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Weekly sermons from the traditional and contemporary worship services at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, Texas. Rooted in Scripture and the Anglican tradition, these messages explore how the gospel speaks to our faith, our everyday lives and the world around us.
Church, we live in a world that is addicted to proving itself. We measure everything, status, credentials, pedigree, spiritual performance. We wanna know about your family, what school has shaped you, and whether your spiritual resume is impressive enough to earn applause. And if we're honest, it's easy to drag our spiritual resume into God's presence like trophies. Our church attendance, our reputation, our ministry involvement, our volunteer hours, our good Christian behavior.
Rev. Shawn Torres:And we whisper, Lord, look at what we've done. Surely, I've earned a seat at your table. But today's colleague strips away that illusion. It reminds us that Jesus was a sacrifice for sin. Church, you don't need a sacrifice when you're doing well.
Rev. Shawn Torres:You need a sacrifice when you are bankrupt, in debt, disqualified. The colic asked God to give us grace to receive thankfully the fruit of his redeeming work. Christ's redemption, it is not a paycheck for the spiritually impressive. Redemption is mercy for the spiritually desperate. And when we look across our scriptures this morning from the missionary heartbeat of the Psalms to the radical openness of Isaiah to the unshakable covenant mercy in Romans and finally to a gentile woman who refuses to let Jesus go until she gets what she needs.
Rev. Shawn Torres:God is pressing one kingdom reality into our hearts. Pedigree and performance don't qualify you for the king's table. Only desperate humble faith opens the door to his irrevocable mercy. Church, if pedigree can't save us, if performance cannot qualify us, if our spiritual resume collapses under the weight of a holy god, then the question becomes unavoidable. What hope is left for people who bring nothing but need?
Rev. Shawn Torres:Where does a bankrupt soul turn when the door seems closed? And that is why our scriptures shine hope for us this morning because the god who owes us nothing chooses to open his mercy to the nations. Psalm 67, it steps forward and reveals the heartbeat of God's mission. God's blessings were never meant to be a trophy for the elite, but a conduit for the world. God is calling his people not to hoard mercy, but to become a conduit, not a reservoir.
Rev. Shawn Torres:The psalmist begins with a prayer familiar to anyone familiar with the Aaronic blessing. May god be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us. But look at verse two. Why does the psalmist want God's blessing? Is it so Israel can brag?
Rev. Shawn Torres:Is it so they can sit back in material prosperity? No. Verse two says that your way may be known upon earth, your saving health among the nations. God does not bless his people merely for their own sake. He blesses them so that they may become a blessing, a conduit through which nations come to trust in Jesus Christ.
Rev. Shawn Torres:Too many churches, too many ministries, too many Christians want to be reservoirs. A reservoir takes in water and it reserves it. Water that has no outlet, it becomes stagnant, salty, and everything in it dies. Similar to the Dead Sea, The Dead Sea sits at the lowest elevation on Earth. It is a terminal basin.
Rev. Shawn Torres:That means the River Jordan, the water flows into it and there is no outlet. The water's only escape is evaporation. I remember being in the Dead Sea floating on my back holding a newspaper. It's easy to float because of the salt. Your body naturally stays on the top of the water like a cork and it looks impressive, but everything holding you up is actually dead.
Rev. Shawn Torres:Imagine everything flowing into God's church, knowledge, blessings, grace, mercy, but nothing flows out. That church looks good, but it is actually dead. But Jesus didn't call his church to be a reservoir, a blessing. He called it to be a conduit, a pipeline through which mercy flows. When we act like a conduit, then we align our heart with Isaiah 56, where God declares that his house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.
Rev. Shawn Torres:God promises to gather the outcast and steal others to himself. Steal others, it is an unconventional way to say even those we missed. God is building a kingdom that is marked by justice and radical openness. If you've received the sovereign grace of God, you cannot afford to be self absorbed. You must make god's priorities your priorities.
Rev. Shawn Torres:God wants his saving health to be known among the nations. He wants the church to be a distribution center for his mercy. Now when you become a conduit of grace, you must be ready for the people that God sends your way. People that don't fit your categories, people who stretch your comfort, who expose whether you truly believe grace is for the nations. And Matthew's gospel wants us to feel that discomfort because the next scene in the gospel, it is not polite, it is not predictable, and it's not easy on the pride of religious insiders.
Rev. Shawn Torres:Jesus, he steps onto foreign soil into a land Israel avoided and what happens next test whether anyone truly believes that desperate faith outranks pedigree. Matthew tells us that Jesus withdraws to the region of Tyre and Sidon, a gentile territory dripping with idolatry and spiritual darkness. And right there is the place where no one expected a Canaanite woman comes out crying to Jesus, Lord, son of David, have mercy on me. This woman is carrying four crushing burdens. First, her daughter is tormented by a demon.
Rev. Shawn Torres:That's a mother's worst nightmare. Second, she is a Canaanite, a descendant of the ancient enemies of Israel, a pagan outsider with zero covenant privileges or pedigree. Third, Jesus meets her with deafening silence. He did not answer her a word. Silence is the most is the hardest test when it comes to faith.
Rev. Shawn Torres:Fourth, the disciples are modeling reservoir behavior. They want her gone. Listen to him. Send her away. She keeps coming after us.
Rev. Shawn Torres:And when Jesus finally speaks his words sound like a slam door. I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Most people would have walked away wounded, but not this woman. She kneels like we do at the altar rail. She begs, extending her hands to receive, and she says, Lord, help me.
Rev. Shawn Torres:Then Jesus gives a mini parable sharp enough to cut pride. It is not right to take the children's bread, he says, and give it to the dogs. Now, I don't know in any era where calling a woman a dog is acceptable. But this woman refuses to let pride rob her of mercy. She doesn't argue her words.
Rev. Shawn Torres:She doesn't defend her pedigree. She doesn't claim she deserves a seat at the table. She simply says, yes lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table. She takes Jesus' analogy and turns it into a confession of faith. I don't know about you, but the dogs that we used to have, if anything fell from the table, if it was steak, it doesn't matter what it was, the dog never wanted to debate its legal rights.
Rev. Shawn Torres:He didn't petition us for equal family status. The dog simply consumes the scraps. Why? Because the dog even knows that a scrap that falls from their master's table is better than Purina or whatever your dog food of choice is. The woman, she knew that she had no pedigree, but she also knew that one crumb from Jesus' power was enough to cast the demon out of her daughter.
Rev. Shawn Torres:The principle here is real simple. Whatever is in the bread is in the crumb. She abandoned pride. She clung to mercy and Jesus was overcome. Overcome.
Rev. Shawn Torres:He says, woman, great is your faith. Let what you want be done for you. She began with desperation, persevered through silence, passed through rejection, and ended with a miracle. Now if a pagan outsider with no pedigree, no privilege, and no place at the table can receive a miracle through desperate, humble faith, then we must ask, what does it expose about the insecurity of our standing and the fragility of our pride? Because Roman 11 exposes a terrifying truth.
Rev. Shawn Torres:The greatest danger for people who receive grace is forgetting that it was grace in the first place. And Paul is about to confront that danger head on, not gently, not politely, but prophetically. In Romans 11, Paul is speaking to Gentile believers who are drifting toward deadly spiritual arrogance. They look at unbelieving Israel and think, well, God cut them off and chose us because we're better. Paul doesn't whisper his response.
Rev. Shawn Torres:He says, absolutely not. He points to himself, a Benjamite, a son of Abraham as living proof that God has not abandoned his people. He reminds them of Elijah who thought he was the last faithful man, but God had preserved a remnant, 7,000 by sheer grace. Then Paul unveils to us this kingdom blueprint for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable. God, he doesn't change his mind.
Rev. Shawn Torres:He doesn't revoke his promises. He doesn't cancel his covenant. He is a God who finishes what he starts. Look at how God orchestrated salvation history. Israel's temporary obedience, it opened the door of mercy to Gentiles.
Rev. Shawn Torres:And the mercy shown to Gentiles will one day provoke Israel to return to her Messiah. Paul, he summons all of this up with a sentence that levels every human being on earth. God has bound all people over to disobedience. Why? So that he may have mercy on them all.
Rev. Shawn Torres:This is the master's plan of redemption. Nobody gets to the table because they deserve to be there. We all start out bankrupt, bound over to disobedience, disqualified by sin, saved only by mercy. The gentiles were saved by sheer mercy. Israel will be restored by sheer mercy.
Rev. Shawn Torres:And the church must walk in the steps of Jesus crossing boundaries, breaking barriers, and extending mercy to the outcast. The church cannot be spiritual gatekeepers deciding who is worthy of grace. It must become grace distributors to the broken, the hurting, and the forgotten. So when you trace the mercy of God from the nations to the outcasts, to Israel, to us, you begin to see a God whose wisdom is deeper than our pride, whose mercy is wider than our boundaries, and whose faithfulness is stronger than our failures. Family, when you trace the mercy of God across the scriptures today, from the Psalmist pleading for blessing so that the nations might know of God's saving health, to Isaiah flinging open the doors of God's house for all outcasts and still others, to Paul unveiling a kingdom blueprint where mercy is the only currency, we begin to see something that is breathtaking.
Rev. Shawn Torres:Every one of us comes to the king's table the same way, not by pedigree, not by performance, but by mercy alone. And that mercy is not fragile. It is not tentative. It is not hanging on by the thread of our disobedience. Paul says, the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable, which means that mercy saved you and that's the same mercy that's gonna keep you and that mercy that keeps you is the very mercy that will bring us all the way home.
Rev. Shawn Torres:So stand back and behold the brilliance of God's redemptive plan. A God who gathers the nations. A God who restores Israel. A God who rescues the proud by humbling them. A God who binds all in disobedience so he may have mercy on all.
Rev. Shawn Torres:And when you finally see that mercy, a mercy wide enough for the nations, a mercy deep enough for the outcast, A mercy strong enough to shatter pride. Mercy irrevocable enough to secure our eternity. There is only one fit in response and that's for us to fall on our face with Paul and cry out, oh, the depths and the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of our God. How unsearchable are his judgments. How unfathomable are his ways.
Rev. Shawn Torres:In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.