As We Have Been Forgiven

 

September 13, 2026 – The 16th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 19A

Genesis 50:15-21; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

© 2026 Evan D. Garner

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

The kingdom of heaven is like a shepherd with a hundred sheep, who, after discovering that one of his sheep had gone astray, left the ninety-nine and went in search of the one that was lost. And, when he found it, truly I tell you he rejoiced over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. Even the ninety-nine, who never left the loving protection of their shepherd, rejoiced to see the return of the one who was lost.

But, the next morning, after the celebrations had subsided, something went wrong. The sheep who had been lost discovered that, while he was gone, one of his fellow sheep had borrowed and used up all of his toothpaste. “Where is my toothpaste?” the formerly lost sheep demanded. “You were gone,” the offending sheep confessed. “We didn’t think you were coming back. I ran out, and we figured yours would go to waste, so I used it. I’m sorry. Have mercy on me, and I will get you a new tube next week when the shops are open.” But the once lost sheep would hear none of it. He immediately chased his fellow sheep out of the sheepfold and told him not to come back until he had procured a new tube.

When they saw what had happened, the other sheep were distressed. They were grieved by their peer’s complete lack of pity, so they went and told the shepherd all that had taken place. Then the shepherd went and grabbed the merciless sheep and said, “‘You wicked sheep! When you were lost, I came and found you and brought you back into the sheepfold simply because I love you—because I couldn’t bear the thought of you bleating all alone in the desert. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow sheep, as I had mercy on you?” Then the shepherd carried the sheep back into the wilderness where he left him, saying, “See if you can find your own way home, but don’t bother asking me for help.”

We love belonging to the Good Shepherd. We love it when Jesus comes looking for us. We love celebrating the radical, limitless, and unconditional forgiveness that God has for lost sinners like us in Christ Jesus. But, when that forgiveness, which is given to us freely, demands a change in our heart—demands that we would become as generous and forgiving as God—we’re not so sure. And sometimes we’re the last ones to realize it.

The reason I retold (poorly) the parable of the lost sheep is that that’s where Jesus begins this teaching on forgiveness. The stark, seemingly harsh parable of the unforgiving servant in today’s gospel lesson is not offered in isolation, nor is Peter’s question, which seems to provoke it. The lectionary doesn’t allow us to hear all of Matthew 18, but, throughout the chapter, in conversation with the disciples, Jesus has been exploring the nature and importance of forgiveness. 

Jesus starts with the parable of the lost sheep, which we know and love, but then he immediately expands our understanding of the parable by applying it to community life: “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.” Right from the start, Jesus lets his followers know that God’s gracious love and forgiveness will make a difference in the heart of the community of faith. God may be the one who seeks and finds us when we are lost, but, once we have been found, we must incorporate into our identity that priority of seeking out those who have gone astray.

Then, Peter, seizing upon what he knows to be true about Jesus and his radical message of forgiveness, seeks to establish the distant boundary of God’s grace. “If another member of the church sins against me,” he asks, “how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” invoking the number seven as a symbol of perfection or completeness. In other words, Peter asks Jesus if his forgiveness of those who wound him is supposed to be limitless—as perfect as the forgiveness that only God can give. Perhaps Peter was simply showing off in front of the other disciples. Or maybe he really was questioning whether we could ever be expected to forgive as freely and generously as God. Either way, Jesus shatters any notion that our forgiveness has justifiable limits: “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”

In order to get his point across, Jesus tells a parable of ridiculous forgiveness and equally ridiculous reluctance to forgive. The story is intentionally exaggerated. The debt of ten thousand talents is an unfathomable amount of money. No servant—no slave—would ever be allowed to amass a debt that big. And, even if they did, no master or ruler could afford to forgive it. We’re talking about the equivalent of sixty million days’ worth of wages—almost 400 tons of silver. And yet, when the servant begs for forgiveness, the master, knowing well that the debt could never be paid off, forgives it entirely. Such is the nature of God’s love.

But, when that same slave confronts a fellow worker about a modest hundred-denarii debt—an amount that was only one six-hundred-thousandth or 0.00017% of the initial amount—he refuses to show forgiveness. And, even before Jesus finishes the story, we know that’s wrong. It doesn’t matter that there was no law against demanding the repayment of the debt. We don’t care that the slave had every right to ask for his money back. It doesn’t matter to us that the owner didn’t require any promise of similar behavior from the slave whose debt he forgave before he forgave it. The only person in the story who doesn’t understand that the magnitude of mercy shown to the indebted slave absolutely and unequivocally demands that forgiveness be passed along is the slave himself. And perhaps that’s the real point of this parable. 

We are loved and forgiven by God freely and undeservedly. That’s the gospel of Jesus Christ. God loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten Son so that we, simply by believing in the magnitude of his mercy, might be reconciled to God. The infinite debt of our sin has been paid by the death of God’s Son. But Christians like us have a habit of accepting that free gift and then ignoring the transformation it necessitates within us because it’s a lot easier to believe that we deserve God’s love than to share it with those who hurt us.

If God loves us because we are better than other people—better than our enemies, better than hypocrites, better than fundamentalists, better than people who don’t love God back—then we don’t have to love them either. In other words, if the debt that God has forgiven us isn’t terribly significant, then we can’t be expected to forgive other people all that significantly. But the only person in the world who struggles to see how much we have been forgiven is us. To paraphrase the words of the prophet Nathan to King David, “We are the man in the parable.”

Because of God’s grace, we have been born on second base, but it’s easier for us to believe that we hit a double than to admit the consequences of accepting God’s unconditional love. Yet, if we allow the magnitude of God’s love to confront our self-righteousness, we will find that even our pride—that part of ourselves that most stands in the way of God’s love—has been forgiven and is being dissolved by the love of Jesus. Ironically and counter-intuitively, the antidote to self-righteousness is not to try harder to be a good person but to admit how not good of a person you really are. Then the Holy Spirit can work its way into even the tightest cracks in our ego, transforming us from the inside out. 

Thanks be to God that, when we are lost in the wilderness of our pride, God comes and finds us and carries us back home like sheep in need of a shepherd. But, on that journey, while being carried on the shoulders of our savior, we must let his embrace transform us deeply, softening us and melting away our hardened exterior until the magnitude of his grace begins to shape us into the image of the one on whose shoulders we are being saved. When we struggle to forgive with the same limitless forgiveness with which we have been forgiven, we must return there—to the embrace of our savior—where his love fills us anew, enabling us to love others just as we have been loved.

Denying Ourselves to Embrace Jesus

August 30, 2026 – The 14^th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 17A

Jeremiah 15:15-21; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28

© 2026 Evan D. Garner

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

In January 2018, Liam Neeson, in anticipation of the debut of his latest film, The Commuter, gave an interview in which he was asked about the pay gap between women and men actors in Hollywood. Earlier that week, USA Today had highlighted the disparity in a story it published about Mark Wahlberg being paid 1,000 times more than his co-start Michele Williams in the film, All the Money in the World. When Neeson was asked about it, he was ready…sort of.

“There’s a lot of healthy and necessary discussion about it because the disparity sometimes is [really] disgraceful,” Neeson said, using a word that was once enough to get a film an R-rating all by itself. When asked what it would take for Hollywood to move past the disparity, Neeson responded, “We’re starting…it’s starting with these extraordinary actresses and brave ladies, and we as men have got to be part of it, you know? We started it, so we have to be part of the solution.” 

“So would you take a pay cut to kind of equal things out?” the interviewer asked. “No! Pay cut?” Neeson scoffed. “No, no, no, no, no. That’s gone too far.” The actor seems to have anticipated being celebrated for his bold stand, but the video clip of the interview quickly became a meme for everything that stands in the way of equity. Doing the right thing always sounds like a good idea until we are confronted with what it will cost us.

Last week, we heard Jesus ask his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets,” the disciples replied. Then, Jesus turned the question back onto them: “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Peter’s confession was a moment when God revealed a truth about Godself to the world. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah,” Jesus said, “for flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter—Petros—and on this Petros I will build my church.” Peter’s confession will become the bedrock upon which Jesus Christ will build his community of followers. But, as we hear today, that community of followers isn’t what Peter and his companions expected it to be.  

The authors of the lectionary split Matthew 16 into two separate weeks, which makes it hard for a preacher to convey the extent to which Peter’s confession and Jesus’s prediction are really two sides of the same coin. In the gospel tradition, Peter is the first person to correctly identify Jesus as the messiah—God’s anointed one—and, almost as soon as Peter gets the words out of his mouth, Jesus begins to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering and be killed and on the third day be raised. 

Jesus knows that you can’t have one without the other. He can’t be God’s anointed one and not also be the one who will suffer and die for the sake of God’s people. He knows that his suffering and death are the very means by which his identity as God’s messiah will be fulfilled. But holding those two seemingly disparate truths together is more than the disciples can bear.

“God forbid it, Lord!” Peter exclaims in utter shock and disbelief, forgetting himself and rebuking his master. “This must never happen to you.” But Jesus then turns to Peter and rebukes him back: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” I love the way Matthew’s version of this story helps us know that Peter’s instinctive, human desire to protect Jesus from suffering is actually a stumbling block—an impediment—to Jesus’s faithfulness to God’s will.

The thing that’s getting in the way is Peter—his humanity—his instinctive attachment to, immersion in, dependence upon, and preference for the ways of humankind. It’s one thing to confess Jesus as God’s messiah, but it’s quite another to follow where he leads. Jesus has been sent to accomplish God’s will, and his faithfulness to God will bring him into direct conflict with the ways of the world. His allegiance to the reign of God and God’s preference for the poor, the outcast, the marginalized, and the oppressed is the reason the religious and political powers will execute him by nailing him to the cross. But it is not Jesus’s suffering and death that are a threat to God’s ways becoming manifest in the world. It is our unwillingness to accept them that stands in the way.

“If you want to become my follower,” Jesus offers as an alternative, “you must deny yourself and take up your cross and then follow me.” We must deny ourselves. That is the first step to faithfulness, Jesus teaches us. But what does that mean? What is self-denial? At its root, the word means to refuse, reject, disown, or repudiate. When that word occurs in the New Testament, it is usually used of denying someone or something else—most notably in the Last Supper, when Jesus tells Peter that, before the cock crows, he will deny him three times. Only twice is this word used in the reflexive sense—once in 2 Timothy and once here in Matthew 16—and, in both cases, it suggests a fundamental rejection of one’s identity. 

But I don’t think Jesus means that we are supposed to lose touch with the person God has made us to be. I think the self-denial he has in mind is less psychical and more physical. In the text, there’s a linguistic link between “deny yourself” and “take up your cross.” Unlike “follow me,” which comes after, the verbs for “deny” and “take up” share the same tense, implying that they must be completed together before any following can begin. Given the way in which Jesus has described the inseparability of his faithfulness to God and his acceptance of suffering, I think he means the same for us—that to deny ourselves is to take up our cross, and that we must do both before we can truly follow him. 

I think Jesus expects us to die. I think the self-denial he has in mind looks like a willingness to embrace our own suffering and death for his sake. I think the instinctive desire to avoid hardship at all costs is the very thing that stands in the way of our faithfulness to God. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” That’s not a metaphor for spiritual discomfort or nominal sacrifice. That’s a call to martyrdom. Two thousand years after Jesus said these words, they have lost their sting. None of us expects to die for our faith. This is America, after all. The most that following Jesus has ever cost us is ten percent of our paycheck and an early start to Sunday morning. But, if we are going to proclaim Jesus as God’s messiah and ourselves as his followers, we must be willing to die.

To believe in Jesus and to be his disciple is to give up our allegiance to this world and to seek, through the spiritual disciplines, the dissolution of our attachment—our enslavement—to its ways in order that we might freely follow him unto death. Why would we ever do that? Because Jesus has showed us that it is only by dying to this world that we are reborn to new and everlasting life. “Those who lose their life for my sake,” Jesus promises us, “will find it.” 

To close, I want to reflect on the nature of Christian discipleship as a life of suffering that we would gladly choose. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Whether we follow Jesus where he leads is up to us. As John Chrysostom preached 1600 years ago, “See how [Jesus] also makes His discourse unexceptionable: not saying at all, “Whether you will or not, you must suffer this,” but how? “If [anyone] will come after me. I force not, I compel not, but each one I make lord of his own choice…For to good things do I call you, not to things evil or burdensome; not to punishment and vengeance, that I should have to compel [you]. Nay, the nature of the thing is alone sufficient to attract you” (Sermons on Matthew, 55.1).

By suffering and dying for our sake, Jesus has made us the lords of our own choice. He has presented us with the offer of everlasting life, and we must choose whether we will accept it even though it means that we must die with him. To accept the way of Jesus is to accept the way of the cross, and accepting the way of the cross requires that we learn how to deny ourselves. But we cannot learn the spiritual way of self-denial all at once. It takes practice. Thankfully, we have a good teacher. Jesus has taught us how to pray. He has taught us how to love each other. He has taught us how, when two or three are gathered in his name, he will be present in the midst of them. 

Prayer, worship, service, community—the fundamental spiritual practices of our faith are designed to show us what Jesus has done for us—the abundant life that he has given to us. Those practices teach us how to say yes when Jesus invites us to follow him and to do so not out of compulsion but out of joy. When those practices teach us that our greatest hope is found not in our attachment to this world but in our being set free from it, our eager reply to Jesus will be yes because following him will cost us everything in this life but it also promises us everything in the life to come. 

Standing In Line For Salvation

 

August 16, 2026 – The 12th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 15A

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15:10-28

© 2026 Evan D. Garner

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

Word got to a bishop that one of the rectors in his diocese was leading a congregation astray. No one ever admitted to making the accusatory phone call, but apparently someone called the bishop to let him know that this new rector was undermining everything The Episcopal Church stood for. “What’s this I hear about worship at St. Mary’s?” the bishop asked after calling the offending cleric. “Is it true that you are using guitars and projectors during the service? And have you stopped wearing vestments altogether? And are you preaching twenty-five-minute sermons that focus on the Bible and Jesus and say almost nothing about social justice and radical hospitality?”

“Well, Bishop,” the rector replied. “I suppose that’s true.”

“What are you trying to accomplish?” the Bishop snapped back in a judgmental tone, not waiting for an answer. “We don’t want our church to be overrun by a bunch of simple-minded, unsophisticated, Bible-thumping Baptists, do we?” After two seconds of stunned silence from the other end of the line, the bishop continued, “What do you plan on teaching in this year’s Inquirers Class—sword drills and altar calls? If you’re going to clean up this mess, you’d better teach your people how and when to make the sign of the cross, how and when to bow and genuflect in worship, and how to properly chant the liturgy. That’s how you build a congregation full of real Episcopalians.”

“But Bishop,” the rector said meekly, “It isn’t what’s on the outside that makes someone a good Christian but what’s in the heart. It’s saying your prayers, reading the Bible, coming to church, serving others, and loving your neighbor that make someone a real Christian—not all the external gestures and ceremony.”

“Poppycock!” the bishop exclaimed in exasperation. “You sound more like a Presbyterian minister than an Episcopal priest, and, no matter what you think, I don’t mean that as a compliment.”

It’s hard for twenty-first century Episcopalians to appreciate the controversy at issue in the first half of today’s gospel reading because we’re so far removed from the ceremonial Jewish practices of Jesus’s day. The idea of Jesus’s disciples eating with unwashed hands sounds more like a hygiene issue than a religious one, but this practice struck at the heart of what it meant to be faithful to God. 

Although the practice of ritually cleansing your hands before eating something isn’t specifically mentioned in the Bible, rabbis interpreted the scriptures as calling for this sacred gesture as a way both to give thanks to God for God’s goodness and to remember the uniqueness of God’s relationship with God’s people. Back then (and still today), observant Jews would wash their hands and say a blessing before any meal that included bread—the most basic form of human sustenance—as a way of living out their fundamental identity as God’s people. 

Throughout history, that reminder has seemed especially important when the way of God’s people has been under threat from occupying Gentile forces like the Roman Empire’s domineering presence in first-century Palestine. As a religious teacher himself, Jesus would have been intimately familiar with the practice and its centrality to the Jewish faith. He would have known that omitting it from one’s daily life was seen as tantamount to giving into the pressure to conform to the expectations of the Empire. And to teach his followers to ignore that tradition would be like the rector of this church proclaiming that the sacrament of Holy Communion is nothing more than a mid-service snack of bread and wine. 

Although it was shocking to his contemporaries, we aren’t surprised that Jesus taught his followers that that ritual impurity doesn’t stands in the way of a good and holy relationship with God. “It isn’t what goes into the mouth that makes a person unclean,” he said. “Everything you eat eventually finds its way into the sewer. It’s what comes out of your mouth that matters because what comes out of your mouth reflects what’s in your heart. Don’t pay attention to what’s on the outside. It’s what’s on the inside that counts.” That makes sense to us. God cares less about unclean hands than unclean hearts. So why, then, does Jesus say such shocking things about the Canaanite woman who only wants his help?

“It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Jesus said those words to a desperate mother because she wasn’t Jewish. It’s hard to reconcile that with the sentiment behind his dismissal of the handwashing ritual. If the ceremonial handwashing was something that Jews did to distinguish themselves from their Gentile neighbors, and Jesus dismissed that practice as a meaningless gesture that masks the truth, why did he speak to this Gentile woman as if she were a dog? Where did his compassion and humanity go? I know that arguing with the religious leaders can rob anyone of their patience and compassion, but this turnaround seems especially abrupt if not contradictory.

We don’t know what Jesus was thinking. We don’t know what his motivation was. I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not going to suggest a particularly clever way of hearing these harsh words as something less than terrible. Now, I’ve heard preachers suggest that Jesus was just proving a point—that he spoke to this woman this way because he knew she would respond with brilliant faithfulness, and he wanted his disciples to see and remember this dramatic reversal. And I’ve heard preachers argue that Jesus was merely testing her faith—that he didn’t really mean what he said and that he only called her a dog to give her the chance to prove herself worthy of a miracle. To me, those feel like cop-outs—cheap ways to sidestep a difficult passage of scripture that we’re supposed to wrestle with and that, with God’s help, we’re supposed to benefit from, even if we don’t get a satisfactory answer.

I think we need to focus on what Jesus says to the disciples when they beg him to send her away: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The disciples are tired of her disruptive begging, and they want Jesus to snap his fingers and grant her request so that she will be satisfied and leave them alone. But Jesus can’t do that. He wasn’t sent to the earth to rescue Gentiles from the forces of evil. He was sent to save God’s people—the descendants of Abraham—from their oppressors. And those of us who are used to being first in line may have a hard time with that.

Tyre and Sidon—the region to which Jesus has withdrawn after his confrontation with the religious authorities—was the home of some of Israel’s oldest and most persistent enemies. Prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, Amos, and Zecheriah—when they announce God’s promised deliverance, they single out Tyre as the nation that must be defeated before God’s people can have their freedom. When Matthew describes this woman as a Canaanite, he uses for her a label that embodied everything that stood in the way of the flourishing of God’s people. What should be remarkable to us, therefore, is the reversal that results in the granting of her request and, perhaps most importantly, the means by which this woman achieves it.

We know from Jesus’s earlier encounter with the Roman centurion in Matthew 8 that he was willing to share his healing power with those who did not belong to the family of Abraham. In Luke’s version of that miracle story, the Jewish leaders approached Jesus on the centurion’s behalf because he was known to them as a respectable and honorable man—even a friend of God’s people. But Matthew doesn’t try to explain the motivation for Jesus’s decision to heal the centurion’s servant. Matthew only stresses the faith of the centurion, who, after admitting he was unworthy to have Jesus come under his roof, asked that his request be granted from a distance. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus said of that Gentile, “in no one in Israel have I found such faith.”

We should have that encounter in mind when we wrestle with today’s gospel lesson. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” Jesus says to the Canaanite woman. But then she responds with a statement of faith just as remarkable as that of the centurion. Our translation doesn’t quite do justice to her forceful response, which sounds more like, “Yes it is, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from their masters’ table.” Jesus may have been sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but this woman recognizes that the salvation of God’s people means salvation for her and her people, too. And, when Jesus sees this woman’s faith—her insight that God’s love for his covenant people brings the light of salvation to all the nations of the world—he calls her faith great—the only time Jesus does so in the gospel.

I’m still not happy with the words Jesus said to this woman. I don’t understand them or why he said them. But his debate with the religious authorities about the necessity of ritual purity and the praise he reserves for this woman’s faith together show us that God’s love for the children of Abraham has not abated even if we Gentiles are now also the recipients of that love, which has overflowed and trickled down from them to us. Salvation reaches those who are willing to accept their place in line and trust that God’s love is enough for all of us. May we never presume God’s love and favor for ourselves in a way that denies them to anyone else.

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.