Setting the Table (Luke 14)

“Christ Breaks the Rifle” © Kelly Latimore Icons

This sermon was first preached at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN, on August 31, 2025 in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, MN. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here.  The sermon alone is below.  Amy opens with the song“A Kin-dom Here” [by Amy Courts]  and closes with ​“Flags” by Brooke Ligertwood from her album of the same title. Scripture texts:  Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 • Luke 14:1, 7-14 . **Poor sound quality during the livestream of the sermon and songs could not be corrected.**

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Beloved, I begin here today, not at the pulpit but with a guitar and a song because today is brutal. This week has been brutal. As a mother, a neighbor, a pastor, I just haven’t had words. And so often, when I am without words, Spirit sings to me and in me and for me, birthing pleas and prayers for some way forward -- this, a prayer written in the wake of another act of barbaric violence, because all my hope for whatever else is to come is rooted in my desperation for a better Kin-dom -- one birthed in us and by us. I want to trust the birth pangs, that Life will make its way when death is all around. 

In truth, I spent a lot of this week crying -- in my car, in my therapist’s office, at the piano, in bed, in the shower… just crying with grief for parents who lost whole universes this week, and whose universes survived but not without injury or trauma, and listening to songs on repeat that helped me cry more.

​As I cried, Spirit reminded me of so many weeping mothers in Scripture — like Jeremiah 31:15, which Matthew quotes early in his gospel, describing the terror of King Herod’s slaughter of all the baby boys in around Jerusalem: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

I clung to the promise of Isaiah 2, when the Temple of the Most High is finally established, and where, from God’s throne on high on that Holy Mountain, God judges between the nations, not to usher in new waves of death, but to instead settle their disputes. Then, instead of warring, the people, “will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” Can you imagine? Weapons of death turned into tools of life?

​I dug into Hebrews in which the author, probably Priscilla, tells us how to Live when death and destruction abound.

She writes in chapter 12’s lead-up to today’s text, that since we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, we ought to throw off every sin and hindrance that keeps us from doing the work to which God has called us, keeping our eyes on Jesus who endured the cross, scorned its shame, and sat down at God’s right hand in that Kin-dom Isaiah proclaimed. That we ought to resist assimilation to this world and live at peace with everyone, because we are Children of Mount Zion, the Living City of the Living God, by Christ, God’s son, whose blood speaks a better Word than the blood of Adam’s murdered son, Abel.

As citizens of a city which cannot be burned by fire or destroyed by storms, she goes on to say, let us worship in reverence and awe -- and how?, by remaining resolute in our love for one another, and our hospitality to stranger and neighbor alike. By remembering the incarcerated as if we ourselves are incarcerated; and caring for the oppressed as if we ourselves are oppressed. It’s a call to grieve with the parents of murdered children as if we ourselves are the parents of murdered children, to act in solidarity with those who crave hope because we, ourselves, crave hope. 

It’s a powerful letter, no doubt, but what Priscilla is teaching us in Hebrews 12 and 13 is really just an echo of what Jesus teaches us in Luke 14 and across the gospels: To let go of our obsession with wealth and influence, of our desperate need for a seat at the tables of power and privilege, and instead set our own table --​ not for the rich and well-resourced, but for those whose suffering produces their wealth and ease: the poor, the sick, the grieving, homeless, hopeless, helpless, and outcast who know the gravity of this world’s callousness and brutality because they are crushed by it every day.

These were Jesus’s people because Jesus was these people! Which is to remind us, again, that God has never been far away, uninterested in what terrorizes us or unmoved by our pain, but is inside of it — incarnate right here with us. Far from abandoning us to our burdens, Christ bore them to the Cross. There, God his Mother, who birthed and loved Her son as much and more than any of us has ever loved ours, bore the agony of watching Her whole universe suffer and die, and still made a Way out of No Way -- not by killing the killers but by rendering Death itself dead, by the power of resurrection. 

When our children are killed, whether with guns, or in war, or by a culture of individualism, loneliness, racism, radicalization, and weapons-worship that puts those guns in the hands of shooters and celebrates their march of terror, it can feel impossible and even naive to maintain relentless hope and a resurrected imagination. 

And yet we must. Our whole work as people of the Cross is to remember, the way we remember to breathe (that is, it must become so innate and native to us that we do not need to remember because it simply is) — we must remember, as Dr King preached and Rev Angela Denker affirmed in this week’s Star Tribune, that violence in return for violence will only ever beget more violence; that we will never be able to “hate hatred out of existence.” 

So instead, we trust God’s promise incarnate in the Jesus we follow. We meet the demon head-on, as Jesus did for the son of the man in Mark 9, who believed but needed help with his unbelief, and we proclaim resurrection. We pray for resurrection. We await resurrection. We believe (oh God help our unbelief) that we will, as we already have and do, witness resurrection. 

Still, I know. 

There are troubles we cannot contain, forces against which we feel utterly defeated before we even begin. Times when the enemy’s unquenchable thirst for death leaves us asking, again, “What can we do against such reckless hate.” And to be sure, there will be time in the weeks and months to come for us all to meet this moment with dogged resistance and active rebellion, to demand and create a world in which children are not gunned down at school. I pray we will be ready for it— that we will commit ourselves wholly to the work of beating swords into plowshares that grow food, and melting guns into griddles that feed the hungry. I pray our hope will rise as triumphantly as Jesus did.

But for today, it is Good Friday in Minneapolis. So we gather. We grieve. And we set the table, not for the powerful in hopes they will return our hospitality with promises to fix what is broken in our state and nation and world, but for the hungry and hurting. And we offer the only things we ever really have: Ourselves, our table, our community of Belovedness that can sometimes do nothing more than sit and cry and listen to one song on repeat, like this one that held me all week.

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A KINDOM HERE
© Amy Courts Music

All this laboring and toil
We are tired, we are tired
Of tending to good seed and soil
For the thief to come set it all on fire

Where are we to go
And how are we supposed to grow
A Kin-dom here

Mother God, do you not see
We are weary in dis-ease
When will you come to our relief
And be near, and be near

Where else can we go
And how are we supposed to grow
A Kin-dom here

Come by us now
Be our guard and place of rest
Dry our tears and be our breath
Come by us now
And let your justice roll down

Let not our labor be in vain
Be our good defense
again and again
As we labor in your name
To birth your Kindom

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FLAGS
© Brooke Ligertwood

​Come, tell me your trouble
I’m not your answer
but I’m a listening ear
Reality has left you reeling
all facts and no feeling
no faith and all fear

I don’t know why the good man will fall
while the wicked one stands
And our lives blow about
life flags on the land

Who’s at fault is not important
Good intentions lie dormant
and we’re all to blame
While apathy acts like an ally
my enemy and I
are one and the same

I don’t know why the innocents fall
while the monster still stands
And our lives blow about
life flags on the land
​I don’t know why our words are so proud
yet their promise so thin
While our lives blow about
like flags in the wind

…oooh…

You who mourn will be comforted
You who hunger will hunger no more
Oh the last shall be first
of this I am sure 

You who weep now will laugh again
All you lonely, be lonely no more
Oh the last shall be first
of this I am sure

I don’t know why the innocents fall
While the monster stands
I don’t know why the little ones thirst
But I know the last shall be first
I know the last shall be first
​I know the last shall be first