Christ the King Church, Hiawassee

On Rogation Sunday — when the Church traditionally processes through fields and farmland asking God's provision for the harvest — the Gospel appointed is John 15, the vine and the branches. The Church did not place an agricultural observance alongside the most agricultural image Jesus ever used of himself by accident. Still in the Upper Room on Maundy Thursday night, Jesus gives the last great I AM statement of John's Gospel before the cross: I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. The Father prunes the fruitful branches — not the barren ones, the fruitful ones — not as punishment but as preparation. It looks like damage and feels like loss, but the vinedresser knows exactly where to cut and what the branch is capable of bearing. The central command of the passage, repeated ten times in eleven verses, is simply abide — “meno”, to remain, to stay, to dwell. Not a dramatic word. Not a mountaintop experience. The branch does not produce fruit by trying harder — it produces fruit by staying on the vine. Apart from him we can do nothing. Psalm 148 calls all of creation to praise God by being what it was made to be, and the passage opens into its deepest point in verse 9: as the Father has loved me, so have I loved you — the sap running through the vine is the love of the Trinity itself. Obedience is not the condition for earning that love but the fruit of abiding in it — put the cart before the horse and you get it exactly backwards. First Peter 3 calls the community formed by abiding to be ready to give a defense of the hope that is visible in them, with gentleness and respect. The sermon closes where the passage closes: the goal of abiding is not productivity but joy. The fruitfulness is for the Father's glory. The joy is for the branches. Abide in him, and your joy will be full.

On the Fifth Sunday of Easter, the sermon steps back from the resurrection appearances to Maundy Thursday night — the Upper Room, the Last Supper, the night before the crucifixion with the worst still hours away. John 14 is not a resurrection appearance but words spoken before the arrest, words the disciples heard in grief and confusion and that we now read with resurrection eyes. Everything they believed about the Messiah is beginning to collapse — the same collapse the Emmaus disciples will voice within days: "we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel." Into that room Jesus speaks his pastoral command: “let not your hearts be troubled”. Not a promise that trouble will be avoided, but a call to an act of will, an orientation of trust rooted in a person rather than in circumstances. Thomas asks for directions to where Jesus is going, and Jesus gives him not a map but a person: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The way is not a method or a route to be memorized — it is Jesus himself. Philip asks to see the Father, and Jesus answers arrestingly: whoever has seen me has seen the Father. The eternal God has made himself fully known in the person of Jesus — not partially, not in a simplified version, but completely. The sermon moves through the promise of greater works — greater in reach and number, partially fulfilled at Pentecost and continuing to be fulfilled through the Church today — and lands in 1 Peter 2's vision of a royal priesthood and holy nation whose purpose is to proclaim. It closes with three direct questions for the congregation: what is troubling your heart right now, where has your picture of God become distorted, and who in your life needs to hear what happened to you. The first order things cannot be taken away. The second order things come and go. We still have the way, the truth, and the life.

On this Fourth Sunday of Easter, Good Shepherd Sunday, Jesus declares in John 10, “I am the gate for the sheep.” In the familiar image of the ancient sheepfold, he presents himself as the one true entrance to safety, provision, and life—exclusive in that there is only one gate, yet generously open to anyone who enters by him. Contrasting the thief who comes only to steal, kill, and destroy, Jesus promises abundant life: overflowing pasture, restored souls, and a cup that runs over, even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Drawing from the Easter encounters with Mary Magdalene, the locked room, and the Emmaus road, the message reminds us that the risen Christ still calls his sheep by name with a voice we learn to recognize through time spent with him. Supported by Psalm 23 and 1 Peter 2, the sermon shows how our Good Shepherd went first through the deepest valley—laying down his life on the cross—so that straying sheep could be healed and brought home by his wounds. In a world full of competing voices that diminish and distract, the invitation remains clear: enter by the Gate who paid the price to open it, follow the Shepherd who goes before us, and find true, abundant pasture.

On the third Sunday of Easter, Jesus meets two grieving disciples walking away from Jerusalem on the road to Emmaus. Their hopes have collapsed into the past tense—“We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel”—as they speak with exhausted detachment about the crucifixion and the confusing reports of the empty tomb. Unrecognized, the risen Christ draws near, gently rebukes their slowness to believe the prophets, and opens the Scriptures to show how his suffering and glory were necessary and foretold from Moses onward. As they reach the village, he joins them at table, takes, blesses, breaks, and gives the bread—and their eyes are opened. In that moment they realize their hearts had been burning all along the road, even while they were still confused and walking the wrong direction. The sermon calls us to recognize that the same risen Lord still meets us on our wrong-direction roads of grief, shattered hopes, and restlessness. He opens the Scriptures and is known to us in the breaking of the bread. The simple application is to stay in the Word, stay at the Table, and stay in the conversation—because the burning is already happening, even when we cannot yet feel it. When our eyes are opened, like the disciples, we will rise and go tell what happened on the road.

On the evening of the resurrection, the disciples are hiding behind locked doors — not just afraid of the authorities, but crushed by the guilt of having fled and denied. Jesus comes through the door anyway, stands among them, and speaks the one word that addresses everything in that room: peace — spoken first, before any apology, proven by the wounds he still carries. He breathes new creation life into them and commissions them. Eight days later he comes back for Thomas, who had missed it, meeting his doubt with exactly the encounter he asked for — and getting the greatest confession in the Gospel in return. What the whole passage insists is that Jesus takes the initiative with frightened, guilty, grieving, and doubting people alike, and the word he speaks into every locked room is the same: peace, purchased at the cost of the wounds he still bears, and powerful enough to turn a room full of cowards into the witnesses who changed the world. He is still doing this today.