Since the video didn’t take, I’ll leave you with this audio re-recording of the homily. Happy Pentecost!
Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA
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I want to start with something the late Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde used to say — and I’m paraphrasing him here, but it went something like this: If you assume people are free, you’ll grow to resent them. But if you realize they’re bound, you’ll have a heart for them.
I think this might be one of the most pastorally useful things I’ve ever heard.
Because here’s what we all do. We walk around assuming that everyone around us (and ourselves, too) is basically a free agent. Making clear-eyed, rational choices. Fully in control of what they do and why. So when someone blows up their own life, or keeps making the same devastating mistake, or hurts the people who love them, we quietly simmer. What is WRONG with them?
There’s a writer named McKay Coppins who spent a year embedded in the world of online sports gambling as a journalist trying to understand what it does to people. And what he found was less about gambling specifically and more about what he calls the “casinofication” of everything.
Picture a sports bar. Full of people watching a game together — cheering, groaning, arguing with strangers. There’s community here. The collective groan creates bonding. All good stuff.
Now picture the same bar. Same people, same game on the TV. But now everyone is on their phone, playing their own private game that no one around them can see. They’re not simply betting on who wins. They’re betting on micro-events only each one, individually, cares about. It’s wild: Apparently, you can bet on whether a Venezuelan drug boat gets blown up between June 1st and 10th. Whether Tom Holland and Zendaya will split up in 2027. Whether famine hits North Korea by winter. (These were real examples Coppins provided). A thousand tiny private games, running simultaneously, in a room full of people who should be together.
Coppins found something in his own experience: when a player he’d bet on fumbled the ball, he didn’t just feel disappointment. He felt hatred. Personal, visceral hatred for a stranger he’d never met. His affections were being quietly reordered by an algorithm, without his consent, and he hadn’t even noticed it happening.
The numbers are staggering. Seven years ago, Americans wagered less than five billion dollars on sports annually. Last year?... A hundred and fifty billion. Nearly half of all men under fifty now have an online sportsbook account.
It gets bleaker: one in five people with a gambling disorder will attempt suicide (a higher rate than most substance addictions). Experts are calling it the next opioid epidemic, and say we’re a decade behind in understanding what’s happening.
This is one specific example of endless examples of what being bound looks like.
The ancient theologians have a Latin phrase for it: incurvatus in se. The will curved in on itself. Turned away from God and neighbor, obsessed with the self and simultaneously the self’s own worst enemy.
We didn’t choose this. But here we are. And you can’t get yourself out of it from the inside.
Look at Peter. Three years walking with Jesus sharing campfires, walks, endless meals. He left his whole former life for this. He knew Jesus. (Can you imagine?) And when the cost finally came — when following Jesus meant risk, exposure, and arrest — Peter saved his own neck. Three times. Not because he was a villain. Because he was us. Even proximity to the most compelling human being who ever walked the earth wasn’t enough to unbind his bound will.
We can’t bootstrap ourselves out of this. We can’t lather up enough sincerity or moral resolve to free ourselves from the inside of a locked room.
Which is exactly the room they were in on that first Easter evening.
The disciples, gathered together. Doors locked. Fear of arrest. Trauma they hadn’t processed. The worst week of their lives, barely behind them. And out of nowhere comes Jesus. Standing in the center of the room. Saying, Peace be with you.
And then he shows them his wounds first. Before anything else, the wounds. He doesn’t show up pretending the bad thing didn’t happen. He shows up wounded, and present, and real.
Then he draws close and he breathes on them. The word John uses here appears in only one other place in all of Scripture: Genesis 2, when God bends down to the dust and breathes into the nostrils of Adam and he becomes a living being.
John isn’t being subtle. This is that moment, again. New creation. The church is born the same way humanity was born: by divine breath, unasked for, unearned, given freely into the face of something that could not give it to itself.
Fast-forward fifty days. Same disciples. Same city. Something happens that nobody planned or manufactured. Violent wind. Flames. These Galilean fishermen begin speaking languages they’ve never spoken, and every person in the crowd (Parthians and Medes and Egyptians and Romans and Arabs) hears it in their own tongue.
Do you remember the Tower of Babel? Humanity was unified; one language, one people. And they decide to build a tower to heaven. This was more about self-assertion than it was architecture.
We will make a name for ourselves. We will close the gap by our own effort.
And they’re scattered. Because how can a project like this maintain any sense of unity? To become self-important, you have to be more-important-than-THEM.
One language becomes many. The community shatters. The will curved in on itself, grasping for its own glory, destroys the very love it was embedded in.
That’s casinofication. That’s being bound. Everyone making a name for themselves. Everyone scattered. We’ve been building that tower for a long time, and we keep ending up in the same place: alone and speaking languages nobody else understands.
But at Pentecost the direction reverses. The human project of Babel goes up and fails. While the divine project of Pentecost comes down to the rubble and restores.
And the crowd’s reaction? They must be drunk.
Peter stands up and says: No... This is what the prophet Joel promised. God is pouring out the Spirit like a libation — like a holy intoxicant — on all flesh.
The western church has spent a long time branding itself as very serious, very sober, very responsible. We’re known as being stagnant and drab; a buzzkill!
But the Spirit isn’t stagnant or drab. The Spirit is not a buzzkill. When the Spirit moves in us, we look like people who’ve been invited to a party with such a generous host that it’s SO good, so undeserved, so liberating, that the only way to describe it from the outside is:
Hey... Are they hammered?
This isn’t enthusiasm you can manufacture. You can’t cure your own casinofication by trying harder not to be casinofied. You can’t unbind yourself from wanting to build a tall fancy tower of some sort.
And before you think this only applies to the wealthy or the addicted, not so fast... The monk in his cell builds the same tower. The activist who has given everything to the cause builds the same tower. The super religious person who never misses a Sunday builds the same tower. The direction and the form of the tower looks different. But the project of self is identical.
What must happen is that you finally, somehow, in your body, believe that the forgiveness is for you. That God’s breath is for you. That the party you assumed was for other, better, more together people... was always already for you. And that belief, when it lands, makes you bold in a way that nothing else does. So bold that you might appear to others as... intoxicated.
So hear this, for whatever your locked room looks like right now.
Maybe it’s debt and shame you haven’t told anyone about. Maybe it’s a private game you’ve been playing that’s hollowing you out. Maybe it’s grief, or fear, or a faith that’s mostly just going through the motions. Maybe you sat down this morning not quite sure why you came.
Welcome to church. And I mean that. Because apparently more people are finding their way back here than anyone expected. After decades of decline, church attendance has stopped falling. And the generation leading the comeback is Gen Z. The young people most saturated by algorithms and apps are now showing up to church more than any other generation. One researcher says it’s because they’re “fed up with a virtual world” and “seeking something real.” I think we’re all tired of casinofication of everything; especially them, since they grew up on it.
So yes, welcome to church.
Jesus sits in this room. Not as an abstraction or a good, heady podcast. But really. In water, word, and wine. He shows you his wounds in the breaking of the bread. He doesn’t pretend the hard thing didn’t happen. And he exhales his eternal, cosmos-creating breath into your lungs.
Peace be with you. Not as you should be. As you are.
Again. And again. And again. However many times the room gets locked.