Troubled Hearts -- Fifth Sunday of Easter

John 14:1-14

May 3, 2026

 

            I’m going to start my sermon today doing something that I have never done before. And that is not exaggeration on my part. I’m starting today’s sermon by asking you all a question. This is not rhetorical. I hope that some of you will consider giving me an answer. It’s your turn to talk during the sermon.

            What troubles your hearts?

            I realize that I am putting you on the spot, so to give you some time to think about this, I will tell you what troubles my heart. As a mom, I worry about our kids. Even though they are all adults, I still worry. I worried when they were little, and that worry has only grown as they have. But I also worry about the world’s children. It is unfathomable to me how many children suffer needlessly, and to me it is unconscionable. It is unconscionable to me that adults will terrorize children to terrorize adults. And it is not just children in war zones. We cannot deny that in our own country, in our own neighborhoods there are children who are suffering, who are hungry, who do not know from one day to the next what their life will look like. This reality troubles my heart. It hurts my heart. It breaks my heart.

            So what about you? (long pause to let folks answer)

            Again, I know I’ve put all of you on the spot. If you didn’t want to speak up, that’s okay. But I encourage you to think about this question and consider letting me know later. I do want to know what troubles your heart.

            Troubled hearts begin our passage this morning. In verse 1, Jesus encourages the disciples not to have troubled hearts. But why would the disciples’ hearts be troubled in the first place? The answer to this goes back to the beginning of chapter 13. Chapter 13 is where we find our story for Maundy Thursday every year. In this chapter, Jesus shares a final meal with his disciples. At this meal, he washes the disciples’ feet, and that includes the feet of Judas. Jesus, who knows what Judas is about to do, sends him out to get it over with. Judas does just that. He leaves the table, the community to betray Jesus. Jesus gives those remaining his new commandment to love one another as he has loved them, through service and acts of compassion and kindness. And Jesus predicts Peter’s denial of him even as Jesus is preparing to be crucified. And now it looks as though everything that Jesus has told them would come to pass is coming to pass.

            It is no surprise then that the disciples’ hearts are troubled. My heart would be troubled as well. Chapters 13 through 17 of John’s gospel are known in theological terms as The Farewell Discourse. Jesus is telling his closest followers goodbye. He tells them that he is going to his Father’s house, a house that is roomy and spacious and is large enough for all of them. But that does not seem to register, because even though he has been preparing them for this moment, now that the moment is here, they are struggling to come to grips with what is about to happen. Jesus is leaving them. Jesus is leaving them.

            This is John’s gospel, and typically the disciples as portrayed by John are not quite as clueless as they are in the other three. But in this critical moment, they cannot see beyond their own fears and anxieties. They cannot see beyond their own troubled hearts.

            Thomas says to Jesus,

            “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

            And Jesus responds,

            “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

            If they know Jesus, and they do know Jesus, then they also know God. But Philip wants more.

            “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”

            But Jesus, with infinite patience, says,

            “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

            In other words, believe me. Trust me. Believe and trust in God and believe and trust also in me. You have been with me all this time. You have witnessed my healings; you have heard my teaching and preaching. We have created a relationship that goes beyond teacher and students. We now call each other friends. I have shown you what it is to love one another and to love this world. So, trust me. Believe me.

            But belief and trust, even when, maybe especially when, it comes to faith, can be challenging. And the disciples are clearly challenged by Jesus’s words and by everything that Jesus has told them lies ahead for him. We believe what we can see, and we trust what we know. And even though the disciples have experienced Jesus up close and personal, they are struggling to believe. If they struggled to trust, than it’s no wonder that we do.

            I think our very human trust issues have led to this passage being traditionally interpreted as exclusionary and narrow. When it comes to Jesus, you are either in or you are out. He said he was the gate after all. That must mean that the gate is about closing off people rather than opening. I don’t really want this sermon to wander off into universalism, but I do wonder if there is more to what Jesus is saying to them than what we have previously considered.

            When Jesus says he is the way, is he speaking only about a road or a path? Or is he also speaking about behavior, how we live and act and be in the world? As I said, in the previous verses he showed the disciples what he meant by loving, and that was to wash their feet. To love was to serve, to love was to do for others. Love was about being and acting with kindness and compassion and being willing to serve rather than expect service. And the truth and the life? They are connected to the way as well. The more we love, the more we see that love is at the heart of God’s creation and God’s relationship with us and the world, then the more fully we understand the truth that Jesus spoke of. And when we can more fully love, aren’t we more fully living?

The more we see that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, our relationship with him becomes deeper and stronger. And the more our relationship with him deepens, the more our relationship with others deepens. The deeper the relationship, the deeper the trust.

            There is another key point in verse 1 that is not clear in our English translations. In English, we read, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” The word hearts is translated in the plural, just as we assume the your is plural. But in Greek, it is only the your that is plural. The word for heart is singular. Your is plural. But heart is singular. What does that indicate? Jesus was speaking to all the disciples about their one heart, their collective heart. Clearly, this is not literal. We all have our own physiological hearts, but in this context, Jesus is speaking about their collective heart in community, in relationship. Do not let your collective heart be troubled. You are in this together, just as we have been in this together. So, believe me.

            At the beginning of this sermon, I asked you to share what troubles your hearts. And whether you answered out loud or not, you may have been thinking about your individual troubles; your individual concerns and worries. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all do it. But the truth is, we come together in this place because we are a community together. We share a heart. So my troubles are your troubles and your troubles are my troubles. My joy is your joy and your joy is mine. Jesus came to be in relationship with others, with us. But those relationships were built and deepened in community. They were not isolated. They were not about one individual above another. They were in community. When Jesus forgives Peter for his denial at the end of John’s gospel, he also forgives him in community. Peter, if you love me, feed my sheep.

            The thing is, our faith is not meant to be privatized. It’s not just about my relationship with Jesus or your relationship with Jesus. Our faith deepens and grows and flourishes in the communion of the body of Christ. Yesterday at the presbytery meeting, we were reminded by a speaker that the church is not an organization, it is an organism. It is a living thing. This is true for congregations and this is true for the Church with a capital C. We are part of the living body of Christ in this world. Living organisms exist in relationship, in community. We are in community. We bear a collective heart.

            It seems to me that if we see each other and our community and this world as sharing one heart, that changes everything. There is no longer an “us” and there is no longer a “them.” Our hearts break together and our hearts rejoice together too.

            Jesus told the disciples that God’s house, God’s heart was roomy and generous and big enough for all. May our hearts, our heart, be as big as God’s. May our hearts, our heart, expand beyond these walls, beyond the boundaries of town or state or country, to share the troubles and the joys of all God’s children.

            And let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

            Amen.

 

                       

The Gate to Abundance -- Fourth Sunday in Easter

John 10:1-10

April 26, 2026

 

            I have a pair of pajama bottoms that were my dad’s. They’re getting very old, very worn, and they are too big for me. I should get rid of them. I was looking at them the other day and thought, “I should get rid of these.” But they were some of the pajamas that he wore when he went into nursing care for the last time, so there is a label in them that says William Busse. And even though they are wearing out, and could be at risk of falling apart spontaneously, I folded them up and put them back into the dresser because I just couldn’t bear to get rid of them. Even though I know that they are just pj’s, they were my dad’s pjs and I just can’t bear to get rid of them yet. So, I’m going to hang onto them for a while longer.

            Despite what I just told you about my dad’s pj’s, I can be pretty ruthless when it comes to clearing things out. If I buy new clothes, I get rid of some old ones. If I have things I never use, they have got to go. Too much clutter overwhelms me and I feel like I am constantly surrounded by it, so, I am always trying to clear it, decrease it, and minimize it – whatever I can do. But what stops me in these efforts are the sentimental things: my dad’s pajama bottoms, my kids’ favorite books from when they were little, and my favorite wooden spoon of my mom’s which has gotten warped. I don’t like clutter, and there are times when I think I should embrace a minimalist lifestyle, but then there are these sentimental things that I just can’t get rid of. I have sentimentality in abundance.

            Before they died, my parents did their best to downsize. They got rid of furniture, dishes, clothes, so many things they accumulated over almost 70 years of marriage. But the remainder of my mom’s things are still filling up my brother’s house, and although I have taken as much of her stuff as I can, I know there is more that we could get rid of. Like my parents, whenever I embark on a move, I try to downsize. When we moved from Oklahoma to Tennessee, I got rid of stuff. I donated things. I sold some things. I did the same when we moved from Spring Hill to Columbia. I donated things. I sold some things. But we still have an abundance of stuff. And I know that as quickly as I get rid of old stuff, new stuff will come along to take its place. It’s just a lot of stuff.

            Why do we have such a preponderance of stuff? Is it because we live in a consumer driven society? Is it because we are bombarded with messages that stuff will make us happy? Is it because we fear scarcity? One concrete way of dealing with that fear, the fear that we just don’t have enough, is by having stuff. And our abundance of stuff is not just a problem for us. It’s a problem for the planet. With all the stuff we accumulate, we also throw a great deal of stuff away. Landfills are overflowing. Garbage rides the current of the oceans. With the multitude of stuff we accumulate in our daily lives, it is easy to become confused with what abundance is and what abundance is not. This is true especially considering the words we hear from Jesus in the last verse of our passage from John’s gospel.

            “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

            Jesus was an itinerant prophet-preacher with no permanent address. He warned his would-be followers that if they wanted to follow him they must understand that while even animals have places of their own to rest, he did not. If they followed him, they would need to be prepared for that reality. So, when Jesus speaks of giving abundant life, I doubt he was talking about a life that had a plethora of possessions. Although let’s be honest, the prosperity gospel is alive and well in our culture. There are plenty of preachers, big name preachers, who offer the message of the prosperity gospel week after week. If you just believe hard enough, if you just cling to your Bible tightly enough, you will be blessed with plenty. Though that plenty is not always specified, the underlying message of the prosperity gospel is that plenty is an abundance of the material. Nice houses, nice cars, nice stuff equals nice lives.

            But I don’t think that’s what Jesus is referring to when he speaks of abundance. To get to the heart of abundance as Jesus preached it, we must look back to chapter 9, to the story that precedes this one. It is the story we read in Lent; the story of the man born blind.

            A man is born blind. Jesus heals him then leaves the scene. While Jesus is absent, the man is repeatedly interrogated by the religious authorities. You would think that when someone is healed of his life-long blindness, there would be rejoicing and celebration. Yet instead of joy, the people only feel fear. So the result of this miraculous healing, this giving of sight, is that the man is cast out of the synagogue. He is cast out of the community.

            Jesus tells the religious authorities that just because they can physically see doesn’t mean that they can see the holy in their midst. They may have sight, but they are still blind. He follows these words with the words we read in this passage. In verse 7, Jesus says,

            “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate.”

            I am the gate. This Sunday in Eastertide is commonly known as Good Shepherd Sunday, but in these verses, Jesus doesn’t talk about being the shepherd. Jesus talks about being the gate. In the ancient Near East, a sheepfold could be a communal enclosure—stone walls with a single gate, a single opening—where multiple flocks stayed overnight. A doorkeeper or gatekeeper would guard the entrance. In the morning, each shepherd would come, call his sheep, and lead them out. Sheep are not guided by force so much as by trust. They learn a voice. They remember the person the voice belongs to. They follow that person.

Jesus is telling those would listen that he is the gate, the entrance to green pastures. He is the gate and the shepherd. The sheep who know him hear his voice and with trust follow through the gate. Jesus is the gate and it is through him that we are led to abundant life. Jesus is the gate. So, if we want abundant life, if we want salvation, we must go through the gate.

None of this is surprising. I doubt that the idea that salvation comes through Jesus is news to any of us. But I think the question that is begged from this passage is what does this abundant life look like? What does salvation look like? When Jesus said that he came so that we might have life and have it abundantly, to what and when was he referring?

Let’s go back to the story of the man born blind. Do we think his salvation came only after he died? Do we think that he finally experienced abundance when he left this life and went to the next? Or did salvation come to him in the form of sight? Think about it. He went from a life of darkness, a life of begging just to survive, to a life of sight! Would there be anything more abundant, more salvific for a person born blind at that time to receive sight? With sight came the ability to provide for himself, to envision – no pun intended – a new way of living and being. With the giving of sight, that man was given a life he had never had before. He was given an abundance of new life! He was given sight. That was his salvation.

It seems to me that this abundant life, even salvation, is not something that is reserved for a future existence. Jesus came to give abundant life now. This is not a promise of prosperity. It is not about stuff. It is about abundance. It is about salvation in the here and now. If Jesus meets us where we are, then maybe salvation does as well. If we are lost, then salvation comes in being found. If we are hopeless, then salvation comes when we realize that reasons to be hopeful abound. Jesus came so that we might have abundant lives, saved lives right now.

But do we live lives that are abundant? Do we believe that salvation is ours in the moment? Are we living lives that are filled with an abundance of joy, hope, and love? Are we living abundant lives where we share that abundance with others? Because if we are looking at abundance through the lens of Jesus, then we know that abundance is not stuff that can be accumulated. Abundance is about celebrating that we have enough at our table, then making a bigger table so we can share with others. Abundance is about picking up our cloths and washing the feet of the least of these. Abundance is about knocking down fences and recognizing that every other child of God is our neighbor.

Are we living those abundant lives? Or are we living small lives? Do we live more out of a fear of scarcity, a fear of being without rather than trusting that we will have enough? I think trust is the key. Trust is at the heart of living an abundant life. If we don’t trust that we will have enough to live, to survive, than it is downright hard to be abundantly generous. If we don’t trust that we are worthy of love, then loving others abundantly is impossible. Without trust we cannot hope. Without trust we cannot fully love. Without trust we cannot fully live. Living an expansive, hopeful, loving, joyful, abundant life requires trust.

There is a beautiful scene in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding where Toula, the main character, is sitting on her bed looking unhappy. She is about to be married to the man she loves, but this man is an exenno – a stranger, a non-Greek. Her mother comes in and asks her what is wrong, and Toula asks her mother if her impending marriage is hurting her father. Her mother tells Toula a story about her young life in Greece.

In my village there were many wars. There were many occupiers and they all left a mess. Her mother would tell her that they were lucky, lucky to be alive. But she would think, lucky? How is it lucky when people tell us where we can live and what we can eat? But when she saw Toula and her sister and brother, she knew why they came to America. They came to America so that they could live. She told Toula, “I gave you life so you could live it.”

I gave you life so you could live it.   

Jesus is the gate to abundant life. But an abundant life is not about perfection or something we can only see in the far distance. Abundant life is a full life – full of joy and full of love and full of the wonder and the messiness that comes with being human. An abundant life is a life that grows bigger not smaller, that trusts thoroughly not cowers in fear. An abundant life is what God created us for, what Jesus lived and died and rose again for, and it is what the Holy Spirit beckons us toward. So let us trust enough to go through that gate. Let’s trust the voice of Jesus calling us. Let’s go through that gate to abundance.

Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

Heart Burn -- Third Sunday of Easter

Luke 24:13:35

April 19, 2026

 

            When I was little, I was a terrible sleeper. If I fell asleep too late in the day, even for just a few minutes, I would be up and going long past midnight. So, to try and avoid this, my older sister and brother were charged with keeping me awake at any cost. This was especially true in the summer when I had been out playing, swimming, and just generally being physically active all day long. The dangerous time for me to fall asleep came in those moments when Mom was getting dinner on the table, and we would be in the den watching tv. I would relax, get comfortable, and my eyes would start to close. When my sister or brother noticed my eyelids drooping, they would say, “Amy, don’t go to sleep! Amy! Amy!”

            If warning me verbally didn’t work, then they would resort to other methods. One of those methods was to take my hands and hit me with them. And while they were doing this, they would say, “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”

            Now, I need to say that the hitting wasn’t hard. I wasn’t left with bruises. But I still hated it! I hated it with a passion. It was annoying. I didn’t like the feeling of not being able to control my own arms and hands. And I hated hearing, “Stop hitting yourself!” But it did the trick. I was awake and I would stay awake no matter what, because I did not want them to do that.

            Flash forward to many years later when I was in seminary. I was playing a lot of basketball with the youth group I worked with, and I strained some muscles. I was a student and I was broke, so I didn’t want to spend the money to go to the doctor. The spouse of one of my theology professors was a physical and massage therapist and she invited me to come see her, free of charge. So I did. When I was there, she was checking me out, and she went to lift one of my arms. Without knowing that I did this, I flinched and resisted her picking up my arm. She stopped and she asked me,

“When you were little, did you people take you by the arm and make you go places you didn’t want to go?”

And without pausing for breath or thought, I responded,

“No, but they used to take my hands and hit me with them.”

I want to pause here and say that my sister hates when I tell this story. But if my sister and brother are watching this, or read this later, please know that I know you were just doing what mom told you to do, which was to keep me awake. I love you both very much. It’s all good.

I tell you this story because I see it as an example of how our bodies remember things that our minds may not. My siblings were not trying to traumatize me when they played the Stop Hitting Yourself game. They were just trying to keep me from falling asleep. But I clearly hated it so much that years later when a therapist tried to gently move my arm, I unconsciously flinched. When that happened, I wasn’t thinking about that game or that time in my life but my body remembered.

There is research being done that suggests that our bodies are often way ahead of our conscious minds. Books such as The Body Keeps the Score and My Grandmother’s Hands detail how we carry the traumas we endure physically as well as mentally and emotionally. Dealing with trauma requires dealing with the physical aspect as well. But I suspect, I hope, that it is not just trauma that we carry in our bodies but also what is good and loving as well. When I look at the apron my mother wore every Christmas, my body responds to that loving memory as well as my mind. I feel her wearing that apron as well as remembering her in it. It is muscle memory as well as conscious thought.

Every time I read this story from Luke’s gospel, I wonder at what the disciples mean when they say, “Were not our hearts burning within us?” Is it a poetic turn of phrase only, or is ti a reference to a physical sensation, a muscle memory, a heart burn of emotion?

Surely these two disciples, Cleopas and his friend, were not describing the heartburn that results from a spicy meal or too much caffeine. No, they were describing something else that was happening within them as they walked along the road to Emmaus with this stranger.

While our calendar tells us that Easter happened three weeks ago, in the biblical timeline, our story takes place later the same day as the discovery of the empty tomb. It is later the same day that the women returned from the tomb with a fantastical tale of meeting two men in dazzling clothes who told them that Jesus was resurrected. Although Cleopas and the other disciple are not part of the twelve disciples, they must have been part of the larger circle of people who followed and worked with Jesus because they heard the women’s news, along with the others. But the disciples dismissed the women’s good news as an “idle tale”. And these two, Cleopas and the other guy, must have accepted the disciples’ interpretation because they are burdened with sorrow and disappointment at the horrific death of their beloved rabbi. The women’s good news has not broken through.

So Cleopas and his friend were leaving Jerusalem and heading seven miles down the road to Emmaus. While they were walking and talking about all that had happened, a stranger joined them on the way. He asked what they were discussing, and with shock and grief they told him that he must be the only person around who had not heard about the terrible crucifixion of their teacher and leader, Jesus of Nazareth.

“We had hoped,” they told him, “that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

We had hoped. I did some brushing up on my grammar, specifically the tenses, to dig into these three words. Grammatically, this sentence is written and spoken in the past perfect tense. I don’t want to do too deep a dive into grammatic details of the past perfect tense because this is not a grammar lesson. But for the purposes of this sermon, the simplest definition is that past perfect tense describes an action that was completed before another one took place. We had hoped that he was the Messiah, the one to redeem Israel, but he must not have been. We had hoped that Jesus would change everything, but he didn't. We had hoped that he truly was the Son of God and that all this talk about death was a mistake, but it wasn't. He died anyway. We had hoped, but Jesus died anyway.

As far as these disciples could see or understand, everything was lost. Their dreams and belief that God would rescue them, that God's long-promised Messiah would free them from occupation -- those dreams were dead, done. Jesus died and so did their hope. We had hoped. 

            We had hoped. It is easy to skip over these words. It is easy to breeze past what they convey. I know that as many times as I've read and preached this story, I haven't given those three words much attention. Yet I think that moving past them too quickly is not only problematic, but it also reflects what we too often do in our daily lives. We want to move past our broken hearts, our grief.  We need to get over it, move on, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and get back to life. We express those sentiments to others. We tell them to ourselves.  Yet, I don't think there is any way that we can get around the fact that the disciples have broken hearts. Their hopes and their dreams for a different outcome for Israel have been disappointed.  They have broken hearts. They had hoped. 

            Even though we may attempt to ignore or quickly dismiss them, we too have broken hearts. We too have hopes that aren't realized. How many times have we heard someone say as they leave a funeral, “we had hoped that she would recover?” Or, we had hoped to make it to another anniversary. We had hoped that he would move past the depression. We had hoped that this time the rehab would work. We had hoped that he would have found a job by now. We had hoped. We had hoped. We had hoped.    

            There is no age limit for loss or broken hearts or disappointed hopes. None of us are immune. The only way to move through life without a broken heart or a dead dream is to live without love or relationship. That's not living, though is it? So it seems to me that every one of us comes here today with some lost hope. Every one of us is here with a disappointment. Every one of us sitting in this sanctuary could probably tell a story that begins with the words, "We had hoped." 

            Maybe that’s why these two had hearts that burned the whole time Jesus was with them. Maybe that’s why their hearts were burning when he told them once again what the scriptures about the risen Christ meant, how the whole arc of the story of God and God’s people led to this moment. Maybe their hearts were burning because they were broken, because they were filled to the brim with loss and grief and pain. But maybe they were also burning because their hearts recognized what their minds could not yet grasp, what their eyes could not yet see. Jesus was risen. Jesus is risen. Their hopes were not lost or dead because he was not lost or dead.

            When the two convinced this stranger to stay with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it. Jesus would have done this at every meal he shared with them. So when Cleopas and the other disciple sat at table with the risen Christ like they had so many times before, when they heard his blessing, when they saw him break the bread, muscle memory kicked in. Their minds caught up with their bodies. Then their eyes were opened and they could see this stranger for who he really was. Perhaps their hearts were burning with joy and hope and exultation at the sight of him, but their minds had not yet caught up.

            Last week we heard that our faith is a living thing because our belief walks side by side with doubt. Doubt does not destroy faith; it is a part and parcel of a living faith. And today I think we understand a little more that our faith is not just a mental exercise. It is embodied. It does not reside in heart and not mind, nor does it live in our minds but not our hearts. It is both and. We live our faith in our bodies, in our muscle memory, in our hearts which burn even if we do not yet understand why. And what brings all this together? The breaking of bread, the breaking of bread that we experience around this table and at every table we share. The breaking of bread that is fundamental to our relationship with each and with God. Our faith grows and deepens in meals shared, in time spent, in prayers offered, in relationship. That is the good news of this story and every story. The risen Christ meets as we meet one another in relationship. The risen Christ meets us even if our eyes and our minds don’t yet recognize him. Our faith, our living faith, exists here – in our minds, and here – in our hearts, and here – in our arms and legs and feet. Our faith is what we believe, our faith is what we feel and experience, and our faith is what we do.

            Our hearts burn with faith, our muscles remember, even if we do not yet see or understand. Our hearts are burning and that is good news, that is good news indeed. Thanks be to God.

            Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia!”

            Amen.