Author: John Langenstein

Sermon 03/30/2025 – An Icon of Sin

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

2 Corinthians 5:16-21

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we no longer know him in that way. 

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 

So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Sermon Text

 Last week we looked at the way that our images of Christ impact our Christian walk. If we engage with Christ as anything but who Christ truly is, the perfect incarnate Word of God, then we miss out on imitating that same God in our walk to perfection. There is another way in which Christ acts as an image, however, or more properly how Christ acted as an image. Christ, despite living without sin and living perfectly from eternity to eternity, became the perfect image of human sin, so that humanity might aspire to the perfection of his divinity.

That language is too technical though. We could dig into hamartiology (the study of Sin,) for years and not come any closer to the central and simple truth of what Christ was able to accomplish for us in his death. The work of the Cross, a perfect sacrifice offered once and for all, was the moment that redemption and resurrection became possible for humanity. Yet, what does it mean for Christ to have “become sin?” Furthermore, what about dying as this image of Sin was means that we are saved by Christ’s work in the first place?

The general way we talk about Christ’s saving work is with the moniker of “atonement theory.” We use this large net because it covers all the different ways that people talk about Christ’s work to save us. You see, when you have something as major as Christ’s death on the cross and subsequent resurrection, no one way of talking about it is enough. Most people have a singular explanation that they focus on when they talk about how Christ saved us but each has a little bit of the picture within their vision of Christ’s work. Imagine you have a bunch of clear projection papers, each with a few lines drawn on them. Each one you stack on top of the other will give you a little bit more of the picture, and all of them will complete the picture. In the same way, we talk about God by stacking images of God on top of each other until we can see who God is, and more often who God is not.

Christ’s becoming sin on our behalf is ultimately a completion of his work in the incarnation. By becoming human, Christ experienced everything we as humans experience: sickness, tiredness, temptation, hunger, thirst, pain, and even death. The only thing Christ never experienced was sin itself. In becoming fully human, Christ took on all of humanity. In going to the Cross, he took on the penalty for all of humanity’s sin, and in his death therefore removed the punishment from the rest of humanity. Though flesh may die still, the soul could be freed and the resurrection that Christ himself would take part in was promised to all others who had faith in that same resurrection.

The thing that most people disagree with is in what way Christ “became sin.” Some put forward that Jesus, like the scapegoat of ages past, literally became filled with the sins of all humanity as he hung on the cross. Therefore, all sin died with him on the cross. Catholic doctrine asserts that the agony he felt in Gethsemane came from him looking ahead and seeing all of human sin, and still choosing to take it upon himself. Others see it simply as Christ, though innocent, died for our sins and therefore “became sin,” in the sense of taking punishment on despite having none of the spiritual taint of Sin within him. The difference in those two ideas is subtle, but it does lead to some interesting nuance in how we talk about Christ’s death.

I remember when I was at a funeral once, there was a plant in the crowd. Very strange to orchestrate a funeral like that, but so it goes. The minister leading the service “noticed,” another minister in the crowd and asked him to pray to close out the service. “Lord Jesus, we thank you for your mercy and for you substitutionary death upon the cross…” He began. Substitutionary here means that Jesus died in our place, took on the punishment meant for us, and so satisfied God’s wrath in his death. This idea is reflected in Hebrews where it speaks of God seeing Christ’s righteousness and not our sin, when God looks upon us.

The problem with substitutionary language is that, while it is true Christ died in our place, if we leave it only at that – where do we stand now? Between the life material and the life eternal, there has to be something more to what Christ did for us. Did Jesus die to free us from the consequence of Sin, or did Christ die to fully reconcile us to God? If Christ is just a divine distraction from God’s wrath, then the crucifixion was a singular act with a singular outcome. That, to me, does not reflect the wider narrative of scripture in what Christ did for us.

Christ did indeed die and take on the full consequences of sin, but as our scripture says in dying he became “Sin,” not merely the consequences of that sin but the idea in itself. In dying, Christ destroyed Sin in its entirety, leaving a shell of what the evil had been before. As John Wesley put it, when Christ saves he does not save by “mere deliverance from Hell,” but by completely freeing us from the weight of Sin and from its hold in our life.

A fully regenerated Christian, washed in the water and the blood, filled with the Spirit, has nothing in them that means that must sin. Ignorance or thoughtlessness is the only cause that must necessarily result in sin in our life. All other sin is a consequence directly of our habits that engrain sin within us, our conscious choice to sin despite knowing better, or our brokenness misleading us into acting in sin rather than facing our trouble directly. We who are saved do not sin out of powerlessness, we sin because we have allowed sin to be our nature even though sin was destroyed once and for all on a hill far away.

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, he paints the image better than most. In the poem, after Satan decides to go to Eden and tempt Adam and Eve, he approaches the gates of Hell which are guarded by Sin and her horrible child Death. The gates of Hell are sealed, not from the outside, but the inside. Satan, Milton puts forward, chose his imprisonment, and in the same way we decide again and again to submit to sin rather than be free in Christ.

Christ lived a life of perfection, not only as a highlight of God’s goodness, but to demonstrate to us what was possible once we were freed from Sin. Christ was fully human, inclined to the same temptations and weaknesses we are, and yet Christ overcame sin in maintain his perfection of will as a human and as God. When Christ took on sin – literally or consequentially – he took on every aspect of it. He broke the chains that had held us forever in bondage, and offered us the key again and again through his grace. In descending to the dead, Christ suffered the fate of all who taste sin, proclaiming the Gospel even in the grave. In rising again, Christ was forever victorious over death – the ultimate consequence of sin.

The Gates of Hell were forever taken off their hinges. The vice grip that death had on humanity was shattered and the beast reduced to a whelpling. Satan was crushed and all his minions reduced to shades in a kingdom of shades. Christ, the Icon of Sin in death, is now the eternal emblem of God’s grace, power, and mercy – perfected humanity forever wed to the perfection of Godhead. All things began, and found their natural end and purpose through Christ’s journey to the cross and from the grave.

Whether we talk in terms of substitution or moral exemplars, in Christus Victor or ransom, Christ died for our sins. Christ in that death took on Sin in a substantial and real way. That taking on of our sin allowed for us to be freed from all of Sin’s power in our life. We can, in other words, be perfected, and Christ gladly will lead us toward that perfection if we willingly submit to the work Christ sets before us. Having been redeemed, justified, saved through Christ’s work on the cross – Christ now offers us the Spirit and the Church, and asks that we live so that we may know true abundance. Abundance of love, or mercy, of holiness… Life is born out of death, because Christ changed everything… Praise God, praise God, praise God! – Amen.

Sermon 03/23/2025 – Golden Calves, Bronze Serpents

/ John Langenstein / 1 Comment

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.

Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. Do not become idolaters as some of them did, as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.” We must not engage in sexual immorality, as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents. And do not complain, as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come. So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it

1 Kings 18:1-6

In the third year of King Hoshea son of Elah of Israel, Hezekiah son of King Ahaz of Judah began to reign. He was twenty-five years old when he began to reign; he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Abi daughter of Zechariah. He did what was right in the sight of the Lord, just as his ancestor David had done. He removed the high places, broke down the pillars, and cut down the sacred pole. He broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it; it was called Nehushtan. He relied on the Lord, the God of Israel, so that there was no one like him among all the kings of Judah after him or among those who were before him. For he held fast to the Lord; he did not depart from following him but kept the commandments that the Lord had commanded Moses.

Sermon Text

Growing up, in my home church, I was caught between two extremes. On one end was the hyper-contemporary services my family attended. They would always go to either the service that met in our church’s multi-purpose building or a local community gym. All around were normal fixtures of business – standard seating and bare walls, basketball hoops and industrial fans. In these places of baren utility, however, God’s spirit still found a way to people, and without the frills of anything “churchy.”

However, that was not where my heart rested. When I was old enough, I would go to a different service than my family. Even though the service was the latest in the morning, I didn’t go so I could sleep in. Instead, it was the content of the service that enticed me. Hymns, organ music, doxologies and unison prayers were shared week after week. I found that I was drawn to the more historic expressions of the faith. When I came to them, I found a deep well that I could pull from. It was no more legitimate than the services my family attended, but for me I couldn’t turn back once I found my niche. I was home, and throughout college and seminary, I found myself settle more and more into the trappings of traditional expressions of worship.

One of the most treasured aspects of the Church, throughout history, has been the art and iconography we use to express our faith. When we picture “Christ,” we usually have pictures in our head drawn from stained glass in churches we’ve sat in for years. When we picture “the Last Supper”, it is Da Vinci’s impractical table setting that jumps into our heads. More recently, “The Chosen,” and its depictions of Christ shape how people see Jesus and his works. The way that Christ and the various figures cast throughout scripture are depicted in popular culture, in art, and in our own spaces of worship and homes shapes our perspective a great deal.

However, there is a danger in representing God – mainly that by representing God we are suddenly opening ourselves to “mis-represent,” God. Removed from the context and intent of the author or artist, depictions of Christ with an intended message or symbolic purpose, simply become our de facto image of our savior. Films replace scripture in our recollection of Christ’s life, and bit by bit we are given a lesser version of the riches that are freely revealed through the real source of knowing Christ – the fellowship of believers, the sacraments, the study of Scripture, and the visitation of the Holy Spirit. These and other “means of Grace,” are where we truly meet Christ.

Let me take you back to my home church for a minute, where I first fell in love with God. Behind the altar, up at the back of the chancel, was a massive picture of Jesus. Christ appeared life sized, seemingly stepping out of the painting and into the sanctuary. It was a powerful image, and for many it defined the presence of Christ in the building. However, that painting was the thorn in the side of every minister I ever knew to stand in that pulpit. The picture, beautiful as it was, had become a focus of the people’s worship, and the second it became the focus of their adoration it became the most insidious thing an image can become. It had become an idol for the people of that church, a sacred thing that must never be touched.

Our scripture today, the Epistle reading firstly, tells us the cost of idolatry. I used to always find it strange that scripture lumped “idolatry,” in with a variety of other sins. In particular, Paul is focused upon sexual consequences for idolatry, interpreting the “play,” of the Israelites in carnal terms. I don’t know if I agree with Paul’s reading in this instance, but over time I have begun to understand his and scripture’s broader prohibition against idolatry – and more particularly of images in general. Idolatry leads to sin, not because the pieces of wood or canvas or metal that is being worshipped impacts the people, but because the lack of God’s real presence does.

For the Israelites wandering in the desert, they had just witnessed God’s amazing saving power. They had seen plagues afflict their oppressors, they had seen the Red Sea part, water came from dry stones and quail fed their appetites even beyond God’s provision of Mana. They were given every good gift, but they were still not sold on God. When Moses went up to the mountain to receive the Law, they began to worry that the Moses would never return. They feared they could not hear from the true God again, and so in desperation they cast an idol of that same God, an image of a bull cast in gold.

We know from archaeology that bull imagery was commonly associated with the God of Israel, indeed scripture confirms the same.[1] Yet, when Aaron held the calf aloft for the people to adore, he did not say, “Behold, this is a representation of the God who brought you out of Egypt.” He said, “These are the Gods that brought you out of Egypt.” The people immediately replaced the true God with a lesser facsimile. The true God thundered above them, ready to give them Teachings that would give them new Life, but instead they decided to embrace a lesser image of divinity – to doom themselves to a half-life lived in imitation of an imitation.

“But,” a concerned listener may say, “The images we use in Church and in our homes are different. We do not intend for them to be Gods in their own right, just reminders of Christ’s presence in our lives.” I hear your concern, and you are right to name it. I am not so iconoclastic as to oppose any image of God. John of Damascus argued that as Christ was the Icon of God’s invisible substance, so iconography provided us a window into Heavenly things. In my own house I have a pantocrator, a picture of Christ in triumph, to remind me that God prevails over all troubles. I have an icon of Mary and Jesus in my nursery, to remind me that Christ who once lived as a child, watches over my own child. Yet, I would destroy either image the second they became all consuming to me, the moment I saw God’s presence in them, the second I made them into idols.

Well intentioned images often are the first things to become idols. In the wilderness, God commanded Moses to break the law against graven images and create a bronze serpent. That serpent was lifted into the air, and whenever people were bitten by the “Nachashim Seraphim,”
“the flaming serpents” they would look on it and be cured. This serpent eventually found its way into the Temple, where it served as a reminder of God’s salvation… Until it became something else. People began to worship the serpent, offering it incense, transforming the emblem of salvation into a source of destruction.

The Church in my hometown, the one with that picture behind the altar, were forced each Sunday to imagine Christ within the confines of that image. They looked up at his blue eyes, his pale white face, his long brown hair, and they never could see from it anything but a savior that reflected back their own visions of respectability. The Christ that hung above the altar would not live on the streets as the real Christ did, his robe was too clean. The Christ that hung above the altar would not reach his hands to heal the sick, they were too properly manicured for that. The Christ that hung above the altar was not just a flawed representation of the Christ that hung on the Cross – they had nothing to do with one another.

The images we form of Christ are not just in paintings or in statues though, no they are in the stories we tell and in the testimonies we give. When we present Christ to the world, are we truly presenting the Christ of scripture? Or are we presenting a therapeutic presence, a God that makes us feel good and that makes death a little less scary? Do we see in Christ a figure that is great than ourselves, that calls us to be better tomorrow than we are today, or do we see a divine yes man that is constantly patting us on the back for all our good work? Are we willing to meet the real Christ, and not the sanitized image that we have enshrined in our hearts?

So what do we do now? Go home and burn all our paintings and crucifixes? Of course not! What good would that do? It would not change our hearts. No, instead today I call us all to search our hearts and see what idols we have put up. What half-baked images of Christ are we accepting rather than the one, true Christ who reigns now and forever? If that half-baked image has a physical form, by all means get rid of it, cast it far away from you. I would wager though that it probably isn’t on your wall, it is more likely in your heart, in your mind, in the capitulation to “the world as it is,” we are all prone to. We all have idols to smash, people of God, and we had best find them before they ruin us. – Amen.

[1] C.f. 1 Kings 12:28 with the Kuntilat Arjud Pithos depicting “’HWH and his Asherah.” Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ajrud.jpg

Sermon 03/16/2025 – Enemies of the Cross

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Philippians 3:17-4:1

Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.

But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

Sermon Text         

I’ve said it before, and I will say it many times more before I am done on this earth – Philippians is my favorite book in the New Testament, perhaps the entirety of scripture. This letter captures the final words Paul has for one of his beloved congregations, he speaks to them so earnestly and honestly that we see an image of the Apostle we don’t usually get access to. Paul is confident, but he is not unafraid. Paul is secure in his salvation, but he is not unaware of his own weakness. He is staring death in the face, and in the midst of the anxiety and uncertainty of his earthly life’s end, he writes one of the clearest and most beautiful expositions on faith ever put to paper.

Though there is some debate about the matter, I agree with older scholarship that places Paul’s writing of Philippians to his time in prison in Rome. Having appealed his case before Herod Agrippa, Paul had set up the series events that would lead to his execution. Agrippa was prepared to release Paul, but Paul saw an opportunity to share the gospel in Rome – the city he never made it to in his own wanderings – and even to speak to Caesar, or Caesar’s representatives at least, on matters of faith.  Paul had freedom from bondage, freedom from the chopping block, in his hands, and he gave it away willingly – just so God’s word might find a new audience.

In this place, where Paul has decided to imitate his savior through giving his life for others, Paul encourages the congregation of Phillipi to do the same. “Be imitators of me,” he says – not out of pride but out of the awareness that he has nothing left on earth but the work of Christ. He wants them to follow him, to take up their cross, and be willing to minister to the Gospel in ways that are unafraid of the consequences. When eternity is promised to you, death is a temporary setback rather than the end of all things.

Paul warns, however, of a group which he calls “enemies of the Cross of Christ.” We are not given specific identifiers for who this group is. Some point to the local pagan authorities in the area, others to rivals to Paul in Jewish society. Personally, however, I think the context suggests that Paul is worried about the congregation picking the wrong role models. When we are asked to “imitate,” Christ, we usually do so through the framework of people and teachers we know. We can only learn by example, and the most obvious example of Christian virtue will be found in the Christians in our own congregations – the ones who model what it is to be a faithful follower of Christ in thought, and word, and deed.

Yet, there are those in the Church, and often in leadership, who do not earnestly seek to imitate Christ. While all of us fall short, some have distorted their image of Christ into something primarily self-serving -something we’ll discuss in depth next week. These are the people of whom Paul says, “Their God is in their belly.” In other words, they worship the things they want to have and the acquisition of that thing rather than worshipping the God who brings both good gifts and adversity to those who follow the narrow road.

I think of those ministers who promise that God will bless you, if you only give a little more money. The minister who tells us that God agrees with what we think, and disagrees with all the people we also disagree with. “God loves who you love, God hates who you hate – how holy you are for being right!” Worse still are those who have made God into an economic system – pay in your devotion, your faith, your time – and receive a custom made blessing. The Gospel of prosperity, the Gospel that seeks to make the average churchgoer feel good at the expense of their own goodness – this is the worship of our appetites, of our belly, that will lead to our destruction. If we are to be imitators of Christ, we cannot lean on the teachings of subpar ministers and church-folk as the basis of our Christian walk.

I grew up in a ministry that was led by someone who I can confidently say was unfit for the role of minister – especially to a minister of young people. Vain, controlling, and singularly bent on manipulating people to support their every wish. In their mind, they spoke for God – and to contradict them was to contradict the Lord. I grew in holiness despite him, because I learned at some point that while he held some of the key doctrines of faith in his hand – he did not practice them. For that I had to look to others in the congregation.

I remember the sweet older women of Berkeley Springs, the kindly grandmothers and great grandmothers who had learned long ago that prayer really did change things. The 85 year old man who would climb up ladders to repair rooves – and only once broke every bone in his body by falling off one (he got better!) In particular, I remember one person in the congregation – she seemed spacey at times. She was quiet, often sitting silently in the back of a room. Yet, when she spoke – you listened – and the words she spoke were the words of Life.

True religion is not found in someone telling you everything is going to be ok. Nor is it found in someone congratulating you on already having all the answers, in being right before you even tried. True religion challenges us, and asks us to be better than our instincts. To give up the “fleshly,” part of ourselves, that God in our stomachs, and embrace what Christ wants us to know. When Paul introduces the idea that his disciples should imitate him, he says what is, to me, the most beautiful summary of Christianity there could be.

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”[1] Paul did not want his disciples to imitate him in that he was especially holy or perfect, but in that he had realized what Christianity was about. Not triumph, but sacrifice, not profit, but emptiness. To serve the Lord was to offer everything up on the altar, to accept losing in this world, for the glory of the World to Come. True compassion, true repentance, true transformation, requires the end of our ego and the beginning of us fully embracing Christ’s humility. “To die to self, and chiefly live, by [His] most Holy Word.”

Half measures are not enough. The triumphalist religion of the past hundred years is not enough. “When Christ calls [us,] he bids [us] come and die.”[2] To be an enemy of the Cross is to deny that the Cross is asked of us at all. Comfort is our destruction, the desire to avoid awkward conversations or dissenting stares is our end. Only in embracing Christ, the radical love and piety that comes from devotion to a World we don’t currently know – that is the only way forward. “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”[3] Have we even gone so far as to put our hand on the plow? Have we, really?

We are called to be imitators of Christ, and to do that well, we must find our role models among the holy – and not the marketable. It is not in pulpits flushed with the most money that God’s presence rest. Not in the Facebook Vloggers who make the most people angry in the name of so-called “religion.” Only in those who imitate Christ can we find our inspiration. The meek, the mild, the humble, and the servants – those who desire peace and challenge those who oppose it. People of God, you will be influenced by those you place in high esteem – make the right choice in who you follow. Let yourselves be led by those who resemble Christ, and not the powers that be – only then will you find the life that comes through suffering alongside Christ, and through the resurrection which is promised to all people who have faith. – Amen

[1] Philippians 3:10-11

[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “Costly Grace,” in The Cost of Discipleship

[3] Luke 9:62

Sermon 03/09/2025 – To Give Thanks

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

“When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time and say to him, ‘Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.’

When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’

You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.

Sermon Text

 “God is great, God is good, and we thank him for our food. By his hands we are fed, let us thank him for our bread.” This is one variant of a very common “grace,” prayer, offered before a meal. This is the standard way to pray over food in many cultures – before the meal we offer a short doxology praising God for the provision of the food, and asking God to bless our eating of it, and closing of course with a simple thanks. The offered praise, the gift of thanks given to the God who so rightly deserves it – the practice of prayer over a meal is something that is genuinely, simply, good for the soul.

The act of thanksgiving is not reserved for prayer, however, nor is the prayer only meant to be for the present goodness before us. When we gather together as the Church, like we did last week, and participate in the “Great Thanksgiving,” that is the Eucharist, we are not just thanking God for God’s present presence among us, but for all the good that God has done. Through birth, through life, through death, and in resurrection we proclaim a gospel that follows us from glory into glory and that testifies to the work that God has done, is doing, and will do in the future. Thanksgiving is not just a reaction to the present circumstances we find ourselves in, but a recollection of what God has done for us up to this point.

The re-hearsal of God’s goodness make us more aware of God’s current work around us. If we look to the patterns of scripture and of our own life, then we are able to see where God might be working now. The idea that, “God works in mysterious ways,” is often used to give words to the inexplicable aspects of God’s work in our lives, but I think we default to it too often. If we learn more, if we begin to acknowledge patterns of God’s work in the world and in our life, to become familiar with that divine rhythm, then we lose the security that not knowing can give us. If we are ignorant, perhaps we can be excused for missing out on God’s work – if we know better… Then we are much more responsible for our own actions.

Our scripture today captures a ritual in the life of the people of God. A commandment was given that, when they had made it through the wilderness, once Egypt was behind them they were to give thanks every harvest in a particular way. The first fruits of the harvest were to be given to the priests, and the person who gave them was asked to proclaim the faith they held in a very specific way. They were asked to recall the salvation history of God’s people, from Abraham to their present day, they were meant to tell a story as they gave thanks through the gift of their first fruits.

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” is a reference to every generation of the patriarchs. While Abraham in his flight from Chaldea represented the first migration of the people who would become the Israelites, it was not the last. Abraham fled to Egypt, and then returned to Canaan. Isaac fled Canaan into Ammon, and then returned. Jospeh was taken into Egypt by force, and then his family followed by choice. The people of God were migratory, but more than that they were “migrants,” moving from one nation to another to escape plague, or violence, or danger. A reality reflected in the life of Christ when his family fled Herod by escaping into Egypt. The history of God’s people, was the history of vulnerable, transitory people.

In Egypt God’s people grew, and through the fear and bigotry of Egypt they were put to hard labor and culled through infanticide. Following years of abuse, God freed them and led them through the wilderness. When they arrived in their new home, the home of their ancestors Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, they were finally given peace. In that peace, for generations to come, they were asked to offer the first fruits, to share them and to celebrate, and to tell once again the story of their salvation.

For ourselves, many of us do not have the exact story of descent or family legacy to bring us to our present place. However, we have a spiritual story to tell. When we come together, when we offer up our time or our money or our resources to God, we ought to tie it to the story of how we got to be here. When I lead worship, I separate out the prayer of thanksgiving from the offering – because I find it vulgar to only thank God in the context of having money in a plate. We offer the gifts we give, because we have a story to tell, and the story we have to tell we tell in thanksgiving. We take time every Sunday to offer our joys, and then to praise God for them, because that is the essence of thanksgiving, not the material gift itself – though it is important and though it does follow.

If I were to adapt the creed our scripture gives us today, my own salvation history would go like this: “I was born into a family without faith, a wanderer in the world. Through accidents of life, and through marriage of my father, I found my way to the people called Methodists. From the mouth of a minister, who would later be found wanting, God’s word broke through and brought life to my barren world. Through a thousand more chance meetings, with righteous and unrighteous, with the holy and the vulgar, God called me to take up the yoke of ordination and serve God’s people with word and table. So now I offer myself to you, Father Almighty, and give you thanks and praise.”

We all have a story to tell, a testimony to give. For all of us, for too long we have let our beliefs be only centered on whether we hold something to be true or not. We are not invested in the story that God has told for us, and with us. The creed of God’s people is not meant to be a list of ideas, but a story we tell proudly. Tell you story, give praise to God, and let thanksgiving rule your heart and mind. – Amen.

Sermon 03/02/2025 – Behold the Lord!

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Exodus 34:29-35

Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses spoke with them. Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he gave them in commandment all that the Lord had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face, but whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he would take the veil off until he came out, and when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, the Israelites would see the face of Moses, that the skin of his face was shining, and Moses would put the veil on his face again until he went in to speak with him.

Luke 9:28-36

Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking about his exodus, which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep, but as they awoke they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us set up three tents: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah,” not realizing what he was saying. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.

Sermon Text

Transformation! To go from one thing to another. This is what we are pursuing as people of faith. We believe that God became human, that that God-man walked this earth to teach us the way we should walk, and then faced death and triumphed in resurrection so that we all might likewise be raised into glory and new life. We proclaim a gospel that is centered in God’s transformative power, but to be transformed we must do something – we must look upon the Lord, and find that the Lord looks back at us.

Each year the church takes a moment, before the austerity of Lent, to look up to God’s revelation of Jesus’s true glory on a mountain long ago. The human Christ was for a moment fully glorified as only his later resurrection would make possible, in the presence of his Father he was made into what he was always meant to be. The perfect human, the fullness of the Word of God’s divinity, the perfection of the body through the power of God’s Spirit and the will of the Divine Father. From glory into glory, Christ stood on that mountain as a testament to what God could do and would do with all flesh in the World to Come.

For the disciples who stood on that mountain, the scene was enough to inspire them to wish to build tabernacles to house the glorious visions in front of them. Yet, another person had seen the glory of God before they had. Moses, one of the three figures present on the mountain, would climb the mountain and receive God’s teachings to bring back to God’s people. That visitation did not just change Moses in his mind, but in his body as well. The flesh of his face, the uncovered portion of himself as he sat with God, had been transformed. Though it was a fleeting transformation, reverting to its normal matter within a few days, it was something that people made note of. More than that, they were afraid of it. To enter into God’s presence was to be changed, and that transformation was something the people were not ready for.

In our modern day life, I think we too are afraid of looking at God and being transformed. God offers transformation to anyone who would seek it, but so often we settle for things as they are. When the people of Israel escaped Egypt, they were barely out into the wilderness before they started wishing to go back into slavery. Why? Not because it was better – but because it was what they were used to. We would gladly take painful normalcy of liberating change. It’s true of institutions as well as people. The idea of change is so intolerable, that we will often never make a change until the pain of staying as we are consumes us.

We are not making nearly as large a journey physically – rarely does God’s call in most people’s life send them far from their home – yet we are often just as fearful of making a change. We know who we are now, we have created bounds to our individual selves and established just the right amount of walls around ourselves to make us feel comfortable. When God comes knocking at the door, asking us to open it so that God may enter in – we know that a renovation will follow that entry. When God enters the space, and when God starts making changes, then suddenly we lose our sense of self-ownership, we let ourselves be reshaped into something different – and even if that different self is better… Do we really want to find ourselves changed?

Moses would climb the mountain, but there’s always an implication that he wanted something else in his own life. When he brings the Word of God to the people, he describes it as being, “close to them,” as if him going up the mountain wasn’t necessary.[1] Had the people been truly looking for God, they might have found him, but instead they sent Moses, “to Heaven, that [he] might bring it down for them.” The journey was reluctant, it seems, on Moses part, but the results were obvious and beatific.

Coming off the mountain, from meeting Christ face to face, he could not help but be transformed. His face shone out with rays of light, a reflection of the glory he had been present with up on Sinai’s heights. The transformation was temporary, he needed to return to the mountaintop for it to return to his face, but this outward sign reflected an inward change as well. Every meeting with God shaped Moses to be more like the God he was beholding, and to behold the Lord is to take part in our life’s truest purpose – to know, and to be transformed by, our God.

How do we behold God? Where can we find God in our daily lives? As Moses said long ago,  “[The word of God,] is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.” The scriptures are before us, this table is set so that we may encounter Christ in the moment of his sacrifice on our behalf, and the Spirit rests in your heart to guide you day after day. We can behold God, we can behold our Lord, and we can walk away from seeing God, transformed fully by the experience. We cannot cover our faces to hide from God’s light, we cannot suppress that light by locking away in a place of worship. It must be allowed to shine fully, as it did at the Mount of Transfiguration and at Sinai, that all the world may be changed by it.

Firstly, it must change us, and firstly we must allow ourselves to see God, and to have God see us. The wonders that follow, the change we allow to happen in our hearts, that is all a consequence of that first step. Look upon God, be transformed, may it be so. – Amen.

[1] Deuteronomy 30

Sermon 02/16/2025 – The Source of Life and Trouble

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Jeremiah 17:5-10

Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.

Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.

The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse— who can understand it? I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.

Sermon Text

One of the first questions I was ever asked as a religious authority in someone’s life was about the human heart. Not the organ, the metaphysical concept. A cousin of mine was recently getting into their faith and so they would shoot me questions about different verses and ideas in Christianity. I only remember one of those questions though, and it was on a day I was doing yard work at the house I grew up in that they sent it. “How can it be that Proverbs calls the Heart the ‘wellspring of life,” but Jeremiah says it is, ‘devious above all else.’”[1] It’s a question that stuck with me for a few reasons.

Firstly, the one thing we all cannot escape is our own heart. That thing deep within ourselves, the seat not only of emotion but every affectation of the body. No matter what we do, body, mind, or soul – there will always be the center point of all of them, the heart that translates the ephemeral into the physical – broad concepts of emotion into physical sensation and action. Secondly, these two verses reveal something fundamental about scripture we all forget sometimes – it is meant to be read in conversation with itself. Proverbs is right to say that the wellspring of life is in the Heart and Jeremiah is right to call it deceitful about all else, but you can only know why if you’re willing to read both and see what they are saying when they say what they say.

Today we are practicing our exegetical skills, looking at two verses of scripture and understanding what lesson we can take away from them. Today we see what good gift God has given us in the form of our Heart, and how dangerous it can become if we do not take proper care of it.

Jeremiah wrote in a time of great moral degradation. Sounds sensationalist, but he was writing in hard times where everyone seemed to make the wrong choice in responding to that hardship. As the full text of Jeremiah 17 shows, the rich among God’s people had become greedy. Not content with their wealth, they exploited their workers and their neighbors, depriving them of the food and money they needed to survive. The conditions were so bad that the poor also began to become corrupt, stealing from one another rather than working together to oppose the rich or to care for each other. Jeremiah elsewhere says that walking from one end of the city to the other, he could not find one righteous person among the rich, the poor, or the palace.[2]

Jeremiah is often called the weeping prophet, not just because of his sorrow at God’s judgment of his people, but the constant disappointment his people were to him. He would frequently tell God, “Lord, have mercy, surely the people aren’t that bad?!” And then immediately have his own people turn on him and reveal the truly broken nature of their Heart. How horrible a burden it must be, to proclaim the truth and the need for a better tomorrow, only to find that the people you defend are willing to throw you away.

Jeremiah looked out at the broken world around him and called for the people to realize that they were so far gone that unless they changed their ways, abandoning everything about themselves to follow God once again… they were lost completely. The rich who stole from the poor, the poor that abused one another, all of them needed to do away with the old self and embrace the new. The Heart, the confluence of all their constituent parts was no longer helping them, only hurting them, they needed to go beyond any thought or feeling to the reality of their brokenness.

Looking to Proverbs, the full context of the verse which calls the Heart the “springs of life,” is a teacher telling their student to remember the lessons they have been taught. “The wicked,” are prone to evil and become so consumed with it that they only seem to do what hurts other people. “They cannot sleep,” the teacher says, unless they do what is wrong. The student, however, will keep the lessons of their teacher close, will keep their eyes straight ahead toward the right, and in so doing keep their heart from becoming corrupted – from becoming the source of wrongdoing in the world that “the wicked,” represent.

Both passages, it seems, have very similar messages if we are willing to understand their fuller context. Jeremiah is not calling for us to distrust ourselves out of principle, but to acknowledge how easily we give in to the negative aspects of our humanity, and how hard it is to dig ourselves out of it. As God says later in Jeremiah 17, the people of God did not need to have deceitful Hearts, they did not need to cause one another pain, they could change at any time – but they had to admit that someone other than themselves might know something about what is right in the world.

The Church is meant to be a source of correction in the world. Not judgment, not prideful looks down our nose at the world, but a legitimate place where people can find God’s teachings lived out to the fullest. We have in our hands the teachings of two thousand years of people who have understood what holiness can be. What it is to love our neighbor, to care for the members of our church and our community. When we open up our mind, our soul, our entire being to God’s teachings and God’s ways, then we become a place where life is made available to all – a wellspring spilling out from us and filling the world around us.

The Church has to be different for this to be possible. We cannot follow every little inclination of our heart – cannot strike out in anger or dig too deep into despair, we cannot take something just because we want it or deprive other’s what they need just because it would be inconvenient to give it. Likewise, we must fight against these evils in the world. Not through the same tools as everyone else, but through a commitment to righteousness that calls for people to change their ways for their own good, and the good of the whole world.

Scripture is a broad and far reaching source of God’s instruction. Written across fourteen hundred years, it tells the story of God’s commitment to redeem the world. Reading scripture in its context and in conversation, we find deeper truths about the world than we would ever know otherwise. From the cynical Jeremiah, to the guarded writer of Proverbs, today we see that the Heart is truly an amazing – and dangerous – thing. If we embrace the goodness it offers, we can change this world… If only we can safeguard this amazing gift God has given us.

So, I leave you with these word’s from Proverbs, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you. Let your eyes look directly forward and your gaze be straight before you. Keep straight the path of your feet, and all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil.”[3]

And these from Jeremiah, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse— who can understand it? I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings. Like the partridge hatching what it did not lay, so are all who amass wealth unjustly; in midlife it will leave them, and at their end they will prove to be fools.

O glorious throne, exalted from the beginning, shrine of our sanctuary! O hope of Israel! O Lord! All who forsake you shall be put to shame; those who turn away from you shall be recorded in the underworld, for they have forsaken the fountain of living water, the Lord.

Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved, for you are my praise.”[4]

[1] C.f. Proverbs 4

[2] Jeremiah 5

[3] Proverbs 4:23-27

[4] Jeremiah 17:9-14

Sermon 02/09/2025 – Ensnare One Another

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Gospel Lesson                                                            Luke 5:1-11

Once while Jesus was standing beside the Lake of Gennesaret and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gotten out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to burst. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.

But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’s knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were astounded at the catch of fish that they had taken, and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

Sermon Text

What is it that lets people really meet Jesus? Its such a simple question, but I think it is one we struggle to answer. The communities that we serve are all around us – there are people who know about Jesus everywhere, maybe even people who once knew Jesus well – but I think we are all very aware that when it comes to an active and involved relationship with Jesus, people are really lacking a true connection with Christ. We live in a part of the world where most everyone will tell you they’re “Christian,” but few people actually could tell you what that faith actually does for them. Maybe it makes them feel a bit better about the world around them, but does it change the world around them? I’m not so sure.

I think that one of the largest problems is that, in the atmosphere of nominal Christianity, the Church took the perspective that it was inevitable. “Everyone goes to a church, if not now they will when they settle down and start a family, they’ll find their way eventually!” And yet, that just is not the case anymore. Even people who say they are Christian just do not see Church as something essential to their faith, they have no interest in joining a congregation, in finding a community, in taking on the mutual responsibility that comes with a community of faith, in knowing Jesus Christ through the body of Christ that is the Church.

The reason, people of God, is not a fault in the world around us. We are always ready to point the finger at young people or at a secular society or at any number of other external factors, but we have to make something clear. Christ never tells the disciples, “The workers are many but the harvest is really too difficult to take care of, so don’t feel too bad if things aren’t working out.” No, Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.”[1] The Church is responsible for its own vitality and its own willingness to follow Christ and serve the world.

In our scripture today we see Jesus calling some of his first disciples. The disciples were out fishing, they had caught nothing all night, and Jesus told them that if they went out now, they would find their nets full. The disciples doubted, but the second that the net touched the water it began to fill, and fill, and fill. It was a miracle! But it also should no surprise anyone who knows what God typically is up to. There is a pattern we are given in Simon’s willingness to listen to Jesus, and if we follow that model we are going to see miracles in our own life.

Jesus came out and was preaching, and the people wanted to hear what Jesus had to offer. The crowd was pushing too much though, and Jesus needed a place he could stand where everyone could see him and where he could stand without being swarmed. Simon listened and gave him his boat as a pulpit. It was after this that Jesus sends him out to the waters to catch more fish, and after that that he tells Peter his job will be to catch people from now on.

The issue that initiates this episode is that people want to see Jesus. People still want to see Jesus, believe it or not. Christ is the center of everything – the source of all creation and the end to which every piece of creation aspires to. People want to hear Jesus, to know Jesus, to feel the redemption and the revivification that comes from Jesus. The Church needs to be a place that people can heart Jesus. More than that, we need to be a people that are willing to put up our anchor and move to make Jesus easier for people to hear.

We have wonderful outreach programs in this church, but everything we do is still attractional. We want people to come to us, but they’re not looking for us – they’re looking for Jesus! Simon Peter saw that people were looking for Jesus and gave his boat, he moved away from the work he was busy with, to meet the needs of what Jesus wanted to do to reach the people. What are we doing to break away from this building? Have we really chased any of the inroads we have into the community? We’ve got so many people around us that are never going to come into this building, so what are we doing to go out to them?

The vision of what can happen when we take the step away from our usual busywork is found in Jesus’s miracle in those fishing nets. So many people flood the nets that there isn’t enough room in one boat to fill them, multiple boats are needed to hold them. A ministry that goes out into the world, you see, may not bring people into a relationship with the congregation that first reaches out to them, but a good ministry will make people seek Jesus wherever they can get him, and a good ministry is humble enough to acknowledge that may be a congregation other than the one we ourselves come from. What matters, is not that the boat that cast the net receives the catch, it matter that the catch is caught at all.

Now, some people may rightly say to me, “Pastor John, I love our church, but you’re putting a lot of emphasis on the Church here. Faith in Christ is all that is sufficient for salvation, so why the emphasis on bringing people into a church community?” Thank you, theoretical worried congregation member. You’re right that faith is, “the one thing needful,” and you’re right! Membership and participation in a Church do not immediately equal a vibrant and engaged Christian life… However, I have seldom met someone who is thriving in their faith and does not have a faith community to support them.

We’re an individualistic society. We do not want anyone telling us what to do. We do not want to share our things with other people unless we have a good reasons. We’re content to build a bubble all around us and only ever work with the people we want to in the ways we want to when we want to. That is not, however, the society that Jesus is calling us to be a part of. When Jesus opens the door for us and invites us to participate in the Kingdom of Heaven, it is not something we do on our own terms or on our own time. When Jesus comes to the lakeshore, we have a boat to offer and we either let Jesus get in or we don’t.

A Church that follows Jesus is not worried about attendance on Sundays, but on a community of people who are connected and supporting each other. A community that reaches out to each other to make sure everyone has what they need, that they’re living the life Christ called them to live – not only in terms of holiness and service to one another – but in terms of Joy. A vibrant church is able to hold each other as we cry and lift each other up as we celebrate. When I say that people need the Church, I am also saying that the Church needs to act like the Church – not just on Sundays and especially not just in this room.

Christ calls us to be “fishers of men,” “catchers of people.” The word used here can also mean “ensnare,” and I think I like that word better. I like it because, if we are really showing people what Jesus is doing, what a Church that is living out the life Jesus called them to is doing, then they should not be able to get us out of their head. We should be a community everyone wants to be a part of, pushing against the lakeshore to see more of what they can see of Jesus through us. Whether that be on a Sunday morning, a Saturday evening, or at some other hereto unplanned congregational activity does not matter. However, we need to be people who are willing to show the world Jesus, and trust that Jesus is enough.

We need to plan for a church that goes beyond these walls more and more, and we need to be serious about sharing the hope we have. People want Jesus, why do we keep holding him in this room where no one can see him? We need to push our boat from the shore, and we need to see what happens when we let people see what God can really do. – Amen

[1] Matthew 9:37

Sermon 02/02/2025 – A Light to the World

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Gospel Lesson                                                                Luke 2:22-40

When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord”), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.”

Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying,

“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

And the child’s father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”

There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. At that moment she came and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him.

Sermon Text

The world needs light. The world needs hope. The world needs something to testify to the fact that there is more than sadness at the end of the long road of life. Amidst hardships, amidst struggle, amidst the endless complications we face – there must be something that can give direction to the scattered particles of life. To paraphrase a favorite song of mine, “this page of strange gibberish [must] find a final punctuation mark.”[1]

Trouble is not unique to any age or any people, but shared across time and space. While we have been born into one of the most prosperous eras of history, at least relative to all other times, we are still faced with trouble. There’s the sorts of trouble that are seemingly universal and ever evolving: the increasing cost of living that shows no sign of slowing will continue to put pressure on each and every one of us, the weather will be increasingly unpredictable, global tensions show no sign of simplifying in our lifetime. Then there is the sort of trouble that never changes, but always takes on new forms for the people who face it – the threat of hunger and disease, the specter of conflict, and the very real and existential threats to life that come as a consequence of simply living.

The broken world in which we live, further orchestrated to be crueler by human sin, is the same world Christ was born into – simply in a different era of living out its troubles. Christ, who was born fully into humanity was also born fully into creation – a universe that is always changing, but essentially constant. The Hope of Christ is therefore unchanging, available to everyone in all ages equally – something that was clear to those with eyes to see from the moment he entered the world.

In our scripture today, Jesus is taken to the Temple by Mary and Joseph. Mary is going to pay the price given in the Torah that a woman must pay after giving birth, Joseph is going to pay the five shekels (as best I can calculate, equivalent to half of a day’s wages for a carpenter,) required of a first-born son.[2] The two are going to do “everything required by the law of the Lord,” showing their obedience to God. However, they are gifted something far greater than the trifling amount of money they paid. They receive Hope in the form of two prophecies, given by two lay people in the Temple.

One of the things left out of the story is who was holding Baby Jesus in the midst of these prophecies. Women could not enter the inner court where Joseph would pay the redemption price, and likewise Joseph would not be likely to linger in the Court of Women. I believe that the first encounter with Simeon the two parents were together and the second encounter with Anna, Mary was alone. What does this matter to the story? Very little ultimately, but as we shall see, Anna’s words are not recorded while Simeon’s are. I believe whatever praise of God which Anna gave was something private, secret to her and Mary, something that was shared between two women in the outer courts of the Temple long ago.

The one prayer we do hear is from the mouth of Simeon, a prophet not by birth but by the gift of God’s Spirit. He knew that he would live long enough to see God deliver the world from its present troubles, but he did not know what that deliverance would look like. I’m sure he pictured God redeeming Israel the way many others did at the time. A king would appear and destroy their enemies, the nation as a political entity would be revived, a new era would break out of greatness among God’s people. Whatever his vision was, in the reality of the infant Christ he saw something grander. Taking the infant in his arms, snatching him from his parents, the Spirit showed him just what Christ was going to do.

Firstly, he gave peace to the old man – he could now after years spent worshipping God in the Temple. Secondly, the salvation which Jesus was to bring into the world was going to go far beyond God’s people in Judah. Jesus was a light to the nations, a hope for all people, and though he was “prepared,” in Judah, he was meant for the whole world. Salvation, complete and total redemption of creation, would be a light of redemption to the world, it would show God’s presence to the people of Judah, this child would change everything.

With what I have to imagine was a heavy heart, Simeon also saw the hardships the child was to face. Disease, death, poverty – common troubles faced by all people – yet still greater hardships than anyone could imagine. Death on a cross, a redemptive sacrifice that was necessary for life to conquer darkness. The child he now held in his arms, would face the most incredible pain… In giving the child back to his mother, his words must have been frightening, “a sword will pierce your soul too…” Mary would know loss that no one should have to face, the loss of a child and the constant burden of the falsehoods spoken about him.

This child, our savior, is a hope we still bring into the world. If we are willing to make Christ’s presence among us known, we have to do as Simeon did and see Christ as Christ truly is. The sight of Christ made Simeon see a salvation beyond himself, a salvation that went beyond Israel to all nations. The sight of Christ made Simeon see a suffering messiah rather than a triumphant King. Simeon met Christ and changed his view of God, and in seeing God as God truly was, found hope.

We cannot replace Christ’s image with false images of our savior. We cannot diminish the universal nature of Christ’s offer of salvation, creating any distinction that would force us to separate ourselves from the essential truth revealed in Paul’s writings, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”[3] We build up walls to separate ourselves, portioning salvation and pouring it as we see fit. Christ has called for something far greater – for grace to be poured out again and again, on all people, as many as would receive it.

The table that is set before us is clothed simply, but the moment we join together in Holy Communion, it will be the most important piece of furniture in this room. On it, bread and juice will become the Body and Blood of Christ. We who take it will receive grace to empower us, encounter our God directly. We like Simeon will take Christ into our arms, in passing the peace of Christ to one another we will look the image of God in the face again and again… Will we allow ourselves to be changed by that? To offer hope to the world after having received it ourselves? That is the choice we must make today. Christ is among us, let us act and proclaim as if we believe that to be true. – Amen.

[1] “Let’s Get this Over With” track 1 on They Might Be Giants, I Like Fun, Idlewild, 2018.

[2] There’s several problems with my calculation. Firstly, I’m using the Tyrian shekel as my basis which may or may not be the same measurement. Secondly, I’m using the average weight of a silver denarii to compare to a shekel. Thirdly, I’m using the income of a carpenter taken from the Edict of Diocletian to determine the daily salary of someone like Joseph. Joseph was probably paid by job, and so probably made much less than this. This approximation of income is, therefore, a conjecture that tries to tie the ancient numbers and measurements to modern concepts – like spending half a day’s pay.

[3] Galatians 3: 27-28

Sermon 01/19/2025 – Endocrine Dreams

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Because of continued cold weather, this is actually the lection for next Sunday 01/26/2025, but for various reasons it needed to be moved to today.

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect, whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work powerful deeds? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

Sermon Text

            There are a lot of different kinds of people in the world. Given the size of the globe, I don’t think we can be overly surprised about that. People speak different languages, come from different parts of the world, and practice cultures that are sometimes strikingly different from one another. Even in a single country, there are huge differences in the way people speak in one place as opposed to another – how they celebrate holidays and mark the year. Here in West (by God,) Virginia, we have plenty of our own practices that separate us from the rest of the United States.

            Our reverence for the Pepperoni Roll stands out, of course, but it is more than just the way we stuff bread. West Virginia has more folk tales than most places. I don’t just mean the famous cryptids the world has recently fallen in love with – Moth Man and the Flatwoods Monster and the like – I mean family Lore that is passed down generation to generation. Prayer practices that are passed down in families by a strict order of succession alongside tales that remind us there is still mystery in this world. My Great Uncle, I know, saw a black panther on the hills around his farm. Personal stories, recipes, traditions, all these things make this patch of land, just a little different from other parts of the United States.

            Even within the culture of our state, there are demarcations. You have people who move in, bringing their own traditions that mix and match and contrast with our own. You have people who left for a while and then came back, likewise syncretizing their experiences into a gestalt that shifts the larger culture, enforces it, and challenges it. People of different races and incomes and experiences come together and are not subsumed into one another, but instead form a contrast with one another that brings about something even more beautiful. In the presence of difference, the virtues of each person and way of life shine.

For Paul, a Roman citizen, a Greek Speaking Jew, and now Apostle of the Risen Lord Jesus Christ, he sat upon the borderline of many different traditions and cultures. His parents wanted him to embrace his Jewishness, so they sent him off to Jerusalem where he changed his name to Saul and became a zealous defender of Judean faith practices. His parents had, however, understood the best way to protect their family was to become Roman Citizens, a practice that gave them privileges their neighbors would not have. Jesus, of course, changed everything. Paul was poised to persecute the Church, but Jesus called him to embrace his roots – to reclaim his Hellenist background – and to become an apostle to the Gentiles, bringing still more diversity into the body of Christ. Paul stood at the center of many cultures, and to many cultures he was sent.

Today, the Church does not reflect much diversity at all. While globally we can say people of all nations, languages, and cultures are in the Body of Christ, the local level just does not reflect that. The most segregated this country is in the modern era is on Sunday mornings – when black folk go to black churches and white folks to white church, Thai Baptists go to Thai Baptist Churches and the Orthodox Church separates out into dozens of ethno-religious offshoots. Sunday morning the body of Christ self-segregates and it shows something awful about us.

Likewise, we are separated by our politics and by our status. Most churches will have memberships of relatively similar incomes – maybe a few people with much more or much less – but almost always the church finds a median income and that is where most people will find themselves. The Church in particular is meant to be a shelter for those who society rejects – and few people are rejected like the poor – and yet few churches make room for poverty in their membership. The argument was not uncommon until recently, “who needs those people… Not like they can tithe.”

Paul’s vision of the Church has broken apart, and it is not entirely our fault. We are the inheritors of decisions made hundreds of years ago in some cases. However, we are responsible for the path we chart ahead of us. How do we embrace a future that is more expansive of the entire body of Christ? How is it that we go against the river of history rushing behind us and telling people they must find a path separate from one another? Where in a rapidly advancing culture of the individual, do we find an answer to all this mess? The answer, I believe, is in the humble thyroid.

Yes, the thyroid, but more especially the endocrine system on a large level. You see, of all the body parts there are, none are more integral than these glands placed throughout the body. They regulate our appetite, our weight, our development in our childhood, and most every other aspect of daily life. Yet, at the same time, these body parts are something you don’t usually think about. Not unless something goes horrible wrong with one of them. Unlike the eyes and the ears and the mouth, body parts we see everyday and esteem as important, these are silent participants in our wellbeing – they are rarely seen and yet always needed.

There has been a trend in all the history of the Church for people to find positions that guarantee they will be seen in what they do. People will proudly point to what they paid out of pocket for in a sanctuary. Windows and altar settings, furniture and classrooms. They will speak of how under their leadership so many people found their way into the Kingdom of Heaven, how such work was possible because they achieved it. They will speak to the wonders of their people and the work that they did, of the continued excellence of their tradition and of their lineage. And the narrative becomes so grand, that you would think they were the ones who saved our souls.

Among the many different problems in the Church is the tendency to seek to be better than other people. We are not concerned with simply doing what we do as well as we can, we want to win. Therefore, denominations have pushed out people they do not see as worthy of their work. The poor are not given privilege, and so do not feel at home in our sanctuaries. Racial minorities feel that they are regarded as different, and so self-segregate where they can feel like they belong. We fund the ministries we have taken part in and that we like best, but refuse to acknowledge the good work others do. We cut and cut at the body of Christ, until only the parts that look and sound and act like us remain.

Imagine if the human body tried to exist that way. Imagine if the noble pancreas dreamed of a day it was supreme. It removed itself from the eyes, the ears, the spleen, and the intestines. It moved from the constraints of the human stomach and went on to exist on its own… It would perish in a second. No blood to feed it, not eyes to guide it to the sugars it needs to have purpose and feed its work… It would fade away in an instant. Yet, in the midst of its final Endocrine Dreams, I’m sure it would think to itself, “How dare all those other body parts do this to me…”

Bizarre metaphors aside, I want us to do what Paul asks of the Corinthians here. Rather than being obsessed with getting things done our way, rather than privileging our own culture and traditions above those of others, let us resolve to do what we do well, the best we can do it. We’re a church that has many gifted people in it. Lean into that gift and do it to the best of your ability. Still though, there is a more excellent way for us all that we all can enjoy. It shouldn’t surprise you to know, 1 Corinthians 12 leads us into 1 Corinthians 13. The way we all must grow and the thing we all must perfect is and always will be love – the fruits of the Spirit living themselves out in our care for one another. If we perfect love, if we accept difference as strength and lean into our gifts together – then we will truly be the Body of Christ, redeemed by his blood. – Amen.

Sermon 12/12/2025 – All that God Requires

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Gospel Lesson                                                            Matthew 3:13-17

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Sermon Text

Today we gather together to celebrate Christ’s Baptism in the River Jordan. Though we sometimes replace this celebration with an observance of Epiphany, remembering the visitation of the Magi, it is always important to take time to remember that Christ was Baptized. Why is it important? Well, we have to look at the text itself to find out.

As John the Baptist says, it is a strange scenario to see Jesus be baptized. Jesus, who is God, did not cease to be God in his incarnation – just to be fully human alongside his divinity. Yet, in Baptism Jesus receives the Holy Spirit from the Father. The Trinity is always acting in concert with each other, never making decisions without the participation and input of the other members of the union, so this has to be an intentional act. When Jesus comes and is washed, we have to see that Jesus was doing something important. The Spirit gives its power to the God-man, and that Father affirms he is blessed… But why?

Was it just an act? I do not believe so. God is not a showman, although Jesus is a powerful presence wherever he speaks. His power is not in being entertaining or in orchestrating a good scene, it is in his authentic authority. Jesus speaks and you know that Jesus is being true to himself, and therefore showing us the truth of who God is and how God is. To come here and receive baptism, Jesus is doing something that is truly and authentically good, as Jesus says here to John, “it is proper not to fulfill all righteousness.” Jesus is doing something for the good of us in being baptized, and the specific good that this achieves is usually separated into two schools of thought.

The first, and the more general and mystical idea, is that Jesus made all water holy through his baptism. Rather than there being strict requirements for what kind of water someone should be baptized in, Christianity would allow all water to be used to bring people into the Church. One of the earliest texts we have in the Church The Didache, gives us a series of preferences for baptismal waters. The best is cold river water, the next best is warm river water, then a cold stream, then a warm stream, and so on and so forth. All water, even just a sprinkling of water, is sufficient to baptize a person, and availability of that water defines the mode of baptism used. I prefer affusion, dumping large handfuls of water onto people’s heads, but I don’t fault folks for choosing to sprinkle and save the mess.

We are also blessed by this to be able to give thanks for our baptism anytime we interact with water. In washing out face, in drinking a cup of water to start our day, in the rain that falls from the sky… All these thing give us an opportunity to reflect on God’s grace. Wherever there is water there is grace, and wherever there is grace there can be baptism.

The second thing that Jesus did in being baptized, the one that holds more water (heheh,) is that Jesus gives us an example of how to live. Jesus was not washed because he had to atone. The sinless son of God did not need to be washed to be part of God’s family. Yet, Jesus shows us how we are supposed to make our way home to God. Jesus “fulfills all righteousness,” by taking part in all aspects of life that we as sinful humanity must take part in. Jesus is technically exempt from the requirements of faith, being the author and perfector of faith itself, yet he gives it to us as a gift.

Baptism is the starting point of our faith. While many of us in our tradition will have received Communion before our Baptism, it is baptism that properly makes us part of God’s Church. When I gave my baby son the dripping juice off my finger when I took Communion, he received God’s grace in that sacrament, but when he is baptized in six months he will be properly joined to God’s church. It is a position he will affirm when he is older, deciding whether or not he will continue on in God’s family, but it is a gift received directly from God from beginning to end.

In Baptism we are reborn into God’s Kingdom, God’s family, and as such we in the Methodist Church only baptize once. We are born into life once from the womb and we are baptized into God’s Church once. Whether we receive that washing at birth, at six months, and eighty years old, or in the moment we leave this world – our baptism marks that we are part of what God is doing. Baptism reflects that God has been working with us our whole life ahead of our rebirth, that God’s grace is all over every part of our life. When we commit ourselves to the Church, or else our family makes the commitment to raise us in up the faith, we receive a special kind of grace.

Jesus showed us what Baptism means, by showing us that our work continues beyond being washed of our sins in the water. When we join the Church fully, whether in baptism for the first time or rededication of ourselves to God’s will at any point of our life. We like Christ need to take time, periodically, to go out into the wilderness of our lives and prepare for what God is doing. When we study, when we practice righteousness, when we “fulfill all righteousness,” then we do what God requires of us. Still more, it is important for us to show others what it means to live this life. To raise up children to know the love of God and neighbor, to teach them the doctrine of the faith, and to model faith such that they find joy in living within God’s family.

Today we celebrate Christ’s baptism, the washing that set in motion our own entry into God’s kingdom. Let us praise God for paving the way ahead of us, and let us live fully the life we are called to as member’s of God’s divine family. – Amen.