SERMONS

Ivory Casten 7/19/26 Ivory Casten 7/19/26

Proper 11: Patience for the Good Work of God

Readings for July 19

Introduction

Good morning friends. It is great to see you this morning. This morning’s passage from the Gospel is another agricultural metaphor, but with quite a different purpose than the parable of the soils, which was the Gospel passage last week. This week highlights God’s kindness, mercy, and his patience as he invites people into life in the kingdom of God. The way to discover a good spiritual harvest in this passage is through patience to look for what is ultimately good and beautiful versus what is ultimately harmful. I want to invite the kids down now for our kids sermon.

1) Kids Sermon

Hey everyone. I know that we have talked a lot about plants lately. I have one more to consider today and then I’ll move off of plants when I get back from vacation.

I want you to look up at the screen with me. Does anyone know what seedlings we might be looking at here? [Let them answer] On the left, the one with the finger, this is a common carrot. Once it is fully grown, you can pull it out of the ground, wash it, and eat it. The one in the middle is wild carrot, or Queen Anne’s Lace. It is mildly toxic. But the one on the right is called Hog Weed, or poison hemlock. It looks deceptively like a carrot, and it’s related to it, but every part of that plant is poisonous. Can you imagine being a farmer who sells their carrots to the market to make a living, and have someone mess with your crop? Imagine that in the middle of the night someone came in and took seeds from poison hemlock and queen anne’s lace after you had just finished sowing your carrot seeds and then the queen anne’s lace and hemlock both grew in with your carrots. That would be absolutely devastating!

What if, after about a month, the farmer notices that not all the plants are the same? What is the risk if they start pulling things at that point? That’s right! They might pull out the actual carrots with the other things. This means the farmer will lose money. If the farmer would wait, they will be able to figure it out. Queen Anne’s lace will flower after about 2-3 months. Poison hemlock and carrots both take over a year to go to flower. But in that time, the poison hemlock stems will start to turn purple and the leaves will become big and broad. The farmer’s patience will pay off. If they can wait 6 months to a year, they can eradicate the wrong plants so that their harvest can still be plentiful.

We often want things to go our way right now. But it is through patience, in waiting, that God is at work. Sometimes we go through really difficult things and we just wish God would make them better already. Jesus’ disciples felt that way too. Would the kingdom just come already!?! Jesus is reminding them, and us, of God’s kindness and our need for patience. God is at work even when we don’t understand it in ways we may never fully be aware of. What we perceive as slowness is God’s kindness at work, drawing people to himself. And because God is at work, we need to trust Him even when things didn’t go how we thought they would. The disciples of Jesus were to look to Jesus in their waiting and keep growing in their relationship with him. This is the same call for each one of us as well. Please pray with me: “Dear God...thank you...for your mercy...you give good gifts...and when we don’t understand...all that is happening...we know you are working...for our good...thank you...that you are with us...and that you love us. Amen.”

2) God’s Patience is Merciful (cf. OT and Psalm) (vv 24-30 and the other parables afterward)

In today’s parable about the kingdom of God, Jesus tells us about someone who sows good seed in a field, but then when everyone is sleeping, an enemy comes and sows weeds. These are not just any weeds, but they are likely darnel, which looks exactly like wheat until the heads of the grain form. If darnel gets mixed in with the wheat, it will ruin someone’s crop. Even though it looks like wheat, darnel is actually toxic and can make you quite sick.

The slaves of the household, understandably, want to pluck it, but the problem is that in trying to get rid of the darnel they risk losing some of the wheat crop as well. Instead, the master says to let the two grow up together. Essentially, once they mature, they will see exactly which is which. Then the reapers will be called and will separate the wheat from the darnel and store the pile of wheat in the barn. They will take the pile of darnel to be burned.

The slaves’ question is helpful in understanding why Jesus tells the parable. They say “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where then, did these weeds come from?”[1] It gets to deeper human questions: “Why did you put this cruel person in my life?” Or “Why do tyrants still rule over people?” Or, “Why do good, hard working people, get exploited?” Or “How could you allow me to go through that awful situation in which I was so harmed?” Or even, “Why can’t I be healed?” These are good questions that God is big enough to hold for us.

Jesus isn’t providing answers for the “why”, but acknowledges the real and spiritual reality that the Lord, which he laters refers to as the Son of Man as a way to refer to himself, has planted good things. God gives good gifts and makes things good. When creation is described in Genesis it is described as good. In the Syriac translation of the Old Testament they translated it with a word that has semantic overlap between good and beautiful. I like thinking about what God does for us and in us as ultimately good and beautiful.

But that beauty is always growing up next to things cruel and destructive. The enemy of humanity sows counterfeit and toxic weeds next to good wheat. That which is most subtly wrong, what might even appear beautiful at first, is the most diabolically wrong because it is the enemy of what is truly beautiful. These weeds can be people who look like they’ve got it all together, but to try to imitate them is to bring about death. The weeds might be that we should defy our aging and changing bodies to pursue vain beauty. They might be messages about how we should be doing more, or that we should be better off by this point. These might be subtle messages that promise the kingdom and salvation, but don’t ultimately produce the freedom promised. We can see this on a grand scale with leaders who lie and make up problems that don’t exist so that they alone can fix them in order to stoke fear and anger and garner support.

We can see it in good desires gone awry — which is also diabolically subtle. For example, it is a good desire to have children; it would be harmful to desire children in order to fight a culture war or have someone to take care of your needs. It is good to desire a relationship with others, but not at the price of cutting off part of yourself to please them. Good desires misapplied fall short of what is truly good and beautiful. It is a good desire to see God’s kingdom, but the subtly diabolical lie is that it must happen right now in my time and by my power. This is fear and power that circumvents the patience necessary to see God at work.

This passage speaks directly to fear. The disciples may wonder if this is the time to take up arms and fight for the kingdom. There were certainly militaristic groups of Jews at the ready for it! If we take up arms at every injustice we will live in constant fear and exhaustion, and miss the opportunity to see what God does in his patience. There are several times in the Old Testament where God is called the one who is long-suffering and patient, showing mercy and compassion, etc. His character functions like a creed that forms the foundation for the covenant he made with his people. His compassion, mercy, and patience are the guiding principle of his working. He ultimately wants renewal through repentance, and not destruction and separation.

3) God’s glory will be revealed in renewed humanity (cf. Romans 8) (vv 34-43)

While the central theme of this parable is patience, the other part is that there is hope for the renewal of mankind. What God plants is truly good and beautiful. When Jesus explains the parable he says that the one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man, an allusion to God’s restorative work in Daniel 12. Patience is necessary to hang on long enough to see God’s mercy at work. God won’t ultimately let evil win, nor will his work be rushed by us. I do often wish that God would work on my schedule, but transformation is often slow, happening at the speed of restored relationships. God leads with mercy. He is a kind parent. NT Wright says this beautifully: “God is not a sadistic monster who would happily consign most of his beloved, image-bearing creatures to eternal fire. But there are equal and opposite caricatures we should also beware of. God is not an indulgent grandparent determined to spoil the youngsters rotten by letting them do whatever they like and still giving them sweets at the end of the day. We must refuse the second just as firmly as the first.”[2] We can come to our patient God who longs to meet us with his mercy and transformation. He sows good things and his nature is to love his good creation.

Conclusion

Today’s passage is an encouragement for us to discern God’s beautiful and good work with patience. Sometimes things or people spring up who are opposed to what is ultimately good and beautiful. Rather than being immediately reactive, we need to be prayerfully responsive. This requires patience and trust to see what the Lord will do. At the same time, be aware of subtly diabolical work in this world that is set on destroying the good work of God. The best way to expose what is good and beautiful versus what is subtly destructive is stay prayerfully aware of the work of Jesus. In the hard work of patiently enduring and looking for Jesus, God is slowly transforming us into a people who gloriously bear his image.

Let us pray:

O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Grant us the fullness of your grace, that we, running to obtain your promises, may become partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

[1] Matt 13:27

[2] Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1-15 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 173.

Ivory Casten 7/12/26 Ivory Casten 7/12/26

Proper 10: The Heritage of the Suffering Servant

Readings for July 12

Introduction

Good morning friends. Today we read a beautiful passage from the book of Isaiah which I’d like to unpack for us today. You’ve probably heard parts of it quoted in the New Testament, but I want to see it in its context. The passage raises questions we often ask, like “Is working this hard and not seeing any outcome really God’s will?” Or “Why do I feel so spiritually dry and the Lord feels so far away?” The passage is all about the goodness of life promised by God sitting juxtaposed with the reality of the muck we’re in at the moment. I want to invite the kids up for our kids sermon.

1) Kid’s sermon

How many of you have heard that song “I’ve got peace like a river”? Can you sing it with me? [sing] Have you ever thought about what that means? Why are rivers peaceful?

On the one hand, it is a peaceful thing for us to sit next to something beautiful we cannot control. If we are talking about our passage though, rivers do much more than just create beauty. They provide what is necessary to make things grow. Can anything grow in this dirt? Why not? [Hold up dry dirt and let a child pour water into it.] How about now? What will happen if the dirt gets too dry again? What would happen if we continued to consistently water it? There is so much about God and rivers in the Bible. In our Psalm passage we heard the phrase “the river of God is full of water, to provide the people with grain”. They counted on healthy rivers and streams for life. Our passage in Isaiah 55 today starts with this verse: “Look! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.” We need God’s wisdom for our lives like the thirsty ground needs water.

Over time if we try to do things on our own, our hearts can grow hard, but God has planted the seeds of the kingdom of God, of new creation, in our hearts. When we come and seek Jesus, ask him for help, ask him to know his love for us, it is like pouring water on the dry soil of our hearts. God makes good things grow. We are invited to come to the one who says “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”

Would you please pray with me? “Dear God...thank you...for sending Jesus...who died for us...and rose again from the dead...we come to you Lord...because we need you...when things are good...and when things are hard...thank you for loving us. Amen.” Thank you for listening. Go ahead and head back to your seats.

2) vv 1-5 Wisdom for the heritage of the suffering servant

Before jumping into Isaiah 55, let me give a bit of intro. The book of Isaiah from chapters 1 through 35 are inviting the people of Judah to come back to covenant faithfulness to God through cycles of oracles of judgment and salvation. Chapters 36-39 are narrative and tell the story of King Hezekiah’s run-ins with king Sennacherib of Assyria. While Assyria does’t take the southern kingdom, by chapter 39, King Hezekiah does something foolish. He welcomes the Babylonian envoys of king Merodach-baladan, the king of Babylon and shows them all the treasures of Judah. This set us up to anticipate the exile where Babylon would come and conquer the southern kingdom of Judah, destroy the temple, take all their riches, and relocate most of their people across the Tigris and Euphrates, into Babylon.

In chapter 40 we encounter Judah already in exile, people who have been ripped away from everything they know, who long for the good things God said he would do. Chapters 40-55, sometimes called deutero-Isaiah, traces the story of God’s deliverance from exile and healing from their years of unfaithfulness.

In this section there are four songs that are called Servant Songs and they mention how God would restore his people through his servant. This servant would bring justice to the nations and would be a light for the nations.[1] Then in a surprising twist, the servant would endure all kinds of suffering while trusting in the Lord, and he would suffer for the people to bring them healing.[2] If you’re reading or hearing this text before Jesus, it is a unclear about whom this servant language is referring. God promises redemption to those who join in the heritage of this servant.[3] This brings us to chapter 55 where those who are part of the heritage of the suffering servant are invited to God’s renewal and restoration.

God has promised a new and everlasting covenant with the those who join the heritage of the suffering servant. The servant has made redemption possible and those who will join him will find life. Judah had wandered, like a lost hiker who veers off to the right for a long time into they do full circle, Judah had become lost and some may have wondered if they were to far gone to be found.

This is a problem we are all prone to. Like Judah, we need this invitational reminder to come and find what we need in Jesus, who is the ultimate heritage of the suffering servant. God’s posture is kind and invitational, eager to show mercy to those who return. It is not one of waiting to see where we will fall in order to say “look where you are at now...I told you so.” There are hundreds of micro-decisions we make in a day and we need this invitation. I want to encourage us to ask this question right now: “How do I seek the Lord’s wisdom in my...[you fill in the blank]?” Reflect as you consider a typical day, times of vacation coming up, anxieties that sit below the surface about big things in the near future. As we consider the week ahead, what meetings we will have and the people we will encounter, where do you need the Lord’s wisdom? If we can make a habit of asking that question, we will keep the ground soft and wet for the seeds of the kingdom to grow because we are seeking Jesus.

3) vv 6-13 Invitation to trust the Lord for what we don’t yet understand

In verses 6-13, those who follow the suffering servant are invited to seek the Lord whose thoughts and ways are not our own. We are invited to entrust ourselves to the one whose ways are mysterious as we put away evil, and return to the God who shows mercy. In the context of deutero-Isaiah, this meant trusting that the exile was not permanent, that God’s plan was not done, and that someone they couldn’t see would suffer for them and deliver them. The prophet says, “Seek the LORD while he can still be found; call for him while he is still near.” The Lord hasn’t left. The encouragement is that it’s not too late, but also don’t wait. Everyone has stuff to work through that impacts their relationship with God and relationship with others. If you don’t start processing those things in your 20s, you will in your 30s. If you haven’t done the work in your 30s, you’ll probably have to do even more work in your 40s because now there’s an extra decade of baggage and the load just gets heavier and heavier. Often the times we are most disoriented is where the Lord is most at work as he brings us into a place of reorientation.[4]

Sometimes doing the hard work of figuring out the real problem can be scary because it takes us to unknown places. Whether it’s a staff meeting, hearing confession, or spiritual direction, I’m always struck by the fact that the problem as presented is often not the real problem. Someone might say “I spend to much time on this social media app.” If that’s the real problem, then the solution is just simple behavior modification. A better questions might be, “When do I look at this app, and what happened prior to going on it?” “What did the content of this app provide for me?” “Does that same longing and desire show up any place else? And I wonder why I have this desire in the first place?” This could be used for overworking, over-exercising, avoidant behaviors, or overreactions. Once we have asked better questions, then come to the God who is near and waiting for us, this will be a much more profound opportunity for healing as we learn the Lord’s will for us and our good desires misapplied.

Our places of instability and disorientation might just be the soil of new creation. This passage reminds us that God’s ways and thoughts are not ours. In fact, they are about as different as heaven and earth. The good news is that in Jesus, heaven breaks in to renew the earth. And so it is that in the vulnerable places of faithfully opening ourselves up to God’s healing as we obey him, the promise is that He will restore and renew what has been broken and torn down by sin and shame. This is precisely what it means for the writer to say that God’s word shall not return empty. Isn’t it interesting to have this promise bookend this part of Isaiah both in chapters 40 and 55.

Conclusion:

In the experience of feeling uprooted, untethered, and away from home and familiarity, God is present to refine, renew, and restore. God hadn’t finished his story with his people, but it certainly took unanticipated turns from their perspective. These moments of disorientation were the very seasons that God used to dislodge His people from her brokenness, idols they trusted in, sinful desires for autonomy, and their false hopes that their neighbors would keep them safe through political alliances. More importantly, he took these image-bearers and highlighted where cracks had occurred so that as they come to him, he can restore what was broken.

This new-creation work comes through Jesus, who is the suffering servant in whom the new covenant begins and in whom the people of God are restored. For those who claim allegiance to the heritage of Jesus as the suffering servant, and seek him as their savior, his word will not return void. Today’s passage is an encouragement to trust him, to depend on his wisdom in the face of what is unknown, and to ask better questions of ourselves so we can call to him for healing. Dependence, good questions, and vulnerability soften the soil of our hearts to the kingdom work that the Holy Spirit is doing in and among God’s people.

Let us pray:

O Almighty God, you pour out on all who desire it the spirit of grace and of supplication: Deliver us, when we draw near to you, from coldness of heart and wanderings of mind, that with steadfast thoughts and kindled affections we may worship you in spirit and in truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

[1] Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-6.

[2] Isaiah 50:4-11; 52:13-53:12.

[3] Isaiah 54:17.

[4] Cf. This comes from the orientation — disorientation — reorientation from Walter Brueggemann’s commentary on the Psalms.

Ivory Casten 7/5/26 Ivory Casten 7/5/26

Proper 9: Finding Wisdom and Rest in Jesus

Readings for July 5

Introduction

Good morning friends. It is so wonderful to see you. This morning’s passage is a very familiar one and is a beautiful invitation to come and know Jesus both because he is the source of God’s wisdom and because he is the source of rest for us who are weary. He is teaching his disciples something really important, and as we look at what he’s teaching them, I want to begin by inviting the kids down to join me.

1. Kids sermon

This picture is of Ashley and I when we started dating. We were about 18 and just getting to know each other. Since I didn’t know her that well, how do you think I got to know her better? [Let the kids answer]

I could have put together a document or spreadsheet and made observations, asked people who knew her about her: family, former teachers, friends. I could have asked to see old home movies or seen a baby book to learn information about her. But if I had done a bunch of fact-finding without being present with her, then that would be very strange. I’d be more like someone in a fan club than someone in a relationship. Getting to know someone better requires presence, vulnerability and trust. We need the moments where we play and laugh, get into arguments and need to make repair, work on projects together, take long drives, and share lots of conversation along the way. These are the ways people come to know each other.

How do you all make friends? [Let kids answer] Even that requires presence. Sometimes we treat the Lord like we’re in a fan club rather than in relationship. We might memorize facts about God and the Bible, read history, know theology, do the liturgy, do really good service for the community in the name of God, but to do these without constantly coming to the presence of God means we run the risk of knowing a lot about God without knowing him. Today’s passage gives us a glimpse into the ways that Jesus, the Son of God, lived in the presence of His heavenly Father. He wasn’t just studying to know facts about Yahweh, but He was living his life in the presence of the Father, listening for his voice, and kind of like in an apprentice, he was watching and then imitating. In our lives we will have really fun things we get to do, really hard things we have to do, times that we are lonely, sad, and scared, times that we are excited, and many times we’re just making it through the day. The invitation today is to live in God’s presence in all of these spaces, listen for his voice, and learn wisdom and how to rest as we grow in our relationship with Jesus. And to do that, we have to know Jesus and not just about him.

I want to invite you to pray with me: “Dear God...you are here...with us...you never leave us...thank you for loving us...give us grace...to live our lives...to know you....and your love for us...amen.” You can head back to your seats. Thank you.

2. Invitation for the simple to find wisdom — Come to Jesus as the revealer of true, hidden wisdom (vv 25-27)

In Matthew 11, St. Matthew takes us into a prayer of Jesus. In this prayer, Jesus names that everything has been given to him from the Father, no one knows the Father except the Son, and if anyone wants to know the Father, he only can if the Son reveals him. In other words, if we want divine wisdom, we must know Jesus.

Jesus is actually alluding to a Jewish tradition about wisdom that we find in the book of Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Sirach.[1] In Sirach 51:23 it says “Draw near to me, you who are uneducated, and lodge in the house of instruction.” Then in verse 26, “Put your neck under her yoke and let your souls receive instruction: it is to be found close by.” This was written several hundred years before Jesus’ ministry and represents a wisdom tradition within Judaism that seeks wisdom from God as its source. If you want to know the goodness of divine wisdom, then come to know Jesus. If you want to know the goodness of the life that wisdom promises learn from Jesus. This involves grounding ourselves in the grace of Jesus. We have to build our lives around habits of knowing Christ and his grace for us.

3. Invitation for the weary to find comfort — Come and bear the yoke of the one who bears us (vv 28-30)

Jesus then invites us into rest. Each Sunday we take time to confess our sins to the Lord. This is not to plague ourselves with a deep sense of guilt, but to take seriously our disordered loves and attachments, the harms we have done, the good things that we have neglected, the ways that we’ve messed things up for ourselves and others, and to tell God about them because he is the one who can make all things new. We make a daily habit of confession to build the muscle of agreeing with God about what is broken and where his grace is available to make us more like His Son. This daily habit builds into what we do each week in confession corporately. It only makes sense if you’re doing it regularly and individually outside of Sunday worship.

As we receive absolution in community, we are invited to share this peace with one another. Exchanging the peace is not primarily a welcome time; however, your smiles that welcome one another in peace are holy and should not change. The purpose is symbolically to remind one another of the grace we’ve received and give to others.

In any given week we been overbearing, controlling, hurtful, avoidant, inappropriately fearful, selfish, longed for the praise of others, neglected the good work God that has for us in the name of what is easier, and we’ve spoken curses against one another. In confession we name these as places of brokenness as we come expecting the grace of God to begin and continue to change us. The work is never done this side of God’s coming again, but there is progressive healing when we are attentive to the work of God. And in between the confession and the offer of pardon, we hear the comfortable words of Jesus, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Insofar as we have come to know the brokenness of our lives and the world around us and we’ve come to grips with how weary we’ve become because of it, we are made all the more aware of our need for rest. One author put this well, saying, “To all of us who are burdened, exhausted by our sin or its effects, the first gift of the Comfortable Words is that God acknowledges our misery. We do not have to hide our longing and need for good news. Even better, God loves to respond and provide the rest we need.”[2]

Jesus says his yoke is easy and burden is light. This isn’t like an animal yoke where two oxen pull a yoke together. This is a yoke that helps distribute the weight of pulling something across someone’s shoulders to lighten the load. The Pharisees had spoken about people carrying the yoke of the Torah, which is the heavy burden of the Jewish law and all its commandments. This is cumbersome and confuses the minutiae for the guiding principles. Sometimes we can make much of the minutiae to try to keep ourselves spiritually and emotionally safe. A rigid and self-imposed heavy load is not necessarily virtuous, but it can make us feel safer. It becomes a wall to keep ourselves in and keep others out. We can do this in other areas of life as we try to control small details, but miss the bigger picture.

Rather than religious scrupulosity or holding onto control, Jesus invites us to come to him and find rest. Pursue rest; this isn’t laziness, it’s not taking the easy way out, but it is prioritizing Jesus as we arrange our day’s goals and calendars. If we find ourselves in a state of overwhelm, exhausted, emotionally drained, totally spent, fed up, and deeply hurt or troubled, come back to this image of the good shepherd with his arms open wide. He is not waiting to condemn us or berate us. He is here to welcome us with tenderness.

Here is one place this showed up for me. I remember sitting with my church planting coach a few years back and telling him about a really hard week I’d had. I probably spent a good 20 minutes in an emotionally-charged rant that spanned different areas of frustration between different areas of my life. He looked at me, took a deep breath, affirmed that what I was feeling made total sense with what I was going through, and then he kindly asked me questions about what my fears were, what Jesus might be asking of me, then he asked me why it was so hard to have grace for myself in the things that were hard. We can often spiral and then heap shame on top of it because we feel like we should be able to move on and get past it. We berate ourselves for our reactions and then become much harder on ourselves than God is. I think deep down, there was this felt sense of “no one is going to come and help. It is up to me. If things fail, I am at fault. If things go well, it is because of me.” As I took that to Jesus later, it’s like he was saying, “Your yoke is too heavy. You’re carrying things I did not ask you to hold. Give yourself the compassion I give you. The outcomes are mine to hold.” Jesus invites us to rest and learn from him.

Conclusion

We busy ourselves with outward markers of accomplishment or networks, successful ventures, or status, that makes us feel safe; these things deceive us into thinking that we just need to push through in our own strength. Jesus’ invitation is to come and rest. Come to know him in the example left in the tradition of the church in the Scripture and in the lives of the saints. Come to know him in the community of faith; in the lives of one another. Come to know him in the prayers of the church, in the moments of attentiveness in the midst of very ordinary daily rhythms. Come to know him in the stillness and silence, no matter how brief, as we learn to frame the the day in the light of God making his dwelling in our midst, giving us rest, and making all things new. Come to the one who says to us, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

[1] Sirach 6:23-30; 51:23-27.

[2] Justin Holcomb, “The Comfortable Words: An Invitation to Rest.” The Living Church, February 16, 2024. https://livingchurch.org/covenant/the-comfortable-words-an-invitation-to-rest/

Ivory Casten 6/28/26 Ivory Casten 6/28/26

Proper 8: The Relational Cost to Real Transformation

Readings for June 28

Introduction

Good morning dear friends. It is wonderful to be with you this morning and continue together in the Gospel of Matthew. As we look at Matthew 10, I want to invite the kids down.

Kids’ Sermon

I was thinking about an analogy in a book I was reading and it reminded me of our passage today.[1] Cars have these great dashboards. Anyone want to guess what any of these lights might mean? Now I want you all to take a pen cover up things one by one. Ah.... now that it is all covered we can drive in peace, right? We don’t have to be scared or anxious anymore do we? No way! Those lights are meant to tell me to go get something fixed. I know it is hard to stop what I’m doing one day and get the car fixed, I know I have to risk spending a lot of money and potentially putting myself into debt. But the reality is, if I don’t fix the car and I ignore its signals, there will be a moment where everything just gives out and there will be no hope of getting to my destination...or worse — We might get into an accident.

Our bodies have indicators just like a car’s dashboard. When we start to get angry, we might start to feel our shoulders tense up, our neck might feel warm. When we get sad, we might feel something like a lump in our throat. I got into a disagreement the other day; I had this feeling down in my left side, something despair and guilt. We should pay attention to these things: anger can give us energy to push back against something wrong, sadness can point us to what is important to us, and guilt may illuminate something we need to apologize for. They are all indicator lights that something is happening inside us.

If we cover the dashboard and keep driving it will be hard to follow Jesus with our whole selves. Someone may make us really angry and we want to lash out and hold a grudge, someone hurts us and we want to hurt them back. Perhaps we feel ashamed and we go off by ourselves and don’t let anyone else into our life. We keep everyone at arms length can’t figure out why things feel off. Will we pay attention and let Jesus bring peace and healing so that we can share the goodness of Jesus with others?

Sometimes when we are honest about who Jesus is, what we need from Jesus, and what others need from Jesus, it can make them upset. Is it worth the risk? This is what Jesus is talking about today with his followers. It can feel really risky to respectfully tell our parents that we feel hurt by what they did. It can be risky to ask a friend if we can pray for them. When we do this, we’re not being disrespectful, we’re giving a gift. It’s up to the other person to accept it as such. That risk is the only way to real peace and healing. When we do the hard work of following Jesus and being honest, it might be hard, and there might be pain, but you know what we discover? We discover life as it ought to be because Jesus is in charge and we will know his loving friendship even when it is hard. Can you please pray with me?

“Dear God...thank you...for loving us...you died for us...and rose from the dead....and you are with us...even when....doing the right thing...is really hard....thank you...Amen.” Thank you all, go ahead and head back to your seats.

34-39Though costly, prioritize God’s kingdom

In St. Matthew’s Gospel, we have just read a really challenging passage. In the overall picture, Jesus has just commissioned the twelve disciples to carry out his ministry. Then he tells them that as they are following him they will encounter persecutions and trials. This is to be expected. Today’s passage is intentionally provocative. Jesus, what do you mean you came to bring a sword and cause family members to hate each other?!?!

He’s not saying that we ought to hate each other. There are plenty of other places in Scripture where the reign of the Messiah is associated with peace and where we are called to love our family members and our neighbors. There is nothing virtuous about loving violence or hatred, but when Jesus and his kingdom are our first priority —which is virtuous— the result might be violence and the breaking of relationship. This is the risk of following Jesus as Lord. It is about priorities: Following Jesus more than pleasing other people.

Jesus is quoting from the Bible and putting us in the line of the prophets when we follow him.[2] Another prophet told the religious leaders, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying “peace, peace,” when there is no peace.”[3] Jesus’ disciples, including you and I, enter into the prophetic burden of his messengers where we do what is good and right, following Jesus in the midst of chaos, waiting for God’s vindication. Rather than sweeping things under the rug in the name of niceness, we seek for real transformation.

Real peace is hard-fought and costly. Here is a composite scenario; this isn’t anyone’s story in particular, but feels like several scenarios I’ve heard. Darryl comes to me and says that his supervisor at work is often rude and condescending to him. In the break room one day the supervisor comes in and tells Darryl, “Your coworker Alice told me that I talk down to people, what does she know? She doesn’t know anything.” Darryl follows Jesus, and has endured a long history of condescension from his supervisor, but has done the internal work to know that he is competent and a hard worker. More than that, he knows how beloved he is by God and now has the capacity to hold space for his supervisor’s condescension. He has a choice, he can tell his supervisor “You’re right, what does she know?” This is uncaring, but it is easy, and it does not take his supervisor’s wound seriously. He is preaching peace, peace when there is no peace. Or, he can risk. Depending on the amount of risk, he might say “I can appreciate Alice’s experience. I have experienced you that way too.” Or he might be more subtle and say “Huh, tell me more about what you think made her feel that way. Have others told you that before? What might it feel like to apologize for that and what keeps you from it?” Darryl would be giving his supervisor a gracious gift: an opportunity to see Jesus at work. The risk is that Darryl’s supervisor is provoked to anger, resentment, and a grudge. This could set up Darryl for real trouble at work, but this is the risk in naming the grace of God to help free people from disordered attachments to sin and evil. We have to do the inner work with Jesus on our places of disordered love, fear, and attachment, looking to Jesus for help, so that we can offer true peace to our relatives, friends, and even those in our church family. Triangulation and indirect communication, slander and gossip, dehumanization, resentments, and coping behaviors are all indicator lights that show us something is broken, but carefully helping others name their own brokenness is costly.... and the only way to peace.

Some people think that prioritizing the kingdom just means doing a lot of stuff for the church to the neglect of other duties. This is to have good desire and good intentions, but the wrong execution. The world is not split up into secular tasks and sacred tasks. Instead, and I get this from C.S. Lewis, the daily tasks are all invitations to the will and kingdom of God and it is up to us to participate in them religiously or irreligiously. It does take healthy rhythms of prayer, Scripture reading, and community to frame the day this way, but it also sanctifies and makes holy all the parts of our day: Those conversations you’re not looking forward to with a family member, coworker or friend, making lunches in the morning, correcting a child or apologizing to a child, going to doctor appointments, the inconveniences when things don’t work out the way we’d hoped. Doing the hard work of rightly ordering our interior world with Jesus creates the capacity we need to help others discover the kingdom of God. In other words, the hard conversations aren’t derailments from the work of the kingdom, they are the soil in which the seeds of the kingdom begin to grow.

What keeps us from the work of the kingdom? This gets us back to the warning lights on our body’s dashboard? What story does our body tell? Perhaps there is a fear of rejection (Which ironically is Jesus’ point). It could be the voice of self-condemnation: we have come to believe the voice of someone who told us that we are a trouble-maker, an outsider, unlovable, ugly, overemotional, just too much, clingy, etc. And as we hold to those scripts we begin to act out of self-defense and self-preservation, incapable of vulnerability because we’ve vowed never to let ourselves get hurt again. We need time in Scripture to know the God who longs to be at home among his people, especially when they do things that are evil and turn towards him in repentance. We need time in prayer to know the nearness of God or to be fully ourselves in the presence of the one who might seem distant sometimes, but who always holds space for our full selves. It is hard work to carve out time to pay attention to our good loves and desires have become distorted such that we now notice our overreactions, our sinful proclivities, our disordered loves, and our wayward desires. It is so much work. And it is precisely that work that Jesus uses to make all things new. And when he does this in us, we have capacity for that hard work with others — even in the face of rejection.

Conclusion

When it comes to discipleship, being nice and not making waves is like a ceasefire. It doesn’t move things forward in the work of God’s kingdom. It is just the path of least resistance. Kingdom work involves honest curiosity and wonder in the face of brokenness — and that starts with ourselves. Of course we must have wisdom about when to stay silent and when to speak, but the reality is that it is risky to be courageous, kind, and curious about what is true of someone and the world they’ve constructed because it involves us constantly reorienting our interior world toward Jesus and his kingdom. This is the hard work of following Jesus; this is true peace-making.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, from whom all thoughts of truth and peace proceed: Kindle, we pray, in the hearts of all people the true love of peace, and guide with your pure and peaceable wisdom those who take counsel for the nations of the earth; that in tranquility your kingdom may go forward, till the earth is filled with the knowledge of your love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

[1] Chuck Degroat, Healing What’s Within.

[2] Micah 7:6

[3] Jeremiah 6:14.

Ivory Casten 6/21/26 Ivory Casten 6/21/26

Proper 7: Two Sources, Two Humanities: Grace Abounding

Readings for June 21

Romans 5:15b-19 NRSV

Many years ago, bottled water companies began emphasizing not the bottle, but the source.

Their message was simple:

if the source is pure, the water will be pure.

If the source is contaminated, everything downstream is affected.

We understand this instinctively.

In fact, modern history gives us sobering examples of it.

In 1993, the city of Milwaukee experienced a major water crisis when a single microscopic contaminant entered the municipal water supply. The result was catastrophic: over 400,000 people became ill, and dozens of deaths were linked to the outbreak. Ordinary households across an entire city were affected—not because of what they did at their taps, but because something had gone wrong upstream at the source.

Whether it is river, a reservoir, or an entire distribution system, the principle holds: when the source is compromised, everything downstream is affected.

Paul says the same thing about humanity in Romans 5.

Our problem is not merely that we make bad choices downstream. Something has gone wrong at the source.

One man's trespass (deliberate and conscious decision) unleashed sin and death into the human race. Adam is the source from which the river of fallen humanity flows.

But Paul immediately introduces another source. Through one man, Jesus Christ, grace has overflowed to many.

If Adam is the polluted river that carries death,

Christ is the living river that carries righteousness and life.

Romans 5 is the story of two sources, two rivers, and two humanities. EVERYONE IS A PART OF ONE OR OTHER. THERE’S NOT A 3RD OPTION

BTW. The question is: From which source are you drinking?

ARE YOU IN ADAM OR IN CHRIST?

And what Paul wants us to see is that while no one is unaffected:

What Jesus accomplished was far superior to what Adam started.

Adam’s sin affected all of us. He’s not merely a moral example. He is the headwaters of a fallen humanity. His act of rebellion does not stay contained. It spreads. It defines the condition of those who come after him.

Romans 5:12 says: “just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned

Paul wants us to see that we are not merely people who commit sins (we do). Rather: We are people born into a broken stream.

Article IX of the Thirty-Nine Articles describes original sin as:

“The fault and corruption of the nature of every man naturally engendered of the offspring of Adam.”

This confronts modern assumptions of self-invention. Scripture says we are not morally neutral. We are born into a humanity already facing death.

It’s By God’s grace, along the way, that we see the truth of this lived out in our own everyday lives - as we honestly see ourselves in light of the holy holy holiness of God. In light of our inability. Our lack of desire to live his way.

That’s the effect of Adam - our inheritance expressing itself through us.

As Genesis tells us God gave incredible freedom and abundance in the Garden of Eden. And drew only one line don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for in the day in which you eat of it you will surely die.

And Adam deliberately crossed it.

I remember seeing this in one of my kids. We lived on “cut through” street. People used our street to quickly cut through from one busy road to another to save time on their commute and we didn’t have speed bumps to slow them down.

Our children were little - we gave them the abundance of the whole yard to play in - with only 1 condition - don’t go in the street . Don’t cross the curb. I watched one of kids repeatedly find her way to edge of the street. Looking at the curb. Observing the curb. Occasionally glancing over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching her looking at the curb. And then one day - you guessed it — she did it - she deliberately put her toe in the street.

It’s cute and funny - but there’s nothing unique about it.

That’s what ADAM - and Eve did. That’s what we all do because that’s now who we are. Like Adam we do what we want to do - thinking about ourselves.

But the Good news is that Jesus Christ, the Son God, came into the world of his creation. He’s called the second Adam. But as the Nicene creed and our Eucharist liturgy make clear:

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man.

He doesn’t have Adam’s seed. Or Adams corruption in him.

He didn’t have to come into the world. He didn’t have to come incarnate. He did so because was thinking not thinking of himself. He was thinking of others?

He was thinking of you.

He lived from the delight of the heavenly Father’s love and for the heavenly Father’s glory. He had no sin of his own. He did not trespass. When he died on the cross it wasn’t for himself. It was for others. It was for you. And me. In our place. To undo what Adam did.

I love how CS Lewis captures this in the Lion the Witch and the wardrobe:

Aslan has died on the stone table and he has been raised from the dead. The Great Lion explains to the young girls Lucy and Susan who are marveling at his resurrection what he has done:

“When a willing victim who has committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s place, the Table would crack and death itself would start working backward.”

Adam brought death and condemnation for all. Christ’s obedience has the power to overcome what Adam did. To bring justification and life

Romans 5:18 says: “just as one man’s (Adams) trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s (Jesus) act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. 19 For just as through the one man’s (Adams’s) disobedience the many were made sinners, so through the one man’s (Jesus) obedience the many will be made righteous.”

They both consciously acted in ways that had huge ramifications/huge results.

But they are vastly different results.

Paul wants us to marvel in this: Paul wants us to marvel in GRACE.

V15 says: But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.

V 17: If, because of the one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

If you are in Adam, and we are all born in Adam - you’re under the reign of death.

If you are in Christ, you are reborn and you will reign in life. All because Christ’s gift is greater than Adams’ sin.

Twice (5:15, 17) he says, “much more surely.” And that has to do with the abounding gift of grace.

Grace is: "divine love and protection bestowed freely upon mankind".

It’s vitally important that we live in and from the abounding of God. In the much more of grace.

Paul wants us to know that God’s grace and God’s provision for us isn’t random, haphazard or insufficient. According to the Bible, there’s always plenty. There’s always more than enough. There’s an overflow. In fact that’s what the word ADOUND means. An overflowing quantity

We come from Charleston. Our church was on an island. One side was ocean. The other side marsh and the intercostal waterway.

Whenever there was high tide during a super moon. The water would ABOUND. It becomes so full that the water encroaches on yards and creeps over roadways. Downtown Charleston floods because it’s built at sea level and water would fill the streets so that College of Charleston students could be seen kayaking through portions of the city.. That’s what it means to ABOUND.

Paul is saying that God’s grace and provision ABOUND to you through what Jesus has done for you.

Think about what God is like. God is gracious. He is lavish. He is intentional. He is a giver. John 3:16 says, “For God loved the world so much that he gave his Son…”

As Alan Redpath writes,

“When God gives grace, He does not reluctantly open a little finger and maintain a clenched fist full of gifts. God’s hands are nail-pierced hands and they are wide open. This fountain of grace is always pouring itself out with no limitation on heaven’s side at all.” Romans 8:32 says, “Since [God] did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t he also give us everything else?” (NLT)

You might wonder: To whom does grace ABOUND? The answer is: to the person who needs it most! In Romans 5:20 Paul writes: “But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more.” (NKJV)

Grace is needed most where sin exists and when trouble comes. Like a light in a cavern, God’s ABOUNDING grace becomes more brilliant in the midst of darkness.

When I came to Christ in College (when my baptism came alive in me through faith) - I saw my desperate need…..

The Question is will you receive this abounding grace. Will you drink from the stream of Christ?

And if you have - live daily drinking from the abound grace he has for you. From who he has remade you to be in Christ. With all that affords you… And off this to those around you…

Amazing grace story:

15 But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. 16 And the gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the gift following many trespasses brings justification. 17 If, because of the one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

18 Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. 19 For just as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Ivory Casten 6/14/26 Ivory Casten 6/14/26

Proper 6: Sowing Grace, Harvesting Joy

Readings for June 14

Introduction

Good morning friends. It is so good to be with you this morning. Last week we looked at the calling of St. Matthew and today we are in the same chapter of his gospel. People have been questioning Jesus’ authority to heal people, even wondering if he is something like a spy who works for the devil, or Beelzebub. But he is showing them the power that is coming in the kingdom of God and our Gospel passage summarizes that ministry and shows us how it is going to be passed on down through Jesus’ disciples.

Kids Sermon

As is our new custom over the summer, I want to invite the kids down for our kids’ sermon. [bring a flower not yet in seed and one that is seeding]. How many of you have been growing things at home? What kinds of things are you growing?

This is from our meadow that we have been working on at our house Anyone know what kind of flower this is? That’s right: [whatever the flower is]. What are the differences between these? One’s job is to produce pollen for bees, moths, butterflies, etc. The other one has moved into a different stage where it has gone to seed to spread and make more flowers. [Pull one seed]. How many seeds do you think I’ll get from one flower? Who knows...perhaps 20 or so. Trick question: How many flowers are in one seed? There is no way to answer that question! A seed will fall into the ground and produce another flower, which will produce more seeds, which will produce more flowers, and on and on it goes. It would be possible over a long period of time to fill a field by starting with one flower!

Today’s passage is all about the good news of God’s kingdom being proclaimed to individuals who were looking for God’s king to come. Jesus says this really interesting phrase about “The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few, therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers” What he means is that God is doing amazing things. He is healing people, their lives are being restored, just like Matthew the Tax Collector. When they are encountering Jesus they are seeing God’s kingdom breaking into their world. People are ready! And he tells them to pray for more people to help with the harvest. The funny thing is....they are an answer to their prayers! They will be ones helping sow the seed and do the harvesting. This is how we follow Jesus. We ask God for help, we look for what Jesus is doing, we give him thanks for it, we share it with others. And then they do the same. And in the church then we start to see the harvest where God’s new creation is coming about and you can look at the church like a field of flowers blooming with the beauties of the kingdom of God. From our lives there goes seed which spreads this goodness to our friends and neighbors that are also longing for Jesus to be king. You and I are part of that story. Before you head back, can you pray with me?

“Dear God...thank you....for loving us...and for Jesus...Who died for us...and rose again...to make all things new. Amen.”

1) 9:35-38 Compassion motivated his kingdom ministry (in the face of evil shepherds who accused him of working as an agent of Satan).

Where are we in Jesus’ story? Last week, Jesus had invited Matthew, the tax collector to follow him. He would go on to heal people of their diseases and the demons that afflicted them. All of these are tangible signs that God’s kingdom was breaking into the present evil age. These were the signs prophesied about what the Messiah would do from the Old Testament.

In his summary of Jesus’ ministry, St. Matthew takes time to note that Jesus saw the crowds, and had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. There are passages of the Old Testament that condemn Judah’s leadership for being bad shepherds. I’m thinking specifically of Ezekiel 34 where the leaders are compared to shepherds who completely neglect their flock and as a result, the sheep are scattered and injured and no one is there to care for them. God promised to remove those shepherds and then to personally be a shepherd to his people, seeking out the sheep, bringing them back, binding their wounds, and leading them to pasture.[1] In this Gospel passage, I think St. Matthew means for this to be a veiled critique of Judah’s spiritual leaders, and I think he means to underscore the ways that Jesus is doing what God promised He would do.

Jesus’ ministry begins with God’s compassion, and the best ministry happens when that continues to be the lens through which we see others. A long time ago I’d been a supervisor in a coffee shop and remember being so annoyed that one of the employees would come in late for her shift every time. There was never an explanation; it was just normal for her. After months of this she revealed some things about her mom that demonstrated that she was essentially dealing with an incredibly dysfunctional household and then as a result, she had to shuttle her little sister to various places. I had to repent of my misrepresentation of her and my lack of compassion. It’s these little moments that remind us that the people around us, no matter how put together they might look, are still wandering and helpless like sheep with no shepherd. There are people who annoy us, perhaps even anger us, but can we be moved to a place of compassion for them? Having compassion is the first step in joining the harvest that Jesus talks about.

2) 10:1-4 Jesus invites the disciples/apostles into the ministry of compassionate healing

Jesus tells the disciples to pray to the Lord of the harvest and that the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.[2] The way this is followed by the next chapter suggests that the disciples themselves become the answer to this prayer...and of course anyone after them. Jesus summons the 12 and gives them authority to carry on this ministry. St. Matthew then lists out the twelves disciples. This authority, through the apostles, is also given to the church to carry on this mission.

This is the first time in this gospel that the disciples are also called apostles. We use that word and we don’t often know what it means. It means, “Sent ones”. The good news of the kingdom of heaven was a message to be announced. It was being announced by Jesus with preaching and miracles and now Jesus is sending out the twelve in the continuation of this work.

Bishops continue the apostolic office and remind us all of our own part of the apostolic call. They carry on in the tradition that is passed down from the 12 sent ones through those they sent, down today to the bishops of the church. When a Bishop is consecrated, one of the things we pray over him is this: “Grant to this your servant such grace that he may ever be ready to spread abroad your Gospel, the glad tidings of reconciliation with you, and to use the authority given to him, not for destruction, but for salvation; not to hurt, but to help; so that, as a wise and faithful steward, he may give to your family their portion in due season, and at the last may be received into everlasting joy, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” This feels very similar to what Jesus is asking of his disciples. While we don’t all hold the apostolic office, we do all carry on the apostolic mission of being bearers of the kingdom work and message. Like I mentioned to the kids earlier: We ask God for help, we look for what Jesus is doing, we give him thanks for it, we share it with others.

This has been lived out in different ways in different times. One of my favorite examples from our Anglican heritage is in the Celtic spiritual heritage. Between the 4th and 7th centuries, the common way of doing ministry is that a Bishop would go to a place and evangelize, bring some monks and nuns with him, set up a monastery and churches for a robust life of prayer, leave the administration of it all under the care of an abbot or abbess and then move on. The landscape was dotted with monasteries and churches that engaged in a robust prayer and monastic life even as the Bishop created front porches of entry through hospitality and care for people to encounter Jesus in new cities and towns. Then the process repeats. Bishops were trailblazers and the abbots and abbesses functioned like our bishops do today.

This is why I love church planting so much. It feels apostolic. We started a church to create a thin place where heaven meets earth, where new creation is coming about through a robust communal and sacramental life of prayer, to then engage in mission as we create front porches of hospitality for people to discover Jesus. Our various ministries give us spaces to build rhythms of hospitality, prayer, relationship-building, and service. Our community events cultivate an imagination for hospitality and welcome as we have cookouts, go to baseball games, have coffee, do stories in the park, have fun at the skatepark, and however else we think to gather and make space for friendship. Every person here has people they know who long for Jesus’ compassion, even if they couldn’t articulate it yet. We should hold them in prayer with compassion, look for ways to invite them into life with Jesus, and let the church’s rhythms of prayer and community shape our lives for what kingdom-minded harvest looks like where live, work, and play.

Conclusion

We have seen Jesus’ compassion as the motivation for his kingdom proclamation. He shares this ministry with his disciples who are sent as messengers of this kingdom. They aren’t in it for wealth, ease, or fame. They are ambassadors of renewal who keep their eyes open for those ready to hear this message. We share in this apostolic ministry, looking for the Spirit’s work of new creation, practicing it in the church, for the good of the world. As we say goodbye to some dear friends today, I’m so grateful for the ways they’ve made this church what it is. One of my prayers is that as a church, for as long as we have an individual or a household, that this would be a resting-place of grace for their journey, where people experience the goodness of the kingdom to be sent out more healed by Jesus than when they arrived. As long as we are here together, there is always more work to do. We are looking for the Spirit’s work, harvesting where He has sown seeds that have matured, finding those ready to receive the message and power of God’s kingdom and the reign of Christ. As we walk faithfully with the Lord, and name his work for others along the way, we do not know the lives we’ll impact along the way.

Let us pray:

O God, our heavenly Father, you manifested your love by sending your only-begotten Son into the world, that all might live through him: Pour out your Spirit on your Church, that we may fulfill his command to preach the Gospel to all people. Send forth laborers into your harvest; defend them in all dangers and temptations; and hasten the time when the fullness of the Gentiles shall be gathered in, and faithful Israel shall be saved; through your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

[1] Ezekiel 34:1-16.

[2] Matthew 9:37-38.

Ivory Casten 6/7/26 Ivory Casten 6/7/26

Proper 5: Substantive Discipleship Involves Risk

Readings for June 7

Introduction

Good morning dear friends. It is so wonderful to see you this morning. Today’s Gospel passage and the passages in Hosea and the Psalms have a lot to do with getting our priorities straight as we follow the Lord. As we think about this text and what God is teaching us through it, I want to begin by inviting the kids down.

Kids sermon

How many of you like cookies? What are your favorite kinds? There was one night where Ashley and I really wanted to have cookies for dessert, but we had to use the few ingredients we had in the cupboard. I looked online for help with recipes and I discovered a peanut butter cookie that only uses 4 ingredients. Because there are only four ingredients, each one is super important. Cole, do you remember what we call them? ...Dad’s super fast peanut butter cookies. It takes one cup of peanut butter, one cup of sugar, one egg, and a bit of vanilla extract. Then you stir it all together, ball it up on some baking sheets, use a fork to flatten them out, and bake them at 350 for about 9 or 10 minutes.

They are not healthy by any means, but they are delicious. There are certainly more complex cookies with a lot of additional ingredients that are not necessary, but in this cookie, three of the four ingredients are absolutely necessary. If you forget the vanilla extract, they’ll taste fine, but they’ll taste like something is missing. if you forget the peanut butter then you’re just eating sugar and eggs. If you forget the egg, the cookie won’t bind together. If you forget the sugar, it won’t taste good at all. When we are cooking or baking, there are some necessary ingredients we really cannot skip out on without doing irreparable harm to what we’re trying to make.

Today in our passages, we are hearing some different ingredients of Old Testament discipleship being put together: sacrificing animals, keeping the law, rules about keeping someone clean, and who to avoid. Some of them are more important than others. Jesus meets some people who were worried more about the less-important ingredients than about the main ingredients that are involved in following the Lord. Jesus wants to help them put their priorities straight. These texts were recorded for us so that we learn how to love God, love our neighbors, and invite them into his love. Jesus is helping us prioritize what is most important. As we look at our text together, will you pray with me? “Dear God...thank you...for teaching us...how to follow you...and for giving us...the Holy Spirit...to become more like you...Amen.” Thank you. Head on back to your seats.

I. Jesus sees need rather than failure and offers healing rather than quarantining himself.

In St. Matthew’s Gospel reading today, Jesus is walking along in Capernaum and sees a man sitting at the tax booth named Matthew. Matthew would have been one of those who was hired out to collect various taxes that were levied by Herod Antipas on goods carried through the town and goods that were traded. He would have been working with a group in this booth. The fact that “tax collectors” is paired with sinners shows you how these folks are seen. A foreign oppressor was taxing the Jewish people on their goods, serving as a reminder that they were not free, but under the subjugation of an enemy. Tax collectors were seen as part of the system of oppression and a Jewish tax collector is then seen as a traitor to his people. And this is where Matthew ends up in his life. I doubt he is proud of it, but this is how he has made his living. His home, its furnishings, even down to the utensils he would use to host Jesus, were funded by the taxation of God’s people.

This was someone the religious culture saw as undesirable and someone to keep at arm’s length. And yet where the Pharisees saw a failure, Jesus saw someone in need. This is the one Jesus saw, one whom God loves, and in whom God’s glory would be made known as his life became transformed and he was put into communion with other followers of Jesus—like Simon the Zealot, who was part of a group that militantly opposed paying Roman taxes.

Jesus risks his reputation to heal people and bring them into the kingdom of God. We would do well to remind ourselves that we are people in need. We are in need of friendship, of salvation from our disordered attachments, healing from our coping strategies, healing from the ways we react out of our own hurt, healing from the ways that we walk away from God’s will for what is best for us. We are needy people whom Jesus longs to heal.

As we follow Jesus and experience healing, we become, like Henri Nouwen talks about, wounded healers. We should err on the side of wanting to see others changed by Jesus and not err on the side of what others might think of us. This doesn’t mean we capitulate to someone’s sin, or even accept it as good, but neither do we need to hold every person at arms length who doesn’t align with our faith. It is incumbent on us to remember that no one is outside the reach of the grace of God. As we think of those we rub shoulders with, whose sin makes us tense up and avoidant — why? Of course be wise and safe, but begin to pray about how this person might be in need of the love of God as we ourselves are. Rather than asking “what will people think of me if I associate with this person?” begin to ask, “what does this person need from the Lord and how can I care for them in that need?” We are still confident, pursuing holiness, differentiated, but also compassionately pursuing what is good for another image-bearer.

II. Jesus allows the guiding principles of the law to govern its application rather than being hung up on external false flags of piety.

Jesus sees a need where others see failure. In the latter part of our Gospel passage, he gets to a guiding principle. Being transformed by God’s love to then share it with others is the key ingredient of discipleship; if we miss this, discipleship becomes obscured — and potentially legalistic. C.S. Lewis talks about priorities in discipleship. He says, “I read in a religious paper, “Nothing is more important than to teach children to use the sign of the cross.” Nothing? Not compassion, nor veracity, nor justice? Voilà l’ennemi.”[1]

There are certainly times to stand at arms length from people we disagree with because they are potentially harmful, or we’re not differentiated enough not to get sucked into their sin, or because we need to put up a boundary to keep ourselves physically or emotionally safe. Some of those exceptions aside, a defensive posture that makes people less human and keeps them at an arm’s distance should not be a guiding principle in the pursuit of holiness. If someone disagrees with us, it is an opportunity for us — and for our kids—to have great, age-appropriate conversations. It is an opportunity to come with curiosity an notice someone’s need.

Kids, when you go to the doctor with a horrible cough, and you’re still contagious, the doctor will mask up and get in the room with you to run tests, help figure out what is going on, and help you get better. There is some risk in being a physician, but to risk is the only way to heal. Rather than asking “What will happen if that sinner gets near me” Jesus says “What might happen if their life of brokenness is given back to them as a story of redemption?”

Jesus uses a rabbinic phrase with the Pharisees when he says “Go and learn what this means...” Then he quotes Hosea 6:6. In Hosea, the prophet is warning the Northern Kingdom of Israel of the ways they have strayed from the Lord to then call out the southern kingdom for the same. The quote says “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”. The quotation as its recorded matches perfectly the Greek version of the Old Testament. The word “mercy” is one you’re probably familiar with ἔλεος as in when we say “Kyrie eleison...” We usually mean something like compassion. But this word is translating Hebrew word חֶ֥סֶד, which has less to do with compassion and more to do with covenant love and faithfulness. We often translate it lovingkindness, which is true if by that we mean the lovingkindness connected with faithfulness to God’s covenant with his people. God’s desire is that Israel and Judah would love obedience to Him and when they make a wrong turn, to turn back in repentance, to throw themselves onto the grace of God which he longs to meet them with. God desires a deep relationship of love and trust, not merely some sacrifices. He is not some Pagan god that needs to be fed by human beings through their offerings.

So with St. Matthew, God’s desire is for those who have strayed to come and find life in him. One can obey the Sabbath religiously, hold all the feast days, sacrifice the best offerings; and for us— have all the kids in Sunday school remember to bring their bibles, hold the most church programs, do all the family prayer times, do all the daily bible readings, memorize all the Scriptures we can, but if the result is a defensive faith that culminates in tokens of piety without the substance of real life change that produces a desire for the love of God for ourselves and others, then we have missed the guiding principle of Jesus. We don’t want a faith that only keeps us safe, we want a faith that makes us holy.

Conclusion

The faith that makes us holy risks something because it enters the messiness of life with God with others. Worshiping together forms us to go into the world to love and serve the Lord; it doesn’t form us to perform the liturgy better. To love the Lord our God and our neighbor as ourselves, as we say each week, becomes the guiding principle in following Jesus. Without this key ingredient, we miss the result of discipleship, which is Christ being formed in us. A good and right faith prioritizes what is most important in a life of discipleship and produces what is ultimately good in us and others — whether we call this the virtues or the fruit of the spirit. This is where God’s kingdom comes. If we miss this, the external badges of piety won’t mean much. Let’s join Jesus in noticing others’ needs rather than their failures, inviting them into God’s transformative love, and to make Jesus’ transformative love become our guiding principle in living out a life of discipleship.

Let us pray:

Gracious God and most merciful Father, you have granted us the rich and precious jewel of your holy Word: Assist us with your Spirit, that the same Word may be written in our hearts to our everlasting comfort, to reform us, to renew us according to your own image, to build us up and edify us into the perfect dwelling place of your Christ, sanctifying and increasing in us all heavenly virtues; grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

[1] C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, Letter 6.

Ivory Casten 5/31/26 Ivory Casten 5/31/26

Trinity Sunday: The Commencement of the Great Commission

Matthew 28:16-20

Introduction

Good morning dear friends. Welcome to Trinity Sunday, the Sunday that follows Pentecost, where we focus on life with our Triune God, and the Sunday that leads us into ordinary time. As I mentioned last Sunday, while the kids aren’t in CGS, I want to have a specific time for them during the sermon, so kids, please come and sit down front near me...

Kids sermon

How many of you have been to a graduation? Have you had your own? What were these graduations like? What do you remember? I wonder why we do them. What do you think?

Anyone know what another name is for a graduation?...A commencement ceremony. I remember our high school graduation a few decades ago. It was a sunny day in northern California, we wore green robes and funny hats. Music played and we walked around the track of our football field to get to where we were supposed to sit. Then they called each name individually. I cannot remember how many hundreds of kids were in my senior class, but it did feel like an eternity under the sun. Eventually, hearing my name, I walked across the stage, got my diploma, and went back to my seat. Eventually they had us all move the tassels on our hat from one side to the other to signify that we’ve made it across the finish line.

Commencement is really a better word for what happened that day. We ought to celebrate accomplishments, and making it through high school was certainly an accomplishment! But it really was a beginning, not an end; Monday morning rolled around and everything was new again. I wouldn’t see my high school friends much anymore unless we saw each other at community college. I had to start making money to pay for gas and classes. Graduation really isn’t the end. It’s actually the beginning, the commencement of what is next.

May and June always feel like big seasons of change. Maybe some of you are feeling nervous or scared about that. That is okay to feel that way. God is with you even when life changes and God brings us into new places and circumstances; into new schools and new friendships. Can I tell you something surprising? Adults still get nervous about that too. A little bit of that fear about new things is what the disciples feel in our Gospel passage today too. I want to look at that passage together with everyone. Before I head back to the lectern, can you all pray with me: “Dear Father... thank you...for Jesus...coming to be with us... thank you... for the Holy Spirit.... living in us. Amen.” Okay, head on back to your seats.

I. Our Commission with a Promise (I will be with you)

Today’s passage is very grounding for the seasons of change we find ourselves in. Several of you have visited friends or relatives who are graduating. Lots of you are graduating high school or junior high, or entering elementary school. In a season of change, excitement, and potentially anxiety, I’m so grateful that Trinity Sunday occurs this time of year. It is very grounding to focus on who God is and what he calls us to become.

In Matthew 28, Jesus had risen from the dead and showed himself to his disciples in Jerusalem. They are told to meet Jesus in Galilee, so they make the trek north. They arrive in Galilee at the mountain Jesus told them to go to. Jesus says to them “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”[1] All of creation, visible and invisible, is now under the rule and reign of Christ. This was part one of his kingship, part two involves the disciples. The disciples’ commencement began with walking into the unfamiliar with trust in Jesus’ ongoing presence.

Jesus commissions them and tells them that as they go along they are to make disciples. How are they to do this? By baptizing people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And by teaching them all that Jesus has commanded them. The command is not “to go”. We aren’t called to make special trips and then make disciples. In other words, this is not a commission for missions trips or becoming itinerate preachers. Those are good things — and they aren’t the totality of making disciples. This is a commission to live a certain way. As you go, wherever you go, make followers of Jesus. You might be a kid figuring out how to follow Jesus in the context of your friend group at school and helping your friends see what Jesus is doing in your life. Who are you praying for among your friends? Adults, what does it mean in our vocation to follow Jesus and help our coworkers learn what Jesus is doing in our lives? How do we do our jobs according to the ethical demands of the Gospel with compassion? Who are we praying for among our coworkers? If you’re raising little ones, how are we forming disciples in the household? This starts with our own work on ourselves and our own stories. You might be retired, but actually you’re only retired from one vocational calling because there is no such thing as retirement in the kingdom of God. How are you becoming like Christ and sharing his love with your new calling in retirement? Who are the people you responsible to now that one vocation has gone?

The great commission is for all of us. We are all commissioned to help people become more like Jesus. Help people discover the life and work of the Triune God. Help others follow Jesus, to be baptized, and to live life in the Holy Spirit. Walk with others in instructing and helping them live out the commandments of Jesus.

There are a five steps to consider in living out the great commission: 1) prayer, 2) our own growth, 3) knowing Christ’s commands, 4) seeing the needs of others, 5) invitation. This begins with praying for friends, relatives, acquaintances, neighbors, and coworkers who need Jesus and don’t know him yet. Get to know the people who live near you, both their name, and if possible, know something about them you can be praying for. Where are our spaces that we know others and are known by others?

Second, we have to prioritize our own growth in Jesus. Jesus wants to deliver us from this present evil age into the age to come, which has broken in through his death and resurrection. Are we aware of the places we need to grow in holiness? Our inner critic and our besetting sins are often intimately related. We all have a strong inner critic who likes to lob bombs of self-contempt our way. Mine likes to attack me when I risk something and it doesn’t go well. I move very quickly from “I wish that turned out differently...” to “you failed,” then to “you are a failure”. I wonder what your inner critic says and whose voice it is? Prayerful journaling is such a helpful practice for me. I’d encourage you to do it too to learn how to bless the goodness of the longings we have, name the voices of the inner-critic, and come back to God and to ourselves as God sees us. Perhaps use questions like “what happened?”, “What did I feel? And where did I feel it?”, “When did I feel that before?”, “What was I longing for?”, “How does this point me to my image-bearing self?”, “What is true of God in this situation?”, and “How do I now see this knowing what I know of God and myself?”.

Third, in becoming more like Christ, we have to know the Triune God and what Christ commands of us. We take in God’s truth in Scripture and in the Church, making space for prayer in the offices of the church, or in finding short and rhythmic prayers to reframe the day in the presence of Jesus. This grounds us for the turbulence of the world around us.

As we come to know the commands of Christ, we need to enter with curiosity into the needs of others. Having created a capacity to hear well, we listen. As you’re listening to your coworker, what are the questions behind their questions? As you’re out with other parents on the playground, what kinds of fears do other parents have? Whose grass is really overgrown in your neighborhood and what is the reason for that? Is someone elderly, sick, or do they have a newborn? This world, for all its online connectivity, is more disconnected than ever. Just sit in a crowded coffee shop and note the percentage of people on a screen vs. in conversation. Enter into that reality with curiosity. Big societal problems and trends are too large for us to solve, so start with those close to you, one individual at a time. For example, I saw a woman cross the busy road outside our complex with a baby in arms and a car raced behind her. This is the only place to cross the street to get to the bus stop. It has a cross walk, but no flashing lights. I wonder what it would look like to gather my neighbors and petition the county for a flashing crosswalk signal. The ultimate end is that my neighborhood knows our deep concern for our neighbors of all walks of life and my hope is that through an effort like that we might build the relational capital needed to earn the right to be heard.

Finally, we invite people into conversation and there is trust and shared vulnerability. We earn the right to hear someone share their story with all of its goodness and brokenness and they are better able to hear about Jesus’ work in our lives and about the goodness that Jesus is inviting us and them into. This takes a long time, but it also aims at a life transformed by the love of Jesus and not just mental assent to a body of knowledge. The Great Commission involves all of who we are interacting with all of who someone else is and that process is slow; it moves at the pace of relationship.

Conclusion

The life of someone becoming more like Jesus and helping others do the same is accompanied by, and empowered by the presence of God. The Gospel of Matthew began with the declaration that Jesus would be Immanuel, God with us.[2] Here, at the end of the Gospel, Jesus fulfills this and says “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”[3] The promise is that the Great Commission is not done alone. Our commission is to continue the work of Jesus’ 12 disciples. We are bringing people into the life of our triune God; growing the kingdom through the lives of individuals, neighborhoods, workplaces, and our other spheres of influence — Wherever we go.

The commencement ceremony that took place on a mountain in Galilee continues in 21st century Northern Virginia and as we look to the youngest in this church, continues in and through them. We need to become a church where this great commission is lived out and passed on. 1) pray, 2) work on your own growth in holiness, 3) know Christ’s commands, 4) notice the needs of others, 5) and invite others into life with Jesus. We cannot give what we ourselves have not received, so let’s do the hard work together of noticing and taking up God’s grace for ourselves so that we might share it with others, knowing that Jesus is with us and is bringing us all back into communion with our Triune God.

Let us pray:

Almighty God our Savior, you desire that none should perish, and you have taught us through your Son that there is great joy in heaven over every sinner who repents: Grant that our hearts may ache for a lost and broken world. May your Holy Spirit work through our words, deeds, and prayers, that the lost may be found and the dead made alive, and that all your redeemed may rejoice around your throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

[1] Matt 28:18.

[2] Matthew 1:23.

[3] Matthew 28:20.

Ivory Casten 5/24/26 Ivory Casten 5/24/26

Pentecost Sunday: A Commission to Join in New Creation

Genesis 11:1-9

Acts 2:1-21

Introduction

Good morning friends. Welcome to Pentecost Sunday. Jesus has ascended and on this day we commemorate His sending the Holy Spirit to the church to continue his work. While the kids aren’t in CGS, I want to start doing something new. I want to invite the kids down for a children’s sermon. Kids, come on down.

Kids’ Sermon

How many of you enjoy playing in the sand? Me too! What do you like doing in sandboxes? If we were to try to build a sandbox together, what kinds of things would we need? [Let the kids answer]. If we just had a pile of wood and pile of bags of sand, could we do it? What would happen if I poured the sand on the ground with nothing to hold it in? What would happen if I put boards up with out nailing them together and put sand in it? What happens if I just put a bunch of bags of sand on top of each other? Would that make a sandbox? NO! That’s right, we need a plan and the right tools to get things done. It’s not enough to think hard about it, or to just get the supplies. We need someone with a plan and the right tools to help us build it. We’ll have to cut the boards with a saw, hammer or screw together those boards with drills and screws or hammers and nails. We need a sharp knife to open the sandbags and someone who is really strong to dump all the sand into the sandbox. What happens after we build it? We can finally play! We fill it with toys, we spend time in it. We enjoy it.

In today’s passages we heard about how people made a mess of things in the world. But the thing is, even when we make a mess of things, God still loves us. He made us and he wants us to ask him for help and to enjoy his goodness in this world. I would even say that the joy of play is learning the reality of heaven, but when people want to do things their own way and not listen to God, they start to break things and make everything more chaotic and complicated. In our Genesis reading today, people became separated from one another, and they separated themselves from God. They forgot how to play in the goodness of God’s presence.

Pentecost is where the Holy Spirit, God himself, comes to make things new for all people. He will reorder the chaos they’ve made and reconstruct the things we have broken so we can play in His presence and have a full life with God once again. He is the one who has all the supplies, the knowledge, the wisdom, the tools and the power to bring us back to himself through Jesus. Today, remember that God loves you and has given his Holy Spirit to help rebuild what is broken. Thanks for listening kids. You can head back.

As I look at our texts with all of us, let me pray for us:

“In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. O God, you have made of one blood all the peoples of the earth, and sent your blessed Son to preach peace to those who are far off and to those who are near: Grant that people everywhere may seek after you and find you; bring the nations into your fold; pour out your Spirit upon all flesh; and hasten the coming of your kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

1. Hubris, destruction, and the need for a new history — Genesis 11

We read today from Genesis chapter 11. It’s a strange story which shows humanity’s recapitulation of the ancestral sin: refusing God’s goodness to opt for our own autonomy and authority. The peoples who were born from the descendants of Noah migrated east and wanted to build a city. As Alexei pointed out in his sermon last week, there weren’t the abundance of rocks that there had been where they came from, so they innovated and figured out how to make bricks and mortar with what they had. They say “Let’s build ourselves a city, have a tower with its height in the sky, and make a name for ourselves.”[1]

God comes down to visit the city. In contrast to the book of Acts today where God comes down to indwell a people, God here comes down to look at it. In his mercy, so that they did not create a scenario which they could not come back from, he scatters the people and creates confusion by dividing their languages. This whole narrative is a critique of Babylonian culture and human pride. Babylon viewed themselves as the height and pinnacle of human civilization. It also served as a warning to Israel in the future that the divisions, wars, and animosity towards strangers and foreign nations were a result of a choice to reject the good life with God in creation. In this narrative there is no small token of hope. There is no fig leaf, no mark to keep one safe, no rainbow. This is the first judgment narrative in Genesis with no hope of blessing. History has to be rewritten. And this is why the narrative begins in chapter 12 with introducing us to God’s calling of Abraham.

The whole narrative hinges on a wordplay. The people say “Let us make bricks” (נִלְבְּנָה) in verse 7. Despite their ingenuity and hubris, God says “let us confuse” (וְנָבְלָה) their languages. The group in Babel saw themselves as “the whole earth” and now they’d be scattered through the whole earth. God’s purposes will be accomplished despite the arrogance and defiance of proud people. Abraham begins a new history which gives humanity hope that all things will be put right again. Since the time of Abraham, the descendants of Abraham have been looking for that servant who would come and restore these cracked icons and destroy the dividing wall between heaven and earth and between our many earthly divisions caused by fear and pride.

2. God comes to dwell and put the two parts of creation (Heaven and earth), back together again. Shalom— Acts 2

Jesus is the hope humanity was looking for and his work is continuing through the Holy Spirit in the church in Acts 2 and beyond. God indwells a people in the Holy Spirit and begins reversing not just the curse of Babel, but the effects of the ancestral sin of humanity. I was reading a book this week on the counter-world that we long for in the Psalms, and the author points out some of the brokenness that seems so commonly a part of the human story.

Living with the mindset of scarcity, there is not enough out there for all of us, we have not done enough, we are not enough, and all of this heightens our anxiety. And once we are anxious and fearful, we are met with messages that keep us in this state of alert and people can sell us narratives and products we think we need to keep ourselves safer, healthier, more loved. Our anxieties then push us to control more of our lives, control our situations, control the people around us. In a world of scarcity and anxiety it is not hard to discover that greed becomes the means to keep us safe. We need more and more to keep up appearances, to make us feel important, to help us feel safe. The author says, “Thus the ideology of anxious scarcity generates artificial needs, so that unthinkable luxuries are quickly redefined as necessities...”[2]

Our greed gives us the illusion that we are self-sufficient. In our self-deluded self-sufficiency we think we can make it on our own or we fear rivals and competitors and say “I have to be self-sufficient”. God told Israel that once they got into the land and had eaten their fill and built fine houses, they should not exalt themselves and think that their wealth came by their own hand.[3] God makes no sense and has no relevance to those bound to a high-control, greedy, self-sufficient, and a frenetically-paced world. This leads us to denial. Buying that advertised razor and having a better shave won’t give me the perfect life that commercial promises any more than re-posting that one thing on social media will satisfy my rage and longing for safety and prosperity. But we do it anyways. And then the denial finally begins to give way to despair where our world feels like the bottom has dropped out of it and we are incapable of care and hospitality, unable to keep thoughtful attention and an even temper, and without hope. We cope with the hopelessness with a cultivated amnesia, addiction or other coping strategies to forget the hurt we have experienced. This produces only disconnection: disconnection from God, others, and even ourselves. Ultimately the disconnected world becomes a world without norms “because without God and without tradition and without common good, everything is possible.”[4]

Whereas God visited Babel to look at it and then thwart their plans, Jesus is God’s visitation of the world to inhabit it, re-create it, and bring unity to heaven and earth — the two realms of creation. The book of Acts continues the narrative of the things Jesus did. The work of Jesus was continuing in a people who were filled with God’s very presence as the new temple for the Holy Spirit to fill. The point of Pentecost is not the injection of energy into a people, it is God’s coming to dwell with his new covenant people — a new Sinai. It is a fulfillment of promises long ago. What started with Abraham in Genesis 12 has found its fulfillment in God’s homecoming.

Pentecost launches a worldwide mission to put the world right again. You and I are filled with the Holy Spirit and part of this mission. Pentecost Sunday always feels like a re-missioning. What brokenness have you encountered this week? What disappointments? In any given week there are a number of reminders that the world is not as it should be. And in the midst of these places, the Spirit is working. Have we asked him what he wants to do in us? Have we sat with others in community to discern the work of the Spirit?

Conclusion

God has come, the Spirit is here. The church has what she needs to become the mature body of Christ and to continue the works and teachings of Jesus in a world bound to anxiety, greed, self-sufficiency, denial, amnesia, and disconnection. The fractures of humanity are being healed in the church as the place of new creation. In our own strength, innovation, and pride, we will only sow chaos into creation, but God’s Spirit has been poured out into the church to bring about new creation. As God rebuilds, we come to know the profound joy of the work of the Spirit in the church and as we know this joy, we come to learn the stuff of heaven where we learn to play again where God dwells.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus, Master Carpenter of Nazareth, on the Cross through wood and nails you wrought our full salvation: Wield well your tools in this, your workshop, that we who come to you rough-hewn may be fashioned into a truer beauty by your hand; who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, world without end. Amen.

[1] Genesis 11:4.

[2] Walter Brueggemann, From Whom No Secrets are Hid: Introducing the Psalms, 10-11.

[3] Deut. 8:12-17.

[4] Walter Brueggemann, From Whom No Secrets are Hid: Introducing the Psalms, 12-14.

Ivory Casten 5/17/26 Ivory Casten 5/17/26

Ascension Reflections on Building the Life of the Church

I Peter 4:12-19

Good morning. I’m Alexei, a member here. Let’s pray together. Father, as we consider these words, help them to manifest in us a wellspring of life. Lord, we pray in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Last sermon, if you were here or if you had a chance to listen for Ascension Day, Father Morgan covered, among other things, the expectations of the disciples in terms of what would come next and the meaning of adoration. We heard a very long, but good, example of Father Morgan’s love of coffee as it relates to adoration today. I am given similar texts, but I’m going to weave the text a bit differently in terms of what we covered today. I will cover the preview of what is to come with the children of God, us, our active pursuit of building and how and by what means, and what contrast these momentous days of Ascension leading up to Pentecost will look like. We’ll look at the spiritual elements of this building up of the body and consider the persecuted church out of our First Peter passage, and its practical application, and how that draws us from the smaller loves into the greater loves of the body of Christ. We will consider how to be in the world and not of it, holding the body and how to navigate the times we’re in, and will consider how we can claim a love for even our nation and pray for it, but how that is a secondary love to the love of the body of Christ and how those two loves are in relation to each other. First, I’m gonna start with a bit of a reflection from Alexander Schmemann.

So, for those of you who might be newer to the Anglican church or might be newer to liturgy, you might notice that every year we make a big deal of our liturgy. It really, in many ways, for those of us who practiced in the Anglican tradition for some years, starts at Advent and it moves all the way through Pentecost. But sometime in this part of the year, Easter to Pentecost, we kinda lose a little bit of its meaning, or it can seem that way. And so Schmemann, I think, gives us a way to think about liturgy and the importance of liturgy again. As a church where we read the Book of Common Prayer, we’re common people, and we’re seeking uncommon transformation, and part of that is the liturgy. Part of that is the liturgy of this day and going into Pentecost itself. So let’s hear Schmemann on these words. Alexander Schmemann, for those of you who don’t know, is an Orthodox teacher and protopresbyter.

“In the center of our liturgical life, in the very center of that time which we measure as year, we find the feast of Christ’s Resurrection. What is Resurrection? Resurrection is the appearance in this world, completely dominated by time and therefore by death, of a life that will have no end. The one who rose again from the dead does not die anymore. In this world of ours, not somewhere else, not in a world that we do not know at all, but in our world, there appeared one morning Someone who is beyond death and yet in our time. This meaning of Christ’s Resurrection, this great joy, is the central theme of Christianity and it has been preserved in its purity by the Orthodox Church. There is much truth expressed by those who say that the real central theme of Orthodoxy, the center of all its experience, the frame of reference of everything else, is the Resurrection of Christ.

The center, the day, that gives meaning to all days and therefore to all time, is that yearly commemoration of Christ’s Resurrection at Easter. This is always the end and the beginning. We are always living after Easter, and we are always going toward Easter. Easter is the earliest Christian feast. The whole tone and meaning of the liturgical life of the Church is contained in Easter, together with the subsequent fifty-day period, which culminates in the feast of Pentecost, the coming down of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. This unique Easter celebration is reflected every week in the Christian Sunday, which we call in Russian ‘Voskresenie’ (Resurrection Day). If only you would take some time to read the texts of Sunday Matins, you would realize, though it may seem strange to you, that every Sunday we have a little Easter. I say ‘little Easter,’ but it is really ‘Great Easter.’ Every week the Church comes to the same central experience: ‘Having seen Thy Resurrection...’ Every Saturday night, when the priest carries the Gospel from the altar to the center of the church, after he has read the Gospel of the Resurrection, the same fundamental fact of our Christian faith is proclaimed: Christ is risen! St. Paul says: ‘If Christ is not risen, then your faith is in vain.’ There is nothing else to believe. This is the real center, and it is only in reference to Easter as the end of all natural time and the beginning of the new time in which we as Christians have to live that we can understand the whole liturgical year. If you open a calendar, you will find all our Sundays are called Sundays after Pentecost, and Pentecost itself is fifty days after Easter. Pentecost is the fulfillment of Easter. Christ ascended into heaven and sent down His Holy Spirit. When He sent down His Holy Spirit into the world, a new society was instituted, a body of people whose life, though it remained of this world and was shared in its life, took on a new meaning. This new meaning comes directly from Christ’s Resurrection. We are no longer people who are living in time as in a meaningless process, which makes us first old and then ends in our disappearance. We are given not only a new meaning in life, but even death itself has acquired a new significance. In the Troparion at Easter we say, ‘He trampled down death by death.’ We do not say that He trampled down death by the Resurrection, but by death. A Christian still faces death as a decomposition of the body, as an end; yet in Christ, in the Church, because of Easter, because of Pentecost, death is no longer just the end, but it is the beginning also. It is not something meaningless which therefore gives a meaningless taste to all of life. Death means entering into the Easter of the Lord. This is the basic tone, the basic melody, of the liturgical year of the Christian Church.

“And the real content of the Church life is joy. We speak of feasts; the feast is the expression of the joyfulness of Christianity.

“The only real thing, especially in the child’s world, which the child accepts easily, is precisely joy. We have made our Christianity so adult, so serious, so sad, so solemn, that we have almost emptied it of that joy. Yet Christ Himself said, ‘Unless you become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of God.’”

We reflect on Schmemann, and he’s pushing us into this idea that our Christian year is in these days, these high days of Easter, these days of the Ascension leading us into Pentecost. We can get into some of our passage. We look into John 17, which is where we started. I just wanna cover a few pieces out of the Gospel of John. It’s really, when we look at it, a bit—this is a combination of very serious and also a bit comical at the very end. So He’s taken up into heaven, and the comical part: they look up, and then two men are dressed and stand and say, “Why are you looking up?” That’s the comical part. “This same Jesus has been taken from you into heaven and will come back in the same way you’ve seen Him go into heaven.” And so then, as we continue into 12 and 13 and 14, we notice that what the apostles give themselves into is an intense focus on prayer coming into Pentecost. This is tied into the very essence of our Anglican way of life. Our Book of Common Prayer—prayer is the anchor of the waiting as part of our Christian life. It’s the anchor, but it’s also part of the building.

I’m gonna move us into Genesis 11 a little bit. The Ascension, in many ways, is a kind of bridge, is one of the Exodus bridges. OK, so in the book of Exodus, you’re leaving from Egypt and you’re crossing the Red Sea. Jesus, in a very literal way, is ascending to heaven, creating a bridge for us. Do you see that parallel? He’s creating a bridge for us, an Exodus bridge. Second thing is, in the Old Testament, you have the Exodus, you have the wilderness, then you eventually have the coming into the Promised Land after a severe sequence of things that culminates in the Old Testament in the temple, the temple itself and temple worship. In the New Testament, what this whole culminates into—Ascension as a start and Pentecost—is the temple of our own bodies, our own bodies, the Lord dwelling within us. You can see, then, the seriousness of our bodies and our actions and our acts in the epistles, how seriously we take what we do with our bodies, why this is now the place where the Spirit, God’s presence, dwells with us.

You can see these parallels here now both the Old Testament and New Testament are dealing with a human tendency that I want us to look at in Genesis 11 as we start thinking about what is the Ascension mean for our life as a Christian that’s the tower of Babel so what I’m doing here is I’m contrasting new Old Testament the New Testament what is the human condition? What is life apart from God actually look like what does the scriptures have to say about it if you can see the connection because this is the starting point of ours ascension to worship Genesis 11 the whole world had one language in a common speech as men moved east where they found a plane in Shinar and settled there they said to each other come let’s make bricks and bake and thoroughly. They use brick and instead of stone and for mortar and they said come let us build ours of the city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves two things are going on here that I want to draw our attention to one. Is that notice of the tower of Babel we’re moving from the natural to things that man makes brick.

Do you see that the technological development were no longer using what God has given us, but we are selves are making the equivalent the equivalent of their day the iPhone AI you know these things are still alive in the sense of what man breaks a generation or two ago cars and airplanes. The making of the brick is not necessarily the challenge meaning what man makes a lol more than it’s a challenge of what you what you’re making in your life your personal life what you do with your time in your energies it’s the second part to make a name for ourselves to make a name for ourselves to put us first to put our ways first. Think about this to put our ways first, but we’ll still exploit the poor in the town in the Babel system and then if you look in the New Testament Babylon takes on the same kind of archetype. Egypt is another architect to make our name for ourselves, but we will not have justice to make a name for ourselves, but we will not reform our hearts for peace patients kind of self-control to make a name for ourselves, but to worship ourselves not to worship God.

The temple in the Old Testament is this place where you’re making sacrifices for sin in heaven and earth can then be in a place to make your to make it right with God, Jesus who’s made our way right with God ascend into heaven, and then gives us new tools, new tools for the body of Christ to move forward his patient kind of self-control. The new tools that are necessary to actually take conflict more slowly how many of you had conflict this week. Do you have conflict with anyone add conflict this week one way that the Ascension in the Christian life and the Holy Spirit dwelling in our temple in our bodies matter is it slows us down? It slows us down in a world that is wanting to speed us up.

Do you feel that how fast everything is how much your time is supposed to be taken up everything supposed to be on the quick the double quick and if you don’t have time, ask AI will give you the answer, right just slow us down but not to slow us down just to be slow. This is not even though it’s wonderful to be slow and it’s wonderful to have a relaxed life and to have a more peaceful life in a life where you have time to have time for yourself and to rest the point isn’t the slowness the point is the time to go back in prioritize, the Lord right think of the conflict you had this week if you have conflict this week or think of a difficulty you had this week if you didn’t have conflict, part of stepping back from the conflict from the difficulty from the distraction is not just for rest sake it’s to go back and seek for the Kingdom of God and of itself to slow down and then apply the Christian life to your circumstances, which can be difficult sometimes why can it be difficult because we wore against the world the flashing the devil there’s all these things that push for our time but again this is going back to living as Christians in our day-to-day and to be a sweet offering go into our Peter passage in for Peter.

It’s very interesting what we’re given and it’s interesting if you’re thinking about why did we have the particular readings that we had today the psalm if you noticed, it’s the Ascension verse did you see that in the Psalm he ascended into heaven, right it’s right there and then we also have the the John 17 prayer we end with and then we’ve already covered a little bit of the ax but in first Peter, it’s pretty interesting but love do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you as though something strange were happening to you, but rejoice and so far as you share Christ suffering many of us, not all of us but many of us in the Christian Weston in the United States were a bit removed for some of the suffering and not saying that we don’t suffer. Certainly people can look down on us for being very religious. Certainly people cannot think well of us for going committing our life to Christ that that does happen, but it’s a different degree then you will be jailed.

So I wanna talk about three examples of persecution that it is happening the church today and how that draws us back into a love for the body and then tie back into our Discipline so three examples of people that I’ve known and come across in the last year within my personal life involvement for Kingdom Mission Society. The persecuted church has been very important and certainly for the Anglican Church in North America. It is also very important.

First example I want to talk to you is something that probably was in the news today or this last two weeks he probably heard of Pastor Ezra Jin or maybe Jimmy Lai been persecuted in China in the last year. The Chinese government at last year and a half has made it illegal for you to not meet in the state sponsored church Pastor Ezra Jin had the largest online church in China. They reached probably 50,000 people a week and that also meant this is how a Chinese could go and get some of the online Bible apps right so they jail Pastor Ezra Jin in about a year and a half ago or last October less than that and 200 members of his church in the charges there are fraud why are the charges fraud well from the Chinese government‘s perspective they’re operating tithing and offerings apart from the state church therefore that’s the fraud he is kept in a place where he cannot talk to his family knowing the daughter who attends a sister church in the region he is kept the lawyers are harassed and threatened to their licenses be removed unless they drop the case and he it is unclear half and he’s given his diabetes medication. He is facing likely 7 to 10 years in prison in what is the story due for us well this story best for us were to pray for Pastor Ezra certainly to think about how we speak up or support the persecuted church but what happens when we start thinking about the prosecuted church as we realize that these are believers alive right now praying to God right we are tied with them in a fellowship right and that helps us. Yes pray for our love for our country, but also to pray for the global body.

Let me give you two more examples and will move into our clothes out of John 17. The second is the church in Syria. This is the church that at the start of the 20th century was 20% or more of the Syrian population it’s now down to 2%. It is eight different churches in Syria. The stories go that Christian communities are often harassed with bullhorns and threatens that they should convert to Islam it’s not the whole society that does this but some of the extremists so you can imagine being a church like ours suddenly being interrupted by a large bullhorn that’s the experience of our brothers and sisters saying convert to Islam. What happens is the man in the church will go and talk to the person and say please stop and they’ll make a report to the government to please stop but in one of these churches have three weeks after an incident like that there was a church Bonding right as we pray for our brothers and sisters in Syria in Iraq in Iran, who face this kind of intimidation is how I describe the Christian persecution in much of the Middle East today

Third one I wanna talk about is Christian prosecution in the Congo you would think well why the Congo it’s an 80% Christian nation. Why would they have Christian persecution in the Congo well, they’re having Isis affiliated groups who are going and asking are you Christian? Is your name Christian John that sounds like a Christian name convert otherwise I’ll cut your hand off. It’s really at that level, it’s very brutal. It’s very brutal and we think of our brothers and sisters in the Congo. These are very different types of places you know different types of the economies, different types of living, but we are united in this first Peter passage for them can’t suffer Price suffering or living Krise suffering. Do you see them until we get connected with the global body, even as we give things for God‘s blessings in the United States and then other parts of the Western world that we’re connected with the global body, and we know that these are not suffering as murderers of thieves or as criminals, right we know they’re suffering as Christians and so we pray for them we think about how to send relief and sad to send aid through the Anglican Church in North America. Does that quite well and we support our brothers and sisters who are in this place and we know that they’re deeply connected into our liturgy and then I’ll move to the John passage, we know out of the book of Revelation that they are in White right they are calling out. They are the martyrs and White and let’s make a connection of our liturgy. That’s the same White that you’re given in baptism right this is the connection for the liturgical life. This is one of the reasons that part of building the new city part of building the city of God on earth part of building up the church is where we’re turning it all around we’re not practicing injustice within the church. I’m not saying there’s a scene in the church there’s certainly is we’re turning it all around because God‘s doing the building so it’s slow sometimes God‘s doing the precious building in our lives think about your own growth and faith.

It’s a slow growth, but this is all enabled in part because of the new exodus because of the Ascension the feast day we’re celebrating today right let’s let’s final finish and John 17 so here it’s pretty incredible in the gospel of John. we’re given Jesus‘s prayer to God the father we are let in on a divine conversation. How amazing is this and here’s what he pray in 17. He talks about his time being here. He talks about being glorified and then at the end here at 17 he says 11, which is our remain you know I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world and I’m coming to you. Holy father protect them by the power of your name the name you gave me so they may be one as we are one. He praise for the unity of the church the unity of the church that begins in our hearts, the unity of the church for the spirit dwells in our hearts and dwells in our conflicts the unity of the church that it matters what you do if your body it matters what you do if your time he prays for the temple that will go on forever in our own resurrection right and so it in Dallas each of us within incredible meaning Jesus does with incredible dignity CS Louis talks about you’re talking to strangers you may be having everlasting conversations conversations with eternal consequences in his writings so think about that as we had between now and as we go into Pentecost, we’re thinking about the meaning of these days the liturgy is what we’re given going back to Schmemann right from Easter to Easter from Easter to Pentecost. This is what we’re given until the next age to experience the simple joys of the Christian life where it’s not about ambition, it’s about having the Lord‘s business at mind always and having contentment joy from following the Lord always not in flashy moments and flashy careers so that can be fine if it’s present there it’s that you have your contentment somewhere else and that is what helps heal the restlessness. It’s been in the human spirit since the garden. Jesus is what helps heal this and says we think about Ascension as we head into Pentecost this week about the importance of time and your week and take the small steps if you haven’t opened up the book of common prayer if you haven’t done your scripture reading in a while use this week as a mini renewal week because I always find the Pentecost is sending season in my own walk-in lot, so think about that enter into the glory of this time whatever stage of life that you’re in and seek the Lord fully let’s pray vicious father we thank you for this ascension Sunday what enables through the waters adapt we asked that you would be with us and help us to renew our hearts even this day the name of the Father Son and Holy Spirit.

SERMONS

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