Sermon on Matthew 5:1-12

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

All Saints Day is a mixed bag when it comes to church holy days.

Most holy days are celebratory: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost. We belted out “A Mighty Fortress” last week for Reformation. Some churches do a blessing of the animals to mark St. Francis Day. Even quieter festivals like Holy Trinity and Baptism of our Lord evoke a hopeful reverence.

And though Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are solemn, at least they’re decidedly so. There’s no question that they’resomber, weighty holy days.

But All Saints Day is, at the same time,joyful as we remember the great cloud of witnesses cheering us on and sad as we grieve those who are no longer with us physically. It’s a bittersweet holy day when we hold grief and hope together.

It comes right after the significant secular holiday Halloween. Amid the costumes and candy, there’s also an undercurrent of discomfort. It’s as much as the dominant culture in the US is willing toacknowledge death.

As we’ve moved tonursing our sick at the hospital instead of at home and having our deceased loved ones at funeral parlors instead of in our houses’parlors, our society has become increasingly uncomfortable with the realities of mortality.

There are good reasons why we outsource these parts of our lives and deaths, but now we can ignore the inevitable until the last possible moment, which makes it harder to process and accept.

We glorify youth, reject any sign of aging, and hide away sickness and death. At best, we dress up as zombies and ghouls once a year, making truth into make-believe.

But All Saints confronts us with the reality that we will all dieand we are never fully parted from our loved ones and all our ancestors in faith.

Those are challenging truths to confront at the same time.

The Beatitudes also are comprised of difficult truths to hold at the same time.

Based on how the world generally works—now and back then—we would expect Jesus’ blessings to go to rich people, powerful people, lucky people, ruthless people who are willing to take decisive action at others’ expense, and warriors who show strength through violence.

But that’s not what Jesus said. After Jesus had been going around curing people of all kinds of illnesses and pains and freeing them from demons, he felt compassion for those who were following him, and he sat down on a mountain to teach.

And instead of describing the hierarchy of society the way they understood it, he turned everything on its head, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…blessed are those who mourn…blessed are the meek…” and so on.

These are, of course, the types of people who were following Jesus around. People who were rich, powerful, fortunate, and ruthless aren’t as likely to feel the need for healing.

But the least, the last, and the lost? Those left behind by society—marginalized, stigmatized, ostracized? That’s exactly who felt compelled by Jesus’ message. That’s who Jesus was collecting—the nobodies.

But why would Jesus want to collect people like that?

He couldn’t become influential among the religious leaders with followers like that. He couldn’t gain political power with followers like that. He couldn’t build an army with followers like that.

But that’s exactly who he collected throughout his ministry. He got criticized for eating with tax collectors and sex workers and sinners—the nobodies of the first century.

He didn’t seek the favor of the influential or the charismatic or the well-resourced. He sought out the hurting, the heart-broken, the oppressed, and the down-trodden.

He didn’t make grand promises that they would get rich by following his investment plan or that they could manifest a better life by paying for his twelve-week course or that they could win friends and influence people if they read his book.

He welcomed people as they were and named them as blessed.

He did warn them, though, that if they followed him, they might be treated even worse by those in power. They might be persecuted, reviled, and spoken about negatively and untruthfully.

But, so were the prophets—ancestors in faith who God chose to speak difficult truths to God’s people, inviting them back into the way of life God gave them after freeing them from Egypt.

God doesn’t abide by the hierarchies we humanshonor. Instead, God turns them on their heads. After all, the “first will be last, and the last will be first.”

And those least, last, and lost people make up the great cloud of witnesses the writer of Hebrews talks about.

We celebrate All Saints Day today, and the word “saints” can evoke the “great” people of faith, the biblical heroes like Abraham and Moses and David and Mary and Mary Magdalene and Peter and Paul.

It can evoke the people the Roman Catholic Church has actually named  as saints,like St. Francis, St. Patrick, St. Oscar Romero, St. Joan of Arc, St. Theresa of Avila, and St. Teresa of Calcutta.

Or even non-official saints who we might view as personal heroes who accomplished great things or suffered unjust untimely deaths: Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Oskar Schindler, Matthew Shepard, Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many others.

And those are great people to look up to and learn about and be inspired by.But the great cloud of witnesses is mostly comprised of the least, the last, and the lost—the nobodies of every age—the flawed and human people like us—those who feel poor in spirit, who are meek, who, on this All Saints Day, mourn.

Grief is another thing our culture doesn’t make much room for. We’re expected to get on with our lives, to move on, even after the most significant people in our lives die. It’s not fair. It’s not realistic. It’s not compassionate or kind. It’s downright inhumane and inhuman not to make space for grief, as uncomfortable as it can be.

On this mixed bag of a holy day, we’re allowed to mourn, and we’re blessed for it. We’re encouraged to remember also that our loved ones and all our ancestors in faith—the greats and the nobodies—are cheering us on as the cloud of witnesses.

I’d like to close with a reminder from one of those who have gone before us: Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish author who died in Auschwitz, who left us this beautiful reminder about grief and its capacity to heal:

“Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate.

“But if you do instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge — from which new sorrows will be born for others — then sorrow will never cease in this world. And if you have given sorrow the space it demands, then you may truly say: life is beautiful and so rich.”

Today and always, may you be encouraged by the great cloud of blessed nobodiesas they cheer us on until we join them.

Sermon on Matthew 22:34-46

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

We’ve been reading for the past four weeks about the conflicts between Jesus and various religious leaders between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. Today, we’ll wrap up our informal sermon series by looking back at these readings and what questions they invite us to consider on this Reformation Sunday.

At the end of September, we read the parable of the two sons: the one who said he would do what his father asked but never got around to it, and the one who said, “no, thank you,” but eventually did it anyway. Jesus was calling out the religious leaders for not believing John the Baptistor Jesus’ prophetic messages and acting on them. We asked ourselves what prophets we’re ignoring now.

On Reformation Sunday, we remember Martin Luther in 1517 posting his 95 Theses, his lengthy list of things he thought the church should be doing better.

This got Luther into a lot of trouble, and when he wouldn’t apologize for what he said, he was excommunicated.Violence and bloodshed followed, and the Church had a lengthy time of reckoning.

Though violence and church schisms are worthy of grief, we do need prophets and reformers to help us examine where we as the Church fall short of God’s call to the fullness of Beloved Community.

What prophets and reformers like John the Baptist and Martin Luther should we pay attention to today?

In our Gospel reading the next week, Jesus continued with the parable of the wicked tenants, who not only didn’t hand the harvest over to their employer, but killed his messengers and even his son.

God has called each of us to bear good fruit in the world, and yet sometimes we view people as enemies and treat them with fear and anger. Maybe God is speaking to us through people we treat as enemies.

There was violence on both sides of the Reformation. Siblings in Christ were killing each other over their differing views on how God works and how the church should operate, as well as the political dynamics that played out alongside theological disagreements.

How can we stand up for what we believe in while still honoring the humanity and personhood of people who disagree with us? How can we love our enemies as siblings made in the image of God?

If that parable wasn’t violent enough, the next one which we read on the 11this the one I find most troubling in our recent readings.

In this parable, all of the invitations to a king’s wedding banquet were turned down and the messengers hurt or even killed, so the king had all the people on the guest list killed and burned their city.

After that, he invited anyone and everyone to fill the seats, which in itself is a nice image of God’s inclusive wedding feast. Except that one guest wasn’t wearing the right clothes, so he was thrown out of the feast, and the imagery is ominous and alarming.

If we can set aside Jesus’ attention-getting storytelling tactics, we can focus on the abundance and inclusivity of God’s banquet table. There’s a feast, where we’re invited—all of us, regardless of class or background or worthiness—to come as we are, clothed in Jesus’ love.

In Jesus’ life story, we are the ones who rejected his invitation to life abundant and inflicted violence upon him.

And he didn’t burn down cities or kill anyone. Instead, he broke the power of death and invites everyone, everyone, everyone to his banquet—now and for all time.

Martin Luther, who was an expert at beating himself up and trying to be perfectly pleasing to God, had a life-changing shift in his understanding of God. He directed his attention to passages like our reading from Romans that describe God’s grace: “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

He insisted that we don’t and, indeed, can’t earn salvation or God’s love. God’s grace saves us—not anything we do or don’t do.

Your invitation is secure. A place card with your name is on the table. You are clothed in Jesus’ love and grace.

And though our salvation is secure in Christ, there are times in our lives where God extends other invitations. Invitations to life choices, relationships, opportunities to serve, compassion to offer, joys to celebrate. And we might miss them if we’re not paying attention.

We have choices to make about whether to accept those invitations or stay in our comfort zones or nurse our egos.

What invitations from the Holy Spirit are we ignoring? What are we refusing to celebrate?How can we learn to trust God and offer an enthusiastic “yes”?

Then, last week, we read Jesus’ famous non-answer to the religious leaders’ clever verbal trap regarding paying taxes: “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

We talked about this being a question not just about taxes but about how to live out one’s faith when one’s government doesn’t fully align with one’s religious beliefs. No matter what party is in power, we’re not going to agree with everything our government does—it’s just a question of to what degree our government and our faith conflict.

Similar questions came up during the Reformation, when government and religion were more drastically intertwined in Germany and in Europe in general. The Reformation was a time of reckoning not just for the church but for all of life, including government.

Fortunately, we don’t have to change our religion based on who’s in power like the kings in 16th-century Germany. But our faith still has something to say about how we operate in this life, not just the next.

God is still calling us to reform—in the church, in the world, in our everyday lives. Though we’re human and miss the mark every day—every hour—God’s still calling us to learn and grow and change and imitate Christ.

How is God calling you and us to reform today? What parts of scripture do you turn to for grounding amid hard decisions and change in the world? How can we say “yes” to what God has in store for our next chapter?

And finally, this week Jesus summed up all of God’s teachings in two principles: love God and love your neighbor.

Instead of offering a perplexing parable or answering a question with a question like he did in the previous readings, Jesus answered this one directly and succinctly, quoting parts of the Lawas a summary of the whole.

We know what will happen after this series of Gospel readings. Jesus will have Passover dinner with his friends, wash their feet, offer them himself in bread and wine, pray desperately in a garden, be arrested, tried, beaten, and killed as an enemy of the State.

And we also know that the story doesn’t end there. He rose again. Even with all of humanity’s violence and evil intentions, we couldn’t keep him down. He broke death itself to bring us God’s grace—a gift we can never earn and, thankfully, don’t have to.

Jesus loved God and loved us: his neighbors, his beloved, made in God’s image.

And through God’s grace and love, we are freed to love God and our neighbors too, without the fear of trying to be worthy of any of it. God’s already taken care of it. You are right with God just as you are. And you reflect God’s love for you in how you live in the world.

Just as we can get caught up looking at our lives and only see the ways we fall short, we can look back on the Reformation and only see the division, the violence, the name-calling (which Luther did plenty of). Many things happened during the Reformation and throughout Church history that do not live up to loving God and our neighbor. We’re human. We get caught up in our egos and biases and defensiveness and dehumanization of others.

And God calls us to more. Not as a requirement for salvation—Jesus took care of that. But out of love for God and the freedom we’ve received, we can cocreate with God a more loving world here and now.

The Holy Spirit calls us to reform, not out of anger or disapproval, but out of love and compassion, desiring that every person feel their God-given worth and connection with everything God has created.

So, beloved children of God, freed in Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, how are we being called to reform the ways we love God and our neighbor today? What is the Spirit calling us to next?

Listen, answer, and act bravely and full of God’s love.

Sermon on Matthew 22:15-22

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

This week’s Gospel continues yet again with another story about the religious leaders trying to trap Jesus into either discrediting or incriminating himself in the days between Palm Sunday and Good Friday.

We had Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday,

the cleansing of the Temple,

the religious leadersquestioning Jesus’ authority,

and, in response, Jesus’ inflammatory parables that we’ve been looking at for the past few weeks.

In this week’s reading, which immediately follows, the religious authorities sent their disciples to talk to Jesus instead of going to him themselves. And their disciples resorted to flattery to try to get Jesus off his guard.

Then, they sprang their trap: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”

Jesus could have said, “Yes, obey the law and pay your taxes.”

That doesn’t seem so bad, except that the Jewish people were occupied by the Roman Empire. They weren’t too happy about foreign occupation and high taxes. The taxes the Pharisees and Herodians were talking about here was a flat tax: one denarius (about a day’s wages) due for every person, which meant that the poorest people were the most burdened by these taxes. The people who had celebrated Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem would not have been happy if Jesus responded that they should pay these heavy taxes inflicted by a foreign power.

On the other hand, Jesus could have said, “Don’t pay taxes to these Roman oppressors!” But guess who wouldn’t have been happy about that: the Romans. That’s a real good way to get arrested.

Yet again, Jesus had been asked a question with no easy way out. But hewas a good rabbi who answered questions with questions. He asked to see one of the denarius coins that taxes would be paid with.

It’s worth noting that Jesus didn’t pull out a coin of his own—he probably didn’t have one. Instead, he made his opponents have to physically pull out one of the tax coins they were asking if it was okay to use.

Jesus then asked them, “Whose image is this?”

And they replied, “The emperor.”

Not only were these coins stamped with a picture of the emperor; they were also inscribed with the words “Tiberius Caesar, August Son of the Divine Augustus” and “Pontifex Maximus,” which means high priest. The coins stated that the emperor was the son of God and claimed divine authority.

To the Jewish people, this was blasphemy. It was a graven image—an idol—which was forbidden in the ten commandments. It was a graven image of someone who was definitely not God claiming to be God.

This question wasn’t just about taxes, money, or politics: it was about divine authority.

It was about how to live in occupied territory while staying true to God.

It was about what to do when your government’s orders don’t align with your religious beliefs.

This is still a pressing question: how to be true to your faith in God when your government doesn’t fully align with your religious beliefs.

For most if not all of us, there’s some degree of dissonance between our faith and politics, regardless of what party is in power.

In this election season, this is a particularly pressing difficulty as we cast our votes in these next few weeks.

This reading from Matthew feels timely, if a little perplexing.

Jesus didn’t give a straight answer to the Pharisees and Herodians. This was partly to avoid getting trapped by them. But it was also because there’s no easy answer for how to live in a society that doesn’t align with your faith.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,

and to God the things that are God’s.”

So, give the coins that have the image of the emperor on them to the emperor when he requires them of you.

Jesus also said, give to God the things that are God’s.

But what has the image of God on it?

Listen to this from Genesis chapter 1:

‘Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image,

according to our likeness...

So God created humankind in his image,

    in the image of God he created them;

    male and female he created them.”’

This mighty emperor could have coins stamped with his image and inscribe a claim that he was divine,

But every human being bears the image of God.

The entirety of creation, in fact, has God’s fingerprints all over it.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,

and to God the things that are God’s.”

God is not subject to earthly rulers, governments, or political parties.

No political party or government official will save us.

Jesus has already saved us and will bring about the fullness of the Reign of God at the end of time.

But that doesn’t mean we give up on trying to make our world and our country a better place.

But just as Jesus didn’t give an easy answer to the Pharisees and Herodians, there are no easy answers for how exactly we as Christians should participate in the political systems of our day.

But here’s one way to practice giving to God the things that are God’s:

As we vote in this election, use scripture as a guide. If you’ve already turned in your ballot, good for you! You can keep this in mind next time.

What are the parts of scripture you turn to when you have to make a decision? Let them ring in your ears as you consider who and what to vote for.

Perhaps the greatest commandments, which we’ll be reading next week: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’” and ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matthew 22:37-39)

What decision puts God first?

What decision is most loving to my neighbor?

Or Micah 6:8: “what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?”

Where are justice and kindness and humility in these decisions?

Or when Jesus says in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

How does this decision support abundant life for everyone?

Or even Jesus’ words from today’s reading:

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,

and to God the things that are God’s.”

How does this decision honor the image of God in every person?

How does this decision recognize that everything was made by God and belongs to God?

It’s not simple to live for the Beloved Community in a world where it hasn’t become complete yet. We have difficult decisions to make.

Whatever you choose to do in the political sphere—vote, educate, protest, run for office, or any number of other actions—remember:

You are made in God’s image.

You live in a world that has God’s fingerprints all over it.

You share that world with billions of other people made in God’s image.

Honor that image of your Creator and entrust God with what is God’s.