based on Matthew 28:16-20 and Genesis 1:1-2 for Trinity Sunday, Year A


Before we go anywhere, watch this ridiculous video. It's three minutes, it's St. Patrick, and it's the best little summary of why we should all be nervous when Trinity Sunday rolls around: Lutheran Satire — St. Patrick's Bad Analogies.


Every year at least a few preachers (why, I genuinely do not know) attempt to blaze a brand-new trail and explain something Christians have spent two thousand years failing to explain. Father. Son. Holy Spirit. Three. One. One. Three. At some point, every Trinity sermon becomes a hostage negotiation with mystery. The preacher backs slowly toward the analogy that's going to set everybody free, and the analogy turns out to be a heresy. Foiled again!


So, I don't think explaining is the point of Trinity Sunday. Wondering is. Noticing is. Maybe even just plain ol' protesting, is. So this past week at church, I didn't preach at anyone. I asked the room to wonder and notice with me, and then tossed in the protest idea on top.


Here's what we did: People found a couple of buddies and everyone had a set of questions with about eight minutes to (quickly) move through the questions and share with one another. The invitation was to think about transformation. About the experiences that actually change us. And then to listen to each other for themes, for patterns, for the kinds of places and situations that seem to be generative. The kinds of places that teach us something. These were the questions:


1) Tell a (short) story about a time when you changed your mind about something important. What happened? What made that change possible?


2) Where have you learned the most important things in your life? What kinds of places seem to teach us things we could not have learned otherwise?


3) When have you encountered something that did not fit your expectations? Something that forced you to rethink what you thought you knew.


If you weren't in the room, sit with those questions yourself for a minute before you keep reading. What did you notice? What showed up over and over? Were there patterns in the kinds of experiences that changed people? Patterns in the kinds of places where that change tended to happen?


Here's what almost always surfaces when we do this:
Very few of us changed because someone handed us a perfectly correct formula. Most of us changed because experience interrupted our certainty. Because reality turned out to be larger than our categories. Because of some encounter (with creation, with another person, with a moment we didn't see coming) and not because we sat down and reasoned our way, ex nihilo, from nothing, into a new self.


And here's what's interesting: I'd argue that is exactly where scripture keeps trying to point us, too. Not toward certainty. Toward noticing that our growth and transformation comes through experiences that showed us our understandings are far more multi-faceted than we initially thought. Nothing in scripture is static. Everything is in a state of becoming, and comes with all kinds of fluctuations. And the becoming doesn't happen inside the safe house of certainty—it happens in the wilderness, in threshold spaces, in the places where co-creation is actually underway, in the encounters where entities are being made and remade together.


Start at the very beginning. Genesis begins with co-creation. It is not God alone, conjuring out of a void. We're told there are already waters, and there is already spirit—ruach—hovering over the face of those waters. Which is kind of wild, when you sit with it. There's no doctrine here. No neat categories. No proof of correctness offered up front. The very first thing this creation story hands us is mystery and movement: God, co-creating with elements—water, and mud, and words, and Spirit. God who, at one point in these stories, is even referred to as they. There is a multiplicity already inherent in the text. (And to be clear, I'm not reading that "they" as a tidy Trinitarian proof tucked into Genesis for us to find later. It's stranger and more interesting than that. It's the plurality that's just there, in the text, before we Christians showed up attempting to tame and colonize.)


And that multiplicity carries forward, too. God met in many experiences, many modalities, mostly in wild and in-between places. In fire (burning bush, anyone?), in wind, etc. The Israelites receive the commandments while wandering. Moses meets God in the wilderness, and then on a mountaintop. Hagar meets God in the face of death in a desert. Elijah meets God in the wilderness. Desert. In-between. Threshold. These spaces keep becoming revelation spaces—and maybe that's precisely because certainty and comfort let us build neat categories, and the neat categories become cages, and the cages let us... relax so much that we stop paying attention.


Then Matthew takes us to one more threshold, one more creation moment. A mountain top. (Nice parallel to Sinai, no?). The risen Christ (yet another form God is showing up) now turning to the disciples and saying, essentially: it's all you, folks!" And listen to the line that comes right before he says it: "they worshiped him; but some doubted." Uncertainty stays in the frame. Nobody graduates into perfect clarity. And yet Jesus (God- three in one, one in three) commissions these doubting, faltering, full of terrible ideas and ill-conceived notion people to go and do the work of co-creating the close-by realm of heaven anyway. With God. Just Aas they are.


So let me ask the real question:


What if Trinity Sunday is less about pinning God down, and more like a little tricky protest weekend that is in actuality asking us to show up with our little protest signs that say "free God." What I mean is, free God of the cages and the assumed constancy and the never-changing-ness and the doctrines we have built around God for centuries.


Because here is the thing: the cages we build for God become the cages we build for ourselves. Every time we decide in advance who God is and what God will and won't do, we are not only shrinking God, we are shrinking ourselves, and shrinking all of creation. We are shrinking the very possibilities, the potential, the hope for what we might yet come to be in more alignment with the realm of God.


The cages we build for God become the cages we build for ourselves. Let me say that twice, because it's the whole sermon. Trinity, Genesis, wilderness, the Great Commission-- all of them keep telling us the same thing: God exceeds our categories, and God keeps inviting unfinished people into the ongoing work of becoming, with God, in a world that is in an ongoing process of becoming.


So you see, I think maybe Trinity Sunday is not primarily a doctrine to explain, but a protest against every attempt to reduce God to a fixed category. Because God exceeds our categories, human beings and creation remain unfinished, invited into ongoing co-creation and transformation with God.


The disciples leave that mountain unfinished. Still wondering. Still becoming. Still uncertain. The text literally says they were doubting—faltering—and it does not seem to have been a problem for Christ. They don't leave only with their doubt. They leave with a responsibility: to keep walking with Jesus, with God, to keep becoming and to help others come along.


And the same is true for us. The future is still open. The kingdom of heaven that is so close at hand is not quite here yet. And God entrusts that unfinished future to this unfinished creation—that Genesis story does, after all say "in the beginning" -- not "in the end"... which means we are somewhere gloriously in the middle, for now.


So here's where I'll leave you, in the in-between, where the becoming is still happening: What might grow among us—if we just freed God, and let the collaboration really take off?


with joy,
Pr. Sam

This week's sermon is a direct result of the work of Sr. Ilia Delio, who came up with the idea "Free God." In her case, she said in an interview that if she were to show up at a protest, she would just have one little sign that would say "free God." Sr. Delio is a brilliant scientist and theologian, I cannot recommend her work highly enough.

based on Matthew 28:16-20 and Genesis 1:1-2 for Trinity Sunday, Year A


Before we go anywhere, watch this ridiculous video. It's three minutes, it's St. Patrick, and it's the best little summary of why we should all be nervous when Trinity Sunday rolls around: Lutheran Satire — St. Patrick's Bad Analogies.

Every year at least a few preachers (why, I genuinely do not know) attempt to blaze a brand-new trail and explain something Christians have spent two thousand years failing to explain. Father. Son. Holy Spirit. Three. One. One. Three. At some point, every Trinity sermon becomes a hostage negotiation with mystery. The preacher backs slowly toward the analogy that's going to set everybody free, and the analogy turns out to be a heresy. Foiled again!

So, I don't think explaining is the point of Trinity Sunday. Wondering is. Noticing is. Maybe even just plain ol' protesting, is. So this past week at church, I didn't preach at anyone. I asked the room to wonder and notice with me, and then tossed in the protest idea on top.

Here's what we did: People found a couple of buddies and everyone had a set of questions with about eight minutes to (quickly) move through the questions and share with one another. The invitation was to think about transformation. About the experiences that actually change us. And then to listen to each other for themes, for patterns, for the kinds of places and situations that seem to be generative. The kinds of places that teach us something. These were the questions:

1) Tell a (short) story about a time when you changed your mind
about something important. What happened? What made that change possible?


2) Where have you learned the most important things in your life? What kinds of places seem to teach us things we could not have learned otherwise?


3) When have you encountered something that did not fit your expectations? Something that forced you to rethink what you thought you knew.

If you weren't in the room, sit with those questions yourself for a minute before you keep reading. What did you notice? What showed up over and over? Were there patterns in the kinds of experiences that changed people? Patterns in the kinds of places where that change tended to happen?

Here's what almost always surfaces when we do this:
Very few of us changed because someone handed us a perfectly correct formula. Most of us changed because experience interrupted our certainty. Because reality turned out to be larger than our categories. Because of some encounter (with creation, with another person, with a moment we didn't see coming) and not because we sat down and reasoned our way, ex nihilo, from nothing, into a new self.

And here's what's interesting: I'd argue that is exactly where scripture keeps trying to point us, too. Not toward certainty. Toward noticing that our growth and transformation comes through experiences that showed us our understandings are far more multi-faceted than we initially thought. Nothing in scripture is static. Everything is in a state of becoming, and comes with all kinds of fluctuations. And the becoming doesn't happen inside the safe house of certainty—it happens in the wilderness, in threshold spaces, in the places where co-creation is actually underway, in the encounters where entities are being made and remade together.

Start at the very beginning. Genesis begins with co-creation. It is not God alone, conjuring out of a void. We're told there are already waters, and there is already spirit--ruach—hovering over the face of those waters. Which is kind of wild, when you sit with it. There's no doctrine here. No neat categories. No proof of correctness offered up front. The very first thing this creation story hands us is mystery and movement: God, co-creating with elements—water, and mud, and words, and Spirit. God who, at one point in these stories, is even referred to as they. There is a multiplicity already inherent in the text. (And to be clear, I'm not reading that "they" as a tidy Trinitarian proof tucked into Genesis for us to find later. It's stranger and more interesting than that. It's the plurality that's just there, in the text, before we Christians showed up attempting to tame and colonize.)

And that multiplicity carries forward, too. God met in many experiences, many modalities, mostly in wild and in-between places. In fire (burning bush, anyone?), in wind, etc. The Israelites receive the commandments while wandering. Moses meets God in the wilderness, and then on a mountaintop. Hagar meets God in the face of death in a desert. Elijah meets God in the wilderness. Desert. In-between. Threshold. These spaces keep becoming revelation spaces—and maybe that's precisely because certainty and comfort let us build neat categories, and the neat categories become cages, and the cages let us... relax so much that we stop paying attention.

Then Matthew takes us to one more threshold, one more creation moment. A mountain top. (Nice parallel to Sinai, no?). The risen Christ (yet another form God is showing up) now turning to the disciples and saying, essentially: it's all you, folks!" And listen to the line that comes right before he says it: "they worshiped him; but some doubted." Uncertainty stays in the frame. Nobody graduates into perfect clarity. And yet Jesus (God- three in one, one in three) commissions these doubting, faltering, full of terrible ideas and ill-conceived notion people to go and do the work of co-creating the close-by realm of heaven anyway. With God. Just Aas they are.

So let me ask the real question:

What if Trinity Sunday is less about pinning God down, and more like a little tricky protest weekend that is in actuality asking us to show up with our little protest signs that say "free God." What I mean is, free God of the cages and the assumed constancy and the never-changing-ness and the doctrines we have built around God for centuries. 

Because here is the thing: the cages we build for God become the cages we build for ourselves. Every time we decide in advance who God is and what God will and won't do, we are not only shrinking God, we are shrinking ourselves, and shrinking all of creation. We are shrinking the very possibilities, the potential, the hope for what we might yet come to be in more alignment with the realm of God.

The cages we build for God become the cages we build for ourselves. Let me say that twice, because it's the whole sermon. Trinity, Genesis, wilderness, the Great Commission-- all of them keep telling us the same thing: God exceeds our categories, and God keeps inviting unfinished people into the ongoing work of becoming, with God, in a world that is in an ongoing process of becoming.

So you see, I think maybe Trinity Sunday is not primarily a doctrine to explain, but a protest against every attempt to reduce God to a fixed category. Because God exceeds our categories, human beings and creation remain unfinished, invited into ongoing co-creation and transformation with God.

The disciples leave that mountain unfinished. Still wondering. Still becoming. Still uncertain. The text literally says they were doubting—faltering—and it does not seem to have been a problem for Christ. They don't leave only with their doubt. They leave with a responsibility: to keep walking with Jesus, with God, to keep becoming and to help others come along.

And the same is true for us. The future is still open. The kingdom of heaven that is so close at hand is not quite here yet. And God entrusts that unfinished future to this unfinished creation—that Genesis story does, after all say "in the beginning" -- not "in the end"... which means we are somewhere gloriously in the middle, for now.

So here's where I'll leave you, in the in-between, where the becoming is still happening: What might grow among us—if we just freed God, and let the collaboration really take off?

with joy,
Pr. Sam

On Matthew 5:13-20 | from Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026

Let's start in a spot that's a bit strange-- With a woman whose name we aren’t even given, from a story that isn’t even part of this past Sunday's lectionary excerpts.

You know the story in Genesis, the one where Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt?

She’s fleeing a city that is being destroyed. But she looks back. And she becomes salt.

For generations, this story has most often been told as a cautionary tale. When God tells you to go, don’t hesitate- get up and go. Follow the directions. Don’t look back, lest you too become a pillar of salt!

But that interpretation doesn’t sit very comfortably with what Jesus later says about salt, or about fulfilling the law. And I think we actually need to think about Lot’s wife in order to hear what Jesus has to say, today, clearly.

Because here’s the thing: Lot’s wife didn’t refuse to leave. She left the city. God said it was time to go, and she went, right along with her husband and other folk.

What she refused to do was make a clean break, as if the people she was leaving behind were disposable. She went ahead and looked back toward where her life had been. Toward the people who shaped her. Toward the neighbors, the children, the relationships, the losses. Toward the destruction. Toward the truth of what had happened.

And in that act of looking back while still moving forward, she became something valuable-- salt. A monument to a woman stubbornly clinging to exactly who she was created to be: Rooted in both her past and her present, holding the two together, difficult as that may be.

She refuses the lie of the clean break. She refuses to act as though the city and people she’s leaving behind are simply expendable. And in some ways, that refusal costs her-- everyone else leaves her there. (I guess Lot didn’t fully appreciate the potentialities of a literally salty wife.)

So--A woman so rooted in who she is that she refuses to let even God’s command to flee and not look back shake her loose from herself. So rooted, that she becomes salt itself. Hang on to that image and those values, and now let's turn back to Jesus, according to Matthew 5:13-20.

Jesus, speaking to people gathered around him on a mountain, says, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.”

Not you should be. Not try harder to become. Just… you are.

The thing about salt and light is that neither has to decide to do its job.
Salt doesn’t work up the courage to be salty. It simply is. Light doesn’t psych itself up to shine. It shines. That’s its nature.

Now, what I'm about to say next may feel a little heretical to our Lutheran sensibilities, and it may go against our Protestant work ethic, but try to stay with me:

What if being salt of the earth and light of the world is not about serving others, directly.
What if being salt of the earth and light of the world is something closer to what Lot’s wife has shown us?

Being salt of the earth may be about refusing to be anything other than who you are. Refusing to forget who you’ve been. Refusing to be diluted, flattened, or hidden in favor of what’s easier or more socially acceptable.

Now, we don’t want to become monuments like Lot’s wife. She’s already got that role covered.
And yet, we are salt of the earth and light of the world.

Which means we are called to be so grounded in the image of God stamped into us that the upside-down kingdom of God comes closer simply because we are being so fully, so exactly who we were made to be.

Take that in for a moment. Because it carries some weight.

Lot’s wife looked back. She insisted on remembering. And she became something incredibly valuable: pure salt. And then everyone else walked away.

Being rooted in our salt-of-the-earth-ness, our light-of-the-world-ness, doesn’t always play nicely with maintaining the status quo.

Systems that oppress, exploit, and uphold illusions of goodness are not especially afraid of kindness, per se. Kindness is pretty easy to overcome.

But those systems, they are afraid of integrity. Of character. Of grit. They fear people who know who they are. People who remember where they come from. People who insist on carrying their complex histories instead of erasing them for convenience (hello, lies of race, lies of whiteness, lies of white supremacy-- all of which ask us to break from our ancestral bodies of self in favor stories that make us far easier to control and manipulate to the detriment of many and gain of an elite few).

Oppressive systems and the people who perpetuate those systems are terrified of people who refuse to become flavorless or hide their God-given light in order to survive.

To live from the roots of who God created you to be will draw attention. It will provoke criticism. It may stir anger in those who benefit from things staying exactly as they are.

After all, have you heard what they did to Jesus of Nazareth? To John the Baptist?

And yet-- and yet

Living this way also brings sanctuary. Joy. Freedom. Energy that doesn’t burn out but keeps replenishing itself. This kind of life draws from divine energy itself, magnifying and refracting wherever it goes, especially when others are walking this path alongside you.

And that line about salt losing its flavor? That’s a joke, you realize, right? I often picture Jesus in this scene with a knowing nod and smirk, twinkle in his eye while he watches folk in the room realize the absurdity of what he's saying and the obvious parallel:

Salt doesn’t lose its flavor.  Sodium chloride is sodium chloride. It doesn't go stale. And neither do you. The only thing that can happen is that salt can be diluted, mixed into or compromised or replaced by things that resemble salt. But at the end of the day, you are being told that you are salt- and if you are salt you simply cannot be anything other than what you are: salt. Therefore, you cannot lose your salt. And if you are being told that you are light, then you cannot be anything other than what you are, light. You cannot lose your light.

You are salt. You are light. Made in the image of God. Valuable. Powerful. Grounding. Guiding.

Over the last few weeks, those of us who gather in person at University Lutheran have been doing some small simple practices.

We’ve been checking in with one another. Naming feelings. Listening carefully to one another and to our bodies. Writing beatitudes for one another, reflecting back. 

Yes, these practices are connective and relational. But they’re not just social.

They’re practice, too. Practice in following Jesus. Practice in becoming a little more fully our salty, lit selves together, here.

When we tell the truth about how we’re actually doing and invite the same from others, we are being who we are: salt of the earth. And when we receive someone as they are, without fixing or correcting, and reflect back their brilliance and inherent goodness, we are being who we are: light of the world.

And when we do this together, the effects multiply. This is how the kingdom of God comes near. This is how we build collective strength. This is how justice, peace, and equity begin to take on flesh.

These small, honest connections grow over time into bold interruptions that redistribute power and reshape futures. One salt-of-the-earth, light-of-the-world human being at a time. One conversation at a time.

This is how the law is fulfilled. The law Jesus insists will not be discarded but fulfilled down to the smallest detail is ultimately about loving one another well.

As Lot’s wife loved enough to refuse erasure, to refuse to completely throw away any part of herself. As Jesus commanded of us, to love one another as he loved us.

We are salt of the earth and light of the world. Jesus is telling us it's in our DNA to love, and to love well. One connective, elemental act at a time. So refuse any dilution. Refuse attempts at dimming. Remain rooted, remembering, living firmly exactly as who God has created us to be.

with joy,
Rev. Sam