There is a verse people reach for when the room is emptier than they hoped: where two or three are gathered, I am there among them. It gets said over half-filled chairs and coffee that outlasts the crowd, a kind of consolation prize. Pastor Hans reads the whole paragraph that sentence sits in — Matthew's account of a congregation with a real grievance inside it — and finds something far better than consolation there. Christ is not absent from the lake, or the ridge, or the back porch on a September morning; he fills all things. But presence is not the same as promise, and there are things that only ever get placed into your open hands. Whatever you believe, and whether or not you have ever belonged to a congregation, you are welcome to listen in.

Almost everyone has said the sentence Peter says in this passage. Sitting in a doctor's office, hearing a word you refuse to accept: God forbid it. This cannot go that way. Peter says it to Jesus quietly, with an arm around his shoulder, out of love — and Jesus answers him harder than he answers anyone. In this sermon, Pastor Hans follows what happens next: a man who has just been handed the keys and immediately tries to lock the door, who fails in a courtyard, who fails again years later in front of everyone, and who is never once replaced with somebody steadier. Along the way there is a word for anyone carrying a hurt no one ever answered for — that the deepest fear in suffering is not the pain, but that nobody saw it, and that God is neither neutral nor a spectator. Wherever you are coming from, and whether any of this is familiar to you or not, you are welcome here.

Most of us have put something up where people can see it. A name on a door, a photo on a wall, a line in a bio that says who we are. It is very old work, and we are remarkably good at it. Inthis sermon, Pastor Hans begins at a cliff in the ancient world — drilled full of niches, crowded with statues of a god, a temple to the emperor standing out in front, and beneath it a cave that people believed was the door to the land f the dead. Standing there, of all places, Jesus turns to his closest friends and asks, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, and is told in the same breath that the answer was never his own idea. What follows is a word about identity and calling that arrive from outside us, about a promise made againstthe largest ending there is, and about what it means to say something true out loud in a year when someone we love is leaving. Wherever you are coming from, and whether any of this is familiar to you or not, you are welcome here.

When she was 12 years old, Deaconess Deborah crouched down on all fours at the Four Corners Monument so she could have a hand and a foot in four states at once — at a dot thatsomeone, somewhere, at some time simply decided to draw on a map. Most of the lines we live with aren’t on any map. In Matthew’s Gospel, a woman crosses the deepest one of her day because her daughter is sick and she has nowhere else togo, and what happens when she kneels in front of Jesus changes the shape of who gets included. If you have ever wondered whether you would be welcome in a roomlike this one, this is a good place to start listening.

It is August, and the evenings are long. Thecorn along the country roads is over the tallest head, the market is up, and most of the people we love are well. And yet the calm some of us are enjoying is not reaching everyone in the room, and none of us can promise it will last.

In this episode, Pastor Hans takes up an old line from Psalm 85 — righteousness and peace have kissed each other — and finds in it something more durable than good season: a peace that was already settled rather than one we have to keep negotiating. Along the way there is a medieval poem about four sisters having an argument, a garden before daylight, and Peter going under in the waves witha hand reaching for him. Wherever this finds you, and whatever kind of week you have had, you are welcome here.

A pastor walks into a memory care unit with five small dinner rolls and thirty people waiting. She hands out bread the whole way around the circle, wondering if it will last — and at the end she looks in the basket and can't account for what's left.

Pastor Biniek sets that morning beside two ancient invitations to the same surprise: Isaiah telling exiles who had nothing to come and eat without money, and a tired, grieving Jesus telling his disciples to feed thousands with five loaves and two fish. Scarcity, she argues, is a way of seeing rather than a fact. God's grace is free, and Jesus doesn't begin with what we lack. He begins with what we place in his hands.

What do you treasure most? In this episode, Deaconess Deborah asks the congregation that very question, then turns to Solomon's request for wisdom and Jesus' parables of the mustard seed and the yeast to explore how the kingdom of heaven takes root — quietly, person by person, even in seasons of grief or doubt. A reflection on what we truly value, and on a God who is already at work redeeming the world, whether or not we can see it.

Every gardener knows the frustration: good seed, careful soil, straight rows — and still, by midsummer, something growing that nobody planted. It's a small, earthy image, but it opens onto one of the oldest questions we carry: if the world is this tangled, did God plant this mess? In this sermon on Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds, Pastor Hans wrestles with that question honestly and finds in Jesus' own answer a word of patience, justice, and grace — the promise that the one who planted the good seed is also the one who will bring in the harvest.

What would it take for a mother to forgive the teenager who killed her son? And what does that have to do with you?

In this episode, Pastor Hans Becklin takes one of the most remarkable true stories of forgiveness you'll ever hear and places it alongside one of the most powerful declarations in all of Scripture — Romans 8:1: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

Whether you're a lifelong churchgoer or you haven't set foot in a sanctuary in years, this sermon has something worth hearing. Pull up a chair. We're glad you're here.

On America's 250th birthday, Pastor Hans preaches on a nation that wrote the truest sentence about human dignity — "endowed by their Creator" — and has been struggling to live up to it ever since. Drawing from Jesus's invitation in Matthew 11, he names the exhaustion underneath our cultural moment for what it is: the crushing weight of self-justification. And he points to the only rest that no election, platform, or anniversary can deliver. A timely word for a weary people.

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