The Ministry of Small Talk
Sermon — August 30, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
The Presbyterian minister Eugene Peterson once wrote an essay entitled “The Ministry of Small Talk.” He begins it with a story from his youth: “My pastor, during my adolescent years [in the late ’40s] came often to our home. After a brief and awkward interval, he always said, ‘And how are things in your SOUL today?’ (He always pronounced ‘soul’ in capital letters.)” Teenage Eugene never said much; his ordinary thoughts and experiences, he writes, “seemed small potatoes after that question. I knew,” he writes, “that if I ever wanted to discuss matters of SOUL, I could go to him. But for everything else, I would probably do better with someone who wouldn’t brush away as worldly vanity what it felt like to get cut from the basketball varsity.”[1] Eugene had been told—and his pastor had been told, too—that faith was about big questions and weighty demands, not the ordinary struggles of his life.
And, when you listen to our readings this morning, you can kind of understand where they’d get that idea. To be fair, Moses began our story today as an ordinary guy. Sort of. An ordinary guy who’d been miraculously rescued from violence at his birth and adopted by the daughter of the Pharaoh, to be fair. But things have taken a turn since then, and now he’s out there in the field, keeping track of his father-in-law’s sheep. (Exod. 3:1) This is about as normal as you can be in Moses’ day. But not for long. One ordinary day, he sees an extraordinary sight: a fire burning in a bush that is blazing but not consumed. (3:2) He turns aside to look. (3:3) And then comes the dramatic call: “Moses! Moses!” God calls Moses by name and assigns Moses a task: to go and rescue the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Moses shies away. “Who am I,” he says, “that I should go to Pharaoh?” (3:11) Well, you’re his adopted grandson, but we get your point—you’re just a regular guy. And by the way, Moses asks God, “Who are you?” If they ask me, “This ‘God’ who sent you, what’s his name?” what do I say? And God answers, “I Am Who I Am” (and you can hear that God pronounces it in capital letters.) (3:14)
Jesus’ words to his disciples this morning are equally weighty. Immediately before this passage, in our Gospel last Sunday, Peter proclaimed, for the first time, that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” (Matthew 16:16) Now Jesus begins to tell the disciples that he must suffer, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. (16:21) And Simon Peter pulls him aside. Jesus, don’t say that. Don’t do that. “This must never happen to you.” (16:23)
Moments ago, Jesus told Simon he’ll now be called “Peter” because he’s the “rock” on whom Jesus will build his church; now he calls him “Satan,” and tells him he has set his mind “not on divine things but on human things.” (16:23) “Satan” is an interesting choice. In the Bible, Satan is not a generic figure of evil, but specifically a “tempter,” someone who entices Jesus to choose the easy way out rather than the difficult path of faith. Jesus rejects that temptation. He’s headed toward Jerusalem, and toward the Cross. And in fact, he tells his disciples, so are they. “If any want to become my followers,” he says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (16:24) Following Jesus, he says, will be a matter of life and death. And he’s not wrong. Peter and Paul and James, and many more of the early Christians, will indeed lose their lives because they refuse to abandon their faith in Jesus.
Moses experiences an extraordinary call. Jesus describes an extraordinary cost. And the extraordinary ideas in these stories can be hard to translate to the level of our ordinary lives. “Take up your cross,” we sang, as I processed down the aisle. “Let not its weight fill your weak spirit with alarm.” And my weak spirit wasn’t alarmed. My weak spirit was looking out the door and thinking, “Wow, it is just a beautiful day out there today.” “The God of Abraham praise,” we sang, “who reigns enthroned above.” Great hymn! But it feels a little strange to sing these big hymns about the majesty of God and the cost of discipleship on a quiet August morning, when the whole world and half the congregation are trying to squeeze in one last summer weekend, and then to invite you all to join us for a lovely Coffee Hour in the garden’s cool breeze. And that’s not a criticism of the worship planning. It’s exactly the disconnect that Eugene Peterson felt.
Paul’s Letter to the Romans helped me connect a few of those dots, this morning. At first, this passage seems like a series of semi-connected platitudes: “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” (Romans 12:9) “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.” Beautiful. Wonderful. But there’s nothing particularly surprising there. But there is a counter-intuitive edge to some of what Paul says, as well. “Associate with the lowly,” and “don’t claim to be wiser than you are”; (12:16) these are certainly counter-cultural. “Never avenge yourselves” is quite a pacifistic stance, although it turns out we can still “leave room for the wrath of God.” (12:19) But “bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them”? (12:14) That’s really hard. “If your enemies are hungry, feed them.” (12:20) That’s nearly unheard of, in this world. But this, I think, is what it looks like—in a world in which Christianity is not punishable by death—to “take up your Cross.” It means to live out the values and the teachings of your faith in a way that might actually be to your detriment. It means to deny some of the things that you want—like taking revenge on those who’ve wronged you—and to make your own sacrifices for their benefit instead; to feed them with food you’d been keeping for yourself.
Even Paul’s words probably need to be scaled down to our lives. I’ve heard plenty of people say, in reflecting on this passage, that they don’t have enemies. Many of us don’t feel like we are persecuted. Some of us don’t really need to avenge ourselves.
But Paul isn’t writing to Moses or Peter, extraordinary people living extraordinary lives. He’s writing to Prisca and Aquila and Mary and Urbanus and a dozen other people you’ve never heard of, people living more or less ordinary lives. And Paul doesn’t ask them, “How are things with your SOUL?” He tells them to care for the people around them, friends and strangers alike. To bless the people who reject them, who criticize and question them. To choose not to take revenge when people do them wrong; to leave that in God’s hands and to feed them instead. And even this may sound abstract, but I’ve seen the way people drive, and I’ve heard the way people yell at the refs, and I know a lot of people who claim to be pretty wise, and I can tell you: Paul has some good advice.
This is what it means to “take up your cross,” not as an extraordinary act, but as an extraordinary way of living an ordinary life.
There is no life of the SOUL that’s somehow distinct from the rest of life. The soul is what shapes the way you live your life. The small things of life are where the big things of faith are worked out. And that’s the irony of the story that Eugene Peterson tells. That’s the point of entitling an essay “The Ministry of Small Talk.” These so-called “small” things really matter. Learning how to respond well to not making the varsity basketball team was probably the primary opportunity for him to grow that year as a person and as a Christian. But it seemed small beside the command to “take up his cross.” He’d been told that was a “human thing” and not a “divine thing.” He’d been told that Christianity was about things too big to be relevant to his everyday life. What a shame. Because the same great I Am that was there to call Moses was there when Eugene got cut from the team. That same God is there for you and me, amid all the struggles and opportunities of our ordinary lives. If we think that faith’s about something so big that we can’t attain it, then we miss the chance to let a living faith shape the way we live every day. But if we recognize that the cross we bear is sometimes very small, then we might quiet our own minds enough to hear the voice of God speaking to us, as to Moses, encouraging us—however big or small our struggles may be—to “hold fast to what is good.”
[1] Eugene Peterson, “The Ministry of Small Talk,” in The Contemplative Pastor (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1993), 112.
