10/4/2026 - "The Story Fear Tries To Tell" - Rev. Anthony Spearhart

So there's a particular kind of heartbreak that comes when something meant to hold us becomes something we have to protect ourselves from.

A home, a relationship, a school, a community, even a church.

Something that once gave us language for love begins to speak in a voice we no longer recognize.

We hear cruelty wrapped in scripture.

We see exclusion presented as faithfulness.

We watch people invoke the name of Jesus while treating others in ways so far from the life that Jesus lived.

And a question begins to stir.

If that is Christianity, where does that leave me?

Some of us have asked that quietly.

Some of us have asked it through tears.

And some have spent years finding a community where we could bring our whole selves through the door.

And some of us are asking it now.

What do we do when the faith we love becomes tangled up with things we cannot call loving?

This morning, our scripture brings us to a shoreline.

Behind the Israelites, an army is coming.

Ahead, the sea stretches farther than they can see.

They've left Egypt, but Pharaoh has decided he wants them back.

Their bodies have begun a journey toward freedom, and their fear is telling another story.

You should have stayed.

At least you knew what to expect.

At least you knew how to survive.

And then the people turn on Moses.

They wonder why he brought them into the wilderness to die.

They say they would have been better off serving the Egyptians.

That is painful to hear from people who have been enslaved.

But fear can make the familiar look safer than it ever was.

They know Egypt, its demands, its punishments.

They have learned how to live within its limits.

And freedom has no familiar shape yet.

And with chariots approaching, they begin to remember captivity as security.

I wonder how often we do that with something like faith.

We inherit pictures of God, ways of reading scripture, assumptions about who belongs, whose questions are welcome, whose lives need explaining.

Then something happens.

We love someone whose life does not fit the categories we were given.

We experience grief the old answers cannot hide.

We discover that a teaching we accepted had wounded someone beside us.

Or we realize it has wounded us.

And we begin to ask whether what we inherited can bear the weight of what we now know.

Even the painful certainty can feel easier to hold than an honest question.

But familiarity is not the same as faithfulness.

Growing beyond an understanding of God does not mean we have grown beyond God.

Sometimes we are finally making room for a love larger than the one we were taught to expect.

And at the shoreline, Moses calls the people to stand firm and see the deliverance God will accomplish.

The danger is real, but Pharaoh's power has limits.

Pharaoh believes these people belong to him.

And God is making another claim.

Their lives are worth more than the labor Pharaoh can extract.

Their future reaches beyond the boundaries that Pharaoh has set.

And through the night the sea begins to open.

But we need to notice the difficulty in the story here, too.

The people cross and the pursuing army dies in the waters.

We cannot make that a cheerful ending.

And we need to remember that what we experience as liberation may not be experienced that way by someone else.

In this very story, one people's deliverance is another family's grief.

We have to listen.

Ask whose pain we have overlooked, whose story we have not yet heard.

Even our language of freedom needs the humility to be examined.

And still, where the extravagant love of God is concerned, we have something to proclaim.

When God's name is used to humiliate someone or welcome, our welcome needs to be louder.

When faith justifies cruelty, our compassion needs to be unmistakable.

When someone is told they are unworthy of love, our words and our lives need to say this is not the God we serve.

And we need to be clear about what we mean.

A God of condemnation, a God holding a debt over our heads, demanding payment before offering love.

A God of fire and brimstone, whose power is measured by our terror.

A God whose crown God who crowns us rulers over creation and gives us permission to exploit what we are called to tend.

A God who declares that one gender has greater worth, power, or authority than another.

A God who declares our race, our nation, or our culture is superior, and gives us permission to demean, exclude, or cast out others.

A God invoked to turn our Haitian kindred into targets instead of neighbors.

And a God who takes people's lives away.

Whether we say their time has come, or as in today's story, that their death was necessary for someone else's deliverance.

A God who asks us to celebrate what another family mourns, who makes a human life disposable or less precious, because that person stands on the other side of the story.

That is not.

That is not the God we know.

Let me say that again.

That is not the God we know.

The God we know holds us in our grief and receives us in death with the same extravagant love that accompanies us in life.

And yes, today's story contains death.

We have to wrestle with that.

We cannot question harm done in God's name today and refuse to question it when we encounter it in our scriptures.

We bring those difficult stories into conversation with the God we continue to encounter.

In the life of Jesus, in the wisdom of many traditions, in creation, in one another, and in the quiet movements of the spirits.

You've heard me say that I believe in the kaleidoscopic divine.

With each turn, another color, another pattern, another glimpse of sacred beauty comes into view.

No single image holds the whole.

There is always more of God to discover.

And the extravagant love we have encountered gives us a way to discern what we see.

The God we know does not require us to become afraid before we can become beloved.

And making that love known takes more than raising our volume.

It means showing up, speaking when silence would be easier, sharing what we have, standing beside the person being targeted, even when it costs us something.

Our lives need to give people reason to believe our proclamation.

And sometimes recognizing that love asked us to take another look at the places and the stories we thought we already understood.

We have just watched a people flee Egypt to find freedom.

Now in Matthew, we watch a family free toward Egypt to find safety.

Joseph learns that Herod wants to kill their child.

He gets up in the night, takes Jesus and Mary, and flees to Egypt.

Egypt, the place the Israelites escape because the place where Jesus' family, it becomes the place where Jesus' family finds shelter.

Captivity in one story, refuge in another.

Scripture itself will not let us freeze the place into a single meaning.

There is more to the story.

Perhaps we need to remember that when we look at Christianity as well, that there are versions of Christianity that have caused terrible harm.

A wound does not heal because we hurry past it.

But those versions do not contain the whole of this faith.

People who use scripture to minish others do not own scripture.

People who make belonging conditional do not own the table.

People who speak most loudly about God do not decide the limits of the divine's love.

We can refuse their cruelty, question their interpretations, leave communities where we are being harmed.

And we can make those choices without surrendering every possibility of faith.

And when Christianity begins to look like something we no longer recognize or something we no longer want to be claim, may we have the courage, may we have the courage to help build what it can become.

We do not have to return to what wounded us simply because it's familiar.

We can make room for questions, practice an extravagant welcome, care for creation in honor of the equal worth of every person.

We can build communities where the love we have proclaimed becomes the love people experience.

Freedom has no familiar shape for those people at the shoreline.

And the Spirit of the Living God is calling us to give that freedom shape here at Lakeview United Church of Christ.

In this church, in this community, and in this world.

So if you carry religious wounds, nobody here gets to demand your trust or put your healing on a schedule.

But perhaps there can be room to wonder whether the story is larger than what hurt us.

Today on World Communion Sunday, we come to a table that helps us imagine the larger story around us.

Around the world, people gather with different breads, different languages and different songs.

In grand sanctuaries, in homes, in places where gathering itself takes courage.

Their prayers will not all sound alike.

Their understanding will not all be the same, because unity does not require sameness.

Does not require that we recognize one another.

It does, however, recognize that we recognize one another as people whose lives matter to the still-speaking God.

So here we receive something we did not create and could never earn.

Grace is placed into our hands.

And we are asked to carry it into the world.

Into how we speak, into whom we protect, into whether our neighbors experience our faith as nourishment, shelter, and care.

Beloved, fear has a story it wants to tell.

It tells us love must be rationed, belonging guarded, and someone else's freedom threatens our own.

Today we gather to practice another.

A story in which captives have a future.

A story in which a frightened family finds refuge.

A story in which bread is shared across languages and borders, with room for people whose questions remain unanswered.

Those who weaponize faith do not get the final word because there is still bread, there is still grace, and there is still room.

And through our welcome, our courage, and our extravagant love, may the world hear us say, this is the God we serve, and this is the faith we proclaim.

Amen and amen.

Beloved, let us go from this table nourished by grace and called by the Spirit of the living God.

Let us give freedom shape, make welcome tangible, and proclaim extravagant love through the lives we live.

May our neighbors encounter that love and know this is the God we serve.

This is the faith we proclaim.

And may the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing, so that we may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.