Monthly Archives: July 2026

Preaching, Sermons

Midwives of Hope [OR Ideological Purity is Death-Dealing from Every Angle]

 

Pastor Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on July 19, 2026

[sermon begins after two Bible readings]

Matthew 13:24-30  [Jesus] put before [the crowds] another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field,25 but while everybody was asleep an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. 27 And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ 28 He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he replied, ‘No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. 30 Let both of them grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’ ”

Romans 8:12-25 So then, brothers and sisters, we are obligated, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh—13 for if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. 15 For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

[sermon begins]

Gardening and farming with hands in the dirt can feel like heaven for some folks. They can till, plant, prune, deadhead, weed, and harvest for hours, satisfied as much by their work in the dirt as their harvest. For others, myself included, it’s more transactional. We like flowers or vegetables, therefore we do the work that they need to grow and be beautiful or tasty. It’s taken some years for me to tell the difference between the flowers and the weeds in early spring, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. Lo and behold, according to the Bible anyway, I could have simply left the weeds to grow alongside the more desired flora and let God handle it in the end.

But, of course, Jesus isn’t telling a literal tale in today’s Bible reading. It’s a parable. A parable is a story told to direct the listener’s attention. In the Greek, “para” means “alongside” and “bole” means “to throw,” so a parable means to throw things alongside each other and see what emerges.[1] In this twisty parable, Jesus reveals the kingdom of heaven to the crowds and his disciples with wheat intentionally and quite nefariously sowed with weeds. It’s so like Jesus to describe the kingdom of God using images of creation: wheat, weeds, birds, trees, seeds, yeast. Jesus could have used other images like warriors, empire, navigation, music or others.[2] But he didn’t. Jesus used God’s creation as illustrations of the kingdom of heaven. New and tender baby wheat. Threatened by something so similar that removing it could harm the harvest.

The Gospel of Matthew spends some of its time trying to figure out who’s in and who’s out while intensely cautioning elsewhere to care for the least, the most fragile, the little ones.[3] In our parable today, the householder tells the enslaved farmers that it’s not their job to figure out the weeds from the wheat, the insiders from the outsiders. For the listeners of this parable, their task is to nurture the fullness of the kingdom of heaven to grow to maturity. Elsewhere in Matthew, Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful…[and] blessed are the peacemakers.”[4] The same Jesus who said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[5] No single passage can hold the entirety of Jesus’ message but parables are meant to unsettle Jesus’ listeners, to make us wonder where the allegory calls us out of comfort and into following Jesus.[6]

Jesus didn’t ignore the weeds. He names them throughout Matthew’s gospel. He regularly and actively challenged his followers and the powers that be on behalf of the poor in spirit and the persecuted.[7] In the parable of the weeds and the wheat, he reminds the listener that it’s impossible to identify oneself as either weed or wheat. Although we tend to think of ourselves as wheat and that other people are nasty weeds, there may be weedier parts of us that, as the parable suggests, will be bundled for burning so that the wheatier parts of us can thrive while the ash can be used as farmers use it to enrich the existing soil.[8] I find the thought of being unburdened from a few of my own weeds both a challenge and a comfort.

Identifying weeds and wheat takes on the either/or proposition that we humans seem to fall into as much as the faith community in the Gospel of Matthew. One case in point is what’s known as “cancel culture.”[9] Canceling initially meant to boycott someone in power who has committed atrocious acts against other people. Canceling was a way for the community to reduce the power of people who abused their position of authority to hurt other people. It has evolved into cutting someone out of the conversation or canceling someone who even tries to negotiate a conversation with a perceived enemy so that constructive dialogue with opponents is not possible.[10]

Canceling reduces people to unworthy based on a moving target of ideological purity. It makes me wonder how long it will take before no one is ideologically pure enough to survive cancel culture. Before anyone gets on a high horse, this happens across political and cultural ideologies. No one is immune to the temptation to cancel or to the dismay of being canceled. One tweet or blog post or comment that doesn’t measure up to the purity code, and you’re out.

Canceling seems to move against every lesson that Jesus tells us about how grace works. No grace or transformation exists in cancel culture. It’s about social shaming. Nuance is lost as the humanity of the opponent is canceled. Violence becomes easier once opponents are dehumanized. Just like that, we’ve circled back to the parable of the wheat and the weeds; back to the either/or proposition of ideological purity. Ultimately, we’re back to the cross, where shame and ideological purity lead to inevitable violent death. And the earth groans in its shadow.

No wonder the whole earth is groaning as described in the Romans reading. The Apostle Paul who wrote the letter to the Romans, seldom used creation language. This is one of those rare times he writes about creation, much less so poetically. But first he dabbles in the first century inclination to pit our flesh against our spirit. Once again, the either/or proposition becomes oversimplified in such distinctions. Human beings are bodies AND spirits. However, the Apostle Paul makes a key theological move by indirectly placing the wheat-and-weeds-like distinction within each person. He makes an important claim that our whole selves wrestle with being saint and sinner at the same time. If you want to be Christian-fancy, you can quote Martin Luther’s “simul iustus et peccator” – simultaneously righteous and a sinner. The letter to the Romans describes it as adoption out of bondage to decay. That’s heavy-handed language but it gets at an important truth about our tendencies as earth’s creatures. Our hope rests in the comfort of adoption and the challenge of labor.

The metaphor of groaning in labor aptly describes our current moment. The groans of labor come from a deep, primal place, when the process is simply experienced. Oh sure, there’s coaching and catching the baby. But the process of labor itself will have its way. Pregnancy and labor are painful and hard but also expectant and hopeful. Translating that hope into our collective lives, maybe what we’re laboring through in this world will birth a society better equipped for 21st century life together. We’re at a time when groans of despair are intermittently muted by shouts of rage. Not a lot of fun to be had, but there is hope. The kind of hope experienced by a laboring woman.

In the birth process, groaning in labor is active waiting. (Lest we think that we’re being encouraged by the Apostle Paul to hang out in a Barcalounger recliner while we wait.) Labor is active, sweaty, messy, painful waiting. Our adoption as children of God calls us into midwifery for a planet groaning in labor.

We’re called to be midwives of hope who can see the good and the beautiful alongside the hard and the painful, who are able to tend the sweet young wheat whilst knowing the weeds will simultaneously exist in each one of us and that others may need to be called on their weediness when they dehumanize and destroy. Being midwives of hope may mean being guided by the angels of our better nature to see the humanity in each person, in even our enemies, when we’re asked to align with false ideological purity over and against our fellow humans. Or to paraphrase Rev. Dr. King, “Let no one bring you so low as to hate them.” Or maybe a more apropos way to say it given this morning’s Bible reading from Romans would be to rely on our baptisms of adoption as children of God.

During the rite of baptism, we pray to God to:

“Sustain [the baptized] with the gift of your Holy Spirit: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, the spirit of joy in your presence, both now and forever. Amen.”

This baptismal prayer names the Holy Spirit as the One who empowers us as the adopted children of God to midwife the birth of hope through the labor of creation’s groanings. We’ve got this! Amen.

_________________________________________________________

[1] Karoline Lewis, Professor of Homiletics, Lutheran Seminary, St. Paul, MN. Discussion on the lectionary worship texts for Sunday, July 19, 2026. #1093: Eighth Sunday after Pentecost – July 19, 2026 – Working Preacher from Luther Seminary

[2] Cody J. Sanders, Professor of Congregation and Community Care, Lutheran Seminary, St. Paul, MN. Discussion on the lectionary worship texts for Sunday, July 19, 2026. #1093: Eighth Sunday after Pentecost – July 19, 2026 – Working Preacher from Luther Seminary

[3] Matthew 18:6

[4] Matthew 5:7 and 9

[5] Matthew 22:39

[6] Ibid, Sanders.

[7] Matthew 5:3 and 10

[8] What Does Ash Do For Soil? – Complete Soil Enrichment Guide – GardenerBible

[9] Merriam-Webster. “What It Means to Get ‘Canceled.’” https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cancel-culture-words-were-watching#:~:text=The%20term%20has%20been%20credited,calls%20to%20cancel%20such%20figures.

[10] Petra Bueskens. An Apology to JK Rowling. June 23, 2020. Areo: Politics, Culture & Media. https://areomagazine.com/2020/06/23/an-apology-to-jk-rowling/

Preaching, Sermons

Civic Freedom and Christian Freedom [OR Happy Bisesquicentennial!!]

**sermon art:  Freedom Sculpture — America 250 — Zenos Frudakis

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on July 5, 2026

[sermon begins after two Bible readings; Zechariah reading is after the sermon]

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 [Jesus spoke to the crowd saying:] 16 “To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,
17 ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’
18 “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; 19 the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”
25 At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; 26 yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. 27 All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Romans 7:15-25a  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. 17 But in fact it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. 18 For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.
21 So I find it to be a law that, when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, 23 but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25a Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

[sermon begins]

Happy bisesquicentennial! Or is it a happy sestercentennial? Or maybe it’s quartermillenial. Or perhaps you agree with the United States’ official term semiquincentennial. As a word-nerd, I prefer the former-most term. Bisesquicentennial packs poetic punch along with an insanely impressive number of syllables. Regardless, they all mean the same thing. These words denote the 250-year mark of a date or event like the 250th celebration of our country’s Independence Day from England. Americans in the United States commemorate our democracy that began as a fledgling republic. On King Charles’ recent trip to the states in April, he noted, “The [Founders] were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause. Two hundred and fifty years ago, or, as we say in the United Kingdom ‘just the other day,’ they declared Independence.”[1]

“Just the other day” to many countries around the world, we are a country with youthful idealism about democracy and especially about freedom. These foundational ideals inspired passionate freedom movements that changed our civic life together over the past 250 years. Some of these movements were led by non-religious humanists and others were led by citizens across the religious spectrum. The shared ideal and essence of the conflicts often boiled down to who our countries’ freedoms are for. We can call this civic freedom or state freedom.

One challenge for Christians in the United States is that we talk about Christian freedom in the church. We are made free by what Jesus did and who Jesus is. But it’s difficult to tease apart these two freedoms because we interpret the separation of church and state to mean that we can’t talk about them in the same breath. Alas, this means that we don’t get to practice talking about these two major identities in our lives. Being an American AND being a Christian.

I am both. No shock there. I love my country, the place of my birth. I love our shared story, and I love our millions upon millions of different stories even as I lament historical and present day suffering caused by my country. I’m a patriot who appreciates the Framers’ founding documents that promise freedom then and now. I cry when I sing our national anthem and our black national anthem. I’m inspired to do better when I hear the stories of people and communities from whom freedom is withheld by habit or trampled by malice. I love that we can gather on Sunday mornings to worship, as do my Jewish family members who light Shabbat candles on Friday evenings, as do my Muslim friends who pray multiple times a day. I’m grateful for family and strangers who have served in the United States military who have protected all our freedoms.

Civic freedom is complex. Christian freedom is also. A couple of Sundays ago, Pastor Michael preached about Christian freedom. He said, “The strange promise of the gospel is that when God occupies the center, other loves are…freed. [Jesus] wants to free our congregation, our nation, and every other good gift from having to carry a weight they were never meant to bear. When God is first, everything else is finally free to be what it actually is. Not less loved, but more rightly loved. Not diminished, but liberated.”[2] Pastor Michael’s sermon caught my ear in a particular way because I was already working with our scripture for today and the confusion from conflating our civic freedom and our Christian freedoms.

Jesus’ preaching in our Bible reading this morning challenges his listeners, the crowds. The missing verses from today’s reading include Jesus’ woes to unrepentant cities. Cities who rejected Jesus’ deeds of power that gave sight to the blind, healed the lame, and raised the dead. Into the cultural chaos of unrepentant cities, Jesus commanded his listeners. He said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” The language of the scripture is an imperative. Jesus is not suggesting or inviting or sweet-talking the crowds. In the Greek, he speaks in the imperative tense of command. “Come to me…” He commands the weary. In Jesus’ command to “come to him’ he also says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.”

The language of “yoke” was often used by Jewish rabbis as a symbol for Torah and teaching. Yokes were used by farmers to connect animals to harness their power for heavy lifting beyond human capacity. It makes some sense that Jesus would use it with his listeners here. He leads his followers into the heavy lifting of loving God, loving self and neighbor, feeding the hungry, caring for widows and orphans, and setting the prisoners free. Jesus aligns himself with centuries of Jewish tradition as he commands the crowds to learn from him because, in his words, “I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

A gentle and humble Jesus’ described his yoke as easy, and his burden light. He didn’t, and doesn’t, use violence to take his listeners by force or fear. He commands in freedom. Christian freedom. Freedom to be on the way of Jesus, to live by faith, not to live by the sin to which we are bound.

Which gets us to Paul’s letter to the Roman church in the Bible’s book of Romans. He wrote, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…Now if I do what I DO NOT want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.” Paul wasn’t having a crisis of confidence. Elsewhere he wrote about being an upstanding Roman citizen and a righteous Jew.[3] Paul’s writing here captures a truth about sin that many of us experience. We don’t seem to be able to solve sin ourselves—our own sin much less the sin of others. Sin describes our separation from God that leads to sins, plural. Sins that include violence against our very own selves and inflicts ourselves on the people around us. Violence is anything that is the opposite of the love we’re yoked to in Jesus. The paradoxical yoke of Jesus that binds us to obedience in love and for love as we are freed by faith into his love.[4]

Freed by the yoke of Jesus into naming my sin that separates me from God and other people also allows the wide-angle view of how my sin becomes cooperative and systemic, even intentional through willful ignorance. We are social creatures. It makes sense that our individual moral failings combine to form social systems that bind us further into what we do not want.[5] Big examples include the intentionality of the opioid epidemic or tech algorithms that change our neurobiology.[6] Insidious, quieter examples are local and national laws and legislation that make it hard to feed our families or take care of our bodies or recover our lives after being in prison or to find places of rest.

Our 21st century moment is moving fast and can feel exhausting. Jesus’ promises rest for our souls. Souls are the deepest part of ourselves. The soul is often how we describe where God connects with us. There’s so much coming at us that demands our identities right through our souls. And before we’re aware of it, we’ve squandered our Christian freedom and foundational identity in Jesus Christ. No longer are guided in faith by the One who teaches us to follow his gentle humility. We unyoke ourselves from the One who commands us to love and pray for our enemies only to become the very worst of our enemies. We unyoke ourselves from the One who frees us from sin, as the Apostle Paul writes in Romans, only to be “at war with the law of [our minds], making [us] captive to the law of sin.”[7] We unyoke ourselves from the One who revealed on a cross that vicious insults and violence have only one end–death.

Jesus commands us to learn from him, he who is gentle and humble in heart. Jesus was the embodiment of our reading from Zechariah—a humble, triumphant king riding on a donkey leading “prisoners of hope.”[8] You may remember hearing that verse quoted on March 29th in the Palm Sunday Gospel reading from the 21st chapter of Matthew.[9] Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last time before he was executed in a plot concocted by religious and Roman leaders. The crowds, prisoners of hope, celebrated his arrival as he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.

We, too, are prisoners of hope given a foundational identity in Jesus Christ – our humble, triumphant, non-violent king. We who are weary are commanded to come to Jesus with our heavy burdens to learn from him and rest our exhausted souls. Yoked with Jesus we are freed to share repentance, forgiveness, wisdom, gentleness, and humility. These are gifts given as promise for God’s sake, for our sake, and for the sake of the world. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”[10]

___________________________________________

[1] King Charles III, The King’s Full Address to Congress on April 26, 2026. King Charles’ speech to Congress: Read full transcript – NBC New York

[2] Michael Tassler. Matthew 10:24-39 – Hanging Our Hearts. Augustana Lutheran Church. June 21, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/live/twgH_7qfBxc?si=lqmR3htIAcV_tbhz minute 24:34.

[3] Matt Skinner, Professor of New Testament, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN. Podcast discussion on the worship readings for July 5, 2026. #1091: Sixth Sunday after Pentecost – July 5, 2026 – Working Preacher from Luther Seminary

[4] Karoline Lewis, Professor of Biblical Preaching, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN. Podcast discussion on the worship readings for July 5, 2026. #1091: Sixth Sunday after Pentecost – July 5, 2026 – Working Preacher from Luther Seminary

[5] Cody J. Sanders, Associate Professor of Congregational and Community Care Leadership, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN. Podcast discussion on the worship readings for July 5, 2026. #1091: Sixth Sunday after Pentecost – July 5, 2026 – Working Preacher from Luther Seminary

[6] Ibid.

[7] Romans 7:23

[8] Zechariah 9:12

[9] Matthew 21:1-11

[10] Romans 7:25a

_____________________________________________

Zechariah 9:9-12 Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
10 He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall command peace to the nations;
his dominion shall be from sea to sea
and from the River to the ends of the earth.
11 As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
12 Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
today I declare that I will restore to you double.