**sermon photo: Nasa

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on April 19, 2026

[sermon begins after Bible reading]

Luke 24:13-35 Now on that same day two [disciples] were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, ¹⁴ and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. ¹⁵ While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, ¹⁶ but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. ¹⁷ And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. ¹⁸ Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” ¹⁹ He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, ²⁰ and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. ²¹ But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. ²² Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, ²³ and when they did not find his body there they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. ²⁴ Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see him.” ²⁵ Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! ²⁶ Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” ²⁷ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.
²⁸ As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. ²⁹ But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. ³⁰ When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. ³¹ Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight. ³² They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” ³³ That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem, and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. ³⁴ They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” ³⁵ Then they told what had happened on the road and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

[sermon begins]

The first assignment in my 9^th grade drama class was choosing and memorizing a monologue to read in an accent different than my own. Thus was Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” earnestly butchered in a British accent by yours truly.[1] Sparing you the torment of a reenactment, Frost’s poem observes the chosen road from the rearview of looking back on it. It’s a very human thing to do. We make sense of our life by looking back, interpreting events and then reinterpreting them, wringing meaning from our experiences as we wrestle with them.

Our faith stories are similar. Those of us who’ve lived long enough can look back and see how God wastes nothing from our lives. Each wild misadventure. Each painful doubt. Each transcendent hymn. Each miserable failure. Each shining celebration. Each shattering grief. Each quiet joy. Each deep regret. Each sin forgiven. Each normal everyday moment. All those seems-like-yesterday moments spun by God through baptismal water into the cross-and-resurrection Easter faith we live today.

For Cleopas and his friend on the road to Emmaus, yesterday couldn’t come soon enough to start making sense of all they’d seen and heard and felt in Jerusalem. They had a seven-mile walk ahead of them. Just that morning the women disciples had come racing from the tomb to tell them that Jesus was alive. While the two friends walked and talked, the freshly resurrected Jesus joined them. They didn’t know it was Jesus and regaled him with their story. “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, [Jesus] interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” He preached way, way back about himself through Moses and the prophets before his earthly yesterdays, stories winding through time that made Jesus himself.

It’s not lost on THIS preacher (pointing at myself) that his lengthy sermon did NOT open the two friends’ eyes to Jesus. The big reveal happened through the meal. “When [Jesus] was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.” Ahhh, they ate and then the scriptures and preaching made sense. Hindsight. Looking back through a current experience to see something new on the road we traveled.

Making sense of things in the moment and seeing God’s activity in real time can be tough. Communing and talking with another Jesus follower, sharing our experiences through faith, can make all the difference in our faith. Very few people are good at figuring things out all by themselves in real time. Most of us need other people as we understand our experiences, allowing the roots of faith to deepen as our stories wind across time.

If you had told me back in the days when I was building my nursing career, acquiring degrees, and having babies that I’d become a pastor, I would have laughed out loud, shaking my head at the lunacy. Looking back though, I see the threads of being baptized as an infant and having First Communion in the Catholic Church; being baptized again by immersion at the age of 12 in my stepfather’s fundamentalist reformed tradition; leaving church altogether as a religiously exhausted college student; and then marrying a Lutheran and baptizing our babies by the grace of God. Those roads made little sense at the time.

But God wastes nothing. Those stories now weave together by the power of the Holy Spirit. Telling those stories reveal imperfect and unlikely roots of faith in Jesus. Each one of you has your own story through which faith has played its part, perhaps along with some doubt shaking things up and keeping faith real. Faith and doubt are partners in the mystery of faith.

We have plenty of mysteries of faith starting with the mystery of creation itself. Earth Day, celebrated civically on Wednesday this week across 190 countries, is but a piece of this cosmic Christian mystery. The Nicene Creed that we’ll say together a little later in worship attributes creation first to “one God…maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.”

We’ve seen some wondrous glimpses of the unseen most recently through the eyes of the Artemis II astronauts looking out the windows of their spacecraft Integrity. We saw a bright feature where the near side of the moon meets the far side. They officially named this bright feature for Commander Weisman’s wife Carroll who recently died of cancer.[2] The crew cried together as they grieved and celebrated with their Commander. And some of us also celebrated God, maker of heaven and earth, for the sheer magnitude of the cosmos through which our earthly home spins.

The Nicene Creed goes on to acknowledges “one Lord, Jesus Christ…through him all things were made.” A second attribution of creation through the words of John’s Gospel: ¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴ in him was life…[3]

Lastly, the Nicene Creed acknowledges “the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life…and the life of the world to come.” Each of the three articles of the creed revels in the mystery of life and creation through the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Creation is announced; life is formed and given. Looking back through the millennia reveals what we can see of the road taken by God whom we profess as three-in-one and one-in-three, the holy, blessed Trinity.

As creatures set within creation, we can also look back and around now to see the impact of our interactions with creation. Producing life giving energy means negotiating the unintended consequences of mining, oil extraction, and use of their gifts. Consequences that negatively impact air, water, quality of life, worker safety, and peaceful coexistence without wars over energy sources. It’s well-documented that our creaturely lives are changed for the better when energy becomes available and affordable. Communities thrive when energy production is introduced and when we address energy as a systems issue not an individual failure.[4]

We are creatures who are simultaneously saint and sinner through the cross of Christ. The cross is our foundation for truths that are good, bad, and ugly. Not one of us can claim perfection or omniscience when it comes to our motivations, actions, or their consequences. This is just as true of our collective energy production and use for both positive reasons and negative outcomes as it is of our individual and community relationships. Saint-and-sinner is more than a catch phrase. It’s a theological truth.

Regarding the church, we see and celebrate God’s history of salvation and our individual roads that converge here. However it is that we understand the mystery of ending up here together, we can look back and interpret events and experiences through which God has called us here. Like the two friends on the road to Emmaus, this congregation walks deeply in faith while each of our own individual faiths take turns wavering, deepening, doubting. Faith converges our roads into a shared path. It’s a cooperative and Christ-centered pilgrimage for we who “walk as yet by faith.”[5] Walking alongside each other as church. Challenging each other through our different perspectives. Praying for each other when we won’t or simply can’t pray for ourselves. Holding faith steady when we cannot dredge it up in ourselves.

As church together, we remind each other that the Holy Spirit daily and vigorously seals us by our baptism to the faith OF Jesus. Through no effort of our own, the Spirit draws us through the cross of Christ revealing our messy lives on various roads and the fragile faith from which not one thing is wasted by God. Alleluia and amen.

______________________________________________

[1] Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken in Complete Poems of Robert Frost 1949. (U.S.A. Robert Frost, 1949), 131. Also see his poem here: The Road Not Taken – poem by Robert Frost | PoetryVerse

[2] Artemis II proposes moon feature name “Carroll.” https://youtu.be/GAMkRJdu9j4?si=jdfZa4Y_wfG0PiHQ

[3] John 1:3

[4] Melanie Allen, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Robert J. “R.J.” McGrail, and Robert Puentes. “How local leaders and communities are leading the transition to clean energy.” Brookings Institute podcast on July 30, 2025. How local leaders and communities are leading the transition to clean energy | Brookings.

[5] “Burial of the Dead” in Occasional Services: A Companion to Lutheran Book of Worship – LBW Hymnal. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House and Philadelphia: Board of Publication, Lutheran Church in America, 1982), 121.

Sermons

Joy and Fear Mingle in Easter Hope [OR An Easter Riff on Seismic Shifts]

April 5, 2026 caitlin121608

**sermon art: The Empty Tomb by Anne Cameron Cutri

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on April 5, 2026

[sermon begins after Bible reading]

Matthew 28:1-10 After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. ² And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. ³ His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. ⁴ For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. ⁵ But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. ⁶ He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. ⁷ Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” ⁸ So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples. ⁹ Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

[sermon begins]

I grew up in earthquake country. We’d guess the seismic strength of the current quake with each other–a 3.0 on the Richter Scale could be felt a little, a 4.5 would get your attention, and a 6.0 could knock down walls. I remember the first big quake in my teens. I was home alone, on the second floor of our house. It was loud, like a freight train barreling by within feet of the house. It was long, the shaking lasted almost 30 seconds. And it was scary—5.9 scary, the epicenter of the Whittier Narrows quake wasn’t far from Altadena.[1] The house stood through it, but I shook for a while. A few minutes after the quake, my stepbrother Bill strolled nonchalantly into the house and asked me if we had any bar soap. He’d been on his way to get bar soap when the quake hit but the grocery store was a mess. I’d never been so happy to see him! Quakes happen on their own time. They surprise and disrupt what you thought would happen next. And they connect us differently to each other.

This Easter morning, our Bible story begins with an earthquake. But it isn’t the first one felt by Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. Their world had been metaphorically and literally rocked by the events of the past few days. Judas had betrayed Jesus to the ones who arrested him.[2] Peter had denied knowing Jesus to servants and bystanders at his trial.[3] The women looked on from a distance as Jesus cried out on the cross and breathed his last while the EARTH QUAKED THEN, too.[4] Mary Magdelene and the other Mary watched Joseph of Arimathea wrap Jesus’ body in a linen cloth, lay him in the tomb, roll a great stone to cover the door, and walk away.[5] The women’s constant presence was unwavering as their world was rocked by the execution of their teacher and friend at the hands of the powers that be. Some of us know that feeling of not being able to look away when our foundations tremble through a seismic shift.

We’re told that Mary Magdalene and the other Mary return to see the tomb. Their longing to reconnect could have stirred their natural instinct to visit after Jesus’ burial. Their world was immediately shaken by another earthquake, an aftershock of the one at the cross. Perhaps the angel gained leverage from the quake to roll back the two-ton stone before using it as a chair. Afraid of the angel’s power, the guards quaked and fell over as if dead. Just like that [snap fingers], the ones in power were laid flat by their own fear while the Marys’ fear and joy launched them from the tomb to go tell the other disciples, “He has been raised from the dead.”

Reverberating with the good news from the angel, the women met Jesus on their way. They ran to him, knelt and touched his feet. Like the angel, Jesus sends them to tell the good news to his disciples. In this telling of the story, we don’t know how surprised the other disciples were to hear their news. But we do know that the women’s story led to action, because a few verses later the disciples actually do meet Jesus in Galilee.

Regardless, the fear and joy of the women are part of this seismic story. Many of us are shaken to the foundation by things that happen to us and by things happening around us. And many of us experience a God who brings life out of death. Maybe not as dramatically as Jesus resurrecting out of tomb. But individual experiences that, like Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, can mingle our emotions of joy and fear. God begets us through cross and tomb into new life because we are children of God, broken and beloved, resurrected into the body of Christ that we call the church. The church that is resurrected through Jesus’ death and new life.

Part of the good news that we get to share as the church is that there is enough for everybody—enough resources, enough love, enough life—as we extend Christ’s arms of love and grace, so that Jesus’ joyous welcome through us nourishes a disrupted world with community and belonging, nourishes us with hope and new life. Jesus calls us to be the love that we receive however imperfectly we get that done. We share joy with our new neighbors who are new homeowners just down the hill in Augustana Homes. We welcome the stranger with our Refugee Support Teams. We pray for our public leaders while holding them accountable for the dignity of each person made in God’s image. And we love our neighbors as ourselves by accompanying them in advocacy and amplifying their voices with our own.

New life literally abounds as Easter and Spring happen simultaneously this year. Tree roots are soaking up the latest snow even as they clamor for more. Birds fly back to our latitude for nesting and nectar. Perhaps your suffering, confusion, and grief make it difficult to see life at all, to feel any joy alongside your fear. Real life doesn’t conveniently align with the season of the earth or the season of the church. Fear is a reasonable reaction to the unpredictable nature of life on this planet. One gift of the body of Christ is that the prayers, practices, and people of the church’s resurrection faith surround us while we grieve or heal, holding space for joy until we can feel it once more. When we’re too broken to pray, our church community prays for us as the risen body of Christ for each other and for the world. Individually, we are not designed to hold all the things, everywhere, all at once, but the church IS intended to hold the surprises, disruptions, fear, and joy, as a people who look to the future with hope. As a people formed and sustained by the life and love of Jesus.

The good news of Easter surprises us with God’s love for the world, reminding us that we belong to God through the life-death-life of Jesus. The seismic shift of Easter surprises us with the reclining angel on the tomb’s stone who announced to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary that Jesus had been raised as he said; and today, Easter Sunday, and for the next 50 days of the Easter season, we remind each other that there is good news of defiant joy alongside our fear.

God brings us through cross and tomb into the joy of new life because God is love.[6] Made in the image of God, each one of us is beautiful and unconditionally beloved—there is nothing we can do or not do to make God love us any more or any less. YOU are beautiful and unconditionally beloved by God. Such is the radical, excessive, audacious love of God. The love of God is a seismic shift that surprises and disrupts with the power to change the world that God so loves. Jesus first revealed God’s love in his life and ministry on earth including taking our violence into himself on the cross and transforming death into life through the self-sacrifice of love. Through that very love of Jesus, the body of Christ gets to be the love we receive for the sake of the world. Thanks be to God and Happy Easter!

________________________________________________________

[1] M 5.9 – The 1987 Whittier Narrows, California Earthquake

[2] Matthew 26:47-50

[3] Matthew 26:69-75

[4] Matthew 27:45-56

[5] Matthew 27:57-61

[6] 1 John 4:16a

Preaching, Sermons

Good Friday for Goodness Sake [OR Jesus Loves You More Than You Can Hate Anyone]

April 3, 2026 caitlin121608

**sermon art: Jesus’ Mother, Beloved Disciple by Laura James

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on April 3, 2026

The Gospel of John, chapters 18 and 19 [grab a Bible or web search the readings]

[sermon begins]

How are we to understand the goodness of Good Friday? Is it like how kale is good for us but really not that tasty? A violent execution seems an odd thing to commemorate much less celebrate, especially in a time when the world is wrestling with disturbing violence and deep pain. Today of all days, it’s especially important to understand that it’s not the violence of the cross that is redemptive. It’s not the pain of Jesus that saves us. It’s easy to get lost in the message of the cross because the earliest Jesus followers who wrote down their experiences couldn’t quite figure it out either.

The goodness of Good Friday has to do with God’s goodness. More specifically, the goodness of Good Friday has to do with Jesus who embodies God. In the Gospel of John, God is Jesus and Jesus is God. The love of God in Jesus, the audacity of grace personified in Jesus, the ultimate power of that love, so enraged his enemies and fueled the mob mentality that ultimately killed him. Jesus ate meals with unlovable people, he had public conversations with women no one spoke to, and he had secret conversations with religious leaders who opposed him by day. The list of his ever-expanding circle of grace and love is endless.

Finally, when the threat of his grace, the threat about who is included in the love of God, became too great, he was killed for it. Grace and unconditional love are that powerful. Jesus predicted his death because dying for goodness’ sake was anticipated as the inevitable attempt to do away with love. Hate’s last gasp against love’ great, disruptive power. Hate will always try to do away with love. But Jesus will always love us more than any of us can hate him.

The goodness of Good Friday reminds us that we are not abandoned in suffering. God suffers with us. God absorbs our suffering into God’s heart. Good Friday also tells the truth about suffering caused by violence. Large acts of violence are obvious. War, terror, and murder are clearly seen. There are also the smaller acts of violence that destroy relationships and murder people’s spirits and our own spirits – lies, gossip, passive aggression, dissing someone’s body rather than debating their ideas or confronting their hurtful behavior. The list of our violent ways is as endless as we are creative in inflicting ourselves against the ones we love and the ones we hate. The level we inflict suffering on each other, and on the earth and all its creatures, knows no bounds.

The goodness of Good Friday reminds us that the cross is the place where we struggle in the darkness and the very place where God meets us. We live in this darkness in different ways – failure, addiction, confusion, doubt. God loves you through the cross, in the darkest places that you don’t tell anyone about. The truth is that most of us are capable of just about anything given the right set of circumstances. The goodness of Good Friday isn’t about pointing away from ourselves to other people who cause suffering. It’s also a sacred space to wonder and be honest about the pain that we cause as well.

Confessions of sin extend to systems that we’re a part of—institutions, countries, governments, families, friendships, communities, and even churches. Systems that hold us captive to sin from which we cannot free ourselves. What does free us? Jesus on the cross. Jesus on the cross holds up a mirror in which we can see our own reflections. Our reflections that simultaneously reveal God’s beauty in us as well as the sin we inflict on each other and cannot justify. No matter how many times we enshroud our sin in self-righteousness, the cross tells us otherwise.

We often act without awareness of how our actions may hurt someone else. That’s why our worship confessions talk about things we’ve done and things we’ve failed to do. That’s why we talk about our sin. Sin gives us language for the way we hurt other people and ourselves with our actions – actions that separate us from each other and God. But nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.[1] Good Friday’s goodness creates space to experience life-giving compassion from the heart of God in the face of our sin. God’s SELF-sacrifice in Jesus also reminds us that Jesus’ death is NOT payment to an angry God or a hungry devil. That’s just divine child abuse. Jesus is a revelation of the goodness of God, taking our violence into himself on the cross and transforming death into life through SELF-sacrifice. The cross surprises us with grace in the face of sin.

God reveals the truth of our death dealing ways while reminding us that God’s intention for humankind is good.[2] Jesus was fully human and fully divine. His life’s ministry and his death on the cross reveal his humanity and our own, reminding us about the goodness for which we were created. The cross awakens that goodness. Jesus’ full and fragile humanity was displayed on the cross. He sacrificed himself to the people who killed him for his radical, excessive love. He did not raise a hand in violence against the people and the world that God so loves. Jesus’ self-sacrificing goodness clears our eyes to see God’s intention for our human life together. Jesus loves us more than we could ever hate him or anyone else.

Our connection with each other is also revealed in the goodness of Good Friday. From the cross, Jesus redefined connection, kinship, and belonging. Hear these words again from the gospel reading:

“Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. ²⁶When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” ²⁷Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” [3]

From the cross, with some of his last breaths, Jesus did this incredible thing. Jesus knows we need belonging. He connects people through and beyond suffering. This is NOT a reason for suffering. Simply one truth about it. When we suffer and feel most alone, Jesus reaches out from his own suffering to give us to each other. To belong to each other. God’s heart revealed through the cross destroys the illusion of our isolation and connects us to each other once more. In each other, we’re given kinship and appreciation for the gift and mystery of being alive. In God we live and move and have our being through God’s goodness in Jesus on the cross.

In the end, the cross isn’t about us at all. It’s about the self-sacrificing love of Jesus who reveals God’s ways to show us the logical end of ours—our death-dealing ways in the face of excessive grace and radical love. We struggle to believe that God applies this grace and love to everyone. It’s hard enough to believe that there’s a God who loves us. It’s downright offensive that God loves our greatest enemy as much as God loves us. But that is God’s promise in the goodness of Good Friday.

There is nothing you can do or not do to make God love you any more or any less. The same holds true for the person you like the least. Jesus loves you more than you can hate anyone AND Jesus loves that person, too. Offensive? For sure. And also reassuring. Because if God’s love includes everyone then it also includes you. God’s arms are opened to all in the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross, receiving us by God’s reckless grace because Good Friday is reveals that God’s goodness is love.[4] Thanks be to God and amen.

_______________________________________________

[1] Romans 8:38-39

[2] Genesis 1:26-31 God creates “humankind.”

[3] John 19:25b-27

[4] 1 John 4:7-21

Caitlin Trussell

Monthly Archives: April 2026

Looking in the Rearview at The Road Taken [OR God Wastes Nothing—Cosmos, Creation, and Creature]

Joy and Fear Mingle in Easter Hope [OR An Easter Riff on Seismic Shifts]

Good Friday for Goodness Sake [OR Jesus Loves You More Than You Can Hate Anyone]

Pastor, Preacher, Speaker