Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Matthew 10:24-39 + Pentecost 4 + June 21, 2026

I have not come to bring peace but a sword. These are hard words.

The religious leaders have just suggested that he’s not the Messiah. He’s the devil–Beelzebul. He fires back that if they won’t acknowledge him, he won’t acknowledge them. So there! Then throws a wrench into everyone’s Father’s day plans by suggesting that we better love him more than our dads. He warns them that he will turn communities against communities. Then calls his friends to an impossible and confusing task: pick up your cross. If you can’t die like him, well, you’re just not worthy either.

Time for a big chorus of, “Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.”

This version of the Prince of Peace does not feel like the embodiment of love.

Maybe we should ignore it, as many do. Or, more dangerously, take it literally, finding justification for one nation’s war as blessed by Jesus. My enemies clearly his enemies. Language appearing at the highest levels of the American government to make the bombing of Iran into a holy war. In the name of Jesus, bless these swords.

Or we could do what most do: just focus on the sparrows.

 

In fact, on the day I wrote this sermon, even before any grappling with the sword, I heard the sparrows loudly calling one another as I woke up.

The sparrows always come first.

Which is a beautiful thought, until you see those English sparrows,

Image of sparrows sitting on a fence in a row.

an invasive species, stealing the native sparrows feeders, raising family after huge family in the Arborvitae next to your bird feeder, inviting their friends to join in, invading, shoveling the seed to the ground, emptying an entire feeder in less than a day–a feeder, by the way, that lasts weeks if only the pretty—now displaced—birds come.

But I project.

I can’t get English Sparrows out of my mind’s eye or out of that Arborvitae. They even greeted me from the bushes next to my car at church this morning. Hoards of them, everywhere!

Yet not one falls to the ground without being felt by God.

And that stops me in my tracks.

God notices them when I can only see them as a threat to my way of life. And, wow, if that’s how God is with a mangy English sparrow, how much more intimately God knows us. We, who have flocked to the church’s feeder this morning. God knows us so intimately that if God worked at the fair at the Guess-The-Number-of-Your-Hairs Booth, wearing a fancy, jeweled hat with a giant feather, you could walk right up, and she would be right every time. By the way, cheers to the evolutionary creator who made sure half the human population lost hair, making the divine accounting easier as it goes.

A God who dies and rises right alongside us. A God who grieves, who sees every fall—to the ground or from grace. A God who falls into wonder at even the dullest of plumage. A God who knows everything within us—and I mean everything—and we still cannot stumble to the ground without God feeling it deep within the heart of the universe.

And then comes the sentence that frames the whole passage: Do not be afraid.

I bet by the time we got to the end of the gospel, you had already forgotten that it appears three times. Do not be afraid.

No matter what happens. No matter who hates whom. No matter how much distress or how little peace. No matter how divided your family has become. Know that nothing happens that is not felt profoundly in the heart of God. And that matters. Because God will not let the story end there. So keep on keeping on, even if there’s a cross on your back.

In Howard Thurman’s classic book Jesus and the Disinherited, he argues that Jesus speaks first and foremost to people whose lives are shaped by fear. Fear can shrink a person’s humanity, distort relationships, and tempt people into silence.[1]

For Thurman, Jesus’ command is not sentimental encouragement. It is liberation.

Rise up and find the life God intended you to have.

Not just find it. But claim it. Live out loud. It’s Pride month. Be your rainbow self.

There is nothing more disruptive than someone who has been told to be small, to be quiet, to stay in their place, deciding they will not move to the back of the bus today. Or simply to be like the residents of Dr. Suess’ Whoville, the ones Elephant Horton can hear, too small to be seen, but set a whole new world into motion by shouting while being held over a boiling pot of oil, “We’re here. We’re here. We’re here.”[2]

The conflict that follows from these moments is not created by God. It is created by truth. It is salvific.

This week, as we observed Juneteenth, Star Tribune columnist Haley Taylor Schlitz wrote about this rising holiday, one I was never told about in school. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued more than two years before enslaved people in Galveston learned they were free. The law had changed before life had changed. The promise existed before the people most entitled to it were allowed to live it.

With the Fourth of July right around the corner, this is the holiday that speaks a word not everyone wants to hear. We’re not done. Freedom is not equally shared. Justice and peace have not arrived in every place.

Juneteenth reminds us that truth can be declared and still be resisted, often strategically and intentionally. That resistance can even be placed on the lips of a flag-waving Jesus. Liberation can be proclaimed and still not be the law of the land, out of reach to those who don’t belong or deserve the bounty at our feeders.[3]

It’s still true that speaking the truth, bringing such a disruptive message into the light of day or on to our calendars, will create conflict.

The kingdom of God works that way. Jesus announces that every sparrow matters. That every human being bears immeasurable worth.

The announcement itself is a disruptive kind of good news. It hurts before it heals.

“Glory, glory hallelujah. God hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword.”

In the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Christian and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe imagined God moving a nation toward equality and justice during the Civil War. Slavery could not stand in the light of God’s truth. It’s unfortunate that the hymn, which is more about the solid promises of God, was titled to be a Battle Hymn and sung as a kind of national anthem. Nations are always tempted to claim God’s sword as their own. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we probably need to remember that God’s reign is never identical to any nation, party, ideology, or tribe.

God’s truth will always collide with systems built on fear.

In countries that want war, slogans announcing peace become fighting words. In communities where hate becomes foundational to security, love will eventually threaten the foundation itself. Like the rain on a roof that is failing, it will find a way in. And it will keep coming every time God weeps.

I had a problem when I was writing this sermon, the chorus of sparrows loud out my window.

Every draft eventually made ME into hero.

Every draft made US the good people.

Every draft drew the battle lines in exactly the place we want them to be.

But omething in me, something from outside, at times as irritating as the sparrow’s song, something that challenges me would not let me settle there.

I suspect it’s that invisible mark of the cross on my forehead, a sign of baptism that was placed upon me, which I now bear every day, whether I hear its call or not.

In the church where I grew up, there was art in the sanctuary that had a sword coming from an open Bible. Inscribed on the pulpit was, “Thy Word is Truth.”

We need this truth that can cut us free.

To put to death any way of seeing that does not begin and end with God’s tender compassion for sparrows.

To cut away every story in which I am always righteous.

To cut away the hatred that grows in me toward the haters.

To cut away the version of myself that wants enemies more than neighbors.

Perhaps the sword Jesus brings is given to us in baptism, more like a pocketknife than an unwieldy sword.

Not a weapon for conquering.

A tool that makes real life possible.

For cutting loose whatever keeps us from speaking honestly, loving boldly, risking disapproval, rocking the boat.

Barbara Brown Taylor says that courage is not the absence of fear. It is acting faithfully while afraid. Because courage is not certainty. It is not righteousness. Courage is trusting that if we fall, we do not fall alone. ^[4]

And that brings us back to the sparrows.

Maybe the sparrows are more the symbol of baptism than the dove.

Or maybe both belong at the feeder.

We are doves and we are sparrows.

Noisy. Anxious. Beautiful. Irritating. Wounded. Afraid.

All of us seen. All of us priceless to the God who made this earth.

We are not left to the world as it burns around us and then blamed on the judgment day for our failures.

God has a wine opener in the divine pocket knife.

A table is set. Wine is poured. There is always enough bread for everyone who comes.

Tenderness breaks in to meet us. To feed us. To become part of us.

The kind of love that protects. The kind of love that speaks. The kind of love that refuses to abandon what God cherishes. It is as fierce as it is tender

Bold. Loud. Disruptive. It means life in this real life in this real world is going to be a bumpy ride for all the right reasons. We are marked with the cross. We bear its image. We bear God’s image.

As do those English sparrows.

Not one of us will fall without hearing what is most disruptive of all:

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

Christ is risen, indeed.

[1] Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, Beacon Press, Rereleased 2012.

[2] Dr. Suess, Horton Hears a Who, Random House, 1954

[3] Haley Taylor Schlitz, We’re entering the season of America’s unfinished freedom, Star Tribune, June 18, 2026. https://www.startribune.com/black-liberation-emancipation-texas-juneteenth-federal-holiday/601858547.

 

 

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark, HarperOne, 2014