Sermon: Go and tell John what you hear and see (Dec. 14, 2025)

Advent 3A
December 14, 2025
Matthew 11:2-22; Isaiah 35:1-10

INTRODUCTION

The third Sunday of Advent is known as Gaudete Sunday, or “Rejoice!” Sunday. It offers us a bit of respite from all these difficult, end-times-y texts. Great, right? So where does the Gospel reading drop us? In prison, of course, with a doubting John the Baptist. 

Last week’s confidence has apparently waned: since we last saw John in the wilderness, he has gotten himself arrested for criticizing King Herod’s marriage practices. And he is starting to wonder why things aren’t looking the way he thought they would. But Jesus’ words, we hope, will set him back on track.

Isaiah is far more joyful. Last week’s reading from Isaiah was from before the exile, as the Assyrians are about to attack. Today’s text is written while the Israelites are in exile, in Babylon, and offers them a vision of healing and restoration – a joyous procession out of Babylon through the blooming desert, and back to Jerusalem and the land promised to their ancestors. It is truly beautiful poetry. 

Lots going on in these texts. Take them all in, and listen for a word that will speak joy to whatever ails your heart this day. Let’s listen. 

[READ]

Grace to you and peace from the One who is and who was and who is to come. Amen.

Can I be real with you for a moment? I love the Advent season and all the declarations of the light shining in the darkness and the coming Messiah saving us all… but this has been a difficult year for a lot of vulnerable people, and so many things I read in the news are so distressing, my heart just aches. And when I proclaim all these wonderful Advent promises, I admit that sometimes I feel like I am trying to convince myself, as well as you, that they are true. I mean, I believe them, I do, deep in my heart… but then something else discouraging happens, and my heart breaks again and it becomes difficult to believe that God’s reign will ever come to be. When will the Prince of Peace break into our world for real? How are we to rejoice on this Gaudete Sunday when there is so much pain and sadness all around us? 

All this is to say that I really needed to hear this story today about John the Baptist, doubting in prison. 

John, with all his fiery passion about the coming Messiah. 

John, who had the guts to call the religious elites a brood of vipers and tell them to change their ways. 

John, who recognized Jesus even when they were both in utero, as someone who would bring about the dawn from on high. 

John, who now sits in prison for his outspokenness, and is beginning to wonder, “Was I wrong? Is this really the guy? All those things I preached about – are they really going to happen? Because this is not looking like I thought it would look. Did I get this one wrong, and go to prison for the wrong guy?”

Now, his doubts, by themselves, are not very hopeful. But I find it very powerful when I can see my own questions and concerns represented in scripture, even and especially in the heart of a faith hero like John the Baptist. Because then, I can see the response to those concerns as a response also to my own aching heart.

And that is what happens. Jesus tells the messenger to tell John what he hears and sees: 

That those who lacked understanding are finding clarity. 

Those who were at the end of their rope and couldn’t take another step are finding a way forward. 

Those who were ill in mind or body are finding healing. 

Those who couldn’t receive the good news have had their hearts opened. 

Those whose lives were ending are finding new life. 

The poor have good news brought to them.

Jesus could have just said, “Yeah, I’m the guy.” Instead, he invites the messenger, and John, to look around and see the effects of Jesus’ power on the world around him. And then, to tell about it.

I needed that advice this week. Because it can be all too easy to get bogged down by the bad news. And when you wake up each day and expect bad news, that is indeed what you will find. Yet I will tell you, this week for me was full of glimpses of the joy, the life, that Jesus tells John and the messenger to look for. And, because Jesus urges the messenger to tell John about it, I’m going to follow suit, and tell you about the ways God’s power has been on display.

This week, I had a chance to tour Loop Ministries, which is housed at Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word on East Ave, to see them in action as they packed and handed out bags. The director was thrilled to meet me and give me a tour, saying we were one of their most generous donors. She said, “Because of the extra financial gifts you have given us recently, we were able to purchase some special items for those we serve. This month, each family gets to choose to add coffee, tea, or hot chocolate to their bag, which we can’t normally offer. And we made these little holiday gift bags with some candy in them to give each family. These are a luxury to our families, and we’re glad to give them. But I’ll tell you, it is really a boost to our volunteers. When we see people’s faces light up, it really energizes our volunteers – which we really need after such a tough year with so much increased need.” Our gifts to Loop Ministries make this small but tangible difference for hungry people, and those who serve them. 

On Wednesday, I went with members of our Endowment Committee to deliver the disbursement checks from our endowment fund for this year. Our endowment account did very well this year, and we were able to be quite generous. First, we delivered $10,000 to Bethany House, which provides transitional housing to women and children experiencing homelessness. The woman who received the check, the House Manager, cried when we gave it to her. She said, “This place is so important to me. I grew up homeless, and I have been in and out of this house with my children, trying to get my feet on the ground. Finally, I was able to become resident staff and now house manager, and I have some stability in my life. I used to be afraid of public speaking, but now I get to go places and tell them about the wonderful work we are doing here at Bethany House. Just yesterday we had a board meeting, and we weren’t sure how much longer we can sustain this program. But this gift will make such a huge difference for us. Thank you so much!” Bethany House is changing the lives of women and children, and we get to be a part of that.

Then we went to Rochester Hope, where many of us volunteered last month. We had been impressed by
their “choice pantry,” which allows anyone to come get whatever and however much food they need, no questions asked. But as anyone who was there can tell you, it was cramped quarters for how many they serve (as many as 400 people a week)! For them, we had a check for $80,000, which will go toward the extension they are currently building. That addition will provide a larger pantry and more storage space. They, too, teared up in shock and delight at this gift. The director just kept looking down at the check and smiling. The poor have good news brought to them.

Finally, we went to St. Peter’s Kitchen, which provides hot meals six days a week (that’s nearly 160,000 meals served last year), as well as a choice pantry and various social services. Both they and Loop Ministries get volunteer help from adults with disabilities, and there was a very cheerful atmosphere as

they worked. When we handed the CEO a check for $20,000, he was literally knocked off his feet! He gasped and fell backward on the pew behind him, hand to heart, speechless. “I didn’t expect this!” he finally exclaimed. “This is incredible!” 

“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” What do you see and hear? Where are you seeing glimpses of light and life in the gloom of the world? What lives are being changed? Who needs to hear about it?

In the darkness that threatens to overwhelm, these are signs of Christ’s light, signs of joy. As small as a holiday bag with candy inside, and as big as a building project that provides more food to more people, and everything in between. Jesus’ call to us is to notice them, to name them, to go and tell about them – about the ways that God is bringing new life to places where life seemed impossible. We at St. Paul’s were a part of God’s work, the work of the coming Messiah, in a very real way this week. And when we tell others about it, God shines that light even brighter into our community. 

So be strong, people of St. Paul’s, and do not fear. Here is your God, who will come and save us all.

Let us pray… God of joy, we thank you for our many resources and the ways that we, with your help, can use them to make our corner of the world a better place. We pray for those who will benefit from our recent gifts to Loop, Rochester Hope, Bethany House, and St. Peter’s Kitchen, that through these gifts, they will see your light, and be able to bear witness to that light for others. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Sermon: The Process and Peace of Repentance (Dec. 7. 2025)

Advent 2A
December 7, 2025
Matthew 3:1-12

INTRODUCTION

Traditionally the second week of Advent is known as “Peace Sunday,” and we will see that theme especially in today’s famous reading from Isaiah: the description of the Peaceable Kingdom, where the wolf lies with the lamb, and other predators live in peace with their prey, and a little child leads them. It is what we hope for and picture when those angels sing to the shepherds in the fields, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace among those whom he favors.” And that description of a peaceful kingdom was very good news for Isaiah’s audience, who were living under threat of the Assyrian army, which had already destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and were likely heading south next, to Judah. Israel is living in a time when the people don’t trust their leaders to be faithful, and their hope is lost because the line of King David, from whom they were expecting a Messiah to come and save them all, has been cut off. But here, Isaiah promises that from the stump of David’s family tree (Jesse is David’s father), a sprout has sprung – there is yet hope!

As for the Gospel… this second Sunday of Advent we encounter John the Baptist in the wilderness and his cries for all to “repent!” John is always a centerpiece of the Advent season, as he heralds the Lord’s coming. Difficult as his message of repentance is to hear, it is a necessary one for the preparation of our hearts. Today he says so quite extremely, so, buckle up. Both the nice text from Isaiah and the difficult one from Matthew can bring peace, if we hear them with open hearts. So, let’s listen.

[READ]

Grace to you and peace from the One who is and who was and who is to come. Amen.

So what do you think: if I could somehow arrange to have John the Baptist come here as a guest preacher, how do you think he would be received? Do you think you would leave the sanctuary, shake his hand, and say, “Thanks for your sermon today, pastor!” Or maybe… leave before he was finished?

I can’t say John’s strong words would make me want to hang around and thank him! On the surface, at least, this sermon is more in the fire and brimstone preaching genre that makes me pretty uncomfortable. I don’t always need to feel good when I’m listening to a sermon, but I at least appreciate not being likened to a brood of vipers, ya know?

Yet if we dig a little deeper into this scene and John’s words, what appear on the surface to be very judgmental and accusatory words are actually words of hope and transformation (serpentine insults aside!).

First, a little biblical history. Matthew is going to great lengths here to identify John the Baptist with Elijah, the 9th century prophet who was whisked off into heaven by a chariot of fire. In Jewish belief, the return of Elijah would herald the coming of the Messiah – and with it, great hope! So when Matthew paints John as Elijah (for example, by his strange clothing of camel’s hair and a leather belt, and his location in the wilderness), he is starting us off by saying: “God is on the move! God has raised up another Elijah in the wilderness. The dawn of a new day is upon us, and we know this because Elijah (or someone like him) has returned.” It is no wonder people flocked to the wilderness to hear what John had to say! So, we’re starting from a place of hope, which helps us see the rest of John’s sermon through that hopeful lens.

Though John’s words in this text are directed at the Pharisees and Sadducees, but they are just as important for us. The meaning of that word, repentance, is not merely saying “I’m sorry,” or confessing your sins at the beginning of the liturgy each week. When John says, “Repent!” he is calling upon people to change their hearts, to turn around and reorient toward a new way of living. It is certainly possible and even reasonable to take this call to repentance personally. Someone telling you, “You need to change,” can be pretty tough to hear! But also… don’t we all already know it, know that we need a change? Is there anyone among us who is completely content with their life, their relationship with God, their prayer life, their relationships with family, friends, and colleagues? Is there anyone here who is immune to greed, self-absorption, apathy or anger? 

Speaking personally, I’m fairly content – I have a job I love, a family I cherish, I live in a beautiful place and have a roof over my head and food on the table. But there are plenty of times a week or even a day when I feel unsettled, unsatisfied, or a sense of longing. Plenty of times when I long for my heart to be changed: to be more oriented toward God than toward myself, and toward radical love of neighbor. John is speaking to that: “change your heart!” he says. “God is coming near, and a new day is upon us! Out with the old ways, and in with the new! Change your heart, change your life!”

Consider for a moment, be honest: how does that message land with you? To me, it feels both hopeful (as I said, I do often long for a change, even if I can’t always pinpoint what I envision that change to be), and it also feels exhausting and a bit scary or intimidating. After all, what if the change is hard? What if it requires too much from me? Isn’t it easier just to stay the way I am, because it’s pretty good, and at least it is known? Even if the future is hopeful – what if getting there is too much?

Well, John’s response to these fears is not especially compassionate (John was not known for his bedside manner). Instead, he draws upon another image that on its surface is terrifying, but actually offers life: that of the separation of chaff and wheat. It sounds very judgmental, right? A separation of good (wheat) and bad (the chaff that will be burned). But this is referring to a farming practice wherein the husk is removed from the grain, and allowed to be blown away by the wind and burned. These husks, together, are called chaff. You see? Each grain of wheat has both grain, which is to be preserved, and chaff, which is to be discarded. We are all made up of both grain and chaff, and the goal is to save every grain, and do away with the chaff. So although we may be tempted to hear this image as a separation of good people from bad people, it is actually speaking to the wheat and the chaff within each heart. As Russian author Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn says, “The line separating good and evil passes not [between groups, or between people] – but right through every human heart.” 

So John asks us in this Advent season: what is the chaff that needs to be burned, in order to prepare our hearts for our Lord’s coming? What husks are getting in the way of our ability to see and welcome God’s presence among us? Anxieties, apathy, or greed? Judgment of others? Bitterness over past wrongs? A brain that is overactive with worry? Coping habits that draw our attention away from trust in God, and toward trust in our faulty human ways?

John’s dynamic sermon on this second Sunday of Advent tells us that it doesn’t have to be that way. The coming of Christ means restoration and empowerment, hope and new life. And it also does mean peace – the peace that comes from shedding those traits and patterns that cause distress to us and our communities, that keep us from living peacefully with one another. With the chaff gone, we can heal as individuals and communities. Of course, separating the wheat from the chaff may not be an easy process. But allowing the chaff to burn away, as difficult as it may be to watch our old ways shrivel up, will bring us to new life. It will do away with all the junk that clutters our minds and hearts, and prepare room instead to receive the Lord of Love, the Prince of Peace.

Let us pray… Emmanuel, so much gets in the way of us finding peace – in our hearts and in our world. Let every heart prepare you room, so that we might get closer to your vision of living peacefully with one another. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Sermon: What's behind the curtain? (November 30, 2025)

Advent 1A
November 30, 2025
Matthew 24:36:44

INTRODUCTION

On the first Sunday of Advent, which begins the new church year, we hear a lot of, “Pay attention, and look at this new thing that God is doing! Don’t miss it!” We’ll see that theme very strongly in both Paul’s letter to the Romans and in the Gospel reading. In Isaiah, we get a glimpse of what that new thing might mean for our broken world – it could be a world in which all people will gather on God’s holy mountain, and there will be no more weapons or war, because they’ll be turned into tools for feeding people. This comes as good news to a nation that is, in the 8th century BCE, being pummeled by the army of the Assyrian Empire; Isaiah speaks these words of hope and new life into a context of suffering, anxiety, and imminent imperial conquest. 

The Psalm also reflects on this world of peace. And in all four readings, we’ll see bits of the persistent Advent themes we think about every year: we wait, we watch, we hope, even as we anticipate the light of God breaking into the darkness of our lives.

Throughout Advent, we encounter the ways God shows up, sometimes where we least expect it, and pulls us into the future of hope and promise – even if it wasn’t a part of our original plan. So as you listen today, watch for those surprising moments in the texts, words or themes of the unexpected – and think about the ways God has shown up in your life in unexpected ways. Let’s listen.

[READ]

Grace to you and peace form the one who is and who was and who is to come. Amen.

Along with millions of other people, Grace and I saw the movie, Wicked: For Good last weekend. In case you aren’t familiar, Wicked (originally a book, then a Broadway musical, now a two-part blockbuster hit), tells the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch from Wizard of Oz. The two women were friends back at school, and this may come as a shock, but Elphaba (the so-called Wicked Witch) is actually the moral hero of the story, and is not wicked at all. Things aren’t always what they seem – which of course is a sentiment also classically described in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and her friends discover that the all-power Wizard is just a little man behind a curtain. Wicked takes this idea further, and digs into the reality that there is much more than we realize that lies behind the curtain – someone’s true moral character, the childhood that formed them, their motivations and intentions which may appear good on the surface but are actually evil. Turns out, the world is a morally complex place.

Well, since seeing the movie, Grace and I have had many conversations about it. So when I asked her this week, just to make conversation on the way to school, what I should write my sermon about, she said, without missing a beat, “Wicked.” I said, “Honestly, that’s not a bad idea.” Because Advent, especially this first Sunday, is all about pulling back the curtain and revealing what is behind it. This reading from Matthew is what we call “apocalyptic,” the end of the world as we know it – and the meaning of that word, apocalypse, is a sort of unveiling. It is pulling back the curtain to reveal what was there all along, but we were unable to see it (whether due to circumstance or choice). Being in the midst of apocalypse is a scary and anxious place to be, because suddenly all the things you thought you knew are revealed to be illusions and lies. It is very unsettling and disruptive to the status quo. But it is also the first step toward getting to the truth.

The Wicked story really gets at this. At the beginning, Elphaba (remember, she becomes the Wicked Witch) wants nothing more than to meet “our Wonderful Wizard,” who she believes truly has the power and the will to make the world a better and more just place. But when she meets him, she discover not only that he is merely a man who is good at illusions. He also is the mastermind behind what she perceives to be one of the greatest injustices currently plaguing the Land of Oz. The very thing she hoped he would help fix, he is in fact causing! She is soon caught in the web of the lies of the powerful, and she is used as a tool for their purposes. When she tries to unveil this truth and reveal who the wizard really is, the powers that be paint her instead as the villain – those in power paint her not as the good and morally just Elphaba, but the Wicked Witch, to be feared by all. That is where the first movie ends – the second movie digs deeper still into the human inclination to grasp yet more tightly to our illusions, because they are what we have always known, and even if they are wrong, these lies are what have given people a sense of security, false and unjust as it may be. Elphaba, for her part, steadfastly refuses to look away from those being harmed by these illusions.

I was struck, while watching this movie taking place in an imaginary land, how relatable this was. We see today, too, in our own lives and in the world more broadly, how resistant we are to acknowledging when we’ve been duped; that the leaders we trusted have created a common enemy, even sometimes out of someone good, so we have something external on which to blame our unease and to direct our attention away from the real problem; how willing we are to believe anything that promises to lower our anxiety. We want to protect ourselves from the dangers that lurk round every corner. And this sometimes keeps our eyes closed to the realities that exist that need to be addressed, whether in our own hearts, or in the world around us. The curtain needs to be pulled back. The truth needs to be reckoned with. Even if it does terrify us and make us feel ashamed. 

But the disruption of Advent comes into our lives, and first acknowledges our fear. We hear this story from Matthew that is full of anxiety that echoes our own – anxiety about the future, the unknown, about what may lie hidden beyond the curtain. We are told to “keep awake,” to keep watch – not for dangerous and scary things to happen (though sometimes they do), but for the Lord himself to break into that fear, even when we least expect it, like a thief in the night. God breaks in so that he can be present with us. 

You see, that is the promise of Advent: not that we will be immune to danger and anxiety, not that pulling back the veil will be smooth and everything will happen just as we wanted or hoped… but that when those things happen, we are not alone. We are created for more than fear, because God himself, whose birth we watch, wait, and hope for, has promised to come and be both with us and for us. 

With that promise, we can face the realities that lie behind the curtain. We can endure the moment when everything we thought we knew comes crashing to the ground. We can stand firmly in the promises of God, to love us, to know us, and to be present with us, even in the middle of the night when the world is darkest. Jesus will do what it takes to get to us, even break down our barriers and break into our hearts like a thief, even and especially at the darkest hour.

And so, let us light candles, to remind us that we do not face the shadows alone. Indeed, the light of the world has already come, shining in the darkness to illumine our lives, to lead us forth not in fear but in courage. Let us string lights on trees and homes. Let us keep awake and watchful for the ways God is already breaking into our fear and anxiety, so that when illusions fall away, we are left with the truth of God’s loving presence, lighting our way and encouraging each step toward something new. Come – let us walk in the light of the Lord!

Let us pray… Lord God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown.  Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.