Sean Palmer 9-21-25

Well, thank you. It's an honor to be here. Kate is my youngest daughter, and she's a freshman this year at acu. And I know you guys actually don't have a lot of guest preachers from out of town, but I told Shane, like I told my friend Luke, my oldest daughter is a senior at the University of Texas. And I told my friend Luke who preaches there in Austin, I said, I am the easiest invitation you will ever have.

Like, just pick up the phone and ask, and I will be there. And so she has been worshiping here for the last several weeks. And I'm glad for those of you who have met her and welcomed her. We're gonna spend some time in the scriptures. And as we do that, let me ask God's blessing.

Creator God, we thank you for your word. And we would ask that in this moment that you would speak to us anew, that we would hear you, that we would respond. And God, that in our response, that we would join you in your mission to heal the world, that we would join you as you introduce new creation. And toward that end, Lord, we pray you open our ears and our hearts as we join you in your vision for your preferred future. And we ask it in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Well, I wanted to ask you, has anyone ever said anything bad about you on the Internet?

Because I have a history of people saying really mean things about me on the Internet. It was maybe 15, 17 years ago, back long, long time ago, there were these things called blogs. And I had a blog, and every blog had a comment section. And there was a particular time in our lives where Rochelle, my wife, and I, and our two daughters were leaving, serving from one church, and we were moving to another. And so I just put an announcement about that on my blog.

And there were some people at the church we were currently serving, and one person wrote, good riddance.

And then another person wrote, arrogant and deluded. And then someone else said, he thinks he's God's gift to preaching. And I thought, come on, only one of those is true.

About that same time, when I was writing and posting all that I wrote on Facebook for people to find, I wrote something that someone didn't care for. And they wrote in the comments section, why do you hate the Lord's Church? In all caps?

Which my children thought was hilarious. And so now, whenever they are displeased with me, They will ask, why do you hate the Lord's church?

And there was a time period when I was writing articles for FoxNews.com and I remember the very first article that I wrote. We had a wonderful editor there, she lived in New York. And I'd written this article and we'd worked on it and it was getting ready to publish. And so she calls me the night before it publishes the next morning. And she said, sean, I just want you to know.

And I tell all of my writers this, don't read the comments.

And so I thought, well, that's good, good advice. So I called my parents and let them know this was going to go live the next day. And I said the same thing that she told me, don't read the comments. So the next day it goes live and my dad absolutely reads the comments and not only that, feels the need to tell me what the comments were that I was not reading. That's the world we live in now.

In 2023, I had a 12 week sabbatical. And so what I decided going into that sabbatical was that I was going to leave social media completely. For the whole year while I was working, I had to check in every Sunday at least just once a week to see if people had left messages for me. And so I read a couple of books in that time. One was Stop Reading the News and the other was a book by a man named Max Fisher called the Chaos Machine.

And this is what he says in the Chaos Machine. He says, remember that the number of seconds in your day never changes. The amount of social media content competing for those seconds, however, doubles every year or so, depending on how you measure it. Imagine, for instance, that Your network produces 200 posts a day, of which you have time to read about 100. Because of the platform's tilt, you will see the most outraged half of your feed next year when 200 doubles to 400.

You will see the most outraged quarter, the year after that, the most outraged eighth. Over time, your impression of your own community becomes radically more moralizing, aggrandizing, outraged. And so do you. At the same time, less innately engaging forms of content, truth, appeals to greater good, appeals to tolerance, become more and more outmatched. Like stars over Times Square.

We now live in an ecosystem where virtually everyone is addicted to their phones and to the content they find on it.

And it's not just teenagers and young adults. I sit with 50, 60, 70 year olds who are constantly looking at their phone all the time. And every one of us acknowledges that people are addicted to social media and their phone and they need to use it less. But. But they acknowledge that everyone who's addicted to their phone is somebody else besides them.

And it is a perpetual outrage machine.

We have a wonderful woman in our community named Celeste. And about six months ago, Celeste started a new show in Houston on npr. And so she has to talk for two hours every day, Monday through Friday. And when you have to talk for two hours every day, you're bound to say something that somebody doesn't like. And so it wasn't too terribly long into her stint hosting that show that she got an email from an angry listener that said, I'm going to come down to that station and.

And blow it up.

Well, people in the public eye, you just kind of get used to hearing things like that. Washes over you pretty quickly. There's always someone who's displeased with what you're doing. But around that same season, someone called her son's school and asked to speak to her son. And the people at the front desk, they were just trying to figure out, who is this?

This is a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle? No, it was just a crazy person.

And then she got asked something that we would all love to be asked. I had been on her show, and someone emailed her later with something that sounds like a benign question.

What church do you go to? And that would be really great. Most of us would love to get that question from somebody. But when you've been threatened and your children have been threatened, the question, what church you go to? Doesn't sound so benign.

And so we had to put in all of these structures around her and her kids and their safety and protection.

It's the world we live in. And so I was talking with a group of church leaders not terribly long ago, and someone asked the group, what rituals do we need for ourselves, for our communities, for the world? What do we need to lean on during this time? And you would think that it would be something really profound and hard, especially in this era where more and more people are discovering the benefits of spiritual direction and spiritual formation. And there are lots of talk around the table as we discuss that.

But one person in the group said, I think we need two things. The first is breathing. Most of our problems would go away. At least our anxiety would turn down if people knew how to breathe. And not just to breathe, to live, but like, deep breathing, centering, breathing.

And then he said, we also, I think, need to rediscover praying the psalms, which is really pretty good, because no matter what you're thinking or what you're feeling, what you're going through at any particular Time. There's a psalm that covers it. Like, there's a broad span of things that you can turn to, what you can lean on, what you can draw from. And so I started to do that, but I started in a very secure, safe, understandable place, which is Psalm 23. And you don't have to have been in church very long or know the Bible very well to know Psalm 23.

If you had a praying grandmother, you know Psalm 23, it was hung on a wall or stitched on a pillow. My grandmother had Psalm 23 hung on a wall right next to the picture of the Southern black families, Holy Trinity of Jesus, Martin Luther King, and jfk.

And it's this psalm that everybody knows, and we know it so well that we forget it. And you can almost recite it by heart. There are songs written about the psalm, and it's this beautiful call, this invitation to rest in God and to be assured.

And who wouldn't want God to be their shepherd?

Who wouldn't want to be led beside still waters? Who wouldn't want their soul restored? Who wouldn't want to not fear in their darkest valley? Who wouldn't want God to be with them?

But there's a section of the psalm that's really important and right in the middle. And hardly anyone ever talks about. And it may be the exact thing that we need for our day, because just when we are bathing in all the good stuff that we want from God and God can give us, we get to this one.

Enemies.

And even if we don't want enemies, we certainly don't want to admit that we have enemies.

Years ago, Rochelle and I were living out of state, and I was serving a congregation there. And we were having a class on Wednesday night about spiritual practices. And we started talking about praying for our enemies and what it means to pray for our enemies. And I said something that seemed extraordinarily obvious to me, which is, to pray for your enemies, you have to know who your enemies are, or at least who your perceived enemies are. And so it might be a good idea to go home and write down the names of people that you perceive to be your enemies.

Well, at that same church, we had a group of elders who really liked to get together on Monday nights and hammer me about the sermon from Sunday morning, which was really interesting feedback for people who have never given a sermon. And I showed up at one meeting, and their heads exploded because they said, well, we're Christian people and Christians shouldn't have enemies.

Which I thought was really odd because I had known These men. And guess what? I knew that they had enemies. And it happened to be the same enemies that their favorite cable news station told them should be their enemy.

And I thought, it's a really different practice than to work through who your enemies or your perceived enemies are, then creating an enemies list.

One of my favorite homileticians, Barbara Brown Taylor, says Christians think they shouldn't fight. So we're really bad at it.

And I think that's true for a lot of us.

We think that Jesus calls us to a particular posture in the world that prevents us from. From fighting, or at least to fight openly. And so we do other things instead. We're passive aggressive. We gossip, we obfuscate, we manipulate.

Some of us do that. And then there's another kind of Christian who doesn't believe the world has enough enemies already and are looking for more.

Some of us have this orientation to the world that basically says, if you don't agree with me today about this thing, then you're my enemy. And the only way that I can feel like God is at work in the world is to have a growing list of enemies.

A couple years ago, I read an article in the New Yorker. It was profiling a talk show host. And not only did she have a talk show, she had a podcast, and she wrote columns. And they asked her this simple question about how she generated all of this content.

And she says, well, it's pretty easy for me. I just wake up in the morning and see what makes me angry. And that's what I talk about. And I thought, girl, you gotta settle down. You can't live like this for very long.

A friend of mine leads a Bible study. It's almost all non Christians. Matter of fact, that's his goal for having the Bible study. He's very invested in non Christians coming to Jesus. And so he had been working with a guy for about 18 months.

When the guy calls him up, he says, I think I want to do it. I've decided I really do want to be baptized. And he says, this is great. We'll talk about this tomorrow. Let's get together.

Let's have lunch. They get together for lunch, and his friend tells him, he says, I decided last night that I actually can't be baptized. Well, why not?

He said, the thing that brings me the most joy every day is getting online and owning the libs.

And if I'm baptized, I can't do that anymore.

We don't know what to do with enemies.

Either we deny that they exist, or we pacify them or attack them.

But what if there's another way?

Sitting right there in the middle of Psalm 23.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows.

I wish I didn't, but I have a little bit of experience with having enemies. I've had plenty in the past, and so have you. And enemies come in all shapes and sizes and to all degrees. When I was young, when I was a little boy and in high school and played baseball, the opposing team. Enemy.

When I was an undergraduate here, romantic rivals for a girl's affection. Enemies. And you and I, we worked in systems, and in every department there are only so many dollars, and we're all computing. We're all competing for the same resources. Enemies.

And there are companies where there are layoffs coming and you can see them coming down the road, and you'd much rather it be their people in their department than your people or you and your department. Enemies. There are times, small windows of time, when you want one thing and your partner wants another. And even as brief as it can sometimes be Enemies.

And maybe it's just me, but in those times when I am faced with an enemy, I don't sleep well, I'm angrier than I want to be.

And God knows, there are certain things that I really don't want to do in those times. I don't eat well, and I really don't want to eat in the presence of my enemies.

But the psalm says, you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. What in the world could that possibly mean? And why on earth would I want it?

Here's what I think.

You don't have to deny or pacify. Attack your enemies. Like all of Psalm 23, this Psalm is about an invitation from God to God's abundance and God's rest. And in that time when you are at your end, God sets a table before you, even in the presence of your enemies.

In the presence of our enemies, when we think things can only be one way, God is still a God of rest and abundance. And God never says that we will not have enemies. As a matter of fact, the psalms kind of assume that you do. It also assumes that you probably should worry about it a whole lot less than you do, because it's really popular in our times to wish for the destruction of our enemies. We even sing songs about it.

And I often wonder when I hear those lyrics, is that what we want to do with our praise? Drown our enemies in them?

Because the deeper call is that you are so secure in the ability, abundance and rest that you trust so deeply in God that you have nothing to worry about from your enemies, that no enemy is a threat to you at any time or any place for any reasons. We have no reasons to make or to keep or to seek out enemies. God sets a table before us in the presence of our enemies. And since the same God, since this same God is the God that calls us to love our enemies, our enemies are welcomed at the same table, too.

Dallas Willard writes about it this way. He says, you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Since I love my enemies, I would not feast upon a delicious meal in their presence and let them stand there hungry. The abundance of God's provision and safety in my life is so great, I would invite them to enjoy what God has prepared for me.

And I don't know, maybe one of the more helpful distinctions in this moment in time would be for many of us to know the difference between an enemy and an opponent.

So recently, in the last couple of years, I had a couple of friends who have decided to take up jiu jitsu. And I think that they have decided to do this because they are deluded about how old we've become.

And I will tell them I go for long, fast walks, I ride my peloton, I lift weights and then drown in ibuprofen. And that's it at this point.

But they post their pictures and their videos online. And I don't know anything about martial arts, but watching these videos, right before they begin to grapple with another person, they turn and face one another and extend to each other this courteous bow. And I have no clue the ancient reason why they do that. But I wonder if it's because they will know that two people who are about to fight are not enemies, but just opponents.

And so here's a practice for all of us to try out.

You go find somebody, someone in your world who is very different from you, who thinks differently than you do, has a different perspective on the world, and you invite them to a meal, and a meal in your home, not at a restaurant, where you can distract yourself talking about how bad or how good the service is, or what's your favorite thing on the menu, Invite them to your home, sit down with them over a meal, and here's what you do. You ask them a good question and shut up.

And then when that thing that's in all of us begins to rise up in you, where you've heard something that you disagree with or you dislike and you want to push back. If just in that moment, you can restrict yourself, have a little bit of discipline and say, okay, tell me more.

We don't have to accept everything that anyone says, but we have so many more skills at our disposal than the ones we choose to use. And the problems that we see that we face will, will not be solved solely by vigils or protests, by marches and shouts. Posting what will heal the world is the same thing that has always healed the world.

The Table from the night that Jesus was betrayed till this very day, healing has always been found at table. And God has said it already.

Hyland Let me pray for you.

God. May we embrace being people of the table.

The tables where we gather for lunch at work, the tables where we have meetings, the tables where we serve our dinners. On every table that we find ourselves is an opportunity for healing and love, to rest and trust in safety and abundance that only you can provide. And we ask it in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Thank you, Sean, for that powerful and timely word. It's good to have you with us here today. Hyland. Would you please stand for our benediction?

Hyland have the courage, be brave, to invite someone to your table and listen. Be brave to hear them not just their words, but their heart, and be transformed by the power of the gospel as it moves through us and in us.