This sermon was preached at Church of the Redeemer in Greensboro, GA on Sunday, July 26, 2026. The lectionary was for Proper 12A (Track 2) and included 1 Kings 3:5-12; Psalm 119:129-36; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33; 44-52. Sermon audio and text are below.
Gamblin’ on Heaven
Americans have a gambling problem.
Over the last decade, legalized sports betting has swept through the nation. In 2018, Americans spent $7B on sports betting, but by 2025, that number had exploded exponentially, eclipsing $167B.
New York spent the most money last year, a whopping $22B.
While not legal among the red clay and pines of Georgia, thankfully, our barely-northern neighbors in Tennessee spent $5.8B in 2025, or 1% of their Gross Domestic Product.
This craze is quickly reaching the fever pitch of an epidemic.
In legalizing a form of gambling, we have left the lid to Pandora’s box completely open.
Dissent Magazine cites some surveys supplying shocking statistics about this state of affairs:1
- An estimated 1/3 of eleven year-old boys gambled in the last year.
- 42% of bettors admit to spending more money than they should.
- A majority of males between 18-49 have an active, online sports-betting account.
- More than 1/4 of American adults have a daily gambling habit.
- 1 of 5 people with a gambling disorder have attempted suicide.
More than any other addiction.
And the numbers are rising.
Data from Kellogg Insight and research by institutions like BYU show that low-income bettors spend a higher percentage of their income on bets, resulting in increased credit card debt, more frequent bank overdrafts, and reduced long-term investments.
Neil Walsh, the SVP of sportsbook for Hard Rock Bet, said, “This World Cup will go down as the biggest betting event in American history — we’re talking the equivalent of ten Super Bowls.”2
And it’s not just sports.
It’s political speeches, standing ovations at the State of the Union, operations in the Middle East, regime changes across the globe, anything you want.
If you can predict it, you can bet it.
And if you can bet it, you can win money.
And if you can win, you can also lose and lose big.
Why are we doing it, then?
Because we are entertaining ourselves to death.
In our desire to make more, or keep up with the Jones, beat or cheat the system, or simply to anesthetize our anxieties, we have turned to sports betting and futures predictions.
We’re quite literally in debt up to our eyeballs and we still want more of it.
At its core, every wager is an act of faith. Every bet asks the same question: What, or whom, can I trust with my future?
Christ followers are called to trust in something stronger.
Something steadfast.
Something surer.
Our passages show us that the safest, surest bet is not a sports team, player, statistic, political party, stock, or a man-made work. Instead, our readings demonstrate what it looks like to train for the Kingdom by gamblin’ on heaven. In fact, these passages show us the false bet, the better bet, and the sure bet.
We begin with Solomon in One Kings.
Israel is still a unified kingdom as Solomon, the son of David, has ascended to the throne after his father’s death. We’re told that even with a hefty, heavy crown to fill, Solomon “loved the LORD and followed the statutes of his father.”
In One Kings 3, Solomon has gone up to the high place of Gibeon. This would remain the principal high place for Solomon until the Temple in Jerusalem was built.
It was here that God appeared to the King in a dream.
It was also here that the undoing of the kingdom was anticipated.
In this encounter, YHWH says to Solomon, “Ask what I should give you.” This was no small question. It’s as though God said ask me for anything and it’s yours.
It’s a blank check.
It’s the genie in the lamp.
It’s a chance to ask for more wishes, or eternal life, or the Braves to win the World Series.
It’s…well, it sounds miserable.
What does one ask for when he is the strongest, richest king in town?
Talk about paralysis by analysis!
According to the text, Solomon has no problem stating his desire. We should have known what he was going to ask for when we read that he loved the LORD and followed his father’s footsteps as a man after God’s heart. In keeping the covenant, indeed as one who knows the covenant maker-and-keeper, Solomon asks for wisdom to rule the people.
We hear echoes of Moses in this request. Moses knew how vast the people were, how unruly they could be, how precious they were to YHWH, how weighty was the responsibility of leading them. Solomon forsakes all of the personal gains and requests the one thing that will bring him closer to God.
The LORD was pleased. He grants Solomon’s wish by giving him wisdom that exceeded all who had come before and all who would come after. There would never be another like him.
And it worked.
Everything was hunky dory.3
Until it wasn’t.
Solomon won’t be the last king of Israel to place his confidence in the wrong things. He simply became the pattern.
Solomon’s wise reign starts well: with a unified kingdom, he built the Temple in Jerusalem, and he built himself a palace. It all went swimmingly for the better part of three decades…until Solomon broke the covenant and betrayed his covenant-partner. God appears to Solomon a second time, many years after the first, and warns Solomon to remain faithful to him.
But Solomon does not.
He grows his military might, he seeks riches, and his unprecedented hunger for women is so vast that he finds himself in bed – physically and spiritually – with women who worship other gods. He soon follows suit. He worships in the high places, like he did in our passage, but now he’s sacrificing to false gods.
Even the wisest man in Israel can wager his life on the wrong things.
His wealth.
His military power.
His political alliances.
His foreign wives.
His idols.
He gambled everything on the wrong kingdom.
His trust, allegiance, loyalty, and fidelity should have been in God alone, but instead he places it everywhere else. He risks the entirety of his kingdom on false things and he loses. Big. Everything. Upon his death, the kingdom will divide. 19 kings will follow in the northern kingdom and not one of them will be good. The southern kingdom will fare a little better, with several bright spots in an otherwise bleak period. Both kingdoms will ultimately fall to foreign powers.
And it started with Solomon having all the wisdom in the world but not enough sense to stay true to his trustworthy God. Nearly a thousand years later, Israel is still awaiting her redemption and the arrival of her faithful king.
As our Parable Girl Summer continues, Jesus gives us five parables describing the kingdom of God. These parables show us a better bet than Solomon’s false bet.
Remember how last Sunday I told you the parable of the wheat and weeds was one of the few times that Jesus was blunt in assigning parabolic roles with real life counterparts? Good.
I’ve got bad news for you: today’s parables don’t function that way.
These are not stories in which we can find a point-by-point, step-by-step guide toward discovering a lost-and-forgotten Rembrandt buried in someone’s back 40. They are, rather, a descriptive depiction of what the Kingdom of God is like.
We are still in the middle of Jesus’ teaching from the boat. Our first two parables were actually told in between the parables of the sower and the wheat. Jesus’ listeners were not the rich and satisfied. They were the farmers, peasants, laborers, outcasts, and the hungry.
In the first two parables, we see the Kingdom of God looking vastly different that we could have imagined. There’s something hidden and secret about how the Kingdom works. Under the surface, there’s more than meets the eye. The mustard seed is tiny and yet, for Jesus, it grows into a great shrub and tree. No one would have expected it, especially because mustard seeds in that region didn’t become trees like this. The mustard seed is “an image of God’s plenty in a renewed world…This is how God’s reign works.”4
So, too, with the woman making dough. She has prepared bread for the entire neighborhood without anyone knowing it. The amount of flour used would have fed a vast number of people and she hid her leaven within the dough, surprising anyone who would have taken the fresh bread out of the oven. “The whole of the dough then becomes what the leaven was, appetizing as well as plentiful, and giving promise of further growth.”5
No one would have imagined that the tiny seed would become a great tree or that the dough would feed the neighborhood. But the Kingdom doesn’t look like our world because God’s economy operates on an altogether different level. The Kingdom is upside down and God-side up.
The parables about the treasure and pearl show us what it looks like to risk everything on the kingdom. Someone finds a treasure, buries it, and then buys the land. A merchant finds an incomprehensibly beautiful pearl and buys it. In both instances, they sold everything they had to get the treasure.
They risked everything.
They gambled it all away to obtain that which was priceless.
This, says Jesus, is what the Kingdom is like.
The Kingdom is like the mustard seed, the leaven, the treasure, the pearl.
The reign of God is life changing.
And from the vantage point of the parables, these bets are better than Solomon’s because they are founded-and-grounded in the character and power of God.
McGowan suggests, “This is…because God can overcome the barren ground, and the darnel, and lifeless dough, and all else, to make growth from what seems beyond hope, and life from out of death.”6
Privately, Jesus asks the disciples if they understand.
They say yes, although who knows if they were being overzealous. Either way, Jesus concludes his teaching by mentioning training for the kingdom of heaven. This is the end toward which all of this has been pointed. These parables, his teachings and healings, and ultimately his death, are not a form of spiritual advice, self help, or moral guidance. They are, rather, a call for women, men, and children to become citizens in-and-for the kingdom of heaven in the right here, right now.
To risk everything on the Kingdom requires not just a better bet, but a sure bet. And this is how we find Paul in Romans 8.
We pick up where we left off last Sunday. Paul is still waxing eloquent about our status as adopted children of God and co-heirs with Christ. The Spirit remains our intercessor and interpreter, according to the will of God.
But then Paul moves in a different direction…a deeper direction.
He begins with a verse many of us have taken to heart, or even tried to tattoo on our heart: We know that all things work together for good for those who love God.
This might be one of the most misunderstood and misappropriated verses in the Bible. We like to interpret this verse through the lens of me, myself, and I.
As in, things will work out how I want them to.
Or, God helps those who help themselves.
Or, good things come to those who wait.
No matter how we cut it, we are constantly putting the wrong emPHAsis on the wrong syLLAble. The point here is not how things will work out, or even that they will work out, but rather the One who is doing the work in us, through us, and for us.
You cannot gamble everything simply on the idea that it will all work out in the end.
No, our faith and trust has to be thicker, more trustworthy.
Paul tells us instead that we need to go straight to the source.
And the source is the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Remember that Paul is writing to the Christians living in Rome. The Romans will soon sack Jerusalem, Caesars will use Christians as fiery lamps for garden parties, and the Church will move to the catacombs. Such is the life awaiting followers of Jesus in the empirical heart of darkness.
And yet, Paul tells them to have hope because nothing, not even the most cataclysmic and apocalyptic events can ever separate us from the love of God.
Not powers or principalities.
Not military or might.
Not kings or caesars.
Not sins or misdeeds or things that go bump in the night.
None of it.
Listen to Paul here: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Friends, the love of God is stronger even than death, having trampled death and overcome the grave. We know that love to be enacted, embodied, enfleshed in Christ Jesus.
He is the surest, safest, steadfast-ess bet you can make.
All analogies ultimately break down and here is where mine falters: giving yourself fully to Christ and his kingdom may feel risky, but it is neither a gamble nor a wager.
In Christ, we’re playing with house money.
We can risk it all because everything has already been won.
In Christ, the House always wins.
Instead of searching for cheap replicas and knock-offs like sports betting, gambling, drugs, sex, or any other form, substance, person, ideal, or idol, perhaps we should pay attention and heed the advice we’ve received this morning:
Solomon lost it all with his false bet on the wrong kingdom.
The parables show us a better bet of life in light of God’s kingdom.
Paul shows us the surer bet as enfleshed by the love of God in Christ.
We don’t place our trust wholeheartedly in Christ because hard times won’t come or troubles won’t strike. Scripture never promises sunshine, daisies, and sparkles. Instead, we are promised that God will never leave us nor forsake us, that Jesus will be with us to the very end, that he who began a good work in you will see it through to completion, and that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
That’s something worth believing.
That’s something worth gamblin’ everything on.
That’s something you can stake your life upon.
Because we know the One who was, and is, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.
NOTES
- https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/sports-betting-online-gambling/
2. https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/49426841/world-cup-betting-us-equivalent-10-super-bowls
3. My intentional nod to the inimitable Kathy Hilton
4. Andrew McGowan, https://abmcg.substack.com/p/parables-and-other-treasures
5. McGowan, ibid.
6. McGowan, ibid.