Vicar at Mount Olive

Following Jesus means loving others in ways that reflect heavenly priorities, not just earthly ones. In Romans, Paul helps us imagine what this cross-shaped love looks like on earth.

Vicar Emily Hagen
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 22 A
Texts: Jeremiah 15:15-21; Psalm 26; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Most of us have found ourselves in Peter’s position at least once. We can imagine the rush of fear, sadness, and confusion that Peter felt when he learned that he was about to lose his leader, his dear friend—the one he had just acknowledged as the Son of God. Throw in the crushing news that his beloved teacher was walking knowingly and willingly toward a painful, shameful death, and we might have joined Peter in imploring Jesus to change the plan, driven to panic by the depth of our love and our dependence on his leadership. We too might have begged, as Peter did: “Stay with us, beloved teacher. We who love you cannot bear for this harm to befall you, and we cannot face a future without you. Stay with us.”

But it was not to be. Jesus rebuked Peter soundly, calling him the Opponent, the Adversary—the one who gets in the way. Jesus made it clear that his path served heavenly purposes, not earthly ones. He challenged us, his followers, to take up our crosses and follow Him, that we may lay down our lives… and yet find them.

His words sound rather bleak, even to twenty-first-century disciples who have already celebrated an empty tomb on Easter morning. But in these words, Jesus made a promise that can comfort his followers in every age. Jesus promised that the love and guidance that Peter so feared losing were not about to die on the cross. Until the end of time, Christ’s presence would abide within, among, and through his followers who have the courage to take up our own crosses and follow Him.

Of course, loving like Jesus is not as easy as it sounds. While we live in earthly bodies surrounded by earthly suffering, our call to love and serve as Christ requires us to bear a cross-shaped love… a love that practices humility, that forgives, speaks difficult but necessary truths, walks beside those on the margins, and returns good for evil.

In Romans, Paul describes one version of this cross-shaped love—a love that places heavenly things above earthly things, but also has the courage to stand up for what is right in this world. It calls us to love one another enough to tell the hard, deep truths—to do the difficult work that allows healing to begin and community to flourish.

Paul doesn’t shy away from naming the difficult ways we will be called to love one another. For example: “bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” This one is hard. But for some of us, myself included, an even harder version might read: “bless and do not curse those who persecute your loved ones.” When we see earthly injustice, bigotry, or cruelty prevailing and the vulnerable suffering, it becomes so hard to live out a cross-shaped love, even in small ways.

It is not easy to respond with humility when we are called out for an action that exposes our own bias. It is hard to take the deep breath before responding when a high school friend reposts some infuriating political talking point that cuts us to the heart every time because we know the relentless harm that those words cause our loved ones. It feels impossible to pray for blessings on powerful people who advance policies that deeply harm us or people we love. We see our dear ones’ faces in our minds, and it becomes so hard to respond to injustice with love—even though the emotion driving us is love. We get stuck between the desire to put our adversary in their place with a few well-researched facts and a smug parting comment for good measure… and social pressure to keep the peace, which lures us into silence under the guise of being the bigger person. After all… when online, it’s best not to feed the trolls.

Thankfully, Paul’s words reassure us that living into cross-shaped love does not mean suffering injustice in silence. The act of taking up our cross does call us to respond to persecution, not with curses, but with the love that overcomes evil… love that refuses to ignore the humanity within the enemy, and the need or fear—or even love—that might be driving them, when all we can imagine in their hearts is hate. Even when our righteous anger is fully ignited, we can speak powerful truth in a spirit of love and healing—and leave vengeance for God, the One who knows all hearts and sees the painful emotions that lie behind our friends’ hurtful Facebook comments. Their painful guiding emotions will not be healed by earthly vengeance—and neither will ours. They will not even be healed by performative kindness, the sort we might offer to enemies out of spite just to enjoy, as Paul puts it, heaping burning coals on their heads. We can only be healed—and our communities restored—in one way: through the authentic, transformative, cross-shaped love of Jesus. This is the self-giving love that refuses to curse, to condemn, to push away and instead draws others in by listening first. It speaks powerful truth calmly, and it leans in.

Sometimes this kind of love fails. But Paul has a second piece of good news for the righteously indignant. His words help us to find the boundaries of our earthly responsibility. Paul writes: “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” We can show love in all those things that depend on us, but when we do, we are not ultimately responsible for the actions of others. We can’t make other people accept the loving truth or kindness that we offer. We can’t force others to agree with us, even if we are speaking powerful words of Christ’s restoring justice.

When Peter begged Jesus to stay, he showed us why this sort of love does not always succeed on earth. A cross-shaped love often doesn’t make sense to the people around us—maybe even those closest to us, as in Peter’s case. Jesus’ love violates our social expectations by building real peace where there has been false peace—one that relies on someone being quietly exploited. And sometimes that work has consequences, big or small. Sometimes telling a loved one the truth really hurts and requires some healing time. Sometimes relationships do break because despite our authentic love, the other party is not willing to budge an inch, let alone meet us halfway. We might even risk arrest, injury, or worse when we choose to peacefully advocate for the human rights of others.

Fixing our minds on heavenly things places love of God above personal comfort and public status in ways that can test us fiercely. And yet, in Jesus’ closing words to Peter, which at first seemed so stark and so laden with risk, there is also such deep reassurance. While we carry a cross, we do not travel alone. We will lack neither guidance nor love, because Jesus goes before us and is present among us and within us. In our cross-shaped love for one another, we recognize the love of Christ, which Peter so feared losing. And when we commit to setting our minds on heavenly things… when we make Jesus’ priorities our own priorities… we find the guidance that we need to join Peter and all the disciples in the continuing work of the church. In those challenging words Jesus spoke to His disciples, we can take comfort knowing that the beloved teacher abides with us. There could be no better authority to guide us and there can be no deeper love to receive us.

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus shows us an example of the reign of Christ in action. God pours abundance on us freely. We’re invited to join in that abundant sharing.

Vicar Erik C. Nelson
Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 18 A
Texts: Isaiah 55:1-5; Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Today’s gospel reading is one of my favorites because in this short story, we see Jesus in one of his most human moments, that then moves into one of the most brilliant revelations of his divine power and the nature of God.

This first verse starts out, “Now when Jesus heard about the beheading of John the Baptist, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.”

This story starts out as one of the worst days of his life. His cousin is killed, so of course he wants to be on his own, to have time by himself, to feel the grief and work through the pain. He shows us that it’s okay to step away and feel what we’re feeling.

But that doesn’t last for long. Even as he goes off to a deserted place, the crowds find him and follow him. And it’s so beautiful that the next verse says, “he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them…”

He didn’t rebuke them and send them away, but instead he saw an opportunity. His cousin John came to proclaim that the kingdom of God is close at hand. And this crowd came to give Jesus a chance to show us that reality.

This crowd reminds Jesus, reminds us, that the kingdom of God, the reign of Christ, isn’t just some faraway thing, it isn’t just a utopian vision of the afterlife.

The reign of Christ comes to us now. It’s all around us. We can’t get away.

The people come to him seeking his love and compassion, and he gives it freely. He heals their sick, and when they become hungry, he feeds them from the abundance that can be found in five loaves and two fish.

He feeds them, and there is more than enough for everyone. By the end, there are still 12 baskets full of leftovers.

Some preachers explain this by saying that maybe each person was inspired by the generosity of others that they shared what little they had, and all together, their abundance overflowed.

I would lean more into the miracle of it all, with Jesus channeling his divine power to pour out abundance for them, for us.

I don’t think how it happened matters as much as the fact that it did happen. A hungry crowd gathered, and in the end they all left full and satisfied.

In the Gospel of Matthew, this story comes in the chapter right after the parables we’ve been hearing this summer. Jesus had been teaching the crowds, teaching us, about the reign of Christ, and this is him putting all into action.

This is him making it a concrete reality. Making it something we can see and taste and touch.

Last week, we heard Jesus say that the reign of Christ is like a mustard seed that grows into a great tree, with room for all the birds. In the reign of Christ, abundance grows out of the tiniest things.

And this abundance isn’t just about numbers. The tree isn’t big just to be big. The tree is big to provide a home for the birds. To become a place of safety and shelter.

It is impressive that Jesus fed 5,000 men plus women and children, which altogether is like 15,000 or 20,000 people. But it’s not just about the incredible numbers. And it’s not about just each individual being fed, though each individual is part of it.

It’s about all of us together, in family, in communion, in community. Every piece matters, as a part of the whole. In the mustard tree, there is a place for every bird, every squirrel, every insect.

In the family of God, in the reign of Christ, there is a place for each and every one of us. Because what Jesus is teaching us here is that it’s not about each of us on our own, getting whatever we want or everything we think we deserve.

It’s about something even bigger than that. That huge crowd, they’re all fed. Without any limits; without the disciples, or even Jesus, deciding who deserves it and who doesn’t.

Everybody gets food because Jesus knows that we all do better when we all do better. When we all have enough. When we recognize that together, there is more than enough to go around. God has provided more than we could ever need. And God continues to provide.

When we see that we have abundance together, we can stop holding on so tightly. We can loosen our grip. We can let go of our own little empires, our own little fiercely guarded, carefully curated corners of the world.

We can reject the messages of the world that say that you are defined by your work, by your career accomplishments, by your wealth, your marital status or the size of your family. We can reject any message that says you are defined by anything other than God’s love for you.

The reign of Christ is a reign of abundance, where God freely pours out love and grace and compassion on all of us, without asking beforehand if we deserve it, or if we can afford it.

Jesus is almighty, all-powerful God, and he is also our dear friend. He grieves for his cousin John. He has compassion on this crowd. He stretches his arms wide on the cross to show that his loving embrace is wide enough for the whole world.

God just gives and gives and gives, freely, without a price, without counting the cost.

Toward the beginning of this encounter, the disciples tell Jesus to send the crowd away. There’s not enough food for them, so they should go find it for themselves.

But Jesus, as he often does, refuses to send his family away. He already knows that he will provide for them.

He knows that in the kingdom of God, there are no outsiders. When Jesus looks at the crowd, it’s with compassion. When he looks at us, he sees his beloved family. He heals us. He cures our sickness. And he offers himself to us, the bread of life that always satisfies.

He invites us to come to him always, knowing that there will always be more than enough for all of us. And once we’ve eaten and received our fill, he sends us out to share God’s abundance with the whole world.

Thanks be to God.

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In his parable about wheat and weeds, Jesus makes us think about the reign of Christ. Maybe, after 2,000 years, it’s time we reconsider what we call weeds and what we call wheat.

Erik C. Nelson
19 July 2026
Texts: Isaiah 44:6-8; Psalm 86:11-17; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30

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Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
—

In the year 1002, the Christian king of England, a man called Aethelred, issued a vile proclamation, calling for the extermination of all Danish people who lived in the realm of England.

In the days that followed, hundreds of people were killed by their neighbors. A couple years later, Aethelred proudly told a story of a couple dozen young Danish men in Oxford, being chased by their neighbors, who went into a church seeking refuge and barricaded the doors for safety.

Their neighbors, seeing that they couldn’t drive them out, set fire to the church, killing all those young men. In telling this story, Aethelred reached into today’s Gospel reading, saying, “all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination.”

Today’s parable, wielded as a weapon, has done unimaginable damage throughout Christian history. People who assume that they are the good wheat miss the point entirely, thinking that it’s their duty to destroy the weeds.

I want to invite you to reconsider the point of this parable.

This parable is not prescriptive, telling us what to do. It’s descriptive. It describes the world, which is a difficult place to live. It describes how good and bad seem totally intertwined.

And this is the way that for better or for worse, God, in infinite wisdom, has designed our universe. And this parable promises us that God has a plan to disentangle the good and bad, to save us from the suffering that seems unavoidable. But in the meantime, as we trust in God to provide for us, we wait.

We wait in a world where good and bad seem like they shouldn’t coexist, and yet they do.

Cycles of life and death and new life surround us. The good soil we grow crops in is organic matter, once made of living things, who got their sustenance from sunlight and the ground.

The sun, a giant orb that is slowly burning itself to extinction. The ground, made up of tiny rocks that were eroded over eons from mighty mountains who have their own life cycles on time scales we can’t imagine, rising up and grinding away and rising up again, over and over.

This parable describes our everyday realities. Good and bad, life and death, creation and destruction, they’re all tangled up.

That doesn’t give us justification to make more bad, more death, more destruction. It actively cautions against that.

Because very often when we are the ones who decide what is good and bad, who’s wheat and who’s a weed, we get it wrong. Our wisdom is not perfect.

One of the first things I learned in my college Environmental Science program was that there is no real scientific definition of what a weed is. Any plant can be a weed if it’s growing where people don’t want it.

We decide what a weed is. And usually we just use that as justification to destroy something. If you went back 50 years and showed people the wildflower gardens that we have in our parking lot now, the beautiful, beautiful gardens, they’d probably think the parking lot is overrun with weeds.

They’d probably pinch your ear and tell you you’re doing something wrong.

But in embracing these native plants we used to call weeds, I believe we’re finally listening to the voice of God. We’re seeing the wisdom of God in nature.

Saint Augustine said that God gave us two books of divine revelation, two ways to hear God’s voice, two ways to know God in the universe. The first, of course, is Scripture itself, and the second is all of creation. He called it the Book of Nature.

So what else is God teaching us about this parable, through nature? through weeds?

The incident described in the parable is something that has happened over and over, basically every year for the last 10,000 years or so. As long as humans have been cultivating certain plants as crops, other plants have been jumping into our fields as weeds.

This is a destructive process often, with those plants killing our crops or hurting us with their thorns, or just generally decreasing productivity, but sometimes those weeds have been what we never knew we actually needed.

Several of our favorite grain crops started as the weeds within a wheat field. Over thousands of years, rye and oats both underwent significant changes from their wild forms as people accidentally domesticated them.

Like the servants at the end of the parable, humans tried to sort the wheat from the weeds, but humans always made mistakes, happy accidents, and missed the oats and rye that looked the most like wheat.

As generation after generation of human farmers were tricked by the cleverness of the rye and the oats, those grains became more and more desirable as crops in their own right. And as humanity spread out around the world, they encountered more difficult climates where oats and rye could survive where wheat could not.

And so the weeds became the precious wheat. Oats helped humans move into hotter and drier climates. Rye saved my ancestors’ lives when they moved to colder and wetter places.

When we get up on our high horses, when we think that we get to decide what’s wheat and what’s weeds, we put ourselves in a dangerous position. We can’t even begin to imagine what we’re missing out on when we decide that we’re better judges than God.

When we hear the parable for today, I’m sure many of us had people we thought of when we heard about the weeds. An annoying neighbor. Difficult relatives. Certain politicians. Other Christians who believe differently from us.

When we think that we get to decide, we get it wrong.

The reign of Christ is not about who’s in and who’s out. The reign of Christ isn’t about who’s wheat and who’s a weed. The reign of Christ is about God’s cleverness surprising us. It’s about trusting God’s wisdom, the wisdom that comes to us through Scripture and through nature, as Saint Augustine would say.

The reign of Christ is always subverting our expectations, demanding that we reconsider our assumptions. The people we want to cast out as weeds might be the rye or oats that save us in the darkest times. The people we want to cast out are loved by God.

King Aethelred, that King of England who ordered those massacres, is remembered in history as Aethelred the Unready. The arrogance that led him to use this parable to justify brutal violence became his downfall. In spite of him taking up a sword and turning scripture into his weapon, he still lost the throne.

When we rely on our own wisdom to decide who belongs and who doesn’t, it can have disastrous consequences. Instead, rely on God’s wisdom, wisdom that comes to us in nature.

Wisdom built into the fabric of the universe that casts down the mighty, that lifts up the lowly, that binds up the broken-hearted and the beaten-down.

Wisdom that comes to you in bread and wine, simple everyday things, that are for us, the body of blood of Our Lord, the creator of the whole Universe, who made stars and mountains, and wheat and rye, and you and your loved ones and your enemies.

God, who sometimes works through our mistakes. God, who takes what we intend for evil and uses it for good. God, who is always extending grace and love to us.

God invites us to respond to that love not by wielding it as a weapon, but instead invites us to go into the world looking for the places where God is already working, making things more beautiful than we can imagine.

Thanks be to God.

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In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesus invites us to share his burden. This is a beautiful invitation but also can be a heavy lift.

Erik C. Nelson
5 July 2026
Texts: Zechariah 9:9-12; Psalm 145:8-14; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

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Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
—

Today’s Gospel lesson is one that we hear often. It’s beautiful, it’s full of promise. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

And these are beautiful words, and there is truth behind the promise, but I have to confess to you that these words are difficult words for me to preach. Because as beautiful as they are the first time you hear them, the more you think about it, the harder it becomes to believe it.

Yes, sometimes we get weeks where we hear Jesus call the Pharisees a brood of vipers, or we hear him tell Peter to “get behind me Satan!” Those are tough, but they can be explained with some context and historical critique. Though they’re tougher on their face, they’re maybe easier for me to wrestle with.

These words from Jesus today are tough because they strike right at the heart of everyday lives. When we hear him say this, it feels contrary to how we live our lives, as Christians in America.

Jesus is gentle and humble in heart. He picks up on language from Zechariah, which says, “See, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey.”

Across our history and even today, there are countless instances where Christians have stopped reading after the first part. They hear it say, “Your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious.”

And they use that image to justify horrific things. They lose sight of the rest of Scripture. They lose sight of Jesus as a gentle and humble and compassionate ruler. 

They don’t read the rest of Zechariah that says the King will cut off the chariot, the war horse, and the battle bow. The King shall command peace to the nations. The King sets prisoners free.

In connecting himself to Zechariah’s prophetic image of a King, Jesus shows us what his reign is like. He destroys anything that we wield as a weapon. Jesus demands peace. Jesus frees the prisoner.

He stands firmly with the outcast and the outsiders. He stands with the people we hate, the people we cast aside. And that can be hard to hear. We often expect that we should be the insiders. 

But in this, Jesus offers us an invitation. He invites us to become outsiders. He invites us to disrupt systems that dehumanize people and dishonor his family.

He says this is an easy yoke, a light burden, but to be honest with you, that feels pretty far from the truth.

To follow Jesus, to take his yoke upon us, is to let go of our own priorities, our own demands, our own privileges, and to align ourselves with his priorities, his demands.

And that means, this weekend, being honest about the ways that our country has fallen short throughout our history. The genocide of Indigenous people, the horrors of slavery, the ongoing systems that strip people of their dignity.

These things happen in a country that proclaims itself to be One Nation Under God.

Paul was onto something in our Epistle reading today when he said, “the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability.” I think we all know what that’s like in our own lives. We want to do the right thing, but sometimes it just feels impossible.

It’s true of our own history as a country. We had our start with documents that proclaim that “all men are created equal,” and yet our country’s actions haven’t matched that desire.

The actions of Christians have left scars in this land and wounds in our people that we haven’t even begun to heal. That’s a heavy burden.

And it’s a burden that the people of God have taken up. Across this continent, over the last five centuries, there have always been people of God who have resisted systems of injustice.

The people of God have taken up this heavy burden, working for the Reign of Christ wherever they are.

We stand shoulder to shoulder with people like Bartolome de las Casas, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, and countless others.

People who have done their part, motivated by their faith, to try to make our national actions match our desires.

And so as we look into the future, remembering our past, we can start to see a way that maybe we can believe Jesus when he says that his yoke is easier than we think and his burden is lighter than we expect.

Because none of us carry it alone. We share this yoke with one another. We share this yoke with all God’s people across time and space. We share this yoke with Christ himself.

This image of Christ’s yoke is one that binds us together, like a team of oxen, pulling in one direction. We are bound together, just like we are in Communion. We are made into one body, broken for the world, so that new life might spring up everywhere.

The invitation of Christ’s yoke is the same one that our spiritual ancestors received. We are invited to know Christ personally and intimately in Word and Sacrament, and through the family of God, and then, to go out together, to do God’s work in the world. 

And yet again, I know we look at a world that seems to be careening out of control. All we see violence and poverty and cruelty, and it can be overwhelming.

But of course, we aren’t called to do all of it at once. There’s no way we could fix everything in a day. But instead, together, we can take it one day at a time. One step at a time, one moment at a time, one day at a time.

As we travel together, I pray that the reign of Christ comes with us, the yoke becomes easier, the burden becomes lighter, step by step, moment by moment, day by day.

May it be so.

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In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In the midst of a suffering world, Jesus comes to us with healing and grace. In spite of our pride and pretense, Jesus offers us new life, springing up from his endless love for us.

Erik C. Nelson
The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 10 A
Texts: Hosea 5:15-6:6; Psalm 50:7-15; Romans 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

“God didn’t make us to hate us.”

That’s a line from the Rev. Lizzie McManus Dail, an Episcopal priest down in Texas.

God didn’t make us to hate us.

This is good news. We live in a society, in a culture, in a religion that too often tells us that there’s nothing delightful in us. That there’s nothing good we can do or anything beautiful that comes from us.

This line reminds us that God, who created the beautiful universe, with planets that rain diamonds and nebulae that glow with every color imaginable, this God who made it all and said it was good, made you, and says you were good.

God didn’t make you to hate you. You bear the unshakeable image of God, and that can never change.

When we remember that this is how God sees us, as beautiful and loveable, we can start to understand what Jesus means when he says, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

We can start to understand what God meant when speaking through Hosea, when God said, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

What God wants most is a relationship with us. God wants us to know how much we are loved, and God wants that knowledge to then flow out of us in love.

In today’s Gospel reading, we have three stories of Jesus’ love encountering people in ways that challenge the status quo, that challenge us.

The first people Jesus spends time with are the tax collectors and sinners. Matthew, the namesake of this book and the disciple called in this story, was a tax collector.

They were hated because on top of the imperial tax they took in, they were known to take extra off the top for themselves. So people avoided them, shunned them, hated them.

And the others Jesus was with are identified only as sinners.

And yet these are the ones who Jesus chooses to spend time with. He doesn’t see them as outcasts or pariahs, and instead calls them to follow him. He leads Matthew out of the tax collection booth, and invites him to the table.

Matthew walks away from his life of taking advantage of people and is welcomed into the love of God.

And in response to this grace, the people who should know better, the ones who spend their days in worship, claiming to be close to God, come to Jesus and scold him for spending time with them.

And Jesus responds by saying that he has come to heal the sick. He has come for mercy, not sacrifice. In this, we are reminded that we are in that group that Jesus chooses to spend time with.

We are sinners. We are sick. We all have ways that the things we do and don’t do hurt others, separate us from God, and alienate us from ourselves.

And in Jesus’ loving example, he reminds us that that is not all we are. We are deeply loved. And all that God wants for us is to know that love and to share it with others, that we will be healed, and the world will be healed as well.

In the middle of this conversation with the religious leaders, he’s called out by one of them, who asks him to go raise up his daughter, who just died.

And on the way, he encounters this woman who had been suffering for 12 years, and in her desperation, in a moment of faith, she reaches out to him, hoping that he might help her.

And in this moment, the pharisee and the bleeding woman discover how alike they really are. The unfortunate reality is that the woman’s condition would have kept her away from the temple all those years. The religious and social structures put her and the pharisee in very different positions.

And yet, when they both face moments of great desperation, everything is leveled. The truth is laid bare, that they’re both human.

Whatever structures we set up to elevate some of us over others, the only thing that’s true at the end of the day, is that we’re all only human. And that means we all need healing. And we all are desperately loved by God.

When we’re at our lowest, when there’s nothing else we can do, God invites us to turn our eyes to heaven. God invites us to interrupt and beg for help. God invites us to reach out in faith, hoping against hope, trusting that God will care for us.

God wants mercy and steadfast love from us because God first extends mercy and steadfast love to us. God made us to love us. God didn’t make us to hate us.

After the woman has been healed, Jesus continues on his way to the pharisee’s house. When he gets there, he says that she is not dead but sleeping, and the crowd laughs at him.

Jesus responds to the pharisee’s desperation with mercy, and in return, he’s met with mockery. Nevertheless, he goes in, takes the girl by the hand, and she gets up.

She receives this most miraculous form of healing, resurrection from the dead. And this is the healing that we are promised.

We ourselves will be raised from the dead. Because again, at the end of the day, we are human, we will die, we can’t avoid that. But we know that like the tax collectors, like the bleeding woman, like the pharisee and his daughter, we’re not alone in any of it.

We have God with us who carries us in love now, who will be with us when we die, and promises that the pain and loss that comes in death isn’t the end for us. When we reach the end, all that will be left is God’s love, and God’s promise to us.

God’s grace will meet us there, and will carry us into new life.

God’s grace is already meeting us here, carrying us to new life.

And because we know this grace, because we know that God didn’t make us to hate us, because we have experienced the mercy of God, because God’s love lives deep inside us, God invites us to let that all flow out of us.

Share God’s kindness to a world that is unkind. Extend God’s healing and forgiveness to all people, even when you’re cast out or met with mockery. Bear the fruits of God’s mercy and steadfast love.

And when you reach the end of your rope, when your candle has burnt out, when there’s nowhere else to turn, hope against hope, trust that God’s promises cannot be broken.

God gives life to the dead.

God calls into existence the things that do not exist.

May it be so.

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

King Saint Erik’s death on the Feast of the Ascension in 1160 invites us to consider what kind of King Jesus is, and how that compares to the leaders we follow. Jesus is a different kind of ruler, and so his followers live a different kind of life.

Erik C. Nelson
Feast of the Ascension
14 May 2026
Texts: Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53

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Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this church has a lot of Eriks. And while all of our parents had different reasons and inspirations behind our names, the popularity of the name goes back to one person, King Erik XIV, the patron saint of Sweden, who died on the Feast of the Ascension in 1160.

If there’s one thing to know about his life, King Erik was someone who clearly had an eye on his legacy. He wanted to make a name for himself.

He fought through a bloody civil war, eventually ending up on top. He wrote a new legal code for his domain.

He also launched the first Finnish Crusade, leading Swedish soldiers to Finland, to demand that the Finns became Christians or face death.

The chronicle of a prominent monastery recounts how he harassed the monks there, demanding they listen to him, pay him tribute, submit to their “good Christian king.”

As followers of the risen and ascended Christ, we know that these actions are not consistent with who we know Christ to be as our King. A godly king would not spend his time harassing monks and launching crusades.

On the Feast of the Ascension, 1160, King Erik’s violent reign finally caught up with him.

About halfway through the mass, in the Cathedral at Uppsala, he heard that a Danish rival had arrived to challenge him. Everyone expected Erik to get up and go fight him, but he stayed through the end of the liturgy.

I like to imagine that in hearing today’s Scripture lessons about Christ our King, the only one who reigns over all the nations, he started to get a glimpse of what Christ’s kingship really means.

It took him his whole life, but he finally, as he was facing certain death, he finally knew what it meant to be a king like Christ. It wasn’t about imposing his will over the people. It wasn’t about leading a crusade.

To lead like Christ means to serve like Christ … sometimes, to die like Christ, laying down your life for your friends. Sacrificing everything so that others can live.

After the mass was finished, Erik went out the door, met his rival, and was killed. The legend goes into too much detail about that, but I see in his choice, a change in him.

Instead of leading an army, instead of getting all the people there together to fight and die on his behalf, he went out and gave himself up for his friends, preventing greater bloodshed.

His attempts to claim a legacy for himself, especially the crusade, they’re now looked back upon with scorn and dishonor.

What he’s remembered for is that last moment, laying down his life for his friends.

In our first reading, the reading from Acts, we see the disciples acting like King Erik. They hear Jesus make this wonderful promise of the Holy Spirit, and they respond by asking him if this is the time he’ll restore the kingdom.

They’re hoping that this is finally the moment they’ve been waiting for, looking for Jesus to cast out the Romans and rule like King David, or like King Erik.

But he sees that they still don’t get it, and he gently redirects them, saying that that it’s not for them to know what the Father has in store, but reaffirms his promise that the Holy Spirit will come to them, to give them power and comfort as they go do the work of the reign of Christ.

This reign of Christ, they heard about again and again in Jesus’ teachings, is not about imposing our will on others or using violence to force people to say what we want them to say or believe what we want them to believe.

This reign of Christ is about Christ. And Jesus says that he came not to be served, but to serve. He is a humble king, who we are invited to emulate.

So today, on the Feast of the Ascension, it feels a little off with all the imagery of Jesus the King of the Universe, seated at the right of the Father.

And this is an eternal truth of him, and who he is for us.

But when we look only at Jesus reigning in glory, like the disciples who were stuck on the Mount of Olives, staring into heaven, we lose sight of what really matters.

The angels told the disciples. “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

Jesus is gone from them, from us, and it’ll be quite a while before he returns again in the same way.

But as we wait for his return, don’t just stay there, looking for him in the heavens, waiting for his glory.

Look for him where he promises to be.

Look for him in the bread and wine of communion, the body of Christ that makes us the body of Christ. And then we leave our Mount of Olives, to look for him elsewhere.

Go out and look for him in the faces of the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the prisoner, the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the outcast.

In Matthew 25, Jesus says that whatever we did for the least of these brothers and sisters, we did it for him.

Look for Jesus in the face of the outcast. Get down on your knees and wash some feet.

It took King Erik his whole life to realize that he was building the wrong kind of kingdom. The disciples, stuck on the hill, staring toward heaven, were looking for the wrong kind of kingdom.

We aren’t supposed to be looking for a Christian nation because Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is already here.

The reign of Christ has already come, not in an earthly government, but in the people of God, the ones who have inherited God’s glorious riches. Those riches aren’t gold or silver, but instead they are the knowledge, the truth, of God’s love.

The one who stretched out the heavens, who created the galaxies, and the seas, the one who now is reigning at the right hand of the Father, is our own brother, who loves and cares for each one of us.

Jesus Christ is the name above every name, and when we know how much he loves and cares for us, we’re free.

We’re able to take a breath. We’re able to loosen our grip. We can stop hustling and start trusting.

We’re freed from the need to get our own way. We’re freed from the desire to make our own name.

We’re freed to look for Jesus, not in the air, not in glory or power or majesty, but in the most unlikely places. In the face of the stranger, in the face of the outcast, in the face of our friends, in the face of our enemies.

We’re freed to love, not because of some demand from on high, some command from a king, but because we know that we are loved.

The immeasurable riches of God, given to us in Christ, means the only name we have that really matters is Beloved Child of God.

Thanks be to God.

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In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.