Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church

Jesus's teaching on where to sit and whom to invite exposes how honor-seeking and transactional invitations exclude the vulnerable, and calls the church to build tables of humility where the marginalized are welcomed without hope of repayment.

Jesus's rebuke of Martha is not a verdict that spirituality beats service, but an invitation to let her service be shaped by communion with Christ rather than anxious self-reliance, so that both Mary's devotion and Martha's action flow from sitting at Jesus' feet.

In Luke's story of the sinful woman and Simon the Pharisee, Jesus exposes cynicism; not doubt; as the deeper soul sickness, and the cure he offers is not a better argument but genuine, lavish thanksgiving poured out at his feet.

Salvation in the Zacchaeus story is not a private, individual transaction but a collective, communal healing; Jesus seeks out the excluded before they repent, and the whole community is made whole when outcasts are welcomed to the table.

The parable of the great banquet isn't primarily a preview of the kingdom of God but a mirror held up to us, showing how anger, resentment, and grudge-holding; even the host's, even when he does the right thing; can spoil the very feast we're trying to build; God instead calls us to choose grace over resentment and keep expanding the table.

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is not chiefly about who goes to heaven or hell after death, but about how we live now; whether we notice and welcome those pushed outside the gate; true 'home' is found wherever indifference and exclusion give way to welcome and belonging.

Jesus, as Lord of the Sabbath, reveals that the Sabbath was made to serve human flourishing and healing, not to be a rigid rule that leaves people in their brokenness; faithful obedience means stretching out our shameful, withered places before God in trust.

At Levi's banquet, Jesus reveals that Christ's table is for the sick, not the healthy; both the exploitative tax collector who needs to repent of harming others and the self-righteous Pharisee who needs to repent of believing others are beyond grace need the same doctor, and grace, not shame, is what transforms hearts.

In an annual 'View from Here' sermon marking his departure for summer study leave, Johnston argues that amid America's disillusionment and political dysfunction, Christians are called to abandon a transactional, human point of view and instead see the world through Christ's reconciling perspective, expressing that view through the ordinary practices of church life.

Pentecost calls every ordinary, imperfect Christian; not just the disciple chosen by lot; to leave the safety of the upper room and become 'from the church' to the world, embodying good news through patient, persistent presence with hurting people.

The Day of the Lord in Zephaniah 3 is not only judgment but salvation: God the warrior fights for his people and, astonishingly, sings and rejoices over them with loud singing, revealing a God who is head over heels in love with his people.

Song of Solomon, though it never mentions God, has long been read by Jewish and Christian interpreters as an allegory of God's passionate, romantic love for his people, and this sermon calls the congregation to receive and embrace that fierce, intimate divine love rather than shy away from its intensity.

God is fundamentally a renovator who calls and equips craftsmen like Bezalel to build sacred spaces, and who is likewise patiently renovating the hearts of his people until the day of Christ, as the church's own chapel renovation embodies.

Revelation 5's vision of the slain Lamb on the throne exposes what we truly worship, and worship itself is formative; we become like whatever we stake our lives on, so the church is called to worship the crucified and risen Christ rather than the powers and idols of the world.

Malachi's image of the 'sun of righteousness' shows that God's righteousness is a constant that dawns now, not just at history's end, and how a person experiences that dawning; as scorching judgment or as healing, joy-filled freedom; depends on whether they cling to self-righteousness or open themselves to God's truth.

Jesus' threefold restoration of Peter at the charcoal fire transforms his shame into commission, and that same pattern; being fed by the Good Shepherd so we can feed others; defines the church's calling to love God by caring for the marginalized.

Jesus is both the carpenter (artisan who repairs and rebuilds broken lives) and the prophet (who speaks disruptive truth), and his own hometown rejected him for both roles because familiarity bred contempt rather than honor.

Jesus, embracing the strange title 'serpent' in John 3, is a shocking, disruptive form of God's grace; like the bronze serpent Moses lifted up; that must jolt and even wound something in us before we can be healed and turn toward love of God and neighbor.

In a Lenten sermon on the names of God, the preacher explores 'the Rock' as a name for God that shifts meaning across Scripture; from steadfast father and eagle in Deuteronomy, to the water-giving rock that is Christ in 1 Corinthians, to a strikingly maternal image of the God who 'bore' and gave birth to Israel; calling hearers away from modern idolatries of greed and violence back to the one solid, life-giving God.

When Abraham names God 'El Olam' after a peaceful, honest resolution of conflict with Abimelech, he demonstrates that we come to trust and rightly name God as the everlasting, steadfast one through recognizing God's presence in moments of honesty, honor, and reconciliation.

On Ash Wednesday, true repentance is not merely outward ritual (fasting, ashes, giving something up for Lent) but an inward turning of the heart back to a God who is gracious, merciful, and slow to anger; and that same mercy must be extended toward the people we least want to forgive.

True Christian moderation, as Paul commends it, is gentleness and love, not the 'lukewarm' neutrality that Revelation condemns and that Dr. King criticized in white clergy; when a matter like segregation rises to the level of a 'status confessionis,' calling for patience becomes complicity, and faithful Christians must instead become 'extremists for love and justice.'

Jesus's parable of the sheep and the goats teaches that God judges not just individuals but entire nations by how they treat the hungry, the stranger, and the vulnerable, and this biblical standard calls America to be held accountable to the lofty promises of its Constitution's preamble.

Just as Jesus' baptism by John revealed him as God's beloved Son and empowered him with the Holy Spirit for ministry, our own baptism claims us as God's beloved children and draws us into the same lifelong process of conversion; turning us from fear and tribalism toward trust in God's impartial justice, sustained through prayer.

God's good news of great joy first broke into the world not through kings or priests but through shepherds doing ordinary, risky, unglamorous work, and that same news still calls ordinary people today to move toward the unexpected with haste and to tell the story of Christ's love for everyone.

Mary's Magnificat is an act of holy, faithful imagination; rooted in God's character and history; that envisions a world where the proud are scattered and the lowly lifted up, and this imagination stands in stark contrast to the narcissistic, self-absorbed imagination of evil and worldly power.

The invisible connections that unite all creation; celebrated in Psalm 148's call for everything, even animals, to praise God; are the same kind of hidden, powerful reality that grounds religious reverence, making it fitting that animals join the manger scene in praise of the incarnate Christ.

Joseph's story shows that true righteousness is rooted not in rigid rule-following but in love, compassion, and trust in God's disruptive work, modeling the countercultural, hospitable response Advent calls us to embody.

Gabriel and other angels always begin their announcements with 'be not afraid' because they recognize humans are constantly wrestling with fear and looming anxiety, and Advent hope itself can feel frightening to those who have given up on it; yet God's messengers come to rekindle that hope.

Jesus's parable of the unforgiving servant reveals that refusing to forgive others; despite having received God's immense mercy; is not just disobedience but self-imposed torture; the only escape from that torment is to forgive from the heart as we have been forgiven.

Greed is not defined by net worth but by an isolated inner conversation that turns away from God and the needs of community, focusing solely on self-congratulation while ignoring mortality and eternity.

In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, Jesus shows that self-righteous pride isolates us from God and neighbor while humble self-awareness opens us to be truly seen; God's love and identity as 'saint' come not from our achievements but from his gracious gaze upon us.

Jesus tells the parable of the unjust steward not to endorse dishonesty but to teach disciples that ministry inevitably means handling messy, morally compromised money, and that they must be shrewd stewards who use worldly wealth to make friends for the kingdom rather than avoiding money as though pure hands were possible.

The parable of the wedding banquet is not about etiquette or belief-as-entry-ticket but about attitude: God's kingdom party is thrown open to good and bad alike, and what gets someone tossed out is refusing to throw off half-hearted excuses and dive into the celebration wholeheartedly.

Jesus's parable of the persistent widow teaches that prayer and justice-seeking require relentless, even annoying persistence, and that joy, humor, and 'tactical frivolity' are faithful, subversive weapons for sustaining hope and resisting despair under unjust systems.

The parable of the lost sheep reveals that God's realm operates by a joyful, offensive logic in which the lost; however we define lostness; are sought, found, and celebrated, and Jesus invites us to recognize our own lostness so we can stop resenting God's grace toward others.

Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan challenges how we use Scripture: the priest and Levite knew the law well enough to justify walking past a dying man, showing that knowing the Bible is not the same as loving God and neighbor; true eternal life is found not in mastering right answers but in the outrageous, self-forgetting love that moves from right answer to right action.

In the parable of the wheat and weeds, Jesus acknowledges that evil is real and mixed in with good, but warns that human attempts to violently root it out now do more harm than good; final judgment belongs to God alone, and that promised future should ground and motivate faithful action in the present.

The kingdom of God works like leaven; a small, unclean-seeming, even offensive substance that quietly and dangerously transforms everything it enters; and in a week of national violence and division, ordinary people practicing reconciliation and goodness are the pinch of yeast that can change a hateful culture.

God does not wait for order before creating; God creates new life, hope, and community from within chaos itself, as shown in the chaotic waters of Genesis 1 and in the chaos of our lives and world today.

Jesus's baptism reveals that even in hesitation and reluctance; like John's 'who, me, Lord?'; God's transformative grace overflows and claims us as beloved, calling us to come up out of whatever underwater, in-between suffering we are experiencing into community and resurrection hope.

Jesus deliberately crosses the social and religious boundary between Jews and Samaritans to offer the living water of himself to a woman whose past made her unacceptable, showing that in Christ there is full acceptance despite full knowledge of our sin.

True faith begins not with having answers but with the humility to ask for help, as the Ethiopian eunuch's honest question 'can you help me?' opens the door to the gospel and baptism, and faith continues afterward as an aspirational journey pursued within community rather than alone.

When suffering happens, Jesus redirects our instinct to assign blame or find theological explanations toward the calling of noticing the sufferer and acting with compassionate, present engagement, even without answers.

Jesus's question to the man at the pool; 'Do you want to be made well?'; shows that healing in John's Gospel is not just physical cure but restoration to community and personal agency, and that God's presence sustains us even while we wait, unhealed, for miracles.

In turning the purification jars into wine at Cana, Jesus reveals that he meets people in their emptiness and messiness rather than requiring them to make themselves clean or orderly first; emptiness is precisely what he needs to work a miracle.

Jesus meets Peter in the exact circumstance that has him distracted and defeated; a failed night of fishing; and by having Peter push into the 'deep water' shows him he is truly seen, which frees Peter to respond in obedient discipleship rather than demanding upfront that he abandon everything.

Like Elijah proclaiming rain before a single cloud appeared, believers are called to actively and persistently hope for God's promised restoration even when current circumstances show no sign of change, refusing to let present despair define the future.

The Noah story reveals that God's relationship with an imperfect humanity can only be sustained by grace, and the rainbow sign of God's covenant invites us into that same grace-filled solidarity with one another, including with the LGBTQIA+ community during Pride month.

Isaiah's exuberant promises of desert-blooming restoration sound almost embarrassingly hopeful to a world worn down by exile and oppression, but that hope only makes sense because God has already entered human suffering through the cross and resurrection, and calls the redeemed to tend whatever small patch of hope they've been given.

On Pentecost, the church's task is to be a 'marker tree' pointing a noisy, anxious world toward the moral signal of Christlike empathy; a love that refuses both the selective compassion of the left and the 'toxic empathy' rejection of the right.

Sabbath is not a legalistic rule but a gift of grace that frees God's people from the mindset that their worth is defined by what they produce, teaching them instead to trust the Giver rather than their own labor.

Moses' death outside the promised land shows that God's view of us differs from our own limited self-assessment and that leadership transitions; however uncomfortable; do not disrupt God's faithfulness, since he raises up successors and remains present through every change.