Hunger's Only Hope

August 2, 2026 – The 10th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 13A

Isaiah 55:1-5; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21

© 2026 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—they are the four accounts of the one gospel. Together, they all tell the same story—the unified good news of Jesus Christ—but each evangelist tells it in his own way. Writing in the second century, about a hundred fifty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Irenaeus of Lyons stressed, “It is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are.” Those groups of so-called Christians who remain devoted to only one account of the good news, Irenaeus wrote—like the Ebionites who only read Matthew or the Valentinians who only like John—end up “totally in error” because the true gospel of Jesus Christ is the four-pillared foundation of the world, breathed and bound together by one Spirit (Against Heresies, III.11.7-8).

You probably know that the first three gospel accounts—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—are fairly similar to each other. They are called the “synoptic” gospel accounts because they share the “same” (syn) “view” (optic). They share most of the same stories—so many, in fact, that it’s usually more interesting to note the relatively few episodes of Jesus’ life that are found in only one of them. John, on the other hand, does something very different. Instead of giving us the breadth of Jesus’ teachings and miracles, he focuses on a handful of encounters, which he mines deeply for their theological significance. It’s like the difference between going to Crystal Bridges and walking through the entire collection versus deciding to spend all day looking at the paintings in one gallery.

One of the reasons today’s gospel lesson is so interesting is that it is one of only six stories that are found in all four gospel accounts, and, if you lump the stories from Holy Week into one shared encounter, the feeding of the five thousand is one of only three moments from Jesus’ life that is recalled by all four evangelists: Jesus’ baptism, the sequence of events surrounding his death and resurrection, and today’s miracle story. Not even Christmas or the sharing of bread and wine as Jesus’s body and blood make it into all four accounts. This story, in other words, is as important to the early Christian tradition as any other. So central was it to the life of the early church that all four evangelists agree on almost every detail: the wilderness setting, the number of loaves and fish, the number of people who were fed, and the same number of baskets of leftovers.

What if this story became the basis for our principal act of worship? Sara wondered aloud about that in staff meeting this week. What if the language of this miracle formed the basis for our eucharistic prayer rather than the words Jesus used at the Last Supper—words that don’t even make it into all four gospel accounts? How different would church be? Would we insist on going outside and reclining on the grass for a picnic-style meal? Would all of us eat until we were full instead of snacking on a morsel of bread? What would the altar guild do with twelve baskets of leftovers? And would we include fish every time we gathered for this sacred meal? 

Although I don’t think the feeding of the five thousand draws us into the death and resurrection of Jesus as fully as receiving his body and blood in the bread and wine made holy, I do recognize in this miracle the same gift of life and salvation that Jesus offers us through his death and resurrection. In each gospel account, this story is presented as one in which Jesus rescues God’s people by giving them what they don’t have on their own and what they couldn’t have had without him.

Although the miraculous manufacture of sufficient bread and fish for the multitude is itself a statement of Jesus’ power, the establishment of a crisis as the setting from which that miracle arises is just as important to the gospel tradition. A great crowd of people has come out to see Jesus. He is curing the sick and teaching the people about God’s kingdom. As the hour grows late and the impending crisis approaches, the disciples urge Jesus to send the people away. They know that the crowd won’t disperse until Jesus takes a break, and they know that five thousand hungry people who had hurried out to see him without thinking to grab provisions for themselves was a problem they couldn’t solve. “This is a deserted place,” they remind their teacher. “Send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”

But that’s easier said than done. Have you ever walked into a busy restaurant at the peak of dinner service and asked the host for a table for thirty people? This was five thousand people in the middle of nowhere, and the hour was late. There wasn’t enough food in the nearby villages for them to get enough to eat. The disciples didn’t want the people’s problem to become their problem, so they urged Jesus to send them away—to push the looming crisis back onto those who would be hungry. But Jesus didn’t see it like that. “They need not go away,” he said. “You give them something to eat.”

In all four gospel accounts, Jesus places upon the disciples the responsibility for feeding all the hungry people, and, in all four gospel accounts, they come up short. “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish,” Matthew recalls the disciples saying to Jesus. We don’t have enough. There isn’t enough. We can’t fix this problem. Make it go away. Make them go away. 

When the Jewish philosopher Philo explained why Moses had led God’s people out into the wilderness before feeding them with manna from heaven, he wrote that it was so the people would know that it wasn’t Moses who had scrounged together enough food for the multitude but so that the people would know that God alone had fed them. Thus, when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai and delivered God’s commandments to the people, they would know that Moses hadn’t come up with the law on his own—that God himself had spoken to God’s people (Life of Moses, I.15.87).

The four evangelists don’t preserve for us this miraculous feeding because they want us to be inspired to share what we have with each other until everyone has enough. They give us this story because they want us to know that the only way we will ever have enough is if Jesus is the one who provides it. Jesus is the one who sustains God’s people. Jesus is the one who feeds them in the wilderness. Jesus is the rock from which the water flowed. He is the bread of life that came down from heaven. He is the one who leads them from the deserted places into the abundance of God’s healing and wholeness. And he is the one who then says to us, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”

For us, those words represent a crisis, but for God they are an opportunity for salvation. For those who stock the Little Free Pantry and the Friendly Fridge, there is never enough. There is no amount of food prepared for Community Meals or Sunday Suppers that can satisfy the hunger of our neighbors, even when we have leftovers. There is no food bank or feeding program that can give the people what they truly need. Yet Jesus tells us to feed them because he knows that, in him, something else—something new—is possible.

Let me be clear: although the sustenance Jesus gives to the five thousand is a metaphor for spiritual nourishment and the salvation of our souls, the provision Jesus has in mind is in no way separable from the filling of empty bellies. Jesus does not feed the five thousand simply to display his power to turn a meager offering into an abundant feast or to foreshadow his place at the head of God’s messianic banquet. He feeds them because the crisis of the moment is both physical and spiritual—literal and metaphorical. And he calls us to feed others in the same way.

The crisis we face in this world and in our lives is both physical and spiritual. God’s vision for the salvation of God’s people is not a ticket to heaven on an empty stomach, nor is it a full belly without hope beyond this life. Somehow, we Christians have allowed our hope in God to become either one or the other—either concern for the life to come or concern for lives we have now. But Jesus shows us that it’s always both. 

Jesus didn’t come to the earth to inspire us to be more generous, teaching us a way of life in which our best efforts are enough to save us. He came and died and was raised to new life so that our greed and hunger and fear of not having enough could be put to death in his body, and to raise up in the place of what has died within us his new resurrection life. In that Spirit-led, Spirit-filled resurrection life, there is an abundance, and those who are no longer defined by or bound to the limitations and insufficiencies of this world are free to share it with all people. 

In God’s kingdom, bread and wine and milk have no price. Those without money are free to come and eat whatever they need. Our world is as far away from that reality as it could possibly be, and the only way it will ever change is God’s transforming love. That kingdom is not possible without Jesus because there is no amount of good intention or inspired generosity that fix us until we have died with Christ and been raised to new life and become channels through which God brings that kingdom to the earth. 

Those who share Holy Communion offer themselves to God by participating in the death and resurrection of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. If we die with Christ and are raised with him in the waters of Baptism, Communion is the spiritual meal through which that identity is renewed in us. This sacramental encounter of bread and wine is what renews our ability to accept and respond faithfully to Jesus’s command to feed the world in his name—to ensure that no stomach is empty and no soul remains malnourished. “You give them something to eat,” he tells us. And he is the food we give them.

Just Keep Growing

 

July 19, 2026 – The 8th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 11A

Isaiah 44:6-8; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

© 2026 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Every spring, while the rest of our lawn lies dormant, a few bright patches of green spring up. Vibrant indications of the changing season, these tufts of soft, thin-bladed grass grow quickly and soon display their silvery spikelets, ready to release their seeds. When the rest of the grass awakens and turns green, these first-to-grow patches are most easily distinguished by their taller, more thickly clumped sprouts, but they soon become unmistakable because, as the heat of summer arrives, they wither and turn brown, leaving bare spots in our lawn.

Poa annua or annual bluegrass or annual meadow grass is a frustrating and persistent weed that affects many of us. We pay companies to treat our lawns with preemergent weed control in the hopes that the Poa annua will stay away, but seeds that are already in the soil seem to sprout no matter what. As an herbicide-resistant weed, Poa annua is hard to eradicate once it starts to grow, and pulling it from the ground does little to prevent next year’s growth. But there are some places where it grows not as a weed but as a carefully cultivated plant.

In the eighteenth century, English horticulturalists noticed that Poa annua seemed to flourish on rural paths but did not grow on adjacent hillsides. It wasn’t long before this “path grass” became a favorite for well-trodden areas with compacted soil. Despite its invasive qualities, it remains a favorite among some golf course greenskeepers, who use it to give putting greens consistent coverage despite all the foot traffic. As nine-time major championship superintendent Paul Latshaw once said, “Poa annua has probably saved more superintendents’ positions than it’s destroyed” (https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/course-care/green-section-record/61/issue-17/understanding-poa-annua.html). 

But I don’t care how pretty the greens are at Oakmont Country Club. Every spring, when those bright green patches break through my otherwise dormant lawn, I feel the urge to call our lawn company and say, “Didn’t you apply a preemergent treatment? Where did all these weeds come from?” But I’m sure their answer would be, “An enemy has done this.”

Life is full of weeds—lawns, gardens, and fields; friendships, families, and marriages; universities, businesses, and churches. Every corner of our lives is subject to invasion by nutrient-sucking, sunshine-stealing, space-crowding weeds that we don’t want. And some of those weeds feel really threatening. The truth is that I can live with Poa annua, and I might even enjoy a salad made with dandelion greens, but there are some weeds that represent a real and dangerous threat to God’s people and their flourishing. Where do those weeds come from? What are we supposed to do about them? And why does God allow them to persist even though they make life so hard for God’s children?

These are the sorts of questions Jesus addresses when he tells the parable of the wheat and the weeds. One of the reasons Jesus uses parables to describe the kingdom of God is because they allow him to present simple, straightforward truths about God’s reign that don’t fit within the wisdom of the world. Those who belong to God’s kingdom, Jesus tells us, receive these parables with child-like simplicity, and those who are immersed in the ways of the world are frustrated by their strangeness. Parables are never intended as complete portrayals of God’s kingdom. Instead, they give us a sharp, singular look at a particular characteristic of what our lives are like when we belong fully to God, and those glimpses are usually found at the place where the other-worldly description of God’s reign feels most strange to us. In today’s gospel, that strangeness is found in the householder’s decision to let the wheat and the weeds grow up together.

“Didn’t you sow good seed in your field?” the laborers ask when they see that the field of wheat is also full of weeds. “Where, then, did these weeds come from?” “An enemy has done this,” the master replies. We might look down upon those conservative religious traditions that are quick to attribute bad things to spiritual enemies like Satan or the devil, but Jesus makes it clear that God is not responsible for the evil that plagues our lives. Someone else is actively working against God and God’s reign, which means that the kingdom of God is not manifest only in those places where weeds are kept at bay. It grows in us and among us even when the forces of evil are sprouting all around. 

We must not despair, Jesus teaches us, when bad things happen nor when evil takes root and flourishes in our lives. God is still God, and those weeds are not a sign that God’s kingdom is being overwhelmed, even when to us they feel overwhelming. And, as strange as it seems to a farmer or a gardener, God’s kingdom is a place where wheat and weeds grow up together.

“Do you want us to go and gather the weeds?” the laborers ask the householder, offering the standard, common-sense remedy for the invasive plants. “No,” the master replies, surprising us and them, “for in gathering them you would uproot the wheat along with them.” Sometimes scholars try to find an agricultural reason to let the wheat and the weeds grow together. Maybe the weeds were a particular species of poisonous rye grass that, when freshly sprouted, was nearly impossible to differentiate from the wheat and that, by the time its leaves were distinguishable, had deep roots that would be entangled with the farmer’s crop. But surely the purpose of the parable is not to teach us about the agricultural practices of the ancient world but to help us gain an insight into why a loving God would allow the lives of his children to be impacted by evil and why Jesus, who brought God’s kingdom to the earth, doesn’t rid the world of evil once and for all. 

We want God to hurry up and make everything right, but God chooses to allow the wheat and the weeds to grow up together until the harvest. That doesn’t make sense to us, but somehow it makes sense to God. We want Jesus’ victory over sin and death to be fully realized here and now, but the promised day of judgment is still ahead of us, and faithfulness in our day means continuing to grow and bear fruit despite the hardships we encounter. We expect unabated weeds to undermine our place in God’s kingdom, threatening the viability of the seeds that God has planted, but there is nothing that the enemy can do to prevent God’s reign from coming to its perfection within us. Jesus urges us to have hope and to hold on.

Our instinct is to see a patch of Poa annua sprouting up in our lawn and to be discouraged by the imperfection that interrupts an otherwise monocultural landscape. But the kingdom of God is not a place where only desirable plants take root—a life in which only good things happen. The kingdom is the goodness of God that grows within us despite the challenges and hardships we face. It is the fruit that God bears in our lives no matter what seems to stand in the way of that fruitfulness. Today, Jesus reminds us that getting rid of the weeds isn’t our job. And thanks be to God for that! Our job is to trust in the one who promises to bring us into the kingdom and who assures us that nothing can keep us away.

Grace Alone Gives Us Rest

 

July 5, 2026 – The 6th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 9A

Zechariah 9:9-12; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

© 2026 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be found here.

I’m exhausted. I suppose that’s not good news considering I just got back from two weeks of vacation. As one of our children declared, this wasn’t a vacation; it was a trip—implying that, instead of relaxing, we set a grueling pace, seeing and doing everything we could. I am still a little jet-lagged, and my feet still hurt, but that’s not the kind of exhaustion I’m talking about. I’m talking about spiritual exhaustion.

I’m exhausted—emotionally, spiritually, soulfully—because I live in a world that doesn’t allow people to rest. The demand for superior performance follows us without abatement into every corner of our lives. It’s one thing to be expected to give our best at school or at work, but that same expectation comes home with us every day. We have to be the best spouse, best parent, best neighbor, best friend, best all-around person all the time. In fact, ironically, school and work have become the only places in our lives where we are occasionally given a break. You can’t take a “mental health day” off from being a mom.

The worst part of it all is that the church, which is supposed to be the one institution in this world in which God’s unconditional love and acceptance promise rest to anyone who seeks it, so often exchanges the good news of the gospel of grace for a substitute message that invariably boils down to some version of “God wants you to try harder.” For example, last Sunday, I heard an Anglican preacher use Jesus’ words in Matthew 10 to charge the congregation to offer Christ-like welcome to other people—prophets, the righteous, and little children—in order to guarantee their heavenly reward. 

On the surface, it was a fine sermon. Who doesn’t think hospitality is a good thing? But what happens when I can’t muster the emotional or physical strength necessary to be as welcoming as Jesus? What about those people whom I don’t have the capacity to welcome into my heart? What about individuals who represent a real threat to me and my family? What happens when I have to say no? Do I lose my reward? The preacher probably didn’t mean it this way, but what I heard her say was, if you want the reward of a righteous person, then you’d better find a way of becoming righteous. That’s not the gospel. That’s not grace. That’s “try harder,” but trying harder isn’t working.  

Just ask the apostle Paul. “I do not understand my own actions,” he confesses in the seventh chapter of his Letter to the Romans. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Paul was faithful to God for his entire life. First, he was a zealous Pharisee. Then he became a devout follower of Jesus. In both chapters of his life, he sought to honor God with every fiber of his being. Paul spent more time studying, praying, practicing, and disciplining himself in the search of faithfulness than almost anyone else on the earth, and still he couldn’t summon the strength of character or the willpower necessary to do what is right. In fact, the inevitability of his failure became for him a rule of life: “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.”

Paul could write those words because he had learned in the most dramatic way that wanting to do what is good and right is not the same thing as doing it. His zeal for the Jewish faith and the promised deliverance of God’s people had led him to persecute the church of Christ. Doing what he believed to be God’s will, Paul devoted himself to the destruction of the Way of Jesus. Everything he knew about God and God’s promises had led him to conclude that God’s salvation is closer to righteous people and further away from sinners. And, in Paul’s mind, Jesus and his ragtag group of outcast followers threatened to push God’s salvation further away by teaching people that holiness of life and keeping the commandments of God didn’t matter anymore. So Paul did anything and everything he could to stop them—until Jesus met him on the Damascus Road.

Imagine Paul’s horror when he realized that his earnest attempt at faithfulness was actually working against God and God’s anointed one. It was enough to transform his whole understanding of how salvation works. Paul learned that God’s grace, acceptance, and love do not come to those who love God or who seek to do God’s will, no matter how hard they try. They are given to us wretched sinners by the grace of God and by nothing else. In his realization that God loved him enough to save him even when his actions were working against God and God’s love, Paul discovered a freedom that he wanted the whole world to know.

That’s the good news we come to church to hear. The gospel of Jesus Christ is freedom from needing to get it right all the time. It is freedom from needing to be the best at everything. It is freedom from the consequences of our failures. It is freedom from needing to be good enough for God because there is no amount of wanting and trying to do the right thing that can make us good enough. Only God’s grace can do that.

In spite of ourselves and our best intentions, we fail every day—in what we have done and in what we have left undone. Wretched sinners that we are! Who will rescue us from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! Paul knew the hope and relief that can only come from God’s grace. With faith in Jesus Christ, we admit that we aren’t good enough, and we know that that’s okay because Jesus is. Christians aren’t perfect people. We are not immune to the power of sin. The forces of deception still infect our bodies and constantly lead us astray, but, because of God’s grace, we are immune to their eternal consequences. And that at last allows us to rest.

God loves sinners like you and me. Convincing the world (and ourselves) of that isn’t easy. The God of holiness—the God of perfection—chooses to love, redeem, and save imperfect and unholy people like us—not because of our best efforts but despite them. That doesn’t make sense. And that’s why Paul wrote these words in Romans 7—because he knew that being honest about ourselves and about sin is the only way we will ever know the power of God’s grace. It is the difference between being set free from our failures and being buried beneath them. It’s the difference between coming to church and leaving with a fresh dose of guilt and spiritual exhaustion and leaving with that restorative sense that God’s love will always be bigger than your best efforts and your worst failures. 

Jesus did not come to the earth, minister to outcasts, proclaim liberty to the oppressed, and be killed upon the cross for doing so in order to teach us that we need to try harder. We don’t need to try any harder in order to be loved by God. Anyone who says otherwise isn’t preaching the gospel. Jesus came to set us free from the burden of our failures—free from the crippling weight of not being good enough. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,” he says, “and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Who Packs Your Parachute?

 

June 14, 2026 – The 3rd Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 6A

Exodus 19:2-8a; Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35-10:23

© 2026 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

If you and I were leaving the church after a meeting and you suddenly remembered that you hadn’t turned off the light when we left the room, but I told you that I had turned it off, would you believe me? If we were driving to Little Rock for diocesan convention and my gas light came on, but I assured you that we had enough in the tank to make it to Trinity Cathedral, would you worry about it? What if the “miles until empty” went to zero, but I still insisted we would be fine, could you put it out of your mind? If you and I were going skydiving, and I handed you a parachute and told you not to worry because I packed it myself, would you jump out of the plane without checking it first?

Our willingness to take someone’s word depends on a number of factors. First and foremost, it depends upon the trustworthiness of the individual making the promise to us. To be honest, I have never packed a parachute in my life, and I wouldn’t know where to start. Please, for both our sakes, don’t take my word for it. But I do know my car pretty well, so, if I tell you we’re going to make it to Little Rock, you can count on it. 

That leads me to the second factor, which is how consequential the outcome would be if the person were wrong. If the lights get left on in the Library, it won’t be a big deal. If we end up stranded on the side of the interstate, it would be a considerable inconvenience but not nearly as bad as if your parachute didn’t open. 

The third factor is how difficult it would be for you to verify my claim. It wouldn’t take you very long to run back into the church to make sure the light was off, but it might not be worth it because leaving the light on isn’t a big deal. Unpacking and repacking a parachute would take a lot of effort, but, given the consequences of getting it wrong, I’d say it’s worth it to be sure. You’d have a hard time figuring out how many miles beyond zero my car will run before it’s completely out of gas. I supposed you could call Elizabeth and ask her how often I’ve been stranded on the side of the road because I neglected to refill my tank, but you might just have to take my word for it.

The big insight that the apostle Paul provides us in his letters is that, in the cross of Christ, God has packed your salvation parachute, and, as long as you don’t try to repack it, when you jump out of the airplane, everything is going to be okay. That’s what Paul means when he tells us that we are justified by faith. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God, who is trustworthy and true, has demonstrated his beyond all doubt that God’s will for us and promise to us is new and unending life. Taking God at God’s word is the faith by which we are justified. That’s the faith that Paul’s talking about—our willingness to fling ourselves out life’s airplane door with all the confidence we need to go hurdling toward our demise simply because God is the one who has packed our chute—because God is the one who has promised us that his love will get us to the ground safely. 

That kind of faith is not the same thing as believing every word of the Bible or the Nicene Creed with enough conviction to pass a lie detector test. If the faith by which we are made righteous—by which we are made right with God—were the sort of faith that could be measured or quantified on a Likert scale, that faith would simply become another kind of work—something we have to achieve on our own before God will save us. And that’s precisely the opposite of what Paul has in mind, and it’s the exact opposite of what God shows us in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Bible and the creeds and the teachings of the church do not provide litmus tests for verifying a level of faith worthy of salvation. Instead, they are the very things that teach us how to trust in God with all our hearts. They are tools, not tests.

For most of his life, Paul didn’t think about salvation that way. Like most human beings, he assumed that good things happen to good people—that salvation is closer to those who say their prayers and go to temple—that God is more fully manifest in the lives of saints than sinners. In fact, as a zealot for the faith of God’s people, Paul believed that so fully that he was willing to do anything and everything in his power to keep people from messing that up. That’s why he persecuted the church and cast his lot among those who condemned Christians to death—because their radical ways of celebrating God’s love for outcasts and criminals was, to his mind, a threat to the nearness of God’s reign. If he could stomp out anyone and everyone who followed Jesus, he could help God’s promised deliverance of God’s people become a reality on the earth.

But it turns out that, despite his best efforts, Paul was working against the reign of God and against his own participation in it. That’s why Jesus appeared to him on the Road to Damascus and said, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.” We call that moment the moment of Paul’s conversion, but Paul wasn’t converted from Judaism to Christianity. He was converted from the belief that it was his job to make God’s salvation come to the belief that the only thing he could do about God’s salvation was to accept it. He had spent his whole life believing that faithful people were supposed to faithfully pack their own parachutes and that God would bless those who packed them well by keeping them alive. But, that day on the Damascus Road, Paul discovered that, in Christ, God had already packed it for him and that God had done the same for every outcast and sinner who already knew that they couldn’t pack it for themselves. 

In the years following his conversion, as Paul reflected on that moment and how all his attempts at being faithful had been misguided, Paul wrote passages like this one from Romans 5. Justification by faith became for Paul more than an understanding of how salvation works. It became his way of making sense of the whole world. “Since we are justified by faith…,” he wrote, “we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” 

Paul’s faith in what Jesus had accomplished on the cross led him to turn his whole life over to God—even to give his body to the chains of imprisonment, his back to the scourge of torture, and ultimately his life to the executioner’s sword. That’s because Paul knew that his salvation was not up to him—that God’s promise to rescue him did not depend on his participation in that rescue plan but only on his willingness to accept it. That is justification by faith. And the peace with God that had come to him through that faith in Jesus Christ gave Paul the peace to accept that whatever hardship and adversity he faced were not signs of his failure but the means by which God’s victory would become manifest in him.

We boast in our suffering, Paul wrote simultaneously with absurdist language and complete conviction, because suffering provides an opportunity for endurance, and endurance is what proves our character within us, and character wrought through persistence in the face of hardship always gives way to hope, and hope is the future tense of faith (see Michael Gorman on 1 Corinthians)—the confident expectation of the fulfillment of God’s promises that sustains us here and now. Paul had experienced the virtuous cycle of justification by faith and the peace that came from it, and he wanted us to know that peace as well. 

So did Jesus. Why else would he send out his disciples woefully underprepared—like sheep in the midst of wolves—except to teach them that their success was not a product of their own doing but God’s gift to them and through them? God always works through our emptiness, through our weakness, and through our failure—not through our résumé or our accomplishments. When we trust in our own good and faithful work, we leave no room for God. We must learn to believe in the one who knocks us off our high horse and instead meets us down in the dirt. 

We will know peace with God and peace in this life when we know that God’s love is the only thing that can save us and that it already has. Our confidence in that love is the faith by which we are justified. With Paul, we boast not in what we have achieved but in what God has achieved on our behalf. And, because of that, we join him and boast even in our suffering because suffering in this life is nothing more than a place where God’s saving love is sure to show up.

You can’t pack that parachute for yourself no matter how hard you try. In fact, the harder you try, the more you’ll mess it up. But don’t take my word for it. Ask God to help you learn how to receive the gift of salvation as a gift—how to trust that what God has done for you is more than you could ask or imagine. God will hear and answer your prayer. Then, all that’s left for you is to jump.

Drawn Into the Heart of God

 

May 31, 2026 – The First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

© 2026 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

When the eleven disciples saw the risen Jesus, they fell down and worshipped him, but some doubted. Today’s gospel lesson is taken from the very end of Matthew’s gospel account. This is how he concludes his version of the good news, and I think his Holy-Spirit-inspired decision to include the bit about the disciples’ doubts is a powerful witness to the truth that salvation is not a reward for perfect people with perfect faith but a gift of grace to uncertain sinners like me. And I am thankful for that.

Matthew didn’t have to include that part. There are countless details about Jesus’ life and ministry and the disciples’ reaction to them that are left out by each of the gospel writers. Matthew could have wrapped up his version of the gospel by depicting this as a moment of unequivocal triumph—a joyful encounter in which the disciples were reunited with the risen Christ in an expression of unwavering love and devotion. But that’s not how he tells the story. Some of them doubted. When they saw Jesus, all eleven of them fell down and worshipped him, but, at the same time, Matthew wants us to know, some of them were unsure. And that is a gift to us—a gift that helps nurture our faith.

We aren’t completely sure what the disciples were doubting. In Matthew’s gospel account, this is the first moment when any of the eleven met the risen Christ. After Mary Magdalene and the other Mary found the empty tomb, they ran to tell the disciples that Jesus wanted them to head back to Galilee—back to Jesus’s home, back where his ministry started—where he had promised to meet them. In this first moment with the resurrected Jesus, it could be that some of them doubted it was really him. Perhaps they thought they might be dreaming or maybe even seeing a ghost. But I think it’s more likely that their doubts had to do with worshipping Jesus.

As faithful Jewish people, the disciples knew that they were forbidden from bowing down and worshipping anyone or anything except God alone. And yet, when they met the one whom God had raised from the dead, a part of them knew that the right thing to do was to fall down at his feet in worship. By raising him to new life, God had shown Jesus’ followers that Jesus had been given power over sin and death—a power which they knew belonged only to God. And so, without even thinking about it, when they saw the risen Jesus, they worshipped him. But, as their bodies bent toward the ground in adoration, some of them felt a hesitation growing inside of them. “Is this right?” they wondered silently. “Is this God?”

The word translated for us as “doubted” literally means two-stanced—as in stuck standing in two places or positions at once. It’s a word that has less to do with rational hesitation and more to do with divided loyalty. It’s a word that only appears twice in the New Testament—once here and once back in Matthew 14, when, at Peter’s request, Jesus called him to walk out on the water to him. When Peter noticed how strong the wind and the waves were, he began to doubt—his conviction became divided—so he began to sink. If you’re wondering about Doubting Thomas and his refusal to believe in the risen Jesus unless he touched the wounds of the Crucified One for himself, it turns out that the word used to describe Thomas’ perspective isn’t “doubt” but “unbelief.” Thus, “Unbelieving Thomas” would be a better nickname for him. But, in this case, it wasn’t unbelief that the disciples carried in their hearts but a lack of faithful clarity.

I think it’s only natural that, when the disciples met the risen Jesus for the first time, they found themselves caught in between two positions. A part of them recognized the divinity of their risen Lord while another part struggled let go of their commitment to worshipping God alone. And who can blame them? Not Jesus, apparently. So much had happened so quickly and without a full explanation. Only a few days earlier had they learned that their crucified teacher had been brought back to life. How do you go from exclusive and unequivocal monotheism to bowing down at the feet of a back-from-the-dead rabbi whose resurrection may or may not be indicative of divine status?   

The answer is with the help of the Holy Spirit. It takes the Holy Spirit working in and through the community of faith to bring into unity the disciples’ understanding of who Jesus was and the truth of the divine nature he possessed. They were right to bow down at Jesus’ feet in worship because he was the incarnate Son of God. And they were right to feel uncertain about that because the faithful understanding of who Jesus was had not yet been fully propagated within them by the Holy Spirit. And we should notice that their hesitation—their doubt—didn’t stop Jesus from commissioning them to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Our faith in God is something that God produces within us. God is the one that makes our faith happen. Now, that’s a radical thing for me to say, so I’ll say it again: our faith in God doesn’t come from us; it is a gift that God gives us. Just like the eleven disciples, we cannot fully believe in God—we cannot be singularly stanced—unless God, through the Holy Spirit, works in us and brings us to faith. That’s because God is not something we can find or understand or comprehend on our own terms. God is not a truth to be learned or a knowledge to be studied. For us to know anything at all about God, God must reveal Godself to us, and God does that by drawing us up, along with the rest of the community of faith, into the divine life. When we participate in the very life of God through the Holy Spirit that lives in us, we experience the truth that is God in order that we might be fully conformed to that truth in a way that we call faith.

Now, after twenty-one Trinity Sundays in ordained ministry, I have learned that no one ever came to salvation because they heard a good, careful, orthodox exploration of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. But I’ve also discovered that no one ever came to salvation without experiencing the fullness of the triune God. That’s because salvation is not merely what happens to us when we die. That’s a part of it for sure, but it’s so much more than that. Salvation is God rescuing us from our mortality, from sickness, poverty, isolation, and death, from sin, struggle, and everything that threatens us, from everything that stands in the way of our perfection. And that doesn’t happen when we reach the pearly gates. It happens when we become one with God—the God who created us in God’s image and who redeemed us by taking on our flesh and blood and who sustains us and empowers us by living within us and drawing us up into the life of God.

We become one with God in Holy Baptism. And we become one with God in Holy Communion. And we become one with God in wordless prayer and in ecstatic utterances of praise and in the songs of our hearts when the Holy Spirit takes over. We become one with God when we gather in worship and Jesus is present with us and his presence brings us into the heart of God. That’s where we receive the gift of faith. Faith is that clarity and unity of heart and mind that comes to us and fills us when we experience oneness with God, and that oneness is the inseparable, indivisible work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

When the eleven disciples saw the risen Lord, they worshipped him, but some doubted. Those doubts were not an obstacle to their faith, but, as they grew in faith, those doubts—that dividedness within them—gave way to unity. It is through worship and prayer that we are drawn into the heart of God, and it is by dwelling within the heart of God that we receive the gift of faith. The disciples remind us that we don’t have to be perfect or have perfect faith in order to be drawn into the divine life. It is God, whose love draws us into Godself, that makes us perfect. It is God who gives us perfect faith. 

Are We There Yet?

 

May 17, 2026 – The 7th Sunday of Easter, Year A

Acts 1:6-14; 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11; John 17:1-11

© 2026 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Are we there yet? Summer is almost upon us, and, for many of us, that means lots of time in the car with young children. Are we there yet? Those words have unique power to annoy any parent who is just doing their best to get their family to the beach or to the lake or to grandma’s house. Are we there yet? That question reflects more than the impatience of the petitioner. It is born of immaturity—the conceptual inability or, perhaps, willful refusal to accept that the journey will take as long as it will take and that there is no amount of wanting to get there faster that will, in fact, make the journey go by any faster. 

Are we there yet? Parents don’t hear that question as much as they used to. When I was a child, I didn’t have a smart phone or a game console or a portable DVD player to anesthetize my restlessness. My parents had to be creative, which, in turn, helped me learn how to be creative. I can’t tell you how many times we counted cars or played the alphabet game or I-spy or twenty questions. We sang songs until I was old enough to know that singing songs in the car wasn’t cool. With nothing else to do and bored out of our minds, we picked a fight with our parents and asked repeatedly—Are we there yet?—until we discerned that the likelihood of parental violence outweighed the tedium of the journey, so, for at least a few minutes, we rode in silence.

MIT sociologist Shelly Turkle says that children need to be bored or else they will grow up lacking the ability to form meaningful relationships with other people. Until we can sit and be comfortable with ourselves—and just ourselves—we won’t develop the skills necessary to engage another person in deep and mutual exchange. Are we there yet? We need to grow up asking that question and being disappointed with the answer in order to learn that all the stuff in this life that really matters—like friendship and romance and triumph and flourishing—are more than a click away. They require patience and perseverance and vulnerability and mutuality—attributes that only develop over time. 

Are we there yet? Children aren’t the only ones who ask that question, though they may be the only ones who use those particular words. Adults ask their own version all the time because, in truth, when we’re stuck in the back seat and unaware of how long we’ll be there, we’re no better at waiting than our children or grandchildren. When will my boss take me seriously? How much longer can I hold this marriage together? When will God finally take me so that I can be reunited with my beloved? There’s no map or GPS for that kind of waiting. We wish we could snap our fingers or click a button or tap a screen and make the interminable waiting stop, but part of what it means to journey through this life is to wait and wait without the ability to do anything about it.

Are we there yet? That’s the question the disciples asked Jesus right before he was taken up into heaven, though it sounded more like, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel.” They wanted to know if the waiting is over—if the time when God’s people would be in control of their own security and prosperity had arrived. The disciples had experienced the agony of waiting—waiting in despair after Jesus had been crucified. They knew what it meant to suffer without hope. But now they had known the power of the resurrection. God had brought their rabbi back from the dead. Jesus had been given authority over heaven and earth, over life and death, and the disciples wanted to know if this was the time when he would use that authority to establish God’s kingdom here on the earth. 

“Is this the time?” they asked, confident that their master would rule all the kingdoms of the earth with righteousness and justice—that he had the power to subdue the enemies of God’s people and give his followers the peace and security they had always dreamed of. Are we there yet? Are we finished? Can we celebrate? Is this what we’ve been waiting for?

“It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority,” Jesus said to his disciples. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Jesus was raised from the dead in triumph, and he was exalted into the heavens to rule over the cosmos, but the power he promised to send his disciples was not the power of our journey’s completion but the power to wait for its completion in hope. 

Jesus sends us the Holy Spirit to make us his witnesses—witnesses to his triumph and witnesses to his promise. And we bear witness to him whenever wait with hope. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we know that God has won the victory over sin and death. Because he has been exalted to the heavenly places, we know that there is no longer any separation or barrier between God’s presence and our struggles. Because God abides with us in the Holy Spirit, even our most tortuous and aggrieved waiting is imbued with hope, and hope is what sustains us as we wait for his promised return, and waiting in hope is how we bear witness to him in the power of the Spirit. 

That does not make the waiting easy, nor does it make the pain of waiting go away. As Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “For in this [earthly] tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling” (2 Cor. 5:2). Sometimes we groan or whine or complain from the backseat because we cannot see how far we have to go, but just because this waiting is long and hard and painful doesn’t mean that we give up on waiting for God. 

If we allow our struggle to be overcome by impatience or restlessness, we cannot bear witness to the one for whom we wait or the Spirit that abides within us while we wait. If we reject outright the holiness of waiting for that which is beyond our control—if we instead prioritize the manufacture of our own security and prosperity over the stark vulnerability of waiting for the one who was crucified for the sake of the world—we lose hope and the faith that is within us. As Michael Gorman wrote, “Hope can be understood as…the future tense of faith.” Believing in Jesus—putting our trust in God’s promises—means nothing if we are unwilling to endure the long and hope-filled wait for his return.

Are we there yet? No, we are not. And the hardest part is that we do not know how long it will be before Jesus comes and draws us and all things to their perfection. All we can do is wait and wait with the hope that the Holy Spirit nurtures inside us—the hope that fills this community whenever we gather together in prayer. We are the recipients of the Holy Spirit. Jesus has sent that Spirit to sustain us and comfort us and lead us to bear witness to Jesus Christ—to show others about his victory and his promise—his triumph over the forces of evil and his promise to come and set all things right. And you are a part of that witness every time you let hope shine through the hardship of waiting. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Are we there yet? No, not yet, but, by God’s grace, we will be soon.

Blessed Assurance

 

May 10, 2026 – The 6th Sunday of Easter, Year B

Acts 17:22-31; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21

© 2026 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

It’s exam season. Last week, as I drove one of my children to school, I noticed that the roads and sidewalks around the university were unusually empty except for a few, spaced-out undergraduates walking with that dazed look on their face that could only mean one thing. High school seniors are done with classes, but some of them still have AP exams to take. Other high school students are just gearing up for the stressful season. 

In a way, final exams still affect us all, even if it’s been decades since we sat for one. How many of you still wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about studying for the wrong exam or showing up on the wrong day? Some of you spend as much time grading exams as your students spend studying for them. And, as the name Father Chuck gave our end-of-life planning workshop a few years back implies, all of us will someday be facing our “Final Exams,” whether we’re ready for them or not.

In today’s gospel lesson, for the second week in a row, we hear about Jesus’ disciples cramming for their final exams. This is the Last Supper. This is the moment when Jesus explains to his disciples that one of them will betray him. This is the dinner at which he tells them that he is about to depart from them and go to a place where they will not be able to follow. And the disciples’ response is a mixture of disbelief and panic. 

Last week, we heard Jesus reassure his disciples that they were ready—that they already knew everything they needed to know to carry on in his absence. “You know the way to the place where I am going,” he said to them. But Thomas wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about anything anymore. “Lord, we don’t even know where you are going. How can we know the way?” And Jesus replied, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. If you know me, you don’t need to know anything else.” Then, we heard Philip speak up and say, “Lord, if you will just show us the Father, we will be satisfied.” And Jesus replied, “Have I been with you all this time and still you do not know me?”

The disciples are grasping at straws. And who can blame them? They now know that the moment of truth is right around the corner. Jesus is leaving them, and it will be up to them to follow in his footsteps—to maintain his ways and observe his teachings—without his help. He won’t be around to show them how it’s done. They want nothing more than to be found faithful in his absence, but they hardly know where to start. So, like any good teacher, Jesus speaks to them with calming words of reassurance. Jesus knows that this is his last chance to teach them and form them for a lifetime of being his disciples even after he is gone, so he lays it out for them as simply as he can.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Those words are supposed to make them feel better. They are Jesus’ way of telling his disciples that, as long as they focus on what is really important, everything else will take care of itself. But somehow, over the years, like anxious disciples, we’ve forgotten what Jesus was trying to tell us and allowed his words to take on a new meaning—one that doesn’t sound at all like what Jesus was meant. And it all depends on how we hear the word “if.”

Among the many challenges that come with translating the biblical manuscripts into an English text is the challenge of not being able to hear the tone with which Jesus said these words. How do you hear him? Does the way he says these words anticipate our success or our failure? I’m not sure I can adequately give voice to the distinction I hear in my mind, but one version sounds like the equivalent of, “[As long as] you love me, you will keep my commandments,” while the other sounds more like, “If you [really] love me, you will keep my commandments.” 

The first is a statement of reassurance—one which lets the disciples know that, as long as they love Jesus, they will be faithful to him. The second feels more like a thinly veiled threat—one which conveys to the disciples Jesus’ doubt that they will ever love him enough to be faithful—like an emotionally manipulative parent who tells their children that, if they really loved them, they would clean their room. To me, only the first one sounds like Jesus, but that doesn’t stop us from hearing these words as if Jesus were trying to shame us into obedience.

I bet all of us have had a teacher, coach, boss, spouse, or parent who has used that tactic to try to get the best out of us. In fourth grade, my PE teacher was like that. He went around telling students that he didn’t think they were fast enough, strong enough, or disciplined enough to impress him. And he was right. Plenty of us resented him so much that we tried our best to prove him wrong, but I know I didn’t come out of the fourth grade any better for it. His “tough love” wasn’t really love at all because the only things that it fueled with us were spite and hatred. 

How often does that same approach get transferred to Jesus by pastors and preachers and Sunday school teachers who don’t know how to think about discipleship any other way? There are so many Christians out there who teach children that, if they really love Jesus, they will always do the right thing. But that never works. Because we never do the right thing. We’re human beings. We’re sinners. And, if we have been taught that people who really love Jesus always do the right thing, whenever we fail, we will believe that it’s because we don’t really love Jesus. And that fills us with shame. And shame has never motivated anyone to be better. It only shuts us down. 

I once heard a pastor say to a congregation, “If I could scare the hell out of you, I would.” And he meant it. But turning Jesus into a chronically disappointed motivational speaker or frustrated life coach won’t help us one bit. We need a savior.

If all we’ve ever known in our life is “try harder or else,” it may be difficult to grasp the truth of the gospel. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to motivate us to work harder. He died to give hopeless, recalcitrant sinners the gift of God’s unbreakable love. And the only thing we need to focus on is nurturing within ourselves the love that God’s love for us inspires. 

Unconditional love is the only thing that has the power to change us for good. In Jesus Christ, you are loved with a love that has the ability to shape you for holiness—to form you into the image of the one who loves you—to love you into loving others as you have been loved. “This is my commandment,” Jesus says to his disciples, “that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). We are already loved. That love is not withheld from us until we clean our room, say our prayers, or reach a prerequisite level of faithfulness. It is showered upon us freely and indiscriminately even and especially while we are lost in our own failures because God knows that unconditional love is the only thing that works. Love inspires love, and love is the root of faithfulness.

Imagine showing up for the most important final exam of your life and being told that you have already received a perfect grade. Imagine your teacher or professor or doctoral advisor letting you know from the outset that you are already home free and that the only point of the exam is to give you a chance to celebrate and explore everything you already know. Imagine diving in not at all worried about the outcome but excited for the chance to delight in having already been found worthy. Axios! Worthy! That is the affirmation Jesus proclaims to us through the cross. His death does not highlight our failures. It makes us worthy.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. That is Jesus’ promise to us. His love teaches us how to love and beckons from us the love that is our faithfulness.