Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
July 27, 2025

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Joseph L. Morrow
Associate Pastor

1 Kings 9:1–9
Colossians 2:6-19

At some point in the book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the wizened professor Dumbledore of the Hogwarts school consoles young Harry when he needs words of wisdom. Dumbledore says, “There will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.” The scriptural moments we’re going to visit with today are about such choices. 

The Colossians letter asks its intended community to choose between their Christian faith being held captive by an alternative philosophy or acknowledge they are already faithfully bound to Christ as Lord. Solomon too, as Louise read earlier, has a choice. 1 Kings 9 finds Solomon in the second half of his reign as king of a united monarchy of Israel. God answers Solomon’s prayers after the building of the First Temple with a warning about the impact of his choices. If he chooses to honor God’s teaching or Torah faithfully, then God ensures the succession of his rule. However, if Solomon strays from that path, then calamity ensues not just for him but for an entire people.

Choices do matter. But if the path to choose were obvious, I could wrap up this sermon now. However, righteous paths often prove difficult, and wrong paths can tempt us with their easiness.

Let’s go back to the Colossian letter and consider why that community was held under the spell of this philosophy that Paul and his associates opposed. While the identity of these opponents is unclear, biblical scholars have given us an outline of their beliefs. At its core, these opponents drew on the popular mystery religions found throughout Greco-Roman cultures. These religious traditions emphasized sophisticated rituals and secret, advanced knowledge. Specifically, the opponents praised private spiritual visions that included angelic messengers. To see these visions required precision in diet, fasting, and timing. The result was a direct and powerful communication with God. It made the seer appear in control and favored by God. Perhaps those who received the Colossian letter were spellbound by the people who took this mystical path. Maybe they looked smooth and well put together. These could be the spiritual elites of the church who appeared to never have any trouble, to by-step difficult people or circumstances, to float above adversity.

Now in our own time, we find spiritual athletes like these who always seem to leap above problems. But I think the first, or primary, way in which you and I experience the kind of temptation these opponents promote is in our consumer-driven lives: The appeals to a hack for every problem, be it vacationing, parenting, or dating. The idea that we can purchase through coin or effort direct experience of the divine or genuine happiness. That there is always a VIP lane to sidestep every challenge. There’s a new word that has entered into my vocabulary to describe that desire. It’s called frictionless. 

Now you all may remember the concept of friction from a high school physics class. If not, try this little experiment.

Sit two hymnals side by side and open them up about halfway. Then begin to overlap the pages one by one so that the two books fold into each other. Eventually when you go to pull the books, the more pages are stuck together the more difficult it is do. Why? Well, the normal force between the surfaces of paper increases as they pile more and more on top of each other. When that force increases, so does the friction, and the pages become difficult to separate. Friction of this kind is what makes it difficult to move rubber boots on carpet. The opposite is a frictionless environment. That’s what makes it easy to glide your ice skates on the ice. The desire for a frictionless life pops up in all sorts of unexpected places.

Back in May, my eldest daughter and I were getting ready for our summer trip to visit family in the countries of Thailand and Singapore. As she gets older I want her to be an informed and curious traveler. So in order to do that, we decided to look for a podcast to listen to during commutes that would prepare us for the trip. I went to my podcast app on my phone and put “Singapore” in the search, and sure enough, a number of related podcasts about Singapore, its history and sites and people, popped up. So I just tapped on the first one I saw, and we started listening. It’s a panel of three people talking about their favorite experiences in the city, and I start jotting down a few of their recommendations when my daughter put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Dad, there’s something really strange about their voices.”

I hadn’t thought much of it, but as we continued to listen I indeed began to catch on to what she was saying. I detected no hiccup or belches, no “umms” or throat-clearing, no interruptions between speakers or heated arguments. It was too smooth. There was no friction. Come to find out we were listening to an AI-generated podcast. Someone had likely written or sourced the material, but then employed artificial intelligence to create the podcast and its hosts. 

Many good questions can be asked about why the creator of this podcast wanted such a frictionless experience. Did they dislike or mistrust their own true voice or experience? Were they afraid of a conversation between real people which they could not control?

This isn’t a jab against technology. Just like all visions and mystical experiences aren’t fraudulent and some can surely deepen our faith, technology can appreciatively help us sift through raw information of the world and give it meaning. But when we are tempted to use technology to mask our own voice or smooth out the wrinkles of disagreement, it reveals deeper issues we as human beings have not yet addressed. I think the letter from Colossians offers us an opportunity to contend with our desire for frictionless experiences and our aversion to dealing with flawed people in a rough-and-tumble world. 

The advice Paul and his associates give to help resist this desire to live in a frictionless world is to remember our baptism. And to be baptized for Paul is to participate in the dying and rising of Christ Jesus. That means we are close to Jesus as we do the things he did, endure what he did, and claim what he did.

Responding to Solomon in 1 Kings 9, God says “If you will walk with me like your Father King David.” If you will walk with me. I think that’s an apt description for what it means to be close to Jesus. We walk with Jesus. And if we go walking through suffering and glory with Jesus, what might we see?

There was a book written a few years back describing what might be termed the perfect Christian community. It was called The Benedict Option, and its author, Rod Dreher, attempted to describe and then profile communities that upheld Christian virtues in a secularizing world. He portrayed them like monasteries founded by St. Benedict, little oases of hope in tumultuous and dangerous times. Now the profiles of some of these communities I actually found uplifting. They paint portraits of what might feel like Disneyland for faithful Christians. But as I thumbed through the pages, one word was missing: the poor. 

You walk with Jesus and you will see the poor. But they are more than a category; they are real people, you and me, in distressing situations. When you see people in distressing situations you will see people who are not well put together or perfect. People who struggle with issues that are generational or systemic. Yet here’s the good news: at some point or another you and I, or those we love or just respect, will be in distress, and we are going to want to know that we or they are not alone, and if Jesus walks with the distressed, then it means Jesus will walk with us too.

And I should add, when you walk with the distressed, there’s no expectation that you will always agree with them. Even those who walked with Jesus and shared in his baptism did not always see eye to eye. Lord knows between the rich Zacchaeus, Matthew the tax collector, Simon the militant, Mary and Martha, there was a lot of friction in this ragtag bunch of disciples. 

I learned about this friction early in my ministry. I met a fella named Bob while a pastoral resident in Delaware. Bob was unhoused. He slept in the cloister of the church. He was simply a category of suffering for me, but I would always see him in the local coffee shop, and one day instead of slinking past him to go in a corner and write a sermon, I decided to talk with him. He knew a lot about me, having observed me at the church, but I knew little about him. But over the course of conversation that day and in the months that followed a young Black pastor in training from working-class Chicago became real for a disabled white dockworker from Maryland. Now I don’t want to give you the impression we never disagreed. We walked through the daily newspaper, commenting on stories, and gave contrasting opinions often. And even when I tried to give him my apartment after my residency was done, the transition to that kind of home proved too difficult for him. Our story wasn’t wrapped up in a bow. But we drew closer to Christ from the friendship, and I learned the truth of William Stafford’s poetry when he says:

“If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are 
A pattern that others made may prevail in the world
And following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”

Friends, if we seek a world without the friction of the suffering, without the messiness of the distressed, then a pattern others made may prevail. But if we dare to relate to each other, then our understanding and appreciation of others will increase, and with those two things in tow, you and I are less likely to miss our star, the one who Revelation calls our bright and morning star, the root and offspring of David, Jesus who is the Christ, come to love and redeem us all. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church