Joshua wasn't written to give you a history lesson.

That's not the point of Joshua.

It was written to secure a nation's identity.

 Their sense of covenant, of law, of belonging to this land during a time when all of that felt like it might come apart during the Babylonian exile.

This is a people trying to answer who we are written in a season when that question was not simply theoretical.

It was a matter of life and death.

 So Joshua opens what's called the Nebom, the former prophets, and it picks up, Joshua picks up the very next page after Deuteronomy ends, and that is intentional.

There's no gap.

There's no breath.

Moses is barely in the ground before his books, this book starts.

Moses was told, if you remember, that he would not cross into the Holy Land.

He will not cross into the land.

 And the very last thing Moses does is he hands over leadership responsibility to Joshua.

The whole operation belongs to Joshua.

 And that sort of transition doesn't happen gently.

There's no sort of org chart.

It's not planned out.

There's not a transitional plan.

It just sort of, Moses one day essentially dies and Joshua picks up the pieces and begins to lead the people.

And think about that then, the position that Joshua is in.

Because he didn't ask to lead.

 He'd spent decades as Moses' assistant, the aid, the one who carried Moses' bags, I imagine, up the mountain and waited at the bottom while Moses spent however long Moses was going to spend on top of the mountain talking to God.

And now overnight, he's the one that everyone is looking at.

And 40 years of wandering behind him in an entire nation's future in front of him, and the man he learned everything from was gone.

That's...

 not really a promotion as much as it is a burden.

And so I want us to sort of, that's sort of the sociological stuff that's happening as we pick up Joshua.

I don't know how, it doesn't really matter.

You just need to see two colors.

They're both green, okay?

 There's the light green to the east.

That is the current land that Israel sort of occupies.

And then there's this darker green to the west.

And that is the land that they will be conquering.

And right in between the two pieces of land is the River Jordan.

 Now the big body of water in the south, that's the Dead Sea.

And right to the north of it, the first city to the north of it on the darker side of the map is Jericho.

And that is the place where the book of Joshua begins its sort of conquest narrative.

 Jericho is the first city standing between Israel and everything that Moses promises.

And so as we go through this book, it's important to note that not only does it describe a movement, a sort of relocation and expansion of a people, it happens in a very particular geographical location.

And everything west of that river, of the Jordan,

 All that dark green still belongs to somebody else as we begin to read this book.

That's the tension essentially of the whole book.

The whole book exists within this tension, the promise and possession, that promise and possession are not the same thing.

And here's the deal that Joshua gets handed to keep the law, to get the land.

It's in the very first chapter of Joshua.

And this is what we read.

 Be strong and courageous for you shall lead this people to possess the land that I swore to their ancestors to give them.

Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with all the law

 that my servant Moses commanded you.

Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left so that you may be successful wherever you go.

This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth.

You shall meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it.

For then you shall make your way prosperous and then you shall be successful."

 The very first chapter of Joshua, we read that Joshua and the people are to meditate on the book day and night.

You don't turn from it to the right or to the left, and you'll succeed wherever you go.

It reads almost like a transaction.

Obedience in, blessing out.

That's a very common theological proposition.

 position that we hold in this country.

If you're obedient, you'll be blessed.

And for the first several chapters, that's exactly how it plays out.

Jericho falls, Ai falls eventually, and the land starts changing hands.

And through obedience, God fulfills promises.

This is the overarching, very thin, overly optimistic view of the book of Joshua.

And this is where, honestly, if anyone preaches,

 sermons on Joshua, this is where all those sermons stop.

This is sometimes where I would love to stop.

Faithful leader, conquered land, God keeps God's promise, the end.

A tidy testament to what happens when God's people trust God's word.

 And if that were the whole book, we wouldn't need three weeks to deal with it, and we certainly wouldn't need to call it banned.

But unfortunately, that's not the whole book, because the same chapters describing Israel keeping the law also describe what keeping the law required, specifically bringing about destruction, like massive amounts of destruction.

 Entire cities, everything living inside them in some accounts, not as a regrettable side effect of ancient warfare, but something that scripture commands, something that is holy, something that represents obedience.

 And there's a word underneath all of this, a word that doesn't translate cleanly into English, which frankly is part of the problem we run into when we pick up the book of Joshua.

We keep softening it because we don't have a category for what it actually means.

And that word is harem.

You'll sometimes see it translated as devoted or dedicated or set apart.

 It almost sounds sacred when we do it that way, almost gentle, which is exactly why it's misleading.

Harem means to ban something completely, to ban it completely in a devotion to God, essentially by destroying it.

Not to give it away, not to set it on a shelf as an offering, but to wipe it out.

 cities, livestock, people, all of it consecrated to God through total annihilation.

Most ancient warfare, the whole goal was to plunder.

 You conquer a city, you take what's valuable, you haul it home.

The idea of harem sort of flips that on its head because nothing is kept, nothing gets sold.

The entire idea is that nothing survives to be claimed by human hands because the claiming belongs to God alone.

This isn't violence for gain, it's violence that is essentially framed as worship.

 And I think that's what makes it so hard to sit with.

And I think that's the part that we skip past too quickly.

We hear ancient conquest and our brains follow it under history, something that happened to other people a long time ago for reasons that made sense in their world even if they don't make sense in our world today.

But harem isn't presented as military strategy that happened to have religious backing.

That's not what we're reading about.

 It's presented as an act of devotion, which means the question this text is actually asking us isn't did God command violence somewhere back in the Bronze Age?

The question is what kind of God and what kind of devotion this text believes it's describing?

And that's a harder question, I think, for us to look away from.

 So for the next few weeks, we're going to sit with it instead of rushing past it because our instinct is to explain it away, to find the footnote that makes it feel less severe, or just to move right by it and pretend like it doesn't exist.

That's typically how we deal with challenging text, and there are some footnotes, and we'll get to some, but not really today, not before we really let

 the book of Joshua sort of sit with us, because harem, this idea of devotion to God through complete annihilation, shows up 80 times in the Hebrew Bible, and almost all of them are clustered entirely in the conquest narratives.

 And so it's not incidental language.

This essentially, this idea is the engine that drives the whole story of the book.

And listen to how plainly it's commanded actually in Scripture.

Because before we even get into Joshua, in Deuteronomy chapter 7, we sort of get a glimpse of this.

The passage that Joshua is standing on when he leads people into the land is,

 back in Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy 7 says, when the Lord your God brings you into the land that you're about to enter and occupy and he clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them.

 It's what the text says.

Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.

Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me to serve other gods.

 Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.

But this is how you must deal with them.

Break down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire.

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.

The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

There's no ambiguity there in Deuteronomy 7, no poetic distance that I can find.

 utterly destroy them, show them no mercy.

Unfortunately, there's no like background noise.

This isn't just background noise like on the way to the good parts.

This is just what it is.

And I think here's maybe the whole point of today's sermon.

It is easy for us then to pick up the book of Joshua and say, wow, that's awful.

 I can't believe that someone would think that way and project all of our sort of negative feelings onto a whole group of other people and say, man, they should do a better job of reading the Bible, right?

To essentially take what is uncomfortable and try to like cast it upon other people.

But the truth is every single one of us probably already knows how to do a very small version of this every day.

 Now we don't call it harem and we don't stand at a border with an army behind us, but every one of us at some point has decided who's in and who's out.

Every one of us at some point has decided who gets in and who doesn't.

Who's safe, who's family, who gets the benefit of the doubt.

 Who gets held at arm's length until they prove themselves?

Now we don't beat war drums, but we are still drawing those lines quietly every day.

 A guest list, a comment left unsaid, a decision about who gets invited back and who doesn't.

We don't call it conquest.

We call it boundaries or wisdom or just knowing our own people.

And most of the time we can explain exactly why the line sits where it sits.

That's the part that I think should unsettle us.

It's never arbitrary.

 arbitrary from the inside.

It always feels reasonable.

It always feels justified.

That's what makes it so easy to live with and so hard to see clearly until years later looking back.

But every single one of us participates in the drawing of lines, the setting of boundaries, and the clearly othering of other people.

Some of you heard me tell this story, and I'm going to tell it again because I still

 I can't let go of it.

But back in 2014, when I was a pastor of another church, a young mother reached out to me and asked me to baptize her son.

She wasn't ready to join the church herself.

And we sat across each other at Cultivar Coffee at PV and Garland Road, one of my favorite coffee shops.

 And her baby was fussing as babies do.

And she looked at me and asked me plain as day, will you baptize my son?

And I said, no.

And I could actually justify that no.

I could justify it today.

You just give me a whiteboard in five minutes and I can justify the no because baptism is essentially covenant, right?

 The church makes a promise to that child alongside the parent.

And the parent promises to raise that child within the church.

Doctrine and polity, all of it lined up neatly on my side, a defensible no, a theologically sound no.

And it took me four years to understand what it actually was.

 I didn't actually think about that conversation too much until I was standing in front at the font watching my own son get baptized.

 both of his grandfathers speaking an identity over him that he had nothing to do to earn it, nothing he had to do to deserve that.

And it hit me as I watched Cash get baptized that I had denied a mother and her son the exact same thing that I was watching transpire and happen within my own family.

 And I drew a line, and I said no, and I had good reasons for where I drew it, and a woman and a baby ended up on the wrong side of that line.

The truth is I've thought about that instance like 100 times since, and I don't know her name anymore.

I don't know what happened to her son, whether he grew up in the church, whether anybody ever did for him what I wouldn't do.

 That sort of not knowing what has happened to that family is its own kind of weight.

You don't always get to sort of find out.

You don't always get to find out what your line drawing has cost somebody.

Sometimes you just have to live with it, live with the fact that it costs something and you move forward carrying that.

 I tell you all of this because this is the truth that's found in Joshua.

It isn't only a text about people who lived 3,000 years ago.

The same instinct that told Israel who was in the land and who it belonged to and who was in and who was out, that same feeling

 That same sort of response to the world is happening within us each and every day.

It doesn't just show up when we're wearing armor.

It shows up when we're wearing good theology in a calm, reasonable voice telling me exactly where the line goes and why it's justified.

We have a habit of drawing lines.

 I don't think I need to convince anybody in this room that we are living through a season that rewards drawing hard lines.

We turn on the news, scroll for five minutes, sit at a family dinner table, if you dare.

Plenty of people will tell you exactly who belongs and who doesn't.

 Who counts as a real American?

Who counts as a real Christian?

Who's inside the story of this country and who's just an obstacle standing in front of it?

I say that carefully because I'm not up here to score points for one side of our politics.

That's not my job and essentially it's not the church's job either.

But I'd be lying to you and failing this text if I pretended a book like Joshua has nothing to do with the world we're actually living in.

 This book has been picked up before by people who called themselves faithful and justified line drawing in pretty disastrous ways.

Land taken in God's name.

Nations conquered in covenant's name.

Whole peoples treated as obstacles standing between somebody else and a promise that they believed was theirs alone.

 And before we assume I'm only talking about someone else's history somewhere far away, remember where we are sitting.

This land had people on it before any of us arrived to.

And I think that's a thread that pulls this book tight to us because we're not exempt from it just because it makes us uncomfortable to pick it up.

 Because here's what gets lost when we rush to make this only about ancient warfare or the Bronze Age or a misinterpretation, a violent culture doing what violent cultures do.

Joshua 11 doesn't say Joshua decided on his own to wipe out the northern coalition.

Listen to the wording, as the Lord had commanded his servant Moses...

 So Moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did.

He left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses.

Joshua isn't the author of this violence.

He's simply the instrument of it.

 And the text puts the command, the intent, even the hardening of the hearts directly on God.

In Joshua 11, 24, it was the Lord's doing to harden their hearts so that they would come against Israel in battle in order that they might be utterly destroyed, receiving no mercy, but to be exterminated just as the Lord had commanded Moses.

 That doesn't make this easier.

If anything, it makes it harder.

This idea that the command, the intent, the hardening of hearts is God's work.

So now we're not just wrestling with what an ancient army did to others.

We're wrestling with what scripture says God commanded them to do.

 A quick bit of history, and we'll go deeper next week.

Most scholars believe Joshua as we have it, as we read it today, was compiled generations after the events it describes, likely finalized, right, under King Josiah and completed or edited, as I said, during the Babylonian exile.

 This isn't a battlefield transcript.

I said that out front.

It's closer to people rewriting their origin story generations later, in exile, under the threat of it, wrestling with a desperate question, who are we, when everything that made us who we are has been taken?

 So maybe you're a scribe, maybe you're a priest sitting somewhere in Babylon, far from anything familiar, and your job is somehow to keep telling your people who they are when every visible sign of who they were has been stripped away.

No temple, no king, no land, just stories.

 Now that doesn't excuse the violence.

The command still says what it says, but it changes what kind of book we're holding.

This is also a people, generations later, telling themselves why they mattered, why God hadn't abandoned them.

 And the anxiety underneath all of it isn't so different from the anxiety underneath a lot of our own line drawing.

Fear of disappearing, fear of losing what has made us who we are, fear dressed up as certainty because certainty feels safer than grief.

That doesn't excuse it or make it right, but it does make it human.

And that is, I think, the most important point about Joshua.

It is a very human-centric book.

 And a text that's human, rather than simply monstrous, is a text we're actually required to keep reading.

So we'll sit with that this week, and we'll pick it back up next week.

But here's what I want to leave you with.

We can pretend like the book of Joshua isn't in our Bible, and many faithful United Methodist churches do.

Or we can bend over backwards trying to explain of it, but neither one of those options is really the faithful option.

 Because I think the most faithful thing we can do is take a posture that is honest.

It means staying at the table with a text that unsettles us.

And it essentially means that we are going to refuse to leave this book unread, refuse to sort of stand it down or sand it down into something easier to swallow.

And so as we wrestle with this text this week, this book this week, I want you to think just

 This question, this is the question I want you to think about.

Where in your life have you already decided who is in and who is out?

Where in your life right now have you already drawn lines, othered other people, and where

 Where do you see that playing out in your life in such a way that you can relate to the sharp lines found in the book of Joshua?

Because the truth is, we all are drawing lines each and every day.

The first step for us to really engage with this book is to clearly and honestly name them.

 Now, you don't answer this question out loud, but I am gonna ask you to sit with it for this week on the drive home and conversations at the dinner table.

But where are you drawing lines already in your life to decide who's in and who's out?

So for the next two weeks,

 we're gonna wrestle with what does Joshua then mean for us as a people of faith and how can we engage scripture faithfully when it seems to be clearly saying that God is in favor of genocide.

 And how does that have an effect on our public witness in the world?

We'll talk about Christian nationalism some next week.

We'll also sort of talk about geopolitical forces.

But the truth is, until we're able to find ourselves in this book,

 find the human element, how we show up in this story, it will remain something that we rarely engage with.

So we need to be honest with ourselves about how we draw those lines, and then we can be honest about how to claim a new identity or rewrite the identity that Joshua gives God.

The truth is because we follow Jesus, and Jesus is really the antithesis of this.

Jesus is constantly crossing the line.

 Jesus is constantly touching those who are seen to be unclean.

Jesus is constantly inviting people to the dinner table who have been shut out.

So how do we maintain a Christian faith while Joshua is a part of our scripture?

We'll talk about that more next week.

But before we get there, we have to be honest about our own line drawing and not just project it onto others.

 And as we do that good work this week, I trust that God will continue to show up to give us grace, an abundant amount of grace, as we do what is often not done, wrestle with hard parts of our scripture in hopes to become better, more faithful disciples of Jesus Christ.

May God bless the work in front of us.

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

Once again, good morning.

My name is Reverend Elizabeth Mosley, and I am happy to be with you as we continue the sermon series we've been in for the last few weeks called Recoloring the Bible, where we take a closer look at those stories in Scripture that we might have heard as children, but maybe, as Leah pointed out, don't remember all the details of.

And so Anna preached about King David,

 And Roy preached about Joseph and his brothers.

And last week, Joe preached on the Tower of Babel.

And this week, well, my story falls right after Roy's story, a little bit more after Joe's story, but before Anna's story.

And it is the story of baby Moses.

Now, Moses...

 is a big deal.

Moses is a big deal in the Bible.

Moses is a big deal in our faith tradition.

You remember the story.

He starts off as a baby in a basket, rescued by Pharaoh's daughter, brought up as a son of Egypt, even though he was really an Israelite.

 Remember Moses?

He runs away and he gets married, but then he has that encounter with the burning bush.

Remember that?

And God calls him to be God's representative to Pharaoh, to demand that Pharaoh release God's people.

Remember, let my people go and all that?

 Then there are the 10 plagues and finally God's people are released and then they flee to the Red Sea and the Red Sea parts, which I am told you can see some great artwork out on our Ross sidewalk about the Red Sea parting and baby Moses.

 They escape across it, the Israelites do.

Then the Egyptians are drowned, and it seems like they're free, but then they're wandering through the desert, and Moses goes up to Mount Sinai, and he gets the Ten Commandments, and he sees God, and he turns really old, and then there's that whole thing with the golden calf, and then they wander in the desert some more.

And I feel like at this point in Moses' story, we've left the felt boards from Sunday school, and we are fully in the Yul Brynner, Charlton Heston, Ten Commandments movie.

 Which I loved as a child.

But that's not actually what we're going to talk about today.

The point is though that Moses is iconic.

This story is not really just a story for kids because Moses has such a huge impact on so much of our world even to this day.

 He is a significant foundational religious figure for both Jews and Christians.

In the New Testament, you might, I'm sure you remember this, he appears with Jesus and Elijah on the top of the mountain during the Transfiguration.

Moses is one of those people that appears.

His connection to the law, and remember the Ten Commandments,

 It makes his character almost an archetype for the Israelite people and the Jewish faith in general.

And his role in leading the Israelite people out of slavery links and has linked his character to fights for freedom throughout history around the world, notably in our own civil rights movement here in the US.

 In fact, MLK Jr.

repeatedly referenced Exodus throughout his work, and in his sermon, I've Been to the Mountaintop, he likens himself to Moses, claiming that just like Moses, he was gazing upon the promised land even though he might not get to enter it himself.

Moses is an iconic character.

 His story, all that he does in his life is a powerful account and testament to the work of God in our world through this important and influential character.

Again, this goes far beyond our own faith and reaches our broader cultural traditions.

 God's work through Moses creates an entire new relationship to God that impacts so much of how our world operates and truly, in many ways, could be argued, leads us to where we all are today.

So, it's worth a closer look at how he began.

It's worth a closer look at Moses' origin story, if you will.

 To really understand the things that happened to him that set him up for what he did for the rest of his life.

So that's our goal today.

Would you bow with me for a moment of prayer?

Oh God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight.

For you are our rock and our redeemer.

And we love you.

Amen.

Amen.

 I was thinking about my high school yearbook the other day, and in my high school yearbook when we were seniors, you got to have a senior page.

Does anyone remember that?

Anyone have a senior page in their yearbook?

And on your senior page, you could have whatever pictures of yourself you wanted and also include whatever quotations you wanted that meant something to you in your life.

 So I had a picture of myself as a senior, and then I had several quotes, and it's really funny when you look back and see the quotes that meant something to you at that time in your life.

I honestly cannot remember all of them that I had listed on my page, but I do remember that I had one from the movie Wayne's World.

All of my elder millennials especially will appreciate that, I'm sure.

And then I also had this quote.

 Remember that even the mightiest oak was once a little acorn that held its ground.

 Remember that even the mightiest oak was once a little acorn that held its ground.

And I'll be honest, I'm not actually sure where that came from.

I don't remember where I heard it first, but that is a quote that still comes to me every once in a while.

And I have to admit that as cheesy as it is, it's cheesy.

It's okay.

I kind of like it.

I think for me, it's a reminder that

 Over time, seemingly small things can have a huge impact.

It's a reminder for me that a little grit, a willingness to hold your ground, to take up space, to push back against the forces that might try to swallow you up can yield tremendous results.

 It's also a reminder that the big successful end outcomes that we see are often the results of earlier, smaller, simple actions.

And I think that that is certainly the case when we look at the story in scripture today.

 Now while the image in our head starts with a baby in a basket, the context that surrounds, that really encapsulates this story is so important.

So I'm gonna read a lot of scripture, okay?

We're gonna start in Exodus 1 and read part of that, and then we're gonna go into Exodus 2.

Now the place in the story where we start is right after the end of Genesis.

And in that place in the story, the Israelites

 have ended up in Egypt.

You know, that's the story of Joseph and his amazing technicolor dreamcoat and his brothers and how he was betrayed and taken to Egypt.

That's the story that Roy told a couple of weeks ago.

And the important thing for this story is that the Israelites are in Egypt, and because of Joseph and all of that story,

 They have a great relationship with Pharaoh and the leadership, and they are all good.

They are in Egypt, but they are good.

And then the Israelites did and do what Joe reminded us last week that they were supposed to do.

They were fruitful and they multiplied.

At this point, there are now several generations born in Egypt.

 And then Joseph's generation passes away.

We're going to pick up in Exodus chapter 1 with verse 8.

Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.

 He said to his people, look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we.

Come, let us deal shrewdly with them or they will increase and in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.

 Therefore they, the Egyptians, set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor.

They built supply cities, Pithom and Ramses, for Pharaoh, but the more they were oppressed,

 the more they multiplied and spread so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.

The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites and made their lives bitter with hard service and mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor.

They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, when you act as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him, but if it is a girl, she shall live.

But the midwives feared God.

They did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.

 So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, why have you done this and allowed the boys to live?

And the midwives said to Pharaoh, because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.

So God dealt well with the midwives and the people multiplied and became very strong.

And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.

 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, every boy that is born to the Hebrews, you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live.

Now, we're not going to spend a ton of time on the details of this.

There's so much we could talk about.

But I want to point out two things.

Pharaoh is not smart.

 because everything he does leads to more Israelites, which is the very thing that he is afraid of.

You heard that line, right?

The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied.

So one, when I think we see that when decisions are made out of fear, they are often bad decisions

 And sometimes they can result in actual evil.

And when people are in positions of power and are afraid, their bad decisions can become systemic evil and lead to the oppression of entire communities and peoples and even nations.

 And that is what happened to the Israelites in Egypt.

Now, Pharaoh tries to get to the root of his fear, or so he thinks.

Again, we can talk more about this, but the math does not add up if you're really trying to limit the number of people born.

So he goes to these two midwives who are named, which is unique for women in Scripture, they are named Shiphrah and Puah.

 Because of their skill set, these two women are all of a sudden in a position where they have a choice to make.

Either they go along with Pharaoh's horrific command, or they don't.

And we are told that because they feared God, which means they respected God,

 They actually end up becoming the first wave of resistance to this oppressive evil, and they straight up lie to Pharaoh's face.

Remember, as midwives, their role is to help bring life into the world, and they refuse to let themselves become agents of death.

 They make really a creative, courageous, clever choice when they have to, when they're forced to.

And so too, I think this part of the story, this context reminds us that we all maybe are more powerful and influential than we realize sometimes.

Because all of us will face a moment when we must decide how we will align ourselves

 either with good or with evil.

And what we choose may perhaps sometimes literally mean life or death for others.

Now because Shiphrah and Puah plead ignorance, Pharaoh shifts his tactic and demands that all of his subjects are to kill any boys that are born to the Israelites by throwing them into the river.

 And here I just want to point out that once again, he intends to weaponize people against each other, taking what is meant to give life, community, and changing it into an environment of potential death.

So the people, the Israelite people, are systematically and ruthlessly oppressed, and everyone is a potential threat.

That's the context.

 in which we now get to talk about baby Moses.

So here from chapter two, verses one through 10.

Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman.

The woman conceived and bore a son.

And when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months.

 When she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and plastered it with bitumen and pitch.

She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river.

His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.

The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river while her attendants walked beside the river.

 she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it.

When she opened it, she saw the child.

He was crying, and she took pity on him.

This must be one of the Hebrews' children, she said.

Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?

 Pharaoh's daughter said to her, yes.

So the girl went and called the child's own mother.

And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, take this child and nurse it for me and I will give you your wages.

So the woman took the child and nursed it.

And when the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter and she took him as her son.

She named him Moses because she said, I drew him out of the water.

 for the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

This story is iconic and it's powerful, especially if you remember who Moses grew up to be and all that he did throughout his life.

But honestly, this story of baby Moses is not a story about Moses.

It's a story of the three women in Moses's life.

 The first is Moses' mom.

Later in Exodus, she is named Jochebed.

Jochebed sees that her newborn baby is a fine baby, and that literally is translated to the word good, the same word that is used in Genesis when God sees all that God has made and calls it good.

 God creates the world and sees that as good, and because like God, Jochebed sees her child as good, Jochebed refuses to obey in advance.

She does not throw her baby into the river to drown.

She hides him.

And when she can hide him no longer, you know what she does?

She creates a mini ark.

 Yes, like Noah's ark.

We didn't talk about that story in this series.

Maybe in the next series.

But like Noah's ark, because the bitumen and pitch that this story references are the exact same materials that were used to create the ark and make it watertight so that it could save the remnants of creation.

You see a theme here that's being repeated.

She does take Moses down to the river, but she sets him afloat on it.

 I mean, maybe technically you could argue she follows the law.

The river was a source of life for all the people in the community in that area.

And once again, Pharaoh had tried to take something meant for life and make it a source of death.

But Moses' mom, in her one action of desperation, not knowing what else she could possibly do,

 She refuses to allow that to be so.

She refuses to let what is for life be used for death.

She doesn't know what will happen to Moses.

She sets her baby in a basket to float along the river and doesn't know if it'll work.

But she was going to do anything instead of what she knew was evil.

 Next comes Moses' sister.

Now later in Exodus, we know that her name is Miriam.

Now she's a smart cookie.

The apple really does not fall far from the tree here.

 She sees all that is happening in her land.

She sees what is happening with her people and with her family.

She knows she has a secret baby brother.

She knows that her mom is taking a huge risk, and with typical older sister energy, she does not sit by on the sidelines.

She keeps up.

She pays attention.

 She doesn't ignore it or look away.

In fact, we're told that she deliberately follows the basket to see what will happen.

And I'm just going to say that I think it's so okay to take breaks and to rest and to engage in self-care.

But when there is the potential for injustice, we must keep watch.

We cannot pretend that it doesn't exist.

 We cannot close our eyes and feign ignorance and hope that it just goes away.

We have to watch.

And even more, when the moment comes when Miriam's brother is found, she doesn't just watch, she speaks up to royalty.

Let's just not, let's not forget that this is Pharaoh's daughter that she just kind of jumps out of the reeds at and says,

 with boldness and courage, the right words at the right time, that really changes everything.

She orchestrates the best possible outcome, which is to keep her family together.

Even as a child, Miriam is not afraid to use her voice when the time is right.

And that brings us to Pharaoh's daughter.

 Just a princess, minding her own business, going down to the river to bathe.

She sees this basket in the reeds, she opens it, she sees this child crying, and she has pity on it.

Now she is not a dummy, okay?

Also, these women are all very smart.

She immediately knows that this must be one of the Israelite children.

She knows.

 She knows that her father has ordered all of the people to kill the boys that are born to the Israelites.

We don't know anything else about her.

We don't know her name or her age or what she does next.

We don't really see her again in Scripture at all, but we know one thing, that she very intentionally and deliberately in this one moment when confronted with this baby in a basket,

 She defies her father and her king and she adopts this baby as her own.

She even pays the Hebrew woman to take care of him when so many of the Hebrews and the Israelites were not being paid for their labor.

 She does the opposite of what she's supposed to.

She doesn't throw him into the river.

She draws him out of the river, which is exactly where his name comes from.

And you know what?

She doesn't talk about it.

She doesn't call a press conference or draw any attention to this decision.

It's all done.

It seems kind of very quiet and just off to the side.

 And she does this one thing in her control that changes the course of history.

She didn't seek this choice out, but when she's faced with a baby in a basket, she makes a choice out of pity, of kindness.

It's a risky choice.

Maybe she's intentionally defiant even.

But she does all of that in spite of her privilege as a daughter of Pharaoh.

 She doesn't go out and adopt all the Hebrew babies.

She simply does what she can for the one that is there.

When the choice presents itself to her, she took the option of mercy, even potentially at great cost to herself.

 The story of baby Moses is amazing.

It's amazing and powerful and wonderful, and not because of Moses, but because of all the women who acted on his behalf, his mother and his sister and his adoptive mother.

So when I think of something small having a huge impact, I think of the choices that these women have made.

They're like the little acorns that hold their ground.

 These women made individual, seemingly small decisions that took up just enough space to grow into something that God ended up using in a mighty way to change the world.

 Moses grew up to be a powerful, iconic figure.

He led the Israelite people to freedom.

He embodied this relationship between humanity and God in this new way.

But he would not have done any of that.

He would not have grown up at all if it weren't for the actions that each of these women took.

 Out of context, their actions might even be small.

They're individual acts of desperation or defiance or bravery.

These aren't grand sweeping collective actions.

These women weren't writing treatises or leading armies or followers or claiming to have extraordinary power.

They are ordinary people doing what is presented in front of them, making a choice in an ordinary everyday moment.

 They don't actually know, no one outside of these women actually knows the individual choices that they made.

And truthfully, none of these choices alone, none of these actions that these women took alone would have saved Moses' life.

But it was because when you put those actions together, those seemingly small actions together, have a huge impact.

 They all have a choice.

They all had a choice.

They could go along with what was evil and cruel and stupid, or they could choose a course of action that was risky, but loving and merciful and just.

And the truth is we have the same kind of choices today.

There are a lot of Pharaohs in our world

 There are a lot of people in power who are afraid and who are making unwise and downright evil decisions that impact entire communities and groups of people.

There are pharaohs in our own lives, people who use their power and influence in ways that cause harm and destruction to those around them.

 At every level, even you and me have the option to choose how we respond when moments like this present themselves to us.

Will we go along?

Or will we be like Jacobed, refusing to let people take what we know is life-giving and full of grace and love and to use it for evil and oppression and death?

 How might we in our own lives refuse to obey in advance and instead figure out how to let our love for others guide us rather than blindly following evil laws based on fear and hatred?

Will we obey the pharaohs in our lives or will we be like Miriam, paying attention to what is happening and then courageously speaking up when the moment requires it?

How can we take up some space and refuse to be sidelined?

 Will we submit to evil and tyranny and let it harm those around us or will we be like Pharaoh's daughter and risk our privilege and sacrifice our peace in order to resist what we know is wrong?

How can we make room for those who might need a place so desperately?

 We will, all of us at some point, face a moment where we must make a decision about how we will act.

It might be in how we respond to those in need around us.

It might be in how we speak up against hatred, even in small conversations at home or at work or at school.

It might be in where we spend our money or in how we vote.

But ultimately, it will be in how we respond to the individual moments of potential mercy that present themselves to us every day.

 As Christians, we follow a God who called creation good, and I don't know why, but we believe that God always has and always will act in this world through people just like these women and just like us.

 Through our small individual acts of justice and love and sacrifice, God doesn't need us to always be big and powerful.

God just needs us to be faithful in the moments that they present themselves to us.

 So when we pay attention, when we refuse to obey unjust laws, when we are willing to take on great personal risk to do what we believe is right in the name of God, when we choose to act, even in small ways, even if we're not sure if it's going to make a difference or it will lead to anywhere, when we treat someone with kindness or forgiveness or respond in the moment with pity and with mercy,

 God uses it all and works through us to transform the world to bring freedom and redemption and goodness and love to all.

The mightiest oak was once a little acorn that held its ground.

God's mighty works in our world and in our lives stem from the small actions that we choose to take every day.

I don't know this week

 What decisions will confront you?

I don't know what choice might come your way, what moment may materialize that you did not ask for, but there will be something this week or next week or some time, some moment where you can choose mercy and sacrificial love and bold courage or not.

 And I pray that when that happens to you and to me, that we will remember baby Moses, but most of all, that we will remember the women who saved his life.

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

The Tower of Babel: When Divine Confusion Becomes Mercy

There's something profoundly unsettling about the Tower of Babel story. On the surface, it seems like divine sabotage—God coming down to scramble human language and scatter a unified people across the earth. But what if we've been reading it wrong all along? What if this ancient tale from Genesis 11 isn't about judgment at all, but about liberation?

The Ambition That Built a Tower

Picture the scene: survivors of the great flood, given a second chance at life, gathering on the plain of Shinar. They speak one language, share one vision, and harbor one collective fear—the fear of being scattered, erased, forgotten. So they devise a plan: "Let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves."

Their motivation seems almost noble. After witnessing the destruction of nearly everything, who wouldn't want security? Who wouldn't crave permanence? The impulse to build something lasting, to create cohesion, to ward off fragmentation—these are deeply human desires.

But woven into this seemingly reasonable ambition are three dangerous threads: fear, pride, and defiance. The tower becomes more than architecture; it becomes a monument to human control, an attempt to secure ourselves against vulnerability, to reach heaven through our own effort rather than grace.

When Unity Becomes Uniformity

Here's where the story gets uncomfortable for modern readers. We live in an age that prizes unity, that celebrates bringing people together, that seeks common ground. Isn't one people with one language and one shared goal exactly what we need in our divided world?

Not necessarily.

The danger isn't unity itself—it's when unity hardens into uniformity. When there's no room for difference, when dissent is silenced, when everyone must speak the same language in the same way, solidarity risks becoming tyranny. What begins as togetherness can calcify into oppression.

History bears witness to this pattern repeatedly. Totalitarian regimes have always sought to bind populations under a single ideological language—one people, one destiny, one leader. The result has never been harmony but genocide, war, and the crushing of the human spirit. Even in our own lives, we see this dynamic play out in cults, rigid belief systems, and corporate cultures that demand absolute conformity.

The Scattering That Saves

So God intervenes—not to punish, but to protect. The confusion of languages and the scattering of peoples isn't divine cruelty; it's divine mercy. God is safeguarding humanity from entombing itself in false security, from mistaking cohesion for genuine unity.

The gift hidden in this "confusion" is profound: it forces humility. It compels us to encounter the other. It enriches the human story with difference, dialogue, and the beautiful struggle of translation. Life becomes dynamic, open, surprising—everything a tower of sameness would have prevented.

Consider what we would lose in a world of absolute uniformity: no need for empathy (everyone thinks like us), no call for translation (everyone speaks our language), no invitation to grow (everyone already agrees). The very things that make us most human—our capacity for curiosity, compassion, and creativity—would atrophy in a world without difference.

The Towers We Build Today

The Tower of Babel isn't just ancient history; it's a pattern that repeats in every generation and in every human heart.

We see it in technological utopianism—the dream of one marketplace, one digital language, one algorithmic logic that can optimize human existence. We see it in political movements that promise security through sameness. We see it in religious communities that confuse doctrinal uniformity with spiritual unity.

But perhaps most painfully, we see it in ourselves.

What tower are you building? Is it a career monument, constructed brick by brick to make a name for yourself, only to face the scattering of burnout and disillusionment? Is it the tower of parental identity, where you've invested everything in your children, only to experience the fragmenting loss of self when they leave? Is it a tower of rigid belief, where you've constructed a theological fortress, only to have it shaken by questions that refuse to be silenced?

Each of these is a personal Babel story—the ego constructing its monument, and then life scattering the bricks.

The Paradox of Wholeness

Here's the beautiful paradox at the heart of this story: true integration is not sameness but harmony. True wholeness—whether in society, family, or within our own souls—is not one voice but many voices, each carrying part of the truth.

To be fully human is to host a babble within—messy, polyphonic, alive. We contain contradictions, multiple perspectives, competing desires. The scatterings we resist, the breakdowns we fear, the fragmentations we try to prevent may actually be redemptive, leading us into a more spacious, more human way of being.

The story finds its redemptive echo in Pentecost, where the Spirit allows many different languages to be heard as one message. Not uniformity, but harmony in diversity. Not the elimination of difference, but the celebration of it. This is the birth of true unity—not imposed from above through control, but emerging from below through love.

Living in the Scatter

What if we stopped resisting the scattering? What if we embraced the confusion not as punishment but as invitation?

The confusion of languages is really a call to deeper listening. When we can't assume everyone thinks like us, speaks like us, or sees the world like us, we must lean in with curiosity and humility. We must learn the sacred art of translation—not just of words, but of worlds.

The Tower of Babel reminds us that any effort to erase difference in pursuit of sameness is ultimately doomed and dangerous. It warns us that the ego's quest for control must be unsettled for us to grow whole. It teaches us that what looks like divine judgment is often divine mercy, protecting us from the tyranny of one voice—whether that voice belongs to a regime, a culture, or our own frightened ego.

So perhaps the next time you feel scattered, confused, unable to make everyone understand you or agree with you, remember Babel. Remember that the scattering might be the gift, the confusion might be the mercy, and the many languages might be exactly what we need to become fully human.

Good morning, friends.

I am Joe Stabile, one of the associate pastors here.

And as Elizabeth said, we're continuing our Recoloring the Bible series this morning and looking at some of the stories of the Bible that perhaps we learned when we were children and

 and maybe have always wondered about.

So today we're going to look at the story in the Bible about the Tower of Babel.

 The Tower of Babel is one of those great mythical stories that we use to explain why people on earth all speak so many different languages.

We certainly have experienced that in these last weeks and days with the World Cup.

And the Bible is filled with so many wonderful stories

 that you may want to just ask the question, did that really happen?

So I love what my good friend Father Richard Rohr says in talking about the Bible.

He says, everything in the Bible is true, and some of it really happened.

 And I think this is one of those kinds of stories.

It's short, it's abrupt, it's a story that is very easily overlooked when we're reading the Bible.

However, like so many biblical dramas, it hides a depth that we seldom consider.

 What we have this morning is not just a story about bricks and towers.

It's not only about God and humankind, but rather it is about the very nature of human ambition and pride and those fault lines that run through both societies and souls.

 The Tower of Babel is less about architectural ability and it is more about what happens when we try to secure ourselves against fear or when we strive on our own somehow to get to heaven through human endeavor.

 or about when we confuse unity with control.

I invite you to hear the story from Genesis chapter 11 verse 1 through 9.

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.

 And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

And they said to one another, come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.

And they had a brick for stone and bitumen for mortar.

 And then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.

Otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which mortals had built.

And the Lord said, Look,

 They are one people and they all have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do.

Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

Come let us go down and confuse their language there so that they will not understand one another's speech.

 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

 For the Word of God in Scripture, for the Word of God among us, for the Word of God within us.

My brothers and sisters, what we have here this morning is not only about bricks and towers.

Would you pray with me?

 May the Lord be in our hearts and on our lips that we might worthily proclaim Him both by our words and by our deeds.

Amen.

 So here we are after Noah and the great flood.

And the population has grown and everyone has gathered on the plain of Shinar and they decided to build a huge city with an enormous tower that would reach to the heavens.

And they have two purposes.

First, to make a name for themselves.

And the second,

 to prevent from being scattered over all the earth.

Now the problem is that God sees this ambition and recognized the danger of such concentrated power all in one place, people speaking one language.

 So God comes down and confounds their speech and scatters them across the whole of the earth.

Now I hope you all will remember with me back in the very first story of Adam and Eve and God says, be fruitful and multiply.

 And then again in chapter 9 of Genesis, just after the flood, Noah and his family is told again, be fruitful and populate the earth.

And this language confusion now leaves the city and the tower unfinished and abandoned

 and perpetually left as a monument to frustrated aspiration and the limit of human pride.

 We're in the midst of the heat in the summer, and Europe has experienced a lot of heat this summer, so I would imagine it's pretty easy for all of us to picture the hard, sweaty work of baking bricks in the sun, and then the determination and the labor of a united people to begin building the city and tower.

 And then can you imagine all of a sudden there's silence?

Words spoken to one another turn to nonsense.

Companions in labor are now strangers.

And all they're left with is confusion where there was clarity.

 and scattering where there was solidarity.

So, church, we might ask ourselves the question, what drove them to build the city and the tower in the first place?

But I don't think it's hard to imagine.

They were survivors of a huge flood, and now they've been given a second chance.

 So perhaps, perhaps it was fear.

The fear of being erased, the fear of being scattered, the fear of being undone.

So what do you do when you have that kind of fear?

You build so you can stay together.

You do something that brings us cohesion.

You ward off dispersion.

 and they decided, let's make a name for ourselves.

Let's never ever be fragile like that again, and let's make sure that we can be in control.

Three impulses become interwoven, fear, ambition, defiance.

They're caught up with the desire for security,

 The longing for immortality and the will to just be independent.

Now church for me on the surface seems like a pretty good outcome.

One people, one language, one shared goal, cohesion in an age of endless division.

 And perhaps that appeared to be safety, but it also leads to compulsion.

You see, when there is no room for difference, when there is no room for dissent, when there is that, the result could be that what begins as solidarity

 risked hardening into tyranny.

So as we see in the Scripture, and as happens so very often in Scripture, God intervenes.

God intervenes not because unity is dangerous, but because unity can become uniformity

 and uniformity can become oppression.

So we have to consider that what happens in Genesis chapter 11 is not judgment at all, but liberation.

You see it's an insistence on plurality.

 It's an insistence on messy, creative, frustrating diversity which allows true freedom to breathe.

Unity is not the problem.

But unity becomes toxic when it silences difference in the name of security.

 Babel has reared its ugly head many times throughout history.

Humans attempting to build their own towers either personally or corporately or nationally.

Communism sought to bind vast populations together under a single ideological language.

 Fascism's vision was not of many voices, but of one people, one destiny, one leader, and the result was war and genocide.

In our own lifetime, there have been countless utopian projects, communes, cults,

 all of them asking people to conform to one way of life, one belief system, or one interpretation.

And even most recently, globalization and big tech, they dream of one marketplace, one digital language, and one algorithmic logic.

 So much so that even Pope Leo has referred to AI as the new Tower of Babel.

So if Babel explains the scattering of nations, I think it also highlights something much closer to home, the scattering of the human heart.

What is a tower?

 but the ego's monument.

Now I'm aware some of you don't know my history as a former Roman Catholic priest.

Forty years ago, along with Suzanne, who is now my wife, as a priest and layperson in the Roman Catholic Church, we started a nonprofit ministry.

 And the role of the ministry was to go to Catholic churches and conduct revivals for a week at a time in those churches as a priest and layperson working together side by side.

And when we started the ministry, we went from church to church and we never advertised for ourselves word

 just went around, and somebody would hear us in one city, tell a relative in another city, and we'd get invited from city to city, and we were doing fairly well with the ministry and filling churches.

And then in 1986, Pope John Paul II was coming to the United States, and he was going to visit in New Orleans.

 and the order of priests that I belonged to owned the third largest Catholic church in the United States, in New Orleans.

So I got the brainy idea, why don't we invite ourselves to New Orleans, to this church, which holds three times as many people as sitting in this church here,

 we'll conduct our revival and we'll invite people from all over New Orleans and it'll be such a great thing before the Pope ever gets there.

We got to the church on that weekend to begin our week-long revival and the very first night of the event in the church that seats 3,000 there were 50 people.

 And they didn't even sit together the whole week.

You see, sometimes, sometimes we build our own towers, creating our career, our reputation, our family legacies, our philosophies of control.

 And maybe it's not so obvious in the moment, but what we're saying is let's make a name for ourselves.

Consider for just a moment the executive who's building his tower of career success, only to find that it's shattered by burnout and disillusionment.

Or maybe it's the parent

 invests her identity wholly in her children only to face the scattering of self when they grow and leave home?

Or what about the believer who just clings to one rigid creed of

 only to be undone by theological questions that refuse to be silenced.

Each one of those is a Babel story.

It's the ego constructing a monument and then life scattering the bricks.

You see, church, true integration is not sameness.

 But harmony and true wholeness, whether in society or in business or in a family or in a relationship, is the voices of many languages, each one carrying a part of the truth.

And to be truly human is to host a babble within.

 something that is messy, polyphonic, and alive.

So here, church, is the paradox.

What looks like judgment is in truth mercy.

God's intervention is not punitive, but protective.

 protective from entombing ourselves in false security and mistaking cohesion for unity.

You see, the confusion of languages is really a gift.

It forces humility.

It compels us to encounter the other.

 And it enriches the human story with difference and dialogue and translation.

And it makes life dynamic and open and surprising.

And for all of us who follow the Christian tradition, this comes full circle in Pentecost where the Spirit allows many different languages all to be heard as one message.

It is the birth of

 of deeper harmony in diversity.

And so what I think it is, my brothers and sisters, with all of us, the scatterings that we resist, the breakdowns, the contradictions we experience, the fragmentations of our lives,

 may just be redemptive, leading us into a more human space.

The Tower of Babel is more than just a story about the origin of 7,170 different languages spoken on the face of the earth.

It's a parable of human pride and fear

 It's a parable of the temptation to mistake unity for uniformity and control for security.

And it warns us of efforts, it warns us of any efforts that erase difference in the pursuit of sameness.

 And it reminds us that the ego's quest for control must be unsettled in order to grow whole.

What we think of as divine judgment is in fact divine mercy.

God

 protecting us from the tyranny of one voice, whether that voice belongs to a regime, a government, a culture, a faith belief, or an ego.

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

Amen.

Holy and merciful God,

We come before you today with stories we have known since childhood, stories once colored in simple lines, now asking us to look again with honest eyes. In the story of Joseph and his brothers, we see the pain of betrayal, the damage of jealousy, the long ache of separation, and the complicated work of forgiveness. We see a family fractured by harm, and we remember that not every wound can be explained away, rushed toward healing, or called good.

God, help us tell the truth about pain. Help us resist the temptation to say that you caused what has hurt us, or that suffering was your plan all along. We do not believe that cruelty, abuse, betrayal, disaster, or grief come from your hand. We do not believe you delight in our suffering or require our pain in order to teach us something.

But we do believe you are present in the midst of it. We believe you meet us in the aftermath. We believe you can take what was meant for harm and still work toward life, mercy, repair, and liberation. Not because the harm was holy, but because you are holy. Not because the pain was good, but because your love is stronger than pain.

For those carrying wounds from family, friendship, church, or community, draw near with tenderness. For those who have been told their suffering was deserved, ordained, or necessary, speak a truer word of grace. For those who long for reconciliation, give wisdom, courage, and boundaries. For those for whom reconciliation is not safe or possible, bring peace without shame.

God of Joseph, God of his brothers, God of every complicated family story, teach us to seek repair without denying harm. Teach us to forgive without pretending. Teach us to make room for grief, accountability, healing, and hope.

Recolor our faith with truth. Recolor our memories with compassion. Recolor our lives with the promise that even when you do not cause the bad thing, you do not abandon us to it.
And now, with the confidence of children of God, we pray together the prayer Jesus taught us:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power,
and the glory forever. Amen.

When Faith Meets Uncertainty: Finding God in the Unthinkable

The human body contains between 13.5 and 17.5 grams of hemoglobin per deciliter of blood. When that number drops below seven, doctors administer blood transfusions. Below five is a life-threatening emergency. At 4.8, you're staring death in the face.

This is the stark reality one couple faced when jaundice—that telltale yellowing of the skin and eyes—progressed from a curious observation to a medical crisis that would span 57 days in hospitals across two cities. What began as a question about lighting became a desperate fight for survival, complete with misdiagnoses, institutional failures, hallucinations, and the agonizing wait for an organ transplant.

But this isn't just a medical story. It's a theological reckoning.

The Ancient Echo of Near-Death

The Bible contains its own captivating near-death tale in the story of Joseph. You know the one—the favorite son with the coat of many colors who couldn't help but tell his older brothers about dreams where they all bowed down to him. Unsurprisingly, this didn't endear him to his siblings.

What followed was a cascade of catastrophes: sold into slavery, falsely accused of assault by Potiphar's wife, thrown into prison, forgotten by those he helped. Yet somehow, through an improbable series of events involving dream interpretation and famine prediction, Joseph ended up as Pharaoh's right-hand man, second in command of all Egypt.

When his starving brothers eventually came to Egypt seeking food during the famine, they stood before Joseph without recognizing him. In Genesis 45, Joseph reveals himself in an emotional scene of reconciliation, weeping so loudly that the entire household could hear.

But here's where the story takes a theologically troubling turn.

The Problem with Providence

Joseph tells his brothers: "Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life... So it was not you who sent me here, but God."

Wait. What?

If God orchestrated Joseph's rise to power, then God was also responsible for everything that came before—the betrayal, the slavery, the false imprisonment. If we credit God with the happy ending, we must also blame God for the suffering that preceded it.

But we know exactly why Joseph suffered. His brothers sold him out of jealousy. Zuleika falsely accused him out of spite. Potiphar imprisoned him based on a lie. Human choices, not divine intervention, created Joseph's nightmare.

So how can we reconcile this?

The same theological dilemma emerges in modern medical crises. When someone survives against impossible odds, we're quick to say "God saved them" or "it's a miracle." But if God gets credit for the survival, doesn't God also bear responsibility for the illness, the institutional failures, the suffering along the way?

The Uncomfortable Either/Or

This presents us with an uncomfortable binary: Either God is responsible for everything—including childhood cancer, natural disasters, and systemic injustice—or God is responsible for nothing.

The first option is theologically repugnant. A God who deliberately causes suffering, who allows hospitals to make fatal mistakes, who orchestrates trauma as part of some grand plan—that's not a God worth worshiping. That's a cosmic sadist.

But the second option seems equally problematic. What's the point of believing in a God who exists but never intervenes? Why dedicate your life to serving a deity who remains perpetually on the sidelines?

Neither answer satisfies. And that's okay.

Living in the Questions

Sometimes the most honest theology is the theology that admits it doesn't have all the answers. The question of why suffering exists in a world supposedly governed by a loving, all-powerful God—what philosophers call "the problem of evil"—has vexed theologians for millennia. There's no neat solution.

Is God unwilling to prevent suffering? Then God isn't all-loving. Is God unable to prevent it? Then God isn't all-powerful. Does suffering exist because God doesn't? Then what are we doing here on Sunday mornings?

None of these options provide comfort. The honest answer is: I don't know. You don't know. None of us really knows.

What We Do Know

But here's what we can know with certainty:

We know that people survive because other people fight for them. Parents who refuse to accept inadequate care. Spouses who advocate when their partners can't speak for themselves. Medical professionals who dedicate their lives to healing.

We know that love—genuine, sacrificial, tenacious love—makes life worth living. The kind of love that sits in an ICU room for weeks, that learns the names of every nurse, that puts on headphones to drown out delusions because listening is too painful.

We know that beauty exists. That joy is real. That peace is possible. That generosity transforms communities.

We know there's something transcendent about laughing with friends over dinner, about your favorite song washing over you at a sold-out concert, about stumbling upon a piece of nature that takes your breath away. These moments feel like they come from the same source, the same wellspring of meaning that defies easy categorization.

A Different Kind of God-Talk

Maybe we need a different way of talking about God—not as a puppet master pulling strings, not as a cosmic vending machine dispensing miracles, but as that transcendent source of love, beauty, connection, and meaning that makes life worth living even when it's unbearably hard.

Maybe God isn't the one who causes or prevents suffering, but the presence we discover in the midst of it. The force that compels us to fight for each other, to show up, to keep hoping when hope seems irrational.

Maybe crediting God for survival isn't about divine intervention but about recognizing that love, community, and human dedication to healing are themselves sacred acts.

If you want to call that feeling—that transcendent experience of love and beauty and connection—God, that's okay. If you need a different word, that's okay too.

What matters is that we keep showing up for each other, keep fighting for survival, keep choosing love even when the outcome is uncertain.

Because in the end, that might be the only theology that matters.

5-Day Devotional: Finding God in the Wilderness

Day 1: When Life Turns Yellow

Reading: Job 2:11-13; Psalm 88:1-9

Devotional: Sometimes suffering announces itself slowly—a yellowing eye, a weakening body, a creeping darkness. Job's friends sat with him in silence for seven days, recognizing that some pain defies easy answers. The psalmist cries out from overwhelming darkness, yet still addresses God. Notice: even in complaint, there is relationship. When life deteriorates and answers escape us, we don't need to pretend everything is fine or that we understand God's plan. Honest lament is faithful prayer. Today, acknowledge whatever is "yellowing" in your life—the thing you've been noticing but haven't named. Bring it before God without needing to explain it away or justify it. Sometimes faithful presence—to ourselves, to others, to God—is enough.

Day 2: The God Who Doesn't Intervene (Or Does He?)

Reading: Genesis 45:1-8; Romans 8:28

Devotional: Joseph declares "God sent me here," yet we know his brothers' jealousy, Potiphar's wife's lies, and the cupbearer's forgetfulness caused his suffering. This tension is real: we want to credit God for good outcomes without blaming God for the pain that preceded them. Perhaps God's presence isn't found in controlling every circumstance, but in sustaining us through them and working alongside us toward redemption. The people who saved Joseph—and who saved the pastor's husband—were human hands guided by compassion, skill, and love. Maybe God doesn't intervene from outside our world but works through the love, courage, and dedication of people. Today, consider: where have you experienced God's presence not as divine intervention, but through human love and care?

Day 3: The Hallucinations of Hope

Reading: 2 Corinthians 4:7-12, 16-18; Lamentations 3:19-24

Devotional: In the fog of medication and trauma, reality becomes distorted. We lose our grip on what's true. The pastor's husband thought he was dead; he couldn't name the year. Yet even in that darkness, small anchors remained: his name, his birthday, the greatest band in the world. Lamentations reminds us that God's mercies are "new every morning"—not because yesterday's pain disappears, but because hope renews itself in small, daily portions. When we can't see the big picture, we cling to small truths. Today, identify your anchors—the small, true things that remain constant even when everything else feels uncertain. Write them down. Return to them when the fog rolls in. Great faithfulness sometimes looks like remembering your own name.

Day 4: The People Who Save Your Life

Reading: Exodus 17:8-13; Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

Devotional: Moses couldn't hold his arms up alone; Aaron and Hur had to support him. The pastor couldn't save his husband alone; it took parents, doctors, nurses, friends, and strangers working together. We live in a culture that worships self-sufficiency, but the Bible consistently shows us that survival is communal. Sometimes being held up by others is the most faithful thing we can do. Sometimes holding others up is how God's love becomes tangible. The pastor's husband survived because people refused to let him fall—medically, physically, emotionally. Today, reflect: Who holds your arms up when you're weary? Whose arms are you helping to hold? Reach out to thank someone who has supported you, or offer support to someone who needs it.

Day 5: The Word We Need for Transcendence

Reading: 1 John 4:7-12, 16-19; Psalm 139:7-12

Devotional: The pastor admits he doesn't know why suffering exists or exactly how God works in the world. But he knows love. He knows beauty. He knows the transcendent feeling that connects laughter with friends, music that moves you, and nature that takes your breath away. And he suggests that maybe—just maybe—that word we need for all of it is "God." God is love, John writes. Not God creates love or God commands love, but God IS love. Perhaps God isn't found in controlling outcomes but in the love that fights for life, the beauty that makes life worth living, the connections that sustain us. You don't need all the answers to experience the presence. Today, notice where you encounter transcendence—in connection, beauty, or love. Let yourself name it as holy, whatever word you use.

I first noticed that my husband was turning yellow sometime in mid-December of last year.

As jaundice does, it started in the eyes.

Every once in a while, I would catch him at a certain angle and think, are his eyes yellowing?

Then it started to expand to the rest of his face.

I started asking friends and family, does he look yellow to you?

 Yeah, I thought it was the lighting, but he definitely looks yellow, they would say.

When the calendar turned to the new year and he got on my health insurance, I made him a primary care appointment.

The earliest availability at my doctor's office was in three weeks, and I figured that would be okay.

However, the problem kept getting worse.

The second week of January, we took a trip to see his family in Oregon.

The first thing his mom said when we got in the car was,

 Why are you yellow?

Since she's a nurse, I knew she'd say something right away.

I don't remember whether I'd already brought the issue up with him, but his mom and I made it clear that something wasn't right.

She made some calls and somebody from her hospital said that she'd see him, or that they'd see him while we were in town.

 But we already had that doctor's appointment in Dallas scheduled for the week after, and we didn't know what the insurance situation would be with us out of state.

Plus, he insisted that he didn't feel ill or anything.

The only issue was his skin coloration.

When we got back to Dallas, though, things started getting noticeably worse.

His stamina plummeted to the point that he didn't feel confident driving the short trip from our apartment in Uptown to his graduate classes at SMU.

 so he had me drive him to class.

A few days later, he asked me to carry his backpack because he didn't have the strength to walk up a flight of stairs with a backpack on.

Finally, the day of the primary care appointment came.

When the doctor walked into the room, she was literally speechless.

He assumed that she was taken aback by two of us being in the room, so he explained that I was his husband.

 I knew that she was shocked because of how yellow he was.

She ordered blood work and made it pretty clear, at least to me, that she expected to call back saying that we needed to go to the hospital.

That evening, he went to class and turned his phone off.

Because they couldn't reach him, the doctor's office called me and said, don't be alarmed, but you need to take him to the hospital immediately.

 Hemoglobin is the protein in your blood that carries oxygen from your lungs to the rest of your body.

Men typically have a hemoglobin level of 13.5 to 17.5.

If your hemoglobin is below seven, the hospital will give you a blood transfusion.

Hemoglobin below five is a life-threatening emergency.

His was 4.8.

 I sped to campus, ran into his building, cracked the door to his classroom, and quietly motioned that we needed to leave.

On the way to the emergency room, he asked if we could just go home so that he could lie under a blanket.

I felt like that was a bad sign.

At the hospital, they ran a gamut of tests and pretty quickly determined that he had significant liver damage.

 Over the next few days, they gave him a ton of blood transfusions, which slowly brought his energy back up to a sustainable level.

The doctors discharged him and told us, sometimes liver damage reverses itself.

We'll just have to monitor it to see.

Unfortunately, things got worse from there.

Slowly, his thinking grew increasingly foggy.

He complained that his brain wasn't working, that he couldn't think straight.

 A month later, we were back in the emergency room.

He'd gotten so delusional by this point that he was mumbling nonsense, like when you wake up from a dream and accidentally say the last thing you were thinking, except this was constant.

Finally, he fell asleep and slept for about 48 hours, though his heart rate remained above 110 the whole time.

 Whenever they woke him up for a second, they'd ask him questions to gauge his coherence.

His name and his birthday were the only questions he consistently got right.

It took him three or four days to correctly say the year was 2026.

Slowly, day by day, he got a little more coherent and slept a little less.

About a week and a half into his hospital stay,

 although I would have guessed it was a month if I hadn't looked at the calendar writing the sermon.

The doctors dropped the bomb on us.

They told us that he desperately needed a liver transplant, and they weren't going to be giving him one at that hospital.

I don't really want to get into the reasons why in front of 250 of my closest friends, but we're fairly confident looking back that the hospital made an incredible number of mistakes.

 including but not limited to prescribing medication against FDA guidelines, violating requirements to receive government funding, and advertising an entire liver disease clinic that doesn't exist.

We'd sue them, but as far as we can tell, the hospital is only liable if they cause death or permanent damage.

Regardless, at this point, there was nothing we could do to get the hospital to change its mind.

 and I was fairly convinced that my husband was going to die.

Hospitals rate liver damage based on a metric called the MELD score.

At this time, his MELD score was around 32.

If your MELD score is above 30 and you don't get a liver transplant, your chance of living three months is 50-50.

I don't cry often, maybe five times in my adult life,

 but I cried for two straight days.

The only reason we knew he wasn't eligible for a transplant at that hospital was that a new doctor had rounded onto his care.

She told us that the decision had been made as soon as he was admitted, a week and a half earlier.

By getting us out of that hospital, she saved his life, but even she was a jerk about it.

 She told me it was my homework to see if I could get him transferred to another hospital that would consider giving him a transplant and accept our insurance.

I'll never forget her telling me that my husband's life was on the line and equating it to a math worksheet.

We tried to get him transferred to the other hospital in Dallas that does a number of liver transplants, but they refused to take him based on incorrect information the first hospital had shared with him.

 We heard that Houston Methodist was the best transplant hospital within driving distance, so we asked for a transfer there.

The next day, they called and did a brief questionnaire over the phone.

It was the first time in the past two weeks that anybody had considered that he might actually deserve a transplant.

A day later, they accepted him, and a few days after that, he was strapped into a gurney to ride the four hours to Houston in the back of an ambulance.

 When we got to Houston, they made it clear that just because he'd been accepted as a patient, that didn't mean he was getting approved for a transplant.

Their next transplant review meeting was in four days, so they did every evaluation as expeditiously as they could.

They drew so much blood for testing, 36 vials, that they had to give him a transfusion just to make up for it.

They scanned every body part imaginable.

They did a full psychological evaluation

 Finally, the day of the meeting came, and he was approved for a transplant.

We'd been in the hospital in Dallas for two weeks and gotten nowhere.

But after just four days in Houston, he was on the transplant list.

Now, if you know anyone who's waited for an organ transplant, you know that it's a complete crapshoot on when you'll get matched.

Livers aren't as persnickety as kidneys,

 But you still need someone who matches your blood type and is roughly the same size as you.

The way the system works, the higher your MELD score, the more likely you are to get matched.

By the time we got to Houston, his MELD score was 36.

The scale goes to 40.

He was so sick that he was listed on a Friday and matched with a liver the next Monday.

But there was a catch.

 If someone's removed from life support, they go ahead and match people with all of their organs so that they're ready when the individual passes.

But they still allow the person to die of natural causes out of respect for them and their family.

Unfortunately, if the person doesn't die within 24 hours of life support being removed, then their organs are no longer viable for transplant.

That's what happened with the first liver that he was matched with.

 He was getting prepped for surgery when they called him to say that the donor hadn't passed in time.

Yet his MELD score was so high that as soon as they unmatched him from that liver, the system immediately matched him with another.

Finally, a month after he'd been admitted, he got his transplant.

We thought the hard part was over.

We were wrong.

 When he woke up from his surgery, his cognition was immediately clearer than it had been at any point in the last month, even with the anesthesia still wearing off.

I had him record a video for me to send to his friends, showing them how much better he was.

Before surgery, he'd prepped a message for me to post on his social media.

However, when I showed him the post, he asked why I'd written that he needed a job.

 The message said nothing about a job.

I didn't know why he said that.

Soon after that, his mom was helping him adjust his position in bed while the doctors were in the room, and he freaked out, telling them she didn't mean to do that.

It took me a bit to realize that he thought he had accused her of violating him in some way, but he hadn't said anything like that.

The hallucinations quickly got worse.

 He was convinced that he was dead.

And when his mom and I said he wasn't, he said, well, then you're dead too.

Other times, he thought he had a gun or had set off a bomb and killed people.

On more than one occasion, he yelled about how he had counted to the right number, so please don't do that, talking to someone who wasn't in the room.

 Typically, when a patient is having hallucinations as a result of medication like he was, they would sedate him.

However, he was so lucid when he first woke up after surgery that they'd already removed him from the ventilator.

Sedating him meant putting him back on the ventilator, and they didn't want to do that if they didn't need to.

However, that meant that we had to sit there and listen to his delusions.

For a while, I tried to reason with him,

 but I eventually realized he was going to keep talking whether I responded or not.

So I resorted to putting on headphones and turning it up loud enough that I couldn't hear what he was saying.

During the day, I would play music for him on his phone.

Each day was a different artist.

One Beyonce, one Taylor Swift, one Lady Gaga.

 There's a band with a cult following in the queer community called Muna, whose fans have proclaimed them the greatest band in the world.

One of the few moments of coherence I could manage was when I'd ask him, what's Muna?

And he'd say, the greatest band in the world.

Later, he told me that in his delusions, he thought somebody had offered him one band to listen to before he died.

 and he'd chosen Muna, and that's why it was playing so much.

Then one night, a week after surgery, I could tell he was having trouble breathing.

He was supposed to have been doing breathing exercises once the ventilator had been removed, but he was so delusional that we couldn't get him to do anything but chew on the mouthpieces.

I told the nurses that something seemed wrong.

His heart rate was spiking, and he wasn't taking deep breaths.

 They rushed to take an x-ray of his lungs.

Normally, when your lungs are filled with air, they appear clear on an x-ray.

But on his, one of his lungs was completely white.

They put him back on the ventilator and did a brief procedure to clear out his lungs.

Before the procedure, the attending turned to the resident and asked if he felt comfortable doing it.

And he said, yes, with a question mark at the end.

 At that point, they closed the door and shut the blinds so I couldn't see and I did my best to suppress a panic attack.

The next night, he started shaking a lot.

He'd had tremors before and the medication he was on was known to amplify tremors, but this seemed worse.

The doctors thought it might be a seizure, so they gave him enough sedation medication to knock him out.

They hooked him up to a machine to monitor his brain activity.

 So at that point, he had electrodes connected to his head, three tubes up his nose for medication, feeding, and monitoring, a ventilator tube down his throat, a constant dialysis machine hooked up to tubes coming out of his neck, and multiple IVs in his arms.

I sent my friend a picture of him and said, if he doesn't come out of this with a superpower, I'm going to be pissed.

In reality, though, I started thinking again that he wasn't going to make it.

 At one point, the ICU doctor had said that if he had to be put back on the ventilator, someone would talk to you about what's next.

Later, I realized that she simply meant she wasn't going to be on duty in a few days, so I talked to the next doctor about his care.

But the phrase, someone will talk to you about what's next, kept ringing ominously in my head.

It was so vague that it sounded like a euphemism for death.

 By now his ICU room was so full of machines there wasn't room for my chair to lie flat while I slept at night.

I stuck with it for one night, but he was still knocked out the next day.

So I convinced myself that nothing could happen if I went home.

I went to sleep at the Airbnb that his mom had rented.

It was the first night in five weeks that nobody had slept with him in the room.

The next day I went back to the hospital

 And he was wide awake, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, acting as if nothing had ever happened.

The hallucinations had completely stopped.

It's like we'd unplugged the power cord and plugged it back in.

From there, it was constant, incremental improvement.

Slowly but surely, he was disconnected from various machines that had proved no longer necessary.

 He started agitating to get released from the hospital.

And I tell him, as soon as you can get out of bed and walk out that door without help, you can leave.

After two weeks in the ICU, we moved to the recovery floor.

A week after that, we moved to rehab.

A week after that, he was discharged.

He had been in the hospital for 57 days.

 There are some captivating near-death tales in the Bible too, one of which is the story of Joseph.

So while I read this, if something good happens, say, ooh, that's good.

Joseph was the 12th child in his family, with 10 older half-brothers and an older half-sister.

He was the firstborn of his father's preferred wife, and as such, his father's favorite son.

 Now, if your father clearly likes you better than your 11 older siblings, that's something you might avoid rubbing in their faces.

Joseph, however, had no shame.

From a young age, Joseph had the ability to interpret dreams, and he told his family on multiple occasions about dreams of his in which the rest of them bowed down to him.

Naturally, his older siblings didn't take too kindly to this, so they sold him into slavery

 to some traveling merchants and convinced their father that he'd been killed.

From there, he was sold to be a servant to Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's guard in Egypt.

Potiphar's wife, Zuleika, wanted to initiate a romantic relationship with Joseph, but he rebuffed her, so she falsely accused him of assault, and Potiphar had Joseph thrown in jail.

 While he was in jail, he was joined by two of Pharaoh's servants who had had dreams that Joseph correctly interpreted to mean that one of them would be freed and the other would be killed.

Joseph asked the one who was freed to try to free him as well after he got out, but he had no such luck.

That is until two years later when Pharaoh started having unexplained dreams himself.

 The servant, remembering Joseph's skill, recommended that he be released from prison to interpret the dreams, which Pharaoh agreed to do.

When Pharaoh told Joseph the dreams, Joseph correctly predicted a period of agricultural surplus followed by a famine.

So Pharaoh installed Joseph as his top advisor.

 and asked him to oversee a campaign to store up enough food during the good years that they wouldn't be ravaged by the impending famine.

Joseph did this, and when the famine came, Egypt was in such a strong position that people from across the region would come there to buy food.

As fate would have it, Joseph's family was one of those in need.

When they came to Egypt for food, they met directly with Joseph.

 And he recognized his brothers, but his brothers didn't recognize him.

And that brings us to this scene, our scripture reading for today, from Genesis 45, one through 15.

Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him.

And he cried out, send everyone away from me.

So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers.

 And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it.

Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph.

Is my father still alive?

But his brothers could not answer him.

So dismayed were they at his presence.

Then Joseph said to his brothers, come closer to me.

And they came closer.

He said, I'm your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.

 And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.

For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest.

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to keep alive for you many survivors.

So it was not you who sent me here, but God."

 God has made me a father to Pharaoh, Lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, thus says your son Joseph, God has made me Lord of all Egypt.

Come down to me, do not delay.

You shall settle in the land of Goshen.

You shall be near me, you and your children and your children's children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have.

 I will provide for you there since there are five more years of famine to come so that you and your household and all that you have will not come to poverty.

And now your eyes and the eyes of my brother Benjamin see that it is my own mouth that speaks to you.

You must tell my father how greatly I am honored in Egypt and all that you have seen.

Hurry and bring my father down here."

Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck and wept.

 while Benjamin wept upon his neck.

And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them.

And after that, his brothers talked with him.

For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

There are a number of great things about this passage, most notably the way Joseph forgives his brothers and the reconciliation that forgiveness enables.

 But to be honest with you, there's something that I hate about this passage too.

It's the part where Joseph says that God is the reason that he's in the position to bless his brothers and provide them with food.

The reason I don't like this part is because of the inevitable theological statements it makes.

If God is responsible for Joseph's prosperity, then God was also responsible for Joseph's previous demise.

 If God pulled the strings to put Joseph in a position of power, then God either caused Joseph's false imprisonment or willingly allowed it to happen.

However, when you go through the story, as we just did, you know exactly why Joseph ended up where he did.

God didn't sell him into slavery.

His brothers did.

God didn't falsely accuse him.

Zuleika did.

 God didn't put him in jail.

Potiphar did.

How then can we credit God with Joseph's later blessings when we know God wasn't responsible for the trials and tribulations that brought them about in the first place?

In the same way, God didn't cause my husband's liver damage.

And God didn't force the doctors in Dallas to refuse to treat him.

 And God didn't give him the hallucinations in Houston.

If God had, that'd be a terrible, miserable God that I wouldn't spend my life devoted to serving.

Yet if I'm unwilling to blame God for the bad experiences, it would be hypocritical to turn around and credit God for the happy ending.

I feel like you can't have your cake and eat it too.

 Either God is responsible for everything, including the bad, or God is responsible for nothing, including the good.

Now, I refuse to believe in a God that's responsible for all the terrible things that happen in this world, so that leaves me only with the option of believing in a God that is responsible for nothing.

But what kind of God is that?

 What exactly is the point of a God that never intervenes in the world?

Why believe in a God that exists but doesn't do anything?

It seems like a waste of time.

And this is awkward because you pay me to have answers to these questions.

But in all sincerity, I don't.

 I don't know why all the suffering exists in the world if there's a loving, all-powerful God who could do something about it.

Is God unwilling?

Is God incapable?

Is God not real?

None of these are satisfying answers.

I just don't know.

But I'll tell you what I do know.

 I know that my husband is alive because his parents and I fought to save him.

I know he's alive because the doctors and nurses and techs and custodians in Houston dedicated their lives to helping others survive.

I know that the love we all share between ourselves makes life worth living.

I know that beauty and joy and peace and generosity make the world a better place.

 I know that there's no one word that describes laughing with friends over dinner, and describes your favorite song washing over you at a sold-out concert, and describes stumbling upon a piece of nature that takes your breath away.

But somehow it feels like all of those things come from the same source, the same feeling of transcendence.

It feels like they need one word.

 to describe them.

So if you want that word to be God, that's okay with me.

Amen.

Beyond the Slingshot: The Fuller Story of David

We all know the story. A young shepherd boy faces down a nine-foot giant armed with nothing but five smooth stones and a slingshot. One perfect shot, and Goliath falls. Victory for the underdog. Faith conquers fear. Roll credits.

But what if that iconic moment is just one piece of a much larger, much messier, much more human story?

The Details We Forgot

When we revisit 1 Samuel 17, the actual biblical account of David and Goliath, we discover details that our childhood Sunday school lessons glossed over. Goliath didn't just show up once—he taunted Israel's army twice daily for forty days straight. Forty days of psychological warfare. Forty days of an entire nation paralyzed by fear.

David wasn't even supposed to be at the battle. His father Jesse sent him to deliver food to his older brothers and check on their wellbeing. He was the errand boy, the youngest son, the one left behind to watch the sheep while the "real men" went to war.

Yet when David arrived and heard Goliath's insults against God's people, something ignited within him. While seasoned warriors cowered, this shepherd boy stepped forward with a confidence that can only come from intimate knowledge of God's faithfulness.

His words to Goliath reveal everything: "You are coming against me with sword and spear, but I come against you in the name of the Lord of heavenly forces."

The Story Before the Story

Here's what most of us don't realize: David and Goliath isn't our first introduction to David in Scripture. It's actually our third encounter with him.

We first meet David in 1 Samuel 16, when the prophet Samuel arrives at Jesse's house searching for Israel's next king. Samuel looks at David's older brothers—surely one of these strong, impressive men must be God's choice. But God redirects him: "You may look at the exterior, but I look at the heart."

David, the youngest and smallest, is the one God chooses. The spirit of the Lord comes upon him that day, though nothing is said aloud. David has no idea what God has planned for him.

Our second introduction happens in the same chapter. King Saul, tormented and emotionally unstable, needs music to soothe his troubled spirit. One of his servants recommends a talented musician—Jesse's son, David. So the future king enters the current king's household, unknowingly stepping closer to his destiny.

In both these stories, David is passive. God is acting. God is choosing. God is orchestrating.

But when we get to Goliath, everything changes. This is the first time we see David take initiative, the first moment his faithfulness translates into courageous action. This is when the world takes notice.

The Quilting Metaphor

Think about quilting for a moment. You can't understand a quilt by looking at just one square of fabric. The beauty and function of a quilt emerges through the entire process: selecting the pattern, choosing fabrics, cutting, pressing, assembling blocks, creating the sandwich of backing, batting, and top, quilting it all together, and finally binding the edges.

Any one of these steps in isolation doesn't make a quilt. You need the whole journey for the finished product.

David's life works the same way. We can't zoom in on David and Goliath and think we understand who he was. That's just one square in a much larger pattern.

The Complicated Truth

As David's story unfolds through 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, and into 1 Kings, we encounter a far more complex person than the brave shepherd boy.

Yes, David becomes king. Yes, he unites God's people and brings the ark to Jerusalem. Yes, he receives God's covenant promise.

But David also abuses his power. He harms Bathsheba and arranges for her husband Uriah's death. He faces devastating consequences within his own family. His reign is marked by both extraordinary faithfulness and profound moral failure.

By the end of his life, David is old, his kingdom fragile, and the future uncertain.

So what do we do with this? How do we hold both the courage and the harm, the faithfulness and the failure?

The Grace That Keeps Reshaping Us

Perhaps David's story isn't just about becoming the kind of person who can face giants. Perhaps it's about what it means to be fully human before God—overlooked and chosen, brave and afraid, faithful and messy, capable of courage and capable of harm, and still invited back into grace.

The human condition is complicated. We were all created in God's image, and we were all given free will. With that freedom comes real choices. Some of our choices reflect God's image clearly; others distort it terribly.

We can show generous love to our partners and then be short-tempered with a stranger. We can make wonderful first impressions while treating our families unkindly. We can have moments of profound faithfulness and moments of devastating failure—sometimes in the same day.

David's heart was "large and loud," as one writer describes it. When he trusted God's names for him, his big feelings helped him unite God's people and lead with compassion and justice. But when overwhelmed, those same big feelings led him to grasp, harm, and abuse his power.

The difference? Whether he returned to God or turned away.

The Lifelong Work

Our journey of faith isn't about trying harder to be good. It's about learning again and again to return to the God who is already at work within us.

This is what theologians call sanctifying grace—God's ongoing work in our lives, transforming us, drawing us closer, shaping us into people who reflect divine love more fully. It's not about perfection in the sense of never making mistakes. It's about spiritual maturity, a heart turned toward God, a life that increasingly reflects grace in the world.

Just as David's moment with Goliath is one piece of his larger story, we experience only glimpses of other people's lives. And they experience only glimpses of ours.

We're all human. We all contain multitudes.

The invitation isn't to get everything right. The invitation is to keep returning to the God who made us, loves us, forms us, forgives us, and calls us to reflect that love and grace in the world.

Remember: you were created good in God's image.

And so was everyone else.

5-Day Devotional: Beyond the Snapshot

Day 1: God Looks at the Heart

Reading: 1 Samuel 16:1-13

Devotional:

When Samuel arrived to anoint Israel's next king, he naturally looked at the outward appearance—strength, stature, and presence. But God redirected him: "I look at the heart." David wasn't chosen because he was the oldest, strongest, or most qualified by human standards. He was chosen because his heart beat in rhythm with God's.

Today, consider how often you judge yourself or others by external measures—accomplishments, appearance, or status. God sees deeper. God sees your passion, your faithfulness in small things, your willingness to trust even when afraid. You may feel overlooked, too young, too old, or unqualified, but God is looking at your heart. What matters most is not how the world sees you, but how your heart is oriented toward God and God's people.

Day 2: Courage in God's Name

Reading: 1 Samuel 17:32-50

Devotional:

David faced Goliath not with military training or superior weaponry, but with unshakeable trust in God. While an entire army stood paralyzed by fear, this young shepherd stepped forward, declaring, "You come against me with sword and spear, but I come against you in the name of the Lord."

What giants are you facing today? Perhaps it's a health diagnosis, a broken relationship, financial uncertainty, or a calling that feels too big. David's courage didn't come from denying the reality of the threat—Goliath was truly massive. His courage came from knowing whose he was. When we anchor ourselves in God's faithfulness rather than our own strength, we can face overwhelming circumstances. Your giant may not fall immediately, but stepping forward in faith—trusting that God is with you—is itself an act of courage that honors God.

Day 3: The Messy Middle of Faithfulness

Reading: 2 Samuel 11:1-12:13

Devotional:

This passage is uncomfortable, and it should be. David, the man after God's own heart, abused his power, harmed Bathsheba and Uriah, and tried to cover his sin. The person who defeated Goliath also caused devastating harm. This is the complexity of the human condition.

Faith is not a straight line from victory to victory. Even deeply faithful people make terrible choices. The journey of sanctification—becoming more like Christ—includes moments of failure, repentance, and restoration. David's story reminds us that sin is real and consequences matter, but also that God's grace keeps calling us back. When confronted by Nathan, David didn't deflect or justify—he confessed. Are there areas of your life where you've been running from accountability? God's grace doesn't erase consequences, but it does offer a path forward. Return to God today, honest and humble.

Day 4: Sanctifying Grace—The Lifelong Work

Reading: Philippians 2:12-13; Psalm 51:10-12

Devotional:

John Wesley taught that sanctifying grace is God's ongoing work in our lives, continually transforming us toward "Christian perfection"—not sinless perfection, but perfection in love. It's the daily, lifelong process of becoming who God created us to be.

Like quilting requires many steps to create something beautiful, spiritual growth requires patience, practice, and God's persistent presence. You cannot zoom in on one moment—one failure or one victory—and claim that defines you entirely. Each day offers new opportunities to choose God's way: to show compassion instead of judgment, humility instead of pride, generosity instead of greed. Some days you'll reflect God's image clearly; other days you'll fall short. The good news is that God isn't finished with you. Sanctifying grace means God keeps working, keeps shaping, keeps inviting you deeper into love. Embrace the process.

Day 5: You Contain Multitudes

Reading: Romans 7:15-25; Psalm 139:1-6, 23-24

Devotional:

Paul's honest confession resonates across centuries: "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do." You are not alone in your contradictions. You can be generous and selfish, courageous and afraid, loving and hurtful—sometimes all in the same day.

David's life teaches us that being chosen by God doesn't mean being perfect. It means being known, loved, and continually formed. You were created in God's image, and that is your truest identity. But you also have the freedom to choose, and sometimes you'll choose poorly. The spiritual life isn't about pretending you have it all together. It's about returning again and again to the God who knows you completely and loves you still. Let God search your heart today. Confess where you've missed the mark. Receive the grace that's already yours. And remember: your story isn't finished. God is still writing.

Good morning.

I am Anna Bundy Hagler, one of the associate ministers here, and I am so grateful to be preaching with you this morning.

Before I even begin, let me get my advertisement out of the way.

This sermon was sponsored by the FUMC Dallas Library.

 Really though, I needed an extra commentary for this sermon that I didn't have on my own bookshelf, and I visited our library on the ground floor.

Not only do they have commentaries and religious readings, but they have so many genres and titles that you should check them out yourself.

Get it?

 Yeah, okay.

All right, moving along.

As Roy said, welcome to the first Sunday of our new worship series, Recoloring the Bible.

The associate ministers are leading this series as we encourage Mitchell to take study leave for the next several weeks so that he can prepare for our next year or so of worship series.

 Recoloring the Bible has been a particularly fun series for my department to prepare for.

We wanted interactive series graphics that you will see throughout the series on the front of your bulletin.

We couldn't wait to put our new branding on packs of crayons to hand out that were made just for you.

And during this series, we invite you to join us in the atrium before or after worship for the next several weeks to color a picture of the church with us.

 Our hope during this series is that we're taking familiar Bible stories and recoloring them by bringing them back to life.

These are all stories we learned as kids from our children's Bibles or vacation Bible school, and it's time to revisit them with depth.

This morning, we'll be exploring the story of David and Goliath.

 Admittedly, it's been a minute since I too have explored David and Goliath.

All I remember from childhood is this.

David was a small boy who defeated the giant, Goliath, with only stones and a slingshot because God was with him.

So to check my memory, I looked at this children's Bible, and this is what it said.

 Goliath shouted, who will fight me?

He was over nine feet tall and everyone in Saul's army was afraid of him.

The army did not know what to do.

When David arrived at the camp, he saw Goliath.

Are all of you too afraid to fight me, shouted Goliath.

I'm not afraid of you, Goliath.

I know God is with me, said David.

David put a stone in his slingshot and slung it at Goliath.

The stone hit Goliath in the head.

Goliath fell to the ground.

 Okay, so it seems like my memory served me correct.

Sermon over.

Let's go to lunch.

Just kidding.

I did joke about that all week, though.

And if we stick with just this story, there are many directions we could go in.

Why violence isn't the answer.

How God is with you when you're overwhelmed.

The underdog is empowered by God.

 The direction we're going in today, though, is more about David's life than just what we learned about him as kids.

As a refresher, let's visit 1 Samuel 17 together.

My other joke all week was that my whole sermon would just be reading the whole chapter, so buckle in.

We're starting with verse 3.

The Philistines took positions on one hill while Israel took positions on the opposite hill.

There was a valley between them.

 A champion named Goliath from Gath came out from the Philistine camp.

He was more than nine feet tall.

He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore bronze scale armor weighing 125 pounds.

He had bronze plates on his shins and a bronze scimitar hung on his back.

His spear shaft was as strong as the bar on a weaver's loom and its iron head weighed 15 pounds.

They're really concerned that you know the weight of all of these things.

 His shield bearer walked in front of him.

He stopped and shouted to the Israelite troops, why have you come and taken up battle formations?

I am the Philistine champion and you are Saul's servants.

Isn't that right?

Select one of your men and let him come down against me.

If he is able to fight me and kill me, then we will become your slaves.

But if I overcome him and kill him, then you will become our slaves and you will serve us.

 I insult Israel's troops today.

The Philistine continued, give me an opponent and we will fight.

 When Saul and all Israel heard what the Philistines said, they were distressed and terrified.

For 40 days straight, the Philistine came out, 40 days, y'all, the children's Bible never mentioned that, came out and took his stand both morning and evening.

Jesse said to his son David, please take your brothers' roasted grain and these 10 loaves of bread.

Deliver them quickly to your brothers in the camp.

 And here, take these 10 wedges of cheese to their unit commander.

Find out how your brothers are doing and bring back a sign that they are okay.

They are with Saul and all of the Israelite troops fighting the Philistines in Elah Valley.

So David got up early in the morning, left someone in charge of the flock, and loaded up and left, just as his father had instructed him.

 He reached the camp right when the army was taking up their battle formations and shouting the war cry.

Israel and Philistines took up their battle formations opposite of each other.

David left his things within an attendant and ran to the front of the line.

When he arrived, he asked how his brothers were doing.

 Right when David was speaking with them, Goliath, the Philistine champion from Gath, came forward from the Philistine ranks and said the same things he had said before.

David listened.

When the Israelites saw Goliath, every one of them ran away, terrified of him.

 Don't let anyone lose courage because of this Philistine, David told Saul.

I, your servant, will go out and fight him.

You can't go out and fight this Philistine, Saul answered David.

You are still a boy, but he has been a warrior since he was a boy.

 "'Your servant has kept his father's sheep,' David replied to Saul.

"'And if ever a lion or a bear came and carried off one of the flock, I would go after it, strike it, and rescue the animal from its mouth.

If it turned on me, I would grab at its jaw, strike it, and kill it.

Your servant has fought both lions and bears.'"

 The Lord, David added, who rescued me from the power of both lions and bears will rescue me from the power of this Philistine.

Go, Saul replied to David, and may the Lord be with you.

Then Saul dressed David in his own gear, putting a coat of armor on him and a bronze helmet on his head.

David strapped his sword over the armor, but he couldn't walk around well because he had never tried on the armor before.

 I can't walk in this because I've never tried it on.

So he took it off.

Then he grabbed his staff and chose five smooth stones from the stream bed.

He put them in the pocket of his shepherd's bag and with the sling in hand went out to the Philistine.

The Philistine got closer and closer to David and his shield bearer was in front of him.

When the Philistine looked David over, he sneered at David because he was just a boy, reddish brown and good looking.

 The Philistine asked David, am I some sort of dog that you would come at me with sticks?

And he cursed David by his gods.

Come here, he said to David, and I'll feed your flesh to the wild birds and the wild animals.

But David told the Philistine, you are coming against me with sword and spear, but I come against you in the name of the Lord of heavenly forces, of God's Israel's army, the one that you've insulted.

Today the Lord will hand you over to me.

 I will strike you down and cut off your head.

Today I feed your dead body and the dead bodies of the entire Philistine camp to the wild birds and wild animals.

Then the whole world will know that God is on Israel's side.

And all of those gathered here will know that the Lord doesn't save by means of sword and spear.

The Lord owns this war and he will hand all of you over to us.

 The Philistine got up and moved closer to attack David and David ran quickly to the front of the line to face him.

David put his hand in his bag and took out a stone.

He slung it and it hit the Philistine on his forehead.

The stone penetrated his forehead and he fell face down on the ground.

And that's how David triumphed over the Philistine with just a sling and a stone, striking the Philistine down and killing him.

And David didn't even have a sword.

 This is the word of God in scripture, the word of God among us, and the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

Children's Bibles don't get the action part correct.

I mean, really, we could have watched that in the movie theater.

So thanks for hanging on.

 David is one of the most developed figures in all of Scripture.

We meet him as a shepherd, a musician, a warrior, friend, fugitive, king, sinner, mourner, and a person still being shaped by God.

So if we are going to talk about David, we probably need more than one story to understand him.

 With that in mind, it's important to note that David and Goliath is not our first introduction to David in Scripture, although none of those details give that away.

It's actually our third time meeting him.

We see David first in 1 Samuel 16, where Samuel, chosen by God, is trying to appoint a replacement for Israel's current king, Saul.

Saul has started straying from God, which means that he is also leading the Israelites away from God's direction.

 When Samuel is visiting the house of Jesse, he looks at the oldest son, assuming that the biggest and strongest must be the next in-line king.

God tells Samuel, you may look at the exterior, but I look at the heart.

And Jesse introduces his smallest, youngest son, David.

 David is who God chooses to replace Saul.

When the anointing happens, nothing is said to Jesse or David, but we read that God's spirit came upon David in the exchange.

Our second introduction is in the same chapter.

Saul is troubled, unsettled, and not exactly giving us emotionally regulated leadership.

We read that he is tormented and the thing that brings him relief is music.

So Saul asked his servants to find a musician.

 And what a small world.

One of the servants recommends David, Jesse's son.

While Saul is at home, David remains at Saul's side and plays for him whenever he is overwhelmed.

Now enter the story of David and Goliath.

With the first two stories of David, God has been acting, but David has been passive.

 He had nothing to do with God's choice of him as the next king except for his heart, his passion for God and God's people.

I also think that it was God moving through King Saul's servants that David was brought into Saul's home, bringing David ever closer to the man that one day he will replace.

 This story does not explain why God chose David as much as it lets us glimpse what God may have already seen in him.

He has so much faithfulness in God that he was the only brave one, and the youngest, of the Israelites that was willing to fight the giant.

Saul, the current king and leader of the Israelite army, was paralyzed by fear.

 But David, a man after God's own heart, with a desire to protect God's people, was willing to step into fire.

 This is the first story where we see an active David, a David who has the potential to be a great king for God's people.

We don't only see it in his action of stepping forward to face Goliath, but we see it in his warning to Goliath.

He said, you are coming against me with sword and spear.

Today the Lord will hand you over to me.

I will strike you down.

 When David defeats Goliath, it's a celebration for a multitude of reasons.

The underdog defeated the giant.

The Israelite army will not be captured.

God's people win the day.

But for David, it's the first moment that anyone will remember anything about him.

David's trust in God is incredibly evident in who he is.

 A kid who was sent to the fight by his dad to deliver food and check on his big brothers is so passionate about defending his country and his Lord that he was not willing to sit on the sidelines as the army remained frozen in fear.

We don't get any information about how he was feeling or what he was thinking before Saul sent for him.

 But we can infer that he was so faithful to his God that he was going to lay his life on the line.

And because of his bravery, his courage, and his commitment to God, he's won.

A defining moment.

And this, I believe, is where the story shifts from us remembering the children's Bible rendition and instead lets us see the fuller picture about how God works in human lives.

 Really, the story of David and Goliath just lets us zoom in to one moment in David's life.

But David is much more than the parts of his story.

His legacy is based on the entirety of his existence.

Not to change the subject much, but it kind of reminds me of quilting.

If you don't know me well, I'm a quilter.

I picked up the hobby about four years ago after many desperate attempts to find something to do with my hands.

 I had tried knitting and crocheting and nothing ever really clicked for me until my grana texted me asking, do you want a sewing machine?

And I never looked back.

I love the practice of quilting.

I love that I buy fabric.

 I cut that fabric and then I sew the fabric back together.

Quilting does so much for me in that I get to participate in a centuries long tradition of women working with their hands, creating something tangible and functional for the people they love.

And while I could certainly write a sermon or series on quilting itself and how we can learn faith and community from a hobby like that, I bring it up because it reminds me of how one moment cannot define the whole thing.

 Quilting isn't simply buying fabric.

It's also not simply sewing it back together.

That's a lie we all learn the first time we make a quilt.

There are many parts that make up a quilt.

Pick a pattern, buy the fabric,

 Press and starch fabric.

Cut fabric.

Assemble the blocks.

Sew the fabric.

Press the blocks.

Trim the blocks.

Assemble the quilt top.

Sew and trim the backing.

Make the quilt sandwich.

The backing, the batting, and the quilt top.

Quilt it.

Make the binding.

Attach the binding.

And then you're mostly done.

That's 14 steps.

And really, we're missing a few, but I don't want to bog you down in the details.

 If you did any one of these steps individually, you didn't make a quilt.

You can't zoom in to one part of the quilting process and expect a masterpiece.

It takes the entire process for the finished product.

Truth be told, David and Goliath is only one snapshot of David's life.

 When we read David's story from 1 Samuel through 1 Kings, we see a much fuller, much more complicated person.

In 1 Samuel, David is the overlooked youngest son of Jesse, anointed by Samuel, brought into Saul's court, and eventually known as the one who defeats Goliath.

But he is also the one who runs for his life.

 grieves deeply, waits for his calling to unfold, and refuses to become exactly like Saul.

In 2 Samuel, David becomes king.

He unites the people and brings the ark to Jerusalem and receives God's covenant promise, but he also abuses his power, harms Bathsheba and Uriah, is confronted by Nathan, lives with the grief and consequences that unfold in his own family.

 By the beginning of 1 Kings, David is old, his kingdom is still fragile, and the question of what comes next is anything but simple.

So maybe David's story is not just about becoming the kind of person who can face a giant.

Maybe it is also about what it means to be fully human before God, overlooked and chosen, brave and afraid.

 fateful and messy, capable of courage, capable of harm, and still invited back into grace.

And this is where grace matters, because the life of faith is not simply a matter of trying harder to be good.

It is the lifelong work of letting God continue to form us.

 In seminary, I remember reading 2 Samuel and loving to hate David.

He does some pretty horrific things as a king, and it's really easy to read something in black and white and to label it.

 But when I reread David and Goliath this week, remembering my many papers about David's reign actually saddens me.

There's more to say here about accountability, repentance, and redemption, because David's harm is real and grace does not erase consequences.

But for today, I want us to notice that David's life is more complicated than a clean label can hold.

 He does not start out as a villain, and he is not only remembered as a hero.

He is a person chosen by God, capable of great courage, capable of real harm, and still being called back toward God.

 The Book of Belonging, which is a book I've referenced many times in this sanctuary before, gives us a helpful way to hold that complexity using the story from 1 and 2 Samuel and the Psalms attributed to David.

The book reads,

 When God had chosen David as a king so many years before, everyone was surprised.

But God looks at the heart.

And the heart of David was not hard to see.

It was large and loud with all of those big feelings coming out in bursts.

But David's feelings were so big that sometimes he got overwhelmed.

And at times David hurt and harmed.

He grasped for God's gifts.

 He used other people's bodies to grab for what he wanted.

He felt insecure and acted in a greedy way.

He felt angry and acted in a violent way.

He felt powerless and acted in an abusive way.

Because even kings chosen by God make terrible choices sometimes.

 david's big feelings were true and important and powerful when he trusted god's names for him his feelings helped him unite god's people and remind them of god's ways he felt compassion and acted with justice and kindness david felt sorrow and acted with humility after his messes and missteps

 He felt horror over the hurt and harm he caused.

He admitted his mistakes, apologized, and trusted that he still belonged with God.

Isn't that what we all struggle with?

The human condition?

 That we were all created in God's image and God loves us so much that we were gifted free will?

With our freedom, we make real choices?

Some of those choices reflect God's image in us, and some of it distort it.

But God's grace keeps calling us back, reshaping us, and inviting us to become more fully who we were created to be.

 Surely there are many people you've encountered in your life that your friends or family love and you did not understand the appeal.

Or maybe even more often, you've met someone with a horrible first impression but later wondered what that was about because you got to know them and they're wonderful.

Or even the opposite, sometimes people are wonderful at a first impression and then you get to know them and you say later, what was I thinking about them?

 Just like David, we contain multitudes.

 Just like David, we too experience the human condition.

We were all created in the image of God, and every day we get the opportunity to choose living into that image or distancing ourselves from it.

And the complicated part is that it's not even really a straight line.

We can experience it all in a day.

We can show pure, generous love towards our partners and then be short and frustrated with someone in the service industry.

 We can make incredibly kind, wonderful first impressions with strangers and then treat our family members unkindly.

The good news is this.

Our lifelong work is not simply to try harder to be good.

Our lifelong work is to keep returning to the God who is already at work within us.

 In our United Methodist understanding of God's grace, sanctifying grace is the phrase we use to talk about God's ongoing work in our lives.

It is the grace that keeps transforming us, drawing us closer to God, and shaping us into people who reflect God's love more fully.

 John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, believed that because of sanctifying grace, we could move towards Christian perfection.

Not perfection in the sense of never making a mistake again, but perfection in love, spiritual maturity, a heart turned toward God, and a life that more clearly reflects God's grace in the world.

 Friends, we have lifelong work to do.

And may David's story be a reminder of that.

Even faithful followers of God struggle with choosing God's ways in every single thing that they do.

We also will struggle.

Just as David's moment with Goliath is one piece of his puzzle, we too experience pieces of other folks' lives.

 Not only that, but people are experiencing us in the same way.

Just a glimpse.

 We're all human.

The journey of faith is not that we get everything right.

The journey of faith is learning again and again and again to return to God, the God who made us, loves us, forms us, forgives us, and calls us to reflect love and grace in the world.

May you remember that you were created good in God's image.

 And may you remember that everyone else was too.

In the name of our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.

Amen.

The Table That Refuses to Sort: Living as Leaven in a Divided World

There's a peculiar phrase tucked into Paul's first letter to the Corinthians that deserves more attention than it typically receives: "I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you." At first glance, it seems like simple transmission—information passed along a chain. But look closer, and you'll discover something far more dynamic at work.

This isn't a game of telephone, where the message degrades with each whisper. This is leaven hidden in dough—yeast that doesn't weaken as it spreads but multiplies, activates, and transforms everything it touches.

The Living Chain of Tradition

Consider the extraordinary chain of transmission we're part of. On the very night Jesus was betrayed—when his body was being handed over to enemies—he was simultaneously handing something precious on to his friends. The Greek word is the same for both actions: betrayal and sacred transmission share linguistic DNA. The story survived its own undoing and has been surviving ever since through empire, division, and centuries of ordinary people who received something they didn't originate and couldn't stop passing on.

You are a link in that living chain. Not because you're extraordinary, but because you showed up. Something found you—maybe in an unexpected moment, maybe in a space of silence, maybe at a table you didn't plan to sit at—and handed you something you've been carrying ever since.

Remembering as Participation

When Jesus said "do this in remembrance of me," he wasn't asking for nostalgia. The Greek word anamnesis points to something far more active than keeping memories alive like preserving a voicemail from someone who's died.

The best parallel comes from the Passover table. During the Seder, the Haggadah doesn't say "your ancestors were slaves in Egypt." It says "you were slaves in Egypt." In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally came out of Egypt.

The upper room isn't behind us in the past. It surrounds us. When we come to the table, we're not observers of a 2,000-year-old story—we're participants in it. The people who will gather at this table 2,000 years from now are connected to us the same way we're connected to that first night when Jesus broke bread and poured cup.

This changes everything. You're not an audience watching a performance. You're leaven working its way through the world.

The Most Dangerous Meal in Human History

Here's the uncomfortable truth: we've taken the most dangerous meal in human history and turned it into the most respectable ritual in Western culture.

Paul wasn't writing to the Corinthians because their liturgy was sloppy. He was furious because of what was happening before the bread was broken. Wealthy members arrived early, enjoyed a full meal with good food and wine, sharing it only with people like themselves. By the time the day laborers showed up—the working poor who couldn't leave until their work was done—the food was gone and some hosts were already drunk. Then they broke bread together and called it the Lord's Supper.

Paul's response was blunt: "That is not the Lord's Supper you're eating. That is just a dinner party with a prayer at the end."

Scholar Robert Karras puts it powerfully: "Jesus basically died because of how he ate and who he ate with." In a Roman world sorted rigidly by ethnicity, class, and gender—where the table was a primary way society maintained its hierarchy—Jesus kept setting a table where the wrong people showed up and were welcomed. More and more chairs kept getting pulled up.

When Jesus said "this is my body for you," that word for is critical. His whole life was a body for others—for the ones nobody else was showing up for, for the ones empire had decided didn't count. That's what got him killed.

Carrying the Table into the Week

The tension is real and worth naming: we come to the table on Sunday and receive something that proclaims "the world's sorting systems do not apply here." Then we walk out and spend Monday through Saturday participating in exactly those systems without noticing.

We decide whose calls to return, whose neighborhoods to invest in, whose crisis is urgent enough to interrupt our day. In a thousand small, ordinary decisions, we determine who counts and who doesn't. Most of the time, we don't even notice we're doing it.

That's the problem with receiving something this radical and only letting it be active on Sunday morning. We haven't received the leaven—we've just admired the bread.

So what does carrying the table into the week actually look like?

It looks like noticing who's missing from the tables you sit at during the week—your work meetings, your neighborhood gatherings, your dinner parties—and asking why, then doing something about it.

It looks like calling the person everyone else has quietly stopped calling because their situation is too hard or the conversation gets too long or too complicated to fix.

It looks like examining how you spend money—whether you let the table's spirit of abundance and generosity interrupt the anxiety and scarcity that the market tries to convince you is just responsible practice.

It looks like showing up for the ones the world has decided don't count with the same quality of presence you would offer someone the world decides matters most.

None of that is dramatic. All of it is just the table being carried out the doors.

Living in the In-Between

Paul ends with a phrase we shouldn't rush past: "until he comes." Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

We're a people who live in the in-between—between the first breaking of bread in an upper room under threat of empire and that feast Isaiah describes where God will wipe away every tear and swallow up death forever, where the table will finally have room for everyone ever turned away from every table that came before it.

We stand in that gap. Not because we've arrived or figured it all out, but to keep setting the table between what is and what is coming.

The leaven doesn't leave. It never belonged to any one person. It was here before any of us arrived and will be here long after we're gone, because it doesn't depend on any one person keeping it going. It depends on communities continuing to show up and let whatever happens at the table work in them as they leaven the world.

You didn't start this. You won't finish it. You just have to receive it faithfully and let it work in you.

That's what leaven does. It doesn't announce itself. It just works its way into everything.

The Transformative Power of Love: More Than Words

We've all heard it since childhood. Perhaps you remember sitting cross-legged on church carpet, eagerly awaiting that piece of candy, while singing "Jesus Loves Me" with all the enthusiasm a young heart could muster. The melody was simple, the words even simpler, but something about that message captured our attention in a way that transcended understanding.

That God loves us. That we are loved.

It's a beautiful sentiment, one that brings comfort and security. But what does it actually mean to be loved by God? And more importantly, what does it mean to love in return?

Love Is More Than a Feeling

The apostle John writes with striking clarity in his first letter: "God is love." Not that God has love, or that God gives love, but that God fundamentally IS love. This isn't a marketing slogan or a feel-good catchphrase. It's a radical claim about the very nature of reality itself.

John continues: "Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love."

This presents us with both an invitation and a challenge. Love isn't merely an emotion we experience or a nice idea we affirm on Sunday mornings. Love is the organizing principle of existence, the foundation upon which we build our lives, the lens through which we understand ourselves and others.

Love Shapes Us

Consider the runner who trains daily. Over time, their body transforms. They develop runner's legs, runner's lungs, a runner's physique. The practice doesn't just occupy their time; it literally reshapes their physical form. They become what they practice.

The same is true with love.

When we truly love something or someone, we don't remain unchanged. Love is participatory. It requires our bodies, our time, our attention, our resources. And in giving ourselves to love, we find ourselves transformed by it.

Think about the person who stops their car in traffic to move a turtle safely across the road. This isn't someone who merely appreciates nature in the abstract. This is someone whose love has become embodied action, someone who has been shaped by love into a person who acts with compassion, even at personal inconvenience.

Or consider the couple married for years who begin to resemble each other—not in physical features, but in mannerisms, humor, and posture. Through the daily practice of loving each other, through difficult conversations and shared joys, they've been chiseled into something new while remaining distinctly themselves. Love hasn't erased their individuality; it has revealed their truest selves.

The Gap Between Desire and Reality

If love is so central to who we are, if we're created for it and called to it, why is it so difficult?

We look around and see a world that doesn't reflect our deepest desires. Injustice persists. Families struggle. Communities fracture. And if we're honest, we know our own hearts don't always align with our aspirations. We snap at the bank teller. We hold grudges against neighbors. We struggle to extend grace to those who've wronged us.

First John confronts this tension head-on: "Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate a brother or sister are liars. For those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen."

Ouch.

Love isn't the easy choice. Our perspective is limited by the world we inhabit. We don't always see abundance; often we see scarcity. We don't feel we have enough resources, enough time, enough energy to love well. In that sense of lack, love fades into the background, replaced by self-preservation, defensiveness, and control.

We become captains trying to navigate our own ships, and instead of finding harbor, we run aground.

God Is the Source

Here's the good news: we're not meant to be the captains of love. God is.

God is the source, the sustaining power, the abundance we need to overcome our feelings of scarcity. It is through participating in God's life, through abiding in the love that God offers, that we find the strength to love when it feels impossible.

John writes: "In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins."

Love originates with God. We love because God first loved us. This means that when we fail at love—and we will—it's not the end of the story. Love gets back up. Love tries again. Love is a moment-by-moment orientation of the heart, not a scorecard of successes and failures.

Taking On God

On the night Jesus was betrayed, he gathered his disciples for a final meal. He took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said, "This is my body, which is broken for you." He took the cup and said, "This is my blood, which is shed for you."

This wasn't just a symbolic gesture. It was an invitation to participate in God's very life.

When Jesus came as a human person, he took on our sufferings, our limitations, our scarcity, our pain. He bore the full weight of the human experience. And he did it through love.

In return, when we participate in communion, when we take and eat, we take on God. We receive God's abundance, God's provision, God's eternal joy. Just as Jesus took on our humanity, we take on God's divinity.

This is the mystery and the miracle: love made tangible, touchable, edible. It's the proof that what we sing about is true.

Moving Forward in Love

If your love has grown cold, if it's shut off or turned away, take heart. You're invited to the same table we all approach. Come with empty hands and an honest heart. Take on the God who offers himself to you in this act of grace.

Your heart is being pulled in the same direction as everyone else's—toward love, toward wholeness, toward the God who is love itself.

This isn't about perfection. It's about direction. It's about getting back up when we fall. It's about practicing love until it shapes us into who we're meant to be.

We're in this together. And the God who is love is with us every step of the way.

It is so good to see you.

But I can peek out and see your faces in here today.

It really is beautiful to get to worship together in this space.

 a mission to create space for belonging, purpose, justice, and joy.

And when you come here and you participate with us in this way, my hope for you is that you would come to know that you are loved and valued just as you are, and that the God of the universe that loves you and values you just as you are is with you here in this space today.

 Our text today is going to come to us from the book of 1 John.

It's one that I have always, my entire life, really wrestled with to understand and to know, but we're going to be digging in today.

It's quite a bit of a hefty text, so bear with us as we go through it together.

The words of this scripture will be here on the screen.

This is starting in verse 7.

 Beloved, let us love one another because love is from God.

Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

Whoever does not love does not know God.

 For God is love.

God's love was revealed among us in this way.

God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him.

In this is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.

Give your friend a pat on the shoulder and say, I love you.

 But no one has ever seen God.

 So we have known and believed the love that God has for us.

Once again, God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

Love has been perfected among us in this, that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.

 For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.

We love because he first loved us.

Those who say, I love God, and hate a brother or sister are liars.

For those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen.

The commandment we have from him is this.

 Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters.

There's a lot of ups and downs in this text, isn't there?

Some highs and maybe even some scary lows for us.

My hope today is that as we walk through this together, as we learn and grow

 together as we worship together, that we would come to see the good news that First John offers us today.

Maybe first, I wanna share a little story with you.

I actually grew up, I call myself a boomerang Methodist because I was born and raised in the Methodist church until about the age of six years old.

And then I came back to the Methodist church around the age of 26 years old.

So there was a bit of a gap in there, but I do have some really, really early and vivid memories.

 of my time growing up in Methodist Church that are very special to me.

And one of my most vivid memories is actually of children's time.

Now, at this moment, we don't currently have a children's time here in this modern worship space, though it gets talked about.

But we do it up in the traditional worship.

So if you're familiar with it, it's a time when the pastor or

 somebody from the front invites the little children to come forward to sit and to hear a short message.

And usually, or at least it was when I was growing up, they get something like a little piece of candy.

Now, my favorite was Sweethearts.

If you've ever had them before, you know they are delicious and they make a mess.

 and they get crushed into the carpet when you inevitably step on them.

And I looked forward every single week to coming down there and getting my sweetheart.

I was so excited to come get this piece of candy.

I cannot tell you one single message that I learned.

 But I can tell you every single word to the song that we always sang.

And that song was called Jesus Loves Me.

Now, if you know this song, you probably know it by heart like me because you sang it ad nauseum.

But the song goes, Jesus loves me, this I know.

For the Bible tells me so.

Which, of course, we just, you know, John just kind of went on about this for a little bit.

Little ones to him belong forever.

 We are weak, but he is strong.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

And I think this captures us from a young age.

It captivates our attention, this thought, this idea that we are loved by something so much greater and so much bigger than ourselves, bigger than our parents, bigger than the worlds we live in and inhabit.

And it brings us comfort and security to know that there's something, some person

 some God, but yet also human with us that cares for us in this unique and profound way.

And as a child, I remember thinking about the song and singing the song at home on my own and wondering if this God is with me and loves me, where is this God?

Is this God

 present is a is this god invisible in the sky is this god at the church whenever we sing where is this and while maybe i kind of thought of god as being this maybe invisible force there was something visible that i did get whenever i would go to children's time that i think really helped me to understand what this love meant and it was that piece of candy

 It was this sweetness, this tangible way in which God's love was showing up for me as a child.

It was this little reminder that I received with hands stretched out and open that God isn't just an idea, but actually in some way comes into our lives in a way that is tangible for a lot of ways.

I think that this piece of candy, this treat, was the thing that proved to me that the things

 we sing are true.

You know, a lot has been made of this idea of love in our culture, hasn't it?

It's the focus point of so many movies and TV shows, and if you play video games like me, you can romance people in video games now.

Don't tell my husband.

 This love shows up everywhere, and in some ways, it kind of organizes not just the things that we consume, it's not just the focus point of a lot of the stories that we hold, but it also organizes our lives.

The things that we love become our rhythms.

They become our routines, they become our investment, our careers.

They determine the ways in which we celebrate family together.

 The things that we love shape us in ways that we may not even notice.

We start to resemble the things that we love.

Are there any runners in the room?

Anybody here who enjoys running?

God bless you.

Thank you.

Typically, if I see somebody running, I'm assuming something is chasing them.

But believe it or not, there's people who do this for fun.

People go to Katy Trail not just to go to Katy Trail Ice House and get a fishbowl margarita, apparently.

 They go to pretend that they need to flee from something.

And you can always tell a runner, can't you?

Well, number one, they're going to tell you they're a runner.

But number two, their running actually begins to shape their body, doesn't it?

And maybe my friend can know what this is like.

You actually structurally change and develop as you run.

You get those runner's legs.

 You get those runners lungs, you get that runner physique, one that maybe I should work on.

So it's not just that you love running and that you enjoy doing it, but in the actual act of it and the practice of it, you actually experience love and participate in that love of running in such a way that it actually comes back and shapes you at boomerangs back around to transform your life.

 your body, your experience.

My wonderful husband gave me permission to share this, which I have to say because people ask me after, did I ask for permission?

But when we first started dating, obviously there's a lot to love about him.

But one of my very, very favorite things, one of the things that made me fall in love with him the most was,

 his love of animals, his love of creatures.

I think we were first talking over Snapchat, you know, we're giggling and flirting and doing all the things that you do.

He would send me pictures of him feeding ducks with lettuce out by the lake.

 And then when we started going on dates and eventually would end up on road trips through more rural areas of the state of Texas, for whatever reason, on more than one occasion over the span of a few months, we would be driving and we would come across a turtle on the side of the road.

And every single time, he would pull off onto the side of the road, get out of his car, take a picture, of course,

 pick up the turtle and go and move it across the road in the direction that it was going, defying traffic to do this, and set the turtle down.

And that just made me fall in love with him.

To see that this is a person who not only watches National Geographic or not only enjoyed a biology class or perhaps a children's cartoon with figures named after famous painters,

 But this is somebody who actually embodies the love that he experiences in the world.

Somebody who stops, who gets out the car, who fights traffic, who picks up and moves.

These actions, these actions that we do in love, they shape us, they change our habits, they change our posture and the way that we move throughout the world.

 It's clear from 1 John, I think, that the author here sees love as this kind of primal source of not just ourselves and our identity and perhaps God's identity, but as this sort of central organizing principle which motivates us and catalyzes us into every area of our lives.

It is not something that is just talked about.

 or sing on a Sunday morning.

It is not just, oh, I will build my life upon the love.

It is the actual building our life upon this love.

It is rescuing turtles on the side of the road.

It is feeding lettuce to ducks.

And it is not something that can be learned in the same way that we often think about learning.

Make no mistake, love is a practice.

 And in some ways, it is a skill, but it is not one that you can pick up in a seminar or a class or, to my dismay, even a sermon.

No Brene Brown book can teach you the ins and outs of love.

Yes, you can get tools.

You can learn some things about love that can help you along.

This is not impractical to seek out information about love, but the truth is that love is really on-the-job training.

 It's something you can only really ever grasp if you actually get into the fray and begin to do it.

And guys, that's really hard because it'll beat you up.

Rachel, when you run, there's some hard days, isn't there?

There's blisters and calf strains and shin splints.

 And days missed for lack of motivation.

There's detours to Katy Trail Ice House that linger a little too long.

There's distraction.

There's the struggle of finding the best playlist.

I never could myself.

Love is something that has to be done.

 or it isn't love at all.

And with it comes all of these other things, these things that feel maybe at times like pain, but perhaps are actually freedom for us.

The chiseling away of ourselves into the shape of love so that we can do and be the very thing that we are called to and are.

 because friends, true love does require knowing, but this is not like the knowledge you can get at seminary.

It is the kind that comes through experience and participation.

It's the kind of love that forces us to invest our bodies into the object of our affections, and it transforms us just as much as we can transform it.

I, um,

 I'm now four years into marriage.

And something that we get now that we never got when we first started dating, people would come up to us when we first started dating, and they would say, oh, you're such a cute couple.

And we would say, thank you, we've been dating for three months.

And we'd look at each other, and then we'd look at them, and it was like, oh, thank you.

It was a precious time.

But now, we don't get, you're such a cute couple anymore.

Now we get, oh, are y'all brothers?

 And this is a little concerning to us.

One, we're entirely different ethnicities.

 It is a little, you know, I don't know which one of us isn't really showing the genetic makeup that we have, but we don't necessarily think that we look alike.

Now, in part, we kind of wonder sometimes maybe if people ask this because they're not sure how to ask, are you together?

Maybe it's a way of getting around it.

But more than that, I actually think what people are seeing is the way that we've shaped each other in such a way that we have begun to resemble each other.

 not in our face, or our freckles, or our eye color, not in the genome, in the phenotype, but in our posture, in our humor, in the ways that we show hospitality, in the way that we laugh.

Perhaps our time together, our chiseling of each other through this act of love, has caused us not to become less of ourselves, but to become more of us.

 us two distinct things sharing more and more an identity.

Not that we lose any of our true self or any of our true identity, but through the act of love, through this shaping, through hard nights and conversations, through discussions about bills and finance and work, and through planning a family, through these acts of investing, we somehow begin to resemble and mirror a more true self.

 One that's not lost in each other, but one that finds real definition and value in the act of loving and being beloved.

And that all sounds really lovely, doesn't it?

It's exciting to think about the possibilities of that in your life.

It doesn't have to be romantic love now, does it?

It could be friendships, communities.

It could be the vocation that you feel called to, your career.

 It could be the philanthropies that you care for.

It can be turtles on the side of the road.

This love can be a lot of things to us.

And if we're all doing it just this way, and it is as beautiful as it sounds, you would think that the world would begin to resemble more of a utopia by now than it does.

That we'd all be getting along, we'd have it figured out, there would be no injustice, no poverty, no crime, no fear,

 families wouldn't struggle to keep it all together, you would think that if this thing that we're shaped for and empowered to do and called to do were really operating in this way so powerfully, we'd all have it together by now.

And I think we know when we look around that we don't.

In many ways, our true life doesn't reflect our most deepest desires.

 And for a lot of us, there's a tension.

Yes, we want to love.

Yes, we want to be loved.

We want to live as 1 John calls us to live in the love of God, abiding in it, but we don't.

Now, if you're reading 1 John for the first time, it's a little scary the way that this gets set up.

1 John says something a little bit like this.

If you don't love, maybe God doesn't live in you at all.

Ooh.

 Spooky okay anybody here thinking about the bank teller that they got snippy with on Tuesday Anybody thinking about the person that cut them off in traffic the grandparent who keeps violating your personal boundaries The neighbor who keeps blasting their music past midnight.

Yes.

I do love Bad Bunny No, I don't want to be serenaded by it as I go to sleep Love is not

 the easy choice for us.

And in many ways, there are parts of us that it doesn't necessarily feel natural or easy because our perspective is limited by the world that we live in.

We look around and we don't always see the abundance that you have to have to love.

We don't always see the resources or feel we have the resources that we have to love.

Our love is intention with the truth.

 that in myself, in the things that I have, in the time that I have to invest, in the resources I have to invest, maybe, maybe I'm not enough.

Maybe there's lack.

And in that lack, then, love can kind of fade into the background and be replaced by a self-preserving drive

 this need to defend where you feel offended, this need to get back at others for the wrongdoing they've done to you, this need to scream, talk to representative over the line over and over again until some poor haggard worker finally picks up.

In the lack and in the scarcity of our lives, our love can become distorted.

 And often, then, we try to assert control.

Like a captain of a ship attempting to land at shore, sometimes we run aground in love.

And instead of harbor and safety and peace, we find shipwreck.

We're not the captain of our lives.

We're the captain of love.

 God is.

God is the source.

God is the sustaining power.

God is the thing, the person, the being that we participate in that gives us what we need to do the thing we're made to do.

It is through abiding, through participation in God, in the life of God, in the lives of each other in God,

 that we find the strength we need to overcome scarcity, to overcome our feelings of lack, and to find abundance.

There's, I think, something very powerful about the ways that we fail.

 do this and the humility it takes sometimes to get back off our feet i think when we fail in love often we feel shame and we try to hide from the way that we're feeling we put on armor and defenses we create rational reasons for why we didn't succeed we find ways to blame that blame turned outward turned inward

 sometimes even turned to God.

And that is okay.

I think that's a natural part of our process.

I think we have to experience the grief of it.

But it isn't where we stay, I don't think.

Not if we truly are who we think we are, and I believe you are.

Love gets back up on its feet and it tries again.

Love

 is a moment by moment choice and orientation of the heart.

It is not the sum of your successes and failures.

It is the posture of your person.

It is the looking this way towards others and towards God and sometimes not.

But that drag and that pull,

 that God calls us to, this participation that God offers us, orients our hearts in such a way that when we fail in love, and we will, there's direction and clarity about next steps.

There's that tug to make amends, to reconcile, to meet the need that was ignored, to participate anew in one another,

 There is redemption through the atoning work of Christ.

This love is messy and gritty and fleshed in us, and it's not easy.

And you can mess it up.

And that's okay.

Because this God is love is not a catchphrase.

It's actual good news for us.

 Just as we don't abandon the cause of love because of our failure, neither does God abandon us.

This statement that John makes that God is love is not a slogan engineered by a Christian's finest PR team.

It is God actually offering God's self to us each and every day anew and fresh.

And it is embodied in this earth through us.

 the church in the way that we love each other in the kindness of strangers and the mercy and forgiveness of your loved one touching you on the shoulder and saying hey i can see you're having a bad day and you didn't mean that it is embodied to us in these acts and traditions that we participate in here in services like this it's embodied to us in communion

 We're gonna get to celebrate communion here today, but I wanna draw attention maybe to something that communion doesn't often necessarily get talked about as.

We think about communion often as a meal that is hosted for us.

In it, we believe that we find God, that we experience God's grace in a very powerful, spiritual, even if invisible way, ways that we don't understand.

 But it's a bit more than that too.

It's not just an invitation to come and to receive the grace of God, but it is an invitation to actually participate in God in a very powerful way.

You see on the night that Jesus was betrayed, he gathered his disciples one final time to do something, something that was powerful enough to evoke a 2000 year old response in us.

 It's generated art and music and traditions like the very one that we're celebrating today.

And on that night that Jesus was betrayed, he took the bread and gave thanks for it.

And he broke it and he said, this is my body, which is broken for you.

And on the night that Jesus was betrayed,

 offered up the cup the wine and said this is my blood which is shed for you in this invitation to take and eat this offering of god to us is an offering for us to participate an offering for us

 to yield ourselves to the same God who yielded themself to us.

This is us taking on Jesus in the same way that Jesus took on us.

You see, in coming as a human person, Jesus bore our sufferings.

Jesus bore our scarcity.

Jesus bore our lack.

Jesus bore the pain of limitation of the human experience and

 Jesus did it through love.

Jesus endured in love.

And so when we participate in God, just as God takes on us, we take on God.

 God's abundance, God's life, God's provision, God's care, God's eternal joy in the love of the Trinity, just as Jesus took on our sufferings, so we take on God's true life.

And at this table, we physically embody it just like that children's moment.

 When I walked up to the front of the church and I held my hands out and I got that piece of candy, that sweet treat that told me that the thing that we're saying isn't just words, it is true, it is experienced in us.

So when we come to the table, we too experience God.

It's a treat.

 It's that sweet thing that tells us that the things that we sing are true.

Pastor Elizabeth is going to come up and lead us in communion in just a moment.

But before we go, I just want to remind you

 That if today, if you're feeling that your love is turned away, if it's shut off, if it's gone cold, if it's not where it needs to be, it's okay.

Come to the same altar we're all coming to.

Take on the God that God offers you in this act.

 And go in peace knowing that you are loved and that your heart is being pulled in the same direction that mine is, that your neighbor's is, that those disciples were being pulled on that night.

We're in this together.

This God that is love is with us.

Amen.

5-Day Devotional: Handed On - Living as Leaven in the World

Day 1: Receiving What We Did Not Originate

Reading: 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Devotional: Paul begins with a profound truth: "I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you." Our faith is not something we invented or earned—it's a gift passed from hand to hand across generations. Like Monica sitting in that Louisiana church, we often encounter God's call in unexpected moments, receiving something we didn't ask for but can't help carrying forward. This is the beauty of tradition—not a dead ritual, but living yeast that multiplies as it's shared. Today, reflect on who handed faith to you. Was it a parent, a friend, a stranger? Their faithfulness made your journey possible. You are part of an unbroken chain stretching back to that upper room. What you've received isn't yours to hoard but to pass on, trusting that the Spirit makes a way where there seems to be no way.

Day 2: Active Remembrance

Reading: Exodus 12:14-17, 24-27

Devotional: "Do this in remembrance of me" isn't an invitation to nostalgia—it's a call to participation. Just as Jewish families at Passover declare "we were slaves in Egypt," when we gather at Christ's table, we enter the story ourselves. We're not observing a 2,000-year-old event; we're experiencing it. The upper room surrounds us. The broken bread is for us. This kind of remembering changes everything. It means the resurrection power that raised Jesus is available now, not just then. It means we carry the presence of Christ into our Monday morning meetings and Friday night dinners. Today, practice "active remembering." As you eat your meals, pause and recognize Christ's presence. Let the ordinary become sacred. You are not outside the story looking in—you are inside it, and it is working within you even now.

Day 3: The Dangerous Table

Reading: Luke 14:12-24

Devotional: Jesus died because of how he ate and who he ate with. In a world rigidly sorted by class, ethnicity, and worthiness, Jesus kept setting tables where the "wrong" people showed up—and were welcomed. Paul confronted the Corinthians not for bad theology but for replicating Rome's sorting systems at the Lord's table. The wealthy ate first and well; the poor arrived to empty plates. This wasn't communion—it was just dinner with a prayer. The table of Jesus is inherently radical, declaring that the world's hierarchies have no power here. Today, examine your tables—literal and metaphorical. Who sits at your lunch table, your meeting table, your dinner table? Who's missing? Whose voice is absent from your conversations? The leaven of Christ's table doesn't just change Sunday morning; it disrupts every space where we decide who counts and who doesn't.

Day 4: Leaven, Not Telephone

Reading: Matthew 13:31-33

Devotional: This isn't a game of telephone where the message degrades with each transmission. This is leaven—yeast hidden in dough that multiplies and activates. What you receive doesn't diminish when you pass it on; it comes alive in new hands, at new tables. Like a sourdough starter inherited from a friend, the living tradition of faith doesn't weaken across generations—it rises. This should bring tremendous relief. You didn't start this movement, and you don't have to finish it. You simply receive it faithfully and let it work in you. The pressure isn't on you to be extraordinary, just faithful. Just present. Just willing to let what you've received change you before you hand it on. Today, consider: where is God's work rising in you? What small, hidden transformation is taking place that you might not even notice until you look back? Trust the leaven. It works even when you can't see it.

Day 5: Until He Comes

Reading: Revelation 21:1-7

Devotional: "Until he comes." We live in the in-between—between the first breaking of bread under empire's threat and the heavenly banquet where every tear is wiped away and death is swallowed up forever. This is the church's calling: to set the table in the gap between what is and what is coming. We don't pretend we've arrived or figured it all out. We simply keep showing up, keep breaking bread, keep pulling up chairs for those the world overlooks. We carry what happens at this table back into the world—into hospitals and boardrooms, into conflict and celebration. We become leaven, not because we're ready or capable, but because something was placed in us that we cannot help but pass on. Today, ask yourself: How am I living in the "until"? Am I setting tables that anticipate God's coming kingdom? The work isn't easy, but you're not alone. You're part of a 2,000-year chain of ordinary, faithful people who couldn't stop passing on what they'd received.

Closing Reflection: This week, identify one concrete way you will "hand on" what you've received. Perhaps it's inviting someone to your table who's been excluded. Perhaps it's showing up for someone everyone else has stopped calling. Perhaps it's simply receiving communion with fresh awareness that you are inside the story, not outside it. The leaven is working. Let it rise.

Well, good morning again.

My name is Monica.

I'm one of the associate ministers here for one more day.

And I am really excited to be with you all this morning, as it is my last Sunday on our staff here.

And on Tuesday night, I was officially ordained as an elder in the United Methodist Church, which...

 Thank you.

Thanks.

Thank you.

So it means the church has stuck with me forever.

And it's been a long road.

Thank you.

But I want to say something to anybody in the room or watching online who is feeling a nudge toward ministry right now.

You can think of a million reasons why

 it won't work, why it can't be you, why the timing is wrong or the path is too complicated or the cost is too high, but I am living, breathing proof that the Spirit has a way of making a way where there was no way, right?

 The first time that I felt that nudge towards ordination, towards ministry in this way, I was actually in grad school at Notre Dame.

I was raised Catholic, so Notre Dame was Catholic Disneyland, right?

It was an amazing place to learn and grow, and as I sensed God calling me toward ordained ministry,

 And realizing I was in a tradition where that door was really closed to me, I set it aside.

And at that time, I actually set church altogether aside.

And my first job out of grad school, out of seminary, I was directing a faith-based AmeriCorps program.

 And that's where I landed.

But God really never quite left me alone.

One afternoon while I was leading a retreat for these young adults who were passionate about justice and really working on changing the world, I found myself sitting in an empty old antebellum church in a town called Grand Coteaux, Louisiana.

 And I was sitting up in the balcony and kind of feeling really far away from the table where the action is, right?

And recognizing that the seats that I was sitting in, that balcony, was built for our enslaved people to sit sort of furthest away.

 from Christ's table.

And something happened to me in that silence, in that moment, that I really don't still quite have adequate words to explain, but what I know is that I was really overwhelmed with a sense of God's peace and presence in a way that I had never really experienced before.

And what came to me was not words exactly, but just a sense of something like this, that God said, this is my table,

 and you are welcome here.

You may not be able to host the meal right now, but you can go and wash people's feet.

So go and do that, and the rest will come.

The rest will come.

 I didn't know then what that would entail.

I didn't know what that would cost.

I didn't know what ordination would require or how long that road would be.

Turned out it was nine years before the church got it together.

Mitchell's dad actually in 2017 came up to me and he said, you clearly have a call to ministry.

Let's get you ready.

And I said, well, the church isn't ready for me to do that.

And he said, well, let's get you ready so that when the church is ready, we can just go.

 But I just knew in that moment in Louisiana, something had been placed in me in that moment, something I didn't generate and couldn't explain, something that has been working in me ever since.

And that's how this tradition works.

 It finds you in an empty room.

It hands you something that you didn't ask for, and then it sends you out to hand it on to others.

Which brings me to what Paul writes to the church in Corinth.

I invite you to listen to how Paul describes it.

This is on page 173 in your pew Bibles, or the words will be on your screen.

This is 1 Corinthians chapter 11, and we'll start in verse 23.

 For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body that is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

 In the same way, he took the cup also after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

I invite you to pray with me.

 May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer, the one who has handed on something to us and invites us to hand it on to others.

Amen.

 For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you.

That word, handed on, is sort of a technical Greek term.

That word is sort of transmission of a living tradition passed from hand to hand, table to table, generation to generation.

Paul didn't originate it when he handed it on to the Corinthians.

 He received it first himself.

And that's one of the things where I think things get interesting.

The same Greek word that Paul uses for handed on is also the word in the Gospels for what's used where Judas did to Jesus in terms of being handed over.

Betrayal and transmission share the same word.

 On the very night that the body of Christ was being handed over to its enemies, Jesus was handing it on to his friends.

The story survived its own undoing, and it's been surviving ever since through empire and division and centuries of ordinary people who received something they didn't originate and couldn't stop passing on.

 And here's what I want you to understand about that chain, that handing on.

This isn't a game of telephone, right?

You remember how telephone works, that someone whispers something at one end, and by the time it reaches the other end, it's barely recognizable to what it started as, right?

Each transmission a little distorted, a little more diluted, a little further from the original.

That's not how this handing on works.

This is Levin.

 Yeast hidden in dough that doesn't weaken as it passes on.

How many of you have inherited a sourdough starter from somebody else, right?

It multiplies.

It activates.

What you receive doesn't diminish with the handing on.

It becomes alive in a new place, in new hands, at a new table.

This tradition doesn't degrade.

It rises like yeast.

 That's the chain that you and I are a part of, not because we were extraordinary, but because we showed up.

You showed up on a Sunday in summer, gold stars, because something found us in an empty room or at a table or in a moment we didn't plan and handed us something that we've been carrying with us ever since.

 Paul quotes Jesus as saying, do this in remembrance of me.

How many of us have seen that carved into a communion table, right?

In remembrance of me.

And we hear that oftentimes, I think, as don't forget or keep the memory alive, right?

That's mostly how we interpret it.

The way you

 You might save a voicemail from someone who's died because you can't bear to delete the sound of their voice, or the way you make your grandmother's cornbread dressing over Thanksgiving even though yours will never taste as good as hers.

That idea of keeping memory alive, that's not exactly what this is.

 The Greek word anamnesis for memory there, to do this in memory is something much more active than that.

It's not just remembering.

The best parallel we have is actually the Passover table, the Seder.

Every year, as Jewish families gather around the table at Passover, the Haggadah doesn't say your ancestors were slaves in Egypt.

It says you were slaves in Egypt.

In every generation,

 Each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally came out of Egypt.

Not their great, great, great grandparents, but them.

And Paul is drawing on that exact same tradition.

When we come to this table here, we're not standing outside of a 2,000-year-old story as observers.

We are inside it.

 The upper room is not behind us.

In the past, it surrounds us and dwells within us, and the people who would gather at this table 2,000 years from now are connected to us the same way that we are connected to that first night where Jesus broke bread and poured cup.

This is not a memorial.

It is a participation, which I think changes everything about how we come here.

You are not an audience.

 at something being performed at the front of the room, like I thought all those years ago in Grand Coteau, you are a link in a living chain.

Something is being handed to you today, and that same something has been passed through every broken and faithful and ordinary community that kept showing up and kept breaking bread across 20 centuries.

 And here's what I want you to feel in that.

Not the weight of it, like the stakes are so high, what if we drop the ball?

Not the weight of it, but the relief of it.

You didn't start this, right?

You don't have to finish it.

You just have to receive it faithfully and let it work in you.

That's what Levin does.

It doesn't announce itself.

It just works its way into everything.

 And here's where I want to slow down and sort of be honest, because I think the text presents us with a problem.

And the problem is this.

I think we have in some ways taken the most dangerous meal in human history and turned it into the most respectable ritual in Western culture.

 Paul isn't writing to the Corinthians because they forgot the words of institution.

He's not sending a letter across the Mediterranean because their liturgy was sloppy or their theology was imprecise.

He's writing because of what was happening before the bread was broken.

 The wealthier members of the community were arriving early, having a full meal, the good food, the good wine, the good company with people like themselves.

And by the time the day laborer showed up, the working poor, the people who couldn't leave until their work was done, the food was gone, and some of the hosts were already drunk.

 And then they broke bread together and called it the Lord's Supper.

Paul is furious.

He's saying, that is not the Lord's Supper you're eating.

That is just a dinner party with a prayer at the end.

Because the table of Jesus was never a dinner party with a prayer at the end.

There's a New Testament scholar, Robert Karras, who puts it like this.

He says, Jesus basically died because of how he ate and who he ate with.

 In a world sorted, in Roman world sorted rigidly by ethnicity and class and gender, where you only sit and eat with people like you, where the table was one of the primary ways that Roman society maintained its hierarchy, Jesus kept setting a table

 where the wrong people showed up and were welcomed, where there were always more and more chairs pulled up.

That's not a minor theological footnote.

That's the reason Rome broke his body.

And when Jesus says, this is my body for you, that word for is critical.

His whole life was a body for others, for the ones nobody else was showing up for, for the ones that empire had decided didn't count.

 That's what he handed on, not just a ritual, a practice, a way of setting a table that kept refusing to sort people by worth.

The world is still sorting people by worth.

This table says otherwise.

 And here's where I think there's a tension for us to name, and I own this too.

I think we come to this table on Sunday, and we receive something that proclaims, here in this room, the world's sorting systems do not apply.

And then we walk out these doors, and we spend Monday through Saturday participating in exactly those systems without noticing.

We decide who's called to return, whose neighborhood to invest in,

 whose crisis is urgent enough to interrupt our day, in a thousand small, ordinary decisions, we determine who counts and who doesn't.

And most of the time, I think we don't even notice we're doing it.

That's the problem with receiving something this radical and only letting it be active on Sunday morning.

We haven't received the leaven, we've just admired the bread.

 So what does carrying the table into the week actually look like?

It looks like noticing who's missing from the tables you sit at during the week, your work meetings, your neighborhood gatherings, your dinner parties, and asking why.

 and then doing something about it, right?

It looks like calling the person that everyone else has quietly stopped calling because their situation is too hard or the call gets too long or too complicated to fix.

It looks like how you spend your money, whether you let this table's spirit of abundance and generosity interrupt the anxiety and scarcity that the market tries to convince you is just good, responsible business practice, money practice.

 It looks like showing up for the ones in the world that the world has decided don't count with the same quality of presence you would offer someone that the world decides matters most.

 And none of that's dramatic, right?

All of it is just the table being carried out these doors.

The leaven is not safe.

It was never meant to be.

It wasn't then for Jesus, and it isn't now.

This is what you have been entrusted with, and that is what gets handed on.

 So one of the things I want to say before I finish out my last day here at First United Methodist Church of Dallas is I came to this church two years ago, not really feeling like I had it all together, but thinking I at least had something to offer.

And I did, I hope.

But what I didn't fully anticipate was how much you were going to hand on to me.

That's how Levin works.

I think you don't always know it's working until you look back and realize something in you has changed.

 Something has risen that wasn't there before.

That's why you draw a line on the jar of your sourdough, right?

So you can see what's working.

You have changed me by taking a genuine interest in my life, asking how my mom's doing or how Lolly's doing, seeing me as a person, not just as a pastor.

And when I started walking alongside y'all two years ago, I didn't feel ready to lead a church, to be a senior pastor.

Year 11,

 has enlivened me with clarity of purpose, and I carry that with me as I step more fully into my calling.

I've also watched you carry what happens at this table back into the world in ways that had nothing to do with me.

I've seen you show up for one another in hard times, the diagnosis, the quiet crisis that nobody else knew about, the grief.

You've sat with people

 I've watched you pull up a chair at the messiest of tables and assured folks across from you that we belong to one another, no matter what.

All of that with a quality of being present to one another that's unmistakably shaped by what happens here at this table.

 As you leavened the world, you have leavened me, and I want you to know that, that I'm leaving this place with more than I brought, way more than I brought, more honesty about my limitations, more conviction that God works through communities like this one, imperfect but faithful, still showing up.

 And I want you to hear this.

The leaven also doesn't leave with me.

It never belonged to me.

It was here before I arrived and it will be here long after I'm gone because it doesn't depend on any one person keeping it going.

It depends on communities like this one continuing to show up and let whatever happens here at this table work in them as they leaven the world out there.

 Paul ends with this phrase that I don't want us to rush past.

He says, until he comes.

Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

That's not a footnote.

That is the whole story.

 We're a people who live in the in-between, between the first breaking of bread in an upper room under threat of empire and that feast that Isaiah describes of the heavenly banquet where God will wipe away every tear and swallow up death forever, and the table will finally have room for everyone that was ever turned away from every table that came before it.

We stand in that in-between.

 That is what this church is for.

Not to have arrived, not to have figured it all out, but to keep setting the table in the gap between what is and what is coming.

In a few minutes, we're going to do what the church has always done.

 We'll take bread, we'll take cup, we'll remember in the way that makes us participants rather than spectators, proclaim the Lord's death, embody, however imperfectly, a table that refuses to sort people by worth.

 and then go back out into the world as Levin, not because we're ready, not because we have it all together, not because the road ahead is clear or the work is easy or the cost is small, but because something was handed on to us that we did not originate and we do not own,

 something that has survived empire and betrayal and 2,000 years of ordinary people who couldn't stop passing it on, something that found me in an empty church in Louisiana and said, this is my table, and you are welcome here.

Go wash feet.

The rest will come.

It came, and now I hand it on to you.

Go and do likewise.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.