Risking in Unity, Liberty, and Charity

What follows is a transcript of our guest speaker's message from our Sunday morning gathering. We share these messages on our blog for those who appreciate the opportunity to read the sermon again—whether for deeper reflection, personal study, or a quieter moment of prayer and introspection. As you read, we invite you to linger with the words, notice what resonates, and remain open to how God may be speaking to you through them.

by Jeremy Poynter

Good morning. I know I'm getting old. I know I'm getting old because the calendar tells me I'm getting old.

The mirror tells me I'm getting old, but my brain just doesn't seem to agree. I know I'm getting old because I want things locked in, things like settings on my computer or my iPhone. I was recently at an appointment and trying to figure out how to turn off my phone.

Couldn't figure it out. It wasn't in the same place. 20-some-plus years ago, I remember reading or observing that folks in their 50s don't want things to change.

Well, Jeremy, you made it. I know I'm getting old. At basketball games and at the store on Wednesdays, I get asked about if I want the senior citizen discount.

Well, yes, I do. Does it count if I feel I'm that old? At the office, I get asked about how I like working with my brother. For those of you taking notice here, John, my brother, lives in Kansas City and works in Kansas City, not here in Maryville.

And just when I thought the bar couldn't get lower, I get asked how I like working with my son. Miles is a freshman at Rolla and no plans to go into dentistry. So every Sunday, pastors find themselves preaching to the choir, okay? During the week, patients and colleagues often have to listen to me preach about the virtues of twice-a-day brushing and nightly flossing.

It's like at a dental checkup. Before I could even get the words out of my mouth, a religious, pious patient looks at me and says, I know, I know, brush and floss, in a tone that was like I was supposed to come into the room transfigured, like with some kind of new ideas for dental care. I get it.

So to this patient, I look at them and I reply, well, you don't go to church on Sunday morning expecting to hear about the 11th commandment, okay? So there might be nothing new in the message here this morning, but let's talk about a few things that we might already know, and maybe a few things around the margins. So a quick story that I know that some of you have heard me tell, because I like to tell the story about my grandfather, Harold Pointer, and that was, there was a group of four of us that were casually chatting in a circle together, and this guy, I was in my 40s at the time, young, you know, in my 40s at the time, and this guy in his 50s, okay, that he looks at me and he goes, Jeremy, things change in your 50s. Your body starts to change.

You better be ready. And this guy that's 70, he looks at the guy that's 50, then looks at me and says, he doesn't even know what he's talking about. And my grandfather, Harold, who's in his 90s at the time, looks at the guy that's 70, then looks at me and says, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

So I guess the take-home message was that things change with time. It is good to be here with friends this morning. I, you know, certainly my formative years were formed here at the church, and good to be with people that were part of that with me.

I've always enjoyed and appreciated having a wide diversity of friends, friends of different ages, different beliefs, different faiths, ideas of what good life looks like. My friend and mentor, Mark Toulouse, he was in his 50s when I met him. He taught a disciples history course.

He preached here in Maryville, I guess it's been more than a few years ago, with Reverend Dale Stewart as part of my ordination service here at this church. And later I would work for Mark at the school in Texas. And Mark was an American church historian, and a few years back he was honored with University of Chicago Alumn of the Year.

He was a distinguished historian. He served at TCU Bright Divinity School as dean. He was a disciples pastor, and a world-class poker player.

I'm not outing him. He outed himself. He showed up on the World Poker TV Classic, okay? So I knew that he had played for a long time, but Mark Dock Toulouse, in the poker world, died at the Texas card house in March 2025, holding a winning hand.

I'm kind of a Mark guy. Mark's gospel in chapter 12 holds a favorite passage of mine, and I'm going to summarize in my own loose translation of the Greek that my New Testament professor, Eugene Boring, probably would not like. But here it goes.

So there were these religious folk arguing about really important things. Taxes and resurrection. So one cat comes to Jesus and proposes this scenario.

Two people get married. Husband has six brothers. Husband dies.

His wife serially marries all the brothers after each subsequent death. This used to sound very strange to me, but reality TV sounds more plausible all the time. And what sounded more like an episode of CSI to me was, aren't they looking at the wife? But in this passage, this Sadducee Cat had a good question.

He said, in the resurrection, whose wife shall she be? Fair point. Jesus' answer, according to Mark's gospel, reminds me of a famous account in the Talmud, which is a written commentary in Judaism. It tells about a Gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism.

And this happened not infrequently. And this individual stated that he would accept Judaism only if a rabbi could teach him the entire Torah while standing on one foot. First, he went to this priest named Shammai, who was insulted by this ridiculous request, threw him out of his house.

The man did not give up, and he went to Rabbi Hillel. And this gentle sage accepted the challenge and said, I don't know if I can do it. What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.

This is the whole Torah. The rest is explanation of this. Go and study it.

In Mark's gospel, we are given Jesus' answer to the greatest commandment while standing on one foot question, love God, love neighbor. In this gospel account, it seems much of what people argue about didn't matter so much to Jesus. Differences in warring factions, in fact, seem common in history, with Christian history being no exception.

Nothing under the sun, according to Ecclesiastes. Acts 2 portrays the first church in Jerusalem as a model church. Members listened to the apostles, prayed, shared their food and money, grew numerically, and experienced harmony with those around them.

And there was not another example of the model church for the rest of the New Testament. Acts 2. So the rest of the church, according to Acts and the rest of the New Testament, discusses difficulties. If you were getting a letter from Paul, it wasn't generally celebration about all the good works.

I'm not saying there weren't any, but nothing new under the sun. There were warring factions, there were theological disagreements that were causing fissures in the church. In Paul's letter to Colossae, a community that I have not read this morning, we know this church too had divisions, fractures, differences of opinion.

We hear the apostles' advice to them, and above all, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. Simple, right? So, this morning's message that is titled, Risking in Unity, Liberty, and Charity, I always thought was something by Augustine. But, as Mark Toulouse would say, I'm wrong.

Mark introduced me to this phrase from an otherwise obscure Lutheran teacher and pastor, Rupertus Mendelus. So, in the 1600s, Europe was embroiled in a 30-year war, and it was described as only the third bloodiest war in Europe, third behind World War I and World War II. So, there seems to be a lot of religious differences behind this 30-year war, differences that I'm sure were around things like death and taxes.

So, Rupertus wrote this tract with hope to help unify warring religious factions. And it said, in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity. So, there is a risk, what are the essentials and what are the non-essentials of our faith, right? We come to the table with different ideas about what good church looks like and what constitutes these essentials.

Simple grounding principles help me with these kinds of questions. Things like the passage from Mark in Colossians, love God and love neighbor. Grounding principles like remembering the kingdom of God is both something that we both live in and strive for at the same time.

Remembering that we have truth, but not necessarily the truth. And how do we seem to piece together seemingly competing values of good to figure out the essentials from the non-essentials? I always like hearing from people who think differently than me and helping to think how these pieces go together or not go together. And in some context, I have not proposed this experiment in a context like this, but if you take an ethics class in kind of an ethics 101, there's this, you are the conductor of a train.

Okay, and you're going down the track. And at some point in this track, you have the ability to flip a switch to go to the left or to go to the right. Okay, so go along with me.

You're the conductor. All you can do is control that switch, whether you're going to the left or to the right. Okay, on the left side of the track is a 70-year-old person.

Okay, that's all we know about this person. On the right side of the track is an 8-year-old person. Okay, I go to say this in a context of my peers.

Okay, overwhelmingly, people say, if I'm going to have to make a decision of where to move that switch, I'm going to take out the older person. And it's almost like not even reflexive, not really a thought. And the reason is that we typically value, you know, the life, the vitality, the life of yet to come of young.

Okay, it's a reasonable response. Now, you ask this, and if I were in a company of folks from the Eastern world, their answer is very different. They're taking out the young person.

And the reason being is that there's a value that I can grow an 8-year-old person a lot easier than I can replace the wisdom of the older person. Now, which is right? I don't know. I love being in conversation and community with folks that think different than me.

World-class poker player Annie Duke wrote in a book, Thinking About Bets, Making Smarter Decisions, that John Stuart Mills, who is a philosopher, is one of her heroes about thinking in bets. And part of this is, I'm going to read here from her, is one of the heroes of thinking in bets. More than 150 years ago, after writing On Liberty, his thinking on social and political philosophy remains startlingly current.

One of the frequent themes in On Liberty is the importance of diversity of opinion. Diversity and dissent are not only checks on fallibility, but the only means of testing the ultimate truth of an opinion. The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion and studying all modes in which they can be looked at by every character of mind.

No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this. Nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. There is a simple beauty in Mills' insight.

On our own, we only have just one viewpoint. That's our limitation as humans. But if we take a bunch of people with that limitation and put them together in a group, we get exposed to diverse opinions, contest alternative hypotheses, and move toward accuracy.

It is almost impossible for us on our own to get the diversity of viewpoints provided by the combined manpower of a well-formed decision pod. To get a more objective view of the world, we needed an environment that exposes us to alternative hypotheses and different perspectives. That doesn't apply only to the world around us, to the view ourselves in a more realistic way.

We need other people to fill in our blind spots. I was touched by Dr. Clarence Green. Some of you might know him.

He's a former Northwest Bearcat, former police chief, past interim Northwest president, and current president and leader at the college in Savannah. He wrote what I thought was something inspiring and thought-provoking on social media that I wanted to share with you. He talks about, you know, occasionally I get in my feelings.

He was talking about driving to work and thinking a lot about his experience in 10 Squared Men. It's a group here in town that they meet together and do different good for the community. He said, I kept coming back to the question, what can we do together? Is there a question we should ask ourselves more often? What can we do together? Since its inception in 2019, 10 Squared Men has raised a little over $400,000 to address needs in Nottoway County.

That did not happen because everyone in the room thinks alike. It happened because people decided that there were things more important than their differences. We decided to focus on what we could accomplish together.

I believe in doing something together is on the surface, but the root is belonging. I believe everyone deserves the opportunity to belong. He says that several years ago he was challenged to read a book by Ben Sass, who was a congressman from Nebraska and president of University of Florida before he retired to take care of his wife who was suffering from cancer.

And then, unfortunately, he himself has pancreatic cancer. He wrote a great book, and Dr. Green writes that it challenged him to think about how easily we divide ourselves into groups, us and them, those people over there, why we don't understand, why they don't live the way we think they should. The book clearly explained that there's a danger when people stop being our neighbors and start looking and simply being them.

That is why belonging matters so much to me, he writes. When I look at ten squared men, I see people from different walks of life. They have different experiences.

They have different political beliefs, ideologies, and perspectives. And despite all that, he says, we come together around a common purpose, the community. We do not have to agree on everything to do something together.

In fact, I believe most people, regardless of their position, their ideology, and or differences, they are advocating for what they believe is right. Most people do not wake up in the morning trying to do evil. They are looking at the world through their own experiences and arriving at conclusions they genuinely believe will make things better.

I know there are people who do bad things, and community must hold people accountable. But we should not begin by assuming the worst about everyone who sees the world differently than we do. Instead, perhaps, we should begin with the question, what can we do together in the spirit of God's love and love of neighbor?