Sermon Scripture: Roman 7:21-8:2 

Community can be the best, most beautiful thing in the world, but it also can be the setting for some of our deepest wounds. It’s a frustrating dilemma. It can hurt us deeply, it can be hard to be open with our sin in community, yet the only way he will ever heal from our hurts is by living in community.

It's easy to become guarded, or even emotionally allergic to community because of our wounding. Yet, as followers of Christ we know that we can't give up on it. We have to move toward the very thing we fear because that is the place where we are designed to heal and grow.

Sermon Scripture: Mark 14:22-26, 32-34

Our culture is pretty superficial. You can spend hours at all kinds of tables, and yet feel totally alone. So, how does the table become more than just another dinner party? How does it become a communion with God, and with one another? 

Well, one of the easiest conversation hacks is just to go around the table and share the highs and lows of the week.

Sermon Scripture: Genesis 1:26-27, Mark 3:31-35

All through Scripture there is a recurring theme that scholars call the messianic feast. It imagines the Kingdom of God as one long table, with Abraham at one end and Jesus at the other, and every tribe and tongue and nation seated together as the family of God, singing and laughing and giving thanks. 

Yet most of us would say our experience of life feels less like a feast at a crowded table and more like a microwave dinner on a TV tray. Radical individualism, isolation, and loneliness are challenging enough, but it is not the whole problem. The deeper trouble for those of us trying to follow Jesus while isolated is that we simply cannot become people of love by ourselves.

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 16:21-28

In the world on the other side of Alice’s looking glass, everything works all topsy-turvey, and that is often true to our own lives. This is a core truth about God's Kingdom that Jesus has been showing us for seven weeks, but we often get this wrong. 

Last week Peter made a profession about Jesus that has guided the church ever since. Then, in the very next moment, he forgets that Jesus works differently than he does and falls flat on his face.

Today, in our last look at the Kingdom hidden in plain sight, we hear the heart of the Gospel, but we have to hold it up to the mirror to read it the way God intends.

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 16:13-20

Jesus sees us the way we rarely see ourselves, and with patience and persistence he fans into flame the image of God in us until it becomes a faith that can carry us past our own limits and into work far greater than ourselves.

Peter and the disciples have been on the road with Jesus long enough to watch thousands fed from almost nothing, to walk on water, and to hear an outsider woman named among the greatest examples of faith he would ever see. All of these experiences had been fanning into flame a confession that the church of Christ still stands on today.

Sermon Scripture:  Matthew 15:21-28

When the Kingdom of Heaven arrives in the middle of our actual lives, it finds old grudges, inherited assumptions, and arguments or misunderstandings that we have been having for generations. All of that can crowd out what God is actually trying to do, which is to bring healing, life, and restoration to everything broken in us and around us.

Jesus walks straight into that mess and complexity, yet the Kingdom of Heaven still finds a way to bring rescue when our back is against that wall.

Sermon Scripture:  Matthew 14:22-33

The parables told us what the kingdom of heaven is like. Now Matthew shows us what happens when that kingdom meets our moments of faith in the face of crisis.

Storms rage, the way storms do, even on faithful people doing exactly what we have been asked to and Jesus met us in our fear and need, taming the very chaos that threatens us, and stretching our faith in God who has promised to never forsake us when we call upon his name.

Sermon Scripture:  Matthew 14:13-21

We have been listening to Jesus tell stories about what the kingdom of heaven is like. The parables tell us how God and his Kingdom are meant to work and it’s what we have been digesting; asking ourselves, how do these revelations about God and the Kingdom affect our everyday lives?

This is the shift in our sermon series where we begin to see Jesus demonstrate this integration of Kingdom values into how we operate in the real world.

Sermon Scripture:  Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

The kingdom of heaven is hidden in plain sight. It is the domain where God lives and the Spirit moves, bringing the treasure of grace, mercy, and love into the ordinary soil of our lives. In our passage today, Jesus offers five more parables that play with this idea from different angles: yeast folded into flour, treasure buried in a field, a pearl found after years of searching, a net dragged up from the sea, and a household that keeps both new wealth and old in a single storeroom. The kingdom of heaven is often a fairly subtle thing, hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone willing to look again, and perceive what is otherwise missed.

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 13:33 (NRSV)

From outward appearances, nothing seems to be happening, but a few grains of live yeast, worked by hand into a large bowl of flour, will transform the whole mass by morning. Jesus compares the kingdom of God to this kind of work, hidden rather than announced, growing from the inside until everything it touches is different.

This week, Grace Easton brings us the story of the yeast, and what it means for that same kind of growth to take root in us.