God's strategy is forgiveness and healing - The Rev. Joanna Leiserson

Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

People were getting healed. There were rumors of a savior. We would overthrow our oppressors and be our true selves again under our true ruler. There were some disagreements among us at first, and some confusion, and some people got pretty belligerent, and they started arguing against us. And then, at the end, it's as if they got carried away with their inflammatory extremist ideas, and here we are. But it wasn't that sudden. There were signs. We just didn't pick up on the signs, because the signs were warning about us, not about them. So we kept going, and then we crossed the line, and we couldn't go back. We always assumed we were the good guys. We are the good guys. So then how did I end up holding these nails and this hammer in my hand? How did we get to be the executioners instead of the saviors? Like I said, it seems so sudden, but it wasn't really. There was a road we went down, an imperceptible slide down the road towards that cross. And at some point, we made a turn down the conventional path that tells us to conform to the empire's moral code.