September 6, 2026

Well, thank you for being here again today. I want to especially thank you for coming on this Labor Day weekend, this holiday weekend. I suspect in our family, Labor Day will now have a new connotation for us. And it's funny, Julie's a labor historian, so this was always kind of an important weekend and remembrance day for us anyway.

But as I was reflecting on the readings that we have for this week, and thinking about what we hear, especially in our gospel lesson, I have to admit, this is one of my favorite passages in all of Holy Scripture, and especially in all of Jesus' teachings, because I think it is one of the most difficult passages to hear, and it's one of the most frequent admonitions of Jesus that we just completely disregard. In our societal context today, in our lives as kind of messy, complicated people, we love to stir up drama. And we so very frequently ignore Jesus' commandment here that you first go and try to resolve issues one-on-one before blowing them up and making them this bigger deal amongst your circle of friends or your community of faith or society at large. In our very quick soundbite social media era, we love to just blast out our condemnations of people and then let all of that foment and degenerate into all of the problems we have today.

But it's also kind of awkward because if you notice, we pick up with verse 15. We're sort of jumping midstream into chapter 18 today when last week we were all the way back in chapter 16. And I get why we kind of dismiss chapter 17 in some ways. It's the great image and story of the transfiguration. And we have moments in time in our liturgical year where we celebrate and remember that moment of transfiguration. So it kind of is set off by itself. But chapter 18 has this kind of internal arc to it. And it's almost as if we're picking up sort of three-fourths of the way through a great novel or a great movie, and we're hearing something really important, but we don't really quite grasp it in its full context without understanding what has come before.

And point of fact, next week we will hear the end of chapter 18. We pick up with verse 21 going all the way through verse 35, and we have this incredible sort of conclusionary teaching by Jesus on the power of forgiveness. But where does this instruction about how to resolve conflict, this great teaching we'll hear next week about forgiveness, where does all of that come from? It doesn't just pop up out of nowhere. It begins with this overarching reflection on greatness and humility.

So I want to take us back just a moment to the very beginning of chapter 18 and think through what we're hearing there and the power that it has for us in fully appreciating what it is that Jesus teaches us today. In verse 1, it says, At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? He called a child whom he put among them and said, Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.

If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks. Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes. If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than to have two hands or two feet and to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the hell of fire.

Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven. What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.

It's a powerful reflection. And it's one that I think we often kind of avoid because there are some messy and difficult lessons in that. Lessons ultimately about our own pompousness, our own convictions about our rightness, a continual call to great humility, great humility that acknowledges the places where we come up short, acknowledges the places where we often get fixated on what we think is right, what should happen, how the world should run and operate.

And ultimately, this instruction, this lesson we have about resolving conflict only really makes full sense if we think about what Jesus teaches us in these verses preceding about being that humble and childlike faithful servant. They're only in the context of having our own proper location to our own places of unknowing, are we able to most fully and successfully approach the other with whom we are in discord or with whom we have some challenge.

And I want to be sure here and acknowledge that this is not a call to simply ignore or fail to deal with places of conflict and places of brokenness in our lives, when we have one who has hurt us, when we have been violated or harmed in some way, we are called to be honest about that, to redress it. And if the one who has hurt us is not willing to listen, there is this powerful recourse that we are given to continually adding force and power to that attempt at correction and reconciliation. But that only comes from this place of humility, this place of centeredness in God, this place of acknowledging our own limitations.

And when we think about the impact that that kind of humility could have on the world around us, it is really quite profound. You know, the journey that we have been making through St. Paul's great epistle to the Romans keeps coming back again and again to this theme of love, the centeredness and rootedness of love. And I've made reference to that over these last many weeks. But there too, when we think about what it means to love, when we think about what it really fully means, to live into the abundance of God's love in our life, to be fully enveloped by it, we have to locate it and locate ourselves in this place of great humility.

I think it is incredibly fortunate and opportune this year that we celebrate this Sunday with these readings on this Labor Day weekend when we prepare to acknowledge and pray for our students returning to school. Because it is that one place in our society where we have perpetuated and continue to maintain this great awareness of the importance of knowledge, the importance of learning, the importance of further development and formation.

So many other sectors of our world today, secular and religious, I often find kind of hemmed in, boxed in, with these places of certain belief, these places of rigid conformity, to a set of dogmas, or to a set of principles. And it's not unimportant to have dogma. But places that seem ever more frequently to lack any kind of charity, any kind of humility, any kind of sense, that we still, as we hear in the great lesson from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians, see through a glass dimly or darkly, that we as broken incomplete humans only ever see in part, and that part of our spiritual journey is this ever-increasing awareness and knowledge of who God is, a lifetime of growth, a lifetime of formation, a lifetime of growing in our own spiritual centeredness.

So often we want to hold fast to the things that we think are right, the things that we think are so very clear, the things that we think are unquestionably true. And we lose this sense of the mystery, this sense of the incomplete, this sense of the ever-developing, ever-growing awareness of God. And if we really locate this important teaching we have about conflict today in its proper context, we are reminded that part of the lesson here is for us always to be open to greater awareness, greater understanding, greater mutual connectivity, greater humility.

And when we celebrate and honor our students, when we take this moment every year to pray for them, to pray for educators who teach them, we also acknowledge this important lesson of continuing to learn, this important lesson on continuing to develop, continuing to ever grow more complete in our human and spiritual lives.

And so today, I invite us, as we hear this incredibly important lesson about conflict resolution, to also reflect on the call to great humility, this call to true greatness that Jesus lays out before us, the importance of recognizing the places of humility that we are called to cultivate in our own lives. That things are never quite as they seem. That we always have a place of further awareness.

Just this past week, I really kind of experienced that incredibly fulsomely. Friday especially seemed to be the crux of this journey. As many of you may know, Julie was supposed to be induced on Thursday morning. And when we called the hospital to kind of check in and know when we should arrive, they said, we're sorry. We're completely booked up. There was no room at the inn. And it wasn't until Saturday morning at 2 a.m. that Shady Grove was finally able to get us a room.

And there was this period of great waiting, of great uncertainty in some ways, of this practiced, cultivated patience that neither Julie nor I really had very fulsomely in that moment, especially Julie in wanting to go ahead and move forward. But I too, I had layers of frustration here because I not only was with her in the anxiety of that moment, ready to get the show on the road, ready for baby boy to be born. But in a much more innocuous and less significant sense, I'd been dealing with phone issues with my cell phone for weeks and had finally been told that they were going to send me a new cell phone. And then it was silenced. And even though it was supposed to be delivered by Wednesday, it hadn't been delivered. I called T-Mobile on Friday thinking, okay, we're in this period of waiting to go to the hospital. I'm going to try to take care of this while we're figuring out what's going on.

I ended up being on a phone call waiting to hear something from them for two hours on wait, listening to this repeat of hold music. And in that moment, I was profoundly struck by the significance of none of this being resolved, of waiting to hear from Shady Grove, waiting to hear on my cell phone, waiting, waiting, waiting. There seemed to be no end to it.

And yet I was also profoundly struck in that moment too about how often we get so fixated in our lives about the ways things should be, the expectations we have, and how often we are called to live in this time of openness, this time of letting God handle things, even in the midst of the frustrations, letting things work their way out. And both cases ended up getting resolved, obviously, but it brought to mind how very frequently we get tied up in knots about what we think we should be doing and how the world around us, how God working in the world around us, so very regularly operates on a different timeline, in a different way, with different expectations and outcomes, but it all works for the good, even when it's not always clear to see it.

And I invite us this Sunday as we enter into this call for humility to recognize those places of tightness we have. Those places of frustration where we feel like things aren't moving fast enough or maybe not even moving at all. And to try to take that moment of pause. Try to take that moment of rest. Try to have that childlike sense that things are taken care of, even if we don't quite know how or why or what the result will be. That we are in the hands of a loving God, a compassionate God, whose ultimate aim and ultimate work will bring to fruition the things of goodness, even when we can't see them in the moment of our despair or frustration.

And so let us have that humility today. And let us, even in the times of uncertainty, find that place of centeredness in the waiting, in the conflict, in whatever the brokenness is, that we may ever more fully feel the presence of God and know His presence and power in our lives. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.