The Sanctuary Church - Sermon of the Week

Emily Sledge preaches Ruth 3, reading her own story of a business collapse, betrayal and abandonment alongside Naomi's bitterness. She traces how God's faithfulness can look nothing like our own definition of it, and closes by asking which character you are today: Naomi, who needs bitterness healed; Ruth, who brings everything she has to the table anyway; or Boaz, who is called to notice the people on the margins.

Ruth 2, with a warning up front that this is not a success story — two women at rock bottom, gleaning at the edges of someone else's field. Johnny Gonzalez sits on the narrator's throwaway line that Ruth just so happened to end up in a field belonging to Boaz, and argues that God rarely changes the world through spectacle; he changes it through ordinary people being faithfully present where he has already placed them. The closing question is not about a bigger platform but about who is actually in your field — the coworker nobody talks to, the neighbour whose lawn has not been mowed.

Drew Tirado opens the book of Ruth as a story rather than a lesson, retelling Naomi's return to Bethlehem as a widow who had buried a husband and two sons and came home with nothing but a foreign daughter-in-law. He draws attention to the author's scandalous choice of lens: the wars, the judges and the rise and fall of nations are pushed offstage so the camera can stay on two women the culture would have discarded. Where the world sees a widow with no prospects and a foreigner with no rights, God sees the line that runs to David.

Nick Burton tells his story: arriving at The Sanctuary in early 2020 as a brand-new believer, at a moment when isolating would have been the easier choice, and the road that led there — homelessness, addiction, shootouts on the streets of Houston, and a motorcycle crash at 110 miles an hour that he walked away from. The line he keeps returning to is that God's pursuit is relentless, including through the week he spent writing this message, when his home flooded and brought the memories of being homeless back to the surface. He closes with two questions: what childhood belief do you still carry that contradicts what God says about you, and where has God been trying to get your attention?

Closing the series, Derek Harvey starts with The Princess Bride and the moment every wedding shares — the whole room rising and turning as the bride appears — and follows it into Ephesians 5, where Paul calls the thing a profound mystery. Borrowing from Tim Keller, he flips the usual assumption: human marriage is the moon and Christ and the church is the sun, so every wedding has been copying something older than itself. The invitation at the end is aimed at anyone who has served long enough to grow bitter — come and waste some time with Jesus.

Derek Harvey begins by celebrating how well this church cares for people through Ragamuffin Cafe, the showers, the food pantry and the recovery community — then turns it: serving people you never learned to need is not the same as being a body. Working from Paul's image of one body with many parts, he argues the promotion treadmill pulls people out of the very thing God built them for, and that the lie doing the most damage in the room is not “I don't need you” but “I'm not needed.” His prayer at the end is that the strong would learn how to ask for help.

Drew Tirado tells how a wound from a pastor followed him out of one church and into the next, and how a visit back to Seattle showed him the damage done by others carrying the same unforgiveness — and that he would have been right there among them. He names unforgiveness as poison in the groundwater of his own life: drinking it and hoping it would kill someone else, burning the house down to catch a rat. The way out he was given was as simple as it was difficult — pray for the man, and pray for blessings that have nothing to do with setting him straight.

In July 1944, a Swedish businessman named Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest with no diplomatic experience and invented a protective passport that carried no legal authority at all, printed to look more imposing than the real thing, and used it to pull thousands of Hungarian Jews off the trains to Auschwitz. Derek Harvey sets that against 2 Corinthians 5 and the claim that we are ambassadors, arguing that the righteousness of God in that passage means God's own covenant faithfulness — something we embody rather than merely receive. Wallenberg climbed onto the roof of a train carrying papers that were only ever as good as the seal on them.

Preaching on Memorial Day, Ben Sledge begins with what people say from a deathbed — never anything trivial — and reads the Great Commission as Jesus' own last words. He argues most churches run discipleship backwards, teaching everything first and baptizing at the end, when Jesus' order starts with go: out of the building, toward people unlike you. Against the excuse that discipleship belongs to professionals, he points out how small the first step actually is — a coffee, a meal, an invitation to come and see.

Derek Harvey opens on a world where an algorithm sorts every part of life — your feed, your news, your music, even who you date — into rooms full of people like you, then sets Jesus' line from Mark 11 against it: my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. He traces the word house back to Genesis 28, where Jacob wakes under a tree and calls an open field the house of God, the passage this church takes its name from, and argues the house was never the architecture. The question he leaves is whether the welcome we read off a card on Sunday is one we actually live Monday through Saturday.