Sunday Sermon - The Rev Joshua Daniel, PH D (May24, 2026)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam. Hallelujah. [00:00:51] Speaker B: The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John. Glory to you, Lord Christ. When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, peace be with you. After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. And then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord Jesus said to them again, peace be with you. And as the Father has sent me, so I send you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained the gospel of the Lord. [00:01:45] Speaker A: Praise to you, Lord Christ. Hallelujah. Children ages 3 through 10 are invited to follow the storyteller for a Bible story, prayers and music. They will return after the feast. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and redeemer. Amen. There is an old story of a campus ministry program in a large southern university. The college students were enthusiastic, showed up regularly when the minister would hold services. One day, when the minister was going on about his normal appeal, how the students needed to repent and turn to the Lord, a woman, young woman, raised her hand. Nothing unusual about this. The sermons were often interrupted by questions, especially from newcomers. She said, you said just now that the Lord wants us to repent and turn to the Lord. Yes, ma', am, that's quite right. That's exactly what Jesus teaches. Repent and turn. You mean after we ask for forgiveness, we have to agree not to do sinning anym? Precisely. He said, that's freedom in Jesus. Clearly not convinced. She said, I don't understand. The way I see it is that this, without the turn part, we've got a perfect relationship. You see, Jesus loves forgiving sins and I love doing the sinning. It's going to be one of those days, people, okay? So just take a big breath and relax. It's quite easy to fall into this view of religion and church. Implicit behind these words is what I call the competitive view of religious belief. There is the stuff we want, the stuff I want, and then there's the stuff of God. These two things are in terrible conflict with one another. Taking one means losing the other. But is that right? Today is Pentecost, the official birthday of the church. The day we mark the Holy Spirit's descent. Jesus breathing new life into his disciples. The day when the Spirit rested as divided tongues of fire on the people of God. When the church was sent out not to speak in the language and tongue of the community that raised them, but the communities that they were being sent to. And on a day such as this, I thought we might hover over this mission and ask the church today what exactly are we being sent out to do? In my view, when the Spirit rests on us, when we speak with tongues as of fire, that view of competition, competition between us and God, competition between me and other people, that sense of competition fades. The gift of the Spirit is to view God, to regard one another as people not fundamentally opposed. Look at the life of Jesus. Jesus is the incarnate Word. Not just proclaiming the love and mercy and forgiveness of God, but in him, that love and mercy and forgiveness is poured out like a cup overflowing. He did not just speak the word of God, he lived it. This love, we speak of it all the time. Look at it again closely. The love of God is uncreated. The love of God is uncreated. It has no beginning, no end. It flows from God eternally. When Jesus shares that love, he loses nothing. Think of examples of sharing. In my mind, when I think of sharing or the lack of sharing, I imagine children on the playground with a limited set of Popsicles. If a child sees another child with a Popsicle, they will ask for a Popsicle. Where did you get that? From home. Can I have one? In my mind, it's a scenario as the end of time. The child who's got the Popsicle looks down at said popsicle. Do I have enough for me? If I share this popsicle, will I get enough to have as much as I want and share for Jesus? The good news is that what we have to share, what the Spirit is in us calling us to say, our new language is that in God there are infinite popsicles. Imagine that child if there was a bottomless freezer right there with more popsicles than they could comprehend. What child would not share the love of God is just this. When Jesus shares it with us, Jesus loses nothing. Jesus dips his hand into the cup that is the infinite ocean of God's mercy and pours it out onto us when we share it. What do you call this? A message. Good news. A new language, a new way of living. When we share this way of seeing, this way of being in the world, we lose nothing. The mission of the church is not to conquer. We're not offering an extremely appealing ipo, an opportunity to get on the bottom floor. All those images fundamentally are rooted in the of competition in a world of scarce resources, where who you know how much was hoarded for, you will determine how far you get. What Jesus offers. There is no thread of manipulation, not one part per million of coercion. When what you're offering, when there is no limit, you need not shame or threaten. You can do as Jesus did, offer it with an open hand, sitting at a table, surrounded by the down and out, surrounded by the despised and misunderstood. To each of us, Jesus offers forgiveness. No matter how deeply we've messed up, no matter how callously we've treated others, there is a way back to our homeland, to our Creator. God sees all of us, all of you, all of me. And in that encounter, God speaks the words of uncreated love. You are beheld by God forever. Love and mercy, returning without end, age after age, until the end of time. That is our message. That is the new language that the spirit stirs inside of us, stirs in us, and sends us out to live and proclaim. The opposite of competition is the love of God. Can I end with a challenging word? Understandably, in our context, imagining us as warriors in this mission, a Salvation army has fallen out of vogue in our nation's history, in the history of Christianity, we have too often turned this message of love into figurative and literal acts of violence. Way back we did this in the Crusades. More recently, we've done it through a nationalistic policy of spreading our core convictions as a kind of colonialism, stripping others of their dignity, and forcing our cultural norms indiscriminately on others across the world. All of that is profoundly wrong. As I've hoped to say this morning, it spreads the message of Jesus in a way that fundamentally corrupts the most important and core aspect of the gospel. As a correction to this, we've mostly substituted language of election and choice. I'll let you decide. I'm not trying to win you over. I'm not trying to convert you. Just consider it. And all that is good. It reminds us that the mission of the church is not to coerce or manipulate, which is true. But what we lose in this is the sense of urgency that defined not just the early church, but also the conviction that Jesus himself spoke with. As a parent. These last few weeks have been difficult. There were two shootings very close to our schools, in places where many children walk past every day. As a family, we've had lots of conversations about violence in our neighborhood and about ways to stay safe and prayers for the child Brady, who was murdered, and for his family. It has also been an occasion for me to say to my children in a way that I confess to you that I don't do enough. The spirit of God, a fire of undivided tongues, burns inside of you. Your mother and I want nothing more than to keep you safe. But this fire inside of you, no one can touch that. No one can harm you in this way. For the greatest thing you have is beyond time, the love of God beating eternally inside you. What I say to you today, our church on its birthday, this love, Episcopalians, there is nothing greater. We need to share it urgently. In our world, in our neighborhood, that terrible sense of competition, of getting ahead, of protecting what we have by force, by violence, none of that makes any sense. In the kingdom of God, when every child knows truly deep in their soul, they are seen and loved by the creator of all, that is when that love pours out of us as a cup overflowing from the endless waters of God's mercy and compassion, then. Then we will speak this new language of God. Amen.