Proper 6 / Ordinary 11 (June 12-18)
Texts: Matt 9:35–10:8, 16-23;
Rom 5:1-8; Ex 19:2-8a
YouTube: https://youtu.be/EBXgktmLRs4
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from Thomas Jay Gates
SCAPEGOATING VIOLENCE: THE CORE OF NATIONALISM
June is Pride Month for our LGBTQ siblings and their allies. As part of our Reconciling in Christ process here at Bethania, we will seek to be allies with special focuses on LGBTQ issues for the next two weeks. This morning I hope to set that up a bit by fitting our relationship as allies to LGBTQ siblings into what we’ve been talking about, regarding getting our story straight. For far too long, followers of Christ have been among those who stood against LGBTQ people, instead of being among those who stand with them as allies. This morning we will spend a few minutes seeing how that relationship is another important part of getting our story right.
We’ve been talking about how the Bible’s story has to do with God coming home to God’s creation.1 The Bible’s story is about God seeking to fill creation with God’s presence so that it finally comes to fulfillment, to completion. But human sin keeps getting in the way. And one of the ways sin gets in the way is by twisting the story into more selfish directions. Christians, for example, have for centuries turned to story of God’s homecoming into a story about some people going home to heaven after they die — while others supposedly go to hell instead. We’ve talked about how urgent it is for us to get the story right as about God coming home to creation in order to save the whole creation.
When we get the story right, we see that God’s begins the project of coming home by making a covenant with Abraham and Sarah and their ancestors. Today’s First Reading from Exodus 19 is an example: “you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” Israel is to bless all the nations by being priests in the sense of making God’s presence among us more clear. But, once again, sin intervenes. Israel keeps trying to be like the other imperialistic nations, with their kings and emperors, turning their calling as a holy nation into a badge of special favor. Instead of being a ‘holy nation’ in the sense of blessing all nations — the responsibility of blessing other nations — they think ‘nationalistically’ so that ‘holy’ means they get to be in charge over everyone else. God’s blessing means they get to be top dogs, with the typical nationalistic violence used to keep them on top.
So, because of sin, God’s homecoming project must come to fruition by sending Israel’s Messiah into the world to suffer nationalistic violence — in order to expose it, forgive it, and lead us into God’s way of reigning, which looks more like democracy than nationalistic authoritarianism. God’s way of reigning pours out God’s loving spirit on everyone so that we might come to serve each other, not rule over each other.
Your Sermon Notes include an overview once again of getting the Bible’s story right in the story of Jesus the Messiah. There’s the three major celebrations:
• Christmas/Incarnation: God begins to come home to earth once again by taking the form of a human life, to live the values of love and justice to all the human family, working to heal what is broken and to unite what is dividing us. God lived among us for a time through Jesus!
• Good Friday/Easter: the empire strikes back. The values of nationalism and empire can’t abide God’s values so they execute Jesus on the cross. God vindicates Jesus by raising him on Easter.
• Ascension/Pentecost: God’s rule in love doesn’t operate as an authoritarianism, so Jesus pulls back for a time, ascending into heaven, and pours out the Holy Spirit of God’s love on all who will receive it, so that we might continue to live the values of God’s reign in this world. We become the Messiah’s body here on earth.
After the first half of our Church Year of tracking that story, we begin what’s known as ordinary time in the lectionary. A time of taking a slower pace at wondering what the Christian story means for our lives as Pentecost people who live in Christ’s Spirit. Last week, we saw how Jesus’ time on earth (Incarnation) modeled healing for all people, rich and poor, treating everyone as equally precious in God’s sight. We asked: Doesn’t this mean in a democracy that we might choose some form of universal healthcare? (Like many other nations have.)
This week, I want to preview the next two weeks celebrating Pride Month by focusing more on how the cross and Easter expose sin, especially the sin of scapegoating violence. There’s a great summary of this in today’s Excerpt Page from Thomas Gates. I realize that these excerpt pages are challenging to read, but I’m carefully choosing these pieces, because if we are to make progress in getting our story right, then we need to learn these things together. Today’s excerpt is about how the cross can be seen in terms of scapegoating violence. ‘The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’
Or, as St. Paul puts it in today’s Second Reading, we keep making ourselves enemies of God’s way of making peace, so God keeps proving God’s love for us precisely by sending the Messiah to suffer our scapegoating violence. That’s what the cross is. It is Christ’s faithfulness in suffering our scapegoating violence which begins to save us from our scapegoating violence. We will never begin to know true peace unless and until we understand the depth of our problem with this kind of violence.
Human history is basically a history of how nationalistic thinking relies on scapegoating violence against others. It is behind all wars. It is behind things like racism, genocide, mass incarceration, and sexism. Today, and in the next two weeks, we want to become more aware of how scapegoating violence is behind how our nationalistic cultures have mistreated LGBTQ people. For most of human history, LGBTQ people have been strictly forbidden to reveal their true selves to others. They’ve been shamed into remaining in the closet, so to speak. More than shamed, it has been made clear to them that, if they dared to come out of the closet, it most often meant complete shunning, imprisonment, and very often death. It has only been in the last fifty years or so, that LGBTQ siblings have dared to courageously show pride in who they truly are. That’s what we celebrate in this month of June.
But in doing so, they also make themselves targets of nationalistic scapegoating. Here’s the most recent history:2
• In 2020 and 2021, Hungary’s authoritarian leader Victor Orbán pushed through many new laws that even ban books about being gay or trans.
• In 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida used Hungary’s laws as a model for Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws.
• Eight months after the Florida law, Vladimir Putin pushed a draconian ‘Don’t Be Gay’ law in Russia. He continues to try to justify his war against Ukraine by saying Ukraine had become too permissive to LGBTQ people.
• Anti-gay and anti-trans policies have long been a part of Donald Trump’s leadership. Example: just this Wednesday he had a long post about military spending that ended with anti-trans add-ons. The vast majority of the really long post is how Republicans need to immediately pass a third reconciliation bill that features increased military spending to support the war in Iran. But at the very end of the post he throws into the bill: no men in women’s sports, and no transgender mutualization surgery for our children.3 Why would he do this? Because it is all part of the same overall scapegoating violence which leaders like him want us to buy into. For authoritarian, nationalistic leaders like Donald Trump, scapegoating violence must always be central to ruling over others.
Siblings in Christ, you and I are called to be part of something different. We are called to live in God’s reign, which is anti-authoritarian and anti-nationalistic. As such, we are sent out as sheep among wolves to stand against scapegoating violence — which includes standing with LGBTQ siblings as their allies. To close out Pride Month, we will over the next two weeks consider such ways of being allies. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, June 14, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/EBXgktmLRs4
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from Thomas Jay Gates
Notes
1. Since Easter Sunday, it has been a continual theme based on N.T. Wright’s most recent book God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (HarperOne, 2025).
2. This recent history is gleaned from Ibram X. Kendi’s recent book: Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age (One World, 2026), pages 148ff., 446ff.
3. Look up the Truth Social post June 10, 2026 @ 9:21 PM ET, that begins, “No other President has ever been more committed to both REBUILDING our Great Military and SAVING our Great Country — And NOW is the time to make it happen, for Generations to come.” You can also find it re-posted on X: https://x.com/TruthTrumpPosts/status/2064899248228106527
