Sermon on Luke 11:1-13

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

What is prayer for? Why should we continue to pray when we don’t receive what we’re praying for? Why bother? Many of us, including me, wrestle with these questions.

I used to find a lot of encouragement in the saying that God only has three answers to prayer: yes, not yet, or I have something better in mind.

But I don’t find that satisfying anymore in the face of tragedies. I don’t know why kids get cancer, and I can’t accept that it’s God’s will. I can’t accept that God has something better in mind when people are praying for their child’s life.

Prayer is a mystery and not always in a good way.

I do find some small comfort in the fact that questions about prayer are nothing new. Even Jesus’ disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray.The disciples had Jesus right in front of them day after day, and they still didn’t feel like they knew how to talk to God.

I don’t have much in the way of answers about prayer. It’s something we can spend our whole lives learning about and practicing and still not fully understand. It’s one of the many mysteries of our faith, which is beautiful and frustrating.

But there are a few things our readings today tell us about prayer.

In our first reading, we see Abraham having a conversation, even negotiating with God. That’s not uncommon. You’re probably familiar with the stage of grief called “bargaining.” We often try to bargain with God when we’re grieving or in danger or even “I promise I’ll never risk eating too-old food again if you get me through this food poisoning.”

But Abraham didn’t bargain for himself. He bargained for the lives of the people in Sodom and Gomorrah. He tried to talk God down from raining fire and brimstone on a city for the sake of any righteous people living there.

I have to take moment here to talk about Sodom and Gomorrah. Our reading today comes right before a passage that has become known as a “clobber passage” or a “text of terror”: a part of the Bible that has been used to discredit, dehumanize, and terrorize LGBTQ people.

I can’t do a thorough enough job in a ten-minute sermon of unpacking why this passage shouldn’t be understood or used that way. If you want to dig deeper, let’s do it. Talk to me later. I can’t fully talk through this passage, but when our readings come this close to a clobber passage, I also can’t pass over it without comment.

So here we go. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah has been interpreted since pretty early on in Church history as God raining down judgment because of “homosexual behavior.” That interpretation is so steeped in our culture that it’s really hard to read it any other way.

But Ezekiel 16identifies Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin differently. God, through the prophet Ezekiel, compares God’s people with Sodom and Gomorrah. It says, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy.”[1] God’s people, it says, had been behaving worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.

The three divine messengers that visited Abraham and Sarah in our reading last week were about to go to Sodom and Gomorrah to see if what God had heard about those cities was true. And indeed, the people of the city tried to commit sexual violence against the divine messengers. So, that is what has been interpreted as the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, despite what Ezekiel says. And of course, sexual violence is a terrible way we humans harm each other and abuse the image of God in each of us. But sexual violence of any sort is very different from a loving relationship between people of the same gender or between anyone besides a cisgender man and cisgender woman. Those should not be conflated.

The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were pride, not aiding the poor and needy, and sexual violence.This is a tragic story, and it should not be used to harm LGBTQ folks. Again, if you want to explore this more, talk to me later.

Apart from its proximity to a clobber passage, I find the story of Abraham negotiating with God disquieting.I believe in a God who knows that we’re all simultaneously saints and sinners, who saves us by grace, and who would not rain down fire on any city, regardless of the righteousness of anyone there, because none of us are righteous by our own power.I want to believe God would be merciful from the start and wouldn’t need talking down by a mere mortal.

But on the other hand, the way this conversation shows Abraham’s value of mercy is beautiful.

I don’t know how much our prayers change God’s mind. Maybe they do, just like in this story. Or maybe it’s an opportunity for us to embody what we want God to be like. We want God to be merciful, so we pray for mercy. We want there to be peace, so we pray for peace. And in that process, we become more merciful and peaceful ourselves, which impacts the world around us.

Maybe that’s what the Lord’s Prayer is for: Jesus was teaching us how to imagine the Beloved Community, where earth is as it is in heaven.Maybe prayer is about aligning ourselves with how God is creating the world to be.

And when we read the rest of our Gospel story and it sounds like God will give us what we ask, maybe it’s about learning to want what God wants for the world.God isn’t a vending machine, but doesn’t mean we can’t bring ourmost trifling, petty requests to God. God wants to hear that too—whatever’s on our heart. C.S. Lewis wrote this in favor of bringing our tiny requests to God:

“…those who have not learned to ask Him for childish things will have less readiness to ask Him for great ones. We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.”

It's okay to bring every desire of our hearts to God to practice asking for the things that make this world like it is in heaven. Prayer may not be about getting every single thing we ask for, and I don’t know why some prayers are answered and some aren’t.

But I do know that prayer is about relationship. God wants us to ask, wants us to talk to God. When Paul says to pray without ceasing, it doesn’t mean that we have to be on our knees day and night, but our inner monologue can instead be a dialogue with God. And over time, that will change us.

Prayer is still a mystery—one we can explore for the rest of our lives. Whether we change God’s mind or just our own, it’s an important part of our relationship with God who is with us always, loving us just as we are and wanting the best for us.

With that, let us pray, continuing this mysterious, frustrating, and beautiful conversation with God:

Loving God, prayer can be hard. We don’t always know what to pray for or how to pray, but You are always listening. Thank you for being a better friend than the one in our Gospel reading. You are never to busy, and our requests are never an inconvenience to You. Make us brave in bringing everything that’s on our hearts to You. Please make us more like You and help us show Your love to this world where there is so much need. Teach us to pray and help us feel Your love and presence always. In Your name we pray, Amen.


[1] Ezekiel 16:49

Sermon on Luke 10:38-42

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

I’ve seen the story of Jesus visiting Mary and Martha used like a personality test: are you a Mary or a Martha? This is usually in a women’s devotional.

I’ve seen the characters pitted against each other: silly Martha was too busy doing chores to pay attention to Jesus. She should have been a Godly woman like Mary.

I’m pretty tired of it.

Maybe if there were more stories about women in the Gospels, especially women whose names are actually used, we wouldn’t be so desperate to use these two characters to exemplify women specifically.

When there’s a story about Peter, James, and John, I see the traits that I resonate with in the characters, regardless of gender. So why are Mary and Martha used as a typology for women?

Christians of all genders are called to service and to learning.

So, let’s let these two followers of Jesus be what he treats them as: disciples.

I also sometimes hear this story framed as service versus learning, as if when Jesus told Martha that Mary chose the better part, he was saying that all of his disciples should choose learning over service. But that doesn’t line up with much of the content of the Gospel of Luke, the book of Acts, which is by the same author, or much of the content of the whole Bible.

The Gospel of Luke focuses a lot on service and working for justice. We discussed the Parable of the Good Samaritan last week, which Jesus toldright before this story. That parable uses an example of service to emphasize that everyone is our neighbor, even and especially those we kind of wish weren’t. Throughout the Gospel of Luke, we see themes of service and acting out our faith in the world and not just paying lip service to God.

In the book of Acts, the follow-up to the Gospel of Luke, the twelve apostles were getting overwhelmed by the needs of the growing number of Jesus followers. They decided to appoint seven folks who would serve the physical needs of the community so the apostles could focus on prayer and other spiritual matters. This is where we and many other denominations get the position of “deacon,” which comes from the Greek word for servant. Service is an important part of what it means to follow Jesus or the apostles wouldn’t have bothered dedicating people specifically for that form of ministry. Both Luke and Acts are particularly concerned with service and addressing people’s physical needs. Martha is an early example of faithful Christian service.

Jesus didn’t discourage Martha’s service in this story. He accepted her hospitality. There’s no Lazarus or any other man mentioned in this story, so we can assume Martha was the head of this household.

So, there would have been certain expectations of her as the host. Hospitality was a huge deal in the Middle East in the first century and before. Look at the lengths Abraham and his household went to in our first reading to show hospitality to the three divine messengers.

Abraham isn’t scolded for showing hospitality, and neither is Martha. Her hospitality is a good thing—how any of us would want to treat Jesus if he were to show up at our door.

If Martha was resentful of her sister for not helping her provide that hospitality, it’s understandable. Making Jesus referee their disagreement isn’t a good look, but it’s a very human reaction to feeling overwhelmed and overworked. Martha’s hospitality wasn’t the problem.Her attempted interference with Mary’s discipleship was the problem.

Mary sat at Jesus’ feet, where students sat to learn from their rabbis. Jesus didn’t make a fuss that she was a woman; she was a disciple. He even encouraged her discipleship by the end of the story.

Jesus accepted and encouraged both Mary and Martha’s discipleship. When he said Mary chose the better part, he wasn’t setting study above service. He was inviting Martha to let study fuel her service. Right then, she was overwhelmed by what she had to do, and Jesus was reminding her of why she served: it was a sign of her love for him.

Discipleship isn’t about choosing learning or service. Most followers of Jesus do both, and that’s good. Learning can help ground our service in love for God and service can ground our learning in love for our neighbor. It’s a cycle of action and reflection that helps us love God and our neighbor with our whole selves.

That cycle’s going to look different for each of us, and it’ll probably take a lifetime to find what works best for us.

Our cycle of action and reflection may look different depending on our season of life. If we’re students, we may not have time to serve. If we’re parents of young children or caregivers for other family members, we may be doing a lot of serving and not have a lot of time for quiet contemplation. That’s okay—it doesn’t have to be an even split. But long-term, it’s helpful to pay attention to what God is calling you to and what nourishes your soul.

The communities we’re a part of affect our action and reflection too. Being a part of a smaller faith community like this one has its benefits and challenges. You can pretty quickly get to know the majority of the people here, which is wonderful. You can easily get plugged into whatever ministry you’re interested in or start something new. If you have ideas or questions, talk to me.

On the other hand, there are things that need to happen to keep the ministries of the church going, and it can sometimes be hard to find people with the right gifts and interests in a smaller community. And conversely, it can be challenging to step away from something if it’s not a good fit or you’re interested in trying something different if there’s not an immediate candidate to fill your shoes.

God provides, and sometimes much to our chagrin, God provides us. It can be hard to keep our service to a manageable level and also have time to just enjoy each other’s company and have contemplative and study time with God. We need to discern what’s essential in this community and what needs to be released or reformed to make sure we’re choosing whatever the better part is for us and our neighbors.

We can get distracted by many things—here at church, at home, at work. Our world moves so fast. There’s always something more to do, to achieve, to innovate, to manage, to perfect.

I realize I’m assuming most of us tend toward the service side of the service and learning cycle. I’m defining service not just as volunteering at church (though that certainly counts), but service to your family, friends, community, work, and any other action-oriented ministry. I see a lot of busy people in this congregation who are generous with their time here and elsewhere.

But maybe you feel a yearning for meaningful service that you haven’t been able to figure out how to fulfill. In that case, let’s have a conversation. You’re probably doing more than you realize, but God may be calling you to something new, and that’s exciting.

But whether your yearning is for service or study, let’s keep imagining together how we can meet each other’s needs in this community.

What’s essential? What needs to be reimagined to make time and space for something different?

We talked about Sabbath throughout last year, remembering in this bustling world that God made us good and invites us to rest and commune with God. It’s in the Ten Commandments—rest is to be a regular part of the rhythm of our lives as individuals and as a community.

How do we foster rhythms both of service and of study and contemplation that nurture this faith community and make this a place of healing for everyone?

We are the church that feeds people body and soul. Let’s sit at Jesus’ feet to fuel us to love and serve our neighbor.

Sermon on Luke 10:25-37

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most well-known. Many folks who aren’t generally familiar with the Bible would still recognize a story about a good-hearted person who helped someone who was injured. We even have Good Samaritan laws to protect people who help strangers in emergencies.

But this story has become so familiar that it’s lost a lot of its meaning. The word “Samaritan” has come to mean someone who helps a stranger, but that’s very different from what Jesus’ audience would have understood.

Jewish people in the first century thought of Samaritans as their enemies. Samaritans were descended from the Israelites who had been left behind when the Assyrians conquered Israel around 720 BCE and took many of the Israelites into captivity.

Over the generations, these left-behind Israelites married with other local people groups. They also came to believe that God was properly worshiped on Mount Gerizim instead of the Temple in Jerusalem. So, when the exiled Israelites returned home, they had issues with the lineage and theology of the Samaritans.

So by Jesus’ time, these two people groups had quite a few hundred years to build up bad feelings about each other. In the Gospel of John, we even get the parenthetical comment in the story of the Samaritan woman at the well that: “(Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.).” A “Good Samaritan” would have sounded like an oxymoron.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan was shocking to its first audience in a way that we just don’t have access to.

That’s significant for understanding that this parable wasn’t just about encouraging us to help strangers. Jesus told this parable in response to the law expert’s question about “who is my neighbor?”

If we take the narrator’s word that this religious leader was trying to test Jesus, it seems like his motive in asking “who is my neighbor” had to do with setting a boundary of who was he supposed to love and who he was off the hook for. Like he was expecting the answer to be: your neighbors are those literally next doorto you or within a mile of your house, and you don’t need to worry about anyone else. Sure, Jesus, I’m supposed to love my neighbor, but who am I justified in not loving?

And so Jesus tells this story about someone who was mugged and left for dead on the side of the road.

First a priest and then a Levite walk by and see the guy in desperate need of help. These would have been trusted and esteemed leaders in the community. They would have been seen as good guys, the people you’d expect to be helpful. Maybe like a mayor or a fire fighter or a school principal.

But they didn’t help. They ignored the man and passed him by. Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the excuse that helping the man would have made the priest and the Levite unclean, and so that’s why they didn’t help, Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine disagrees with that interpretation. She says, “Neither [Jesus nor Luke] gives the priest or Levite an excuse. Nor would any excuse be acceptable.”

These two respected community leaders aren’t given justification by the text. They’re simply fallible human beings who don’t always do the right thing—just like all of us.

And then, a third person walks by. Someone you don’t like. Someone who belongs to a group of people you don’t trust. Someone you’d expect to look the other way or maybe even give him a kick for an extra measure of meanness. People like him are bad news, selfish, violent, hateful, and whatever other stereotypes we humans like to pin on each other.

But wait! He does stop to help. That can’t be right! But he does, and not only does he give him first aid, but he takes him to an inn where he can be tended to further. He pays the innkeeper two full days’ wages and promises more so that this guy will be well taken care of. He goes to great effort and expense to care for this stranger who probably hated him.

So, who was a good neighbor? The esteemed community leaders who should have cared for their people? Or this guy who you probably wouldn’t want to see walking down a dark alley?

As with many of Jesus’ parables, this one is surprising. It turns our assumptions on their heads.

Jesus used this parable to break down any barriers in our minds about who might not be our neighbor. Jesus used this shocking story to show us that we owe compassion not just to the people immediately around us or who are like us or who might show gratitude for our good deeds, but we owe compassion to the people we hate, distrust, and have prejudices against.

We might not understand the conflict between Jewish people and Samaritans in the first century, but we can fill in the blanks for ourselves.

If you were mugged, who would it be hard to accept help from?

Who would it surprise you to receive generosity from?

The answer might be different for each of us, and I invite you to spend time this week answering this question: who are your Samaritans?

It’s uncomfortable work. We don’t like to imagine that we have prejudices or biases. We want to imagine that we are loving to all people. But I encourage you to sit with this question for long enough that you get beyond your initial inclination to say that no one is a Samaritan for you. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you who you would be surprised to receive generosity from.

Because beyond our rational minds, we all have those natural instincts to categorize people and look for threats—instincts that kept our ancestors safe in the wilderness. But these ancient survival skills don’t always serve us today. They can cut us off from our neighbors and make us see threats that aren’t there.

Maybe you’ve done enough work that you have truly overcome all your biases. But “who are your Samaritans?” is a question that has the potential to unsettle most of us if we really spend time with it.

We can’t change what we’re not aware of. Let this parable unsettle you. Let it regain some of its original shock value instead of being just a nice story about someone helping a stranger. Let God show you what it truly means to love your neighbor.

This isn’t about checking off enough boxes to get us into heaven.This isn’t about the law expert’s testing question to see what’s required to inherit eternal life.God already loves you, and you are part of the family of God forever.

Loving our neighbors—truly all of them—is about living the Beloved Community now. Jesus is inviting us into a way of life that treats every life as sacred, erases all our human hierarchies that keep us separated from each other, and fosters love, joy, and peace.

Feel God’s unending love for you and love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.

And let God’s love shine forth from you wherever you go and to everyone, everyone, everyone you meet.

That’s how earth becomes as it is in heaven.