2,000 years after Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, the phrase "Good Samaritan" has come to mean something very different than the first telling. Whereas we hear "a person who goes out of their way to do a good deed," Jesus's original listeners heard "my enemy shocking me by meeting my need." Which means that the parable's primarily call is not primarily to "do good deeds" but rather to recognize that the person we are most inclined to suspect and despise is a person we not only need to love... they are also the person we need.

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RIC Sunday - On Recognizing and Needing Our Good Samaritans

Being separated from the events of scripture by at least 2,000 years can make us wonder how to find points of connection, but even the second generation of the church found itself in a different place theologically and practically from Jesus' first disciples. And these differences might just be the key for us to find how the peace Jesus promises to those who saw him face to face can be a source of hope for us as well. 

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A Peace for Every World

When we talk about freedom we generally know that we are talking about something we value, but the specifics of how freedom translates into our lives need more specifics. No one really experiences absolute freedom because we live in a world where we are all constrained by systems and resources over which we have limited control. But this does not mean that freedom is meaningless. It just means we need to understand the kinds of freedom that really matter. In this reality, the freedom that we find in Christ is truly transformative, because this is a freedom we can know regardless of circumstances.

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The Fullness of Freedom

When Jesus promises the Spirit of God he is promising to draw his followers into the transforming relationship what Jesus shares with the Creator. AND he is drawing them into that relationship with all of the uniqueness and wholeness of who they are. We do not have to choose between belonging and transforming. With the Spirit we have both.
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Both/And Identity

Sermons about the Trinity can be the hardest to preach and to listen to, because... why does it matter? We will never be able to understand the unknowable mystery, and trying is likely to make faith feel less relevant to our lives, not more. But what if we explore the Trinity not as a theological puzzle to solve and instead as an invitation to enter in to God's way of being?  

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Invited In

Human societies, and even religions, often cling to binaries (good/bad; insider/outsider; right/wrong) as a way to project an illusion of safety. But creation is made up of much more complicated realities, and Jesus calls us not to safety but to love. If we are to truly witness to the good that God has done for us, we cannot cling to binaries that make us feel safe. 

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Growth Beyond Binaries

The Christian practice of the remembrance of saints tends to focus on the actions, faithfulness, or martyrdom that sets the saints apart from ordinary people. But such veneration makes their stories less accessible, and thus less meaningful for our daily practice of faith. Perhaps it is more fruitful to explore their fallibility and the way that Jesus meets them in their need and calls them anyhow. 

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Compassion, Confession, and Commissioning

Peace has a lot of meanings spanning the mere absence of conflict to the active establishment of justice, but it is rarely thought of as an entity that takes up space. When Jesus sends his disciples on a preparatory mission, however, he sends them with no resources other than peace... and that peace is enough. It is a powerful gift to settle on those who welcome them and something that will return to them if offered to those who reject its value. How might it transform our experiences of being called to share in the work of God to believe that God's peace is a real and transformative asset?

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Abiding and Returning Peace

Sometimes the enemy of the good is not the perfect, or even the bad, but merely the mindless. It is far too easy to fall into patterns of thought or behavior that lead us away from what we actually value without ever being aware of this shift. All of the necessary activities of life, and the natural worries that occupy space in our brains can be much more dangerous to our focus on what really matters than more direct moral challenges. In the familiar story, Martha's error is not that she was engaging in bad actions, but that she had not chosen what really mattered. We can make the same mistake without even noticing it. But that also means that if we pay attention we can make the better choice. 
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Choosing What Really Matters

When Jesus teaches us to pray, the pronouns matter. He teaches us to pray as community: to pray for our daily bread, for the forgiveness of our sins, for our protection. Prayer in this model is not about private faith, but rather about collective need in which prayer draws us together. It can be a challenging perspective shift for those of us raised in the individualism of American Christianity, but it is also an incredible resource for teaching us how to engage with a hurting world. We are all in this together. 

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Learning to Pray as a Plural You

One of the most pernicious dangers for people of faith is assuming that Jesus's moral instincts match our own. Sometimes this looks like assuming that God hates the same people we hate (nope - God loves them, the same as God loves us). Other times that looks like assuming our moral justifications would earn God's sign-off (nope - God is perfectly ready to challenge us to do better). In both instances, our challenge is to remember that while we always see only in part, God sees the whole. And much as this challenges our biases and self-justifications, this reality is actually really good news. Because it means that even when God is rebuking us, this correction is a message of love. It is an invitation to expect more from God and from ourselves. 

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Not Putting God (Or Ourselves) In A Box

Welcome to the sermon feed for Abiding Peace Lutheran Church: Journey of Faith. We would love to have you with us for worship, but if you can't join us on Sunday mornings, we hope these messages bring the challenge and grace of the gospel to your life.