Hi everyone,
Welcome to worship for this 3rd Sunday of Easter, landing on May 4, 2025!
The bulletin for this service can be found here.
For an enhanced worship experience online, you may have a lit candle in your space for the duration of the service and extinguished when the altar candles are extinguished after the sending hymn. You are also welcome to participate in communion as well if you are comfortable, by having something small to eat and drink prepared. Further instruction will be given at the appropriate time.
May God’s unending love and mercy be apparent to you this day and always!
God of all life and love, by your Spirit may our sight be restored, our minds renewed, and our hearts redeemed, through your Word Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
This has been a pretty big week for so many reasons. From horrific events to funerals to federal elections to income tax deadlines, it’s been kind of hard to think about anything else. And just when you thought that things couldn’t be more hectic or crazy, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest movie release, The Thunderbolts, finally hit theatres this last Friday as well.
Now, I want to be clear that I’m not trying to make light of all the other things that happened this past week, not at all, but I just had this feeling that many, if not all of you, just can’t help but wonder if I was able to carve out the time to go watch this movie. Well, I’m glad you asked, because I totally did.
Again, I’m not making light of any of other things that actually mattered this past week at all, but it’s just that this movie that I’m sure less than 10% of the people in this room would ever watch, was really good in the sense that I feel like they touched on some important themes that were a little unexpected. See, the premise of this movie is that this group of misfits, some even former villains, team up to be this band of unlikely heroes. I know, total Suicide Squad vibes, but that is a DC property and we won’t be talking about that today.
So I thought that the movie would be about these members of the Thunderbolts trying to redeem themselves to make up for their past sins. I thought that they would feel like they needed to be heroes to make up for all the bad that they’ve caused throughout their troubled and questionable lives. I thought they would see all the red in their respective ledgers, and so they had to team up and do all this good in order to wipe it out.
But without any spoilers, that isn’t actually what the movie is about. With the exception of maybe one character, everyone in this star-studded cast learns that they aren’t defined by their past mistakes and failures, that they aren’t trapped in their traumatic histories of hurt and pain, that what they deserve doesn’t have to be what they get.
I know, sounds kind of deep for a comic book movie, but these are themes for life as well, aren’t they? I mean as I mentioned we had an election this past week, and the campaigns of like everyone has turned into just how the other candidate doesn’t deserve to be elected because of their past. Dirt gets dug up, integrity is put in the spotlight, and judgements are made. It’s like how we size people up. It’s how we decide what our opinion is of them. It’s how we humanize or dehumanize the other.
The problems come, though, when they are judged only by their past sins and not by the potential of their aspirations. When their very identities become only a sum of their mistakes, failures, and shortcomings and not their triumphs and successes. When what they deserve is determined only by what wrong they have done, and not by what good they can do.
Well, yeah. Isn’t that how it should be?
Maybe, but let me rephrase all of that before we set it in our minds. The problems come, though, when we are judged only by our past sins and not by the potential of our aspirations. When our very identities become only a sum of our mistakes, failures, and shortcomings and not our triumphs and successes. When what we deserve is determined only by what wrong we have done, and not by what good we can do.
Not so cut and dry anymore, is it. If we learned anything from our faith and all these years listening to these high-quality, top-notch, comic-book-alluding sermons like this one, we know this isn’t how God works. That isn’t how it should be. It isn’t how it has to be.
Because if it were, then we wouldn’t have the Apostle Paul and all his writings that make up like almost a quarter of our bibles. I mean that guy did everything he could to squash the early church and its teachings. If we were judged only by past mistakes, then we wouldn’t have the disciples either as those guys couldn’t comprehend Jesus’ message, they weren’t able to stick with him through thick and thin, they weren’t even able to fish properly and effectively. If we only got what we deserve, then we’d never be forgiven, never be redeemed, never be saved.
So while the world might want to judge that way, we can find solace in the fact that God doesn’t. That while we might identify others and be identified ourselves by the mistakes and wrongs of the past, God gives us an identity full of grace and mercy. That in the face of our spotty pasts and undeservedness, God choses to bless us and call us beloved anyway.
This doesn’t exactly make life easier though, does it. I mean things will still be difficult, awful things will still happen, we could be pushed into anger, judgement, and hate.
I mean, take the massacre that happened at the Lapu Lapu Day festival last week for example. What was meant to be a celebration to honour a cultural hero turned into heartbreaking violence and death. When we first heard of the news, of course our emotions went high. We were sad, dismayed, and even angry. And then as the week progressed, perhaps we started hearing more about the victims. We started hearing more about those who were affected. We started learning more details and connected more dots and we might find ourselves just asking more questions. How could this have happened? How could it have been prevented? Who can we blame?
And honestly, I don’t have any answers to these questions. All I can say is that this did happen. We are hurting collectively as a city and country. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims and all those affected by this horrific act.
And perhaps that is where the healing can happen. In that while the act that took 11 lives and affected countless others was completely and absolutely senseless, we remember that those who died were not. We see the rallying together of the community to honour those lives lost. We see the deep love that was shared with the victims and all those affected. We see the beauty in each and every one of those lives, and we can honour the fact that while the world won’t be the same without them, the world is also better because of them. Not because of what they have done or hadn’t done, but because they were loved, because they loved, and because they shared in the love that connects us all.
See in that peculiar conversation that Jesus had with Peter in today’s gospel reading, Jesus wasn’t asking Peter to prove his love by feeding and tending to the sheep, but he was saying that the love we share moves us to live in community, compassion, and care. The love that is shown to us moves us to see how we don’t deserve it but we get it anyway. The love that God gives us moves us to look past the past, and see the beauty in our lives and in the lives of others, as we are all just as broken, just as sinful, and just as saved and identified as God’s children.
I know, we might still want to point fingers at the failures and shortcomings of others. We might want to label others as undeserving of anything good. We might want to identify others as a sum of their shady pasts. But our faith tells us that we are more than that, we are made to be better than that, and we are loved much more than we could ever deserve.
Again, this doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen and we won’t feel sadness or pain, but it does mean that even in those times of our hurts and brokenness, we continue to be regarded as God’s children. We continue to be given much more grace and mercy than we could ever comprehend. We continue to be loved and given the capacity to love in return as we are invited and welcomed and supported by this community of others who also share in that same love.
So you see, we aren’t a sum of the sins of the past, but we are a product of the beauty of God’s gracious love, that joins and connects us all as the one body of Christ, beaten, broken, scarred and all, but also redeemed, reformed, and resurrected into community and meaning and purpose.
As we continue in our healing of the traumas of the past, may we move into the future in accepting the forgiveness of God, answering the call of the Spirit, and empowered by the love of Jesus that extended to us all. Thanks be to God. Amen.