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.

The Holy Spirit fell upon those gathered in the Upper Room on that first
Pentecost Day. As we turn now in prayer, I invite you to take a deep breath
and open your heart to welcome a new showering of the Spirit to fall upon you
here today.

Creator Spirit, come and fill the souls that are yours; fill with heavenly grace
the hearts that you created. We are yours and we welcome your presence
anew in our lives this day. We and our world need your wisdom and counsel,
your strength and right judgement. So, we invite you to come, Holy Spirit!
We ask you to fill all the spiritual leaders of our day with a deep desire to
cooperate with the One we all acknowledge as Holy & Divine, in creating a
world where we live according to the higher laws of the kingdom of heaven.
You are our Advocate, the leaders of nations everywhere need a fresh infusion
of your counsel; and a sense of dignity and worth of every human being
regardless of race, gender, age or color; so that we can live in a world of justice
and equity for all people.

O Spirit, in our country this weekend we call to mind those who gave their
lives in the service of protecting the ideals of liberty and freedom for
everyone, give us the gift of sweet memories of those whom we have loved
and lost as we honor and respect their service.

In the midst of sickness, pain and suffering, we ask you who we call Comforter
to remind all those who are ill of the healing grace and power of Jesus who
offers wholeness that is spiritual, emotional and physical to everyone.
We are beginning the season of summer break for children, youth and adults,
so we ask you Spirit to shower our country with favorable weather through
which we may take vacation time to rest and be renewed for our varied roles
in this season of life.

And finally, Spirit of the Living God, in the midst of so many questions, and
doubts, fears and worries we ask you to fall anew on each of us with an
abiding sense of peace……peace our world doesn’t understand……peace we
cannot create by our own power……peace you alone can offer.

Create in us a new heart, and renew a right spirit within us. Amen.

Wrestling with the Hard Questions: When Faith Meets Doubt

We all have them—those burning questions about faith that we whisper over coffee with trusted friends, the ones that keep us awake at night, the doubts we're almost afraid to voice out loud in sacred spaces. These aren't the sanitized, Sunday-school questions we're "supposed" to ask. They're raw, honest, and deeply human.

What makes these questions so powerful is their authenticity. They emerge from our lived experiences—from suffering we've witnessed, from prayers that seemed to go unanswered, from the gap between what we believe and what we see in the world around us. These questions don't make us bad Christians or weak believers. In fact, they might be evidence of a faith that's growing, stretching, and becoming more real.

The Sacred Space of Questioning

There's something profoundly spiritual about creating space for honest inquiry. Throughout history, the most vibrant faith communities have been those willing to wrestle with difficult questions rather than sweep them under the rug. Think of Job, who dared to question God's justice in the midst of his suffering. Consider the Psalms, filled with raw cries of "How long, O Lord?" and "Why have you forsaken me?" Even Jesus himself asked hard questions from the cross.

The Bible is not a book that shies away from doubt or difficulty. It's a collection of stories about real people wrestling with real questions about God, purpose, suffering, and hope. Abraham questioned God's plan. Moses questioned his own calling. Thomas needed to see and touch before he could believe. Peter denied Christ three times before becoming the rock upon which the church was built.

This pattern teaches us something crucial: questioning isn't the opposite of faith. Sometimes, it's the very path toward deeper faith.

The Questions We Carry

What are the questions that keep you up at night? Perhaps you wonder why a loving God allows suffering. Maybe you struggle with how to reconcile ancient scripture with modern scientific understanding. You might question whether prayer actually changes anything or if it's just a comforting ritual. Perhaps you're wrestling with what happens after death, or why bad things happen to good people, or how to make sense of religious hypocrisy.

These questions matter because they're your questions. They emerge from your unique journey, your experiences, your pain, and your hope. They deserve thoughtful consideration, not dismissive platitudes or easy answers that don't actually satisfy the depth of the inquiry.

Beyond Easy Answers

One of the greatest disservices we can do to genuine faith questions is to offer simplistic responses. "Just have faith" or "God works in mysterious ways" might sound spiritual, but they often leave the questioner feeling unheard and alone. Real faith can handle complexity. Real faith can sit in the tension of not knowing everything while still trusting in what we do know.

The truth is, some questions don't have neat, tidy answers. Some mysteries remain mysteries this side of eternity. And that's okay. What matters is that we keep engaging, keep seeking, keep wrestling. The struggle itself can become holy ground.

The Community of Seekers

We're not meant to wrestle with these questions alone. Faith has always been a communal endeavor. When we share our doubts and questions with others, something remarkable happens. We discover we're not alone in our wondering. We learn from others who have walked similar paths. We find wisdom in collective experience that we couldn't access on our own.

Creating communities where questions are welcomed rather than feared is essential. These are spaces where doubt isn't seen as a threat but as an invitation to deeper exploration. Where "I don't know" is an acceptable answer. Where we can admit our struggles without fear of judgment.

Questions as Doorways

Here's a beautiful paradox: our questions, rather than leading us away from faith, can actually become doorways into deeper spiritual understanding. When we stop pretending to have all the answers and start honestly engaging with our doubts, we create space for genuine spiritual growth.

Questions force us to examine what we really believe and why. They push us beyond inherited faith into owned faith. They move us from secondhand religion to firsthand experience. They challenge us to think critically and deeply about matters of ultimate importance.

The Ongoing Journey

Faith isn't a destination where all questions are finally answered. It's a journey marked by seasons of clarity and confusion, certainty and doubt, understanding and mystery. And that's as it should be. A faith that never questions might be a faith that never grows.

As you move through your own spiritual journey, give yourself permission to ask the hard questions. Don't be afraid of your doubts. Don't feel guilty about your uncertainties. These aren't signs of weak faith—they're often signs of faith that's alive and active, wrestling with real life in real time.

Seek out communities and relationships where your questions are honored. Read widely. Think deeply. Pray honestly. And remember that some of history's greatest saints were also some of history's greatest questioners.

An Invitation

So what questions are you carrying today? What doubts have you been afraid to voice? What mysteries keep you wondering? Consider this an invitation to bring those questions into the light. Write them down. Share them with a trusted friend. Bring them to your faith community. Sit with them in prayer.

Your questions matter. Your doubts are valid. Your search for understanding is a sacred endeavor. And in the wrestling itself, you might just find that God meets you—not with all the answers, but with presence, companionship, and grace for the journey ahead.

Good morning, friends.

It's good to see you all.

Welcome once again.

For those who do not know me, my name is Mitchell.

I'm the senior minister here, and it's a great joy to be with you this morning.

And if you are a first-time guest, seriously, we're glad you're here.

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

And you're catching us right at the end of a worship series we've been calling Facts, Frequently Asked Questions.

 Not more facts, just facts.

And you know, we solicited questions that you all had last time we did this, and I told you all we got like 90.

But I'm recognizing that

 you know, the curious mind may have new questions or different questions than what was originally submitted.

And so, while this is the end of the series, I anticipate it coming back again because it's so well loved by many of you.

If you have a question you want me to answer, I can't promise that I'll answer it from the pulpit, but I will at least try to respond to your email.

 Send me an email with your question, mboone at fumcdallas.org.

I'd love to read whatever questions are burning within you.

And the whole point of this series is really to wrestle with the real honest questions, not the sort of questions we're supposed to ask, but the real ones.

The ones that are often asked quietly over cups of coffee or in the halls or in emails.

 The ones that come up at dinner tables or on long drives in the quiet moments when not a whole lot of folks are listening.

And to take those questions and to try to answer them faithfully.

And today is obviously the last one.

And I want to say before we start that I think

Good morning, friends.

Welcome to First-Year Mother's Church of Dallas once again.

We're really glad you're here.

My name is Mitchell, and I really mean that.

I just realized about halfway through that you've already been welcomed probably three times.

So, but...

 If you don't know who I am, it's your first time here.

My name's Mitchell, I'm the senior minister here.

And seriously, if you're a guest this morning, we're really delighted that you're here.

Hope you come back and spend some time with us.

We're really serious about our mission statement and we wanna create space for you to belong.

And so know that that's a real invitation.

 And I wanna start this morning off on this Mother's Day by saying something that might feel a little out of place, but it is true.

You are allowed to be tired.

You're allowed to be tired.

Moms that are in this space, you are allowed to be tired.

 Not just busy, but actually tired, like worn out.

That's okay.

There is a difference, and I think most of us know exactly what that difference feels like, even if we never have said it out loud in a room like this.

Busyness is a calendar problem.

Busyness is a sort of logistics problem, but being tired is a spiritual one.

 Busy has a fix, just do less things.

But tired I think runs deeper than that, being worn out, being exhausted, runs deeper than just what one good night's sleep would solve, although I'd take one of those.

 Tired is what happens when you've been giving and giving and giving and giving and somewhere along the way, the giving sort of stopped being connected to receiving or nourishment.

And of course, on this Mother's Day, we recognize that a day like today, it carries a lot of complexities with it.

 Of course, for some of us this morning, it is a day of genuine celebration, and I hope that you experience that.

I really do.

But for others of us, this day sits heavy with grief or with absence or in the midst of a relationship that does not neatly fit into a $3.99 card.

No.

No.

 For many of you who are mothers yourselves, today is one more Sunday in a long season where you've been holding the world up for everyone around you, and almost no one has stopped to ask whether or not you are okay.

Here's what I've noticed about our culture, and specifically our culture and mothers.

Mothers are rarely allowed to be tired.

 Not really tired.

Mothers can say the word, I'm tired or worn out.

They can joke about it.

They can post about it on social media.

But the moment the exhaustion actually becomes true, the moment the depletion is real and not performed, something soft like a serpent in the garden, I would say, says,

 just keep going, it's okay, or you signed up for this, or other people have it harder, or what about the kids, or what about everyone else?

And I want to say something gently and directly to every person in this room who's been carrying more than their share for longer than they want to admit.

God actually has a question for us this morning that I think will help us reorient ourselves to the

 the tired, worn out nature that many of us are operating in.

And this question isn't, it's not a rebuke.

That's good.

It's not an accusation.

God's not making an accusation this morning.

It's simply an invitation.

And to get us to that invitation,

 Our scripture this morning is, I know y'all all had this on your bingo cards for Mother's Day, will be in 1 Kings, yeah, 1 Kings chapter 19, verses 1 through 13, everyone's favorite Mother's Day text.

So here we go.

1 Kings 19, verses 1 through 13.

1 Kings 19.

 Now King Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword.

And then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah saying, so may the gods do to me and more also if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.

Then Elijah was afraid and he got up and he fled for his life and he came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah.

 And that's where he left his servant.

But he himself, on a day's journey, Elijah went into the wilderness and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree.

 And he asked that he might die, saying, it is enough now, O Lord.

Take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.

And then he lay down under the broom tree, and Elijah fell asleep.

And suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, Elijah, get up and eat.

 So Elijah looked and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones in a jar of water and he ate and he drank and then Elijah lay down again and the angel of the Lord came a second time and touched him and said, get up and eat or the journey will be too much for you.

So Elijah got up and he ate and drank and then he went in the strength of that food for 40 days and

 and 40 nights to Horeb, the mount of God.

And at that place, Elijah came to a cave and Elijah spent the night there.

Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah saying, what are you doing here, Elijah?

 He answered, I've been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, throw down your altars and killed your prophets with the sword.

I alone am left and they are seeking my life to take it away.

He said, go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord for the Lord is about to pass by.

 Now there was a great wind so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.

And after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

And after the earthquake, there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.

And after the fire, a sound of sheer silence.

And when Elijah heard it,

 He wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

And then there came a voice to him that said, what are you doing here, Elijah?

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 meets us in the wilderness and asks the question we most need to hear.

Amen.

 So before we go any further in this sermon and with this text, you need to know something about Elijah, something I think that's really critical.

Elijah is not a failure.

 It's not like he isn't up for the task or he is out running God or trying to circumnavigate what God is asking him to do.

It's not like that.

Elijah is not spiritually weak.

He has not wandered from his faith or made some catastrophic mistake.

 that landed him under the broom tree in the middle of the wilderness.

The chapter right before this one is, chapter 18 is one of the most dramatic chapters in the entire Old Testament.

Elijah has just faced down 450 prophets of Baal and on Mount Carmel and he called down fire from heaven and he won.

And by any measure of prophetic accomplishment, Elijah is at the absolute top of his game.

 And then one threatening message from Queen Jezebel and Elijah runs.

He runs a full day's journey into the wilderness and he sits under a broom tree and he says, it's enough.

I'm done.

Lord, take my life.

I'm over it.

I'm so overwhelmed.

 Elijah is feeling like we do, like what happens when all this stuff, all the weightiness of a moment rises to the surface when we come face to face with the cost of faithfulness and when the resistance has been real.

Elijah has just won an incredible battle and Elijah has nothing left to give.

I think we know that feeling.

 not super common but i think we all have these moments in our life where we have sort of reached the end of giving everything we have i know there have been times in my own ministry where i've felt like i've been faithful that i've answered the movement of the spirit that i have trying to discern and trust and faithfully lead a congregation and

 Instead of applause or gratitude, it's just a lot of complaining.

And I have felt sort of that resistance and I have felt being misunderstood.

And it's that sort of soul level exhaustion that comes with it.

It's not the work per se, but from doing the right work and feeling completely alone in it.

 And wondering quietly in the places that you don't say out loud whether any of it actually matters or not.

That is Elijah under the broom tree.

Not faithless, just simply depleted.

And God doesn't just fix it.

 God does not rebuke Elijah for feeling this way.

God does not remind Elijah of what he has accomplished or suggest that other prophets have had it harder.

God simply sends an angel, and the angel wakes Elijah up from his slumber and says, hey, just eat something.

 That is the whole first response that God has to Elijah's pity party under the broom tree.

It's not a strategy.

It's not a sermon.

Simply God gives Elijah bread and water and rest.

And then when Elijah lies back down, the angel comes again and says, hey, get up and eat some more because the journey ahead of you is too much for you.

And that's the truth for all of us this morning.

 The journey is too much for you too.

I want every mother in this room to hear those words today because

 Our world never says them.

The world is perfectly content to let you keep going on empty, to keep performing capable, together, being put together and being fine, to keep being the emotional anchor, not only for your children or your spouse or partner, but also for your aging parents and also the emotional anchor at your workplace.

The world will take everything you have and call it love and never once say to you, this is too much for you to do alone.

 Rest.

You cannot keep going like this.

 But God says it to Elijah, and through Elijah, God is saying it to us here this morning.

Because the first thing God does with depletion is not wipe it away.

God simply works to address it.

And Elijah then walks 40 days on the strength of that food and arrives at Horeb, the mountain of God, and goes into a cave and spends the night.

And the word of the Lord comes to him, and God asks a question.

What are you doing here, Elijah?

 four words that I have not been able to sort of walk away from all week long as I've wrestled with this text.

And at first I thought it was sort of a sarcastic approach that God was taking with Elijah, essentially spurring him to leave the cave.

And while I think ultimately that is the goal that God has, I really think that this question lands a lot better when we think about it in terms of a

 the question we ask one another all the time, how are you doing?

That's essentially what God is doing here.

What are you doing here, Elijah?

How are you doing, Elijah?

What are you doing here?

What has brought you to this place?

What are you carrying that has driven you so far back into this cave?

What is the true condition of your life right now?

And will you say it out loud to someone who is actually listening?

 And Elijah answers, I've been zealous.

I've been, I've given everything I have and I'm the only one left and I am completely alone and they want to take my life.

And now this is Elijah's truth and God lets him speak it.

God does not interrupt Elijah.

God does not correct him.

God first makes space for Elijah to say what is true inside him, even if it's not the whole truth.

 Because Elijah thinks that he is the only one left, but that actually is not true.

There are 7,000 others who have not bowed down to Baal.

But God giving Elijah space to speak his truth, that matters.

That is not merely a footnote in the story.

It is the essence of our text because there is something profoundly generous about a God who asks us a question and then waits for us to answer.

 Most of the forces in our lives, most of the people in our lives ask how we are doing as a formality, as a greeting, and have already moved on before we open our mouths.

We live in a world not set up to receive an honest answer to how you are doing.

So we learn not to give an honest answer to how we're doing.

We learn to say, oh, we're fine.

We're busy.

 We're stressed.

We produce a socially acceptable summary of the interior life, and then we keep moving because there's much to do, much to accomplish.

And somewhere along the line, in that long practice of saying fine, we stop knowing how to say anything else.

We even stop knowing how to be honest with God.

 But God asks the question again after the wind and after the earthquake and after the fire, after all the spectacular noise where God was not found, it is in the sheer silence that the voice comes back and asks Elijah again, what are you doing here?

How are you?

 The question for today is, why do I need the church?

But underneath that question, if we're being honest, is something more like, does any of this even matter?

Is there not an easier, more engaging way to find connection and meaning?

I'm worn out, I'm tired, I have obligations everywhere.

Is Sunday morning one more thing or is it actually something different?

 Now for our graduating seniors, maybe the question feels a little more urgent.

You're leaving soon.

You're about to step into a world that will offer you a thousand substitutes to this.

 New friendships, new communities that feel exciting and immediate and all of that actually that's really good.

It should have new friends and new communities and do fun things and make some mistakes and grow.

 But before you go, I want you to hear this.

You are leaving this place with a memory, a memory of a place that asks you the real question, how are you doing, and waited for an answer.

And I want you to take that with you.

And when the new chapter that you're embarking on gets hard, remember that the church is not just building you a building that you grew up in.

It is a way of being with people that the world will not naturally accept.

 offer you anywhere else the answer the text gives us is this the church at its best is the place where the question gets asked and then someone someone just waits for the real answer how are you doing

 Governments have been labeling loneliness a public health epidemic for a few years now.

It's not a personal failing to be lonely It's an epidemic and every generation is experiencing it the silent generation is lonely because everyone that they know Everyone that they have loved they've buried Boomers are lonely because the digital world moved faster than they could follow and

 Scrolling Facebook is such a boomer thing, isn't it?

Gen X is lonely because the institutions that once held communities together have crumbled.

Millennials, we're lonely because technology promised connection and delivered something entirely different.

 and Gen Z studies show have fewer friendships than any generation to ever be studied.

We are the most connected people in history with the ability to contact anyone at any time when we feel like it, and we, at this moment in time, are starving for real connection.

 It isn't to say that social media can't be that for us, but it is not naturally a place that is going to cultivate real relationships.

It is possible actually to be surrounded by people and still feel completely alone.

It is possible to be the person everyone depends on and have no one who actually knows how you are doing.

The dopamine hit of the scroll

 Scrolling through our newsfeed at midnight, not because it satisfies us, but because it requires nothing from us, is a quintessential picture of the moment in which we're living in.

Because social media and cheap connections, they don't require anything from us.

No vulnerability, no risk, no one to disappoint, and no one asking us how we're doing it.

 Bad theology on social media will tell us that you don't need the church, that you can be spiritual without being religious, that you can find God on a walk or in a podcast.

Certainly God is with you on a walk or a podcast.

And that the church is, though, just overhead or just one more obligation in a life already thick with obligations.

 There is something true, I think, about that critique.

The church has earned some of our skeptics, and I know that.

But here is what a walk alone cannot do.

Here's what a podcast alone cannot do.

It cannot ask you what you are doing here or how you are doing.

 It cannot wait for the real answer.

It cannot be the place where the noise finally stops and someone looks at you and sees the depletion and hands you bread and says, you cannot keep going on like this.

Please rest, eat something, and tell me how you are really doing.

 You're not alone.

God does not answer Elijah's loneliness with a proposition.

God answers it simply with presence.

First the angel, then the food, then the question, then the silence, then the question again.

And if you are sitting here this morning and the honest answer to that question, how are you doing or why are you here, is I do not know, that's okay.

Okay.

 Maybe you're here out of habit, or maybe it's obligation, or maybe because you've not figured out how to stop coming.

That is okay.

The fact that you are here and cannot fully articulate why might be the most honest thing that you can say in church.

Because sometimes we arrive in the presence of God before we know why we came.

 Elijah was in the cave when God asked the question, not on the mountaintop, not in a posture triumphant moment of faith.

He was hiding and God asked the question anyway.

And after all the wind and the earthquakes and the fire and in the sheer silence, right, then the voice came.

The church is supposed to be

 that silence for you in your life, not the performance of certainty, not the spectacle of a rigid posturing faith, the quiet in which a real question can be asked and a real answer can be given by someone and something true, that there can be real connection between human beings who are all, every single one of us, more tired than we let on.

Maybe that is exactly what this place is for.

 not to fix us before we can show up, not to require that we have a better answer than we had last week, but simply to keep asking the question again and again in the silence beneath the noise until we find ourselves moving from the back of the cave to the front of the cave, not completely out of the cave, but at least we are moving closer to the light.

And so, friends, God is asking you this morning, what are you doing here?

 Why are you here?

You do not have to have a polished answer.

You just have to be here engaged and willing to stay engaged long enough to hear the question asked again.

Because the journey that we are all on, it's too much, friends.

 It's too much to go alone.

That was always true.

It will always be true.

And that is why you are here this morning.

That is what matters.

That is why the church, for all of its failures and limitations, is still the place where the question gets asked.

And in the silence, there is something holy.

 and you are never alone in that holiness.

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

Will We See Our Pets in Heaven? A Question of Love, Loss, and God's Goodness

The question sounds almost trivial at first, doesn't it? "Will I see my dog in heaven?" It's the kind of question that might make us feel a little embarrassed to ask out loud, as if it's not quite serious enough for theological consideration. We expect deep questions about doubt, suffering, and the nature of God—but our pets?

Yet this question reveals something profound about the human heart. We're not really asking about the logistics of the afterlife. We're asking whether the love we shared with another living being—the companionship, the loyalty, the joy—matters in the grand scheme of things. We're asking if our grief is legitimate. We're asking if God cares about the things that break our hearts.

The Theology We've Inherited

Most of us have absorbed a particular vision of heaven without even realizing it. It goes something like this: Earth is temporary, a waiting room. Heaven is somewhere else, somewhere up there. The physical world—bodies, animals, nature—doesn't really matter in the end. The goal is escape, evacuation, getting out of here and going somewhere better.

This theology has shaped how we sing, how we talk about death, and how we think about what comes next. But what if we've gotten the direction wrong?

Heaven Comes Down

The book of Revelation offers us a stunning vision in its twenty-first chapter. John sees "a new heaven and a new earth," and then something unexpected happens: the holy city, the new Jerusalem, comes down from heaven to earth. Not up. Down.

God doesn't say, "I'm taking you away from all this." God says, "The home of God is among mortals." The direction of redemption is not escape—it's return. God is moving toward creation, not away from it.

This changes everything about how we think about the end of all things. If God's ultimate plan were to scrap the earth, to evacuate human souls to some ethereal realm while leaving everything else behind, then maybe our grief over a beloved pet would be misplaced. But that's not the story Scripture tells.

God Makes Things

Go back to the beginning. Before we learn anything else about God—before righteousness, holiness, or power—we learn that God is a creator. God makes things. And at the end of each day of creation, God looks at what has been made and calls it good.

Not useful. Not temporary. Good.

The animals are called good. The wild creatures, the birds, the fish—every living thing receives God's blessing and God's declaration of goodness. The first thing God ever said about creation was that it was good. The last thing John sees in his vision is God coming down to dwell among that good creation.

This is not a God who is indifferent to what God made.

All Creation Is Groaning

Paul writes in Romans 8 that "the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of labor," waiting to be set free from bondage and decay. Not just people—all of creation is groaning. The animals, the rivers, the mountains, the forests, the oceans. Everything is waiting for liberation.

Your grief over a beloved animal is not separate from this groaning. It's woven into it. The pain you feel when you have to make that impossible decision at the vet's office, when you say goodbye to a companion who gave you unconditional love—that pain is part of creation's longing for wholeness.

Pain, grief, death, and loss were not God's design. They're the unfortunate byproducts of the freedom God gave creation. Freedom comes with risk. Agency comes with the possibility of suffering. And so all of creation waits and yearns for the day when suffering will be no more.

All Things New

The most important word in Revelation 21 might be this one: new. "See, I am making all things new."

Not all people. Not all souls. All things.

The Greek word here is kainos, which doesn't mean brand new from scratch. It means renewed, restored, refurbished—made what it was always meant to be. God is not starting over. God is redeeming what already exists, completing what was always intended.

Before John sees the new creation, he sees something remarkable in Revelation 5: around the throne of God, "every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea" joins in worship. The song at the end of all things is not a human chorus alone. It's the voice of all creation—everything that breathes and moves and has been called good by God, gathered together in praise.

The Promise Is Wide

God promises to wipe away every tear. Not some tears. Every single one. God will end all mourning, all grief, all pain. "Death will be no more."

If that promise is as wide as it sounds—and Scripture suggests it is—then the love you shared with your pet is not beneath God's concern. It's not a loose end. It's not trivial.

The God who bent down to form the creatures of the earth with the same hands that formed us, the God who declared them good, the God who promises a new creation where every tear is wiped away—that God has not forgotten what you lost.

What We Hope For

We don't have a precise blueprint of what the new creation looks like. Anyone who claims to have all the answers is being more confident than Scripture allows. But we can say what the text says:

God called the animals good from the beginning. All of creation is waiting for liberation. The vision of the end includes every creature joining the song. And the promise is that everything and everyone who didn't quite get to do what they were made for—everything bent and broken by this world's groaning—gets to be made whole.

Gets to find their place. Gets to discover their purpose and joy. Gets to be, at last, what they were always meant to be.

A Legitimate Grief

The culture doesn't leave much room for grief over animals. You get a few days, maybe a week. Then you're supposed to move on, get another pet, stop being so sentimental.

But grief doesn't work that way. Love doesn't work that way.

If you're still carrying the loss of a beloved companion years later, that's not weakness or foolishness. That's the natural consequence of having loved something deeply. And if God is making all things new, then that love—and that loss—matters more than the world tells you it does.

God is making all things new. All things. And we can hope that promise is exactly as wide as it sounds.

Well, good morning, friends.

It is good to see each and every one of you.

If you are a guest this morning, once again, welcome.

My name is Mitchell.

I serve as a senior minister here, and we are in the midst of a worship series, week two, a series we're calling Facts, Frequently Asked Questions.

And we put out a call because, like I said, this is a

 a sequel to a series we did last year.

We put out a call for questions, got almost 90 of them last year, and so we didn't do that again.

You all asked plenty of questions to work through.

And when I was reading through these questions in preparation for this series, I expected the theology stuff.

We're a deep-thinking church.

I expected questions around doubt, because I think we all carry it in some form or fashion.

I expected the hard stuff, and yeah,

 thank you you you submitted the hard stuff and we got all of that but more uh people asked about their pets than I thought uh I thought would happen and so here we are week two of uh more facts and the question uh for today is will I see my dog in heaven

 And so I want to start by telling you about my dog, Hava, and how she came into my life.

I was in my last semester of seminary, gathered together with my fellow students and dear friends.

We had a little group, probably about 10 of us, and we would get together every Sunday night in Denver to, well...

 to watch Game of Thrones.

We streamed Game of Thrones from a BitTorrent download because we were poor seminary students who strong ethical convictions did not extend to corporate profit.

Just being honest.

 And at some point during the evening, someone pulled up one of those old BuzzFeed quizzes.

I don't remember if it was like, what kind of dog are you or what kind of dog should you own?

I don't remember which one, but I took the quiz and I do remember the number one answer.

And that was a Spanish water dog.

And I had never heard of a Spanish water dog before.

 Now, like I said, we did have strong ethical convictions.

And every single person in the room said that I should adopt and not buy a dog.

And they're right.

And that's the right thing to do.

But I was curious about the Spanish water dog.

So I looked it up.

 And there were three Spanish water dog breeders in the United States, three breeders in the entire country, and one of them was 41 miles away from Lone Oak, Texas.

And I was moving to Lone Oak in three months.

And if you don't know Lone Oak, shame on you.

It's a town of about 500 people east of Dallas.

 One stop light.

And like I've said many times from this poll, but one of the best bacon cheeseburgers in the entire state at the grocery store.

And so I just accepted my first appointment in Lone Oak and I was moving from Denver, which is Denver's awesome.

I was moving to Lone Oak.

 in East Texas, I'd never been there, and I would be a solo pastor of a little United Methodist church there, but

 They had a parsonage and it had a three quarters of an acre yard.

And I was 26 and I didn't know anyone.

And I was both excited and terrified, probably in equal measure.

And so I called the breeder and I learned about Hava.

And she had been born actually in Spain.

Hava had been born in Spain and brought to the United States specifically to help introduce the breed to

 to Americans.

And she was brought over for that purpose, but her hips weren't perfect.

She had a little bit of hip dysplasia, nothing debilitating, but enough of it that they didn't want to enter it into the gene pool so early.

So here was this dog, already four years old, with a job she was supposed to do and a body that wouldn't cooperate, and she needed a home.

And so three weeks after moving to Lone Oak, I adopted Hava.

 And I want to tell you about her for just a minute because, well, she deserves it.

Spanish water dogs were bred specifically to work with fishermen off the coast of Spain.

These dogs would spend their entire day right next to one other person, a fisherman, in a small boat in the water.

And

 The owner would send the dog out into the ocean to help herd schools of fish into nets.

One person, one dog, all day in a tiny boat, which means they were bred over centuries for one thing, loyalty, proximity.

 the deep instinct to be near another person they belong to.

Hava was that dog.

She wanted to be close to me, not in sort of an anxious way or an annoying way, not in a way that made you feel like she was following you around everywhere.

She just wanted to be at your feet, so she would find you wherever you were in the house and settle in.

She slept on her back with her feet up against the wall.

It was very cute and a bit weird.

 She was obsessed with tennis balls, her one tennis ball.

She would adopt one tennis ball for a season, and I swear I could throw 20 tennis balls out in the backyard, but she'd find the one that she had adopted and she would carry it around with her everywhere she went.

She was smart and a bit silly, and honestly, she was exactly what I needed when I moved from Denver to Lone Oak.

 Because those early years in ministry were lonely in ways that are sometimes hard to explain, and the parsonage was big.

 four bedrooms.

The town was small, and I was building something from scratch within myself, really, relationally and vocationally.

And most days, most days, I was really not that busy.

Most days, it was just me, three quarters of an acre of land and a Spanish water dog who had no interest in being anywhere other than right next to me.

 She became my constant.

And Eli and I have talked about getting another dog, and the boys would love it.

And we have the space.

It's kind of a sin we don't have one with the yard we do have.

And every time we get close to that decision, we find a reason to wait.

The schedules are complicated.

It takes a lot of coordination and care, it turns out, to keep things alive in a house.

And there's already four of us.

 two hermit crabs, so we're busy.

But if I'm being honest, the deeper truth is we're still grieving.

We said goodbye to Hava at the City Vet on Gaston and Garland Road.

Some of you know that intersection.

And we knew it was time.

She had developed a brain tumor, and we could have extended her life, but that would have been for our benefit, not hers.

 So we made the harder, more loving decision and we let her go.

And the boys were young enough at the time that their world included her but didn't revolve around her.

Eli and I are the ones I think who felt it most and honestly, we still feel it.

I don't always know what to do with that grief because the culture that we live in doesn't leave a lot of room for it.

 You get a few days, maybe a week, you're not supposed to still be sitting with the loss of a dog years later.

You're supposed to just get another one.

But grief doesn't work that way.

Love doesn't work that way.

So here's what I wanna say before we get into the text.

I don't think that this question, will I see my dog in heaven, is an embarrassing one that we're asking.

 I think we're asking it because many of us have loved something deeply and lost it.

And we want to know whether or not our love survives.

So it may seem trivial, but it's really not a small question.

It's a question of depth and meeting and ultimately God's goodness.

So this morning to help us answer that question specifically, we're in the book of Revelation.

I'll be reading from chapter 21, verses 1 through 5.

 The author says, then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

I saw a holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, see, see the home of God is among mortals.

 He will dwell with them.

They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more.

Mourning and crying and pain will be no more.

For the first things have passed away.

And the one who is seated on the throne said, see, I am making all things new.

 Also, he said, write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.

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.

 Help us to trust, to really trust that you are indeed making all things new.

Amen.

There's a lot going on in the book of Revelation.

We know that.

But one of the things that jumps out at us really quickly when we read this text in the 21st chapter is the orientation, the location of heaven.

Heaven is

 I hate to break it to you all, but heaven in this chapter does not go up.

It comes down.

And I know that runs against most of what we have absorbed our whole life.

We've been singing about going up to heaven our whole lives.

 We picture this upward motion leaving the earth behind, arriving somewhere else where the real permanent life finally, finally begins.

The theology most of us have inherited is somewhere along the way.

It goes something like this.

Earth is essentially temporary.

It's a temporary location.

Heaven is permanent.

The body is.

 doesn't really matter that much.

Animals, they don't matter.

The physical world is essentially just a waiting room.

And the goal, the ultimate goal is to get out, to leave earth behind, get to heaven.

And while we may not fully believe that or our logical self can't fully buy into that, it has no doubt become a part of our embedded eschatology, how we think about the end.

 But heaven as an escape, as a physical place somewhere else, is not what John sees in his vision.

John sees the holy city coming down.

The new Jerusalem descending from heaven towards earth.

And the voice from the throne does not say, I'm taking you away from all of this.

Sorry, unfortunately.

It says the home of God is among mortals.

 The direction of redemption in Revelation 21 then is not a direction of escape.

It is a return.

God is moving towards creation, not creation escaping from itself.

 And that reframe, that simple reframing of heaven's location, changes everything about the question we're asking today.

Because if we have the theology wrong, then we will have the answer wrong.

If we believe that God's ultimate plan is to scrap earth, to do away with it, to evacuate the human souls to some other realm, then maybe the animals don't make the cut.

 Maybe the physical world is just kindling.

Maybe grief over a dog is essentially a category error, right?

An attachment to something that was never meant to last.

 But John is not writing that kind of theology, and neither is the rest of Scripture, if we're honest, because if we go back all the way to Genesis 1, before anything else is said about who God is, before we know that God is righteous and holy and powerful, the first thing we learn about God is that God makes things.

That's the first thing we learn about God, that God is a creator, right?

 God creates.

And at the end of each day of God's creation, God looks at what has been made and God calls it good.

Not useful.

Not temporary.

Good.

The animals are called good, the wild creatures of the earth, the birds, the fish in the sea, every living thing.

God looks at it all, all of it, and says, it is good.

 The first thing God ever said about creation was that it was good.

The last thing John sees in his vision is God coming down to dwell amongst that good creation.

That is not a God who is indifferent to what God made.

And yet, for some reason...

 The creation we know is not the creation as God designed it to be.

Paul names this plainly in Romans 8.

He says a whole of creation, all of creation has been groaning.

 groaning together in pains of labor, waiting to be set free from its bondage and decay.

Not just people are suffering, all of creation is groaning.

The whole thing, the animals, the rivers, the mountains, the trees, the oceans, the beaches, the plains, all of it is groaning.

Paul says creation was subjected to futility, not by its own choice, but out of hope.

 and in hope that it would one day be liberated.

There is very real suffering in the world.

There is death in this world.

 There's a dog with a brain tumor and you have to make a decision at a vet's office and it breaks your heart.

And according to Paul, that grief, that particular weight you carry is not separate from the groaning then of all of creation.

It's a part of it.

Your pain is woven into something much larger.

The whole of creation is waiting exactly for what you are waiting for.

 Pain and grief and death and loss are not God's design.

Rather, it's an unfortunate byproduct, I believe, of God giving us the greatest gift.

Freedom.

The ability to choose.

The freedom to make decisions.

And free will comes with significant pain.

Having agency, having freedom comes with the pain associated with being free and living amongst the free creations.

 And so all of creation is waiting and yearning and groaning to no longer be connected to that kind of suffering, which brings us to the most important word in our text this morning.

The one seated on the throne says, see, I am making all things new.

 Chancel Choir did a wonderful job of helping us connect to this idea of making all things new.

Not all people, not all souls, not all humans who said the right prayer at the right time.

All things are being made new.

Now, if you were with us last summer, when we were in our band series and spent four weeks in the book of Revelation, lucky you,

 You may have remembered that we talked about how the church has spent decades turning that book into a manual of fear.

 Left behind theology, escape hatch theology, a God who's done with this world and ready to light it on fire.

And one of the things that we kept coming back to is that Revelation, though read carefully, tells a very different story entirely than the one we've been sort of sold.

And this word is part of the reason why.

The word new here in the Greek is not the word for replacement.

It's the word kenos, which means renewed.

 restored, refurbished, made what it was always meant to be.

God is not starting over from scratch.

God is redeeming what already exists, completing what is always lost.

 But it's always been intended to be.

Which I'll say is going to matter quite a bit when we, this summer, continue our band series and pick up the book of Joshua.

Because if you think Revelation is a difficult book, just wait until we spend three weeks with one of the most unsettling texts in all of Scripture.

A book full of conquest and violence.

 and divine commands that make us modern day readers deeply uncomfortable.

And the question we're going to ask is really the same question we asked about Revelation.

What happens when we stop avoiding the hard parts and actually wrestle with them?

What do we find about the character of God on the other side of that wrestling?

So I don't know if this has ever been said from this pulpit, but mark your calendars for July 19th when we start a series on Joshua.

 Don't miss it.

It's going to be amazing.

But for now, with the book of Revelation in its proper place, I want us to quickly look at the fifth chapter.

Because before the vision of the new creation, there is a scene that we talked about.

 Around the throne of God and every creature in heaven and on earth and under earth and in the sea, all of them are joining in song.

Every creature is worshiping God and singing.

That's very odd image, but the song of worship at the end of all things is not a human chorus.

It is the voice of all of creation.

Everything that breathes and moves and has been called good by God gathered together.

Singing.

 That is the image John gives us, and that is what the end looks like.

So will you see your dog in heaven?

I don't exactly know.

I don't know what the new creation looks like.

Nobody does, and anyone who tells you that they have a precise answer is being more confident than the text allows.

But I can tell you what the text says.

 I can tell you that God called the animals good from the very beginning.

I can tell you that Paul describes all of creation as waiting and groaning for liberation.

I can tell you that John's vision of the end includes every creature in heaven and on earth joining the song.

And I can tell you that the promise is not that God will wipe away some tears, but every tear.

That's what the text says.

God will wipe away every tear.

 God will not end just some of our mourning or grief, God will end it all, all of it.

There will be no mourning and grief when God's work is complete.

 So if God's promise is that wide, and I believe it is, then the love you shared with that animal is not a loose end, it's not a category error, it is not beneath the concern of the God who made it and called it good and promised to make all things new.

What I believe and what I put my hope in is that the God who bent down to form the creatures of the earth with the same hands that formed us is the God who declared them good, the God who promises a new creation

 where every tear, every single tear is wiped away.

That God has not forgotten what you lost.

That God is not indifferent to the grief you carry quietly because the world doesn't give you enough room to carry it out loud.

Hava was a Spanish water dog actually bred to spend her life beside one person in a very small boat.

 She didn't get to do the thing she was made for, and so instead she ended up beside me in a parsonage in East Texas in a season when I needed exactly that kind of company.

And maybe that is what I believe about the new creation, that everything and everyone who didn't quite get to do the thing they were made for, everything and everyone bent and broken by this world's long groaning gets to be made whole.

 gets to find their place in the course, gets to find their purpose and their joy, gets to be at last what they were always meant to be.

That is the promise.

That is what John saw coming down out of heaven.

God is making all things new.

All things.

And I will continue hoping that promise will

 is as exactly wide as it sounds.

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

Amen.

5-Day Devotional: All Things New

Day 1: The Goodness of Creation

Reading: Genesis 1:24-31

Devotional: Before God was known as righteous or holy, God was first revealed as Creator. In these opening verses, we discover something profound: God doesn't just make things—God delights in what is made. Each creature, each living thing receives God's declaration: "It is good." This isn't utility; it's affirmation of inherent worth.

Consider what you've loved and lost—a pet, a relationship, a season of life. That love wasn't misplaced. God called creation good from the beginning, and what God calls good matters eternally. Your grief over what you've lost isn't trivial; it's a recognition of the goodness God placed there. Today, thank God for something in creation that brings you joy, remembering that your capacity to love reflects the heart of the Creator.

Day 2: Creation's Groaning

Reading: Romans 8:18-25

Devotional: Paul reveals a stunning truth: you are not alone in your suffering. All of creation groans together, waiting for liberation from decay and death. The pain you carry—whether from loss, illness, or heartbreak—is woven into something much larger. The whole world aches alongside you.

But notice Paul's emphasis: this groaning happens "in hope." Suffering is not the end of the story. Creation waits not in despair but in expectation of redemption. Your grief is valid, and it's also temporary. The freedom you long for is the same freedom all creation yearns toward. When you feel isolated in your pain, remember that even the mountains and rivers wait with you. Let this truth comfort you: God hears all of creation's cry, including yours.

Day 3: Heaven Comes Down

Reading: Revelation 21:1-5

Devotional: We've spent our lives singing about going up to heaven, but John's vision moves in the opposite direction. The holy city descends. God comes down to dwell among mortals. This changes everything about how we understand redemption.

God's plan isn't evacuation—it's restoration. Earth isn't a waiting room to escape; it's the stage for God's ultimate renewal. The physical world matters. Bodies matter. Relationships matter. What you've loved here isn't disposable. God is moving toward creation, not away from it, promising to wipe away every tear and end all mourning.

Take comfort: the things you treasure aren't beneath God's concern. The God who descended in Christ continues descending still, coming close to your pain, your loss, your longing. Heaven's direction is toward you, not away from you.

Day 4: All Creatures Sing

Reading: Revelation 5:11-14

Devotional: In John's vision of worship around God's throne, the chorus isn't exclusively human. Every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth, and in the sea joins the song. This is the ultimate community of praise—all of creation united in worship.

What does this tell us about God's heart? That nothing created is forgotten. Everything that breathes has a place in the eternal chorus. The animals aren't background extras in God's story; they're participants in the grand finale.

If you've loved a creature deeply, take heart. The God who includes every living thing in worship hasn't excluded what mattered to you. Your Spanish water dog, your faithful companion, the pet who met you in loneliness—God knows their worth because God made them. Today, let yourself imagine that final song, where nothing good is lost.

Day 5: All Things New

Reading: Isaiah 65:17-25

Devotional: "I am making all things new," God declares. Not some things. Not just souls. All things. The Greek word here means renewed, restored, completed—not replaced. God doesn't scrap creation and start over; God redeems what already exists.

This is the hope we cling to: everything bent and broken by this world's groaning gets to be made whole. Everything that didn't quite get to fulfill its purpose finds completion. Everyone who suffered finds healing. Every tear—every single one—is wiped away.

Your grief matters because what you lost mattered. But grief isn't the final word. The promise is as wide as it sounds. God is making all things new, including the things you thought were gone forever. Live today with that hope: nothing good is wasted in God's economy. What you've loved, God loves still. And what God loves, God redeems.

Holy and merciful God,

You have gathered us in worship, and we are grateful. We come with songs, prayers, offerings, and words. We come longing to know you, to serve you, and to be made more faithful.

And yet your prophets remind us that worship can become hollow when it is separated from justice. We confess that we do not always see what you see. We do not always hear the pain our neighbors carry. We do not always notice the systems, habits, fears, and silences that wound your children.

So today, do not let us hide behind beautiful words. Do not let us confuse comfort with peace, politeness with love, or anxiety with faithfulness. Search us beyond the places where we already know how to agree with you.

Where racism is blatant, give us courage to resist it. Where it is subtle, give us wisdom to recognize it. Where it is hidden in our habits, assumptions, institutions, relationships, or even in our efforts to do good, give us humility to be changed.

Teach us to listen without defensiveness, to repent without despair, and to act without needing to be praised. Free us from the need to appear righteous, so that we may become more truthful, more just, and more loving.

Let justice roll down like waters, not as a slogan, but as a way of life. Let righteousness flow like an ever-flowing stream, not only in our public witness, but in our decisions, relationships, leadership, and hearts.

Bless this church and all who call it home. Make us not merely a people who speak about love, but a people through whom your love becomes visible.

In the name of Jesus, our mercy, our truth, and our peace, we pray.

When Worship Becomes Noise: A Biblical Call We Can't Ignore

There's a question that keeps surfacing in quiet conversations, whispered in parking lots, sent via late-night text messages: "Why does the church keep talking about race?"

It's asked by people who are exhausted, circling the same conversations for years without seeming to arrive anywhere. It's asked by those who worry the conversation has become more about politics than the gospel. And it's asked by those who have devoted years to this work and still feel like they're barely moving at all.

The answer is uncomfortable but clear: the Bible doesn't let us off the hook.

A Shepherd's Unwelcome Message

Twenty-seven hundred years ago, a shepherd from Tekoa named Amos received an assignment he probably didn't want. He wasn't a professional prophet or a trained priest. He raised sheep and tended fig trees. But God called him north to deliver a message to the prosperous elite who definitely didn't want to hear what he had to say.

Amos arrived in Bethel, a religious center where the wealthy gathered to offer sacrifices, sing songs, and feel good about their standing before God. They saw their accumulated wealth as divine blessing, their worship as pleasing to the Almighty.

Amos began preaching, and he was clever about it. He started by pronouncing God's judgment on all the surrounding nations—Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab. The crowd loved it. Nothing brings people together like focusing on someone else's failures.

Then Amos turned and pointed directly at them.

The trap shut.

The God Who Sees Everything

The God who sees injustice in other nations also sees injustice in Israel. The God who judges the outsider is the same God who judges the insider.

And what God saw in Israel was devastating: a community that had separated its worship from its treatment of the poor. A community that sang beautifully, prayed regularly, gave generously—and still crushed the vulnerable beneath the weight of economic exploitation.

God's response through Amos is one of the most startling statements in all of Scripture:

"I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies... Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." (Amos 5:21-24)

Not "I'm disappointed." Not "I wish you would do better." The Hebrew word is hate—the strongest language of rejection available.

God looks at worship that peacefully coexists with injustice and calls it noise.

The Connection We Can't Ignore

Amos wasn't talking specifically about race—he was addressing economic injustice and the exploitation of the vulnerable. So why does this ancient text matter for contemporary conversations about race?

Because in America, race and economic mobility have never been separate conversations. The racial wealth gap, the concentration of poverty in communities of color, documented disparities in education, housing, and criminal justice—these aren't abstract political ideas. They are the present-tense version of what Amos described.

When Amos calls for mishpat (right social and legal order) and tzedakah (right relationship between people and God), he's calling for structural faithfulness that doesn't leave entire communities outside the circle of flourishing.

This is what God sees when looking at our cities today.

The Inheritance We Carry

Most of us didn't choose the contexts we grew up in. We didn't design the systems we inherited. But privilege of any kind—particularly white privilege—doesn't announce itself. By definition, that's what makes it privilege. It's the air you breathe without noticing until someone opens a window and you realize the room wasn't as clean as you thought.

Many of us carry inheritances that require reckoning. Family comfort, prosperity, or social position built in part on systems that didn't offer the same opportunities to everyone. If we look closely enough at our own histories, we'll find something that demands honest examination.

Here's the gospel truth in that reality: the gospel isn't for people whose ancestors' hands are clean or whose own hands are spotless. The gospel is that God keeps calling people whose hands are not clean.

God uses complicated people with complicated histories to do holy work.

A Space for Grace and Growth

One of the church's most important offerings in conversations about race is something the world cannot provide: a space where people are accountable without being condemned, challenged without being shamed, invited to keep going even when they get it wrong.

As Methodists call it, this is sanctifying grace—the grace that doesn't wait for you to arrive before it starts working within you and on you. Grace that meets you mid-journey, mid-failure, mid-question, and still keeps forming you into something more faithful than you were yesterday.

We don't have to choose between conviction and compassion. We don't have to choose between prophetic clarity and pastoral patience. We get to hold both. In fact, we're instructed to hold both.

People don't stop asking hard questions because they stop caring. They stop asking because they got embarrassed, because they got it wrong once and someone made them feel it was unforgivable, because the conversation moved so fast or ran so hot that staying in it felt more dangerous than stepping away.

Not a Dream, But a Demand

"Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

Martin Luther King Jr. quoted these words at the March on Washington. They're inscribed on monuments and have become one of the most recognizable lines in American religious history.

But notice what these words are in context: not a dream, but a demand. Not an aspiration cast into the future, but what God says is missing right now. It's the condition God names for worship to be worship rather than noise.

An ever-flowing stream—not a seasonal creek that depends on rainfall. Not a moment of inspiration that surges and then dries up. What Amos describes is structural, constant, built into the landscape.

That's the kind of faith community God is looking for. Not one that talks about justice when it's merely timely or trending, but one where justice flows through everything—every decision made, every dollar spent, every person welcomed, every conversation we're willing to have.

The Work Continues

The work of racial justice isn't finished. It isn't comfortable. And God isn't going to let us stop talking about it because the Bible won't let us stop talking about it.

But here's the good news: the same God who says "I hate your worship" when it coexists with injustice is the same God who keeps showing up anyway. God keeps calling shepherds, preachers, and congregations to keep moving, keep reckoning, keep trying—not because we've arrived, but because the God who demands justice is also the God who sustains the people trying to practice it.

That's grace. And that's enough to keep going.

It's been a beautiful season in the life of our church.

We had an incredible, I think, season of Lent where we talked specifically about love and what that looks like in our daily life.

Easter was incredible, absolutely incredible.

Last week, the choir did an

 an amazing job, and it was such a gift.

And so it sort of feels a bit anticlimactic to start a brand new worship series, especially one called Facts, since we did that one last year, and it's the sequel that no one asked for.

But we know sequels are almost always better than the original, so...

 I actually argued for the name More Facts, but I was outvoted in the room.

So Facts, we get to use the same graphic that way.

I think that was a real deciding vote.

So here we are again.

And last year, the reason I think it was so popular is because we're trying to answer honest questions that you all have.

 We opened a survey last year, and the reason we didn't do it this year is because you all submitted 90 questions.

So we have plenty to work on, but we're only going to go for four weeks, okay?

So we're not doing two years of this, but we're going to spend the next four weeks trying to honestly wrestle with the questions that you've been asking.

And we're going to do that in a real way.

 not with like talking points or bumper sticker theology or trying to come up with a slogan that Anna can put on a coffee mug.

We're gonna try to do it faithfully by using scripture, some humility, and with a particular Wesleyan conviction that we all share, right?

We are Wesleyan in nature.

 And so here at FUMC Dallas, if we're gonna be a place that magnifies God's love for all people, part of that is being comfortable with asking very hard questions.

Now,

 That's not a threat to our faith.

That helps us grow in our faith.

It's an invitation to deepen our faith.

And so the questions this year, you know, hard-hitting ones like, will I see my dog in heaven?

Which is actually a deeper theological question than just that.

Or why do I even need the church?

Seems particularly relevant.

 in today's culture?

What do we do with other religions?

And our question though for week one this week is, why does the church keep talking about race?

And I wanna be honest with you about something before we go any further.

Of the four questions of this series, this is the one that I've been asked the most.

But you all didn't put that question on the survey.

 It's almost always asked to me sort of quietly, like in the parking lot or a text message after an event or an email and a one-on-one conversation.

And most of the time it's prefaced by saying something like, I don't want to cause any trouble or I'm not racist.

 But why does the church keep talking about race?

And truthfully, I understand that question.

I want you to know that I understand it from people who are exhausted and feel like we've been circling this conversation for years without really arriving anywhere.

 I understand it from people who worry that talking about race has become more about partisan or identity politics than about the gospel.

And I also understand the people in this room who have devoted years of their lives to this work and still feel like we're barely moving at all.

All of us, in the variety of ways that talking about race makes us feel, are in this room this morning.

And so I want to start by saying I see you and I get it.

 And the reason the church, though, keeps talking about race is not because we are partisan.

It's not because we're captured by a particular ideological agenda.

The reason the church keeps talking about the race is because the Bible does not let us off the hook.

So there's the sermon, and we're done for the day.

The Bible doesn't let us off the hook.

Scripture doesn't let us off the hook.

 And today our witness comes from a shepherd from Tekoa who's been dead for 2,700 years.

And Amos, he's not going to let us off the hook either.

And so once again, let's take a deep breath.

And let us hear this reading from the prophet Amos.

The fifth chapter, verses 21 through 24.

 Amos speaking on behalf of God.

I hate, I despise your festivals and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

And even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them.

And the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals, I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs."

 I will not listen to the melody of your harps, but let justice roll down like water, righteousness like an ever-flowing stream 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 truly pleasing and acceptable to you, oh God, our rock and our redeemer.

Give us the courage to hear what we would rather avoid.

The honesty to see what we have learned not to notice.

And the grace to be changed.

Amen.

Okay, so Amos.

 Amos is not a professional prophet.

There actually were those professional prophets.

He's not a priest.

He's not been trained as clergy.

He has no formal training whatsoever to speak on behalf of God.

He is a shepherd.

 He's a shepherd from the southern kingdom who raises sheep and tends to fig trees.

So he's a fig tree farmer.

And God calls him north.

So Amos is in the southern kingdom.

God calls him north to deliver a message to the northern elite who don't want to hear the message that he's being asked to deliver.

And so Amos arrives in Bethel, which is a religious center, a place of worship.

 a place where the prosperous gather to offer their sacrifices and sing their songs and feel good about their standing before God as they see all that they have and the wealth that they have accumulated as a

 blessing from God, and Amos begins to preach.

And it gets interesting pretty quickly.

He does not actually start with Israel.

Great, great homiletical trick.

He starts with all the nations surrounding Israel.

Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab.

And so one by one, Amos is announcing God's judgment on the neighbors.

 Nothing pulls people together like focusing on others.

And the crowd in Bethel is cheering.

They're loving it.

And then finally, someone is telling the truth about these people.

And then Amos turns and he points at them and the trap sort of shuts.

Because the God who sees injustice in the nations also sees injustice in Israel.

 The God who judges the outsider is also the God who judges the insider.

And what God sees in Israel is a community that is separated in very real ways, separated its worship from the treatment of the poor.

A community that sings beautifully and prays regularly and gives generously and still worships.

 crushes the vulnerable beneath the weight of economic exploitation.

And God's response is delivered through this shepherd from the south.

And it is one of the most sort of startling statements in all of scripture.

Right off the bat in verse 21, we hear God say, I hate your worship.

 Not I'm disappointed in your worship.

Not that I wish you would do better.

The Hebrew word here saying is hate.

It's the strongest language of rejection that's available in the text.

God looks at worship that coexists with injustice and God calls it just noise.

Just noise.

 Take away from me the noise of your songs, the text says.

Now, here's the move that some of us may resist.

Amos is not talking about race.

 He's talking about the poor, he's talking about the economically vulnerable being ground down by the prosperous while the prosperous go to church on the weekend and feel just fine about themselves.

So why this text then with this question?

Because in America, regardless of how we think about it, race and economic mobility are not separate conversations.

 We can't separate the two.

They've never been separate conversations.

They can never become separate conversations because the racial wealth gap, the concentration of poverty in communities of color, the documented disparities in education, housing, criminal justice, these are not like abstract political...

 ideas.

They are present tense version of what Amos is describing.

They are what God sees when God looks at our city.

So when Amos calls for mishpat, which is right social and legal order, or when he calls for right relationship between people and between God, he is calling for the kind of structural faithfulness that does not leave an entire community outside the circle of flourishing.

 And that is the wrench that Amos churns.

It forces us to see what God sees.

And in Dallas in 2026, what God sees includes the faces of our black and brown neighbors, whose mobility no doubt has been structurally constrained, in some cases for generations, by policies and practices that this church and churches like ours did not always resist.

 and sometimes actively blessed.

Now, I don't think it's going to shock you.

I grew up in overwhelmingly white spaces.

My childhood, my adolescence, my early education, I did not choose that context.

The bishop did.

Most of us do not choose our context.

 But I've spent the better part of my adult life reckoning with what that context, in particular my time in Rockwall, gave me and what it cost me without knowing it.

Privilege of any kind, but specifically white privilege, does not announce itself.

By definition, that's what makes it privilege.

It's the air you breathe without noticing you're breathing it until one day someone opens a window and you realize that the room was not as clean as you once thought.

 I finally understood this after years of work, both in academic spaces, sure, but also in my social context changing.

But nothing did more for my awareness than taking a class at, you all know it well, the Iliff School of Theology called Disrupting White Privilege.

It was designed specifically for white students.

A space to work through the theology and sociology of race with people who shared a similar location.

 It was at the time a controversial class and some people thought it was too much, some people thought it was long overdue.

What I can tell you is that it gave me something I did not have before, a space where I was allowed to get it wrong.

To ask the question I was afraid to ask out loud, to sit with the discomfort of what I was learning without being condemned for the fact that I was still learning it.

 That experience in particular shaped how I think about this work and the work of dismantling racism in the church, because here is what I know.

People do not stop asking hard questions because they stop caring.

They stop asking because they got embarrassed.

 Because they got it wrong once and someone made them feel like that was unforgivable.

Because there's shame in those spaces and not grace.

Because the conversation moved so fast or ran so hot that staying in that conversation felt more dangerous than stepping away from it.

And the church has a theological responsibility to hold something very different.

Not a space where everything goes, but a space where you are accountable without being condemned.

 Where you are challenged without being shamed.

Where you are invited to keep going even when you get it wrong.

As United Methodists, we call this sanctifying grace.

The grace that does not wait for you to arrive before it starts to work within you and on you.

The grace that meets you mid-journey, mid-failure, mid-question, and still keeps forming you.

 into something more faithful than you were yesterday.

This is, I believe, one of the most important things that the church has to offer a conversation around race.

And it is something that the world cannot and will not ever offer.

 We do not have to choose between conviction and compassion.

We do not have to choose between prophetic clarity and pastoral patience.

We get to hold both.

In fact, we are instructed to hold both.

And if we do not hold both, we will lose people.

And we'll deserve to do so.

 Because I need this type of space as well.

I need to tell you something that I have not said publicly before.

Well, I said it about 45 minutes ago in modern worship.

But I want to say it very intentionally because it's not a confession that I make to perform like vulnerability or something.

I need to be honest with you about something because I think honesty right now is what this sermon requires.

I...

 I am a direct descendant, and Kelvin confirmed this, I'm a direct descendant of Thomas Auld, who was the slave holder of Frederick Douglass.

He owned Frederick Douglass, he bought him, he sold him, he reclaimed him, and he is one of the central figures in one of the most important autobiographies ever written in this country.

 And he's very clearly in my family tree.

I share it because it's the truth and the truth about where I come from and because I think the church of all places should be a community capable of holding that kind of truth.

Now, what do I do with that?

I'm still working out, honestly.

But what I cannot do is pretend it's not there.

 What I cannot do is stand in this pulpit and talk about race and racism as if it's someone else's history.

It's my history.

It's stitched into my family's story.

And that means the work of racial justice is not for me an ideological position.

It is really reckoning with my own inheritance.

 I think some of you know something about that, not necessarily with the same specific history, unless we're family, but with the particular weight of realizing that your family's comfort or prosperity or social position was built in part on systems that did not offer the same to everyone.

And most of us, if we're honest and we look closely enough, we'll find something in our own inheritance that requires reckoning.

If you don't find it, just keep looking.

 And here's the gospel in that.

The gospel is not the gospel for those whose ancestors' hands are clean or that our hands are indeed spotless.

The gospel is that God keeps calling people whose hands are not clean.

Amos speaks the truth to power by revealing that God looks at Israel and says, your worship has become noise.

Essentially, God is not impressed.

 Not because worship is unimportant, but because worship that coexists peacefully with injustice has lost its connection to the God it claims to address.

So if our choir, and they certainly do, sound amazing, but we are not doing the work, God is not impressed.

 if our programs are flourishing, but we are not doing the work, God is not impressed.

If our pews are filled, but we're not doing the work, God is not impressed.

And if our building is beautiful, and it certainly is, and our budget is healthy, and thank God that it is, and our reputation in this city is strong, but we are not doing the work, God is not impressed.

 And this is not a new message.

This church has people who have been carrying this work for years, and some of them are weary, and some of them are frustrated, and some of them have pushed harder than the institution could move, and they have felt resistance, both personally and deeply, and I want to honor that.

The frustration is not a sign of bad faith.

It's a sign of genuine love for what the church is supposed to be.

And I also want to say gently that conviction without community will eventually burn out.

 The work of racial justice is not a project that some people in the church own and others support from a distance.

It is the whole church's calling.

And the whole church moves differently than a cohort within it, more slowly sometimes, more messily often, but with a different kind of durability.

And I remember a few years ago, it was my first year, I remember it very well, I made an offhanded comment in a town hall meeting.

 I said I thought we should chisel away the inscription on our front steps that reads First Methodist Episcopal Church South.

Now, I meant what I said.

I probably shouldn't have said it in that space.

And I still think it deserves a hard conversation.

But I've also learned, and part of what Pastor Anthony has taught me, is that what a pastor thinks should happen and what a community discerns together are two very different things.

 And this work belongs to you all.

And taking time to decide is not weakness, it is by definition the work.

The conversation about that inscription is still happening and there's a proposal now to keep it and add a plaque and that is being evaluated by lay leadership and I do not know how it will land.

What I do know is that a church willing to have that conversation at all is a church that has not given up on faithfulness.

 Which leads us to Amos and how he ends his oracle with a word that has outlasted everything else that he has written.

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Martin Luther King quoted it at the March on Washington.

It's beautifully inscribed in monuments and it has become maybe one of the most recognizable lines in American religious and political history.

But notice what it is in context.

When Amos is speaking it,

 to the people.

It is not a dream.

It's a demand.

It is not an aspiration Amos is casting out into the future.

It is what God says is missing right now.

It is the condition God names for worship to be worship rather than noise.

An ever-flowing stream, not a seasonal creek.

 that relies on how much rainfall comes in any given year.

It's not a moment of inspiration that surges and then dries up.

What Amos is talking about is structural, it's constant, it's built into the landscape.

That is the kind of church God is looking for, not a church that talks about justice when it is merely timely or trending.

 A church where justice is structural, where it flows through everything we do, every decision we make, every dollar we spend, every person we welcome, every conversation we are willing to have.

It is the only way we can talk about magnifying God's love for all people and actually mean what we say.

That is the work.

And the work is not finished.

And the work is not comfortable.

 And God is not going to let us stop talking about it because the Bible's not going to let us stop talking about it.

So that, that is the answer to the question, why the church, our church, keeps talking about race.

But here's the good news in all of it.

The same God who says, I hate your worship when it coexists with injustice is the same God who keeps showing up anyway.

I don't know.

That's just what God does.

 calling shepherds from the South, calling preachers from complicated family trees, calling congregations like this one to keep moving, keep reckoning, keep trying, not because we have arrived, but because the God who demands justice is also the God who sustains the people who are trying to practice it.

And that is grace, my friends, and that is enough to keep going.

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

5-Day Devotional: Let Justice Roll Down

Day 1: When Worship Becomes Noise

Reading: Amos 5:21-24

Devotional: God's harsh words to Israel shake us awake: "I hate your worship." How can this be? The Israelites were faithful in religious observance—singing, sacrificing, gathering. Yet God called it noise. Why? Because their worship existed separately from how they treated the vulnerable. Our Sunday devotion means nothing if it doesn't transform our Monday actions. God desires integrity—worship that flows into justice, songs that lead to service, prayers that produce changed lives. Today, examine your own worship. Does it remain confined to sacred spaces, or does it spill into how you treat your neighbors, especially those society marginalizes? True worship transforms us into agents of God's justice in the world.

Day 2: The Ever-Flowing Stream

Reading: Isaiah 58:6-12

Devotional: Amos envisions justice not as a seasonal creek but as an ever-flowing stream—constant, structural, life-giving. Isaiah echoes this vision: true fasting isn't ritual abstinence but breaking chains of injustice and sharing bread with the hungry. God calls us beyond momentary inspiration to sustained commitment. Justice cannot be something we address only when it's trending or convenient. It must flow through everything—our decisions, spending, welcoming, conversations. This requires building new structures, not just having good intentions. What would it look like for justice to flow constantly through your life? Through your church? Identify one area where you can move from occasional concern to sustained action, creating channels through which God's righteousness flows continuously.

Day 3: Sanctifying Grace in the Journey

Reading: Philippians 1:3-6

Devotional: Paul's confidence is beautiful: "He who began a good work in you will carry it to completion." This is sanctifying grace—God's transforming work that meets us mid-journey, mid-failure, mid-question. The work of justice and reconciliation is messy. We will get things wrong. We will ask clumsy questions. We will stumble. But God's grace doesn't wait for perfection before working within us. The church should be the one space offering accountability without condemnation, challenge without shame. You don't have to arrive before God starts transforming you. Whatever inheritance you're reckoning with, whatever discomfort you're sitting in, whatever learning you're still doing—God is present in that process. Grace sustains the journey. Where do you need to receive sanctifying grace today?

Day 4: Reckoning with Inheritance

Reading: Nehemiah 9:1-3, 32-38

Devotional: Nehemiah led Israel in confession—not just for personal sins but for their collective history and inherited patterns. This is uncomfortable work. Many of us discover, when we look closely, that our family's comfort or position was built on systems that excluded others. This isn't about guilt that paralyzes but truth that liberates. We cannot change what we refuse to acknowledge. The Israelites didn't pretend their history was clean; they named it before God. The gospel isn't for those with spotless ancestry—it's for all of us whose hands aren't clean. God keeps calling imperfect people from complicated histories to do redemptive work. What inheritance requires your honest reckoning? Bring it before God, not in shame, but in truth.

Day 5: Conviction with Community

Reading: Ecclesiastes 4:9-12; Hebrews 10:23-25

Devotional: "Two are better than one... a threefold cord is not quickly broken." The work of justice cannot be sustained alone. Individual conviction without community eventually burns out. We need each other—those who've been carrying this work for years and those just beginning to engage, those with prophetic clarity and those with pastoral patience. The church moves differently than an individual, sometimes slower and messier, but with greater durability. We don't have to choose between conviction and compassion; we hold both. This requires staying in community even when it's uncomfortable, continuing conversations even when they're difficult, and recognizing that the whole church's calling cannot be owned by just a few. Who walks with you in this work? How can you support those who are weary? Justice as an ever-flowing stream requires a community committed to the long journey together.

Will you please join me in an attitude of prayer?

Oh Lord, may the words of my mouth and all the meditations of our hearts, may they be acceptable in your sight.

Oh Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Amen.

 There's an old film some of you may remember, The Sixth Sense.

It follows a psychologist who's trying to help a child make sense of things that only he can see, no one else.

And as you watch, everything feels coherent.

 The conversations make sense.

The ways he's interpreting the events, it all seems reasonable.

And you trust the psychologist.

And you trust the story.

And then, as you get to the very end of the movie, you realize we were wrong.

 The psychologist was not aware of everything that was happening.

But not just him, you, the viewer.

You had been watching the entire story through a lens that made sense to you at the time.

And only at the end do you realize

 there was a deeper reality that was present the whole time that you never saw.

And then, by the time that you realize it, it's too late.

It's too late to go back.

 You don't ever get to rewatch it for the first time with that new understanding.

You only understand it afterward.

And I wonder, I wonder if you've ever had that experience

 in your own life where you were moving forward doing the very best that you could making sense of things as faithfully as you knew how and only later realized

 You never fully understood everything that was happening.

It doesn't just happen in the movies.

That is in our scripture for today too.

Two disciples walking along on the road to Emmaus.

 They're talking, they're processing, they're trying to make sense of the tragic and miraculous aspects of this Easter story they're experiencing.

Jesus had been crucified.

Then they're hearing these wild stories.

 about him coming back.

And they say in the midst of this, we had hoped.

We had hoped.

They had hoped that he was the one.

 They had hoped that now things were going to be different.

They had hoped that their understanding of what God was doing was right.

They're sincere.

They're thoughtful.

 And they are desperately trying to make sense of their own faith.

As they're walking, we heard, as they're walking, Jesus is walking right alongside of them.

And as he does, they don't even recognize him.

 It's not because they're careless.

It's not because they lack faith.

And definitely not because they're rebellious.

They simply do not see what is right in front of them.

They're walking with Jesus.

And misunderstanding

 what is happening as they walk Jesus listens listens to their story listens to what they're saying listens to the wide variety of emotions that are stirring within them and then the conversation shifts and he starts

 reinterpreting their story.

He opens up the scriptures for them and reframes everything that they thought that they knew.

And still, they do not recognize him.

It's only later in the scripture

 at the table, in the breaking of the bread, that their eyes are opened.

Then they see, and in that moment, in that moment, right when they recognize Jesus, he disappears.

And in that space, they don't get to

 mentally, emotionally, they don't get to go back and to walk that road all over again with clarity.

They only realize afterward, we're not our hearts burning within us.

They were sincere.

 They were walking faithfully.

And they did not or could not understand what was happening.

And they didn't even know that at the time.

That might be an essential part of the journey.

 Consider for yourself.

What happens when you already know the ending of a story?

When someone tells you how a movie ends before you've gotten to see it?

Or perhaps worse, when someone tells you the score of a game you were just about to watch.

 You can still watch it, of course, but you don't experience it in the same way, do you?

Something changes.

There's less tension, less uncertainty, less wondering what's going to happen next.

 And in some ways, it feels safer.

It feels more controlled, less chaotic.

But something is lost in that, isn't it?

And I wonder how many of us

 are trying to live our lives just in that way.

Trying to know how it's all going to turn out.

Trying to understand everything before we move forward.

And I would be included in that.

 It's happening to myself recently.

As many of you know, I'm in the middle of a transition.

I've been here at First Church Dallas coming up on a full three years, and I'm moving from Texas to Connecticut.

There's a lot of decisions, a lot of unknowns,

 a lot that is not settled in my life.

And I have also been praying a lot.

Praying and praying and praying.

And if I'm honest, I have not been praying for adventure.

 I think I've been praying for certainty.

I've been asking God to make everything clear, to show me exactly what to do, to remove the ambiguity before me.

And if I'm even more honest,

 I have not been asking for clarity because I want to follow God better.

I've been asking for clarity because I do not like the discomfort and anxiety that I've been feeling.

And I'm still in that.

 In our scripture, the disciples, they too do not get clarity first.

They get presence.

They do not get explanations first.

They get companionship.

 They're already walking with Christ before they understand what's happening.

And this is where the text meets us.

Because right now, there are people here, perhaps like me, trying to make a decision.

 trying to understand something that has happened.

Trying to figure out where God is in a situation that does not make sense.

And the instinct is, if I could just understand what God is doing, then I would know what to do.

 If I could just get clarity, then I could move forward.

But what if clarity is not what comes first?

What if you are already walking with Christ and you do not recognize it?

 Now, instead of our tradition of posting our reflection questions after the sermon, I'd like to share them with you before we're done and to take some time for reflection.

Could we get the first question?

So, where am I waiting for clarity before I act?

 The second question is, where am I trying to force meaning so I can feel more certain?

 And our third question is, what story have I already decided is true that might not be the whole story?

Let's take another minute and sit with these.

 So now, what would it mean if Christ is already present with us in the tension of our answers to these questions, and we don't see it yet?

You know, we often think of theology

 theology as a way to make everything make sense.

But what if it's something else?

What if theology is what we do when we're trying to make sense of where we have been while we are still walking forward into the unknown

 without fully knowing where it's all going.

The disciples do not get everything explained.

They do not get to go back.

They do not get certainty about what comes next.

But they do realize something.

 they realize Christ was with them, even when they did not recognize him.

And somehow, that is enough for them to turn around and to keep going.

 And so maybe the question is not, do I understand everything that God is doing?

Maybe the question is, can I keep walking even when I don't?

 Can I trust that Christ may be present even when I don't recognize it?

Can I live faithfully without needing the whole story to make sense first?

 Because it may be that clarity does come, but not usually in time to make things easier.

Only in time to help us keep walking forward.

Walking With Christ in the Uncertainty: Lessons from the Road to Emmaus

There's a peculiar moment in the film The Sixth Sense that reshapes everything. Throughout the entire movie, you've been watching, interpreting, making sense of the narrative. The conversations seem coherent. The events unfold logically. You trust what you're seeing. And then, in the final moments, everything shifts. A deeper reality reveals itself—one that was present the entire time, hiding in plain sight. And here's the heartbreaking part: you can never watch it for the first time again with that new understanding. You only comprehend it afterward.

This cinematic experience mirrors something profoundly spiritual: the reality that we often move through life doing our best, making sense of things as faithfully as we know how, only to realize later that we never fully understood everything that was happening.

The Road to Emmaus: Walking Without Recognizing

The story of two disciples walking to Emmaus captures this experience with stunning clarity. Fresh from the crucifixion of Jesus, these followers are processing grief, confusion, and fragmented hope. They've heard wild reports about resurrection, but nothing makes complete sense. As they walk, they articulate their disappointment: "We had hoped."

Those three words carry the weight of shattered expectations. They had hoped Jesus was the one. They had hoped things would be different. They had hoped their understanding of God's work was correct.

Here's what makes this story so compelling: Jesus himself joins them on the road. He walks alongside them, listens to their story, hears their emotions, and begins reinterpreting everything they thought they knew. He opens the scriptures and reframes their entire narrative.

And still, they don't recognize him.

This isn't because they're careless or lacking in faith. It's not rebellion or spiritual dullness. They simply cannot see what is directly in front of them. They are walking with Jesus while completely misunderstanding what's happening.

The Moment of Recognition

The revelation comes later, at a table, in the breaking of bread. Suddenly, their eyes open. They see. They recognize. And in that very moment—right when clarity arrives—Jesus disappears.

They don't get to walk that road again with their newfound understanding. They can't go back and re-experience the journey with clarity. They only realize afterward: "Were not our hearts burning within us?"

The burning hearts were there all along. The presence was real throughout the journey. But recognition came only in retrospect.

The Tension of Not Knowing

Consider what happens when you already know the ending of a story. When someone spoils a movie or tells you the score of a game before you watch it, something fundamental changes. You can still watch, of course, but the experience is different. There's less tension, less uncertainty, less wondering what happens next.

In some ways, knowing the ending feels safer. More controlled. Less chaotic.

But something essential is lost.

And yet, how many of us spend our lives trying to live exactly this way? Trying to know how everything will turn out. Attempting to understand everything before moving forward. Seeking certainty as a prerequisite for action.

The disciples on the road to Emmaus don't get clarity first. They get presence. They don't receive explanations before the journey. They receive companionship. They're already walking with Christ before they understand what's happening.

What If Clarity Isn't First?

This challenges our instincts profoundly. When facing decisions, transitions, or confusing circumstances, the natural response is: "If I could just understand what God is doing, then I'd know what to do. If I could just get clarity, then I could move forward."

But what if clarity isn't what comes first?

What if you're already walking with Christ and you don't recognize it?

Consider these questions for your own life:

Where are you waiting for clarity before you act? Is there a decision you're postponing, a step you're refusing to take, because you don't have all the answers yet?

Where are you trying to force meaning so you can feel more certain? Are you constructing narratives about your life, your circumstances, or God's will that might be more about managing anxiety than discerning truth?

What story have you already decided is true that might not be the whole story? What interpretations have you settled on that might be premature or incomplete?

Theology in the Tension

We often think of theology as a system that makes everything make sense—a neat framework that answers all our questions. But perhaps theology is something else entirely.

Perhaps theology is what we do when we're trying to make sense of where we've been while we're still walking forward into the unknown, without fully knowing where it's all going.

The disciples on the road to Emmaus don't get everything explained. They don't get to go back. They don't receive certainty about what comes next.

But they do realize something crucial: Christ was with them, even when they didn't recognize him.

And somehow, that's enough for them to turn around and keep going.

Living Faithfully Without the Whole Story

The question, then, isn't necessarily "Do I understand everything God is doing?"

The question is: "Can I keep walking even when I don't?"

Can you trust that Christ may be present even when you don't recognize it? Can you live faithfully without needing the whole story to make sense first?

This isn't a call to thoughtlessness or recklessness. It's an invitation to a different kind of faith—one that doesn't demand certainty before obedience, one that can tolerate ambiguity while still moving forward.

Clarity may come. But usually not in time to make things easier. Only in time to help us keep walking forward.

The Burning Heart

Looking back, the disciples recognized their burning hearts. The presence of Christ had been real all along, creating warmth and movement within them even when their minds couldn't comprehend what was happening.

Your heart may be burning right now in ways you don't fully recognize. Christ may be walking beside you in circumstances that feel confusing, uncertain, or even painful. The full story may not reveal itself until much later.

But that doesn't mean you're walking alone.

And that doesn't mean you need to wait for complete understanding before taking the next faithful step.

The road continues. The companion walks beside you. And sometimes, that's enough.