08/31/2026
Pastor Deb started Sunday with good news: God has a two-part plan to save the world. Even better, we’re already pretty good at Part One.
God gives each of us gifts: creativity, intelligence, compassion, leadership, practical skills, vision, and something inside us wants to use them. And when we do, those gifts make the world better.
Barbara Kingsolver writes books. Dolly Parton wrote songs. Someone invented air conditioning. Someone else invented pants 👖. Thank God for all of them! 🙂
So far, so good, right? But then comes Part Two. Whomp whomp. The Group Project. 😳
Because God didn’t give us our gifts so that all of us wonderfully talented people could orbit around our own individual visions. Part Two is that we bring those gifts together, coordinating them, compromising, collaborating, becoming one body devoted to one vision: the healing of the world.
And that’s where Peter gets uncomfortable. Jesus begins explaining what being the Messiah will actually require: suffering, self-denial, giving himself away, and Peter essentially says: No. That’s not how this should go.
Jesus’ response? “Get behind me, Satan.”
Harsh. But Deb suggested Peter is voicing something deeply familiar in us: If I give something up, what happens to me? If my vision becomes our vision, is it still mine? Will anybody know what I contributed?
We are very good at imagining what collaboration costs us.
What Peter couldn’t see yet and what we still struggle to believe, is what happens after we give something up.
The stone moves. The burial cloths fall away. The tomb opens. Resurrection.
That’s the leap of faith in God’s two-part plan: trusting that what we offer, loosen our grip on, compromise, or give away in service to something larger doesn’t disappear. It becomes part of something bigger, deeper and more abundant than we could have ever created alone.
Pastor Deb sees the alternative all the time: the wonderful idea someone wants to keep entirely their own. Sometimes it stays so pure and perfect inside their head that it never happens at all. Other times it struggles into existence, opening “one petal at a time,” when shared hands, minds and hearts might have turned it into a whole field of flowers.
So how does God’s plan actually work? We all do it. Together.
We “outdo one another” in generosity, in lifting, serving, compromising, collaborating, depending upon one another, loving and sometimes sacrificing for one another.
And imagine what begins to happen then!
No longer separate individuals trying to prove that we matter, but a thriving community, each of us discovering that our gifts matter precisely because they fit perfectly within something larger than ourselves.
