Making Peace with Death
In the midst of Jesus’ toughest words, we also hear some of his most tender.
2026-37
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7A-tr 2), June 21, 2026
Jeremiah 20:7-13; Psalm 69: 8-11, (12-17), 18-20; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10:24-39
So, two weeks ago I asked you to send me stories of times when you were courageous. I’ve received four stories so far! Keep them coming—I see this as a long-term project. I understand, too, that the Women’s Retreat this September will focus on courage. So send me your own story of courage. I haven’t figured out yet what I’ll do with these, but I promise to handle your stories with care.
Now, take courage, and listen again to the words of the one we call the Prince of Peace:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”
Happy Father’s Day!
Hang on a minute, though. What is a sword, and what does it do? A sword is essentially a very large knife, right? It cuts. It divides. A sword can cleave a human being, yes, or an animal. But it can also cleave our expectations. A man in opposition to his father is not necessarily violent. He may just be holding his ground. And you know what? Sometimes that’s the best way to handle members of your own family.
For instance … it is healthy for teenagers to argue with their parents. A child who is cowed into submission for fear of retribution cannot grow. But a child who stands up to their parents will learn whether they have the power to make their desires known and change their situation. It’s healthy, then, for the parent to be affected by the child—to decide whether to allow for a change, or to hold their own ground.
Honestly, some of the most helpful parts of the Bible involve direct conflict among people—or between people and God! Take a look at the Prophet Jeremiah. Allow me to paraphrase what we just heard him lament:
“Look, God, you really had me there for a while—but clearly I was a fool to listen to you! You have manipulated me. I tried to wrestle you and lost, and I’m paying for it every day. You wanted me to tell everyone the hard truth, and now they all laugh at me and tell me to shut up about politics! Even when I try to stop prophesying, I can’t help it, because I really do see what’s coming, and I can’t not warn them. The thing is, these are my so-called friends who are trying to catch me out. Now they think I’m a fool, and maybe I am!
“But if I have to choose sides, I’ll stand with you, God, because I know you’re with me, and I know they’re the ones in the wrong. I’d love to see you give them their comeuppance! But regardless, I thank you, because I know your reputation: wherever the weak find themselves rescued from those who persecute them, I know that was your doing! So I will always stand with the weak, and I will wait with them in their plight, until you come and rescue us all.”
I find Jeremiah’s words astounding. Jeremiah really lets God have it here, but he comes out with deeper trust and dedication to the call God has laid on him. All the people who are in denial about the coming Babylonian invasion will still have to suffer through it, and Jeremiah will too. Jeremiah has tried to just check out and not pay attention to all this, but God demands that he declare what’s coming. He’s angry at God for overpowering his very survival instinct. So he lashes out, accusing God of being too tough on him. And that’s how Jeremiah learns that he’s with God in this fight no matter what—even though it feels like death.
In the same way that God was tough on Jeremiah, Jesus is tough on his disciples. He has no patience with their illusions that following him will be easy or glorious. But in the midst of Jesus’ toughest words we also hear some of his most tender. God cares even about the death of every little sparrow. “Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.” Even your inevitable death is a part of God’s creation.
That may sound like a platitude, but surprisingly often, I hear words like this from people who are actively dying. They know God is with them even in their suffering. They know that no power in the universe will keep them alive forever. God holds every card! Making peace with that fact is a special kind of maturity. We arrive at this maturity through long-term, lifelong practices of intimacy with God.
So to hear, then, that God counts even the very hairs of our head? Well, to the immature that might sound like the most sophisticated surveillance state imaginable! But to the mature, it’s a reassuring promise of something not at all observable—that somehow, some way, justice will be done in every situation. Those who have something to hide are hiding nothing from God. I love these words: “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”
Yes, that includes clandestine recordings from the Situation Room! It includes backroom deals and Signal chats and browser histories and whatever goes on in the depths of Delaney Hall and the Northwest Detention Center. It includes your own deepest, darkest secrets, and mine. Yet the more practiced we are at prayer, the more we come to understand that, ultimately, there is nothing to fear. Since, from God, “no secrets are hid,” we pray every week for God to cleanse us—to scrub us down—to apply the kind of friction that will move us beyond the shame of our sins.
We know we can’t do it ourselves—just ask anyone in Alcoholics Anonymous. “We realized that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.” That’s Step One, straight out of the Big Book. We do our best to manage our own lives, but to each of us comes a time when we can’t anymore. And that’s because our lives are not our own, not exclusively: they are a gift for us to co-create with God in real time. We well up from God’s very being, and it is to God’s very being that we return when our time is through. So those who have made peace with death? Oh, don’t mess with them! Strike them down, and they’ll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
This is why Jesus tells his disciples, “Take up your cross.” Christians hear that phrase all the time, and we may have gotten too familiar with it. For Jesus’ first disciples, it’s no metaphor. The cross is, for them, the stark, literal, likely conclusion of following Jesus. So they’d better make peace with death now.
Hold this up, then, against Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul writes not to an individual, but to a community of Christ-followers, and that’s crucial to keep in mind. It’s all “we,” not “you,” and even when it is “you,” it’s plural “you.” Now, in Christian tradition, what does God’s cleansing look like? It looks like baptism. Baptism is what makes you a Christian—it was true then, and it’s true now. If you want to follow Jesus, seek baptism! This will put the public seal on the reality that is already yours: the reality of God’s love, realized over the course of a lifetime, and supported by a community of faith dedicated to growing together.
But there’s a dilemma here. The dilemma is the undeniable fact that getting baptized doesn’t stop you from harming others—and, by the way, I think “harming others” is as good a definition of “sin” as I’ve ever seen. But more about that another time.
Paul wrestles with this problem. He tells the congregation in Rome that when Jesus walked through the looming door of death, he sneaked all of us in under his tunic! So now, at least from God’s perspective, sin cannot separate us from eternal love. Maybe it never did. Maybe sending Jesus was God’s dramatic effort to get our attention—to remind us how much more valuable we are even than the delicate, lovely, short-lived sparrows—no matter how much we have harmed others.
Paul refers to our “old self” as “the body of sin.” Paul doesn’t mean that our bodies are inherently sinful or wrong, any more than a sparrow’s body can be somehow sinful or wrong. God created the whole idea of a body. Instead, Paul’s metaphor of “flesh” or “the body” is about gratifying ourselves at the expense of the lives and wellbeing of others.
This is sin—continuing to prioritize our own comfort over the kind of self-giving love that’s necessary to heal the world. “The body of sin” is the whole network of harm that we humans create together with our selective alliances, our subtle conspiracies, and the unwritten rules we mercilessly enforce on those taken unawares. “The body of sin” includes everything from vast, exploitative human systems to our tiny, immature efforts to save face by denying our own wrongdoing.
Why, then, do we still sin? It’s a dilemma, but Paul doesn’t solve it. He just redirects his hearers to the cosmic wonder of having been saved from eternal death. There’s no need to be afraid of any other human—only God has the power to destroy both soul and body, and God has renounced that power! Why on earth, then, would we live the rest of our lives in such a way that Jesus could say, “Wait—who are you again? You want to continue to exist beyond death … why? To continue in your selfishness? That’s just denying the possibility of death. And that’s not how any of this works!”
So Paul urges us to live selflessly. Paradoxically, this means enforcing some boundaries, and that does take courage. Jesus doesn’t want to divide families. But he recognizes that you can’t dictate or enforce change in another person. You can only change yourself. Jesus lived like this: he served as an example of how to live, and he never forced anyone to join him in that life. He only gave the gift of joining him in his death and making peace with it—of dispensing with that unnecessary terror once and for all, so that we could truly live. Amen.
