The Cookie Sermon, Part II

This is the sermon preached digitally by Rev. Dr. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, May 3, 2026, drawing from Acts 7:55-60

You can have all the right ingredients, but if you're not aware of the context, if you're not attentive to the technique, if you don't actually pay attention to what you're doing, simply "having what it takes" isn't enough.

A recipe means…very little, because contextual and situational changes might mean that the same, perfectly measured ingredients behave differently where you are than where I am. For example, thanks to the higher humidity of living close to the ocean during the rainy season, my cookie dough might turn out tackier than yours, even if we use the same ingredients.

So we need to know what result we're looking for, and not just what we mean to put into it.

Stephen, missed the point on this. We can do better.

Thirteen years ago now, and boy does THAT make me feel old, I was just starting my first internship as a seminary student, and I had been tasked with delivering my very first Children's Message.

I was terrified. While I'm sure you all know just how much I love my own children, and I pray every day that they know it too, at the time I was really….really unsure of my ability to communicate well with children who were not my own. Kids can be…difficult to talk to, and their needs are never really super clear, even to themselves, so finding a way to communicate spiritual truth to them seemed outright impossible.

So, in order to prepare for this utterly frightening task ahead of me, I decided that the best thing I could do was to sit down with the one kid I knew I could talk to - my own - and ask them just what they wanted out of a children's sermon. Now, I don't know what I was expecting from this (a deep, thoughtful, even theological response, perhaps?) but the answer I received was, in retrospect, pretty obvious.

I only had the one kid at the time, my eldest, and when asked just what it was they most wanted in a children's sermon they looked at me thoughtfully, considered carefully, and responded with a clear, definitive, one-word answer, filled with clear self-awareness and absolute conviction:

Cookies.

That's right. Cookies.

My kiddo, was absolutely convinced, certain and determined, that the answer to every theological and sociological problem I had, the answer to all my fears about having been tasked with communicating divine truth to a pack of distracted 5-year olds, lie in that fundamental statement of Sesame-Street faith, the Cookie Monster's Creed:

GIVE. ME. COOKIES.

At first, I regarded this answer with about as much respect as I think any parent would, which is to dismiss it as an unserious expression of childhood Id rather than a real desire for spiritual connection, but as the hours turned into days, and the week rolled along, and Sunday morning crept closer and closer as draft after draft found its way into the proverbial trash can, I realized that absolutely nothing I was doing was coming even close to making any more sense than that.

So I stopped writing, and I prayed over it. And I realized…I was hungry.

So…I went to the kitchen, cracked open the cupboard, and started making cookies.

As anyone who's watched or listened to me for any length of time knows, or even anyone who's even been around me for long for that matter, I love to cook. I can't really eat as much as I used to these days thanks to having had my stomach removed a few years back, but that has in no way dimmed my love for cooking. I love to come up with new and interesting flavors, to use food as a means of creative expression.

So, frustrated as I was (and having a kid who, since our conversation earlier in the week, had mentioned their desire for cookies somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 times), I decided to just really go for it, and bust out my absolute best cookie recipe. I was gonna make some seriously gourmet cookies, and my wife, my kiddo, and I were going to give ourselves a stomachache which would make pre-revolutionary French royalty blush at the opulence of it all.

This is that recipe, by the way, which I'm going to show you all now. Papa Bear's Spiced Cherry-Vanilla Chocolate Chunk Cookies.

The recipe itself is pretty simple - I'm putting it up on the screen right now - and it's been adapted from an older, online recipe for Nestle's Toll House cookies, which I have adapted into something even better.

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

3/4 cup granulated sugar

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 generous splash of cherry liqueur

1 generous splash of a nice, sweet, spiced rum.

2 large eggs

2 cups milk chocolate chunks

Now, I'm going to diverge from my "prepared" remarks for a little bit, and we'll actually make the dough together here, together.

[Walk through the process, commenting on the various adaptations and changes, but without calling too much attention to it]

Now, you probably noticed as we went through the process just now, that I didn't exactly do a whole lot of measuring. Not only that, I diverged several times from my own recipe a number of times, even though that recipe was something I had put together myself in the first place!

Truth be told, the same thing happened while I was cooking that first batch of cookies, thirteen years ago, while dreading my first-ever children's message. And it happened then for the same reason as it did now.

Conditions…change.

One of the fundamental truths of cooking is that there really is no way to absolutely account for environmental factors. The same recipe that works one way in San Francisco is going to behave very differently in Colorado, or New Jersey, or Ashiya for that matter. Humidity levels, barometric pressure levels, quality of available ingredients, all these things and more are going to be different every time.

If you stick to the recipe precisely every time, you'll fail nearly every time.

Because you have to adapt, figure out what your target is, and change course regularly to keep yourself pointed at it. You adjust the flower balance, maybe add another egg, maybe whisk in some milk, up the amount of chocolate…any number of things. You watch as the situation unfolds and then, with patience and discernment, slowly make course corrections until, at the very end, you arrive at the perfect cookie.

As I stood there in the kitchen all those years ago, it was at this point I realized that my kid had been right all along. Cookies was, in fact, the utterly correct answer, and not just because showing up with a plate of homemade cookies is the quickest way to earn the friendship of every kid in the room, and most of the adults too. The kids, many of whom were just starting out into a world that was pushing them, hard, into predetermined paths and processes, telling them again and again that things had to be done just so in order to work, they needed to hear that it was ok to adapt, to change, and to take a different path to where they needed to go.

Thus was born…the Cookie Sermon. And let me tell you, my eldest kid…whew…they NEVER let me forget it. Even now, more than a decade later, they'll still come up to me a couple of times a year and ask, "When are you doing the cookie sermon again? Are you doing the cookie sermon again? Can you do the cookie sermon?"

…

"COOKIE SERMON!!!"

Well…that day is today.

Now you may be wondering just what any of this has to do with the scripture passage we have today, and if I'm being honest, I kinda had the same thought when I looked at the lectionary for today. I knew that we were going to be cooking before I looked at the texts, but when I saw that we were getting the death of Stephen I knew that it was time for the cookie sermon again.

You see, as long-time attendees of our Bible Study will remember, Stepehen was a…complicated figure. We read today's passage and think, "Wow, here was a guy who was totally unafraid to stand up, proclaim boldly, and even die for the ministry of Jesus Christ. Here was a guy who really knew what he was supposed to do, had his eye on the prize, and followed through…right to the very end. This was a man who really, really, followed the recipe!"

Well…yeah. I would definitely say that this was a man who followed the recipe but, in light of what we just talked about, I think you'll understand when I say I mean that pejoratively.

If we go back just one chapter, to the beginning of chapter 6, we get the introduction of Stephen to the story, in his calling as the head of the brand-new Deacons:

Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables. Therefore, brothers and sisters, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task, while we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word.” What they said pleased the whole community, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch.

Stephen was called to help neglected widows in their daily distribution of food. But the minute he had hands laid on him, the minute the office of deacon laid upon his shoulders, the minute he realized that he was a "leader of the church," he took off like a shot and tried to do exactly what he'd seen and heard the apostles do: preach, proclaim, and stir up as much of that good trouble as humanly possible.

And…within a chapter, he's dead. Stoned to death because he just wouldn't shut up. Martyred for his faith, he died praising the Lord's name. Everything about this passage is giving hero; dude sounds like a 1st century Iron Man, standing up boldly before the ruling authorities of the time and selflessly giving his life for the nascent faith.

But…what about the widows? Did…did they ever get their food?

You see, Stephen here knew the recipe. He knew that once you became a leader, you went out and added two cups of boldness, two cups of theological proclamation, a pinch of sarcasm, and stirred  the pot vigorously, you'd produce real, faithful leadership. And he followed that recipe precisely.

And he died. Immediately. Having apparently never accomplished the task for which he had been set aside for leadership in the first place.

See…we all too often think we know exactly what walking the path of Jesus looks like, on so many levels. I can't tell you how many people I met along the path to ordination, some very close to me personally, who were long-convinced that they could never be a pastor because they weren't great at public speaking, for example, and they knew that this was part of the recipe for being a pastor.

These colleagues of mine, my wife included, are not only absolutely amazing pastors but, to my mind, even better at being a pastor than I am. Because they embraced humility, set aside their preconception of what they "had" to do or be in order to fulfill their calling, and just…did it anyways.

I can't tell you how many people I've met as a pastor who've told me that they would love to study more, pray more, involve themselves with the ministry and work of doing justice and spreading compassion more, but who firmly believed that they could not fulfill that calling because they were simply…not good enough, not holy enough, not kind enough.

But we don't become finished products by waiting until we have all the perfect ingredients, and then carefully assembling them into a perfect form. We become finished products by taking what we have, knowing what we need to become, and then exploring the different adaptations, substitutions, and changes we have to go through in order to arrive at our destination.

Each of us has our own path to God's calling in our lives, and when we finally arrive at it some of us will be perfectly-toasted Nestle-brand Toll House cookies, sure. But some of us will be Spiced Cherry-Vanilla Chocolate Chunk cookies, some of us will be sugar cookies, or some of us will be peanut-butter cookies. Some of us won't be cookies at all, because the ingredients we have call for sweet bread, or peanut brittle, or something else totally unexpected, but no less wonderful for it.

And when we come to the table together, as we are about to do now, we come bringing the fullness of ourselves as who and what we are; unique creations in Christ, each made with our own distinct recipe, our own distinct process; products of our own distinct path from various ingredients, shaped together with love, brought through the fire singed but changed, and shared with the world as an expression of God's love in infinitely diverse combinations.

Amen.