On May 17, 2022, I was the host pastor for the meeting of Missouri Union Presbytery, and so I was assigned to preach the sermon for the gathered pastors and elders in that district. This is what I shared with them.

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life — this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us — what we have seen and heard we also declare to you so that you also may have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world (I John 1:1 – 2:2).

In February of 2012 I got quite ill: fever, chills, intestinal distress, and severe pain in all my joints. I struggled with this for several days, getting progressively more weak and more whiny, and my wife kept saying “Let’s go to the doctor” and eventually I grudgingly gave in. The medical offices in that town are in the east wing of the hospital, which was about six blocks from our house, and I hauled myself to the car and Micaela drove us right up to the front door of the medical wing. They always had a wheelchair or two ready, just inside the door, and I sat in one while she parked the car in the lot. A minute later when she walked in from the parking lot, I didn’t get up out of the wheelchair, and she wheeled me into the elevator and up to the doctor’s office.

The doctor talked with me for a few minutes, and then she said, “You’re obviously quite ill. I think you should be in the hospital.”

I thought, “I feel terrible. I think she’s right.” And I said so. And they wheeled me down the hall from the medical wing into the hospital itself, and put me in a room, and I was there for four days.

The second day I was lying there in bed, feeling bad and feeling sorry for myself. You know how, when you’re lying in bed, and you feel a little uncomfortable, and you just need to rooch a little to one side or the other, and turn a few degrees, and you’ll be comfortable again? It’s not like you need to roll completely over: you don’t need to shift that much, you only need to adjust your position a little, and you’ll be fine?

I realized that’s what I needed to do: I was sore and achy and miserable, and nothing I could do would make that go away, but if I could adjust my position a little that would sure help. And I couldn’t do it. I tried. I tried just to scoot a couple inches to my right. I could not do it. I was too weak. I needed help. I needed to push the call button and get a nurse to come in and move me.

I did not want to admit that. I was determined to do it myself. Surely I didn’t need a nurse to do something as simple as this. But I could not do it. And so, feeling humiliated, I decided to push the button. As it turned out, pushing that button was not a trivial task. My shoulder ached so much it took a lot of effort to reach across and grasp the cord with my hand and press on the button.

In just a minute a nurse came bustling in. I explained my problem. And with a brisk no-nonsense efficiency she slid me two inches to the right and turned me two inches to the left, and it was great. A couple hours later she came back and reversed the process, and it was great again.

Of course, I was still sick as can be. I kept asking, “What’s wrong with me?” And eventually one of the doctors said, “What’s happened is that you’ve caught an opportunistic virus of unknown provenance.”

An opportunistic virus of unknown provenance. I asked, “What does that even mean?”

And he laughed and said, “That’s doctor talk for ‘You’re really sick, and we don’t know why.’ ”

As they were running tests on me at the hospital, they discovered that I had Stage 3 Chronic Kidney Disease. Apparently I had made it through Stage 1 and Stage 2 with no symptoms, which is quite common. At Stage 3 you have about 30% kidney function. When they tell you that you have only 30% kidney function, that makes you want to pay attention: but at 30% it’s still usually symptom free. Your kidneys have a lot of redundancy built into them. If you only have one working kidney, for example, then you’ll have at most 50% function: and for most people that would be symptom-free. So other than an opportunistic virus of unknown provenance, which my immune system eventually figured out, at 30% kidney function I was fine.

I remained stable at 30% for about eight years. Then over the course of a year or so it declined steadily to about 20%, which is stage 4, and it has been steady there for this past year. But for the last eight months, I’ve been continually short of breath, lacking all strength and stamina. The heart doctor, the lung doctor, the kidney doctor, none of them could see any reason why.

Most everyone knows that your kidneys filter the blood to remove waste products. It turns out that another thing your kidneys do is make the hormone erythropoietin, which is the hormone that tells your bone marrow to make more hemoglobin. The name of that hormone is interesting: erythropoietin. The first half of that word, erythro, is one of the Greek words for red: when the New Testament refers to the Red Sea, for example, it calls it the Erythra Thalassa. And the second half of the word comes from the root poieo: that’s the very common verb that means to make or to do. So the name of the hormone, erythropoietin, parses to mean red maker.

With Stage 4 Chronic Kidney Disease, my kidneys no longer do well at making erythropoietin, so the message doesn’t get to the bone marrow to make more red blood cells, and so my hemoglobin count plummeted, all the way down to a reading of 7. The normal range for a man my age is between 14 and 17. So I was always out of breath, not because there was anything wrong with my lungs (they were taking in plenty of air), and not because there was anything wrong with my heart (the pump was pumping the blood just fine), but because the lack of hemoglobin meant that the red blood cells were not carrying the oxygen around in my body.

When you have insufficient hemoglobin, that’s called anemia. That makes me an anemic preacher. I’m not proud of this descriptor, but it is what it is. I’m glad to have a clear explanation of what’s going wrong: stage 4 Chronic Kidney Disease, insufficient erythropoietin, low hemoglobin. That’s why I’m an anemic preacher. That gives me a better excuse for my anemic preaching than the rest of you have: I have a confirmed medical diagnosis.

But I also have a parable. Remember the story about how I was lying there in the hospital ten years ago? Later on I came to see that this was a parable. One of the advantages of being a preacher is you spend a lot of time reading the Bible – it’s cool, they actually pay me to read the Bible! – and as you keep on doing that you become more and more familiar with the parables of Jesus, and after a while you begin to see parables everywhere. I saw that this was a parable, and I told Jesus about it. “It’s like, while I was lying here helpless, that’s a reminder that I can see that I depend on you for strength,” I told him.

And Jesus said, “Well, that’s one interpretation. But it’s not actually a parable about how you need help when you’re sick. It’s a parable about how you need help all the time.”

I said, “Huh. You might want to work on your bedside manner some, Jesus.”

And he rolled his eyes at me, and said, “It figures you’d focus on the way I said that, rather than on the content of what I said. Here’s what you need to see. It’s not like there’s one reality when you’re sick and a different reality when you’re healthy. Instead, there’s just this one reality all the time about your need of grace, and it turns out that you’re a little more open to seeing it when you’re sick.”

The advantage of being a preacher, they told me, is that you only have to work one hour a week. That seemed like it would be a pretty good deal. I asked for more details. You’ll need to prepare and deliver a sermon weekly, they said. I immediately saw the problem there: the preparation time. The worship service might be only an hour long, but the preparation time would be on top of that: so it could easily add up to two hours a week. Just as I suspected, there was a catch.

But even so, the schedule seemed doable. Prepare and deliver a sermon weekly. The people in my congregations have always agreed that I do that. In fact, they point out that I’m a guy who prepares and delivers a sermon very weakly. So they saw that I’m an anemic preacher, long before I did.

Well. Having completed these preliminary remarks, I now turn to the main part of the sermon. In good expository form, it is based on the formal exegesis of three points from our scripture text.

1. The task of proclamation, for anemic preachers like me and like you, is a matter of testifying that our gospel is about what God has done, within the reality of our lives. It is about “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.” It is about the reality of God’s astonishing grace, revealed to us, experienced by us.

2. We have to tell the truth: the truth about Jesus, and the truth about ourselves. We confess that we are sinners: “if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, Jesus is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” How does he do that? Through his blood. Perhaps you remember the old gospel song about that: “There is power in the blood.” But not just any blood. There is power in the blood of Jesus: “the blood of Jesus, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin.” But there is no power in my blood. I’m an anemic preacher: there is no power in my blood. (Wait, that’s another parable, isn’t it!?)

Sometimes when I talk about the blood of Jesus, people get upset about that. They don’t like the ickiness of talking about the idea of an atoning sacrifice, where instead of me dying as punishment for my sins, there’s a substitute, maybe a ram a year old, or maybe the Lamb of God, and that substitute gets sacrificed in my place, and so I’m forgiven. Couldn’t God just go ahead and forgive me, without all this gory mess, blood all over everywhere?

But the reality is this: “the blood of Jesus, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin.” I report to you that this is not yet fully accomplished in my life; but I also report to you that this is the power that is in the blood: the full cleansing of all our sin. Is there part of my life that I can keep outside the reach of God’s grace, just a private little reservation of my own – Jesus, you can be in charge of all the world, you can be in charge of almost all of my life, but there’s this little corner over here where I want to preserve a certain amount of selfishness and lust and pride and gluttony, I know it’s wrong but I like these things and I want to keep them – shouldn’t I get to keep space for a few small sins for myself? No. “The blood of Jesus, God’s son, cleanses us from all sin.”

3. And so John writes to his friends: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.” God has created the program, and if I come to understand it, perhaps I’ll be willing to get with the program, and give up a few more of my sins.

I report to you, however, that I seem to have been slow at giving up my sins. It seems that St John had noticed that about people in his own congregation as well. It’s like, after telling his readers that the program was that they would learn to give up their sins, he hears the sigh that percolates through the congregation, the sigh that comes from ever so many people acknowledging that they haven’t been too good at giving up their sins. And so his very next line is this: “If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” You see, it’s not a question of how much righteous energy I have managed to scrounge up inside my soul, which sometimes is really rather substantial and sometimes is very meager. Instead, it is the advocacy of Jesus Christ the righteous, and the reality that he is the atoning sacrifice for my sins.

But wait: there’s more! “if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins: and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” It is not a question of how much righteous energy anyone else has managed to scrounge up inside their soul, either. Did those other people pray the prayer, did they follow the prescribed process to become Christian, do they have an adequate statement of faith to qualify them for forgiveness? As it turns out, that is not the right question. Probing into whether those other people’s faith is sometimes as anemic as mine sometimes is: that’s not raising the right question. The right question is this: is Jesus Christ the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world?

Because the scripture says he is. And so I think we need to grow in faith, day by day, till we have found the courage to agree with the scripture, and proclaim what the scripture says.

I’m just an anemic preacher. My blood doesn’t work too well. But the blood of Jesus takes away my sin, and promises to transform me into a child of God. I believe that. And I ask for your prayers, not just because I’m sick and would like to be made well, but especially that I will believe more and more in the power in the blood of Jesus, for me and for the whole world.