Christ the King Church, Hiawassee

Come, Holy Spirit: Pentecost Sunday 2026 (Acts 2:1-21)

Come, Holy Spirit: Today is Pentecost Sunday — the fiftieth day of Easter and the crown of the Easter season. We follow the Easter arc from Mary Magdalene weeping in a garden to a community of one hundred and twenty gathered in prayer, waiting for the promise Jesus made in the Upper Room on Maundy Thursday night: that the Father would send another Helper, the Paraclete, to dwell within them and empower them for their public mission. When the Spirit falls like wind and fire, the commissioned Church becomes the empowered Church — and three thousand come to faith in a single day, reversing in one morning what the Law could not undo at Sinai. Pentecost is the anti-Babel: new creation gathering what sin scattered, speaking into every nation in its own tongue, fulfilling the prayer of John 17 that they may be one. We live between the already and the not yet — the victory real, the rubble real at the same time — but we have not been left to rebuild alone. The name of Jesus has been running through every Sunday of this Easter season, and today it reaches the streets of Jerusalem and every nation under heaven. "And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." (Acts 2:21, ESV)

Kept in Your Name (John 17:1-11)

Nearing the end of the Easter season — one week before Pentecost — the sermon enters the longest recorded prayer of Jesus in any of the Gospels. We are not the audience of John 17. We are the subject. Jesus prays not for deliverance but for glorification — that the hour would accomplish what it was sent to accomplish. Later that same night in Gethsemane he would pray for the cup to pass, and together those two prayers show us a Savior who walked into the darkness with his eyes open and his will submitted. The cross and resurrection do not complete the new creation — they inaugurate it. The Ascension enthrones its king, Pentecost will pour out its power, and we are the agents of its continuation, sent into the world with the work in progress. Eternal life is not just about duration — it is about relationship, knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he sent. The name thread that has run beneath the entire Easter season is gathered here: I have manifested your name. And in verse 11 comes the petition at the center of it all — Holy Father, keep them in your name — not taken out of the world but kept in it, sent into it. Psalm 68 gives us the ascended king who stoops to the fatherless and the widow, and 1 Peter 4 calls the suffering community to entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good. The sermon closes with three places to sit with this week: what we are holding that needs to be entrusted, where the unity Jesus prayed for is being tested among us, and the reminder that we are already living in the continuation of the new creation. The name has not changed. The prayer has not stopped. He is still praying it for us at the right hand of the Father.

Abide in Me: Rogation Sunday 2026 (John 15:1-11)

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.

The Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:1-14)

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.

One Gate. One Voice. One Shepherd (John 10:1-10)

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.