This sermon was preached for Sunday, October 6, 2024 at St. Andrew's, Ayer. The texts for the sermon were: Job 1:1; 2:1-10, Psalm 26, Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12, and Mark 10:2-16.
That is not the Gospel I would have chosen for my first sermon with my new church, if it was up to me. It’s a doozy on any Sunday but especially when you don’t know the people you are preaching to very well. I don’t know who among you has been hurt by divorce, and who has been saved by it. I don’t know who struggles with the boxes of male and female, or who has been wounded by the Church’s historically strict vision for what marriage should or can be. I don’t know how this passage has been preached or interpreted to you before - full judgment or with abundant grace.
But if this passage feels like a bit of a trap, it’s because it is one. The Pharisees pose this question about divorce to Jesus precisely because it was contested and controversial, in their day and still in ours. The leaders are asking not so they can learn from him but rather to force him to say something that will turn people away or get him in trouble with the authorities. Asking questions intended to trap someone, to judge someone as on this side or that, is not a great way to begin a relationship, nor really, to sustain one.
So I hope you’ll excuse my side-stepping a bit, for my first sermon with you, with the trust that we can have many lively and intriguing conversations to come about all the controversy and challenging theology - please know I’m here for it all.
My job today, the job of every preacher, is to find and amplify the Good News of God for the particular moment we are in, individually and collectively, to open you to the voice of God in your life right now.
My seminary preaching professor told us once that every preacher really just has one sermon inside of them. What he meant was that for every Christian, at the end of the day, the Good News of God boils down to one essential truth. Whatever that truth is for us the message we need to hear and say again and again, over and over, in many different ways and times and places. Maybe it’s because we struggle to believe it or perhaps it’s because the world is so darn good at convincing us it’s not true. It’s that one reminder that brings us back here to this table week in and week out, a core belief that gives us the courage to keep going, to become who we are meant to be.
So here it is, a decade of preaching boiled down, my one sermon right off the bat: the Good News of God in Jesus Christ is that you are worthy of love just as you are. Not only are you worthy of being loved by others, by all these fallible humans that you’ll one day let down or who’ll one day let you down. You are loved, deeply loved by the very life-force of all creation itself, that great mystery behind, beneath, beyond, within. You don’t need to do or say anything to earn that love; it has already been done for you. And nothing, nothing you can say or do can take that love away.
That’s the Good News that saved my life. The Good News I’ve had the honor of saying again and again in all my pastoral work: you are enough, you are loved, you are forgiven. And yes, it’s there in some way or another in every sermon I preach. And it’s what I tell my children, when they are cheerful and silly, and when they are stormy and obstinate, when they are sleepy cuddly and when they are procrastinating bedtime in a major way. It’s what I hope they hear when they look up at me with big wounded eyes when I’m at my most exasperated or covered in toddler muck: I love you no matter what. Nothing you could say or do could take that love away.
When Jesus bids the little children come to him to be blessed, he says with the force of justice and indignation in his voice, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Now there are two ways to interpret that last bit; both have spiritual wisdom. One way, based on the NRSV translation we have here, is to encourage folks to adopt a childlike faith - receive the kingdom of God as a little child does. But Professor of Biblical Studies Mark G. Vitalis Hoffman argues it is just as legitimate to translate this verse another way: We are to welcome the kingdom of God as we would welcome a little child. This scene, then, becomes a reiteration of the chapter before this one, when Jesus teaches, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Extending welcome to the vulnerable is what the kingdom of God is all about.
What would the world look like if we loved each other as we love a little child? Or for those of you who look around the world today, or look back at your own childhood with pain and sorrow at the reality of how children are actually treated: What would it look like to love others and love yourself the way your child-self longed to be loved?
When I was first interviewing here, I asked your hiring committee: “What is it like to be a child at St. Andrew's?” I was absolutely charmed by your answers. You couldn't wait to tell me about the little girl that dances in your aisle and Joyce’s work with children in the Atrium and what you've raised up in your extraordinary teens. What I heard in your answers was a profound understanding of Jesus’ ministry. You get why he was so forceful with the disciples when they tried to turn the parents away. When we welcome children, their wiggliness, their noises, their wonder, we welcome everyone’s whole selves as well. All the childlike parts of ourselves are welcome, too.
What would the world look like if we loved each other as we love children?
I think it would look like giving each other loads of grace when we trip up and fall. I think it would look like constantly acknowledging that we are all still learning. It would look like loving people they just are right now. But here’s the nuance that loving my own children has been teaching me: love also looks like encouraging each other to stretch and grow.
With children, we instinctively know they won’t stay little and clumsy forever. Seemingly every day they gain new skills; cruising at first, then tentative first steps, then in a blink of an eye they’re running across the playground in light-up sneakers. We see children with double-vision: the child they are and the adult they are becoming. I’m convinced that’s how God sees us, too.
When I look back at the pastoring I’ve done, I can see the power of another piece of Good News, its corollary: You are worthy of love just as you are. And, and God is calling you into so much more.
As often as I sat with folks to say, you are enough, I’ve had the privilege of walking with people as they grew into new gifts, new strengths. The parishioner who never thought of herself as a leader, starting a new ministry; the young adult preaching her first sermon; the older choir member bravely stepping up to sing his first solo. We can take those steps because we trust in our own worthiness, we risk new ventures because we know our belovedness is secure.
Back when I was first discerning the priesthood, I remember being overwhelmed with a responsibility that pastoring and leadership entails. I doubted I could ever be what the church and God's people needed me to be. I shared with my rector that I was struggling to trust God in all this and struggling to trust myself. He then asked me a question that I’ve carried with me ever since: "What if God trusts you?"
The Good News is that God believes in us and all we can be. God believes in you and God believes in me. God believes in St. Andrew’s.
This past Thursday, praying about being here, about being your priest, I read through my ordination vows again and what do you know, all this is right in there. The Bishop tells the new priest: “In all that you do, you are to nourish Christ’s people from the riches of his grace, and strengthen them to glorify God in this life and in the life to come.”
Nourish with Christ’s grace - you are already forgiven, loved, saved - and strengthen them to glorify - God is calling you to so much more.
This is what I intend to do - this is how I hope to love and serve you. I pray this is how you will love and serve me, too. I hope you accept me as just I am, in my strengths and flaws, my faith and doubt, and I hope you'll see my potential, too. I hope you give me grace when I disappoint you - because I will disappoint you at some point. And I pray you'll help me learn how to be the priest you need. That we will go from strength to strength, together.
St. Andrew's is already a great, strong church of faithful people. My first responsibility, my primary job, is to fall in love with you just as you are, and to help you know it - God’s love for you and my own.
Nourish with grace, strengthen to glorify.
I am here to love and serve you as if both these pieces of Good News are true at once: You are enough just as you are. And God is already even now shaping us, strengthening us, into something more.
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