The Vision Will Surely Come

 The Vision Will Surely Come

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-5; Luke 19:1-10[1]

One of the challenges facing the church today is that we live in a marketplace that is filled with very different perspectives on life. I mentioned last week that we all search for meaning, purpose, and a sense of belonging in our lives. But the fact that there are so many different options for finding that sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging makes our choices all the more complicated. We no longer live in a time when everyone shares a common vision for what life is about. It’s hard to find a way to figure out how the church can be relevant to people searching for meaning in life when the very definitions have changed so dramatically. All of that means that it’s not so easy for people to find meaning, purpose, and belonging in our world.

Part of the reason for this is there are so many different versions of what it looks like. Some people are just trying to make ends meet, hoping not to run out of paycheck before they run out of month. Others are hoping to make a mark in this world, to ensure that people remember their name for their great achievements. Some want nothing more than to raise a family that’s healthy and happy, and they devote most of their time and energy toward achieving that goal. Others are simply fighting like crazy to fend off the boredom or the loneliness that threatens to engulf them most days. Some people are trying to juggle multiple options for making sense out of life, because they’re afraid of putting all their eggs in one basket. It’s all quite a bit more than confusing.

In our lesson from Habakkuk for today, the prophet was trying to figure out the meaning of what was happening in his world as well. His problem was that Israel and Judah were being effectively dismantled by powerful empires like the Assyrians and the Babylonians. What troubled him is that this was a judgment from God. The Assyrians and Babylonians were some of the most violent people in the world of that day. It didn’t make any sense to Habakkuk that God was using such violent and ungodly people to carry out his judgment. So Habakkuk questions God’s fairness and then basically decides to watch and wait to see how God would answer.

God’s answer to Habakkuk is that even though it might seem like the events around him invalidated his faith in God as well as his hope for any future for his people, God did indeed have a future in store for them. It might not look like exactly like what Habakkuk expected, but that didn’t mean there was nothing left to hope for. God’s vision for what he planned to do in this world was still very real, and his message to Habakkuk was to write the vision so plainly that it could be read at a glance and carried by runners to all who needed to hear it. And the reason for this was the promise that “This vision is for a future time. It describes the end, and it will be fulfilled. If it seems slow in coming, wait patiently, for it will surely take place” (Hab 2:3, NLT). In spite of the people’s continual unfaithfulness to God, God would remain faithful to them.

As we’ve been working through Luke’s Gospel this year, we’ve seen a unique perspective on the vision of the kingdom of God. It started with Jesus’ announcement at the synagogue in Nazareth that the promise of Isaiah had been fulfilled: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” (Lk. 4:18). In our Gospel lesson for today, we see that God’s “salvation” is extended even to Zacchaeus, who was one of the most despised of the despised. In fact, Zacchaeus was so despised that all who witnessed his encounter with Jesus “grumbled” about it. In Luke’s Gospel, this includes not only the crowds but perhaps also the disciples themselves!

The point of this story is that it’s a kind of “finale” to all that Luke wants to convey to us about Jesus and the kingdom of God. Luke’s story of Jesus began with the promise that the poor, the blind, and the captives were all included in God’s salvation. As Jesus’ ministry progresses, we find that the despised are included as well—Samaritans, tax collectors, and all who were considered “unclean” for any reason. Jesus encounters misfits and outcasts, those whom both society and religion had rejected as “unworthy,” and he embraces every one of them with the love of God that never fails. And in our lesson for today, we learn that this was all intentional: Jesus as the “Son of Man” came “to seek out and to save” every one of them (Lk. 19:10), especially the least and the last and the left out.

Trying to be the church in our world gets harder every year. There are so many different versions of “a meaningful life” that compete with the message of the gospel. It’s hard for the church to stay relevant when the meaning of the word “relevance” keeps changing! And as our traditional measures for how well the church is doing in our world continue to diminish before our eyes, all of this can create a crisis for us as well. Some may find it too discouraging to keep on trying. Some may think they have to go out and find a “better” church somewhere. Some may wonder whether supporting this or any other church is throwing away good money for a lost cause. But the vision of the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed and enacted in the lives of people like Zacchaeus is still just as real as ever.

As we approach our stewardship campaign, some of you may be asking whether God has a future for this church. I would answer with the words that God gave to Habakkuk: God does indeed have a vision for the future of this church, and “if it seems slow in coming, wait patiently, for it will surely take place.” God’s vision for this church may not look like what we expect, but it is real nevertheless. It’s the vision of the kingdom of God that brings salvation to all who would trust in Jesus, including the poor, the blind, and the captives; including the despised people of our world; and including especially the least and the last and the left out. That’s what motivates me to give as much as I can to support the work of this church and of the larger church in the world. This vision gives meaning and purpose to what we do, and I believe it will surely come in God’s time.

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[1] ©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/30/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/XU-xHhcPxYg 

(Not) All About Me

 (Not) All About Me

Luke 18:9-14[1]

We all search for meaning in life in a variety of ways. Many of us center our sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging in our hopes and dreams. Most of you know that I was never very close to my parents. Some of you know that life in my childhood home was more like “All in the Family” than “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Actually, that’s understating things, but I’m trying to be respectful toward my parents. As a result, from an early age a big part of my sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging focused on my “dream” that I would do things “right” with my family. Of course, in my child’s mind the “dream” I had for my family wasn’t quite realistic. But more to the point, my “dream” was really all about me.

I think all of us have some kind of “dream” for our lives. It may be about the “right” career and the rewards that will bring us. It may be about having a certain lifestyle. Living in the “right” house, driving the “right” car, having the “right” friends. “Success” for most of us has a very definite look to it. Often, our dream brings with it the underlying assumption that we’re going to make the “right” amount of money. Many of us have hopes and dreams about family, perhaps involving marriage and children. Of course, life rarely turns out just like we imagine it in our hopes and dreams. But if we’re completely honest, we’d all have to admit that the real problem with orienting our lives in this way is that it’s always all about ourselves.

For many, faith and church are a part of our “strategy” for achieving those hopes and dreams. We try to ensure that what we want will come true by saying all the right words and doing all the right things. That includes how we practice our faith. We go to church so that we can be confident of going to Heaven when we die. But we also do so because we hope it will give us some measure of control over the way our lives turn out. We think that if we go to church, our family will turn out “right,” our career will be a “success,” and life will go “according to plan.” But that’s taking faith and church and trying to make it into some kind of magic way to get all we want in life. And in the end, it’s still all about ourselves.

In our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus tells us a story about two men who went up to the Temple to pray. One man was a Pharisee, and he would have been a respected member of the community. Pharisees were known for their devotion to studying and obeying God’s word in all aspects of their lives. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with obeying God in all aspects of life. But the problem with this Pharisee was that he was living his life in a manner that was all about himself. If you pay close attention to his prayer, it’s hard not to think that he was bragging about himself to God!

The other man was a tax collector. As such he would have been despised by more than just the Pharisee. He would have been viewed as a thief and a traitor to his people. Now, some of us might still think that way about tax collectors, but the situation in that day and time was different. There were a variety of taxes, and some of them were collected by people who basically “bid” for the right to do so. Since it involved paying a fee up front, tax collectors like this man could keep whatever they could extract from people. It’s not hard to see why the tax collector would have been viewed as a thief and a traitor by the public.

Two very different men came to the temple to pray. Both had made their lives all about themselves. The Pharisee had set out to be seen by others as a respected leader of his community by following the letter of the law. And all indications are that he had succeeded in that. For the tax collector, it was about taking the “fast track” to getting rich. He had thrown honesty and decency to the wind, and was basically robbing his own people. But for both of these men, the fact that they were living all about themselves made their success hollow.

Two men came to the temple to pray. Two men not so different in their attempts to live their lives all about themselves, although the paths they took were on opposite ends of the religious and social scale. But I think the real difference was this: one of them was thoroughly satisfied with the way he lived his life. He was quite convinced that his life was right and even pleasing to God. The other one came to the temple not satisfied, or pleased, or confident, but broken. He was so broken that he wouldn’t even look up and he kept beating his chest in remorse. And that’s the whole point of the story according to Luke: Jesus “told this parable to some who trusted in themselves” (Lk 18:9).

That’s one of the most important choices we have to make in this life. It comes down to whether we put our trust in ourselves, in our hopes and dreams, and in our own efforts or we put our trust in God, in his faithfulness, mercy, and love. While the people to whom Jesus told this story would have expected him to say what a good man the Pharisee was and what a rotten scoundrel the tax collector was, he shocked them. Speaking about the tax collector, he said, “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other” (Lk 18:14). Jesus said this because the tax collector had learned a lesson that’s important for us all. When we make our lives “all about me,” our hopes and dreams may thrive for a while, but they will eventually collapse. Only when we base our sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging on our trust in God do we really find the life we’re looking for.

That’s the message of a Bible verse that may be familiar to you: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths (Prov 3:6-7). I don’t think we set out to live our lives “all about ourselves.” It kind of sneaks up on us. For some of us, perhaps our families of origin were such that the only “safe” place we had was inside our own hearts and minds. And that’s where our hopes and dreams took root and grew so strong. And so we put our trust in those hopes and dreams because that’s all we had. For others, we may have noticed that our ideas differed from most of the ones we heard from other people. And so we began to trust primarily in our own viewpoints. This process becomes like second nature to us, and I would say it goes unnoticed. But that’s still a form of making life all about me. And that’s not what life is all about. It’s all about God, and what God wants to do in and through us in this world.

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[1] © 2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/23/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/kRzsxfzmyck .

(Not) Losing Heart

 (Not) Losing Heart

Luke 18:1-8[1]

I think all of us at some point find ourselves in a place where we just want to give up. Most of us know that life can be hard at times. But one of the “uncomfortable” truths is that it can be so hard that we wind up feeling like we’re just beating our heads against a wall. When life gets that hard, we may find ourselves just wanting to quit. We have all kinds of ways of doing that. Usually, it’s about indulging in our preferred means of escape. And, truth be told, we all need to take a break at times. No one can stand up to the relentless pace of life, especially when it feels like we’re getting nowhere.

The question becomes how we take a break. There are some “escapes” that are good for us. I readily own up to the fact that I spend hours on my bicycle because it’s one of the ways I take a break and clear my head. Other “escapes” are relatively benign; they don’t help us, but they also don’t hurt us. The problem comes in when our primary means of “escaping” from the frustration, discouragement, or even just plain boredom we can face in life is through something that actively harms us. All we have to do is look at the statistics regarding substance abuse to see that too many of us take that route.

Our Gospel lesson addresses the question of how we deal with life when it gets hard. Particularly the Christian life. I think many of us expect our faith to make life easier. And, of course, our faith does make it easier to bear with life when it gets hard. But faith doesn’t offer us any guarantees that we’ll somehow be magically spared from struggles. In fact, I would say that if we pay attention to the Bible, those of us who embrace faith as a way of life can expect it to bring some of the very hardships that we’d hoped to escape. And when that harsh truth sinks in, many “lose heart,” give up, and walk away from faith.

In our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells a story. Sometimes it can be tough to figure out what Jesus’ parable stories are about. But Luke gives us clues. He introduces this story by telling us that “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Lk 18:1). To figure out who “them” was, we have to look back into the verses that come before. There, Jesus was warning his disciples about the hardships they would face as they followed him in a world that operates very differently from the kingdom of God. Because they can fall on anyone at any time, Jesus calls those who follow him to “pray always and not lose heart.”

The story itself is about a woman and a judge. The judge would have been responsible for resolving disputes in the community, like a justice of the peace, or perhaps even a county court judge. The woman was a widow who was supposed to receive special care from the community. At least that was what it said in the “Law of Moses” that the leaders of the Jewish people were always claiming to be so devoted to. But this widow had to keep coming back to this judge to demand what was due her until he got worried that she was publicly humiliating him. That should tell us something: leaders aren’t always so keen on what the Bible says.

Jesus describes the judge as a man “who neither feared God nor cared about people” (Lk 18:2, NLT). That’s quite a contrast from loving God with all your heart and loving your neighbor as yourself. Even the judge said he cared nothing for God nor for anyone else. It would seem all that he cared about was himself. This woman who had lost her husband had to hound this dishonest, corrupt, and godless judge very likely just to be able to access the property she was due from her husband’s estate. In the end, a man who defrauded his own people every chance he got gave in not because it was the right thing to do, but because he was worried about his image getting tarnished in public

It’s easy to mistake the point of this passage. We may be tempted to think that God is like the judge in the story. But the opposite is true. Jesus reminds us time and again that God is always loving, always faithful, always generous. God knows what we need before we even know to ask and delights in caring for us. The point of Jesus’ story is that if a dishonest, corrupt, and godless man would grant the request of someone he didn’t even care about, how much more can we trust that God not only hears us when we “cry out to him day and night” (Lk 18:7, CEB), but also that he will keep his promise to make right all the wrongs we may have endured.

Of course, one of the problems we have with trusting God is that sometimes it seems like God “delays” in keeping that promise. We may wonder about God’s notion of what it means to answer us “quickly,” as Jesus insists he will (Lk 18:8). We may even wonder whether God is listening, whether God really does care about us, or even whether God is there at all! When our prayers aren’t answered “soon enough,” it’s tempting to lose heart, just give up and walk away.

But this is where the real point of the story comes in. Just like the widow who never gave up, so we are called to live a life of “persistent faith” (Lk 18:8, MSG). That means coming to God with all our cares, all our fears, and all our doubts. And we keep coming back to God no matter what life throws in our path because we not only pray by ourselves, but we also have each other for encouragement when we feel like giving up. We keep coming back because we’ve learned by experience that none of the other “escapes” we use to deal with life really satisfy us in the end. We keep coming to God because we trust in Jesus’ promise that God will set things right for us in God’s way and in God’s time.

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[1] © 2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/16/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel:  https://youtu.be/Njg2A8yXcxM .

Where Jesus Is

 Where Jesus Is

Luke 17:11-19[1]

There’s an ancient saying that has defined what “church” meant for hundreds of years: “Where Christ is, there is the Church.”[2] For most of church history, it really meant the opposite: “where the church is, that’s where you find Christ.”[3] It was another way of saying that there’s no salvation outside the church, which was what Christians believed for centuries. But I find that vision of what Christ is doing in the world to be too small. God is working in Christ through the Spirit to accomplish his work of salvation in this world in all kinds of ways that we may never even know about. And that means nobody can put limits on where Christ is!

One of my favorite theologians insists that we should read this ancient saying differently: “Where Christ is, there is the church” is more of a mission statement.[4] In other words, where we can perceive that Christ is working in the world, that’s where the church should be working. As the Matthew 25 initiative of the PCUSA reminds us, Jesus said he was with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the strangers, the sick, and those in prison. In fact, Jesus told his disciples that he was the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the strangers, the sick, and those in prison whom they had encountered. My favorite theologian concludes that if that’s where Christ is, then that’s where the church should be.

We’ve already heard the message in Luke’s Gospel that Jesus came bringing the kingdom of God that breaks through all kinds of prejudices and boundaries. In our Gospel lesson for today, we see that played out with the bitterness that separated the Jewish people from the Samaritans. The Samaritans were descended from those who were left behind when the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell. But they were also descended from the gentile peoples that the Assyrian conquerors brought in to solidify their hold on new territory. That took place 700 years before Jesus’ day, but the bitterness between the Jewish people and the Samaritans hadn’t diminished one bit over all that time. 

I find it interesting that when we meet the group of “lepers” in this Gospel lesson, there’s no initial mention of ethnic boundaries. Their common illness made them all unclean and outcast. And like many who are outcast, they bonded together despite any other boundaries that might have otherwise kept them apart. Because these men were all “unclean” and therefore socially outcast, they were excluded from all the normal activities of life—from family to community to worship. When they cried out to Jesus for mercy, they were obviously asking him to heal them from their disease so they could go back to their lives.

Jesus’ response that they go show themselves to the priest might seem strange to us, but when someone was healed from a skin disease, that person was to appear before the priest. The priest examined them, and if there was no further sign of disease, he declared them to be “clean.” That meant being able to re-enter their lives—family, community, and worship. I wonder whether when these ten men first heard Jesus tell them to go show themselves to the priest, they might have looked at their mutilated skin, and then back at Jesus. I wonder whether they may have thought that he had forgotten something: the part where he was supposed to actually heal them. But he said “go,” and they went. And in doing so their skin was restored. 

Luke tells us that one of them, when he saw that he was healed, returned praising God with a loud voice, and fell at Jesus’ feet to thank him. It’s only at this point that we learn he was a Samaritan. As a Samaritan, no Jewish priest anywhere was going to pronounce him clean. Simply because of the fact of his birth and his heritage, he would always be viewed by any Jewish person as “unclean” and therefore outcast. But it was this man, who had lived his whole life on the wrong side of the prejudices of his world, who had the ability to “see” that he had been healed by Jesus. He had the faith to see that it was through Jesus that he had been given God’s mercy that healed him.

In response, Jesus said to him, “Your faith has saved you.” This man’s ability to see beyond his healing and to recognize the grace of God at work through Jesus was a kind of faith that not only made him physically well, it also made him spiritually whole. I think this story reminds us that those who live on the “wrong” side of the prejudices of our world are often more sensitive to the presence of God’s grace than those of us who are “respectable.” Jesus asked where the other nine were, and why only a “foreigner” returned to give thanks. I think part of the answer might be that they were so excited about being healed they didn’t walk but ran to the priest. They couldn’t wait to be declared “clean” so they could return to their lives on the right side of the boundaries and become “respectable” again.

I wonder if this might provide us with a way to think about the church in our time. I wonder whether the church isn’t a bit like the other nine men in this story. We can still get so caught up with living our lives on the right side of the boundaries in our world that we miss the fact that Jesus is out there working with the “outcasts.” If that’s where Jesus is, then that’s where we should be. It leads me to think that if we want to personally experience the new life of God’s kingdom, or if we want to see renewal in our church, we need to be out there working among the people on the other side of our prejudices, because that’s where Jesus is.

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[1] ©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/9/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/91tpPTkHVYo .

[2] This idea originated in the early Second Century with Ignatius of Antioch, in his letter to the church at Smyrna: “wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the universal church” (Ignatius, Smyrnaeans, 8.2; often translated the “Catholic church” but in the setting of the early Second Century that translation is anachronistic).

[3] This development started with Ambrose of Milan in the late 4^th century, who said “Where Peter is, there is the church, and where the church is there is eternal life” (From his commentary on Psalm 40 [41]). In more recent days, the phrase has developed in the Roman Catholic Church to “Where Peter is, there is the church, and where the church is, there is Christ.”

[4] Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 126. He understands Christ’s presence in the world in two ways: “whoever hears you, hears me” (Lk 10:16), in which Christ promises to be with us in the proclamation of the gospel, in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and in the fellowship of the body of Christ (cf. ibid., 123-25). The second way is the one alluded to above, “whoever visits them visits me” (Mt 25:40). Moltmann insists that we can only truly be the Church and truly live in the presence of Christ if we link the and “seek the fellowship of the crucified one in the poor” (ibid., 127).

Good Enough

 Good Enough

Luke 17:1-10[1]

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a problem with the concept of “good enough.” I think it’s fair to say that I’m a “recovering perfectionist.” And when I say “recovering” I mean I’ve made progress, but I still have room for improvement. I grew up with the message that “if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” And, truth be told, I still believe in that. I just recognize that there are times when my “best” is better and times when it’s simply “good enough.” Learning to embrace the idea that it’s okay to do some things “good enough” is a way for me to keep my sanity. Especially when my “to-do” list feels overwhelming. I have an idea that perhaps I’m not alone in that!

When it comes to our faith, the idea of “good enough” can get us into all kinds of trouble. One of the ideas in our part of the Christian family is that we can never be “good enough” to deserve God’s love. For some of us, it’s freeing to know that. For others, it can become a burden. Especially when we think that we still have to try to be “good enough”: good enough for God to love us, good enough to go to heaven. Most of us have to make the journey in our faith from thinking we somehow have to try to be “good enough” to deserve God’s love to the place where we realize that’s not possible. More than that, it’s not necessary. God accepts us for who we are, just as we are.

As we’ve been working our way through Luke’s Gospel this year, I would imagine that our Scripture lessons have at some point gotten uncomfortable. The way Luke’s Gospel presents us with what it means to follow Jesus is deeply challenging. Some of the most difficult demands Jesus makes are found in Luke’s Gospel. We’ve heard them this year. Give without expecting to receive anything in return. Welcome and embrace and even invite into one’s home the outcasts, the unwanted, and the rejected. The “exalted” ones will be humbled and the humble will be exalted. You must “hate” your family and even your own life. You cannot serve God and wealth, and so you must “give up” everything.

In our lesson for today, Jesus makes a couple more difficult demands. First, he instructs his disciples to avoid causing any of the “little ones” to sin. I don’t think he’s talking about children here, but rather the “humble” ones we’ve heard about all through the Gospel: the least and the last and the left out. But this sounds uncomfortably close to saying that we have watch to ourselves constantly to keep from harming others. It sounds like we have to live up to some kind of demand for perfection that we all know is impossible. It sounds like doing the best we can to avoid hurting the “little ones” around us just isn’t “good enough.”

If that weren’t hard enough for us to hear, he goes on to say that if someone sins against us, we should forgive them. And Jesus said, “if the same person sins against you seven times a day and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive” (Lk 17:4). That’s a lot of forgiveness. Think about it, if someone hurts you seven times a day and asks you to forgive them each time, you have to wonder if that person is really “repenting.” And yet the demand is there: forgive those who sin against you. Every time they sin against you. And keep forgiving them. Again, it sounds like a demand that is beyond what is reasonable to expect from anyone.

I think it’s no wonder that the disciples asked Jesus to increase their faith! On top of everything else that Jesus has demanded of those who would follow him, he adds that they’re not to sin against others, and they’re to forgive everyone who sins against them, every time. I think it’s interesting that Luke calls them the “apostles” here. That’s the first time he’s done that. Normally he calls them the “disciples.” But here he says that “the apostles” asked Jesus to increase their faith. I think it would have gotten the first Christians’ attention when they heard that “the apostles” admitted they needed more faith to live up to the seemingly impossible demands Jesus made of them. It sounds like even the “apostles” doubted whether their faith was “good enough.”

I’m not sure it helps us when Jesus adds the bit about being “unworthy slaves.” I think a better translation would be: “We servants deserve no special praise” (Lk 17:10, CEB). The idea is that it wouldn’t have made any sense of for a slave in that day to think that they had done anything to deserve any special reward just by doing what they were told. Similarly, those of us who follow Jesus don’t somehow “earn” rewards by doing our best to do what he taught us. But at the same time, Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom of God has already made it clear that we don’t have to. God extends his mercy to us simply because he wants to!

I think most of us wonder whether we’re “good enough.” A good enough parent. A good enough husband or wife. A good enough friend. A good enough (fill in the blank with your profession). A good enough person. What Jesus has to say about living the Christian life in Luke’s Gospel can make even the most faithful among us wonder whether we can ever be a good enough Christian. But the good news of the kingdom of God is that we don’t have to be “good enough” to deserve God’s love, or God’s mercy, or God’s promise of blessing. God loves us unconditionally and irrevocably; he always has, and he always will. In response, what God asks is that we muster the faith we have to love God back and to love others. And when we do that to the best of our ability, it’s “good enough.”

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[1] © 2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/2/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/1WvsOlIIPk4