😳

This is a first for me. I’ve never named a sermon using an emoji. This is also the shortest sermon title I’ve ever had. The previous record I recall was by the first pastor I served with in Georgia. He named a sermon “GPS,” and funnily enough, the church secretary transposed the letters to “GSP,” so his shortest title was also misspelled! So it goes. 

Why an emoji today? Well, I use emoji to express feelings in texts, and as I read this week’s verses, this is how I felt. Surprised. Shocked. Now, I’ve read these texts before, but particularly after all of the work we’ve been doing around here about kindness, these texts are certainly jarring. 

So, today’s sermon is responding to the shocked feeling I had as I engaged with these scriptures — particularly Jesus’ words in Matthew. As I was trying to add the emoji to the sermon title in my manuscript, I discovered that Pages now uses Apple Intelligence to create its own images, and I went down a rabbit hole for about fifteen minutes, where AI so quickly turned me into an emoji. I tried to make it look a little less excited, but failed. Eventually, I figured I needed to actually write the sermon, so I gave up on trying to improve it. This is AI Troy going bug-eyed and gape-mouthed as I wrestled with Jesus’ challenging words. 

Matthew’s gospel has five extended speeches by Jesus. The first is the Sermon on the Mount. This is the second, and it’s a speech meant to prepare his disciples — his learners — to be sent in mission. They’re going to bring the good news to the wider world. He tells them to announce that “the kingdom of heaven has come near. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers.” This work is disruptive and transformative. But Jesus spends much of this speech telling his disciples that this is going to be hard and that they will face rejection. 

Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Anyone have that verse cross-stitched in your house? 

Then he says some things that fly in the face of what we now call family values. He’s come to set son against father, daughter against mother. These are hard words to swallow, aren’t they?

One pastor shared about how his mother-in-law was a lifelong Christian. Now retired, she attended daily Mass at the Catholic Church. This passage, she insisted, is an example of Jesus going too far. He writes, “The Jesus that she knows comes to bring peace, not a sword. While she has spent enough time around that church to recognize the discord happens within the community of the faithful, her Jesus would never have encouraged such division in the midst of family.”

My response to these hard words is surprise. This woman’s is outright denial. Jesus is too kind and loving to say such hard things, isn’t he? If nothing else, these words would not cut the muster for a church growth strategy. At worst, however, they’ve offered license for people to behave badly in the name of Jesus. After all, in their understanding, if they’re rejected by others, that means they’re doing something right. (Before I go any further, let me be clear on this. Jesus is not giving any sort of license to justify bad behavior that leads to rejection. Sometimes rejection happens simply because you’re being a jerk, right?)

I’ve paired these startling words from Jesus with Paul’s bold commentary in Romans. It may not be as harsh-sounding as what Jesus has to say, but it is so, so bold. As people came to know about God’s graciousness and that it is grace alone that restores relationship to God, they began to ask the obvious question: If grace is that great, wouldn’t it make sense to do even worse things so that grace is greater? 

Absurd as that reasoning sounds, we’ve all entertained it at some point. Imagine your child is wandering around the kitchen with a glass of milk. You see him being a bit careless with it. As you’re thinking about saying something to him, you watch the glass pitch forward, spilling milk everywhere. The tears start to form because he knows he’s messed up. But you do well. You don’t yell. You simply grab some paper towels and cleaner and assure him that it’s alright. 

After you’ve cleaned it up, you want to give this all a positive spin. “Look!” you say. “I needed to clean the floor anyway, and now it’s sparkling!” Picking up on your positivity, your son offers, “Well, maybe I should spill things more often!” 

Grace abounds where mistakes happen, right? 

Paul’s answer to this is emphatic. “By no means!” his pen shouts at us. Mē genoito in Greek. In other words, Paul is declaring, “No way! Uh uh! Don’t even think about it.” In the rest of this section Paul then uses extreme language to make his case. “How can we who died to sin go on living in it?” He then makes a connection between baptism and death. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” 

When we have baptisms here I’ll sometimes use that very language. It’s biblical, but it’s jarring, particularly when there are smiling parents and an adorable baby swaddled in her mother’s arms. But Paul’s language is true for all baptized. We die to ourselves in baptism and come alive in Christ. The old way of life — a life separated from the grace of God — is dead, and the new way is now guiding our steps. 

It’s an astonishing truth. The longer I consider it, the more I come back to that shocked emoji. It’s eyebrow raising. It’s difficult. It’s beautiful. Taken seriously, it creates the possibility for everything in our lives to be revolutionized. 

But here’s something I want us to hold onto. Paul’s words are true, but they are rooted in the radical nature of grace, not our efforts. Sure, we shouldn’t keep on sinning because that makes grace all the more valuable, but also we shouldn’t turn the extremes of this passage into some sort of works-based effort on our part. Grace would be unnecessary if we could earn God’s favor on our own. Even for those who’ve been in the church for a long time this is something we continually wrestle with. Imagine how those not rooted in the church perceive this message. 

This brings me back to Jesus’ hard words about how the gospel will divide and set family against family. Conviction can so easily divide, right? Let’s keep in mind that disciples are learners. They’re students of Jesus. They’re trying to learn how to live their lives the way that Jesus would if he were living them, to paraphrase Dallas Willard. 

I know this congregation has a ton of educators in it. As teachers try to grow their students to be better at writing or economics or math, they leave space for mistakes, right? Sure, there occasionally are students who get everything right, but even the best of students miss an assignment or do not understand a concept. So they don’t get a perfect grade, but they can still pass. And they can still learn and improve. 

Jesus is sending his disciples — like he sends us — into a world that is not always receptive to the gospel, even if we somehow presented it and lived it perfectly (which we don’t). I won’t get into all the ways Christians get it wrong today, but I will point out that even those closest to Jesus were far from perfect. Their learning was incomplete, and their application of it would have caused others to take offense. In Luke 9, Jesus and his disciples are rejected in a Samaritan village. Rather than simply accepting this, James and John ask, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” 

Jesus’ response? He turned and rebuked them. I wonder how long he stared at them in frustration and even anger. All this time they were walking with him, learning from him, and what creeps in? Their misunderstandings and prejudice. 

Let’s get real. The gospel does divide because it ultimately demands a decision about whether a person will or will not receive it, but we are also so adept at missing the point that we can cause others to say the good news of Jesus Christ is not for them not because they think grace is silly but because they see our behavior and want nothing to do with Jesus. 

I think what Jesus is getting at here is that having convictions creates divisions — even when those convictions are right. What I’m also observing is that we’re good at attaching all sorts of extras onto the gospel that aren’t really essential to it. And so in our efforts to live the Jesus way, we repel others.

The way of Jesus is always the way of invitation to come closer. So, let’s not lose the forest for the trees in this. Just one chapter later Jesus says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

This is a passage about conflict, and I am learning to see how conflict can be an opportunity for growth and positive change. Let’s be real here: Very few of us enjoy conflict. (I know there a few folks who really relish it…but I’m not one of them!) Jesus isn’t saying that his work divides folks for the sake of separating them. Rather, he sees this as decisive, a moment where people embrace the conflict and then find a way forward toward Christ.

This church has had around 80 people go through the One Anothering curriculum published by The Colossian Forum. I spent some time with folks from the Colossian Forum just this past week, and a lot of their work focuses on how to embrace conflict on the way to growth. They view conflict as a catalyst for deeper formation into who Jesus is. Conflict brings to the surface our individual opinions and desires. What the healing work of Jesus does is transform those, refining them into what can bring life. Done well, conflict can transform hearts and minds and bring them closer to the heart of God. 

As we seek to follow Jesus, we recognize that the road will not always be easy. We know that not everyone will accept us the way God does. We know that there will be difficulty and even division along the way. Still, Jesus is inviting all of us to take his yoke and learn from him. 

One of those things we’ll learn is that, “True love doesn’t force someone to be something they cannot be — even as it keeps encouraging towards the good it seeks.” Still, “Love makes us courageous enough to be scared and to do it anyway.”

From time to time what we learn from Jesus may shock us. You might find yourself like me this week, where I spent much of my time wrestling with this sermon and trying to find my way deep into the heart of God but struggling to get there. Don’t let your shock discourage you. Take heart. Where Jesus is, there is peace. Together, we’ll learn the unforced rhythms of grace, even when we sometimes run headlong into things that challenge us towards new growth.