June 14, 2026
I want to start off by being clear: this scripture is not telling you that you need to attend church every Sunday.
“Do not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some,” would be an easy scripture to nudge, encourage, or maybe even bludgeon people with to say, you need to make sure you’re at church.
But this is about being together, which isn’t always about Sunday morning.
It can be about eating together. Gathering together. Sharing life together in all kinds of ways.
So, I just wanted to get that out of the way.
Did anybody in here watch the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team on Friday night, when they maybe played their best game of soccer ever?
Okay, we’ve got a couple. We’ve got to work on that, people.
Four to one over Paraguay. They were up 3–0 at the half.
Twelve years ago, before the World Cup, there was a chant that started among U.S. Men’s National Team soccer fans:
“I believe that we will win.”
We didn’t win.
We have never won a World Cup. We’ve never made it past the quarterfinals of a World Cup. And still, to this day, if you pay attention and watch World Cup coverage for the U.S., you’ll hear people in the background chanting:
“I believe that we will win.”
This year, we’ve got a better chance than probably any other year, but our odds are still below 10%.
“I believe that we will win” is simply a statement trying to encourage the team toward a hoped-for future that may happen sometime in the next hundred years.
Because soccer has been “about to catch on” for longer than I’ve been alive. Going back to the ’70s, when Pelé came and played in the United States, and Franz Beckenbauer and some of the greats of the time came and played, and crowds were packing out stadiums.
Then in 1994, with the World Cup in the U.S., suddenly people started paying attention until the World Cup was over.
Soccer has always been “about to catch on.” And as someone who’s been watching it avidly for close to 20 years now, I can tell you it has caught on more.
But again, raise your hand if you watched the game Friday night.
Three? Four? I’ve got Craig up in the box.
Five, including me.
Not a lot of soccer fans.
We’re probably not going to win the World Cup, no matter how much we chant, “I believe that we will win,” because that’s a kind of hope that is Pollyanna-ish. It’s a hope that says, if we just say it, it will come true.
It is kind of like the sermon title: The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.
A hope for something we have no control over. No say in. I’m not about to be out there kicking a soccer ball in a World Cup.
When little orphan Annie sings, “The sun will come out tomorrow,” she’s talking about a hope that something good will happen for her.
And a lot of us have those kinds of hopes, right? For our lives. For the world.
Anybody in here hope you’ll win the lottery?
Now, how many of those who raised their hands actually play the lottery?
Smaller percentage.
That’s the kind of hope we’re talking about. If you don’t play, you can’t win. Literally.
But the kind of hope that the author of Hebrews starts with today is not the kind of hope that says, “I hope it’ll happen,” and doesn’t really do anything about it.
Last Monday, when we gathered for Bible study, we read this scripture, and I hoped I would be able to figure it out. Because immediately what was pointed out in Bible study was how much this scripture talked about community, which was what we were imagining a world with more of last Sunday.
And I thought, Oh no, I should have done this scripture last Sunday.
But the thing is, as we talked about it, and as I studied this scripture this week, what I started to notice is that this is a different kind of hope.
The hope that the author of Hebrews starts in with here is not the kind of hope that says we know God is going to make everything work out. And when we say “work out,” we mean exactly the way we want it to go, right?
It’s not that kind of hope.
The kind of hope the author of Hebrews is talking about is a hope in a God who has promised that goodness and mercy, love and grace, and community are enough.
It is the kind of hope that says to us: we do our little parts and know that the rest of it isn’t under our control, but God is at work.
It’s the kind of hope that says:
Gather together regularly and provoke each other.
That’s another word that came up in Bible study last week. Y’all remember any scriptures telling us to provoke each other?
Poke each other with a stick.
“Spur” is another translation of the word.
Literally, take some pointy things in your heels and kick somebody with them.
That’s what it’s talking about: provoking each other to good works.
Because true hope believes that God will work in the face of what frightens us, what seems daunting, what seems like too much.
The divisions that we see in our world, and sometimes see in our churches, can frighten us and make us think, let’s not even try. Let’s just muddle through and hope that it’ll be okay.
But God’s kind of hope says we can face those things that frighten us.
God’s kind of hope says we can do this. We can provoke each other. We can share from the deepest part of ourselves and trust each other to keep on loving, keep on trying, keep on going so that we can learn to be better than we are.
Why do we come to church on Sundays?
To learn to be better. To be followers of Jesus Christ.
We don’t come here just to find comfort and ease.
There are times that we need comfort. There are times when that is exactly what God is going to offer us.
But the author of Hebrews wants to remind us, as a gathered body, that when we get together, we do not do it simply for passivity.
We don’t do it just so everybody can be placid and calm and easy.
Instead, we do it to stir things up.
Because that’s how we learn, and that’s how we grow.
When I was a kid, my parents told me, “Just so you know, your grandparents are kind of racist.”
They didn’t tell me that so I would hate my grandparents. They didn’t tell me that because they thought my grandparents were evil. They didn’t tell me that so I would disown my grandparents.
It was a piece of information about how they had been raised, what they had been taught, and it gave me context to understand what they were doing.
In this day and age, too often, we hear those words and either we say, “Oh, we’re going to shun them,” or we’re going to shun the people who say them.
We break apart and we lose the hope that we can learn together to do better and to be better.
The same grandparents my parents were talking about, I talked about my grandma two weeks ago. When I was in my 20s and entering ministry, she was able to guide me and help me learn how to listen better.
She wasn’t evil.
She took me by the hand and loved me the best she knew how.
And let me tell you something: because we stayed in relationship, because we stayed loving each other, because we as a family learned how to disagree, all of us grew to be better.
There were times we had to challenge Grandma in some of what she said.
And we watched her change and grow because it was never said out of judgment or anger or hatred. It was said in the hope that she could do better. That she, too, could learn in the same way she taught us how to do things, so that we could be better and learn and grow.
And that is the miracle of the hope we have here in a congregation.
Together, we can say things. We can hear things. We can share with each other what we have experienced in our lives. And together, each of us can grow better.
I want to take a quick poll, just to make sure I’m reading this right:
Is there anybody in here who doesn’t need to get better?
I’m not kidding. I just want to make sure.
We need to be provoked.
We need to live in a hope that supersedes the things we don’t think we can overcome.
That is what a world with more hope looks like.
That is how we can be a light in this world.
Last week’s sermon and this week’s sermon, as we are imagining a better world, are centered right here. This is the core piece.
This is what Jesus established: local communities to work together, to learn together, to grow together, to provoke each other from our different experiences and our different understandings, and to stay put.
Our General Minister and President, Rev. Teresa “Terri” Hord Owens, wrote a book called Staying at the Table.
Staying at the table invites us, as Disciples, to be the church we say we are.
A place where we welcome. Where we share. Where we learn together. Where we do not impose beliefs on each other, but instead come to them together.
And that is our hope.
Not that our beliefs can hold us together. Not that our own work can hold us together.
But that in the face of all that may seek to divide us, God and the table of Jesus Christ can hold us together.
When we live with that hope, it frees us from feeling like we have to do it ourselves.
From thinking, Oh, I can’t do this. I can’t say that. I can’t act this way. I can’t talk about that.
Instead, we are able to share and learn together. To hear the experiences of one another.
And it is that which will, as the scriptures tell us, be iron sharpening iron.
That is what will help us grow and flourish.
It is that hope that we live into. That hope which will grow far beyond our imagining.
And the thing about this kind of hope is this: here’s why I think sometimes we want to take a different kind of hope. I have no idea where it’s leading.
True hope, we don’t know the path.
We simply know what we are called to be and to do.
We are to learn from each other, share with each other, grow with each other, and love each other in such a way that the world looks at us and goes:
Something ain’t right with y’all.
Something’s different.
Something’s going on over there.
What is happening?
Did those people stay at the table? Share together? Learn together? Grow together?
We talk a lot about the fact that we know we don’t have to always be right.
But our hope can’t be in the world turning out the way we think it should be.
Our hope instead has to be in the work that is God. What God is doing right here, right now.
In the same way that when we plant a garden, we hope the ingredients are right. We hope that the seed we put into the ground will indeed have the right conditions.
We planted some watermelon seeds back in the middle of May. And if you know anything about watermelon seeds, which we didn’t, they apparently need to germinate in some really warm soil.
We’ve had success with watermelon before, but not because we knew what we were doing.
Does anybody remember what happened weather-wise in mid to late May?
There were days it didn’t get into the 60s, and it rained.
And guess what? After a couple of weeks, we didn’t see anything from the watermelons.
The cucumbers, the squash, the lettuce, the peppers, they’re all growing and looking great. But the hills where the watermelons were planted? Nothing.
Finally, I was like, What is going on with this?
So, I looked it up, and watermelon seeds will not germinate if the soil is less than 60 degrees.
We don’t control the weather.
There will be times when it seems like it’s not going the way it should go.
We keep working. We keep loving. We keep living in this dirty, nitty-gritty, hard hope.
Knowing that that is what God looks like together here when we do what we can.
We all will be better when we learn to love and to share, to stay at the table, to eat together.
There are miracles that will happen.
Paul... no, not Paul. Paul didn’t write Hebrews.
We don’t know who did.
But what the author of Hebrews says when he says not to neglect gathering is really this:
Don’t walk away.
It’s not, you’ve got to be at church every Sunday.
Be at church every Sunday because you love being here.
It’s this:
Don’t neglect because you don’t like this person or that person.
Don’t neglect because you have disagreements.
Don’t neglect because you’re not getting your way.
Stay at the table.
That is what a world with more hope really looks like.
That we know, somewhere in us, that this right here really is enough.
Amen.