Epiphany 7 2025

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Blessed be God.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God, you all see the spirits.

Our Lord, you've taught us that without love, whatever we do is worth nothing.

Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you.

Grant this, for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever.

Amen.

As you be exceeded, our children are invited to find the foreign children.

What would happen if nobody cleaned your room or your house?

Would it just like stay the same?

Some might even say that the dirt might exponentially accelerate as the food turns to mold.

Truly, right?

Like it just gets worse and worse and worse.

And you know what?

That happens everywhere all the time.

In fact, some people would argue that this is a fundamental law of the universe.

That things will always go from a state of order to a state of chaos and disorder if left unchecked.

Then that's just how things are.

And that happens in our life, in our relationships, in our physical space, and guess what?

Sometimes even in our heads.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by all of the demands and thoughts and stresses and things that are being asked of you?

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, me too.

It can feel overwhelming, and you know what it's not fun.

In fact, I think that that's what creates anxiety.

Are you all familiar with anxiety or stress?

Have you ever felt it?

Sort of feels like there's so many demands on us at any given time.

It's just like the room is getting dirtier and dirtier and dirtier, and there's nothing that we can do about it.

Although I think there is, I think that part of what we're doing when we come here to church, is we're trying to figure out a way to clean up our room.

Because we can't live in absolute chaos now.

We don't want to live in a room that's so perfect all the time that we can't live in it, right?

That's no fun.

We want to have some excitement in life.

But I think part of what we're doing in church, and part of what the people who have come before us, our ancestors, are teaching us, is that there's ways for us to clean up the environment around us.

In fact, that brings life.

Have you ever walked into your room after it was really dirty and somebody cleaned it for you?

Has that ever happened?

What was that experience like?

Alright, let's thank our parents.

Thank you for cleaning our rooms.

And because it's a gift, because and so what I want to encourage you is that as you do your long walk of faith in here, is that there's ways that we can clean up.

Right?

And we can discipline ourselves.

So we call that prayer, we call that service, we call that being in a fun relationship with your friends and even coming to church.

There's ways that we can organize our life and make the stress and the chaos and the anxiety better.

And it's always good to, I think, do that.

We're never gonna get it perfect, right?

We can't eliminate all the chaos in life.

Uh that's true, but what we can do is try to deal with it together.

Sound good?

Good.

Okay, you're left.

End of story.

Bye.

Now there was no food at all the land, and the family was very scary, and the land of Egypt had a land of Canaan because of the.

Thus Joseph provided them with food that year for all their livestock.

When that year was ended, they came to him the following year and said to him, We cannot hide from our Lord that our money is ended, and the herds of cattle are my Lord's.

There is nothing left before my Lord except our bodies and our lands.

Why should we die before your eyes for free and our land?

Buy us our land of food, and we and we are the lands of Pharaoh.

Now give us seed that we may live and not die, and that the land have not become desolate.

Thus chosen upon all the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, and every Egyptian sold their fields, because the sand famine pressed down upon them, and the land became pharaoh.

As for the people, he moved into cities and made slaves of them, from one end of the border of Egypt to the other.

And they gave a statutory holding that the Pharaoh gave them.

Therefore they did not sell their land.

And then Joseph said to the people, Look here, I have got you all this day along with your land of the Pharaoh.

Here is seed for you, see the land, and at the harbours you shall be one built in the fire, and for us, so there shall be your own, and seed for the field, and for food for yourselves and whoever is in your household, and as food for your lady.

They said, You have saved our lives, and if I pleasure, in the pure eyes of the Lord, we will be slaves to the Pharaoh.

The word of the Lord.

Give thanks to she who is majesty, and for she is good.

Let the redeemed of she who saves and proclaim that she redeemed them from the hands of the foe, and she has gathered them from all the lands.

She turns desert into pools of water.

And there she settles the hungry, and they sow fields and plant vineyards, and she blesses them and they multiply even more.

Then they themselves are diminished in poor.

So she pours contempt on the princess, and makes them then she elevates the meeting from affliction.

The upright see it and are glad observes these things.

And he carried back some of the proceeds with the knowledge of his wife, and brought only a heart and placed it at the feet of the apostles.

Ananias, Peter said, Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit, and to withhold from the proceeds of the land?

Was it not a both of yours while it remained as soul in your power?

Why have you contrived this in your heart?

You did not lie to the immortals, but to God.

Now when Ananias heard these words, he fell down, dying.

The young men came and wrapped him up, and then carried him out and buried him.

And it happened after about the space of three hours, his wife came in, not knowing what had happened.

And Peter said to her, Tell me whether you two have sold the land for such and such.

And she said, Yes, that was the price.

Then Peter said to her, How is it that you two have conspired to put the spirit of the Holy One to the test?

Look, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.

And she fell down immediately at his feet and died.

Then the young men came in and found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband.

And a great fear came upon the whole church and all who heard these things, the word of the Lord.

Now, after the woman anointed his feet, Jesus went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the reign of God, and the twelve were with him.

There were also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities.

Mary called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod Stewart, Chusa, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.

Now a great crowd of women, children, and men gathered, coming to Jesus town by town, and he said in a parable, A sower went out to sow seed, and while sowing some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air devoured it.

And another batch fell on rock, and as it grew up it withered, having no moisture.

And other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it.

Yet more fell onto good ground, and when it grew it produced a hundredfold.

As Jesus said this, he called out, Let anyone with ears to hear listen.

Then his disciples, including the women who supported him, asked him what this parable meant, and Jesus said, To you all has it been given to know the mysteries of the majesty of God, but to others through parables, so that they would be looking, yet not seeing, and listening, but not understanding.

Now the parable is this the seed is the word of God.

Those on the path are they who have heard, and then comes the devil and takes away the word from their hearts in order that they not believe, that they may not be saved.

Those on the rock are they who, when they hear, receive the word with joy, however, they have no root.

They believe for a season, and in a time of testing, they defect.

The ones that fell among the thorns, they are the ones who hear, and they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, as they go their way, they do not produce mature fruit.

But that on the good ground, they are those who through a good and honest heart hear the word, hold fast, and bring forth fruit through persistence.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

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

Amen.

Please be seated.

Thanks for coming, y'all.

It's cold.

I had to go back and get my jacket, which does not match my pants.

I know that.

Or my uh shoes.

You're welcome.

Okay.

So this past week uh we were uh we went to a conference.

There was a few of us who went to a conference on staff and a few of you folks.

And it was a good conference, but on the way back, Mike and I were driving together, and I made some comment about this word that I really like.

And the word is entropy.

Entropy.

And Mike said, Oh, the equation for entropy is etched in stained glass over here at the chapel.

And I thought, no way.

And sure enough it is.

It is over there along with all different kinds of other cool Easter eggs.

I encourage you to find it and check it out.

And there's a really beautiful story that's been told through the math.

And so I started thinking, gosh, I love this word entropy, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.

So as I was thinking about the sermon, that's what came to mind.

Now I know there's a few of you right now that are saying, okay, Sean, we get it.

You're into philosophy, you like theology, but are you really gonna stand in front of a church across the street from NASA and talk about the second law of thermodynamics?

And the answer is yes.

Yes, I am.

I'm probably not gonna do it effectively, but I'm gonna try.

Because I think what's interesting about entropy, right?

So, you know, in thermodynamics in science, it basically says that all of the energy in a closed system, in our closed system of the universe, has existed since the Big Bang.

All of the energy is there.

It can't be created, it can't be destroyed, it can only be changed.

That's the first law.

The second law says that there's actually a written, like hard, fast rule on how this energy moves.

And it moves in what's called the arrow of time, and that movement is called entropy.

And basically what it says is that energy will always move from a more structured state to a less structured state.

It will go from order to disorder, it will go from order to chaos, it will go from less possibility to more possibility, if you want to say it in a sort of a positive way.

But there is a fixed movement that affects all of reality, all of matter.

Everywhere that we look, this holds constant.

Things move from a state of order to disorder.

That's called entropy.

Comes from a Greek word, tropos, which means transformation, which I think is fascinating in the Christian context.

So basically, things are moving in a what they would say a movement of transformation of some sort.

Okay, Sean, great.

Why does that matter?

Well, for me, I actually think that it's proven in the psychological literature that we don't do well with high states of disorder and chaos.

That in fact the way that we have sort of evolved as humans or adapted as humans, whatever language you want to use, is that we are predictability machines.

We like to sort of predict how things are gonna go.

We like structure, we like knowing what's coming next.

And if we don't know what's coming next, that creates anxiety within us.

It creates anxiety in systems.

We don't like that at all.

I mean, imagine right now if I started clucking like a chicken.

Like nonstop.

And then Mike sort of like jumped up on the altar and started like kicking things around.

And then they started playing polka music.

Like, for like that would be fun, maybe for like five seconds, maybe ten, but at some point you're gonna be like, wait a minute, Sean, this isn't how this is supposed to go.

Like that type of entropy would inject disorder into this system, and we're coming here in some ways because we have all of this chaos of our life out those doors, all of this potentiality, in some ways it feels like infinite possibility.

And we come in here because we're hoping for a little binding.

We're hoping for a little order in our life.

Do you know that the word relegare, where we get the word religion, do you know what it means?

Binding.

It actually means to bind.

And in some ways, I think that religion and religious traditions throughout time have been trying to fight against this reality of entropy, this tendency for all things to move towards chaos.

Because it creates anxiety in us and we don't like it.

And so what we're asked to do, just like the universe, is use our energy to bind things around us, to focus our energy so that we can create, right?

So that so that we can participate in a more meaningful way, so that we can push back from that anxiety, and all things need this.

I mean, think about the bedroom, right?

If you leave the bedroom uncleaned and just live in it, it's going to entropically fall into more chaos until you come in and put a little order in.

And boy, doesn't that feel good.

I mean, imagine if you left your relationships completely untouched.

The second law of thermodynamics would say that it is just gonna fall into absolute chaos and destruction.

Well, that's pretty much marked every relationship that I haven't put any energy into.

That all things of health require some type of binding.

And that chaos isn't always a good thing.

So I say always a good thing.

I'm gonna get to that later.

I mean, how many of y'all feel more free and positive when you go to the grocery store and there's 17 options for peanut butter?

That doesn't feel good.

Give me three.

Like, I want a little variety in life, but I don't need 17.

That just creates anxiety in me.

Okay, so do you believe me?

Do you believe that part of the project of humanity and what we're doing is figuring out how to order our lives in a way that is beneficial and meaningful.

Dare I say fruitful?

Fruitful.

And I want to take a look at all of the readings.

I really do, because I think they're all offering us sort of different viewpoints into this reality of sort of chaos and binding and entropy and the interplay between the two.

I'm not going to avoid, I wanted to avoid the first two readings because they're pretty tough.

I mean, did anybody read those and be like, what is Sean going to say about this?

I mean, whew, yeah.

So the first reading, right, in the story, basically what it is is you have entropy, disorder, chaos entered into the system on a societal level.

Famine strikes Egypt.

And it is chaos.

And people are afraid of the worst kind of entropy.

The worst kind of disorder, death.

Right?

They're afraid that they're going to die.

So they go to Joseph and they need a solution, and Joseph says, okay, if you give me your cattle, I'll feed you.

They're like, good.

We don't want to die.

We want to survive.

And then the chaos keeps coming, the famine persists, and they go back to Joseph and they say, we still can't feed ourselves.

And Joseph, being a steward of Pharaoh's money, says, I tell you what, I'll give you food, but now you're my slave.

They bound themselves to Pharaoh.

Said, Going forward, you are going to pay one-fifth of all of your produce, all of the fruits of your labor, to Pharaoh.

And they say, Great, because we just want to survive.

Notice they don't want to thrive, they want to survive.

They want to survive.

And so they say, we'll take it.

We'll take this finding.

And I gotta be honest, I think that's dangerous.

I think it's sad.

No, don't get me wrong, I'd like to have rules of the road and police officers and firefighters.

I like paying taxes.

I want to have some type of order in the midst of chaos.

I want to make sure that all of you are sort of abiding by the same rules on the road as I am.

But I don't want to become a slave.

And basically, I think what this story is telling us is that if we're not careful with how we deal with the chaos of our life, we will end up binding ourselves in a way that makes us slaves.

And we will do that as a society.

And Pharaoh wasn't the first, and Pharaoh wasn't the last.

Because you had Julius Caesar, you have Napoleon, you have Stalin, you have Hitler, you have Mussolini.

When the chaos of the world gets to be too much, when I can't handle the anxiety of all the possibility and potentiality, and I'm afraid of the chaos of death, I will bind myself to somebody and I will make myself a slave.

And I will tell you that if we're not careful right now, that may happen again, the numbers.

So maybe we need to consider what are the bindings that we're willing to put on ourselves for the sake of survival that might not lead to human thriving.

Sure didn't for the Israelites, it sure didn't for the Egyptians, just like you know.

Okay, case study number two.

This was a harder one.

Kind of an odd story.

Binding of a smaller community.

The early Christian community was nascent.

It was early on in its forming.

And they were trying to figure out what are the rules and the bindings that are going to govern us together.

We all do this as a society.

It's really important, it's really critical.

And I think the story that it's telling us today is that if you inject deception, lying into a community, it will destroy it like that.

If you put deception and lying in a relational system, if you can't trust people, it will destroy a community just like that.

There are consequences.

In fact, I think in some ways we can look at the Ten Commandments as just sort of the binding rules of a healthy community.

I want to live in a place where there's not lying and stealing and murder, and we respect our elders, and we try not to covet each other's stuff, and, you know, we try not to evade other people's relationships.

I don't know.

We all have a uniting belief or value that we're shooting for.

I mean, there's a way for a community to organize itself that leads to thriving.

And I wonder if this is not a warning to say that in your communities and in your relationships, if you allow distrust or deception into it, it will destroy it like that.

So it seems to me that the response is God was trying to eradicate that reality out of the community as fast as possible.

And I would argue that if you have deception in your relationships or your community right now, then it might be a good idea to not bind yourself around that.

That is a binding that only leads to more chaos.

You lie, it means more lying and more lying and more deception and more chaos, and that will tear a community apart.

Which can be problematic if you don't know what is and is it true.

And so I think St.

Thomas is a beautiful community, and I think it's a community that is based on truth as best we can, and all different other sort of bindings that are healthy.

That's why it's thriving so much.

It's because we have agreed on how we're supposed to be.

So I guess what I'm saying is that we need bindings in our community, and not all bindings lead to life.

And so the last the parable of the sower.

We've all heard this before.

But I mean, through the eyes of entropy, I wonder if it's giving us just some encouragement on perhaps how do we want to bind ourselves or be in relationship to entropy and chaos.

Talks about a sower who is sowing seeds almost haphazardly, like entropy, creating chaos and potentiality.

I mean, that's the thing about entropy.

That's the thing about chaos.

It's out of chaos emerges new things.

You talk to scientists, it's an ultimate potentiality.

If you get to the end of entropy, it is the place where there's the most infinite possibility, right?

This is where new life emerges.

So here we have the reality of chaos that seems to be built into the system.

And so how do we deal with it?

Well, the first, intrapersonally within ourselves, is we can fall prey to the tyranny of order.

Anybody else do that other than me?

Am I the only like OCD person who comes home and is like, that cup doesn't belong there.

There's a place for the cup, and why have you not cleaned?

That pillow shouldn't be there.

It needs to be over there.

Does anybody deal with the chaos of life by just clinging to order?

Thank you for sort of for I'm not alone up here.

Oh, I know there's more of you out here.

That like you just we worship order.

We say, I don't want any chaos at all.

The way that I'm gonna respond to the inherent chaos of life is I'm just going to be so perfectly ordered.

Everything is going to be perfect, and I'm going to control everything all the time.

That is a way, but there's no life to that.

That is like the hard ground where the chaos cannot permeate it, just bounces off.

We cannot eliminate entropy.

We can only have a relationship with it.

We have high states and low states.

And we bind it and we move in and through it.

And there's a way for us to cut ourselves off from the creative potential of reality by just not allowing anything, by thinking that we can control everything.

See how that works in your relationship.

Talk to my wife.

Those are not the best parts of our marriage.

Okay, so what about the next person?

Well, it falls into some shallow, right?

Some shallow ground, and it shoots up, and the scorching comes.

This is like the New Year's resolution, right?

That I start the year, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna live my faith, I'm gonna start the new thing, I'm gonna align myself with a different kind of binding in the midst of all of this chaos, but then it gets too hard and I just give up.

That's real.

Because let me tell you, increased chaos, increased empathy or entropy, increased disorder, it happens.

Is anybody right now feeling overwhelmed by the amount of chaos that is being thrown at you in your life?

All of the potential realities that we can't control in the future, so we're constantly running like algorithm after algorithm, trying to predict how can I keep myself and everybody around me safe?

How can I control everything?

This is what I'm talking about.

And it can get so overwhelming that if we don't have good disciplines, healthy disciplines, we'll get overwhelmed by it.

But then again, I'm talking to the people who have come to church.

I mean, that's what coming to church is.

It's a discipline that's trying to help with that.

And there's other disciplines that the ancestors have given us, right?

That's what I'm talking to the kids about.

There's ways for us to order and bind our life that helps push back against a seemingly endless, oppressive reality of chaos and potentiality.

It doesn't fix it, but it helps us order, find meaning in it.

Okay, the third one, and this is thanks to Mike.

I hadn't really worked on the third one until Mike said something in the announcements earlier.

So in the third story, like the seed goes in and the plant grows up, but then there's other things that sort of come around it and choke it out.

That's fascinating, isn't it?

You see, I think like the number one gift that we have is our focus.

Right?

I mean, for energy to be able to like create, we have to, it has to focus.

It has to come in in a focused way.

That's what's so horrible about social media and our cell phones all the time, is it's stealing our focus.

Y'all?

Like robs our focus.

Am I the only one who wants to check my phone right now?

I'm preaching and I want to check my phone.

What's going on with that?

It's so weird.

So what we focus on matters, and like we can focus on our faith and give energy to other things at the same time that are not life-giving.

And we better, if we want to listen, start getting clear about which ones we want to prove.

And so maybe the wisdom here is it's great that we have sort of disciplines and focus, and we're trying to produce good fruit.

We're trying to let the plant grow, but we're also giving a whole lot of energy to something that is not life-giving.

And that'll choke it out.

That'll choke it out.

Not all focus and organization is life-giving.

We can create, we can create things to our own demise in our life.

Okay, so then the last one.

The last one is like, what does it mean to just be good fruit, to bear good fruit, to be good soil?

It doesn't, it doesn't mean that we have no chaos or entropy in our life.

Like the process of that seed going in and dying and taking energy and growing and organizing, it is a constant process of entropy.

It's a constant process of energy moving and leaving and growing and happening, but it's happening within a soil that can nurture its growth.

We're not going to overcome disorder and chaos in our life.

We're not going to leave here and figure out the 12 steps to control everything and everyone around me.

I'm trying to tell you, that's not even a good idea.

That's what it means to participate in this reality of sort of kingdom building or however you want to look, family building, leaving this place and aligning and doing something with our focus and our energy that is productive and meaningful and beautiful is engaging that chaos around us as a community, sort of bound by sort of values and vision and relationships, as a people within ourselves that are trying to align ourselves with the story, the Jesus story, so that we can produce good fruit.

Fruit that feeds other people, that proclaims the good news, right?

That pushes back against tyrannical forces that are trying to put us in some type of, you know, bind.

Right?

They're trying to put us into slavery.

I think that's that's a way to understand what we're doing.

I'm not sure it's a good way.

But for those of you that helps, I hope it didn't.

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