**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.

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[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.

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church in Denver on June 14, 2015

[sermon begins after the two Bible readings]

Mark 4:26-34  He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, 27 and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. 28 The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” 30 He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? 31 It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; 32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” 33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; 34 he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

2 Corinthians 5:6-7, 14-20  So we are always confident; even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord— 7 for we walk by faith, not by sight.

14 For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. 15 And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.  16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

[sermon begins]

When I was a kid there was a jewelry fad. Perhaps started by Christians.  It was mustard seed jewelry.  There was a tiny yellow seed sitting loosely inside a tiny glass ball.  I’m pretty sure I had a pair of mustard seed earrings and my sister may have had a bracelet but my memory as it relates to my sister’s jewelry is a little hazy.  The point of this jewelry was to remind us that great things were possible from the tiniest drip of faith.  And while there are ways that this is true and there are many Bible verses that inspire us with that idea, I would invite us to read today’s text carefully before we jump on that familiar train of interpretation.  These two parables are saying something more.

Parables are more than analogy or fable.  Parables reveal things, they flip the standard line over on its head and they are subversive and powerful.  They have a kick to them.  When we don’t feel that kick, that “Aha” moment, it’s likely that we’re missing something.  And…surprise, surprise…they can be super funny.  The mixing together the things of daily life into the power of parable stirs the hearer into different ways of being.

The first parable says that the Kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seeds, they grow without tending and “he does not know how.”  Part of this parable is about knowing or, more accurately, the lack of knowing.  There are people who are not me that can describe the phases of plant growth from seeds into plants into more seeds but this parable makes me wonder if they “know how.”  The farmer is able to bring in this harvest without knowing the mystery how it came to be.  This deep mystery of seeing but not knowing how is the set-up for the mustard seed:

“[Jesus] also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? 31 It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; 32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

This mustard seed is not of the jewelry variety – a lovely, yellow, round, tiny ball.  This is a black speck – one that you might mistake for a bit of dirt on your cheek.  It is completely unremarkable.  But this mustard seed grows into an invasive shrub.  The text today says the greatest of all shrubs.

Now there’s a goal; to lay claim to being the greatest of all shrubs.  I’ve had a chance to talk about this text with people who come from different parts of the country and everyone could name the invasive plant that causes problems in their area.  Plants with names like kudzu, tamarisk and toadflax are described with all the damage they can do as they spread and then spread some more.  The original hearers of this parable would have laughed out loud to hear the Kingdom of God compared to the mustard seed.  Like a good South Park episode, it would have been funny in that way that is also offensive – shocking them into laughter while making them think.

The mustard seed goes to work.  Growing and spreading and becoming the greatest of all shrubs with branches large enough to shade the nesting birds. Read off of the page it sounds like soft greenery and birds chirping –Disney-esque in its sentiment. Which, in my book, is often an excellent reason to look a little deeper.  Earlier in this chapter of Mark, Jesus tells a parable that doesn’t show birds in a very good light.  Birds are NOT a friend to the seeds in the earlier parable.  They are the undesirables – more Hitchcock than Disney.[1]   And yet, here they are, just a few parables later, sitting on the branches in the shade.  And the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed growing into the greatest of shrubs that shades even the birds.

Why might Jesus have told this parable in this way?  In the previous chapter in Mark, the religious leaders begin scheming with the politicians to destroy Jesus.  The parables speak into their schemes. The religious leaders and politicians know that Jesus is shaking up the very order in which they operate and their option, as they see it, is to destroy him.  Jesus tells the parable of the mustard seed, foreshadowing that the seemingly fragile or insignificant thing is going to be so vast that even the birds who threaten it will be dependent on it.

To be clear, Jesus is not an anarchist.  Subversion is not simply to disrupt and see what happens, come what may.  It is not freedom that becomes a free-for-all.  That would indeed be Hitchcockian in all its glory.  Anarchy creates pain most often for the most vulnerable people in the world who suffer in the chaos. The subversion of Jesus is freedom into the Kingdom of God.  A kingdom so invasive that you cannot be rid of it.  A kingdom so invasive that even its enemies can find food and shelter in it.  A kingdom so invasive it disrupts our plans and schemes, it disrupts our sin, and makes of us a new creation.

Our location in the Kingdom of God is understood in relation to Jesus’ location.  God coming in a body, in the person of Jesus, disrupts reality in a new direction for us.  Jesus coming in a body makes space for all bodies to be redeemed. Bodies created good but lost along the way in individual plans and schemes, in sin. Jesus makes new creations who are messengers of that reconciliation with God.

As Paul says in 2^nd Corinthians, “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view…So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”  This is an announcement of what Jesus Christ has done and is doing.  Translating out of the original Greek on this would be better stated, “So if anyone is in Christ, A NEW CREATION!”  There is no lead in, no verb necessary, just BAM!  “A NEW CREATION!”

The Kingdom of God, through Jesus Christ, disrupts the ways in which we order our lives, invading our plans and schemes.

The Kingdom of God, through Jesus Christ, reveals our dependence on God, our fragile selves – the ways we screw up, the ways we see each other as a threat and the ways we work against God.

Jesus, the living Christ, sends the Kingdom of God in and through us as he loves us enough to forgive us and he loves us enough to make us new.  Not counting our trespasses against us, entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.[2]  The Kingdom of God is going to the birds.  This is good news indeed.

Thanks be to God!

[1] Alfred Hitchcock. Movie: The Birds. (Alfred Hitchcock Productions: 1963). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/

[2] 2 Corinthians 5:19

Caitlin Trussell on January 11, 2015 with Augustana Lutheran Church, Denver, CO

[sermon begins after these two Bible readings]

Genesis 1:1-5  In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Mark 1:4-11  John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

[sermon begins]

There are wild, unimaginable things happening in this Genesis creation story.  Formlessness and void of the earth.  Imagine that for a moment – formless…void…utter darkness.  Nothing to distinguish one part from another.  Nothing through which to capture any imagining of its future.  A wind in the form of breath, as the Spirit of God blows over the mystery and threat of the deep.  Sound in seismic proportions.  No quiet or tame God picking up a bit of clay and pottering away.  From our human-sized perspective, this is massive.  This is earth and heavens – loud, windy and wild.  This story doesn’t allow us to cozy up into a calm, domesticated God.   This is the sheer power of God beyond our imagining, beyond our understanding.

The God of creation is not to be tamed.  And yet, for many of us, our first inclination is to tone God down.  As if we can make God easier on the heart and mind if we craft just the right language about God.  Or at the very least we can distract ourselves from the problem of the power of God if we spend our time arguing about the accuracy of the story.

Several years ago, when my daughter Taryn was in preschool, I had only been back in church as an adult for a few years.  Taryn’s preschool was attached to our church and some of the school’s parents seemed to know that I was involved in the church too.  It was common to have conversations with other parents during the dropping off and picking up times.  One day after dropping Taryn off, I was sneaking a peek into the classroom to watch her.  One of the dads hung back too.  A few minutes went by and he sidled over to chat.  He confirmed that I went to the church and then, without any preamble or build-up, he asked, “If God is all about love then why do some people say they fear God?”  I fumbled and stumbled around the idea of God’s power for a minute or two but clearly was not passing muster on any kind of answer that settled this man’s mind.  And there’s the problem, right there, when it comes to God’s awesome, creating power, there is nothing that settles our mind.  No matter how many days or millennia you think it took, the creative force of it is mind-blowing – and it blows our soft and squishy imaginings right out the window with it.

Here’s the thing.  When we’re tempted to talk about God as exclusively merciful and loving and forgiving, we forget the fearsome breath of God that moves over a formless, dark void; the Spirit of God that moves over what Jurgen Moltmann calls “creation-in-the-beginning.”[1]  When we soften or negate the power of God in any way, we don’t have to ask the question, “What would happen if God does this again?”

So let’s hang onto the fearsome power of God and ask that question.  “What would happen if God uses that kind of power again?” Oh…wait…God does do it again.  Anyone hear that part of the baptism of Jesus where the heavens are torn open?  The Spirit of God that moves over formless, dark voids, is the same Spirit who tears apart the heavens and descends, untamable, into the wild, over a river, onto a person, and names him “Beloved.”[2]  This baptism of Jesus is a revelation of the redemption to come and the unmitigated power infusing that redemption.

Moltmann talks about the “creation-in-the-beginning” being in continuity with the redemption of all things.  In the whole Bible, “the words used for the divine act of creating are also used for God’s liberating and redeeming acts (e.g. Isaiah 43:19); redemption is the final new creation of all things…”[3]

Oh, how we long for the redemption of all things – all our formless, dark voids in need of the fearsome breath of God.  Voids in which we struggle and wonder about.  Voids in which we lose ourselves, not knowing which way to turn or to take the next right step.  Voids in which we lose the people we love or lose strangers in Paris who other people love.  Voids in which freedom suffers under political tyranny or disintegrating terror.

Into these voids comes the Spirit of God.  The same Spirit of God who breathes light into the darkness.[4]  Light into the darkness, now think about that one.  God spoke these words, “Let there be light” as God’s breath rushed over the mystery and threat of the deep.   What does creation of light sound like?  Is there a crack of thunder as light creates heat?  Is there a deep and resounding vibration that would quake us to the core and make us aware of every cell in our bodies?  What does even a single blaze of light through unfathomable darkness look like as it bounds through creation with power strong enough to sustain life through all the mornings and evenings of the millennia?

We know a lot about light, or at least the scientists do, but did you know that we still don’t know what it is?  Einstein spent a lot of his time researching the interplay between light and time, challenged the orthodoxy of the previous 100 years of physics and won a Nobel Prize.[5] Einstein did all this and yet we still really don’t know what it is.  We mimic it but we cannot create it. [6]  Light is more than a convenient nuance in our days.  Light is sustaining, life giving energy.  It shows us how limited we are as creatures that we still don’t understand it.

God’s breath, God’s Spirit, creates light and life out of formless, dark voids.  And God gives this same sustaining breath to you as you move through your days.  God’s power and imagination creates an earth out of no earth.  God’s power and imagination makes a way out of no way.

This same, fearsome God breathes that power into redemption for you.  This same, fearsome God breathes that power into love for you.  The magnitude of God’s power is not simply a show of sound and light to wow us all and leave us shaking in shoes.  The magnitude of God’s power is the same sheer power of God that breathes grace, forgiveness and love into you.  And your God-infused life and breath bear witness to God, as the power of God’s Spirit moves through Christ in you for the sake of the world.  There is hope in the power of God’s redemption.  What might be possible if we go out and live it?