April 12, 2026 John 20:19–31 Scripture In A Time of Fear, Division, and Uncertainty

The Gospel tells us that the disciples are gathered behind locked doors “for fear.” Fear is the atmosphere of the room. Fear is the reason the doors are shut. Fear is what shapes their imagination of the future.

And then, without the doors opening, Jesus stands among them saying “Peace be with you.”

It is difficult to read this passage today without hearing echoes of our own fear and uncertainty framing so much of public life. Escalating geopolitical tensions, particularly the threat of military conflict with Iran and the resulting economic instability, have stirred global anxiety and shaken markets. 

Domestically, debates over public safety, youth unrest, and the balance between enforcement and care reveal a society unsure how to hold together its most vulnerable members. Politically, sharp divisions over budgets, governance, and national direction deepen a sense that we are living behind locked doors of mistrust and suspicion.

The disciples would understand this atmosphere.

They, too, were living in the aftermath of violence, disillusionment, and shattered expectations. The world they trusted collapsed at the cross, through brutal authority.  Hope was fragile. The community had scattered.

And so they locked the doors. Jesus does not wait for the disciples to become brave. He does not ask them to unlock the doors first. He enters as they are, fearful and confused.

This matters because our national assumption seems to be that fear must be mastered before peace can be known. That security must always come first. Regardless of cost certain nations nation must never be trusted with a nuclear weapon. We assume that strength must precede reconciliation. This also comes with the assumption that the side with strength holds moral high ground over its opponents.

The resurrection changes assumptions. Peace is not the reward for overcoming fear.
Peace is the gift given within fear. “Peace be with you” is not a calming slogan so much as a disruptive presence. It interrupts the logic of anxiety that dominates both ancient Jerusalem and modern America.

Jesus shows them his hands and his side. The risen Christ is not unmarked. Resurrection transforms violence. Jesus' wounds remain visible as testimonies of love that endured suffering.

In a time when our national life is marked by deep wounds, the temptation is either to deny wounds or weaponize them. But the Gospel offers a third way: To reveal wounds without letting them define the future. The body of Christ still bears scars, and yet speaks peace.

Thomas refuses secondhand faith. He wants to see. He wants to touch. He wants something real. Jesus does not reject him. This is crucial in a moment when many people are skeptical of the authority of institutions. When trust has eroded, doubt is not a failure; it is often a form of integrity. Thomas represents everyone who must say “I need something more than words.”

And Jesus responds not with condemnation, but with invitation.“Put your finger here.” The resurrection is not fragile. It can withstand scrutiny. It can meet us in our questions.

After speaking peace, Jesus says: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” This is the turning point where the disciples aren't just comforted, they are commissioned, rather than falling to the temptation either to retreat or to mirror the hostility of the world. Instead they are called to be people who have received peace even in systems shaped by fear.

Jesus breathes on them. And, like Creator's Easter service, this echoes Genesis, that breath of God that gives life. In the resurrection, a new creation begins through presence; through peace, and forgiveness.

Pastor Steve preached an astounding sermon on how important it was for us to bear witness to the Gospel's beloved story. He opened with the Artemis II Flyby story as a de facto Children's Sermon. He preached that we accept the news story as true even if we did not witness the event ourselves. 

We are not so different from those first disciples. We know the locked door, but Jesus is not stopped by locked doors. When we are fearful he forever sends Christians out with his assuring “Peace be with you.”

Sermon 

March 22, 2026 John 19:1–16a Participating In A Respectable Silence

In this week's reading, Soren Kierkegaard wrote the most frightening character in the Gospel story is not the mob. It is Pilate acting as the reasonable, respectable man.

The soldiers mock Jesus, pressing a crowned wreath of thorns into his head and draping him in a purple robe. They laugh and strike him. Violence is ugly, but it is at least honest. Brutality rarely pretends to be virtue. Then comes the quieter moment.

Pontius Pilate steps out before the crowd and says something astonishing: “I find no case against him.” Pilate knows the truth as he understands it, and John's gospel makes this unmistakably clear. He questions Jesus. He sees the absurdity of the accusations. He recognizes the envy and fear that animate the priests. He even tries, halfheartedly, to release him.

Yet knowing the truth is not the same as standing in it. Pilate hesitates, and the crowd grows louder. The accusations sharpen. The political pressure closes in. The priests speak the words that reveal the real fear beneath the moment: “If you release this man, you are no friend of Caesar.”

Suddenly, the question is no longer about justice but about consequences. Rather than refuse the crowd, or simply not act. Pilate chooses the path that history has repeated countless times: the path of respectable surrender. He simply allows the machinery of power to move forward.

This is the tragedy of the Passion: evil rarely triumphs through monsters alone. It triumphs through the cooperation of ordinary, respectable people who know better.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote that the crowd before Pilate is untruth, but the greater danger may perhaps be the individual who dissolves himself into the crowd so that he never has to bear responsibility for what he knows. Pilate represents this temptation by being cautious and politically prudent, and so he becomes the perfect instrument of injustice. He chooses safety.

Yet the Gospel reveals something terrifying: Like Peter in last week's scripture, seeking personal safety becomes betrayal. Pilate sits on the judgment seat to judge Jesus. But in the strange reversal that runs through John’s Gospel, Pilate is being revealed. The one who claims authority is shown to be captive to the fragile stability of his position.

The truth stands before him, bruised and silent. Pilate lets Christ be crucified rather than insisting on his judgment. The question this passage asks must make every reader uncomfortable because it is so close to home. Most of us will not be asked to condemn an innocent man to death, but we will face smaller moments that carry the same shape. What is essentially at stake in these "smaller moments" is rarely clear. We don't have an omniscient narrator to give us a clue as to which way is right,

In those moments, we stand in the shadow of where Pilate stood. The Gospel does not ask whether we recognize the truth. Pilate does recognize innocence as truth. Pilate's dilemma for us would be to move forward with something we don't feel is right because it is easy to follow majority rules. The question actually is whether we will stand with innocence when that standing becomes costly.

For the Passion reveals today's painful paradox: that the greatest crimes in history can often required only one thing from us. 

Our silence.

Pastor Emillie's sermon 

March 15 , 2026 John 18:28-40 The Hidden Roots of a Different Kind of Kingdom

Morning has come, but it is not the kind of morning that brings light.

Jesus is led from the house of Caiaphas to the Roman governor’s headquarters. The priests stop at the entrance. They will not enter the building because doing so would make them ritually unclean before Passover. They remain outside, careful to preserve their purity, while the One who is truly pure is handed over to be killed.

The Gospel reveals the tragic irony: those guarding religious purity stand outside the truth.

Inside, there is Pontius Pilate, the representative of imperial power. Pilate understands kingdoms. Rome’s authority rests on legions, taxes, surveillance, and fear. Every throne Pilate has ever known is secured by violence. In the world Pilate inhabits, a king is someone who can command death.

Pilate asks the question that makes sense in his world: “Are you the King of the Jews?

Jesus answers in an unsettling way: “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my servants would be fighting…”

Two kingdoms stand starkly face to face. One kingdom is built on force. It sustains itself through fear and death, the kingdom of Rome. This stands for every system that believes power must be protected at all costs, too.

The other kingdom stands before Pilate in chains. Jesus’ kingdom has no soldiers, yet it will not be defeated. Pilate cannot understand this Jesus' power. No governor could. The logic of empire cannot comprehend the authority of sacrificial love. Pilate presses him again: “So you are a king?”

Jesus answers: “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

This is the heart of Christ’s kingdom: truth. Pilate’s famous reply echoes across the centuries: “What is truth?”

It is not really a philosophical question. It is the weary skepticism of someone who has lived too long within power systems. Pilate has seen truth bent to serve politics and loyalty. For him, truth is mere convenience and is decidedly negotiable.

The tragedy is that Truth itself is standing in front of him. In the Gospel of John, Jesus has already said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Pilate searches for truth while questioning the One who is truth. The deeper drama of the passage is revealed. The trial is not really about Jesus. It is about us. Humanity stands before the truth and must decide whether it will recognize it.

The crowd chooses Barabbas, a revolutionary. A man of violence seems more believable than a king who reigns through love. Yet the Gospel quietly states which kingdom will endure.

Pilate’s empire once appeared invincible. Its legions marched across continents. Its governors ruled with authority backed by force. And now, Pilate’s empire has long since vanished. Rome’s rulers have turned to dust. The kingdom of Christ continues.

It continues wherever someone listens to his voice. This kingdom does not conquer by destroying enemies. It conquers by transforming them. At the end of the scene, Pilate declares, “I find no case against him.” Still, he will hand Jesus over to be crucified. Power recognizes innocence but sacrifices it to preserve order.

While Jesus recognizes and does not resist because his kingdom will not be established by force. It will be established by self-giving love. However,  this kingdom does not always grow in ways we easily see.

There is a story often told about bamboo forests in Asia. When bamboo is planted, almost nothing appears to happen for years. The seed is watered. The soil is tended. Seasons pass, and the ground looks unchanged.

One year goes by. Nothing. Two years. Still nothing.Three. Four. Then, sometime around the fifth year something remarkable happens. The bamboo suddenly shoots upward, sometimes reaching nearly ninety feet in a matter of weeks. To someone who has not been watching closely, the growth looks sudden and miraculous. But the growth did not begin in the fifth year.

For years the bamboo has been doing its most important work underground. It has been growing an intricate network of roots, spreading wide and deep through the soil. Only when that hidden foundation becomes strong enough does the visible growth appear.

The kingdom Jesus speaks about grows like that. Much of its work happens beneath the surface of history. And in moments like our own, when wars spread, tensions rise, and communities feel fragile; many people quietly ask a painful question:

Is anything we are doing actually making a difference? When change takes longer than we hoped, it is easy to believe that nothing is happening. But the wisdom of the Gospel suggests something different. The most important growth often happens where we cannot see it. When people gather to support one another, roots are growing.

When neighbors refuse to abandon compassion in a climate of fear, roots are growing. When communities continue telling stories of justice, mercy, and dignity even while the culture grows cynical, roots are growing.

None of that work appears dramatic. It rarely makes headlines. It unfolds slowly, too slowly for our impatient hopes, but it matters.

Jesus often described the kingdom of God in this way. He spoke of seeds scattered in a field, seeds that grow quietly through the night while the farmer sleeps. The growth happens beyond human control and often beyond human awareness.

The work of the community rarely unfolds on the timetable we prefer. Like bamboo, it builds its foundation beneath the soil before rising into view. 

The cross itself looked like a failure on the day Jesus died. However, what appeared to be defeat was, in truth, the deepest planting of the kingdom of God. The roots of sacrificial love were sinking into the soil of the world. From those roots, a kingdom has continued to grow.

So the question Jesus places before every reader of this Gospel remains the same one that stood before Pilate:

Which kingdom do we belong to? The kingdom of fear and power, or the kingdom of truth and love? Those who belong to the truth, Jesus says, hear his voice. The kingdom may grow slowly, quietly, even invisibly, yet the roots are spreading.

And these roots can sustain an entire forest.

Pastor Emillie's sermon 

March 8, 2026 John 18:12-27 “I Am Not”: Peter, War, and Lies We Tell Ourselves

Peter stands beside a charcoal fire. John tells us the detail almost casually. A fire burns in the courtyard while Jesus is interrogated inside. Servants and soldiers gather around it for warmth.

It is beside this ordinary fire that the extraordinary fracture occurs. A servant girl asks Peter a simple question:

“You are not also one of this man’s disciples, are you?”

Peter answers: “I am not.”  John 18:17

The words fall quietly echoing with a deep dissonance. Throughout the Gospel Jesus has spoken the divine name: “I AM.” The words recall the voice from the burning bush. The voice of God naming himself to Moses. Now Peter answers that divine name with its inversion.

“I am not.”

This is not merely fear. It is something more familiar and more troubling: the instinct to survive by stepping away from truth. Peter is only standing beside a fire trying to stay warm while the empire does its work, which is precisely the danger. The night began with a sword in the garden. Peter swung first. The Gospel tells us he cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Violence felt like loyalty. It felt like courage.

But Jesus stopped him.

“Those who take the sword will perish by the sword.”  Matthew 26:52

Peter’s first instinct was force. Next is denial. The sword and the lie are not opposites. They are two forms of the same attempt to control the outcome. When the sword fails, the lie steps in. Peter does not shout for Jesus’ death. He does something quieter when he says,  “I am not with him.”

Violence often survives through that quieter sentence. While Peter warms himself, the machinery of power is moving smoothly. Everything is happening according to protocol and routine. Stability must be preserved. Order must be maintained. The language of necessity fills the air.

History repeats this pattern endlessly. Violence rarely introduces itself honestly. It arrives wrapped in phrases meant to soften its edges. We do not say war. We say operation. We do not say death. We say targets. And like Peter, we remain near the fire while events unfold somewhere else.

Every generation hears the same promise: War will bring peace. Strike hard enough. Remove the right enemy. Destroy the right threat. Then stability will follow. Theologians call this belief the myth of redemptive violence. It is the ancient idea that destruction can purify the world.

But the Gospel tells a different story. Violence never stays contained. It ripples outward. Families grieve. Children grow up in fear. Landscapes carry the scars of conflict long after the speeches end.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” Jesus understood this. That is why he refused both the sword and the lie. He would not save the world by force.

And he would not deny the truth of what violence does. The New Testament word apokalypsis means unveiling. War is apocalyptic in that sense. It reveals what was already present. Peter thought he was hiding his fear. Instead, the rooster revealed it. War reveals things about nations in the same way.

Peter breathed that atmosphere in the courtyard, and so do we.  When the rooster crowed, Peter remembered. The Gospel says he wept bitterly. Those tears matter. They are the first truthful thing he does after the denial. Before Peter can become a witness, he must grieve. Before resurrection can restore anything, something must first be acknowledged as lost.

The Psalms teach us to cry: “How long, O Lord?” The prophets teach us to say: "Woe.” Lament is not weakness. It is the refusal to normalize death. Peter’s story does not end in the courtyard.

After the resurrection, the Gospel of John returns him to another charcoal fire on the shore of the sea (John 21). The detail is deliberate. But this time, Jesus asks a different question. Not “Are you with me?” Instead, he asks three times: “Do you love me?”

Peter’s denial will not be erased. It is faced. It is spoken aloud, transformed. From the courtyard’s “I am not” emerges something new: costly solidarity. Tradition tells us Peter eventually dies as a martyr. The one who denied becomes the one who refuses to abandon the truth again. 

Every age has its own charcoal fire. Moments when violence proceeds while ordinary people stand nearby, trying to stay warm. Moments when denial seems easier than truth. War reveals us in those moments.

The rooster crows whether we acknowledge it or not. The question that remains is the one Peter eventually had to answer: Will we continue saying “I am not”?

Or will we step away from the courtyard of denial and stand with the One who refused both the sword and the lie?

Peace will not come through domination. We must rebuild the relationships war has shattered.

The rooster has crowed. The fire is still burning. The question remains.

 Pastor Emillie's sermon 

March 1, 2026 John 13: 1-17 A Basin and A Towel: What Holds Firm Are Relationships.

On the night before empire did its worst, Jesus took off his outer robe. That small sentence in John 13:1–17 contains a revolution.

He does not seize power. He does not fortify himself, nor does he rally armed resistance. Instead, Jesus removes his robe. And another, another scripture rings in my mind:

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea.”  Psalm 46

Two scenes. One kneeling in an upper room. One where mountains are sliding into water and both ask the same question: What holds firm when what is normally reliable does not?

We are living in a time when the mountains feel unstable. Climate disruption. Political whiplash. Technological acceleration. Institutional fragility. Our national nervous system never quite resets when the background hum of instability lives in our bodies. We experience a shortening of patience and outrage that flare and fade into exhaustion. We are trained to expect continuity. Now we live where everything seems shifted, and re-calibration demands seem constant.

Psalm 46 does not deny the shaking. It names it. Mountains move. Waters roar.  Kingdoms totter. And yet: “God is our refuge.” Not an escape from history. A presence inside it.

John tells us Jesus loved his own “to the end.” Not sentimentally, but to the edge of humiliation and what some might see as betrayal. In the Roman world, foot washing belonged to enslaved people. It was work for the lowest body in the room. When Jesus kneels, this is not etiquette. It is a dismantling of hierarchy. The one called Lord chooses the posture of the servant.

Peter resists: “You will never wash my feet.” His protest sounds devout, but it protects order. It protects a Messiah who remains elevated. Jesus refuses that distance.

“You do not understand now.” Of course not. We rarely understand a love that gives up status. In some religious imaginations, holiness is separation, clean from unclean, worthy from unworthy. But here, holiness touches dirt. The dust on those feet is road dust from occupied Palestine. Sweat from anxious bodies. The grime of complicity and denial.

Last Sunday, Pastor Emillie added a cross to the children's Lent in a bag. As you scrubbed it colors were revealed. Again, holiness was not portrayed as avoidance. Holiness is portrayed as intimately interacting with the real. Psalm 46 imagines stability as refuge. John imagines stability as kneeling. These are not opposites. They are the same center described differently.

Thomas Aquinas described virtue as a stable disposition formed over time. Fortitude is endurance in pursuit of the good when circumstances press hard. Prudence is disciplined judgment in complexity. Resilience is not toughness. It is a trained orientation. 

Jesus with a towel. Aquinas with disciplined thought. Both of them lowered their center of gravity. When the waters rise, what stands is not what is rigid. It is what is rooted low. In a world structured by domination, Caesar’s empire then, anxious systems now, Jesus performs a counter-liturgy.

“If I, your Lord and Teacher, wash your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s.”

And here is the new insight: The towel is not only a symbol of humility. It is a strategy for surviving instability.

When the ground shifts, hierarchy cracks. Control falters. Systems strain. What remains viable is not domination but interdependence. Foot washing creates a community that can withstand shaking because no one remains permanently on top. Stability is relational, and refuge becomes embodied. The question for the church is not whether we admire the gesture. It is whether we surrender our robes in a time of trembling. What do we cling to?

Psalm 46 says do not fear, though the earth gives way. John 13 shows us how.

Foot washing is not a ritual once a year.  It is a posture that keeps us from tipping over. On the night before the crucifixion, Jesus does not offer a theory of atonement; He offers a posture. Psalm 46 does not promise the water will be still. It promises presence in the roar. 

Perhaps the quiet subversion of the gospel is this: When the mountains fall into the sea, when empires tremble, when systems fracture, the reign of God looks like kneeling. And the people who learn to kneel together are the ones who do not lose themselves when the earth shakes.

Pastor Emillie's sermon. 

February 22, 2026 John 11:30-44 Jesus calls “Lazarus, Come Out.”

There are two Lazaruses in the Gospels.

The one John describes lived in Bethany, brother of Mary and Martha, beloved friend of Jesus. He died. He is mourned. And in one of the most intimate and unsettling stories in scripture, Jesus calls him back to life.

The other Lazarus appears only in a parable, a poor, unnamed-in-history but named-in-story man in Gospel of Luke 16:19–31. He lies at the gate of a wealthy man, hungry and covered in sores. He dies and is carried to Abraham’s side. The rich man, in torment, begs that Lazarus be sent back to warn his brothers.

Abraham replies:

“If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

Then, in Gospel of John 11, someone named Lazarus does rise from the dead.

And many still do not believe. They do not repent. The authorities plot and organize, even planning to kill Lazarus. They are not convinced.  

The resonance is difficult to ignore. Most scholars believe these stories developed independently. Luke never mentions Lazarus of Bethany. John never references Luke’s parable. Historically, they are almost certainly separate figures.

But literarily? Theologically? Spiritually? The echo is striking. In Luke, Lazarus exposes economic blindness. In John, Lazarus exposes religious blindness.

In Luke, a rich man cannot see suffering at his own gate. In John, religious leaders cannot see resurrection standing in their midst. In both stories, death is real, and a reversal is dramatic. In each, Divine justice is revealed while still many refuse to see.

Before the miracle, before the command, before all the drama, Jesus weeps. This is not triumphal resurrection theology. This is embodied grief. And that matters deeply. Jesus does not bypass death. He does not make suffering spiritual. He stands before the tomb and feels it.

The story refuses easy answers. It does not say, “Everything happens for a reason,” but rather that Love stands before death and trembles. And then Love speaks.

When Lazarus comes out of the tomb, he is still bound. “Unbind him,” Jesus says. “Let him go.” Resurrection is not merely resuscitation. It is communal liberation. The miracle intensified the opposition because resurrection always threatens systems built on fear and control. A dead man is manageable. A living witness is dangerous.

In John’s Gospel, Lazarus becomes a sign and a problem. Which raises the unsettling connection to Luke’s parable: Even when someone rises from the dead, some will not believe. Why? Because resurrection is not just about whether miracles are possible. It is about whether we are willing to change. 

The name “Lazarus” means God has helped. In Luke, God helps the poor man beyond death. In John: God helps the beloved friend through death. In both, God’s help reveals uncomfortable truths. The poor are seen. The grieving are accompanied. The tomb is not ultimate. and systems of blindness are exposed. 

This is a scripture for this moment in our collective history. We live in a time of economic disparity and religious exhaustion. We step over suffering at our gates. We defend institutions rather than embody love. We say we want resurrection,  but resist its implications.

John’s Lazarus walks out of the tomb, and still hearts harden. In Luke’s, Lazarus cannot return, yet the warning remains. Together, they whisper, the problem is not lack of evidence. The problem is an unwillingness to see. 

What does “Come Out” mean today? Perhaps the command is not only for Lazarus. “Come out.” Come out of denial. Come out of systems that entomb others. Come out of theological certainty that leaves no room for tears. Come out of fear. 

And then, “Unbind him.” Since resurrection is communal work and liberation requires participation. The story does not end with belief spreading everywhere. It ends with tension rising. The raising of Lazarus sets the stage for the cross. Resurrection is always costly. But here is the deeper promise: Death does not get the last word. Grief is honored. Love is embodied. Systems of blindness are exposed, and even in resistance, Life keeps speaking.

“Lazarus, come out.” The question is not whether someone has risen.

The question is,:Will we listen?

Pastor Emillie's sermon.  

February 15, 2026 John 9: 1-19, 24-29,32-35 Seeing Clearly, Even When the Light Is Uncomfortable on a Transfiguration Sunday

Transfiguration is observed on the last Sunday of Epiphany. In the Three-Year Lectionary, Transfiguration is on Feb. 15, 2026, which is three days before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. 

Our John 9 Gospel reading begins with what feels like a very human impulse: Who’s to blame? The disciples see a man, blind from birth, and immediately reach for an explanation that keeps the world tidy. Was it his sin or his parents’ sin? Why would a good God permit this? If suffering can be traced to fault, then maybe it can be controlled. Maybe it can be avoided.

Jesus refuses the premise entirely. “This happened so that God’s works might be revealed in him,” Jesus says, not as a justification for suffering, but as a redirection of attention. Stop looking for blame. Start looking for what love is about to do.

That shift, from searching to explain to transformation, sets everything else in motion.

On this Transfiguration-adjacent Sunday, we’re used to talking about light: dazzling light on a mountain, Jesus glowing with divine clarity, the voice from heaven saying, “Listen to him.” We love light when it is heavenly and reassures us when it confirms what we already believe. When it feels holy but not disruptive.

But the light in John 9 is not polite. Jesus heals a man by making mud, rubbing it on his eyes, and telling him to wash. When the man comes back with sight, everything breaks open. The miracle is undeniable, but instead of celebration, there is interrogation. Just like Pastor Emillie has pointed out as being so common in John, the neighbors argue. The religious authorities investigate. The healed man is summoned again and again, pressured to explain himself, to explain Jesus, to fit the experience into an approved theological framework.

The irony is sharp: the man who could not see now sees clearly, while those who are certain they see are increasingly blind.

This is where John’s gospel becomes less about eyesight and more about courage. The healed man does not suddenly become a theologian. He doesn’t have answers to every doctrinal question. He simply tells the truth of his experience: I was blind. Now I see. When pressed to denounce Jesus, he refuses to perform the expected script. His honesty becomes an act of resistance.

And that honesty costs him. He is cast out.

Transfiguration light often feels glorious from a distance. But up close, light reveals fault lines. It exposes systems that rely on silence, conformity, and fear. In John 9, illumination doesn’t make life easier; it makes it truer.

For many of us, this story lands close to home. Many of us know what it is like to be questioned for telling the truth of what we have seen and lived. We know what it is like to be told, “Give glory to God by agreeing with us,” when what is really being demanded is compliance. The command is to assimilate. We know what it is like to be pushed to the margins because our testimony doesn’t fit someone else’s certainty.

John 9 reminds us that faith is not about defending perfect explanations. It is about bearing witness, to healing, to change, to grace that refuses to stay within our approved boundaries. And then comes the most tender moment in the story.

After the man is cast out, Jesus goes looking for him.

This is not incidental. Jesus does not just initiate healing; Jesus remains present for the social and spiritual consequences of that healing. He finds the man and asks, “Do you believe?” Not as a test, but as an invitation into relationship. This is his invitation to a transfiguring truth.

The light of God is not reserved for mountaintops or moments of spectacle. It shines in muddy encounters, in contested truths, in the quiet dignity of someone who refuses to deny their own healing. It shines when Jesus seeks out those who have been excluded and says, in effect, You are not alone. You belong. We need to counter the national narrative that led to some to condemn the Bad Bunny halftime show. We need to rise above last week's infamous racist tweet or "truth". 

As a congregation, we are called, not merely to admire the light in a muddy encounter, but to live by those moments. That means choosing curiosity over blame. Listening to lived experience. Trusting that God is revealed not through control, but through compassion that disrupts unjust systems.

The question John 9 leaves us with is not, Who sinned? It is. What does it mean to see?

To see clearly may mean losing the comfort of certainty. It may mean standing with those whose stories challenge the status quo. It may mean trusting that the God who dazzles on the mountain is the same God kneeling in the dust, shaping new sight out of earth and breath.

And it may mean believing, again and again, that even when the light unsettles us, it is still the light that heals.

Pastor Emillie's sermon 

February 8, 2026 John 4:46–54 From the Well to the Word: Learning to Trust Before We See

James Baldwin reminds us that “the first duty of a human being is to assume the right to see.” Not to dominate. Not to control outcomes. Simply to see clearly and honestly. That duty is fragile and fierce. It can be taken away. It can be punished. And yet, it is the ground of all moral life.

What we are witnessing in our public square right now is a crisis of seeing. Journalists arrested for holding cameras. Legal observers are treated as threats. Witnesses labeled as criminals. The violence is physical. It is an assault on shared reality. When those who document are detained, the message is unmistakable: do not trust your eyes. Look away. Let the story be told for you.

And still, people keep seeing.

They keep recording. They keep naming. They keep standing in the vulnerable space between power and truth, knowing full well the cost. This, too, is faith, not the soft faith of reassurance, but the costly faith of presence. The kind that refuses unreality even when unreality is being enforced. Another component of becoming a beloved community today.

Janet's former Bible Study group was well-named (forgive the pun) as "The Well". John’s Gospel for this upcoming Sunday understands this tension of presence deeply. It does not imagine belief as naïveté or certainty. It understands belief as something forged under pressure, shaped in the space between promise and proof. At the well, a woman risks being seen. On the road, a father risks trusting a word without evidence. Neither receives guarantees. Both receive life.

Pastor Emillie quoted one of her seminary teachers that the way of Christ leads to life. We thought about this as we are mindful we are following Jesus to this death on the cross. Pastor asked us how we reconciled this with the teacher's declaration. Alex Pretti was mentioned. The talk turned to the consequential difference between an individual's death and the way of death for a community. 

Considering this, we are on a knife-edge with John's story. The royal official walks home carrying nothing but a sentence: “Your son will live.” No escort. No spectacle. No visible sign to shield him from doubt. He must decide whether the word is trustworthy before the outcome confirms it. This is not passive belief. It is active courage. It is choosing reality before it is safe to do so.

That same courage is required of us now. How do we insist on clarity when distortion is rewarded? To trust evidence when doubt is manufactured?  Or refusing to remain silent when witnessing becomes dangerous?

The Gospel does not ask us to close our eyes. It asks us to open them wider and then to walk accordingly. Jesus never tells the woman at the well to ignore her thirst. He names it. Jesus never tells the official to stop fearing for his child. He meets him there. Faith, in John, is not the absence of fear; it is movement through fear toward trust.

And here is the quiet, radical hope threaded through both reflections: truth does not depend on spectacle to be real. The healing can happen at a distance. Life returns without witnesses. The Word is already at work before anyone can verify it. Likewise, clarity does not need amplification to be true. Reality does not need permission from power to exist.

Authoritarian systems depend on confusion, on isolation, on the slow erosion of confidence in one’s own perception. The Gospel offers something else: relationship, testimony, and shared seeing. Faith that ripples outward. Truth that flows like living water, finding its way through cracks no wall can fully seal.

So we keep seeing and witnessing. We keep trusting the Word that calls life forth, even when the road home feels long. Truth-telling is not extremism. Witnessing is not threat and clarity is not naïveté.

It is fidelity, to reality, to one another, and to the God who still meets us by wells, on roads, in courtrooms, in sanctuaries, and in the long walk between promise and fulfillment.

And still, the water flows.

Pastor Emillie's sermon 

Is transformation possible? Three stories.

A Prayer for Alex Pretti Faith ripples outward. 

February 1, 2026 John 4:1-42 The Woman at the Well: A Gospel According to Thirst

This story of encounter starts by saying that Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John. The Gospel notes, however, that it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So, as he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee, there is a fundamental water association to what is about to happen. The scripture Jesus follows is filled with holy men who had found their wives at wells. For a reason he himself knows, he must go through Samaria. near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there.

Then Jesus, tired from the journey, sat down by this well. It was about noon. Those details matter. This is not the Christ of lofty abstraction or untouchable holiness. This is a thirsty, weary body resting on the edge of a shared human need. Revelation begins not in triumph but in fatigue. The well is an ordinary place, common and utilitarian. And yet Scripture often locates transformation in such spaces. Wells are where people come because they must. You can delay many things, but not thirst. And it is there, in that place of necessity, that Jesus meets a woman who has learned to live with both physical and social scarcity.

Jesus breaks the silence with a request: “Give me a drink.” This is not an instruction or correction. He begins with vulnerability. He places himself in her debt and anticipates the evangelist she will become after this encounter- a source of living water. This is already about a reversal of power. Jesus is a Jew speaking to a Samaritan, a man to a woman, a rabbi to the socially suspect. He does not cross these boundaries to make a point; he crosses them because love goes where it is not supposed to go.

The woman is startled, rightly so. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me?” Her question is the sound of history speaking. It carries centuries of exclusion, hostility, and inherited distrust. Jesus does not dismiss her concern. Instead, he opens a deeper conversation, not about who belongs where, but about what truly satisfies.

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,” he says, “but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”

This is not a promise of escape from need, nor a denial of the body’s limits. It is an invitation to a different source. In John’s Gospel, living water is not doctrine or moral achievement. It is about a relationship with the world. It is a life rooted in the inexhaustible generosity of God, a well that opens within a person, even one who has been told again and again that she is empty.

Jesus answers her question of why he would speak to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” She responds by asking about the source of living water.

It is the moment she is open to becoming one source. He calls for her to call her husband, and she replies she has no husband. Jesus acknowledges that she is right about her five previous husbands and that the man she is with now is not her husband.

The number five is important in the Bible.Pastor Emillie guided our discussion with details that many of us did not previously know. Obviously, having five husbands is central to who she is. Yet it is doing far more work than it looks like on the surface. John rarely accidentally throws in a number. At the literal level, this names her lived reality, complex and painful. She is likely socially stigmatized, given her appearance at noon, but John rarely stops at biography. He uses personal stories as theological symbols.

Here, Pastor explaoned the Samaritans accepted only the first five books of Scripture (Genesis–Deuteronomy). They rejected the Prophets and Writings that Jews embraced. So when Jesus names five husbands, many scholars hear an echo that the Five “husbands” are the five books that have shaped Samaritan religious life. The “one you now have” could represent a religious system that claims covenant, but lacks fullness. In the Hebrew Scriptures, covenant faithfulness is often described as marriage. Idolatry is adultery. Jesus isn’t shaming her; he’s naming Samaria’s spiritual history with uncanny precision.

And, after the Assyrian conquest, five foreign groups were brought into Samaria, each with their own gods. Israel “married” itself to these influences. So here, five husbands could refer to the five foreign allegiances of Samaria, a people spiritually fragmented, not evil, wounded, and mixed

Jesus stands at the well as the true bridegroom, offering not condemnation but restoration. There is also a Johannine theme of moving from partial truth to fullness. John’s Gospel constantly contrasts Signs vs. fulfillment, Law vs. grace, Seeing vs. believing. Here, Jesus is the one, the Messiah, who knows her fully and still asks for a drink. And, quietly, this woman becomes one of the first evangelists in the Gospel  

Jesus named her story, not to expose her, but to see her. “You are right,” he says, affirming her honesty. This is one of the most astonishing moments in the Gospels: a woman who has been misread by society is read truthfully by God. There is no condemnation here, only clarity. And clarity, when offered in love, becomes freedom.

This also illuminates what Jesus might have meant when he replied to Nicodemus, "I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit." and last week's John 3:18 passage. Rather than this being a condemnation of those who did not believe in God's one and only son, together with  Pastor Emillie's sermon last week of "just in case" altar calls, this is an observation of humanity's nature. In those moments when it is hard for us to believe in Christ as Messiah. That is when we lose our connection to living water  

The woman responds to Jesus' clarity, not with shame but with theology. “I see that you are a prophet.” And then she asks the question that has divided communities for generations: Where is the right place to worship? Which mountain? Which tradition? Which people get it right?

Jesus refuses to be conscripted into that false choice. Worship, he says, is not about geography or pedigree, but about truth and spirit. God is not contained by our boundaries. God is already present, already active, already nearer than we imagine.

Then comes the turning point. The woman speaks of the Messiah, the one who will come and explain everything. And Jesus says to her, plainly and without disguise, “I am he.” This is the first unambiguous self-revelation of Jesus as Messiah in the Gospel of John. And it is given not to a religious leader or a disciple, but to a Samaritan woman at a well, in the heat of the day

This also speaks to what Pastor Emllie referred to in last week's sermon, as her altar care repetitions (or as she put it, those "just in case"affirmations). We don't need to be thirsty, to have our "just in cases" anymore when we believe in Jesus as the Messiah.  

The woman leaves her water jar behind. Another detail matters too. The object she came for is no longer what she needs. She runs, not away, but toward her community. The woman who came alone, at noon not to be seen, returns as a witness. The one who avoided the crowd becomes the bearer of good news. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done,” she says, not as an accusation, but as wonder. Her testimony is imperfect, provisional, deeply human. And it is enough.

Many Samaritans believe because of her word. 

Jesus still sits by wells. He still asks for water. He still waits for those who come at noon, convinced they must remain unseen. And he still offers a life that does not deny our wounds but transforms them into springs of living water. He sits for us, and for the world.

Pastor Emillie' Feb 1 sermon

St. Brigid's Day

Chat about St. Brigid's Day  

Bible Project's Video Clip Water of Life Why Water Matters in the Bible

End of Epiphany Season Candlemas (observed) Through us, Jesus is the Light of the World

A Prayer for Alex Pretti Faith ripples outward.  

 Be sure to check out Sarah's comments on this blog entry. 

Jan 25, 2026 John 3:1-21 - Nicodemus: Pursuing and Questioning Faith

Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, and it is tempting to judge him for that. However, night is often where real faith begins. Nicodemus is not shallow or hostile. He is thoughtful, trained, and he is respected. And still, something in him is restless. 

 

The darkness that surrounds him is not simply fear; it is unknowing. It is the honest admission that what has sustained him so far is no longer enough. John presents Nicodemus not as a villain but as a mirror. Many of us arrive at faith not in confidence, but in quiet longing, unsure what we might lose if we ask the wrong questions.

Another possibility is that he was a very responsible leader who was swamped with his daily responsibilities. He went to question Jesus to find out more about what he experienced at the first available chance he found after his work. 

Steeped in Jewish tradition and culture, Nicodemus would have been confident of his place in heaven. But, like last week's scripture reading, Jesus meets Nicodemus not with reassurance. Rather, Jesus answers with disruption. “No one can see the reign of God unless they are born from above.” The language itself refuses to settle. Born again? Born from above? Jesus does not clarify the ambiguity, but rather leans into it. Faith, he suggests, is not an achievement or a credential. It is not a conclusion reached by the well-prepared. It is a beginning that originates in God, not in us. The Spirit moves like wind: uncontained, unownable, uncontrollable. You can feel its effects, but you cannot command its direction.

Our Wednesday group discussion on the wind fascinated me. For some of us, the wind metaphor was more clarifying than the "born again" language, but even this was as deeply unsettling for us as it was for Nicodemus. Our lives are built on trying to "master" Scripture, or be true to our faith tradition. Jesus describes a transformation that undoes mastery altogether. You cannot earn this birth. You cannot manage it. You cannot even fully explain it. You can only consent to it. That is both terrifying and liberating. It is terrifying for those invested in control. It is liberating for anyone who has been told they are too flawed, too doubtful, or maybe too complicated to belong. God’s new life does not depend on pedigree or purity. It depends on openness. God never overrides relationships, either by certainty or by control. 

Instead, Jesus then reaches back into Israel’s story, recalling the bronze serpent lifted up in the wilderness. It is a strange image: healing comes not by denying suffering, but by facing it. The people are saved not by escape, but by looking directly at what is killing them, and trusting God there. Jesus dares to say that his own life will follow this same pattern. He will be “lifted up,” not onto a throne, but onto a cross. In John’s Gospel, this lifting up is both humiliation and exaltation, death and revelation held together. God’s saving work is not accomplished through domination, but through vulnerability. The cross is not divine cruelty demanded by God; it is divine solidarity with those crushed by violent systems.

Only then do we hear the words so familiar they risk losing their power: “For God so loved the world.” Not a purified world. Not a deserving world. The world as it is, fractured, fearful, resistant, beloved. God’s response to a broken creation is not condemnation, but love embodied and risked. “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved.” If condemnation is the loudest note in our theology, we have misheard the gospel. In John, salvation is not escape from the earth; it is healing within it, liberation from false stories about God, ourselves, and one another.

Kristen was troubled, as it turned out we all were, by the John 3:18 condemnation of those who did not believe in God's one and only son. Pastor Emillie suggested the author of the book of John may have had a different association with those words than we do now.  

Judgment is not God’s eagerness to punish. It is the revealing light of truth. Light and darkness here are not a moral sorting of people into good and bad. They describe our posture toward truth. We resist the light not because we are evil, but because exposure is costly. Systems of injustice require darkness to survive. So do personal illusions, about innocence, superiority, or control. Yet the light of Christ is not a spotlight meant to shame. It is a sunrise meant to awaken.

John 3 refuses to behave like an answer. It is mysterious not because it is obscure, but because it cannot be reduced to a formula. It is less a doctrine than an encounter. Pastor Emillie noted that after every sign John offers, there is immediate confusion that spreads.

She also let us know that, unlike the English language, Swahili, like Greek, has many words with different meanings for love with different emphases..

Greek Term	Meaning	Swahili Parallels	Emphasis

Agápē

Self-giving love

Upendo, huruma

Moral, spiritual, ethical

Philia

Friendship

Urafiki, udugu, ushirika

Mutuality, community

Éros

Desire

Mapenzi, mahaba

Passion, intimacy

Storgē

Familial love, shared life

Upendo wa wazazi

Care, nurture

As I currently understand, we must keep in mind that these Greek categories tend to separate kinds of love (eros vs. agape), especially in philosophical or theological writing, where Swahili tends to layer them.

Anyway, Nicodemus leaves without resolution, and that is the point. Faith here is not certainty; it is movement. It is learning to trust the wind, to consent to being remade, to believe that love, not fear, not condemnation, not and certainly not control,is God’s final word. We are left space to ponder and grow from what we are experiencing. 

Nicodemus comes at night, but the story does not end there. Light is already moving toward him. And toward us. We may come with questions, with half-understood beliefs, with lives carefully managed around what feels safe. Jesus does not turn us away. He invites us into the mystery, into a faith that is less about being right and more about being reborn, again and again, from above.

The Gospel's Truth is alive, relational, and still unfolding. 

Remembering wham Creator Lutheran Church received the RIC Certificate 

 Today's Service

Sermon

Pastor Emillie preached about being a Christian before her time as a  Lutheran. She was afraid how she was living did not measure up to what God expected so she performed many altar calls as her church demanded "just in case".

I grew up Lutheran, but I related. This kind of faith worked for my dad, but it doesn't for me. I don’t follow Jesus because I’m afraid of hell. I follow Jesus because he’s worth following, even if I’m wrong about how the story ends and Pastor Emillie's sermon clarified that for me today. 

The last Sunday in January is normally observed as RIC (i.e., Reconciling in Christ) Sunday. Creator voted to become an RIC congregation in 2009. Many parts of today's liturgy expressed our prayers and desire to continue to become more inclusive as a community. 

What is happening in Minnesota weighed in our thoughts and prayers as well. A Prayer for Alex Pretti 

Our annual congregational meeting happened after service, where we passed our 2026 Budget and approved our delegates to the Synod Assembly this coming May.

Be sure to check out Sarah's comments on this blog entry.  

Creator's 2025 Annual Report 

RIC Newsletter