Lent 3 2026

We do not presume the confidence by table numbers.

We are table.

Therefore, gracious Lord.

Jesus Christ.

And to be more in mind.

Blessed is the Lord who forgiveth all our sins.

God received forgiveness.

My brothers and sisters, not out of dread or fear, but believing that God is faithful to forgive.

Let us rid ourselves of what we need to carry no longer.

O God, please truth to us.

For our faithlessness to do and want to be for our failure to cherish creation.

Give us life to change.

Enable us to change that we may live.

The Almighty and compassionate Lord grant you absolution and remission of all your sin, true repentance, the time to amend your life, and the grace and consolation of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Friends, let's pray together.

Almighty God, under whom all the hearts are, all desires, and from whom no secret seems.

Cleanse the ball separate hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit.

And we may perfectly love thee, and worthly magnify thy holy name through Christ.

Amen.

Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

This is the first and greatest commitment.

The second is like unto me.

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

On these two commitments hang all the law and the prophets.

Let us pray.

Almighty God who seeth is that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.

Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls.

That we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil causes which may assault and hurt the soul.

Through Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth of thee and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.

I said, I will make known my transgressions to the gracious one.

Therefore, let all who are faithful offer prayer to you.

You are high and you are hiding place of your heating from this.

Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another that you may be healed.

The prayer of the righteous woman, our man, is powerful in effect.

Elijah was a human being like us.

And he prayed intensely that it did not rain.

And it did not rain on the earth for three years and then he prayed again and again rained, and the earth yielded its heart.

The word of the Lord.

He said, You have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not murder.

And whoever murders shall be subject to judgments.

But I say to you all, that if you are angry with a sister or brother, you will be liable to judgments.

And if you call a sister or brother an idiot, you will be subject to the counsel.

And if you say you fool, you'll be subject to the hell of fire.

Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar, and you remember that your sister or brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go.

First be reconciled to your sister or brother, and then come and offer your gift.

Come to favorable terms quickly with your accuser, while they are on the way with them, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the court officer, and you will be thrown into prison.

Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Good morning, everybody.

Glad you made it.

Anybody a little tired this morning?

As I get older, that hour matters.

It matters a lot.

So this past Wednesday, I was at the Zoom Supper.

You're all invited this Wednesday.

It's delicious.

And I got a chance to sit with our friend Holt.

Everybody knows Holt.

He sits up here with his family, red hair, little guy, asks like really oddly deep theological questions.

So, like, so when Holt's coming, I'm like, oh, I wonder what's on Holt's mind.

And what was on Holt's mind on Wednesday was, Father Sean, what does Lent mean?

And I realized in that moment that I didn't know.

I mean, I think I knew at one point, but so I did what every self-respecting adult would do.

I just made something up.

I'm just kidding.

I mean, I did make something up, but like it wasn't like it came out of nowhere.

Like, I it was like a really good educated guess.

So I sat there and I thought, okay, Sean, you had to learn this somewhere in the last 25 years for crying out loud.

And so I said, well, well, hold, I think it, I think.

I said, hold, I'm not sure.

So please, I gave me the caveat.

I said, now hold, I'm not sure.

But I think that it has something to do with 40.

Like 40 days.

Like that's what it is.

And I'm pleased to report that it does not have anything to do with that at all.

At one point they actually called the quadrissimo, which like had to do with 40, but um at some point it changed, uh, and it's rooted in a word listed, I think, in the old English, according to uh the Googler.

And uh and the Google told me through research that it comes from a word that used to mean like springtime.

Like, you know, our seasons?

Like springtime.

Uh but what the root of the word actually is, is growing, stretching, link fitting.

So it means to link fit, to grow.

And I thought, wow, that is really appropriate.

You know, we gather together during this season, and really what we're doing is we're wondering like, how can we intentionally look closer at our faith and our life and our behaviors for the sake of growth and lengthening?

Now, I don't know about you, um, but when I grew six inches one summer, um, there was a lot of pain that was happening that night.

Growing pains.

My mom would come in and say, Oh, Sean, those are just growing pains.

And so maybe you're like me, and growth and lengthening isn't always the most comfortable thing.

So uh please report that um I'm going to say some things that will probably make you uncomfortable.

And so to do that, we're going to look at the gospel.

Um, the gospel is Matthew 5, and we are right at the beginning of Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount.

Now, this is the longest recorded sort of teaching sermon publicly that we have of Jesus.

And most scholars will say that this is sort of his manifesto.

This is Jesus laying out to both Jews and Gentiles publicly what he is calling people to do.

What does it mean to follow his way?

What does it mean to declare yourself a citizen of the kingdom of God which he is revealing and trying to tell people is breaking into the world constantly?

And Jesus is doing this as a Jewish person.

And we have to remember that Jesus was a faithful Jewish rabbi, especially in the Gospel of Matthew.

You know, you get the genealogy, son of David, son of Abraham.

Jesus is called the son of David multiple times, right?

He does this teaching right at the beginning.

I mean, he is on the scene, he's baptized, he's tempted, he calls his disciples, and boom, he goes up to the top of a hill, a mount, the Sermon on the Mount, just like Moses.

Just like Moses.

And he is teaching the people, this is what he understands it means to be faithful to the God that is revealed in the Jewish covenant, right?

This is this is his manifesto.

And so he talks a lot about things that Jewish people would be thinking about.

So he's talking a lot about law.

He's talking a lot about what does it mean to follow the Jewish tradition, the law, all the precepts of it.

Like, and he's having people sort of grow and think differently about the faith that they've inherited.

Maybe this was his moment of lent for them.

So I think he's equally speaking to us, having us think a little bit differently.

And right off the bat, he goes right at murder.

You know, thou shalt not murder.

Ten big ones, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal, right?

Thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not blaspheme.

Like he goes right at murder.

And he says, I know you heard say unto you that you shall not murder.

This is a good law, people.

This is a good law.

We do not want to live in a world where we are willy-nilly murdering people, we're stealing from people, we're disrespecting our elders, right?

He's being very clear.

You have been given this rule, and so let's follow it.

And what if we spend our entire life just white knuckling the rules?

Just, ugh, I want to kill everybody, but I shouldn't.

I mean, I want to live in that world.

I don't, I mean, but Jesus is saying, how about we get a little curious and we move from just the law to somewhere else?

How about we get curious about anger, hatred.

Now, I'm not talking about like righteous anger.

I'm not talking about the anger that wells up inside of you when you read the statistics about poverty or oppression or human trafficking.

This is the kind of anger that motivates us to leave here and want to change the world.

This is the kind of anger that allowed Jesus to make a whip and hit the ground and say, You have made my father's house a den of thieves.

He's talking about structural, we want that kind of anger.

Jesus is saying the anger that you direct towards another human being.

The hatred that comes out of it.

Let's start there and wonder about that.

Because very quickly that anger can turn into insult.

The word is raka, it says idiot.

We can go from being angry to giving ourselves permission to insult people.

You idiot is what it says in the translation.

Raka means empty-minded.

So we go from anger to, oh, they're just dumb.

They're not smart as me.

They just don't know.

Bless their heart.

Y'all know what I'm talking about.

Bless their heart.

Thank you.

I need a little laughter here.

Then he goes, but then that quickly turns into contempt.

You fool.

Now it says you fool.

Moros.

So we get our word moron, which we actually isn't think that's that bad of an insult, but like in the Greek, that means you godless human being.

It's a moral judgment.

You are unworthy.

You are no good.

You are without God.

You are not made in the image of God.

You are not like us.

I'm angry at you.

You're an idiot.

You are not worthy of God's love.

You are fundamentally different than us.

Murder.

Violence.

What Jesus is saying is that wouldn't it be better for all of us if we started there?

And we wondered about that and how we can heal and reconcile that.

So it doesn't get here.

How do we do that?

I mean, that's the call.

How do we do that?

I think, friends, that's why we're here.

Inviting and asking the transformation of our lives and our souls and our spirits so that we don't just have to white knuckle our life following the rules.

And y'all, I gotta tell you, I cannot underestimate, no, that's not the right word, I cannot overestimate how radical it was for Jesus to tell a group of Jewish people that as you are on your way to the altar for sacrifice, which means all of you good Jewish people, when you're taking your pilgrimage to Jerusalem at great cost and expense, could be hundreds of miles, fifty miles, and you catch yourself along the way with this hatred, this contempt, this anger that's inside of you.

Turn around and go deal with that before you come to the altar.

Friends, that's an altar.

We come here every Sunday to gather around an altar, God's table, God's heavenly banquet, where we hear that there is enough and that we are loved, and we offer ourselves, and we hear the great story, and we're filled with hope.

And Jesus is saying, as you are coming up to the altar rail, if you find in your heart that hatred, that contempt, go and be reconciled.

Because God isn't as much interested in the sacrifices we make than the transformed and reconciled hearts in the world.

This is super radical.

Now, I do not want you guys to leave before communion.

I'm so many you're gonna leave after communion.

That's fine.

I don't want you to leave, okay?

I'm not saying leave.

What I'm saying is this is so important that our tradition puts something in the worship service.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Now, most of us think this is like the time where we have the shortest, most boring cocktail party we've ever had.

Where we say, the peace of the Lord be with you.

And we say, Peace be with you, peace be with you, peace be with you, peace be with you.

And it's like you want to go to all your friends, and this is the time to say, peace be with you.

And I don't want you to stop doing that.

Please don't like stop.

When Mike says, peace be with you, please turn to all of your neighbors and say, peace be with you.

And the reason that was put in the service was because before we come up, we are called to take a moment and sit and wonder about the condition of our hearts.

And are we holding anger?

Are we insulting people?

Are we looking at people as though they are godless?

And let me tell you, friends, the people that we eat most in this one are the ones that we think are treating other people like they are godless.

We have contempt and hatred for the other people that are dehumanizing.

Well, I have contempt for them because the way they're treating other people, they're dehumanizing other people, so that gives me permission.

Am I acting out in some type of violence, emotional or otherwise, to the people in the world that I love or dishumanity?