A Sermon by Trevor Bechtel on Feb 8th 2026

It’s been quite the week hasn’t it?

I saw a joke this week that January was a long year. At this rate, February, the shortest month of the year, will be a long decade. 

I hope that you all are finding ways to take care of yourself. I know that I didn’t do a good enough job of that this week and so by the end of the week I felt myself careening into the weekend with my head down; not a great strategy for a pastor, sure, but not a good way to live for anyone. The balance between the things we need to do, the news about the world, and our ability to find some piece of joy or contentment is ever shifting, but a world that actively and demonstrably is being made deliberately worse each day by its most powerful leaders makes that balance almost unattainable. 

People in the cities that the apostle Paul wrote to and visit would have struggled with similar problems although the context was different. They thought of the world on two planes; a spiritual one and a biological one. A human could be biologically alive but spiritually dead, something that it feels easy to imagine right now given the wanton cruelty that is demonstrated more brazenly than in recent memory. A person could also be spiritually alive after having died biologically; and this was a common goal to attune ones life to God’s purposes to ensure a vibrant spirit. This quadrant of life and death and the spiritual and the biological dominated thinking about the human person. These realms were not opposed to each other or separated from each other in Paul’s thinking although the could be in other thought of that time like Gnosticism. They were not opposed to each other but the spiritual was thought of as much more important than the biological. Our intellect was a function of the biological and this is part of Pauls’ focus in this text to say that the spiritual wisdom of God that suffuses all of creation is superior to human intellect or power. 

I’m going to ramble on now for awhile about this with a focus on how we as human discern what is right, what is appropriate, what is good, and what we might need to call out as wrong, offensive, or evil. 

On Thursday this week both Jo and I went to events that sought to resource our community around immigration enforcement. Jo was at the Church of Good Shepherd and connected a group that recognized the problematic nature of all law enforcement especially for black and brown people. 

I went to the Sheriff’s Public Meeting, and unsurprisingly she did encourage people to contact law enforcement if they were in trouble. But what was interesting to me was when a representative from the Movement for Immigrant Rights Action spoke about ICE and described the violent detention of one of their members by ICE and said that ICE does not actually follow the law, that they are a completely rogue paramilitary force, and then handed the microphone back to the Sheriff who simply said thank you in response. No was made to attempt to qualify her description. Everyone in the room, a room that included the mayors of Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Manchester, the leaders of the largest law enforcement agencies and several state representatives and senators accepted this description of ICE. Later, the Ann Arbor Police Chief made a distinction between intervening and interfering in terms of they can do. They can’t interfere with federal officers but if a member of the public is being threatened or abused they can and will intervene. 

From 2021 to 2024 I spent a fair amount of time in meetings with people in law enforcement. Through my work at the university I was on the Sheriff’s 20th Century Policing Commission, the Community Reentry Coalition and met regularly with the Washtenaw Prosecutor. Through this and meeting with the Friends of Restorative Justice of Washtenaw County and the Coalition for Re-Envisioning our Safety I learned that one thing a representative of the criminal legal system will never do is speak ill of someone else in the system. And I also learned that this makes some sense. These people need to work together. 

So to be in a jam packed room where everyone is trying to distance themselves from ICE was interesting and it represents a shift in a societal norm. The leaders of government and of law enforcement where, in front of each other, naming ICE as working outside the norm.  I hope that it is a shift that takes root in other parts of our society, and its something that we’ve seen in the last couple of days when the President, who has a history of fantastically racist, xenophobic, ableist and sexist social media managed to come up with his most racist post yet depicting the Obama’s as apes. Tim Scott, the only black senator, who has been in lock step with the President, denounced the post as racist. 

My goal in this sermon is not to keep track of social media use, although denouncing that post from the pulpit is important, even if you all already agree with me. Rather I’m interested in following up on the last verse of the lectionary scripture that Bryan read for us today. 

In most contemporary versions this verse reads, “For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ.”

When I was moving through the lectionary texts for this morning wondering what I would preach on I was stopped at this verse. I am interested in the question “who has known the mind of God” and I am interested in its answer. I am also interested in who has the confidence to say that they know the mind of God. I see throughout our world very different pictures of what it means to follow Jesus or worship God and often one thing that can make me more comfortable with a particular version of worshipping God is if they people doing it have some humility about what they are doing. 

But in writing, “For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ.” Paul doesn’t seem very humble. To me at first gloss Paul is both not being very humble–claiming to have the mind of Christ–but also putting himself as better than the Jews. I get this vibe because this question “Who has known the mind of the Lord” is a quotation from Isaiah 40 and answering that question with “BUT we have the mind of Christ” feels like Paul is one-upping Isaiah. Isaiah stresses God’s unknowability but Paul stresses his ability to know. 

There is a lot of one-upping in religion and politics doesn’t even need to play into it. And as we have always known it can be pretty mean spirited. Your bulletin cover today shows a Roman Soldier worshipping a God with the head of a donkey with the inscription, Alexamenos worships God. This image from about 200 years after Jesus lived is one of the first depictions of Jesus, but it is pretty clear that it is meant to make fun of Alexamenos’ faith in Jesus as the donkey would have been read as a demeaning image then. We may find the language of our culture coarse but that is nothing new. 

We Anabaptists are also pretty good at one-upping in questions of religion. 

Let’s do a quick poll. Jo and I met with the youth last hour to talk about baptism. 

So, what is the best way to baptize? 

Hands up for sprinkling? 

Hands up for pouring?

Hands up for immersion?

I guess this makes sense. One of the things that religion does is give people a sense of community and for much of history that has been managed by boundary maintenance. 

One thing that I have been wondering since I left the Sheriff’s Public Meeting is if some of what was happening there was boundary maintenance. It did feel like the law enforcement agencies present in that meeting were scared of ICE, both because of what ICE is doing to people and because of what people will think of them moving forward. 

A lot of these questions about differences in boundaries are very difficult to parse. Does it matter whether we sprinkle or pour or immerse? Does it matter whether we baptize infants or adults? Does it matter whether we accept that violence is a tool of the state or think that violence is outside the perfection of Christ? Does it matter that we have boundaries? As I said earlier I don’t that Aloka recognizes any boundaries. Some boundaries are probably inevitable even if there are relatively open. Some boundaries are just confusing. 

It’s Super Bowl Sunday. Apparently one gift of our highly polarized political climate is that the commercials are not trying to secure brand loyalty by connecting to social positions; they are instead simply going to be about why the product is a good product. So that’s great. However our highly polarized political climate has created quite the maelstrom around the halftime show. Bad Bunny is performing at the Super Bowl. His recent grammy winning album is a love song to his homeland of Puerto Rico. That is apparently too much for Turning Point USA, the movement founded by Charlie Kirk. They have programmed a counter event featuring Kid Rock which will be broadcast on the Trinity Broadcast Network, the largest Christian network. While it is very obvious that people feel like they are definitely being transgressed it is extremely confusing to figure out what the boundaries are here. 

I grew up without much fundamentalism in my religion. I don’t think that there was a lot of it in the Mennonites of Southern Ontario in the 80’s. However there were two things that I was taught to be careful of. Sex before marriage, and some kinds of rock and roll. In fact there was a whole industry of Christian Rock that allowed you to listen to whatever genre of music you wanted to hard rock, metal, glam rock, with Christian Lyrics. The whole point of this large effort was to avoid musicians like Kid Rock whose lyrics should make anyone blush. That he is now the headliner of exactly the kind of cultural product which would have been aimed at him 40 years ago shows that another shift in a societal norm has happened. And it has been noticed on both the left and the right with several conservative commentators criticizing this event; programming Kid Rock on a Christian network is only about those willing to confess loyalty to the President. 

The last thing about this week that I’ll mention is the President’s comments at the National Prayer Breakfast where he both made fun of the Speaker of the House for praying too much and basically admitted that he has never read the Bible, even though he has said many times that it is his favorite book. 

I pay some attention to worldly and political culture but I don’t pretend to be a good critic of it. Still I hope that the combination of explicit racism and blatant disregard for faith alongside blind loyalty is exposing the current administration for what it is, an Archon. Archon is a greek word for ruler, but in early Christian writing it has a meaning connected to the demonic exercise of power. 

Early Christians recognized a strong distinction between the spiritual and the biological world and a strong connection between them. It made sense to them to think of a spiritual war between angels and archons which both shaped our reality but also occurred around the biological world. 

The raw exercise of power we’ve seen in our federal government makes me wonder sometimes if there isn’t something to that. 

The careful among you will have noticed that when I quoted 1 Corinthians 2:16 early I didn’t use the version that Bryan read. I had Bryan read David Bentley Hart’s version which is adds some obscurity in order to remain faithful to the original Greek text. He doesn’t translate Archon in order to have us remember that Lord in that sense would have had a demonic and spiritual sense even when describing actual people in power. He also separates out intellect from spiritual wisdom recognizing that often those with intelligence and insight about the biological and physical world don’t necessarily possess spiritual wisdom. But finally he treats this verse differently

“For who has known the mind of the Lord, who will give God instruction?” And we have the mind of the Anointed.” 

There is a shift here between Lord (the greek work kyrios) and Anointed (the greek word Christos) which actually resonates very well with our practice here at Shalom of leaving behind the word Lord and its connotations of power over others even benevolent power. There is another shift between the “but” of other translations and the “and” of this one. Rather than suggesting that Isaiah should be one-upped, this version insists that Christ mind can fit into this earlier humility. 

We are living in difficult times. We recognize that these times are more difficult for other than they are for us. I don’t really know what to tell you about all of that even thought I’ve been talking for twenty minutes now. I do hope that we are in a time of some shift and that we are pushing some things that we have allowed to inhabit our social fabric out the right door. 

I do think that meetings like the ones that Jo and I went to this week are part of moving forward. I have been pleased by how there have been more connections between Christian communities in Ann Arbor over the last year. Jo and I have initiated some of this and a new group called the Huron River Clergy Collective has formed and is meeting to be ready to come together around what we might need to do next. I have been very happy in meetings of that group that there has not been a lot of one-upping each other. Most clergy seem very interested in coming together and connecting and being ready. 

Finally, I think that our meeting after potluck is a important part of what we can do in response to what we see. We do not exercise power perfectly in this community, but we try to do it with humility and together, peacefully, simply, together. May God make this its own kind of Epiphany. Amen.