What's Love Got To Do With It: Love Across Distance; October 4, 2026

speaker-1: First reading today comes from Galatians chapters 3, verse 26 through 28. In Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male and female. For all of you are one in Christ Jesus. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Galatians 3:26–28

speaker-0: you

speaker-1: I've spent the past few weeks reminding all of you of our collective roots, that the God who made everything, that created everything. Is love. Like that is what God, who God is, is love. That this God sees you as God sees God's own Son, Jesus, that is, as God's own beloved. And that God made you, like it is, hardwired into you to love one another. That you are made to give and to receive love, just as the God of the cosmos created the all that is, that God might. Love it and receive its love in return. But this faith of ours has never really been only about where we've come from. It is also very much about where we are headed together. And where we are headed is to a table. Together. With people from every nation and every tongue united in the boundary-blurring love of Jesus Christ. So today, on this World Communion Sunday, we confess that while we love the idea of love, and we've been talking about it a lot for the past couple of weeks, loving one another across difference is a rocky road. Not just like the ice cream. It's hard. So let us listen together for the word of the Lord from the book of Revelation, describing the world to come where God's presence dwells among all of us. Listen with me for the word of the Lord from Revelation 21, verses 22 to 26. This is John speaking, and he is having a vision of what he calls the New Jerusalem, which is this the realm where God is coming to earth. I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day, and there will be no night there. So the gates are always open. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations, but nothing unclean will enter into it. Nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those whose whose who are written in the Lamb's Book of Life. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Gracious God, as we strive to to love one another. May you smooth that rocky road for us. May you be present to us in ways that we need you to be present. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Christ, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. So last Friday I was on kid duty. Colleen and I split up the mornings. I've got Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. So I dropped Elliot off at his elementary school, and I dropped Lila off at the middle school, and I'm driving back to the house. And if you remember last Friday morning, it was really nice outside. And so I'm driving windows down down my own street when I see my neighbor walking her dog. And there are a lot of cars parked, and I don't think she's gonna see me. So I don't bother like waving frantically like I normally would. I just leave it be. And I'm driving right past her, and I well, I get right past her, and she yells, Hey! Slow down. And I'm startled, and I say, huh. And I immediately look down and I'm going, 33. Now. Just come from Lamar Middle School, and I know that I saw a 30 mile per hour sign over there, and I've lived on my street for eight years now. We've been in the same house for eight years, and I would have put my hand on a Bible and told you that it's 30 on my street too. And if you know anything about the weight of my right foot, 33 in the 30s pretty dang good. Except for now I'm wondering. Now I'm wondering. So I go home like two minutes later and I Google it. What is the speed limit in unmarked streets in Louisville? And it tells me that's 25. Huh. And Is my day off, Friday's my day off, so I get on my bike and I go on this big on bike ride, and I definitely don't think about this at all the whole time I'm out there. And I get back to my house. And so my I my live off a right off of Garden Ridge. And so what I normally do coming home is I come down Garden Ridge, I take a right onto my street, and then like an immediate left into my alley because I've got the driveway in the back. But I needed like a couple extra miles on my bike. I didn't get quite to the number I wanted to get to. So instead of going into my alley, what I did was I came down Garden Ridge and I turned right onto my street and I started going up my street, which I literally never do. I never do this. And as I turn, my eyes are in a different place, and then I see it right there for God and everybody. 25 miles an hour. Like right there when you go into my street. You gotta be kidding me, right? And so now I've been looking for this neighbor every day this past week. but she's on hiatus from walking her dog, I guess. I don't know why, because I gotta give her a piece of my mind. the piece that says thank you. Right? Like she literally yelled into a blind spot where I had like a lot of confidence and zero accuracy. And she did for me. What God created this vast array of difference and diversity in his world for us to offer to one another as a gift. And if we turn from my Revelation to the book of Revelation, what we see there is John's Wild vision of the fulfillment, the consummation, the marriage of all things, where all evil powers are finally conquered, where innocence are vindicated, and where God's presence floods the cosmos. And Revelation as a book is stacked with all manner of really, really strange symbols. For instance, Rome is named as Babylon, which is an empire that has fallen. It is imaged as a woman who is riding. a beast this beast has seven heads and those heads have crowns and horns and some of those horns talk like it's crazy and all of it is a metaphor for the corrupting seductive power of empire And for most of the book in Revelation, the nations and their kings are all conspiring against God and against the people of God, doing what empires always do in the scriptures, and what God is always taking the task or taking the task the empires for doing, which is this: disregarding the vulnerable, right? Cheating and stealing and murdering their way into power, and taking advantage of the poor. That is a recurrent theme. In all of the scriptures. And it makes you wonder as you read these scriptures, like, why are things this way? It is 2,000 years ago now. Like, why are they this way? And what is more like, why are they still this way? Like, why haven't we been able to get our crap together? I mean, even today, life is really hard for so many people, for the vast majority af in fact, of people on earth, while others get incredibly wealthy and live lives of ease. I mean, even the growing distance between us in what is a very nice Postage stamp of the world here in this area. The distance between us and those who are living like barely hanging on on the margins and edges of society is increasingly easy to accept, or at least pretend because of the distance that it isn't happening. But it does again make me wonder why we haven't chosen collectively to be different together. Like what why is that? To wit. I I listened to Ezra Klein interview Bill Gates this week about AI. And if you listen to this as well, they they talked about the gamut of like possibilities for AI, which which run from like a superabundance that eradicates poverty and disease all the way to like a literal Terminator style apocalypse. and I know which one of those I'd prefer. I'll have the no more sickness option, please, right? hard pass on the Terminator. I will tell you, I did watch Terminator 2 this week just as like prep. but the constant refrain in this discussion that we are having together about AI is that we can't put guardrails on this thing because we have to beat China. And nobody seems to know what that means. But what is clear to me is that all our efforts to rein AI in will themselves be restrained because rivalry makes the world go round. Somebody's gotta win, right? Somebody's gotta win mutually assured destruction. It's gotta be us, dang it, right? Like rivalry makes the world go round. And Renee Girard. Saw this decades ago. And he called it mimetic desire. That is the impulse to imitate one another, even when we don't realize that we are consciously doing this imitation. This is why advertising works, right? It hardly has to convince you that a product is good, it just has to convince you that someone that you trust likes this product. Or that you're being left out of an experience that other people are having. Eventually, Rene Girard says that the object of our desire stops mattering, but the rivalry that that object has created remains. And our rivalries become just as contagious as the desire themselves. To put this into perspective, to help us give you an example of what I mean, I think that this is one really great way to describe the nearly nonsensical tribalism of our political parties and the saber rattling of nation states. Like, if given the choice, like all of us together, like if given the choice, I think that we'd all prefer for all people. Everywhere to be happy and healthy, right? Like, if we could just decide a thing that we'd say, yes, that that I think is a common desire amongst all people of goodwill, and I assume that all of you are people of goodwill. I know you you are good people of goodwill, right? But our rivalries over resources and power blind us to the solutions that we could find together. For instance, What are we doing in Iran right now? Like, what is the object? Is it nuclear weapons? Is it something about Israel? Is it oil? Is it regime change? Like, we've kind of lost the plot, but what remains is the rivalry. Like we we are engaged in this conflict, we feel it deep in us, and what happens when we get trapped in these rivalries is that we need to find somebody to blame. We gotta find the scapegoat that will bring balance back to the force, so to speak, right? And we are watching that also play out right now before our eyes as we head into the midterms, right? Notice that scapegoating is always, as the powers always do, they're always aimed at some minority, right? Like watch anything with commercials right now, and you will find out that all of the problems that you ever had are because of Muslims and the boogeyman of Sharia. Because of the 1%, 1% of people in our nation or around the world who are transgender, or because of immigrants. In short, what I guess we can gather from all this is that we are entangled with Iran because of your gay Mexican neighbor. Who knew? I had no idea. Thank you for clearing this up. But because of our rivalries, The diversity that God has given to us as a gift, as a blessing, becomes a source of strife in the hands of the nations. But it is not to be so among God's people. Like this is precisely what Paul has in mind when he teaches the people of Galatians what Zane just read from the scriptures. He teaches that all who have been baptized into Christ are no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, but that they have become one in Christ. Now that does not mean that those identifiers cease to matter, that they go poof, right? Paul goes out of his way to rep his Jewish heritage. Like he is a proud OG. OJ? OG. He knows that slavery exists. He writes the entire book of Philemon about that. He has plenty to say in Galatians and in Ephesians alike, along with other bits that he's written in other letters, about the rules of what he sees men and women in society. He doesn't think that these things poof and go away. That's not his point. What he wants you to know is that in Christ, the ground at the foot of the cross is completely. level, all of the things that we would otherwise use as identifiers to put on the s your thumb on the scale against somebody else. All of the things that we would use as a power play against another person to use them as a means or to create a rivalry is left behind in Jesus Christ for a more capacious, more loving vision of how we get to be together in Jesus. We are meant to receive one another's difference as an opportunity to fill in our blind spots. Like the sign I couldn't see, but my Neighbor knew really well. We're meant to receive others' difference and our own difference as an opportunity to offer our best to one another, as a celebration, not a diminishment of our difference. And that's why I'm starting a campaign today, and you're here to witness it, to bring back bad teeth. That's right. No more braces. I'm tired of everybody's smiles looking the same. Big dentist has its claw in all of us. I want some nice British chompers. You know what I'm saying? Also, I am team regional accents. Like, I want us to sound different because we do so. Like, I want Southerners to keep adding syllables where there are none. You know what I'm saying? Like, I want Pacific Northwesterners to keep bringing a bag to the grocery store. Like, that's insane. I want people from where I live in Pittsburgh, where I'm from, to keep going down time to watch them stillers whenever. Super bowl at you know what I'm saying? Like anything to amplify difference in our world where everybody increasingly wants to look the same, and thanks to AI Slop, everything is starting to look the same, and everything sounds the same. Also It's Filipino American History Month, y'all. So you better be buying Pastor Kim cases of ube and banana ketchup and letting her teach you the ways of a rose caldo. Delicious. This is a rose caldo weather right now. You didn't know it, but it's true. My point is that difference doesn't have to be the seedbed of rivalry and animosity. It can be The soil of growth and joy and hope and learning and awe and love. And that is what the nations, after they struggle and scream and flail throughout the whole book of Revelation, that is what the nations finally discover toward the end of the book because of Jesus. If you look around the world, You will find vanishingly few places where rivalries actually end for the good of everyone. There are just so many heated rivalries out there. And usually, people stop fighting, rivals stop fighting because they find somebody else to fight with. That's what normally happens. That is the scapegoat, and that is precisely what happened to Jesus if you read the story well. Rulers who could agree on nothing else all agreed that this guy's got to go. The crowd, the priests, the Roman Empire, all of them together. And what we find in Jesus is that the one that we all united against was not guilty. He was vindicated. As an innocent, even by the soldiers standing at the foot of the cross when he was murdered and later in his resurrection. This is why God raises Jesus from the dead by the power of his love. This one was innocent, and he is vindicated in his innocence through the resurrection. And what we see there is we see the system break. Right? This old system that needs a needs somebody to scapegoat that has to find resolution to the rivalry, it doesn't work. And it isn't just. Your gay Mexican neighbor isn't why we're at w at war with Iran. The old story stops working. We can no longer believe that the one who is different is a threat, or that the road to peace runs through somebody else's expulsion or explosion. The victim has been vindicated and the whole machinery of scapegoating gets scrapped. So to me, when I read this passage from Revelation, it is more than a little bit beautiful that all the kings of the earth, the nations that rage against God in the early chapters of John's vision, these bring their glory into the city. They bring their glory into the city of the one who, through his own suffering, puts an end to all of our rivalries. The sources of the rivalries that kept them warring, the differences that keep us all fighting, these aren't melted down into one bland alloy, right? They don't all become the same. They are kept different as a gift, and those differences are brought into the city. Their songs, their languages, their ways of praying, their foods, all carried in their own hands as praise to God and for the enjoyment of every person. But being together in difference has never been easy. Rivalry runs through our oldest stories. Literally, the first brothers in the Bible kill each other, right? Rome told its own founding story the same way. Romulus kills Remus and they build a city there. And the news that you check on your phone by the time you get to your car is gonna be the same story with a different name. But we are taught a different way to be in the world. And it begins right here at this table. At this table, our differences are honored. It's where we learn our limitations, where we make room for the person who can't eat gluten, where we make space for the person who needs us to come to them to be served. It's here that this person who needs to be reminded that they belong somewhere is welcome. It's where I'm reminded every single time that I'm left handed in a right handed world because I'm always bumping elbows with somebody. And the table doesn't erase any of that. It just makes room for it. And at this table, we are confronted with opportunities to learn from one another. I mean today Christians around the world are breaking tortillas and injera, naan and rice cakes, praying in hundreds of different languages to our God in liturgies that we would hardly recognize as Christian. But we join them today in our particular ways so that we will remember that our difference can lead us into humility. There is room for every single person at this table. Including all of our differences. This is the blessing. That Christ is making us one, but that we don't have to become somebody else to come to this table. Native-born and immigrant, rich and poor, gay and straight, left-handed, right-handed, differently abled, the man who drives too fast and the neighbor who tells him so. Rangers fans, pirates fans, and winners. We're all welcome to this table. This table is always set. So let us always be learning to love all who gather at it. And may God continue to drag us into this future of love and hope and unity together. Thanks be to God. Amen. Do

Revelation 21:22–26