God Doesn't Need What You Think He Needs | Tashara Angelle

Show Notes

Tashara Angelle - May 25, 2025 This Eastertide season sermon explores how God consistently works in ways that defy human expectations and conventional wisdom. Through the stories of the man at the pool of Bethesda and Paul's unexpected encounter with Lydia in Macedonia, the message challenges our tendency to exhaust ourselves trying to "fix" everything through our own efforts. The sermon addresses the modern struggle of feeling overwhelmed by personal and global problems, our impulse to become "fixers" who must control every outcome, and the despair that follows when our efforts fall short. Rather than promoting inaction, it calls listeners to find rest and peace in Jesus as the ultimate source of salvation—not in our own abilities, political solutions, or self-help strategies. The central message is one of liberation: God always has a "back door," a creative workaround that doesn't require what we think He needs. Just as Jesus didn't need the pool to heal, and God didn't need a man to spread the gospel in Macedonia, He doesn't need our frantic efforts to accomplish His purposes. The sermon concludes with an invitation to trust Jesus and lay down our expectations of how problems should be solved. Todays Readings: Acts 16:9-15 | Psalm 67 | Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5 | John 5:1-9 We’re so glad you’re here! Get in touch: https://rezaustin.churchcenter.com/people/forms/85960

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Life Together In The Goodness Of God

So today is the sixth Sunday of Easter, and for those of you who are like me and you're not, you weren't born into a Catholic or Episcopal tradition, like can you believe it? We are still celebrating Easter, right? Now Easter is actually my favorite holiday, so I don't have any problems with it. It's actually one of the better things about being in the Episcopal tradition. We have seven full weeks of this joyful season to celebrate this fresh start that we get because of the incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The Jesus who saved back then and continues to save today. The Jesus who liberated back then and continues to liberate folks today. The Jesus who transformed lives back then and continues to transform our lives today. And he did all that in this weird, unconventional way, in a way that really nobody expected. Now first century Jews, they knew a savior was coming. In fact, they expected him to come. They just didn't expect him to come the way he did. They expected a fierce warrior, but instead they got this helpless baby. They expected him to confront the most powerful leaders in Rome, but instead he sat face to face with the despised and the marginalized. They expected him to wield the sword and tear down this Roman Empire brick by brick. But instead, he was murdered, crucified on a cross. And that's how he brought salvation. He didn't need the battle experience. He didn't need the confrontation. He didn't need the sword. He didn't need what they thought he needed to save. In our gospel reading for today, we find Jesus doing another unconventional and unexpected thing. We read about a man who's in need of healing and salvation. In John chapter five, it says that Jesus had made his way to Jerusalem for a festival when he walked by the pool of Bethesda. According to archaeologists and Bible scholars, this pool was likely a Jewish mikveh. So a Jewish mikveh is a pool where essentially Jewish people would go, and they're still around today. They'd go and they take a ritual bath to be purified before they could enter the temple. In addition to this, some people believe that these pools had some sort of healing power. And if you got into the water, just as it stirred, you would be healed and made well. So there are lots of people who were afflicted by some sort of disease or illness who kind of just hung out at this pool. The man in this text seems to be one of those people. In verse five, the man enters the story. It says that one man was there who had been ill for 38 years. Now when Jesus saw him lying there and he knew that he had been there for a long time, he said to him, do you want to be made well? Now this man doesn't answer Jesus' question directly, does he? He kind of instead tells Jesus why he has not been made well. He says, sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water stirred up, and while I'm making my way, someone else steps down in front of me. Now when I read this and read this again, it seemed to me like this man is kind of trying to explain himself. And I wondered why. Like, why does he feel like he needs to explain himself and not just answer the question? Because he's ready with this answer. Maybe he heard the question wrong. And then I thought, maybe that's just not the question he was used to getting asked. He was ready to answer another question. And I thought about how many times in those 38 years of illness that devout Jewish worshippers had walked right past him on their way to purify themselves for the temple and instead of helping him, questioned why he was sick in the first place. What sin had he committed? And how many times did they question what was taking him so long to get into the pool to be healed? How often did they insinuate that he was lazy because he didn't come up with some multi-part action plan to get himself in that pool? Or that he just didn't work hard enough to pull himself up by his bootstraps? Maybe they handed him a self-help book as they stepped over him because, you know, God helps those who help themselves. And maybe he's just not trying hard enough to help himself. Maybe they suggested he didn't have enough faith in God to be healed. Or worse, they thought he didn't actually want to be healed. He must not. He must be comfortable being dependent on others. Maybe he's just a freeloader taking advantage of the system. And I know occasionally we've heard this text preached that way. And to be fair, maybe this man had even internalized some of that judgment. So his answer, his response to Jesus, was one of despair. Because in his response, he lets us know, wait, I have done everything I could to help myself. He's like, he has tried to get people to help him into the water. He has tried to do it himself. He just can't. He can't do it. Despite his best efforts, he knows what he needs to be healed, or so he thinks, but he cannot secure his own healing or purification. He doesn't have what he thinks he needs to be made well. And I know there are some people here who might be feeling or inching towards that despair. We are all likely facing down problems of our own. And maybe you haven't been dealing with them for 38 years. Maybe it's been three years or 30 days. And even if you don't have those problems, I mean, the world in general has enough to keep us up all night, bogged down and worried. And because most of us here grew up in the Western world, our first response to a problem is likely to become fixers. We got to just buckle down and work hard and grind or boss up. We got to read all the books and we have to do all the things in the book. Like, how will I help my kid if I don't follow these guidelines perfectly? How will I fix my marriage if I don't walk exactly through these steps that I heard on this podcast and God forbid we miss a step or we don't handle a talk with our kid in just the perfect way? I mean, I can't tell you how many times I beat myself up when I get overstimulated and yelled at my five year old. I mean, that's not gentle parenting. She might need therapy later on. Or I've gotten concerned that she thinks that Jesus was stapled to the cross and doesn't know that he was nailed there. Like, I'm supposed to be called to ministry. What kind of minister parent am I? And then we have our own problems to deal with. I mean, it feels like the nation is crumbling, but we can't let that happen. And we don't just, we know we have to do something, but we don't just want to do something. We feel like we have to do everything. We need to attend every protest. We need to make a call to every single representative every single day. We need to write the emails and respond to the critics on social media. Okay, maybe that's just me, but we need to get the right people in office to make sure things change. That's what we need. We need them to change the laws right now and then it'll all be fixed. And even the work we do in our spiritual lives sometimes can become a way to change things on our own. We start treating the Bible like a self-help book. If I just read one proverb a day, then the wisdom to fix all of this will come. If I pray exactly at 12 noon, like Daniel did, then God will change things. Now, don't hear me wrong on this. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with any of those things or that studying the Proverbs or looking to the Bible for guidance is wrong. I think, though, that we get into tricky territory when we try to use it to manipulate God into fixing. When reading or praying becomes pressure instead of peace, we're just trying to do all the things we know to do to change all the things. And we simply cannot do it. We're not designed to do it. And things are not changing fast enough for us. And maybe the enemy sees us, he sees us hanging out at this pool, and he walks by, he steps over us, and then he starts convincing us that we are failing, that our efforts are not enough. He's making us of laziness, questioning our will and our worthiness. And like that man laying by the pool of Bethesda, we start to internalize those lies. So then, when Jesus walks by and asks us a question, we don't even recognize him, and we respond to him like he's the accuser, regurgitating to him not what we want for the future, but our failures. I just want to remind you, though, in the text, Jesus doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact, by any of this man's efforts or their lack thereof. In fact, Jesus doesn't ask any follow-up questions at all. He didn't ask how he ended there in the first place or what he'd already tried himself. He didn't ask him how much he read from the Torah or how often he prayed. He didn't ask him to just have a little more faith and then I'll heal you. No. Jesus simply tells the man to stand up, take up his mat, and walk. In other words, just go about your life. Do the normal things. Relax. Be at peace. And the man did just that. And when he did, he was made well. This man didn't need to work harder to get into the pool to be healed or to be purified. He just needed the presence of Jesus. Jesus was the healer. Jesus was the pool. Jesus was the purifier. Jesus was his salvation. And he saved that man in a way that he never expected, in a way he couldn't have even imagined at that pool. And sometimes for us, when things start to get dark and when circumstances start to spiral out of our control, when we exhaust ourselves and we start to lose our peace and joy, we're doing all the things to fix all the problems to no avail, we find ourselves stuck in despair beside that pool of Bethesda. We get stuck thinking there's only one way to fix this problem. There's only one way to get out of this mess that we're in. We have this grand vision of how we think things should go. And we believe that's the only way. We forget about the expansive grace of God, how creative the Spirit of God is, how the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters, how he created every single thing you see in this world. We forget it. And we need Jesus to walk by and remind us to liberate us from that prison of despair beside that pool. That's also what happens to Paul in today's Acts reading. God liberates him from this linear way of thinking, and he expands his imagination for what can be. Y'all know I couldn't not preach this, right? Okay, sorry. In Acts 16, Paul is working at breakneck speed to spread the gospel. And his plan is to go to Asia. But it says the Spirit of Jesus blocks them from following that plan. And then in verse 9, Paul has this vision, his vision of this man in Macedonia. He's pleading with them to come and help. So Paul's convinced. He's like, God is calling me to preach the good news in Macedonia. I got to find this man. Because of this vision, Paul likely thought that this is the man that was going to spread the gospel in Macedonia. This is the one. So when Paul gets there, he's looking for him. He's looking for a synagogue, too. He's like, where's the synagogue? Where's this man? Let's go. And he doesn't find one. He doesn't find a synagogue. Instead he finds a place of prayer. And then he's looking for this man. But verse 13 says, and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. I'm sorry. They spoke to who? Who did they speak to? I got to hear it from y'all. They spoke to the women, not the women. So who Paul finds in Macedonia is not this man that he expected from his vision. He finds a group of women. And in that group, that group includes Lydia, the independent girl boss who runs her own business and apparently her own household. And God does something unexpected again. He opens Lydia's heart. And she and her household are baptized. So she becomes the first recorded European convert to Christianity. And because Lydia was wealthy and owned her own house and had connections in the city probably because of her business, and she could probably raise money really well from wealthy connections, she ends up basically being the first church planter in Macedonia. So yeah, Paul had a vision of a man in Macedonia that he thought would spread the gospel. But that vision was too small for God. God didn't need what Paul thought he needed to move forward. He didn't need a synagogue and he didn't need a man. And he had to show Paul that his grace was so much more expansive. And I think that God is trying to show us that too today, friends. Things might be looking really scary and really hard right now. And you might be thinking, there's really only one way out of this. I can't figure this out. And you're trying to fight tooth and nail to make that one way happen. You're losing sleep and you're losing peace. But we don't have to do that. We can rest. And before anyone thinks it, this is not a call to do nothing. It's not a call to sit on our hands or to ignore our problems and pretend like they don't exist. This is a call to rest in Jesus and to listen for the voice of the Spirit, knowing that our God is a God of endless possibilities and endless solutions, knowing that he can change things outside of the rules. He can change things even when no one is willing to help you and even when somebody jumps in front of you and blocks your way. He can change things. He doesn't need the pool. God always has a back door. He always has a workaround. He always has a cheat code. Now, and throughout history, God has guided his people to incredibly creative solutions to problems, even in the most harrowing of situations. These leaders didn't need what folks told them they needed to liberate God's people. I mean, Harriet Tubman, she didn't need the government to make slavery illegal to free enslaved folks in the United States. She said that God gave her visions and guided her around potential captors to lead over 70 people to freedom. Cory Ten Boom, she didn't need the Nazi occupation to end, to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish people during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Motivated by a relationship with God, she resisted Nazi persecution and worked with the Dutch resistant movement to hide Jewish people from arrest and deportation. She saved an estimated 800 Jewish lives. These women simply leaned on Jesus, the ultimate source of salvation. And friends, as we inch toward the end of the Easter season with Resurrection Sunday further and further back in the rear view, be at peace knowing that Jesus alone is the source of salvation, not ourselves, not our own abilities, not a podcast, not a politician, a pastor or a pool, only Jesus. He didn't need what first century Jews thought he needed to save and to deliver. He didn't need what the sick man at the pool of Bethesda thought he needed. He didn't need a man in Macedonia to spread the gospel. And he doesn't need what we think he needs either. His grace is sufficient. And when he needs us to move, just like he found the man at the pool and Lydia at the place of prayer in Macedonia, he knows where to find you too. The question that we have to ask ourselves is, do we still trust him? As we prepare to come to the table, I encourage you to consider the problems before you. And then lay down any expectations of how you think you will solve them. Take a few minutes and give that trust back to Jesus. Trust in him. Hands and heart open. Amen.