The story of Naaman starts with a shock. God blesses the enemy general, the man with a stolen Israelite girl working in his house. Then it keeps flipping the script. Two kings with all their money and power can’t do a thing. A little slave girl with no name knows where healing is found. Naaman’s servants talk him into stepping down into a muddy river. In a week of red and blue maps and people turned into cartoons, this old story asks us to look again at who God sees, and who God uses. Spoiler: it’s usually the ones nobody expected. The sermon is based on 2 Kings 5:1-15a.

We usually call the story of David and Bathsheba an affair or about adultery. The Bible tells a darker story. A king on his palace roof looks down, takes a woman who cannot say no, and has her loyal husband killed to cover it up. In this Reformation Sunday sermon on 2 Samuel 11–12 and Psalm 51, Pastor Matthew Best looks at what power does to people, how abuse gets protected by those around it, and how the church has sometimes been part of that pattern. He also looks at how God hears the voices the powerful try to silence, and how Jesus came down from the roof to make us fully human again.

What happens when our words say one thing and our actions say another? In Joshua 24, the people of Israel loudly promise to serve the Lord while their idols are still in their pockets. We all know that gap, in politics, in the church, and at home. Let's wrestle honestly with that gap and with the violence in the book of Joshua that so often gets skipped over, from the conquest of Canaan to today’s Christian nationalism. Let's tell the story and deal with it, while also telling the story of how God shows up and acts.