What Stinks?

There comes a time—a moment of clarity, sharp as truth itself—when one realizes the painful yet unmistakable reality that something stinks. This sermon names it directly: you can sense it in the air of our time—in the hate that divides neighbor from neighbor, in the greed that dresses itself as ambition, in the lust for power that corrodes the soul, in the selfishness that forgets the common good. Yet if Scripture teaches us anything, it’s that God has a way of showing up right there—in what’s gone sour, in what we’d rather throw away—to turn the stench of decay into the fragrance of new life. 

In today’s Gospel Lesson, Jesus speaks directly to our fear of loss and our longing to be kept. He says, “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never cast out. This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has…