Steven Hovater

Tag: Jesus

  • Why Do You Look for the Living Among the Dead?

    An Easter Sermon from Luke 24:5

    They were witnesses. They had seen it all.

    Mary Magdalene, a woman named Joanna, another woman named Mary, some others that had been, the text says, followers of Jesus since Galilee. They had come with him as he went around those cities of Galilee, teaching and doing signs of power. Somewhere along the way, as he picked up some disciples named Peter and James and John and the rest of those brothers, he picked up some sisters too—Mary, Joanna, some of these others. They became disciples of Jesus too. They left their lives, left their homes, and began to follow him.

    They were witnesses of the things that he had taught. Imagine them sitting there on the mountain. Perhaps when Jesus gave those incredible words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” you can imagine Mary nodding right along, or maybe Joanna’s jaw dropping in disbelief as Jesus proclaimed that those who were poor in spirit were the ones who were living the good life. Maybe they didn’t catch it on that mountain, but they caught it when Jesus said it in the Plain version that Luke records. Maybe they heard him teaching in the synagogue as it was his habit to teach there. Maybe the places that meant the most to them were the homes in which Jesus often found himself. Even though it wasn’t usually his house, he found himself hosting people. We know that once, Mary Magdalene of all people found herself a surprising guest. She wasn’t on the guest list, but she invited herself and found herself welcomed by Jesus.

    They saw all of that. They heard all of that. They were witnesses to the deeds of power. In the book of Acts, when the apostles give their testimony about Jesus, they’ll say things like, “He went about doing deeds of power, signs of power, healing people, healing all the sick, and releasing people from demons.” This is the sort of thing that Jesus did as he traveled around the region of Galilee, and that kind of ministry led people like Mary and Mary, (it seems like there are a lot of Marys)—and Joanna to become his disciples.

    At some point, maybe they saw something, or maybe they heard something, and they decided to be his disciples, his students. They decided, “That guy, this Jesus of Nazareth, that’s going to be my rabbi. I’m going to be his student. I’m going to follow him.” Maybe it was because he spoke, as the text often says, with authority, and they recognized within his voice the very voice of God. Maybe they perceived the wisdom of the things that Jesus had to say, or maybe they saw or experienced, even in their own bodies, some of that power of God, which was on evident display as Jesus traveled through Galilee. But at some point, they decided.

    At some point they had seen enough—and knew that they wanted to see more. They had seen enough to follow him. And so they, like those well-known fishermen, left their boats too, and they became people that were completely sold out to follow Jesus.

    They were witnesses when Jesus found himself teaching there in the temple or in the city of Jerusalem, as he finally made his way to what was the center of the Jewish religious landscape, the great temple of Jerusalem, a marker place in the story of God’s people. And they saw, they heard, Jesus getting into brawl after brawl with the theologians of his day, who would much rather that he followed every little letter, every suggested letter of the law, even if it meant excluding the great majority of the people.

    They saw Jesus going toe-to-toe with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Herodians—all the people who had power. They were there when Jesus gave them answer after answer that thwarted their attempts to discredit him. They were there when they saw Jesus getting the best of every objection. They were there—they were witnesses.

    They saw Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. They saw Jesus standing up and proclaiming that even the sinners and the tax collectors would enter into the kingdom of God before all those power brokers. They were witnesses when it all went bad, when the crowd turned against him. The text is very careful to tell us that not all of the disciples ran away, and in fact, it was some of these women disciples who were the ones who watched every step of the way.

    They were witnesses when the very crowd of people that had thrown their coats in the street on Palm Sunday became part of the mob that was shouting to crucify him. They were witnesses when Pilate washed his hands and said, “I’ll have nothing more to do with him,” but still turned him over. They were witnesses when Jesus was paraded through the streets of Jerusalem, carrying the cross on his back. They followed with the crowd—these women disciples who had come with him from Galilee were witnesses when Jesus was laid on the cross, when his hands and his feet were nailed to the cross, and he was lifted up. They were the witnesses that heard him say, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

    How else would we know that he said things like “I thirst,” except for the fact that there were witnesses there watching and listening the whole time? And some of those witnesses—Mary, Joanna—they were witnesses when the empire murdered Jesus. They were witnesses to the brutality and dehumanization that came with the cross, which sought to strip Jesus, like it did all of its other victims, to strip Jesus of his last shred of human dignity, his very humanity. They were witnesses when Pilate, by the authority of Caesar, made this Jesus not a person anymore. They were witnesses as the blood, the precious blood of Jesus, the life blood, drained out of his broken body. They heard him say, “It is finished.” They watched as he gave up his spirit. They were witnesses of his teaching, of his deeds of power, of his incredibly unexpected embrace, and they were witnesses of his death.

    Joseph of Arimathea, was on the high council but had disagreed with all of this, had objected when Jesus was being thrown before Pilate. He went to Pilate and said, “He’s died. Can I take his body and bury it?” And I don’t know if they were there for that part or not—I kind of doubt it—but they were witnesses when the body was removed from the cross. They were witnesses when it was wrapped hastily in a shroud as it was carried to a tomb cut out of rock.

    The text is careful to let us know that they watched as he was laid in the grave. They knew, it says, how he had been laid in the grave. They watched. They saw him be buried. They watched as the stone was rolled across the face of the grave. Mary, Joanna, and their friends—they were witnesses that it was over.

    When the long Sabbath had passed—a long Sabbath in which they had waited to go and finish the burial process of Jesus, to go and anoint his body, to spread perfume and ointments on his body as was the custom of that day to honor his body—these women had waited over a Sabbath, honoring God’s command. Even though they were desperate to go and pay their rabbi this great final honor, they waited through that night and the next day.

    Luke says that in the last verse of Luke 23, “They returned and prepared.” They returned to their homes after the burial, and they prepared the spices and ointments. Imagine the scent of that, the aroma of that in the home. They prepared these burial spices, and it’s not something that just wafts out of the kitchen immediately, right? And I can imagine—it says, “On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment”—but I can’t imagine that being all that restful. Imagine a restless rest, a Sabbath in which there is no outward activity, but commotion in the heart, the sense of things that have been left undone that desperately need to be done, the helplessness of not being able to do for their rabbi that last great honoring task. And I imagine the aroma of the house that reminded them in every moment of where Jesus was, waiting for them.

    But Luke says, “On the first day of the week at early dawn”—no sense in waiting around, right? At early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.

    They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground in this angelic encounter where they are at the most confused moment of their lives. Their confusion turns into fear when they encounter the angelic. They are absolutely at their wits’ end in this moment, and they receive this word: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” He is not here, but he is risen. That’s what these witnesses were told in this critical moment that we come to celebrate even all these hundreds of years later—a moment in which the ones who were the very witnesses of his death are told that what they knew as bedrock reality—he was dead, that’s how people stay—in that moment, they are told that reality has been broken.

    This question that the angels ask them I find to be a profound question, and not just for those witnesses, who were honestly just doing the best they could in the moment. Why were they looking for the living among the dead? Well, they didn’t know, right? Of course, I feel like the angels could have cut them a little slack in the moment. But there are still many, many, many people who look for Jesus among the dead, who still count Jesus as just one of the dead ones, one of the many, many characters of history who came, had something to say, did what he did, and died. And I would tell you, just as people who have bothered to come on this Easter morning to church, I would tell you that sometimes even we disciples do the same thing.

    Just like these women, we can be people who are ready to celebrate the things that Jesus said or the great powers of the miracles that he performed. We might even think of ourselves as witnesses to the cross, as people who speak to the gift of Jesus’s death, where Jesus allowed his blood to be poured out for people. The church often gladly celebrates the cross, and yet sometimes I wonder if we might need to hear the question that these faithful witnesses were asked on that Sunday morning. We might need to answer the question about why sometimes we still treat Jesus like he’s dead—why he just came, and his life was taken away from him, and he was killed. He was poured out, and maybe we even act like that is the result. As a result of that death, we have been given our forgiveness. We’ve been given the grace that allows us to know that God still loves us.

    I can tell you, you can know all of that, you can celebrate all that in the name of Jesus, sing songs about that, and still act like Jesus is dead. The Jews came to the temple all the time and gave things for sacrifices in which they were forgiven, and they didn’t expect any of those sheep or bulls to get up off of the altar. Jesus’s sacrifice, even for our sake, for our atonement, doesn’t necessitate Easter. For many, many people, I think they’ve treated our faith like Good Friday is enough without moving onto the rest of the story.

    Jesus, the crucified Messiah, has become the living Lord. He is the king. He’s the one who is empowered and enthroned at the right hand of God. Jesus is not just a story of the way back when, but of living presence now. The story of Jesus is ongoing. We ourselves take on that story, even in our most common rituals. We say things like this from time to time: we come and we take the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper. In that moment, as Paul says, you “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes”. It is a recognition of the body broken. It is a recognition of the blood poured out, but it is also a recognition that Jesus lives and that we await his return. It is not just a memorial for a fallen teacher. It is anticipation of the living risen Lord.

    Baptism also represents the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus, and I’m going to tell you, I think we’d have a lot harder time signing people up if it only represented the death and the burial. Like if you went into the water, and that was it—I just feel like the kind of baptism takes on a different tone! It is the rising up out of the water, the living in the new life as Paul says—to live, to rise, to live in newness of life, where the sinful part of us is laid to rest, and we seek to live to follow Jesus in his life and his new living resurrected life.

    These rituals are just on the edge of it, but in all the other parts of our life, the same is true. Paul in Colossians is speaking to disciples and even recognizes their baptism in their resurrection in that moment. “If you have been raised with Christ”—that’s what Colossians 3:1 says, and I’m sure that that is about this baptismal moment. “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” In other words, he’s not saying don’t think about anything that is happening in this world. What he is saying is even as we live now, there is a way of life that is seeking the things of God even among this fallen place. Don’t go chasing death. Don’t seek death—seek now, seek life, seek the living Jesus. Seek the living Jesus here on Sunday morning. Seek the living Jesus tomorrow on Monday. Seek the living Jesus in your neighborhood. Seek him in your community. Seek living in Jesus wherever he can be found—in your family, amongst your friends and your neighbors. God is alive and is at work even in our city.

    God is here in his presence. Yesterday, because of all the rain, (terrible on the day we were supposed to have our Easter egg hunt), we put a bunch of eggs all over this auditorium. I know that’s strange, after all, there’s no bunny in the Jesus story. There are no disciples looking for eggs. But I do like that there’s a seeking game in the midst of all this, and all those little rascals and youngsters who hopefully today have brought some of their candy to share with you, were seeking after Sour Patch Kids and Nerds and gummy sweets. .

    Those kids that were seeking are a sign to all of us to seek Jesus—not a dead Jesus whose history has moved on, but to seek the living Jesus. I want to proclaim the gospel to you today that if you are seeking Jesus, you will find him. Even beyond that, I want you to know that he’s already started hunting you down.

    The story goes here that the disciples, these women, at the tomb—they don’t meet him there, but they go with this message that he is risen. They go tell the disciples, and Jesus will show up there. In the meantime, as Luke tells the story, there are a couple of disciples who are just completely dumbfounded by all of this that’s happened, and they go on a journey back home. They’re going from Jerusalem. They’re leaving town. It’s all wrapped up and they’re leaving. Jesus finds them on the way, and that’s where the story will go from now. Now the seeking is being done by Jesus, and he goes on and he’ll find people all over Jerusalem that didn’t know to look for him. Then he’ll start finding people in the rest of Judea and Samaria.

    They’ll tell a story about somebody who was on his way seeking disciples of Jesus to persecute—a man by the name of Saul—and it says that he was persecuting Jesus. He was persecuting disciples. One of my favorite little Greek flips in the whole New Testament is this: it says that he was seeking Jesus—seeking disciples—but in the end, it is Jesus that seeks him out.

    In fact, Paul will use the very same word that he uses to talk about what it meant to persecute Christians—to seek them out and chase them down—in the book of Philippians, he uses the same word to talk about chasing Jesus, but now he is chasing Jesus quite differently. It says he reaches for Jesus—because Christ has already reached form. He says, “Not that I’ve already obtained all this or reached the goal, but I press on to make it my own, because Jesus Christ has made me his own.”

    In that language, he’s saying, “I’m chasing Jesus. I press on for that for which Christ Jesus laid hold of me.” The gospel is that the living Jesus is now the one doing the seeking. He’s the one calling people to himself. And the cast of characters that he is calling to himself—just like it was with the Marys and with Joanna—are not the people that look like they fit in the story. But he is calling people, and he’s calling the outcast and the people that don’t fit in. Some of the people who are willing to lay down power and some of the people who never had it to start with—he’s calling all those people. He’s saying, “You will be my witnesses too”—not witnesses of the death of Jesus, but witnesses of his life.

    And my friends, he is calling you to that very task. He is calling you who have come today to celebrate and honor him by singing about the living Jesus. He is going to send you from this place as his witnesses that Jesus, like the angel said, is risen, that he is alive.

    For Paul, in places like the passage in Colossians 3 I was reading, that witness sometimes comes in very simple things, really normal things. It’s not in giving fancy speeches about Jesus or things like that, but in simply laying down some of the death stuff. Paul says things like, Put to death whatever is earthly: sexual immortality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed. Lay down things like anger and wrath, and malice and slander and abusive language. Right after he talks about being raised with Christ, he calls us to lay down all those things that were dead.

    New life for Paul is the stuff like: as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness and humility, and meekness and patience. Bear with one another, forgive each other. For Paul, the witness to Jesus’ life sometimes is not in any dramatic turn. It’s in the simple trading of malice for kindness, bitterness for peace, deceit for truthfulness. And in all those things, all of those little decisions, we bear witness to Jesus.

    Today, some of you have come into this place and maybe you just got dragged here by your grandma. That’s fine. Maybe you came because that religious friend of yours finally persuaded you: “OK, I’ll go and give it a crack.” Man, I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I know who’s looking for you, and Jesus is welcoming you into his people. He wants to give you life, the same life that God demonstrated in raising Jesus from the dead. Jesus wants to give that life to you. Come, come join in this group of witnesses. Join in the story of what the living Jesus is doing in the world. Stop looking for death. Stop chasing the dead things. Start chasing after Jesus.

  • Technology is Pedagogical

    (Or: Why I Made a Sermon Design App.)

    The tools that you use to do a task shape the way you think about the nature of the task.

    This is not a new insight. After all, most people have heard the axiom: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

    That principle is part of the reason for the coding work I’ve done adjacent to my work as a minister. I wanted to dive into the process of tool-building, because it helped me better understand the nature of the work itself. Sermon Design was the first foray into trying to build a tool for myself and my colleagues. A couple of observations led me into that rabbit hole.

    If I went about the work of trying to create a sermon in a word processor, then I tended to approach the sermon like it was an essay. I wrote the sermon, making choices of style and rhetoric like a writer. I would use very precise language, which is fine, but the language was often dense—something that helps good writing feel powerful, but makes oral delivery feel heavy and heady. A densely written sermon often comes off as too intellectual in the actual moment of its delivery. They are harder to listen to because the hearer has to process everything as quickly as it is read, and sermons written like that often don’t give the hearer the chance to process. Writing for speaking requires a great amount of experience if the spoken word is to feel natural in the moment.

    There’s much more to be said about the differences between written and spoken media, but for my purposes here, I want to simply note that the tool for writing—the word processor—subtly influences the kind of thing produced in the end. Indeed, different kinds of word processing apps probably influence the process sin their own way—Word, Pages, and Google Docs1 all exert slightly different bits of influence on the writers that use them.

    On the other hand, sometimes I’ve thought through what I want to do in a sermon by plotting it directly in slide design software. My app of choice is Keynote, but the general influence of building a sermon there will be similar to using its siblings PowerPoint, Google Slides, or something like Canva2. Depending on the version of the software and the preacher’s usage, it may train the preacher to think about the sermon as a sequence of points, or perhaps as a presentation of information. That sort of process will tend to create sermons with flow and structure, but which may be much looser in their detail.

    I’ll leave it to the reader to consider whether “sermon as essay” or “sermon as presentation” is better, but the point is that the kind of tool used to prepare the sermon will heavily influence what the sermon becomes. That observation is what drove me to really consider trying to create a tool that reflected the kind of process that would lead to the kind of sermon I wanted to create.

    The process of coding forced me to slow down and consider what a sermon actually is. It was a vehicle for exploring how the process of creating it contributes to what it eventually becomes. It made me think of where a sermon comes from, from the initial space of discerning what our church’s preaching schedule should look like to the release of the manuscript that will become the preacher’s guide in the moment of the sermon itself. It tries to honor the process of carefully listening to the text and considering the process of building rhetoric for the specific purposes of a sermon.

    In some ways, the app that resulted from that process of coding and reflecting is aspirational. It’s a process I’m reaching towards each week, even if the various stages are somewhat incomplete. The app is also pretty idiosyncratic, meaning that it reflects my ideal process, not necessarily anybody else’s. This app is sort of my contribution to homiletical instruction; it’s a sort of tutor in the process of creating a sermon.

    To mix axioms, I wouldn’t argue that everyone needs to reinvent the hammer. You don’t have to learn to code to consider the tools you use and the influence they have on you. But I do think that process of discerning the way we approach our work can give us insight into the work itself. Ideally, we come out of that process making sure that our proper task is being pursued with proper tools, instead of thoughtlessly letting the technologies available to us, in vogue at the moment, drive the way we go about the work of preaching.

    Sermon Design 3 is an app for creating intentional sermons. It’s available on the macOS and iOS app stores.

    1. There are many more, of course. For example, I’ve used Ulysses, a minimalist WP for years. Ironically, it took me a second to know how to insert a footnote here because I’m writing in my blog’s web editor, and the feature was buried. I almost gave up, which would have been an example of the tool and its assumptions changing what I wanted to create! This happens all the time, where the tool subconsciously shapes the product by making some things easier and some things harder. ↩︎
    2. Again, though I’m speaking of the broad effect of this kind of app, the particularities matter! The features that each of these apps brings to the front, and which are buried will subtly influence the way the preacher thinks about the nature of the sermon being created. ↩︎

  • Find Out

    A Sermon from Ephesians 5:3-20

    Central Church of Christ
    Little Rock, Arkansas
    March 22, 2026

    We’ve had a really full morning already, and my heart is full from this hearted morning in our worship together. Thank you so much for all of what we’ve already had: our family blessings, the reflections on Mike’s death, our shared communion—all these are part of what it means to be a community together, to share a life together. Highs and lows, everything in between, are part of what it means to live together and to be a people, to be a family. I’m grateful for everything that we feel together this morning.

    Let’s have a moment of prayer, and then I’ll get into the book of Ephesians. This practice, what we call a sermon, is not just a speech. It’s a moment that we create in our worship each week, holding space for the word of God amongst us, to listen to God together. We’ll do that here after we pray together.

    Lord God, Giver of all good things, we celebrate the great gifts from your hand today and all of these little ones. As we together as a community are about the work of trying to help raise these kids together, we pray that you would be with us. And God, we pray that you would honor yourself by training these kids to be men and women of God, followers of Jesus, and we pray that they and their parents would receive a lot of help around here. Lord, we need it, and so we pray that you would by your Spirit work through that.

    And Father, for those that are holding grief in their hearts today, we also pray that you would be with them, because today reminds them of their own struggles with parenting or infertility, or because they’re holding in their hearts the loss of somebody like Mike, who has been a part of so many of our lives.

    Oh God, we pray that you would be with us in our grief too, and so in the celebration and in the mourning that we all share together, in the lament that we cry out and in the songs of joy that come from our hearts, oh God, we pray that you would be with us in it all. And we pray that your name is honored by the way that we live through the mountaintops, in the valleys, and all the places in between. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.

    The word of God that we’ve been listening to together for a while is the book of Ephesians. In Ephesians, Paul lays out in these magisterial first three chapters to tell us about what God has done in breaking through what is our sin, the things that are corrupted in our lives, to bring us back to himself, to rescue us. The great rescue mission of God in which God takes the initiative, not waiting on us, but God takes the initiative to come and bring salvation to us and give us new life, to tear down the things that are walls between different kinds of people, to break those things down so that we can really know what it is like to have peace with each other and peace with God. Ephesians is all about that great story of God’s invasion, God’s initiative to reset right what has been so wrong.

    But we would be wrong to say that just because God is taking the initiative that there is no part for us to play. And as Ephesians tells that story, as Paul writes about what it means to live out, to walk out the implications of those truths in our life, finally we come in chapters 4 and 5 to where we just need to deal with some realities of the way that we live.

    Chapter 5, in the first couple of verses we talked about last week, contains one of my favorite passages in all of the Bible: “Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children and live in love, walk in love, live a life of love”—your translation may say—”as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” And this is the orienting reality, the foundational truth on which everything else that comes after has to rest, has to be supported by. You can’t—if you don’t start with love, then none of the other stuff works.

    But Paul, as always, doesn’t just hold love as some abstracted ideal. It’s not just a word that we say, it’s not a feeling that we have, but it is something that changes how we live in the world, how we treat each other, and even how we think about each other in the world.

    And so verse three, the text goes on—and this is our text for today—”But fornication”—it means just any kind of sexual immorality, any kind of corrupted pursuit of sex purely for pleasure without any sense of what God’s intention for it is—”impurity of any kind, greed, must not even be mentioned among you”—shouldn’t even be talked about, it doesn’t have a place in our conversation—”as is proper among the saints.” It says “entirely out of place is obscene, silly, vulgar talk, but instead, let there be thanksgiving. Be sure of this: no fornicator or impure person, and no one who is greedy—that is, an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes on those who are disobedient. Therefore do not be associated with them, for once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.”

    It’s one of those places that Paul speaks about the deep contrast of the world, and in the language that he uses here, it’s the language of light and of darkness.

    He’s really speaking of that in the sense of illumination. In darkness, you just can’t see well. You bump into things. You don’t know where you’re going. You can’t clearly see the realities of what is laid out, even if it is just right under your nose. In the light, things get shown to be what they truly are. You can really see where things are, the nature of things, the shape of things. You can find your place in the world. Darkness is disorienting; light is orienting. It helps you find out where you need to go, what you need to do next. But in the darkness, there is only confusion.

    Paul, right here in this space, talks about what it means to be children of light. I love what verse nine says. I think this is one of those verses that aren’t as well known as they should be, but he says, “For the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” Everything that’s good and right and true has within it the seed—or it’s the fruit of being able to see well and being illuminated in our minds, in our spirits. Good things, good fruit, comes out of being able to see clearly, he’s saying. In contrast, nothing good comes out of everything being completely dark.

    Ironically, we only turned on half of the lights on the switches this morning, and I feel like even though it’s kind of disruptive to turn them on in the middle—I was like, I cannot in good faith preach this sermon with half of our lights out. So we may need to do some lightbulb work around here sometime this next week. Light matters.

    Just as Paul thinks that in the fruit of the light are all these good things and right things and true things, in the darkness is all illusion. The darkness doesn’t understand. It doesn’t really see things clearly. Darkness, for Paul, is where you’re bumping around and you don’t have any sense about life. You don’t have any clear understanding.

    You can’t really get a feel for what’s true or what’s not, and you’re kind of just playing guesswork with the realities of life. The biggest word that we use as a metaphor—this is one of those metaphors to talk about what it means to be separated from God, to be in the darkness—but the one that we use more than any other, of course, is that people who are separated from God are lost.

    Sometimes we use that almost to mean just like a technical description of being religiously out of bounds. A lost person is just simply somebody that doesn’t know God. But it’s a metaphor, right? Being lost is a metaphor, and it’s a painful one. To be lost is to not know where you’re going, to be confused about where you are in the world and where you’re supposed to be. Being lost doesn’t feel good to anybody, does it? Being lost feels disorienting. It doesn’t feel like you’re having a great time. It feels like you’re in panic mode because you don’t know how to get to the place that you’re supposed to be.

    That’s what darkness feels like for Paul. Darkness and lostness are about being in these places where you can’t get your bearings right because you don’t have the right ability to see clearly in the world. In the beginning of this little section here, we got some descriptions of kinds of behaviors that indicate that sort of thing for Paul. Just like he has a description of what living in the light looks like—good, right, true, living a life of love just as Christ loved us and gave himself for us—those are all images of light for Paul.

    The darkness is broken sexuality—sexuality just kind of run amuck, pursuing things for its own nature, for its own pleasure. Of course, Paul would, I think, be horrified to think about the way that our culture thinks about sexuality, but please don’t be naïve about it.

    The Roman world had its own distortions too, and the way that the Roman world thought about sexuality was something that was really truthfully oriented towards power and status in a lot of ways. It was just as corrupt as many of the forms of distorted sexuality that exist in our world. Paul would look around at that and say, “To bring that idea, to allow your sense of your body and your body’s desires to completely drive you so that you use it as a force to just satisfy yourself, but you aren’t thinking about what it means to be a gift to somebody else in the world—that doesn’t have any place in a community of life. That’s darkness. It’s bumping around without any sense or any understanding about the real truth of things.”

    Paul also mentions this: greed is something that does the same thing. You can be so consumed with your own desire to acquire and possess that it blinds you to the realities of the world. You don’t have any sense about the spirit of God because of your desire to hold on and possess. Out of proportion greed is—I mean, we don’t think about it as related to sexuality. Who would put those two things in the same corner? Well, Paul would.

    And then amazingly, he puts something else into the space, and he talks about just the way that we speak—vulgar, silly, obscene talk. He says it doesn’t have any place among you. And I gotta be honest, at this point, I’m like, “Come on, Paul, just a little silly talk, all right?”

    I don’t know. I do think there is something—now, I think the Bible in many places evidences what it means to take yourself not too seriously. I think a sense of humor is not a bad thing. But part of what Paul is talking about is the sort of speech that doesn’t know how to put serious things into serious language. Actually, it’s one of my favorite words here. It’s one of my favorite Greek words when he talks about silly talk here. This is a great Greek word that nobody knows, but we kinda do. You ready for it? Come on, guys, at least play along with me.

    Pretend you want to be as nerdy as I do. Sometimes you guys want to know this word—this Greek word. Yeah, all right, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s “morologia”—moron words. Okay, he’s saying, “Hey y’all, stop using your moron words.” By the way, if I hear somebody say that at some point this week at Central, you get extra bonus stars. Okay, I got some more words—you got some moron words, got some moron talk, right?

    What Paul is saying here is the kind of talk that doesn’t have wisdom associated with it. It’s not just making dumb jokes. Moron talk for Paul is the kind of words that underline a life of foolishness instead of wise talk that has some kind of sense about the way things work in the world. Moron words for Paul—I’m gonna keep saying that—moron words for Paul are the kind of words that urge you to not take life seriously, and they show up in all kinds of forms.

    Chad and Shannon and I were talking with a group of students earlier this week, and we talked about how racism often hides behind the phrase “I was just joking,” and how many other forms of evil do the same thing. Where they send to take something sinister that should be taken seriously, and then they just say, “Oh, I was just making a joke. Don’t take it. Don’t worry about it.” But to take some form of evil—racism or anything else—and then hide it and pretend that it’s okay because it was a joke, that’s moron words. That’s the kind of foolish talk that I think we’re speaking of here—words that really do affect the way that you think about yourself or the way you think about other people or the way that you think about the world. And when you treat those things flippantly, Paul would say that kind of language that distorts the truth—that’s like turning out the light switch in your room. That kind of language, that kind of foolish talk, makes things darker. It hides truth.

    It’s harder to understand or to have any sense in the world. And yeah, I think Paul would have a lot to say about the sexual distortions of our world. I think Paul would have a lot to say about the greed that’s so rampant in our world. Man, I’m telling you the truth—Paul would have a whole lot to say about the moral decay in our society too, and the way that we use language to hide the truth.

    All of this is a description of what darkness looks like for Paul, and he points out—I mean, what he’s probably partly saying is that all of this is living in obscurity. It’s living in a non-reality. It’s living in an illusion. It’s a way of living in a world without actually being able to see things truly. And Paul wants to invite people that are living in that sort of dark space—he wants to invite us into the light, to come into the light. And he says the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.

    And then we come to verse 10. There’s one of my favorite verses in Ephesians. He says, “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.” It goes on: “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, ‘Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’”

    Paul says all of you that are living in darkness, that have these spaces—maybe you don’t think about living in darkness, a space of darkness in your life—Paul wants to encourage us to flip on all the light switches, to turn the light on, to rouse from our slumber, to wake up. Wake up and turn the lights on and see things for how they really are. And this phrase that he uses in verse 10 kind of sums all that up: “Try to find out what it is that pleases the Lord.”

    This is what we’re trying to do as a group, as a church, as a people. Our mission of following Jesus together—doesn’t that by necessity involve trying to walk with Jesus so that we see things well? To wake up and find out, Paul says, and it seems to me to be exactly the kind of thing that I want to dedicate my life to. I think we’re all called to pursue with dedication finding out what pleases God.

    And all of our discipline that we have right now—we marked off time where we sit in unbearable heat and listen to somebody talk about the scriptures. Right? OK, I can see where you’re coming from. What are we doing here? What in the world are you guys doing here today? You drove by who knows how many people out jogging and having happy times in parks, lots of houses where people are sleeping in on Sunday morning. What are you doing here, you crazy folk?

    Are we not all here together in part—I know there’s a lot of things that we’re doing together—but isn’t part of it the pursuit of finding out what God really wants? We come and we share bread and wine together. We listen to the word of God, and we’re trying—we’ve dedicated ourselves to understanding what it is that really pleases God. And that may mean shining light in some dark, hidden corners of our lives, and it may mean turning on light and trying to find ways of illuminating what has been hidden before. But in the end, it is for everything to come out into the light, for the truth to really be known. And I get that that’s scary, but it’s good. And at the end of the day, a life lived in the light of God’s truth is just better than a life hidden in the darkness of sin. Get up, wake up! That’s what Paul wants to do—not to waste our life.

    But the text goes on in verse 15 to say, “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people, but as wise, making the most of the time, for the days are evil.”

    He says you have lived in this darkness with all these kinds of parts of your life that are just sort of hidden away. Come out, come out into the light! See things as they really are and live well. Make the most of the time, Paul says. He’s trying to help us not just to not throw away our lives, but to actually live them well—to live our lives in the fullness of the good things Paul here is calling important.

    Note that he’s not just saying this to people who are pagans outside of the church—he’s calling people who are already following Jesus, and he’s saying make sure you do it in the most awake way possible. Come out into the light and wake up.

    Now, you may not connect it so much, but when Paul goes on from that, he says, “So don’t be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” And then he says, “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

    I think what he does here at the end—he tells the people of the church who are thinking about what it means to live in the light, trying to live away from all of the distortions of life that are possible—Paul here comes to the end, and when he calls them to make the most of the time, it’s remarkable that he lands on precisely this thing that we’re doing together right here. It kind of ends in worship. Make the most of the time—not with drunken parties, but with songs with your brothers and sisters and with gratitude and thanksgiving. Paul, I think, is leading us toward a life that holds worship central.

    Worship is about calling truth out into the world. It’s about seeing things clearly, having these moments where we are aware of the presence of God, and we allow our attention to God to help us reflect on our lives and to think about what we need to do and living differently. And ultimately it comes to a place of gratitude—that’s where he ends here, right? Giving thanks for everything. Grateful, thankful worship. It’s a good ending place for this text.

    You know, life in the darkness where we are completely bumbling around and we’re lost and we have the despair of having to pretend like things aren’t really the way they are—that kind of life leads towards frustration and resentment. A lost life lived in the darkness means things are constantly being corrupted, bent out of their true purpose. So even the things that should have been good, that we thought were going to be great gifts, they end up being broken and they end up causing more pain than we ever could have imagined.

    But in the light—in the light—we receive the things that are meant to be gifts as good and righteous and true. In the light we end up being able to see things for what they really are, and at the end of the day, they’re gifts. They’re gifts. Everything in life is a gift.

    For a long time, my habit in prayer has been to call God “the giver of all good things,” and that’s not just flowery language. It’s a bit of theology to remind myself that when I speak to God, one of the most fundamental ways that I know God is that God is the one who has just given us everything. Everything good comes from God. And when the lights are on, you can see it. When the lights are on, you can receive it. When you’re living awake, you begin to know that the things that are good in your life—no matter how winding the road was that brought them to you—the good things in your life have come from God.

    The person who lives in the darkness doesn’t get that—they don’t notice that they can’t see it. But when God has taken the initiative and broken into our world, it’s like he races around turning on all the light switches in the house so that you can finally see it. And it might feel like the house is in disorder. There might be some stuff I gotta get picked up and moved back into place. There might be some stuff that’s gotta get changed in your life when God turns on the lights. At the end of the day, it’s not for your shame—it’s for your good. It’s so that you can receive and hold and know the good things that are the gift of God.

    For Paul, living life in the darkness isn’t some life of pleasure that it’s just a shame that you have to turn away when you turn to Jesus. For Paul, when you turn to the gospel, you turn to Jesus and you allow God to turn all the lights on in your life. It allows you to see all the gifts. It allows you to receive the good things that God wants to put in your life.

    When Paul says, “Find out what pleases the Lord,” find out the will of God—the will of God is to bless you. The will of God is to give the greatest gifts of life. I call God the giver of all good things, and I think for us, God knows that what he wants us to be in the end is just people who know how to receive the blessings.

    Listen, this is hard in some ways for us. In some ways, it causes us to live differently in the world. It’s not just harsh words—it’s an invitation. So my friends, I just want to say it with Paul today, and I want to invite you into the light. I want to invite you, and if that means that you need to let some of the light switches be turned on in your life and make some changes, my friends, repent. Repent and change. Do differently.

    Repentance—the call to repentance—is not meant to be one out of shame or anything like that. Repentance itself is a good gift from God. It’s an invitation that says, “Come and receive the good gifts of God.” And if you’ve been in a place where you’ve been hanging out with some Jesus folk, found yourself in church this morning, but haven’t quite taken those steps to go and be one of his people, come into the light. Come to Jesus. Receive what Jesus wants to give you, and it’s all the good things of life, my friend. So I can give that invitation to you, and the rest of the church with me too. We want you to join us in finding out what pleases God. Join us in this life of serving Jesus together. You’re invited to do that while we stand together and sing.

  • Imitators

    A Sermon on Ephesians 5:1-2
    Central Church of Christ,
    Little Rock, Arkansas
    March 15, 2026

    Ephesians 5:1-2 says “Walk in the way of love just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.”

    Ephesians 5:1-2, the text that Christopher read for us just a moment ago, feels something like the punchline of the book. We’ve been hustling through this cascade of things that God has done for us and that he has changed about our lives in bringing about our salvation and bringing us together, breaking down the dividing walls that live between people and making us one. Then in the last chapter, in chapter 4, we really see this set of things that defines the contours of what a new life looks like in Jesus—what it means to turn away from certain behaviors that are harmful to other people and to turn towards God.

    And we finally get to this place, and it’s almost like we have rushed right up to this last space. If you remember, the very last verse of chapter four says, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander and all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.” And really, that sets the stage for these first couple of verses. This is the windup for these two verses that I think are really enough for a sermon here: “Be imitators of God as beloved children and live in love. Live a life of love, walk in love”—this is one of the walking verses—”as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

    It is good for us to spend a fair amount of time thinking about the different things that we turn away from as we come to follow God. Here is the great single summary of what it is that we are turning to, and for Paul, what we are turning to is above everything else—it is a life of love. It is walking in love. It is what it means to imitate Christ. At the end of the day, it is to love each other, to love our neighbors, to love strangers, even to love enemies.

    Love is a word that we have all the time in our society. It means a billion different things to everybody, and to be honest, it means something different to me thirty different times a day. And sometimes it’s hard to discern whether or not the life that I live really is a life of love or not. Is it a life of real love—in other words, dedicated to the good of other people that are around me—or is it the kind of love that is more interested in sort of putting on a good face for my own desires, just so that I can get what I want at the end of the day?

    In that magisterial chapter in First Corinthians 13, Paul puts some directions about what love looks like in the household of God, and it’s worth reading again—not just on your wedding day.

    Paul says, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

    Can we hold up for just a second and remember that this isn’t just rhetoric? I mean, if you take the things that are on the front end of his “but have not,” it actually looks like a pretty doggone holy life, doesn’t it? I mean, notice all the things that make up his portrait of what could be on the other side of the scales. It’s miraculous gifts of tongues of angels, it is the prophetic power, the ability to speak with the voice of God, understanding of all mysteries, the kind of faith that literally moves mountains, the sort of sacrifice of giving away everything that you own, and even handing over your very body to martyrdom. I mean, that kind of feels like a lot. Does it feel like a lot to you?

    It’s remarkable how quickly the early church recognized—it’s absolutely remarkable how quickly they recognized—that you could get a lot of the religious forms down right and still have something hollowed out, missing from the middle. I mean, they’re just twenty years into the life of the church. Paul knows that it could be possible that you could have all of the things that happen in worship. And in their day, this is the space of the miraculous: speaking of tongues, the prophetic things that were happening in their worship, these incredible acts of the Spirit. Paul recognizes very early that you could do that but not have a heart of love. He recognizes that you could be a person who has incredible faith in God and even a great understanding of the ways of God. You could be an absolute scholar and yet have something missing in the heart, still have a space in your heart that’s devoid of love. And I mean, it’s crazy how quickly they recognize that you could live so sacrificially that you could literally give away everything that you had—give it to the poor. That you could even go so far as to become a martyr, and yet somewhere in your heart, in the space where it really matters, you failed to cultivate love. And Paul says all of those other things, and it’s his way of saying not just those specific things, not just these four categories. He’s saying everything—everything that you can imagine about the way that you construct whatever it is that Christianity could look like. All of it without love falls apart. All of the things that look right, that could be really impressive, without a heart of love, those things are worthless—like a noisy gong, like a clanging cymbal. They’re just not worth anything.

    It’s not just poetry for a wedding day. It’s a picture about what the most important part of discipleship is. So Paul goes on to say that love is patient, it is kind. It is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. It’s not irritable. Love is not resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing—it does not celebrate wrongdoing—but it rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And the next thing, of course, he says is that love never ends. This is a vision about what it means to live as a person of faith.

    Now it’s not just a solo picture of love. Love is not the only thing, but it’s the foundational thing. In fact, if you pay attention to what he says on the other side, he says that love is the thing that produces all these things. But you can’t go from the outside, and you can’t start with being patient and then patient your way into love. You don’t start with just kindness and get to love. You don’t start with envy—or the lack of envy—or root out boastfulness or arrogance from your life, root out rudeness, and then somehow get to love. You can’t just stop insisting on your own way, and eventually that turns into love. It’s the other way around. Paul is giving us descriptions about what love is. Love is rooted in our hearts, and love is the anchor of our being. These are the sorts of things that come out—these kinds of things which sound a lot like the fruits of the Spirit, right? These sorts of things are what happens when our heart is given over to love.

    Now, in this passage, it’s a little unclear about what he means—what kind of love or who is the object. Paul doesn’t do any of that kind of defining work, and frankly, I’m not sure that he particularly would care about those distinctions in this context. It’s really about love as the definition of who we are, the definition of what it is that God is creating on earth through us—the kind of new community. That’s why it fits so well in our text in Ephesians, because for the community of faith, love is a starting point. It is a commitment that leads to all the other outgrowth.

    In fact, all the things that Paul is saying about the old life and the way that we used to live—those are things that ultimately find their remedy in love. Love from God, the way that God has loved us, and also the love that we in turn have for God. “Be imitators of God,” he says. This is what comes out of you when you’ve been loved. Be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore, be imitators of God.

    Imitation is Paul’s ultimate way, his ultimate lens of thinking about what the difference between the old way and the new way is. He’s not saying to all the people in the church there in Ephesus, “Don’t you guys see how awesome you are? So love each other well.” He doesn’t say, “You’ve been so blessed to have a wonderful church family. Make sure that you love them well.” Instead, he roots his call to love not in any kind of human action whatsoever.

    He says this is the way that God sees you—that the gracious forgiveness of God is for you a sign of the great love of God. So imitate that. Start there. Start with the imitation of Christ. Start with the imitation of God, and then let that love spread out to the way that you treat the people around you.

    Imitation of the way of Jesus is right at the heart of what it means to be a people who follow Jesus together. That’s why we reserve time every year to make sure that we’re rooting ourselves in the gospel stories so that we understand how Jesus spoke, how Jesus acted, and we can get a picture of what his love for people really looks like in the story of Jesus.

    Even as we take it this morning, what we’ve done today in sharing communion together is imitating a story of Christ—really play-acting something that happened in the story of Jesus where Jesus himself, at the end of his life right before he’s crucified, holds bread up to his disciples and reminds them that he is sacrificing himself for them. And then he goes on and he says, “So do this in remembrance of me.”

    And you know what? I think most of the time we take it as meaning “do this in remembrance of me”—take bread and take juice or wine in remembrance, to practice communion or the Lord’s Supper. “Do this”—you know, this practice that you do on Sunday mornings together—”do that in remembrance of me.” But maybe what he means is, “Just as I have given up my body for you, do that in remembrance of me. Just as I have poured out my blood for the sake of you, don’t just take in remembrance of me, but maybe you do this for other people in remembrance of me.”

    You understand what I’m saying? It’s not just a ritual. It’s an ethic. It’s not just something that we receive—it’s a new way of life. When we practice this communion ritual, what we’re doing in this moment is we’re rehearsing the story of Jesus’s great sacrifice, of Jesus’s great act of love for us.

    We rehearse it and remember that that’s what it means to follow Jesus. To reflect on our other great ritual, this practice of baptism, where we come into the story, we’re doing the exact same thing. And baptism is not just a place where we are washed in the blood of Jesus and where we are therefore forgiven of our sins. It is that—it’s great and I love that it’s that—but just like communion, it’s also a space where we are giving ourselves over. We’re saying, “Just as Jesus died, was killed and buried and resurrected for the sake of other people, I take on that story for myself.” In other words, in places where it’s my life or somebody else’s, I choose to offer my life. Where it’s my simple preferences versus somebody else’s, I choose what’s good for the other person. When it’s my rights versus somebody else’s, I look to the way of Jesus and justice. Just as Jesus was killed and was resurrected, I’ve taken that story on for myself for the sake of other people. I don’t just benefit from the ritual—it’s not just something that I receive. Baptism isn’t just a ritual; it’s an ethic.

    Communion and baptism—really what we’re doing is we’re rehearsing the story of Jesus because we are called to imitate the story of Jesus in our lives. These are signs not just of the love of God, but of the love of God which goes through us to each other, into our neighbors and strangers and the enemies around us. This is what it means to be people who follow Jesus together. We follow him to the water. We follow him to the table and we follow him in love at every chance we get.

    They say that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but of course what Paul is calling us to is not just to flatter God, but to worship God. And when we think about imitation in the sense of what it is that we are recognizing in God and that we are trying to follow and imitate God’s love in our own lives, we will often come to the limits of our own capacities. We will come to places where we know that love should look different, but we just kind of fall apart and we fail and we mess up and we let that selfishness that so corrupts our lives—we let it kind of come to the front again.

    When I think about the relationship between imitation and worship, what I think is both the ways that we are called to do what God has shown us—to imitate that story, to live it out in our own ways—and also we come back to the table and we go to the water and we recognize not just that this is just a teaching that we imitate, but it’s also something that demonstrates the difference between ours and God’s. In our attempts, in our broken attempts to imitate God as often as we can, we will often find ourselves brushing up against our own corruption, the sin of our own hearts.

    And you know what? There is an element when we are confronted by that—when we’re confronted by the guilt, we’re confronted by the bad feelings that come with guilt, we are confronted by sometimes shame, the embarrassment at the way that we treat other people in our own failure to live in love. And even though we have those feelings, and I hope that those feelings move us towards repentance and a desire for repentance, they should also move us most importantly to a recognition of the great love of God, which is so far more than we could muster on our own. So that our failures become a witness, even to the greatness of God. Even our failures, even our own limitations of love, ultimately show us and remind us of the incredible, unique love of God.

    Now we’re pursuing it. We want to imitate it. We want to live it out as well as we can in the world. But every time we fail to do that, even though in some sense you could say, “Well, that’s a failure in their witness to Christ,” and that’s true, but even as we fail, the unfailing love of God is still given witness in our lives. My own limitations ultimately serve to remind myself and everybody else around me that I’m not God.

    Imitation is not just flattery. Imitation in the Christian way is about worship. It’s about recognition of who God is, even as we fail, and even as we find our own hearts to need more grace to love well. When Paul says in Ephesians here to be imitators of God, to live a life of love, it’s a great calling. It’s a hard calling. It’s a difficult calling, because we will always find ourselves not living up to it. But as we stretch, as we reach, as we repent, and as God in His own grace teaches us and transforms us over and over again by the same story—by the same story over and over and over again in our lives—this is where God does His work of making something new.

    People don’t know how to love. As much as we talk about it, as much as it’s a word in the air, as many thousands of different ways that we use the language of love, we still don’t know how to do it. God is faithful, and God is bringing to us over and over again the story that defines love. And God has the audacity to pull us into His story of love and to give us a spirit that will teach us little faithful ways, bit by bit, inch by inch, about what it means to be people who imitate the love of God in our lives.

    This is, like I said, kind of the punchline of the story. But if you are paying attention, chapter 5 and chapter 6 are still there, right? The book’s not over yet. We’ll come back next week and we’ll talk about some of the rest of what’s in chapter 5, and then we have more to explore.

    We’re starting to be patient for a few more minutes, and that’s the way it is when you give yourself to this life of imitation and worship. Sometimes you find yourself right at the place where love is calling you, and it’s just hard. This is where I need to get back into the fundamentals—the fundamental calling of love. But then you also have to think about what love looks like in practice. You have to think about what love looks like in your home or in your business or in your school. What does love look like in the streets?

    So there’s a cycle, right? We recognize our limitations. We’re called into God’s story. We find ourselves repenting, and we lean into it a little bit more. Of course, we find ourselves called back into our limitations as we do this. Love is not a one-stop fix. It’s something that we’re working on, right? You know, that’s right at the heart of what I think we’re about here—right at the heart of what I think it means to be this gathered people who comes to tables, that passes bread and wine around on Sunday mornings, that sings songs of worship, recognizing the love of God. A community that has the audacity to share life with each other a little bit—laugh with each other’s kids, celebrate victories, mourn defeats, and lament tragedies. Just hold each other up a little bit to see each other and be known, to be willing to let other people know you. All of that together—it really is about learning to love, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t that what we’re doing?

    I don’t know how you think about it. I don’t know how you think about what it is that we’re doing here, but we’re kind of like a love training camp. We’re kind of a place where people—I think what we’re doing together is we’re coming and we’re diving into each other, just hoping that God—God who loves us through and through—that God will just give us the grace to learn what it means to love well. And you know what? I know I’m not done with it.

    I know that I have a lot of places that I still have to learn where that description of things that we read in First Corinthians shows me places that I still need to grow and still need to stretch in the way that I love people well. But by the grace of Jesus, I’m not where I used to be either, right? I mean, what about you? Has following Jesus made a difference for you? Has he taught you something about what it means to love well?

    There’s an old story—it’s an old Amish story about a man, and somebody asked him, “Are you a Christian? Are you a follower of Jesus?” And he responded, “Well, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask my neighbors.” Do the people with whom I share life—can they recognize that the love of God has grown within me? Can the people with whom I work and play and learn, and the people who live down the street from me, can they tell a difference that following Jesus has made a difference in how I love? And the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no, and I want to be more yeses than I want to be nos. But I’m still learning, and I think we all are together. And I think that’s the heart of what we’re trying to do when we say we are people who follow Jesus together.

    I think what we mean is that we are a people being trained by Jesus to love well. It’s a pretty compelling vision, isn’t it? I don’t know why the church sometimes stops short of saying the message that way. There’s just so much extra stuff sometimes. Sometimes it seems that we’re selling all the things that Paul in First Corinthians says don’t matter without love.

    If you’re a person that hasn’t yet signed up for all this, I just want to say to you this morning, when we talk about coming and being baptized, being part of the church, we talk about giving your life to Jesus. This is what we mean by signing up for a different kind of life and recognition of the sacrifice that Jesus has made for you—signing up to be one of his apprentices, his trainees. Signing up for this, it’s not just an online course. Signing up for this course of following in his way happens in a moment and it happens over the course of your whole life.

    Today we have a moment of invitation, and I want to say if you’re in a place where you have been looking for something like that, you’ve been exploring this Jesus stuff for a while—man, sign up for it. Go for it. Give your life to Jesus, letting him teach you what it means to love well. Let him take all the things that make you broken and let him teach you what it means to be one of his people, one of the people who are in his school of love.

    And my friends, if you’ve been here for a while and you’ve just been going through one of those seasons where this stuff has faded into the background, repent. Come back to Jesus. Come back to the teacher. Give him again—put yourself back in the story and let him do some work.

    As we sing, if you’re in one of those places where you’re at a place where you need to come back to God, or if you’re in a place where it’s time to get started, you’re welcome to come while we stand and sing together.

  • James K.A. Smith on Discipleship, Love, and Worship

    “Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly–who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship–through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine.”
    ― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

    We could hardly have a better modern guide to Augustinian spirituality than James K.A. Smith. His entire project orbits the thought and heart of the ancient Bishop of Hippo, and I think he’s talking about St. Augustine even when he’s not talking about St. Augustine.

    One of the things I think he does that is urgently needed in some circles of thought that I swim in is to connect Discipleship with Worship.

    Some thinkers, being rightly compelled to help the church reinvigorate intentional discipleship practices, wrongly dissociate dissociate what happens in worship from discipleship. Smith helps illuminate the formative power of worship—particularly in a world where alternative worship practices relentlessly sculpt us to be people whose capacity to love well and rightly is degraded and corrupted.

    Setting up a dichotomy between “worship churches” and “discipleship churches” takes what must be a “both/and” situation and makes it not just “either/or” but “neither”.

    There is not worship without discipleship. Nor is their discipleship without worship. Both are about love. Loving God and others well is the point of both discipleship and worship.

    Or to put it in Augustinian terms, both worship and discipleship are about a rightly ordered life of love.

  • Rejected

    “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” -Mark 8:31

    That the Messiah suffered is something that we grasp—Jesus’s suffering, as brutal as it was, could perhaps be comprehensible or even regarded as noble. Bonhoeffer notes the possibility that it could be celebrated as that tragic form of suffering we sometimes regard as having its own honor and dignity.

    But the cross was not just suffering alone, not just a physical attack, but was suffering accompanied by vicious rejection. Christ is not only physically victimized, but it comes at the hands of those who reject him. They reject his messiahship. They mock his authority as a king. They humiliate him, stripping away not only his clothes, but also his human dignity.

    The great irony of the cross is that Jesus, who had already acted in humility in taking human likeness, is then dehumanized through cruel humiliation. They seek not to just pierce his body with nails, but his soul with insults. They not only ravage his back with the flail, but they ravage his humanity with shame. He’s not only beaten, but spat upon.

    Spat upon!

    The Lord of the cosmos is spat upon!

    It is this mockery, more than the physical brutality, that Mark takes great pains to emphasize. It first shows up in the account of Jesus before the high priest. The trial there, full of false witnesses who can’t get on the same page finally builds to this conclusion (14:60-65)

    Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Have you no answer? What is it that they testify against you?” But he was silent and did not answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” 62 Jesus said, “I am; and ‘you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,’ and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven.’” 63 Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “Why do we still need witnesses? 64 You have heard his blasphemy! What is your decision?” All of them condemned him as deserving death. 65 Some began to spit on him, to blindfold him, and to strike him, saying to him, “Prophesy!” The guards also took him over and beat him.

    Jesus is taken to another trial, this time before the Roman Governor Pilate. The trial deadlocks, and Pilate seems ready to release Jesus. He’s even given a chance to release him when the crowd calls on him to practice his custom of granting mercy to someone at the time of passover.

    • Jesus us calls us into rejection.
    • just like death ives way to resurrection, so does rejection lead to new community.

  • Matthew’s Genealogy and the End of the Exile

    After reading N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God, I read Matthew’s genealogy a little differently this morning.Reflecting on the way I normally read Matthew’s first chapter, I think I have typically read the counts that Matthew offers as simply being about the persons involved—Abraham to David, David to Jechoniah, and Jechoniah to Jesus. I’ve typically thought about that as one of the playful ways that Matthew, like the other gospels, shows that Jesus is in fact the Messiah.  I suppose that reading is fine as far as it goes, but this morning a new layer seemed apparent.One of the insights from Wright that I found extremely helpful was the perspective that Israel still thought about itself as in exile into the new Testament period—indeed, for many Jews, long after that period. The spirit of the day was one of waiting for the promised day of Israel’s full restoration from exile. (There is so much more to be said about this.)Reading Matthew with that perspective fresh on my mind, it’s clear that the counted generations are not there simply to highlight certain people, but also the periods between those persons. So you’re looking at the period leading up to the Davidic kingdom, the period of the rule of the Davidic kings, and the period of exile during which those kings lost their throne.What seems to me to be extremely significant in that reading is that by Matthew’s reckoning, Jesus then represents the true end to the exile, the inauguration of a new period in the Davidic kingship.  This doesn’t deny my normal way of reading the text, but certainly shifts the emphasis towards what is happening with Israel in the coming of Jesus.

  • Do Not Judge—A Sermon from Luke 6:35-42

    Do not judgeI told somebody this past week that the sermon for today could really only last a few seconds. Don’t get your hopes up, it’s going to be longer than that, but it seems like I should be able to just say something like, “Jesus says, ‘Do not judge.’  So, stop doing it. Amen, let’s stand and sing.”It’s not as though the command is unfamiliar to us.  The text we’re dealing with is in Luke 6:35-42.

    “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive and you will be forgiven; give and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” And he also told them this parable:  ” Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will not they both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher. Why do you see the speck that is in your brothers eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.”

    It’s one of the most popular passages in the Christian Bible, well known among Christians and nonbelievers alike.  In fact, I don’t know if there is any Christian ethic as respected by the outside world as “Do not judge.”  Of course, the world is also acutely aware of our failure in following this command, and knows that while Jesus tells us not to judge, we are quite practiced in the art.  Unfortunately, it comes quite easily to us.Judgement against our friends, family, neighbors and strangers simmers deep within our hearts.  Occasionally it might pop out as gossip or a sharp word, but we try to police ourselves about that, because we know it sounds bad.  We don’t want to be known as judgmental people, but truthfully, even when we don’t actually say what we’re thinking, it is just so easy to harbor our verdicts, the bitter condemnations of people around us, deep in our hearts.  We don’t want to judge.  We know we’re not supposed to, but it just comes so easily to us. One of the problems here is that we try to avoid judgmental behaviors without really working on judgmental attitudes. We try to catch that stuff before it gets out of our mouths, but really, by the time we get to that place we’ve really already lost the battle.  The mouth is just speaking out of the abundance of the heart, and it’s the fact that all that condemnation is in our heart that is really the issue.  Our morality begins with our identity, or at least our understanding of our identity.  The way we understand ourselves controls the way we interact with other people and perceive them in powerful ways.  That said, there are two significant things I have come to understand about myself that, the more I internalize them, the more they help me escape my tendency to judge.   I want to share and confess here in the hopes that they can help you out as well.1.  I am not God. I know, it’s a shocker. But, seriously, it’s helpful for me to get in touch with the fact that I am not the sovereign lord of the universe. I believe people are accountable for the good and evil things they do in the world—but most of them aren’t accountable to me. I didn’t create anybody, and I’m not supremely powerful.  Beyond that, my failure to be God also means that I have a limited amount of knowledge and insight into people.  I don’t understand the whole of anybody’s situation, don’t understand the different things in people’s backgrounds that make them act the way they do.  I don’t even understand why I do half the stuff I do, much less what’s going on in anybody else’s heart! So I will never the authority or information I need to pass judgment on anybody else.2.  Not only am I not God, but I also know that I am not perfect. Far from it, in fact.  Most people I know can confirm this, but of course I know it more truly than anybody else could possibly suspect.  After all, they can’t see what’s inside my heart.  I am, like the rest of you, a broken human being, a person whose heart has been twisted by sin and who is powerless to recover except for the grace of God.This is an important nuance to the world’s criticism of the church as being too judgmental.  It wants to believe everything is alright. It’s as if the world wants refuse our right to judge on the basis that everyone is basically equally good. But we refuse to judge on the opposite basis, because we know that everyone, including ourselves, is broken and sinful.I know, that because I’m not God and I’m not perfect, that I need grace from God. I need the grace of forgiveness and the grace that God gives to change and purify me. Truthfully, I need all the grace I can get.  And that self-awareness really heightens the shock of this text for me. How I give grace to people around me can actually affect how God gives grace to me? Whoa. That is an absolutely stunning idea, and as it becomes more firmly lodged in my mind, it has the power to really shape the kinds of things I harbor in my heart towards other people.Gratefully, though, I’m also aware that I receive grace from God! It’s not like I’m merely aware of my sin, awaiting some pending judgement and trying to butter God up before he makes his decision. I live in the joy and awareness that God has already acted decisively to extend grace to me.Many of us live fairly aware of those two things, our need for grace and how we receive it.  But, we stop there, not realizing that those who need and receive grace from God are also called to learn grace from God. I want God to teach me how to treat others like Jesus treats me.For our community of faith, that really is the critical turn. So much of our worship and conversation revolves around what we need and receive, and how valuable it is to us.  But how much value do we place on what we are called to become?  How much do we value a gracious spirit? May God help us to honor those among us who cultivate that spirit, who become people of heroic forgiveness, who turn back any effort to condemn others from taking root in their own hearts.  May we value those who work hard to become merciful, just as our father is merciful, and may we become a place of grace for those who—like us—need to receive it.Amen.(This is part three of a series on the Sermon on the Plain. A list of the sermons and the audio recordings are here.)

  • The Other Beatitudes—A Sermon from Luke 6:20-26

    Everybody knows the sermon on the mount.  Unfortunately, if I got up this morning and started reading, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are those who [yawn] mourn, for they will be…”, it wouldn’t be long before I’d see your eyes glaze over, and we’d have to have a coffee break for everybody to stay awake for the rest of the sermon.Everybody knows the sermon on the mount.  It is familiar, beautiful, and powerful.  It is full of language that is burned into our conscious consciences, a part of our ethical core as disciples.  And it should be well known!  It is, after all, the living and powerful word of God! It deserves a place in our ethical core!  But unfortunately, like is often the case, familiarity breeds contempt. In our familiarity with the Sermon on the mount, we have lost something of our ability to really listen to what it really says.But, what if the sermon on the mount had a little brother?  I have a couple of little brothers.  They’re both tough as nails.  They don’t mess around much, say what they mean and mean what they say.  To top it off, they’re stubborn as all get out.  If you can get that mental image in your head—the little brother, fists up, ready to get nasty if need be—I’d like to introduce you to the little brother of the sermon on the mount.  It’s name is “the Sermon on the Plain”, and it waits for us in the middle of Luke 6. (The sermon doesn’t even get its own chapter!  It shows up here just after Jesus has named his twelve apostles.  It almost seems to function as their introduction into what being a disciple of Jesus is really going to be about.)The Sermon on the Plain is really a distilled version of the sermon on the mount.  They have a lot in common, but the sermon on the plain is shorter, tougher, punchier.  Maybe it’s just because it is less familiar that it feels a little more stubborn and unrelenting than its big brother does.  But instead of talking about it too much in generalities, let me show you what I mean, and let’s read a little bit of it together.  It starts out with a set of beatitudes, just like the sermon in Matthew.  They read a little bit differently, though.  We’ll start in Luke 6:20. These are the “other beatitudes’.

    And He lifted his eyes to his disciples and said, “Blessed are the poor, because yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are those who are hungry now, because you will be filled.  Blessed are those who are crying now, because you will laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you and when they exclude you and insult you and throw out your name as something evil because of the son of man. Rejoice in that day and jump for joy! Because, listen—your reward in heaven will be greater, because their ancestors did the same sorts of things to the prophets.

    On the other hand, [this might be a good time to pull your toes in] cursed are you who are rich, because you have received every bit of your comfort. Cursed are you who are full now, because you will go hungry. Cursed are you who laugh now, because you will mourn and cry. Cursed are you when everyone says good things about you; because that’s how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

    I find these “other beatitudes” to be intense, raw, and inescapable. I look into them, and I easily see myself.  Unfortunately, I see myself on the wrong side, not among those who are blessed, but among the cursed.  Jesus paints two pictures.  One is of a group of people who are poor, hungry, saddened.  They are outsiders, and everyone talks and thinks badly of them. Jesus looks at that group and says—you are blessed! In his eyes, they’re the lucky ones!and then there is another group.  They are rich.  They have full bellies.  They are happy and laughing, and everybody likes them because they’re easy to get along with.  Doggone it, that’s a pretty good picture of just the kind of guy I’ve wanted to become my whole life.  Isn’t that just a cup of cold water to the face?  The very kind of person I’ve spent my whole life—Jesus says they’re cursed.  He looks at them and says, “Man.  Gotta feel sorry for you guys.”This set of beatitudes says that in Jesus’ eyes, the reality of the world is the opposite of everything I’ve ever known.  He takes all my assumptions about the world, and politely blows them to pieces.Anybody else bothered by that?If we’re really reading it, we’re bothered by it.  It’s so unrelenting and demanding.  It’s so physical that it won’t let me spiritualize it and shoo it away.  no “poor in spirit” here.  It’s the poor that are blessed.  No hungering for righteousness in this sermon, only the really physical feeling of hunger that comes from not having enough food to eat.Faced with such a demanding text, I think two options present themselves.  “Option 1” is that we take these simple sayings and tease them out, dissect them down, gradually interpreting them in ways that dull their sting a little bit.  In option 1, we interpret them away, and I have to admit that this is a pretty compelling path.  I would love to do that, to employ whatever sophisticated exegesis and interpretation methods might promise to soften the blow a bit.  I wish I could take these things that Jesus says and turn them into what I think he should say.  I would love to somehow transform these beatitudes and woes into something interesting.  But they aren’t that, are they?  Not on their own.  This text isn’t interesting—its dangerous.  It is sharply critical of my vision of my very life.Option 1 is to interpret them away.  In Option 2, we let them interpret us. What if we could let these words diagnose us?  What if I could let them shape me into the kind of person that Jesus admires? What if I could let them really challenge my idea of what the good life is really all about, and provoke me into letting Jesus teach me about his way of life, his vision of life.This week, sometime when you’re by yourself in front of a mirror, I want to ask you to take a few moments and let these other beatitudes challenge you with a couple of questions.  Stop and look, literally, into your own eyes and ask yourself a few questions.First, “Who am I becoming?” What kinds of things characterize who you are, both inside and out.  What dominates your life?.Second, and more interesting, “Who gets to decide who I am becoming?” Looking at where you’re headed is a good start, but for people who claim to be disciples of Jesus, a more basic question is whether or not we are really letting him determine the vision for our lives.  The guy who said these beatitudes is really painting a radical vision, but am I willing to let that vision really affect me.  Drive me?Finally, “What about everybody else?” It’s not just about me. These beatitudes not only change the way I see myself, but the way I look at almost everyone I see.  People aren’t good or bad, lucky or unlucky, blessed or cursed in the same ways I normally think about it.  My ideas of status and value just don’t hold up in the face of these beatitudes.  But, it’s not my ideas of value that really matter anyway.  It’s what Jesus values that really matters.  After all, he is the master.  I am the student.I’ve got a lot to learn.(Audio version here: The Plain Beatitudes. This is part one of this series.)

  • Sermon on the Plain—Cedar Lane Edition

    This past Sunday’s sermon was our introductory foray into the sermon on the plain, an extremely distilled dose of Jesus’ vision of what his disciples are like. Part of the challenge of this past week’s sermon was to get in a mirror, eyeball to eyeball with ourselves, and think about three questions:1. Who am I becoming?2. Who decides who I become?3. How does Jesus’ message change the way I see other people?I shot a little video of some Cedar lane folks reading through Jesus’ sermon on the plain, as a way of helping us hear it.  I want to invite you to settle in, hear these words, and spend some time meditating on those questions. May God bless the hearing of his word.