2025

Sermon 07/13/2025 – No Excuses

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Deuteronomy 30:8-14

Then you shall again obey the Lord, observing all his commandments that I am commanding you today, and the Lord your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the Lord will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors, when you obey the Lord your God by observing his commandments and decrees that are written in this book of the law, because you turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

“Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.

Sermon Text

Proximity makes a difference. Moving to the Panhandle, I am much closer to family, just knowing that makes a difference. When you can take a step outside and see plants, animals… Nature in all its glory! You feel more alive yourself. On the other end, proximity can cause trouble too. Living by a dump will confer its stink onto you. If you go into a nuclear site or swim in a coal run-off pond, you are going to have your health affected. Everywhere you look, how near a thing is to you will have an effect.

It should not surprise us, then, that our proximity to God makes a difference in our life. While God is present in all places and all times, I think we all experience that truth to different degrees throughout life. Many of us come into God’s presence, in worship or prayer or scripture, and do not really realize the magnitude of what that presence means to us. We do not open ourselves up to know God more, or to be known by God. We shut ourselves up, refuse to take advantage of the moment. It is like seeing a dear friend, and scrolling on our phone the entire meal you share together. We meet something precious, and we let the moment pass.

We are not unique in this trouble. All of Scripture and all of Church history shows people neglecting the reality of God’s presence. At Sinai the thunder and fire on the mountain did not prevent the people from making the Golden Calf. In Canaan, the words of the prophets did not stop the people from abusing one another. Even Christ being near his disciples did not prevent their many mistakes,  and of course did not prevent Judas from his betrayal. From the Garden to today, the simple truth is that we are excellent at ignoring God.

Our scripture today is part of Moses’s farewell address to the Israelites. Looking out at the people, he would be remembering all the amazing things they had seen together. The torrenting water shutting behind them as they fled Egypt, the miracle of Mana appearing in the wilderness, the giving of the Law itself. He also would remember their many failings. Their bitter complaints at Meribah, their demand for excess meat, their actual rebellion at Korah… Thousands of highs and lows, all culminating in a final chance to share God’s words to the people.

As Moses works through his preamble to his second giving of the law, he reflects on God’s unique status in the world, on the people’s need to be devoted to God, and seeks to remind the people that they can, with God’s help, meet the high calling of what God has called them to. Moses knows that if the people follow God’s laws, they will flourish – because the laws are not based on obligation, they are based on what is good. If the people care for each other, for the poor, for the foreigner, for the oppressed – their lives and the lives of everyone they meet will be made better. God has given a gift, and they have the chance to do something with it.

There was a time in my life, before I had worked in churches and had a child, when I would read Moses’s words in this passage as judgment. “You all have made me walk up a mountain, time and time again, but I’m done! You want God’s teachings. Too bad! This is what you’ve got, make us of it or get over it!” I am sure he was frustrated after all these years, but I do not believe that this was Moses’s energy in his farewell address to the people. I think it was more similar to a frequent situation I find myself in with my son.

He has a habit of going under tables, chairs, or crawling into the corner of a room and thinking that he is stuck. He has the ability to get out, but he cries waiting for us to come and rescue him. I will sit down on the floor near him, and cheer him on. “You can do this! Just turn around! You aren’t trapped, you’re just confused!” I see that energy in Moses’s words. “You do not need to crawl up that mountain, you are not that far gone! It is so close to you! You’re almost there!”

We are not given any excuses to not follow through on what God has called us to do. We are called by Jesus to pursue perfection, being, “perfect as your father in Heaven is perfect.”[1] Yet, despite how high that calling sounds, it manifests in our life through a fairly simple paradigm. Does our daily work promote the good of our neighbors? Then we have loved our neighbor. Does our daily work bring us closer to God, and honor the holiness to which we are called? Then we have loved our God. Those are not easy, I cannot lie to you and tell you they are, but they are not beyond our power either, not with God’s help at least.

For God’s people at Sinai and beyond, they had the Torah to lead them. For us, Gentiles brought into the faith through Christ, we have Christ himself. The scriptures we read, the continual presence of Christ through the sacrament, the fellowship of the faithful, and the Spirit that dwells within us – all these facilitate our pursuit of God’s will. The Word of God is truly not too far from us, we do not need to chase it down, because the Word came down from the Heaven, dwelt among us, and showed us what can happen when we make use of the grace that is imparted to us.

God continues to come near to us. God is with us now in this room. Will we draw near, open our hearts, and embrace what God can do to transform us? Or will we ignore God and continue life as if nothing is happening around us? I hope we choose to meet God and be transformed by God. To be more peaceful, patient, kind, gentle, and self-controlled – in all things to embody all that God calls us to be. “… the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.” In prayer, in action, in the deepest part of our being… Let us make use of our God who has drawn near to us. – Amen.

[1] Matthew 5:48

Sermon 07/06/2025 – Multiplying Ministries

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go on your way; I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals, and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if a person of peace is there, your peace will rest on that person, but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near…’

“Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”

The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. Indeed, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

Sermon Text

I am never sure what to do with my first sermon in a new church. Do I show a side of my preaching that’s a little out there, inoculate you folks to mu peculiarities? Maybe go for something to show off my doctrinal chops, a refresher of the Nicene Creed or something that shows that I have a few letters after your name, that could work… I can never really figure out a good way to prepare the first Sunday to be something incredible and self-revelatory, so today my regular old preaching will have to suffice.

I still want to be able to introduce myself and to touch upon my philosophy on ministry. What does it mean to serve God through the work of the Church? What form do we expect our ministries to take? More than that, what do we as participants in that ministry need to model, to become, to embody in our ministry to all the world? Our scripture out of Luke has given us a powerful image of what ministry looks like.

In the Gospel, Christ calls his disciples together and laments that there is so much work to be done and so little people to do it. Looking at the twelve, he sees that they cannot handle the ministry on their own. So, from the midst of Christ’s followers emerge seventy-two other capable ministers. Their instructions are specific: go in, preach the word, heal the sick, make no money and hoard no food, and move on when your time is done. That basic formula – do, subsist, and move on – can be a powerful lesson for ministry. Likewise, when the seventy-two return and are overjoyed that they have power, Christ’s warning for them to not celebrate power but instead their identity as God’s people, is a lesson we likewise should not forget.

Ministries are meant to be relevant, efficient, and transient. Each of these feed one into the other into the other. A relevant ministry will meet the needs of the people around it, when that need is met, it will ensure people wish to support it, and when the need or the support dries up, then a new ministry should begin off of the inertia of the first. Failure to acknowledge this triune relationship is bound to cause trouble. Each has there only pitfalls, and we can explore just a few.

A ministry that is not relevant does not seek to meet the needs of the people around it. Sometimes these kinds of ministries are born out of desires in the congregation, to meet their own needs rather than those of the people they’re meant to reach. Other times, ignorance – intentional or accidental – leads to the creation of ministries that just miss the point. I met a minister who worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation once. He told the nightmarish story of clothing drives churches would hold without talking to his mission center first. The well-meaning churches across the country would gather literal tons of clothes, dump them off at the reservation, and then leave him and his staff to sort, clean, and – given the quality of the donated clothing – dispose of, what had been sent in. The ministry failed to address the people it needed to serve, and so in assuming their needs, there was a yearly cycle of waste.

A ministry that does not work efficiently will also falter. I do not mean strict budgeting or regimented working hours, but general sense for acquiring, using, and sourcing resources. If you have a food pantry, but no way to get food, then you are not going to have a food pantry for long. If you have one person who is passionate about a ministry and they establish no successor, then when they move on for one reason or another, that ministry will probably die out too. Ministry must do as the seventy-two did – meet the people, help them in the midst of trouble, and not take more than it needs or meander between too many disparate ideas. To truly be in ministry to all the world, we have to find a niche and embrace our participation in it.

Finally, a ministry must be transient in the sense that it will have its time to exist, and its time to fade away and make way for something new. Many times, a ministry will linger long past the time it is doing its best work, because the people involved are attached to it. We remember when we had hundreds of people involved with it, and we believe that if we just can keep doing things the same way for a few more years, they will all suddenly appear again. The flow of time, of people, of circumstances, means that sometimes a ministry will run out of people to serve, resources to serve them, or just fizzle out. There is no shame in that, just the life cycle of things.

The final point Jesus makes to the seventy-two is that they should not rejoice that they have been given power from Heaven, and I think that touches upon our general love of ministry. We love to do God’s work, to serve the people of our community, but sometimes love of doing supplants love of people. I am a busy body, for sure, I need to be doing something constantly. This is dangerous and has gotten me in trouble at home. Cleaning the house, I throw away things my wife needs, because in my desire to get things done, I clean off her desk and mix up the trash pile for the important document pile. I sometimes get caught up in doing, so I forget that doing serves a higher purpose.

Let me put it another way. I take an anti-depressant. The anti-depressant helps me to function because it traps Serotonin in my brain for a little longer, helping my body actually use it. I need this pill to lead a normal life, but I do not actually have a particular affection for it. Someday, I will need to up the dosage or change the drug, or maybe take two instead of one… but that’s fine because the pill doesn’t matter, its outcome matters. In the same way, the ministries we form are a treatment for the troubles we see in the world around us. The ministry’s form, its composition, and its lifespan – all are in service to doing the good work of the Church to further the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I cannot fall in love with the ministry itself to the detriment of the good that it does.

As I come into this church, I am certain that there are ministries we have not done in ages. Perhaps, the time has come for them to be revived. Likewise, maybe there are some ministries we cling onto, that need to be retired. More amazingly, and exciting for all of us, I bet there is work in this community that is not being done. Things this church has not tried, that no other church has tried, that could really make a difference. Up and down the streets of Keyser, I am sure there is something that the people need… How can we bring it to them?

I get to learn, hopefully for a good many years, all about this church’s past, about the people of Keyser, and about the ministry we owe to them. The Spirit of the Lord is moving in this world, as they have been from before time began. If we follow that Spirit, we will find life and not only life, but abundant life. We are told in the gospels that the springs of eternal life never run dry.[1] If we believe that, let us find new ways to invite people to the font, to drink deep of God’s grace, and find ourselves restored in the process. – Amen.

[1] John 4:13-14

Sermon 06/29/2025 – A Homeless God

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Gospel Lesson                                                      Luke 9:51-62

When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to prepare for his arrival, but they did not receive him because his face was set toward Jerusalem. When his disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village.

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” And Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Sermon Text

The passage we read today captures what I believe is a moment of frustration in the ministry of Jesus. He is coming to the end of his earthly ministry, and the reality of the cross lingers darkly on the horizon. As Christ begins to make his way to Jerusalem, he does so knowing that the end of that path is the end of his life. Regardless of the eventuality of the resurrection, Jesus was going to face death in full, and that is not an easy cup for any person to drink. We are given an account of Jesus being denied entry into a town of Samaritans.

We are told they did not want him in town because he was going to Jerusalem. Why would that stop them from welcoming him? Some of them may have seen his journey there for his final Passover as a betrayal. He had led a long ministry of inclusion of the Samaritans, and now he was going to break bread with their oppressors. Maybe a more sympathetic perspective was in their mind, perhaps they knew Jesus was going to his death and they thought they could stop him by not offering a place to stay. Perhaps, most simply, they just did not like him.

Regardless, we see the disciples react to the news of their rejection angrily. They call for Jesus to send fire down from heaven to destroy the town. Jesus does not feed into their anger, but quickly shuts it down. The image the scripture draws a powerful image of Jesus’s frustration with his disciples. It specifically says he turns, in other words this is a discussion being had as they make their way down the highways of Judea. Christ, literally ahead of the offending disciples, spins around and stops their march to his own death. Luke does not record the words of his rebuke, but it should not be hard to imagine what Christ might say.

“What is wrong with you?!” He booms, “When have when been in the business of carpet bombing cities? When have you ever seen me, mistreated as I am, ever raise my hand to strike someone, let alone to kill?!” Christ, who has just told his disciples that they must take up their cross and follow him, is realizing that his entire ministry with his closest companions has not changed them, not fully, not yet. They are still clinging onto things that keep them from knowing the fullness of who Christ is.

The next few interactions Christ has with people that cross his path seem to reflect the general state of his ministry. People keep coming to him, but they do not know what they are signing up for. “I will follow you wherever you go!” is met with Christ’s harsh truth, “Unless you want to be homeless, then this is not the life for you.” When he meets someone who he sees is ready to join his ministry, he is told that he must first return to his family for his father’s burial. “The people you leave have no hope, and so they should be left to attend to the funeral alone. You have the duty, having seen the Kingdom of Heaven, to bring people to life!” Finally, someone sentimentally asks to be able to go home and tell their family goodbye, Christ responds, “If you have your doubts, then this cannot be the path you walk.”

I do not think that Christ was pushed over the limit, was speaking an unfiltered perspective. I am not implying Christ was flying off the handle as he walked the streets of Judea, but I do think that Christ’s hardest teachings were intentionally placed next to each other like this. We are meant to see Christ looking us in the face, and scolding us for our own failings, as much as we are supposed to hear the specific instructions he gave to specific people centuries ago.

Not every message from Christ was one of hope, at least not on the surface. When people realized what God had to offer, it was a serious matter if they turned their back on it. When his disciples desired to kill, rather than accept that they had signed up to die the moment they joined him – that was a serious sin. When he called someone to follow him, and they wanted to linger in town another week, Christ knew they were seeking an escape. When someone asked to go home before they followed him, he knew they did not truly wish to follow him at all, not without comfort at least.

In our own life, we will not often find an opportunity to do ministry like what Christ would offer. You are not present with Christ in the limited time he walked the earth if you serve Christ now. However, you are still bound to devote yourself to the work you agree to take on. When I took my vows to pursue the life of a minister, I gave up many rights and freedoms because of it. When a person joins the Church, they renounce evil and injustice and sin and all worldly inclinations. To follow Christ is to take up our cross, to serve our God without ceasing, to understand that we are made free only in joyful obedience to the one who calls us.

There is a time for words of consolation, for us to be reminded that God is a God of rest and a God who asks us to care for those close to us. However, that must be tempered with the harsh reality of the ministry we are called to. Christ was homeless, how uncomfortable am I willing to be? Christ suffered alone, am I willing to be lonely sometimes if it means spreading the Kingdom? Christ never moved from his path to his destiny, except to save others from themselves, how devoted are we to finishing what we start?

In the life of faith, I think that daily examen is helpful, not only to foster growth, but to acknowledge our sticking points. What have we been unwilling to give up for the good of the Kingdom, and ultimately for our own good.

Now, the word of caution here is that God does not ask us to give up our family or our other responsibilities. “But the man who was burying his father! And the one who was not allowed to go home!” In one case the father was dead and in the other the man was not told he could never return home, just that he needed to leave town now. More than that, Christ specifically forbids us from using God as an excuse to abandon our familial responsibilities.[1] When I speak of giving up for God, I mean giving up the comfortable parts of life, not just the ones that free up time for ministry. Invariably, those who give up on their family to pursue “ministry,” do so because they think ministry is easier than family life, and they would rather do one as a free person than the other with limitation.

What we need to do, in examining our life and the way we live it, is not to look for excuses or easy ways out. We have to look into the face of Christ, to pray earnestly, and acknowledge that the God we worship is a homeless God. Not once on earth did Christ seek to settle, as soon as he could go on the road he did, and that path led him straight to his death. If we worship a God who gave up all comfort for the good of the people who misunderstood, hated, and ultimately killed him, what can we do to even partially account for the ways we worship our own interests in place of him? If I must stand before Christ and give a full account of my life someday, I hope it is not of the many missed opportunities I had to serve Christ, but that were too inconvenient for my life to pursue.

I do not write these words to criticize any one of their readers. I am guilty of ever crime I have written of within this text. The knowledge of that guilt compels me to ask others to name it too. We do not have to be trapped in our own sin, to be lost in complacency which we call “comfort,” or “life as it is.” We can accept the cross Christ offers us, to give up our desire for vengeance and comfort and a status quo that ultimately benefits us. Let us love radically, sacrificially, and ultimately in a way that resembles the God we serve. – Amen.

[1] Mark 7: 9-13

Sermon 06/22/2025 – An End to Difference

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Epistle Lesson                                                           Galatians 3:23-29

Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be reckoned as righteous by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 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. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

Sermon Text

 Here we are, at the end of this long road. It has been four short years, and yet in those years we have achieved much. The Spirit of the Lord is at work, and the Spirit of the Lord will not be quenched. For my final message, I wanted to look at Galatians and see just what God asks of us in being born again in Christ. Firstly, though, I wanted to go back to the beginning, to the first message I shared with you all. On July 4th, 2021, I concluded my sermon like this:

“We must love Christ, and not only do so with our words, but in our every action. Christ calls us today, asks us to love him with all that is within us, and if we truly wish to say that we do. We must then take a step out from ourselves and care for this broken world. The flock is all around us, let us tend it well.”

For you Temple folks, our first message together ended like this:

“This is the day that the Lord has made, and we will rejoice and be glad in it. Today, and always, Methodists are one people, and we will show the world what power that unity can bring.”

Service, Unity, and the particular Methodist configuration of a Charge – these ideals are foundational to the work of the Church. Each of them helps us to live out the love that Christ has given us, called us to embody, and sent us out into the world to become in every way we possibly can. We are one people, we are sent to love and care for all people, and we are given a story to tell the nations that can change everything for everyone.

We talked recently about the way in which the Pentecost removed barriers of separation between the people of the world, but ultimately the Pentecost was a single moment in history. Though the Spirit continues to work within us, the particular miracle of glossolalia which allowed the disciples to preach to people of all nations is not a common manifestation of the Spirit’s power. Something deeper than miraculous translation has to shape how we as Christians live out our calling to be one people. We have to become a family.

Every person who calls upon the name of Christ is no longer primarily identified by their circumstances or background, but by God’s parenthood over them. Through Christ’s work we have been made into children of God, siblings therefore of Christ. The Spirit has taken hold of all who believe, transforming people from all times and places into one people, Christians are siblings in the same divine family. This truth should transform every aspect of our lives, because like all aspects of the Gospel it demands we see things differently than we do now.

Paul was a radical about his perspective on Jewish and Gentile relations of the early church. Though he was an observant Jew, and Acts tells us he maintained his devotion to Judaism his whole life, he was willing to allow far more latitude than others did. While saying his Judaism was, “an advantage,” he also saw it as a secondary status to his identity as a follower of Christ.[1] Likewise, he saw little issue with former pagans maintaining some of their practices, as long as they did not cause other people to mistake them for pagans.[2] This contrasted the decisions of the Early Church in various circumstances, who took more moderate stances on some of these issues.

Yet, most radical of all was Paul’s assertion that every aspect of a person was secondary to their faith. “Man or woman? Who cares, they are a Christian. Jew or Gentile? Who cares, they are Christian. Slave or free? Who cares, they are a Christian.” We could augment this in our daily life in a thousand different scenarios, but the truth remains the same. For the Christian, looking at our siblings by their secondary characteristics should be treated for the ridiculous thing it is. We are all one in the faith, all united as one family, why do these other features matter?

The world, of course, does regard people by their race, their language, their background. Indeed, the Church is not forbidden from celebrating differences in our midst either. I can tell you that the Thai Baptists I knew were very different form the African Methodists or the Black Baptists, but all were Christian. Primarily and fundamentally, they were people of God. I could celebrate the fact each brought something unique to the family of God, while not ranking them based on which I found most palatable to my sensibilities. All were equal in dignity before God, and all of them had something unique to offer to the Kingdom.

Acknowledging that the Church, in all its diversity, is still one people united in God’s family naturally changes our perspective of other people too. It should not shock you, but the truth that unites all of us as Christians is freely offered to everyone. Therefore, all people can have a place at the table of grace, and therefore we are called not to regard anyone as more significant than anyone else. James puts it well, saying, “My brothers and sisters, do not claim the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory while showing partiality.” In his context, James was talking about treating rich, respectable people, as more important than the poor. In our own life though, we show favoritism is so many ways.[3]

We are such a bisected culture, dividing over everything we possibly can. We cannot live in such a way, especially not in the Church. Yet, we are as factious as anyone. I saw at General Conference how people lied and ranted and railed to try and tear down the church, and I came home to people trying to do the same thing in Clarksburg! Differences of opinion on implementation of policy is natural and good, but what we try to do in our infighting is fundamentally wrong. Whispers convey more questions and rumors than frank and up front conversation brings truth. Hatred brews in the judgmental eyes we cast across sanctuaries and across aisles – literal and political.

The future of the Church must seek to end hierarchy outside of administrative necessity and it must acknowledge diversity as real, present, and necessary. We as a Church have members who are gay, who are straight, who are trans, and who are cis. Why not see in that the work of God bringing us together to something more? We have people of various political leanings. Why be silent on our diverse opinions, when we could in love work for a better future for all, through honest discussions with one another? Everyone in this pavilion, everyone who will receive this in a letter, who will read it online, all are called by the same Spirit – God has called us all to be one family together. I think we should embrace that family identity all the more, to see no more difference between ourselves, and to in all things, prioritize the divine image within one another, above and beyond any artificial distinction of merit or worth we have invented.

Christ has called for an end to difference, not that we all become uniform, but that we all become one. I hope that these churches will continue to embody a future focused upon that idea. Put your arms out, embrace your neighbors, and find that all of them have something deep inside – the image of God imprinted upon their hearts. Let the Spirit flow from you to them, uniting you, strengthening you, and ultimately saving us all. Let today, the end of one era of the church, mark the birth of a wider, more lovely one. Let today be the day we commit ourselves to greater love, to greater service, to be the family of God in every way we can. – Amen.

[1] Romans 3

[2] 1 Corinthians 8

[3] James 2:1-13

Sermon 06/15/2025 – The Work of the Trinity

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Epistle Lesson                                                                  Romans 5:1-5

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Sermon Text

We are blessed as Christians to profess that Christ is our king, our God, and our ruler in every aspect of life. We are blessed as well to have a heavenly Father, somebody who watches after us in every aspect of life, to make sure that we as people bound by our limited human form still know the parental goodness of something that is greater than ourselves. Likewise though we are but physical bodies, we are allowed, through the visitation of God’s Spirit, to be blessed with a spiritual nature as well so our worldly nature. Slowly but surely, every aspect of ourselves is transformed from fleshly thoughts and fleshly nature to a spiritual nature binding together our physical form and our spiritual.

As Christians, we can proclaim this faith because we believe in the Holy Trinity. We profess that God is three persons and that those three persons somehow are one united being whom we call God. Though there are complicated formulas to explain this – things that talk about light, and the source of light, and the warmth of light; or else the roots of a tree, the tree itself, and its branches – the essential nature of the Trinity is that it is mysterious. We do not exactly know how God exists in three persons and yet is one God, but we know that it is true. We are blessed as God’s children to be in on this secret and to enjoy the benefits that come from it.

As I have already said in my introduction, we experience three unique ways in which God loves the creation. Lately, it has been put forward that God acts as the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all things, with each person of the Trinity somehow taking on one of these aspects. However, we are misguided if we think that each person of the Trinity only has one job. While it is true that the Spirit has unique work, as does the Father, as does the Son in God’s economy of grace, God only acts in the world as a united force. More than that, God cannot be limited in any way. God is free because God is freedom.

The Trinity then is not something by which we define God. We do not say God is three persons and therefore we know exactly how God works and in what exact ways God does this and to whom God is willing to serve. Instead, what we are given is the simple truth that God, in this singular multiplicity, loves us in every way possible. through every means possible, as the three persons of God’s singular self. Are we all thoroughly lost in the weeds? Are we ready for a bit more of a concrete discussion of what God’s work?

In the time before Christ came into the world, God’s people only knew of God as God the Father. While it is true that the Spirit was the one mediating discussions between God and God’s people, there was no talk of God as multiple persons, only as God being a single person. When we hear in the Shema, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God! The Lord is one!” That is not any sort of complicated statement about the Trinity, that is simply the view of Moses as he spoke  to his people. Even the one closest to God, Moses, the giver of the law, did not fully understand the triune nature of God.

It was only through the revelation of Christ’s incarnation that we understand that there are in fact three persons of God. Christ the eternal Word of God preexisted everything and through him all things were made, (we talked about this just a few weeks ago.) The Spirit of God speaking through and to the prophets was alongside God and God’s people through every moment of eternity. God the Father, a spiritual person somehow overseeing and yet coequal with these other two persons, all together are called “God.”

As we read our scripture today, we see a Trinitarian argument about what it means to be saved. Paul tells us that, because Christ came and lived and died and rose again, we are now no longer enemies of God, but at peace with God. All those sins that we had committed against God’s divine majesty every aggressive impulse we had against each other no longer has to be the thing that defines us. Now we are granted this new status under Christ we can become children of God and as children of God we are able to develop a new way of understanding life. The hardships that we face no longer have to be overwhelming because God who suffered alongside us has proven that we can somehow find in suffering a way to grow forward. We know that even those parts of suffering that are irredeemable at least have God’s solidarity alongside us through the person of Christ to comfort us in the midst of hardship.

Through this understanding of the world, we can develop virtue in a way that we would not be able to otherwise. Rather than being overwhelmed by a world that is broken we are instead able to accept the broken parts of it as a consequence of the world as it is and grow our own souls and our own communities to be closer into alignment with the world as it should be. This transformative approach to the trouble of the world allows us to see God doing something new even in the midst of a world that has been broken from the very beginning. When we acknowledge that the broken state of the world is a consequence of sin the trouble that we face in that world allows us to see why it is necessary to be more holy and to understand that holiness ultimately comes from helping others in the midst of this broken world.

The final thing that Paul speaks of in this part of the epistle is about how we are able to do all of this because we receive love through God’s spirit pouring that into us. It is hard to overstate how much of the work of the church comes down to love. It is a word that is cheapened in our own culture something that we use to describe any great affection for things as minimal as a certain kind of hot dog to as incredible as the love between family members friends and of course God for us. Scripture also struggles to capture this using different words in different contexts to give slightly different flavors to the kind of love that we experience. Ultimately love cannot be summarized in a singular word, but it must be experienced and the many different colors that it gives to the world around it.

Eager to understand the work of God whether we put it in trinitarian terms or just speak of God in terms of the singular and understand that there is something a bit more complex to it if we really sit down and think about it. If we are trying to understand how God works in the world we do so from the basis of a being that has loved since before anything existed. The father has always loved the son has always loved the spirit and so on and so forth in the infinite combination of their trinitarian relationship. When the creation was made God did so out of love and crowned that creation with the ultimate object of God’s affection human beings. To understand the work of God we must understand love.

This coming Saturday I will stand with a family as they join another family and we will proclaim the importance of love as something that does not envy or boast as something that is patient and kind that does not keep record of wrong of something that is infinite and that is expressed best and the simple sacrifice of oneself for another. Oftentimes love is seen as most profound in marriage or else and the love between a parent and a child the truth is though that the most profound love there is, is always between God and us. All other loves draw inspiration from God’s love for us, and all other loves are secondary to it. If you want to understand the work of the Trinity you must first understand love and there is no greater love than the love that God showed us in Christ presence upon this world dying for us while we were yet sinners and then the visitation of the spirit which is continually with us gifted to us to sanctify us and connect us to God and to one another. As is always the case it all comes back to love and today I ask you people of God to recover your first love to recommit yourself to God in every way that you can so that in all aspects of life you may see the benefits that come from knowing God the father the son and the Holy Spirit and that God’s continual love for you.

Rewriting Babel – 06/08/2025

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Torah Lesson                                                                    Genesis 11:1-9

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” 

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Sermon Text

Today is the day of the Pentecost. We commemorate when the church was truly born through the visitation of God’s spirit upon them and the emergence of different languages in their midst. Traditionally we would read the story out of Acts in which each of the disciples found themselves speaking in languages they did not know and proclaiming the gospel to a long list of very hard to pronounce peoples and nations. However, this year, I think it is necessary for us to look at the text that I believe Acts is inspired by. We look to the language and the narrativization of that event to truly understand what we are being told happened when God sent the Spirit into the Church.

Long, long ago, we are given two stories for how the languages of the world developed. In Genesis 10, we are told that after the flood, as Noah and his sons went to different corners of the earth, the people of the world naturally spread apart and over time developed different languages and ways of being. This is the kind of understanding of how culture and language developed that we see in the social sciences as well. Over time people scattered from their origins in sub-Saharan Africa, all across the earth, taking with them bits of culture that changed across the wide breadth of the earth. In Genesis 10, the Table of Nations that we are given tells a story of how large our human family is – all of us connected, all of us tied together by our shared lineage, and yet separated by space-time and language.

Like much of Genesis, however, there are two different versions of this story. While one tells a very natural story of how people grew apart over time, the other story puts much more intentionality to why God would choose that humanity needed to spread apart. As we read in Genesis 11, we are given an episode out of human history that makes the sudden spreading of people across the world a matter of morality. In the early parts of Genesis, we see again and again the way that people not only go foul of what God wishes, but actively seek to cause harm to God, and to God’s creation, and to each other.

As soon as humanity leaves the garden of Eden, Cain kills Abel and in that killing secures a legacy of violence within humanity. In the time of Noah, we’re told that humanity is so violent that God must send a flood to reset the world as it is known just so that there is a chance for the people to survive through Noah and his family. However, Noah and his family, being human, are still capable of sin. Ham, one of his children, sins against his father, resulting in his sons, Cannan being cursed. Humanity regardless of anything that happened before this point begins to develop their old habits again. Slowly, but surely, everyone comes together and works out this idea that if they can work together they could build a tower that could reach up to heaven.

In art and in our imagination, we imagine this as some great building, but from historical records we know that the largest of the ziggurats in the ancient world were no more than four or five stories. The massive ziggurat that would have been understood by the exilic community of Jews was only 10 stories tall, still not this massive building that would reach up to the heavens. The issue was not actually whether or not the building was giant, it wasn’t even really the intent of the people to reach up to heaven, instead it was simply the potential for these people to work together for any purpose that God decided was worth scattering their language and confounding their tongues.

Looking at the brokenness of humanity, God decided that it was better to separate us to keep us from conspiring again and again. The evil that we had perpetrated in the past and the time of Noah would only be made stronger by our newfound ability to build, to innovate, to keep reaching towards things beyond ourselves. Even in our modern world, the way that humanity comes together is often not for the good of one another but for evil. For every creation that comes about for the good of humanity there are two or three that are built only for greed or for death or for evil. In our own time, our own attempt to get into the heavens, the rocket technology that we continue to use for the limited space exploration that we are capable of, was all born out of a desire to create better rockets for weapons of war. Humanity in the modern age still comes together for evil. We are still is capable of so much destruction.

Yet, what we are given in the Pentecost is a promise that this does not need to be what we come together for. God gives, on the Pentecost, the ability for people to come together and hear of Christ. To come and to hear the instructions that God gives so that they are able to truly become part of a Kingdom that is bigger than the individual nations that they had been a part of. From the time of Babel to the time of Christ humanity, had come together again and again for the purposes of war and evil and trouble. Now in the Kingdom that Christ had initiated through his life death and resurrection a new era was promised, and in this era it was possible for people to come together not just to further their own selfish desire but to seek the good of one another.

The church was not immune from the troubles of becoming large and powerful and full of sin. Within just two chapters of this amazing Pentecost moment, we read about the fact that the church began to discriminate based on the language that people spoke forgetting the purpose of this Pentecost moment. Yet this Kingdom was not disturbed by the failure of its physical body from acting as it needed to. The Spirit still rose up leaders to correct this mistake to change the course of the church and to send it into a better future. We today, recipients of that same Spirit, can lean into or go against the work that God has put within us to send us forward into a better tomorrow.

As we will talk about more in these last two Sundays that I have with you, the Church is constantly discovering the ways that we put up barriers between ourselves and our neighbors. This impulse works against the core of what God’s Spirit is doing. While there was a day in which God said it was better for humanity to be scattered lest they commit evil, that was a punishment and not a goal. The goal of God’s work in the world has always been to reunite all of humanity under the banner of Christ and the pursuit of goodness. Yet, if we search our hearts today, I bet we would find that there is reticence within ourselves to embrace so broad a view of God’s Kingdom.

Maybe it’s the priority of your own country over others or of your own people over others. Maybe you have decided that everyone politically against you must be the absolute epitome of evil. Maybe you have cast aside anything and everything that goes against the worldview that you’ve created for yourself. Maybe you just have forgotten that you are meant to love and that that love has to manifest for every person created by God and not just the ones that fit into the box we have said is lovable. In the Pentecost, God wanted to make clear that Babel was a punishment and that punishment was not the goal.

God is actively rewriting Babel, we do not have to be people who are separate and who push against each other. Likewise, we do not have to come together only to do harm to further our wants above anyone else’s. We have the option through the spirit of God to create a world modeled after the Kingdom which was started before the foundations of the earth and sealed through the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God wants to take you and make you the pencil that will rewrite this world’s story and see things differently tomorrow than they are today. Let the Spirit fall upon you and let you know now and forever that God is the God of all peoples, nations, races, and creeds and that God wishes for all to sit and eat at the table which is prepared for them. Let us call together the people of this earth that our sin forced apart. – Amen.

Sermon 06/01/2025 – To Be Given Glory

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Gospel Lesson                                                                   John 17:20-26

“I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

“Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them.”

Sermon Text

The final message that Jesus gives to his disciples before he is arrested is what we read this morning. Like most parts of John it uses many different words to describe similar concepts building a complex argument that makes it a bit difficult, especially outside of its original language, to understand exactly what Jesus was telling his disciples. The talk of an appointed time finally coming for Christ to be glorified, and for his glory to somehow move from him to his disciples, mixes with the harsh reality that in the chapter before this he shared his final meal with them and in the chapter after this he will be taken and arrested so that he may be crucified within a day.

Farewell addresses throughout scripture tend to have a lot of important information given. We see in the final message that Moses has for the people of Israel in Deuteronomy, a restating of the law making sure that they remember the journey they’ve been on and, more importantly, what they must do when they enter the Holy Land. Likewise, we’re given the farewell addresses of several kings, and prophets, and leaders throughout, always with some eye towards the future, and often with an ominous tone to them a realization that just down the road is a new trouble that the people are going to have to face. Yet on the eve of Christ’s sacrifice, not only for his people but for all people, we see him give a message of hope, and a message more so of enablement. They are about to receive one thing that will make them able to do something impossible till then.

If we look at what our scripture is telling us perhaps we will be able to understand that we are inheritors of much more than just a tradition a set of beliefs and ideas, we might just understand the fact that we are inheritors of a powerful ministry that sets in motion God’s redemption of the world.

Reading through the book of John there are considered to be two “books.” They are not actually two separate books within the gospel but they are two different ways in which Jesus is being portrayed for the people of God. The first recounts Christ as a teacher, capturing the teachings he gave to the disciples. The second recounts the signs and wonders that Christ took part in. In one place we find Christ calling himself the good shepherd, in the other we see him turning water into wine and healing the sick and the dead. In his work on this earth, Christ secured his identity as God in human form, the one who had come to redeem our broken work. Christ the teacher and Christ the worker, brought God’s presence into this world.

Jewish Philosopher of Religion, Abraham Joshua Heschel, describes God’s “glory,” as a visible sign of his presence in the world. Christ, in his submission to die at the hands of Rome and at the will of his enemies, fully embodied the character of God and therefore was fully glorified in having accepted this death. The resurrection, when Christ appeared in perfected glory to his disciples, was the sign that sealed and proved his glorification to them, but the second he set his face toward death he embodied the sacrificial nature of God, that defines God’s presence in the world.

Christ gives his disciples the same glory which Christ has received. God’s presence will soon be defined, not by the physical person of Jesus, but by the Spirit acting through his disciples. The disciples then have a responsibility, to love as Christ love, sacrificially acting on behalf of others so that everyone may see what God is like. We are defined as Christians, you see, only by those scant few beliefs that are tied up with the person of Christ. All other aspects that define a Christian are found in their living out Christ’s call to serve one another as Christ served them. To give, even to the point of death, to see that others can know the goodness of God.

In our life, so obsessed with comfort, are we able to understand what sacrifice means? Maybe for our children, maybe for someone we truly care about or respect, but can we really imagine sacrifice for someone for whom we have no stake in their life? This is a question we have to be willing to ask. Christ explicitly says that any person is capable of helping their friends and loved ones, but it takes a person truly blessed by God to go beyond – to help strangers that will never pay them back in any way.[1] Yet, that is the exact ideal we are called to pursue. We are all asked to give of ourselves, so that other people may find their way to peace and to God.

This invades every aspect of life. C.S. Lewis wisely said that the mark of Christian charity is that a Christian will give until they are living like someone in a lower income bracket.[2] If you live as comfortably as any person making as much as you do, then are you really serving God? Or your own interest? I think this equation ties into more than just money. Are you spending as much time in leisure as other people? Surely some of that time is better served helping other people… When is the last time we truly invested our time in volunteer service? Surely some of the time we spend staring at our phones is better served reading scripture or useful books or else in prayer. If we are spending our time, like any old person would, can we truly say we are living in Christ’s call to share in his sacrificial glory?

I believe that we are called to share in God’s glory, and that that glory is shown in our willingness to give of ourselves for others. I believe this, because Christ showed it to us. Take up the challenge then, and accept into yourself the glory of a life living sacrificially for Christ. Live a life for others, and accept that in doing so you have secured the life eternal for yourself. – Amen.

[1] Matthew 5:46-48

[2] C.S. Lewis, “Social Morality,” from Mere Christianity. In The Essential C.S.Lewis. (New York, New York: Schuster & Schuster, 1999.) 318

[1] Matthew 5:46-48

[2] C.S. Lewis, “Social Morality,” from Mere Christianity. In The Essential C.S.Lewis. (New York, New York: Schuster & Schuster, 1999.) 318

Sermon 05/25/2025 – Light from Light Eternal

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The New Testament Lesson                                                   Luke 24:44-53

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised, so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

Sermon Text

As Christians, I believe we all need to devote ourselves to a thorough understanding of our faith. We should, I think, focus especially on the most fundamental aspects of our faith. I have taken to, when I kneel down to pray, reciting the Apostles’ Creed. Reminding myself, every day, of those essential parts of what our faith is built upon makes me see how those truths present themselves in every part of my life. The part that I keep coming back to, found at the end of the creed’s section on Jesus, is the fact that Jesus “is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.” You will have heard me mention it in several of my sermons lately, because I think that we forget the real impact of that truth. That God, who was, is, and ever shall be, became human and that the human addition to that identity is present in Heaven should change a lot.

The physical presence of Christ in Heaven is celebrated every year in the Church through our marking of “the Feast of the Ascension,” or the associated Sunday preceding or following that day. Today, we are observing the ascension, and as such I think it is important that we do some digging into the truth of our Risen Christ, of his bodily assumption into Heaven, and his continued existence as fully God and fully human. Christ the Lord, not in Spirit or in concept, but in body and reality, is in Heaven, and from this we can draw a great deal of hope.

Christ’s humanity exists in a state that no other humanity does. Christ is, at the core of his being, part of God’s eternal unity. God is not just one person, but three persons, all somehow sharing that singular identity of “Godhood.” The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all existed in unison of will, heart, and mind from eternity to eternity. This triune existence, distinct as much as it was unified, did not know true difference until creation took place. In creation, all of God took part, but “through [Christ,] all things were made.”[1] Despite Christ’s direct participation in creation, only one part was blessed with God’s image – the crowning glory of God’s work, human beings.

Strangely, God would have always remained distinct from humanity, even though they bore God’s image, if humanity remained innocent. Instead, however, humanity sinned again and again and again – scripture is clear about this more than just about anything else. We are not just sinful, we are sin-filled. In the infinite wisdom of God, all the same, a divine conspiracy was hatched. To make humanity well, to take them out of the downward spiral of self-destruction, God would join humanity, so that humanity could join God.

Through the unlikely parentage of an unmarried woman, the humble virgin named Mary, God entered humanity once and for all. Through the Holy Spirit, a miracle occurred, and Mary became more than just a woman in a backwater of the Ancient World, she became the Mother of God. Her son, Jesus, was not born into privilege despite his amazing origins. A great rending occurred within him – though he never gave up being God, Christ did give up the benefits of being God. “Emptying himself,” Christ took on the full image of humanity – not in glory or in innocence, but in the sinful and fallen state they had been since Eden.[2] He suffered all that humanity suffered, becoming completely one with humanity on the whole.

Despite this, the God-Man lived a perfect life. Without sin, Jesus walked the earth. Yet, rather than finding a world receptive to his perfection – he was rejected at every turn. Though he had made all things, his creation did not recognize its creator.[3] Despite his perfection, his love was rejected. Christ, the perfect son of God, “was crucified, died, and was buried,” under the orders of Pontius Pilate. He descended to be among the dead, as all humanity had before him, and the eternal Christ tasted – if only for a moment – the bitter sting of oblivion.

Yet, death could not hold Jesus. As he sat in the tomb, his spirit was not left idle, but he “preached the Gospel to the dead,” bringing the righteous into the proximity of God they now enjoy in anticipation of the resurrection. Death, now thoroughly broken of its hold on the souls of humanity, needed to be shown that the body was not subject to it any longer either. Christ rose from death, not only in the sense of life returning to his body, but in the perfection of his physical form. The image of sinful humanity that he had worn his whole life was now turned into the glorious potential that humanity now knew through Christ’s work. The wounds of his life remained, but they were now glorified. The Jesus who had died was the same as the Jesus who rose again, but in a body that could never die, nor face any hardship or pain ever again.

The perfect Christ gathered his disciples, teaching them all they needed to know for when his finite, spiritualized body would leave them. He promised them that the Spirit would come to instruct them, empower them, and lead them. Having accomplished all things, Christ took his disciples to Bethany and opened scripture to them. The people of God, gathered on that mountain, were now ready to go out into the world and proclaim all that Christ had done. His birth, his death, and his resurrection. Now, they witnessed his last earthly wonder, disappearing into Heaven in an instant, Christ was assumed body, blood, soul, and divinity. Christ would only be physically present with his Church when they gathered for the celebration of Holy Communion, and then only in mystery and wonder. The Church now waits, but it is empowered in its waiting.

Christ, though absent from us physically, now is doing unique work for the Church. At all times, Christ continues to pray for the world, “he always lives to make intercession for them.”[4] As Christ in life prayed, “with loud cries and tears,” for our souls, so Christ continues to advocate for us.[5] There is never a moment where humanity is not on God’s mind, because God remains in human form through the Son, and the Son sits at the right hand of the Father and sends for the Spirit to empower all God’s people. In Christ we not only see a preview of what God will achieve in the resurrection of all flesh, nor do we only receive freedom from the consequence of Sin through his death and resurrection, but we receive continual care, support, and power to free ourselves from all power of Sin.

We also affirm that Christ, who ascended, “will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”[6] Christ, in his eternal unity with the Godhead, and in his now eternal solidarity with humanity, will someday return to set this world right. In our Revelation study this year, we dug into the final book of the Bible and found that – despite the way it is usually sold to us – it is a book full of hope. Like we discussed last week, we have a promise of a story that ends perfectly, and that perfect ending is completely to do with a God who created, inhabited, and will redeem completely this world we live in.

The Light which burned since before Light was spoken into being, the eternal glory which precedes all ability of anything to perceive it, the God who was and is and is to come – this is what we meet in the person of Jesus Christ. As we today remember that Christ sits at the right hand of God, and shall someday return in the same manner, I pray that we can remember the fullness of our faith, and the doctrine we proclaim. Let us go forward to believe in full, to proclaim to all, and to enjoy all benefits of the faith we have today rehearsed. May we be blessed in the name of Jesus Christ, our risen Lord, author and perfector of our faith, and the God-man who advocates for us in the presence of God now and forevermore. – Amen.

[1] John 1:3

[2] Philippians 2:4

[3] John 1:10-13

[4] Hebrews 7:25

[5] Hebrews 5:7

[6] Acts 1:11

Sermon 05/18/2025 – A Proper Ending

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Lesson                                                                          Revelation 21:1-6

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.

Sermon Text

 Ideally in life, we would always have stories with proper endings. There’s nothing worse than reading a book, and usually a nice long book, only to find out that it throws everything out at the very end. For many people, I was not one of them, there was a huge cultural moment when George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones series was turned into a television show. The series eventually reached a point where they went beyond where the books had been written. And when the ending finally came, all those eight years of fandom and success terminated in a series ending that everyone, almost universally, hated.

We were all almost always run into some story that does this to us. Mine was the sequel series of Star Wars. It started so promisingly with The Force Awakens, moving on to the apex, I think, of good Star Wars movies, which is The Last Jedi (I’ll fight you on it,) and then terminating with the movie that was made only to make people on Reddit happy… Diatribe aside, I think we are, as a species, worried that, at the end of the day, our own story is going to have an ending that is unsatisfying, an ending that ultimately doesn’t make the story work.

When we look at life, whether it’s our life or human history, a profoundly painful story unfolds. Hegel, a philosopher, once proposed that history is working towards an end. He narrativized history in saying that, as we keep moving and moving, there is an eventual and definite ending. As everything we do follows patterns, those patterns have to lead to a conclusion. Others like Marx would pick this up and propose definite endings to their history – whether that is in Proletariat Revolution or if that’s in the full freedom of humanity through some other means. But the thing about any of these stories that are told about our history is that they’re often stuck in the assumption that the patterns that currently exist will keep on going. That we will keep going down the drain until we finally hit the bottom.

We in the church proclaim something different because we believe that history was interrupted. When Jesus Christ was born, it was a disruption of history. Everything that was leading up to Christ being born is different than everything after Christ being born. In Christ the fullness of God entered into the physical world in a way that had never happened before. God, who we know is largely content to allow the world to spin by the laws of physics and all other things which God has ordained for it, suddenly interrupted it in the most startling way God could – by becoming a physical part of the story. When the author of a story puts themselves into the story, things have to change. You are no longer dealing with narrative, you are dealing with meta-narrative, a story that is commenting on itself and on the idea of the story at all. When Jesus came into this world, God was saying definitively that regardless of whatever rules there were physical or otherwise, God had a different plan for the world than the one the world had for itself.

In terms of physics, the world has only one ending. This universe will eventually run out of usable energy and when that usable energy ends we will experience something called “the heat death of the universe,” where nothing can happen. There can be no new creation, there cannot be anything, because all there is, is useless heat with no kinetic or chemical energy left. If we go over to a historical perspective, then the only thing that we have in front of us is a succession of national powers. One empire rising and another falling, until eventually one wins out or everyone is killed off. If you look at our history, I believe our extinction is a more likely consequence of our own action than the triumph of any one party. If we as human beings are allowed to keep acting the way we do, we will kill ourselves. We will destroy this planet and everyone. That is the culmination of humanity in their sinful existence ever since Cain killed Abel.

So, what does Christ coming in and offering something new to us achieve? We, of course, in this Easter season proclaim the fact that Christ has risen and in that resurrection has defeated death For those who choose to follow Christ, there is no end to life only its brief interruption, followed by the overwhelming joy of an eventual and bodily resurrection. But what does that resurrection mean in a cosmic sense? What can we understand about how this entire universe is changed by Christ redeeming it?

You see, when Christ took on human form, Christ did not just take on the fullness of humanity – although that was his primary work – Christ also definitely combined himself with the very matter of the universe. Christ was made of protons and neutrons and electrons, Christ was made of atoms and molecules, Christ was real and physical in every way that matters and therefore all of creation is redeemed through the work of Christ.

We can infer from this that matter itself is in some way resurrected through Christ. The eventual heat death of this universe is no longer our necessary end. Christ will make a world in which entropy does not exist, in which we as humans and, indeed, the universe itself do not have to see degradation as a necessary thing, Things will be allowed to exist in perpetuity. There won’t ever be a time where something cannot exist and exist in abundance.

As for our human history, we are told in a latter part of Revelation that the work of God is so complete that the Tree of Life, the thing that was forbidden to humanity in the garden of Eden because of our evil, will be freely available. We are told that the leaves that grow on that tree are for the healing of the nations, that the healing of all of the people of the world is complete in the work of God. We are no longer separated by where we were born, how we were born, or the conditions of our birth, but united in the work that God has done to bring us into the Kingdom which has begun by Christ.

Perhaps the most important thing for us in our day-to-day life (although I would say sociopolitical things are much more important in our current socioeconomic climate,) is that we are told that every tear will be wiped away and that there will be no sorrow in this world which Christ has created. Life is so overwhelming, and the course of human history so self-defeating, that it is no wonder that we feel like we have no hope. It is so easy to be hopeless, so easy to give in to the cynicism of the rest of the world. We find ourselves looking for politicians to save us, but they all of them disappoint. They all have to protect either their business interests or their personal interest or the continuation of the system itself, and the system will always hurt people, you can’t have a system that doesn’t.

We look to align ourselves with the most powerful parties, instead of trying to find a way that we can live together for the mutual good of each other. We have to find enemies and we have defined our allies, as we talked about last week, not by what we agree on but by who we disagree with. And most importantly, I think, is the reality in this world that always fails to deliver on good things, we will become despondent, depressed, and we begin to think maybe we should just give up.

The promise that we are given in Christ is that there is a proper ending. After all this hard work and after all the suffering we deal with, we are not going to be disappointed by what Jesus does with the end of time. We’re used to being disappointed, we’re used to being lied to, but Christ is the truth and so when we’re told that at the end of all things everything will be coming together perfectly we have to believe it. Yes, now it’s hard, and yes we need to do things to take care of ourselves – go to therapy, take your meds, talk to the folks around you about what’s going on in your heart, because you need to do that! And pray, pray, pray.

We do all of that and we put the work into making ourselves right on this side of eternity because we have the assurance that there is another side to eternity at all. This other side of eternity is much better than this one, in fact it is the perfect and proper ending to the chaos of this one.

We hold in our hands the most important truth there has ever been. Not just that God loves this universe, loves every person in it, but that God came to be a part of it. To fix it so that it could have an ending different than what it was writing for itself. There is hope for you and for me and for everything in this universe, we only have to participate in what God is doing and be willing to tell people that good news. Because the thing we’re trying to do, even as much as it is saving souls and redeeming sinners (of which we are all good company I’ll remind you,) is to bring hope to the hopeless.

In a world that is purely material, in which entropy will always create the least energetic outcome, there’s always going to be the heat death of the universe, the rise and fall of nations, and ultimately not a single source of hope. We people of God tell a different story, one that has the proper ending, let us share it and let us believe it. Things are not good now, they will get worse.  We can go through our entire life with things going wrong, but if you have faith in Christ and you seek to live in peace with one another, doing all your part to make sure this world is better than it is now… The next world is guaranteed, and it will be better. You, dear people of God, are blessed with the knowledge of God’s true story.  You can tell it. When you tell it make sure the ending is the right one. – Amen

Sermon 05/11/2025 – Jesus’s Messy Chanukah

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Gospel Lesson                                                                 John 10:22-30

At that time the Festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me, but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, in regard to what he has given me, is greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”         

Sermon Text

Every family, I believe, has some way to find each other in a crowd. My father has a very specific cough. I remember once I was at the state capital, for the Golden Horseshoe (humble brag,) and my mother and I could not find my dad and step-mom anywhere. Then, far away from us we hear that telltale cough, rising up across the crowd. We found him within the next five or so minutes. My mother has a very specific whistle, and when I hear it go, low and then very high, I know two things – I better hurry to where she is and exactly where she is.

Those little identifies, the things that mark us as connected. We do not have as many of them as we used to. We are a paranoid culture, we are less concerned with finding people we can relate to and more concerned with finding out if we do not agree with people. In the book of Judges, there is a story of Ephraimites and Gideonites. The Ephraimites are defeated in battle and try to flee across the Jordan river. The Gideonites are unable to determine who is an Ephraimite or a Gideonite just from looking from them. So they came up with a test, “See how they pronounce Shibboleth.” We don’t know what the difference in pronunciation would be, but it was something significant. It is like asking people to pronounce “Appalachia,” to see whether they’re from one corner of the mountain range or the other or seeing if they call a group of people, “y’all,” or “y’inz.”

In our social life, we do not look anymore for commonalities for productive reasons – but to bolster our own worldview and comfort. We mention off handedly political ideas and gauge the response of the people around us. We mention movies or controversies to see if people are “on our side,” and only after we are absolutely sure that we are in a place of uncritical normalization of our own ideas, do we allow ourselves to let out a deep breath, and tolerate the existence of the people we have proven aren’t “one of those people.”

I do not want to sound like I am oblivious to the fact that there are folks who need this sort of confirmation of safety. There are many reasons why you, especially when moving into a new area, need to check that you are in a safe place. You want to be sure that no one opposes your existence, believes you do not exist, or generally hates you out of principle. That I get. However, we then sequester ourselves further and further until we are starved for any real connection. If we define our community only by the lack of people who disagree with us, then we will never find a group of people we can truly belong to. You cannot build a community off of a negative principle – e.g. not being “one of those,” and expect anything good or productive to come of it.

In Jesus’s time, like ours, there were a great many sects and political parties to align oneself with. Are you a moral pillar of the community, more focused on daily goodness than strict doctrinal correctness? Then you would be a pharisee. Is worship more important than anything and the Bible limited and literal? The a Sadducee will make you feel right at home. What if your more political? The sicari are willing to kill for their ideas. Zealots, Essenes, Herodians, Hellenists, and so many more were all around.

These were the kind of folk who tracked Jesus down one day in Jerusalem. Jesus was celebrating “the Festival of the Dedication,” a commemoration of when the Maccabees won Judean independence from the Seleucid empire. The feast, and the associated miracle of oil lasting for eight days, would evolve over the next few hundred years to be what we now call “Chanukah.” In Jesus’s time there would not be dreidels or menorah, at least not the same kind of menorah used today, but the festival still celebrating God delivering the Judeans and liberating the temple from Hellenistic impurity.

Jesus, going to celebrate this moment that united his people, found that there were people interested in learning if he was the messiah, the ultimate hero of God’s people. Some did so out of genuine curiosity, but later context tells us the full scope of the questioning. After Jesus gives his answer, some in the crowd turn on him, because Jesus identified himself as one with the Father. This statement of Jesus’s divinity angered some of those in the crowd, Jesus failed to provide the right answer. He said “shibboleth,” in a way that identified him as the enemy in their eyes.

Yet, Jesus’s answer is confirmed in their rejection. “You do not believe me, because you are not my Father’s sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them.” For the people who know Christ, and whom Christ knows, then the truth of Christ’s word is self-evident. We hear Jesus, and we know that Jesus is the one who gives us life. When we hear those words, when we are truly revived in our soul – that is when we are able to fully live – only when we accept the truth of Christ and, more than that, accept that we are part of Christ’s flock.

What I cannot stand about the Church is that we are so prone to factions. We want pastors who preach exactly as we agree with and denominations that have no rough edges. We want to come into Church and get exactly what we wanted and we want to go home and go one social media and be told exactly what we already believe to be true about the world and be perfectly content to live and die in a bubble of homogeneity. We do not desire the true communion of God’s Church. We do not desire to see people of all races, nations, and creeds, gathered in the same flock. We want to create for ourselves criteria that define God’s people as nearly identical to us, and then to apply that cookie cutter definition to everyone else.

Again, there is room for discernment in find the right group of people. Churches exist that do more harm than good, and there are social groups that no one has any right being in or associating with. The problem is that we have defined our opposition to people so well, that we cannot find our commonalities. When we all hear the sound of our Shepherd, we should be able to move toward him in, even approximately the same direction. Yet we pull and kick and beat each other, just to go our own way, just to destroy whatever unity there ought to be in Christ.

I believe that the Church can find a new way of being – one that sees that “those who are not against us are for us.”[1] However, it takes a mortification on our part. We have to let go of some of those code words we listen for, to some of those indicators of one thing or another that let us make immediate judgments of who is “in,” and who is “out.” Really, unless something indicates malice or hatred – people yelling slurs or putting white supremacist or other hate signs on their body or property, abusing other people, generally causing trouble etc. – we should at least try to relate to one another on a deeper level.

When we get to Heaven, we will find people there we do not expect. I know I will. Even as hard as I try to maintain hope for all souls and an equality of grace in all I do, I have written people off that God has not. There are people who, when they hear the call of God, will make their way to the throne of grace and receive it in full. I do not believe they will be hateful people, hate cannot live alongside Christ nor can anger cohabitate with the Gospel. Yet, they may be people I cannot relate to and maybe, worst of all, who I disagree with.

If we truly believe that we are made Christians by our answering of Jesus’s call, then we need to stop coming up with other things a Christian “must be.” Because, if you read this book, really read it and try to understand it, there is much more latitude and grace than definitions and strictures. Let us listen close for the call of our shepherd, and not focus so much on the shibboleths we have prepared for war. – Amen.

[1] Mark 9:38-41