Set Free and Welcomed Home--October 31, 2025

 

Set Free and Welcomed Home--October 31, 2025

Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” (John 8:34-36)

This is what Jesus is always doing: finding people who are regarded as less-than and outsiders, and bringing them to belong forever.  He seeks out the folks on the margins and gathers them in. He meets up with the lowly and stepped-on and raises them to places of dignity and honor as members of the family.  Or like the line attributed to Martin Luther puts it, "God is always taking beggars and making them kings."

On this, our final day reflection on the theme, "With Jesus on the Margins" in our year of "Life on the Edge," before a new theme for November closes out the church year, I want to ask us to return to these words from the Gospel that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.  Without getting lost in the weeds in the backstory of this whole passage, let's just zoom in on the imagery of these concluding verses. Jesus imagines a typical ancient household within the Greco-Roman culture of the first century, with which everyone listening to him would have been familiar.  There were family members who all shared biology and therefore official legitimate status in the household: the father and mother, their children, and maybe a generation of grandparents who also lived in the same villa as part of an extended family.  And then there were (at least in many households in the Roman Empire) slaves.  The fact that Jesus acknowledges the institution of slavery in the ancient world is not an endorsement or a statement of his approval of the practice, but rather a description of a reality that everyone in his audience would have seen and known, some perhaps from personal experience.  And if you were enslaved, you were typically treated as less-than.  You didn't control your situation, you didn't control your future, and you or your family could be sold off somewhere else at a moment's notice on the whim of someone else. You were constantly around the other members of the household, but without the sense of permanency, without belonging, and treated without the same dignity or worth as the family members who all shared the same DNA and status before the law.  

Everybody in Jesus' day had seen that; it was a basic reality of daily life for many in the Empire.   One of the particular cruelties of the practice of slavery in any era was just how precarious it made the lives of the enslaved--that you could be shipped off to another place, another family, another job, or another "owner" without any input, or your family, your literal spouse or children, could be sold away as well. And everybody knew the truth of the statement that "the slave does not have a permanent place in the household." That's when Jesus proposes something radical: what if someone who does have a permanent place in the family and who does have authority over the affairs of the household just sets you free? What if, to follow Jesus' metaphor here, someone were to redeem you--to buy you out of enslavement to an old master--and instead of making you a slave to just some new master, what if you were welcomed into the household as a real, full member of the family?  

Could you imagine it?  Well, for one, you would no longer be anybody's property to be ordered about and treated like an object.  You wouldn't be treated as less-than or demeaned. You would know that you, your spouse, and your kids wouldn't be sold away to some other owner without notice. You would know that there was a place at the table where you belonged.  You would know that you, who had previously only been kept at arm's length on the margins to serve the "real" family members were finally at home and were welcomed in with open arms.  If someone who really has permanent standing in a household buys you out of slavery, frees you, and welcomes you into their home and family, it changes everything.  Former outsiders become insiders. The ones who used to be exploited are now treated with honor and dignity.  Those who were constantly afraid about a precarious future now have assurance.  That kind of change surely would have been radical in the first century.

And here Jesus just up and says that's what he has come to do.  For all of us who have been enslaved and captive to the power of sin, Jesus speaks as someone with authority to redeem us--to buy us out of slavery, set us free, and presumably, to welcome us into his new family, where we can share a permanent place in the household of God.  That's what the Good News is really all about, according to Jesus here. He has come to find us while we're stuck in dead-end captivity to our worst impulses and all the ways we have been dismissed as less-than. And he liberates from all that, gives us a permanent place within his own household, and welcomes us to the family table at which there will always be a place set for us.

That's good news we all deeply need.  For whatever ways you have been treated before as an object or a non-person, Jesus says you are an honored member of the family alongside him.  For whatever ways you have felt trapped and captive in old patterns of selfishness, meanness, fear, and greed, Jesus says he has set you free from those old masters and made you a free member of his household. And it's all been a gift.

Hold onto that word, both for the days you need it, and for the times you cross paths with someone else who is desperate for belonging and freedom and the same time.  Go tell everybody--even the face in the mirror--you are free indeed, and you share with Jesus a place in the family.

Lord Jesus, remind us again that you have set us free, and let us be a part of your work to tell others that they are free as well in you.

An End to In-Groups--October 30, 2025

An End to In-Groups--October 30, 2025

"But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the Law and the Prophets, the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus..." (Romans 3:21-24)

When we actually read or hear the Good News of Jesus on its own terms, it sure does reframe the ways we see things--and the way we see ourselves.

Take these words from Paul's letter to the Romans, for example, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday as we (Lutherans) celebrated Reformation Sunday. The apostle does a bang-up job changing our perspective on what the Gospel is really all about.  

In Paul's own day, a great many folks reading (or hearing) his letter for the first time brought a big, worrisome question on their minds: what makes me acceptable (or not) to God?  And of course, there were plenty of competing answers out there to be found.  Some in Paul's audience were certain it had to do with belonging to the right "in-group." If you came from the right heritage, spoke the right language, knew the right culture and customs, and kept all of those well enough, then you could reasonably claim to be acceptable to God.  Some were confident that their ancestry in the family line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the key; others believed that following the food restrictions or ceremonial rituals like circumcision was what made you belong.  In other words, some folks listening to Paul's letter were convinced that being acceptable to God was an us-versus-them kind of thing: if you're on the inside, you've got God's favor, but if you are an outsider on the margins, tough luck.  But Paul doesn't talk that way, does he?

Others in the house churches where this epistle was first read were convinced that God's acceptance depended on performance--how well did you do with keeping the commandments, how frequently did you break them, and how significant were the infractions?  This, of course, led to a lot of folks playing that oh-so-tempting game of "Your-Sins-Are-Worse-Than-Mine," where some would put the worst possible spin on what "THOSE people" were doing, while putting their own transgressions in a more respectable light.  The goal of this alluring exercise is--yep, you guessed it--once again, to create a category of "acceptable" people like me, whose sins are minor, piddling, and trifling, and another abominable category of "unacceptable" people, whose sings are dastardly, malevolent, and unforgivable.  See how it works?  If I can tell myself that MY sins aren't disqualifying--they're really not so bad, right?--and then persuade myself at the same time that those OTHERS are guilty of far worse things by comparison, I fool myself into thinking that I'm acceptable to God by sheer comparison.  At least I'm not like THEM, right?  And we're right back to imagining that our acceptability to God is an us-versus-them thing once again.  And that just ain't right--not according to Paul (who knew something about being an outsider who was welcomed in, since he had been Chief Enemy of Christianity for a good while before Jesus got a hold of him).

Paul insists that God's acceptance of us--what we sometimes call "justification"--doesn't depend on being in the right group, carrying the right credentials, or having a better morality score than somebody else.  It never has depended on that, Paul says!  Even Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--the very founding pillars of the ethnic group of Israel--weren't made right with God because of their DNA, their culture, their language, or their heritage.  And even Moses the great Lawgiver wasn't accepted because of his comparative grades on rule-following.  They were all accepted by grace, as a gift, and that gift can only be received by sheer trust in the Giver.  And for that matter, they were all lacking perfection points in the holiness department, just like all the rest of us.  According to Paul, God has never been in the business of grading us on our performance or checking our pedigree as the basis for accepting us or not.  His way of saying it here is, "there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus."  See?  No dividing up the world into acceptable, lovable "insiders" and disgusting, detestable "outsiders." Only the same free gift of grace, no matter where you came from, no matter your cultural heritage, and no matter your past performance. All of us have fallen short and missed the mark, and all of us are presented with this gift of acceptance from God through Christ.

All of this is to say that if our understanding of the Gospel comes out as "Christianity versus... " somebody else, we've lost the plot. If we think that the Good News is "Join US so that God will love you because you won't be one of THEM!" we have misunderstood what makes it good and news. No, genuine "redemption in Christ Jesus" breaks down the us-versus-them nonsense once and for all. Paul says this was never an us-versus-them kind of thing. In fact, it's not even been an us-versus-God or a them-versus-God thing, either. God has chosen to take the side of all humanity, so to speak, in Christ, and is there's a side God is against, it is God's commitment to stand against our sin and blot it out through Christ, not counting it against us anymore.

In fact, the Scriptures insist all of us would have been outsiders on our own, but God has just up and declared that we are not only "acceptable" in a hypothetical sense but that we are indeed accepted and welcomed in, all as a gift of grace through Christ. All we can do is trust that the gift has been given, but not as though it's the quality of our trusting or the fervency of our believing that makes us acceptable.  We can only trust that what God has already given to us by grace really is ours.  We don't have to try and elbow somebody else out so that we can take a spot from a limited number of empty seats in God's good graces.  We can admit that we've all blown it, without comparing my sins to yours, and then we can also believe the promise that we've been accepted by God apart from our achievements, group-member bona fides, or religious performance.  It's all been through Christ, and it's all been a gift.

Could we dare to believe it's true?

And would we let that truth reframe the way we see other people, so that we quit making everything into a competition or a battle of Me-and-My-Group against You-and-Yours?

That might just change everything in this new day.  Let's find out.

Lord Jesus, enable us to trust the promise of your grace with no more need to pit ourselves against someone else.

After the Last Checkmate--October 29, 2025

After the Last Checkmate--October 29, 2025

"Come, behold the works of the Lord; 

     see what desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
     he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
     he burns the shields with fire.
‘Be still, and know that I am God!
     I am exalted among the nations,
     I am exalted in the earth.’
The Lord of hosts is with us;
     the God of Jacob is our refuge." [Psalm 46:8-11]

There's an image burned into my brain from decades-old memories of watching Star Trek reruns in the basement of my childhood home. Maybe you can picture it, too, if you are willing to own your inner Trekkie. It's that game they would sometimes play on the original series and occasionally on the spin-offs: the "three-dimensional" version of chess.

To refresh your memory (or to offer a sketch of it if you never indulged in the show), three-dimensional chess has multiple flat game boards of different sizes, each at different heights off the table. And in fact, you can buy 3-D chess games in all sorts of variations and names: Parmen, Raumschach, Tri-D Chess, and so on. And as much as these games all try and present themselves as some radical new innovation in game-playing, they are really still all just variations on the same old goal: checkmate. Whether it's the standard flat chessboard or an officially licensed Star Trek commemorative edition three-dimensional set, the game is still based around one side defeating the other by taking your opponent's king, and quite often taking out most of the opponent's pieces in the process. They're all really just various re-packagings of the same old game.

And while that is a classic game, and there is plenty of mental stimulation to be gleaned from a good game of chess, that's really not a very "new" kind of game. Winning by slowly killing off your enemy or cornering their leader is old hat. It is the same game the human race has been playing since Cain decided the only way to deal with the envy he had for his brother was to murder Abel rather than to work on himself. It is the same old game by which humanity has been amusing itself to death since the beginning. It always boils down to Team A against Team B, whether the teams are tribes or nations or kingdoms or campaigns, and "victory" is always defined by ridding the game board of your opponent, or capturing their king. You can add as many game boards as you like, or make the game pieces sleek and futuristic or old and hand-carved, but you are still basically playing the same tired old game that is the only way human beings seem to know how to play, when we are left to our own worst devices.

But... the story of God is different. God doesn't go for our tedious game-playing. God has come up with an entirely different kind of victory. You can hear it in the words from the Psalm about God breaking the weapons of war and bringing war to an end everywhere. It is there, in fact, throughout the Scriptures, but we often do not have the eyes to see it, or we don't realize what radical things are being said about our God. Perhaps we do not expect so revolutionary a deity, or we are consciously trying to tame the divine so that we won't be challenged ourselves. But this is the radical way God wins: God's victory comes by breaking open our old us-versus-them thinking and transforms "the enemy" while embracing them. God's kind of victory isn't just "I have more swords and spears and shields than you, and so my team is going to win," but rather God snaps all of our spears on the divine knee like twigs, and God destroys all of our weapons of war for killing each other... because God has it in mind to reach everybody.

Everybody.

See, if you can only see the other person as an enemy, you will see the only possible resolution to your conflict as a win-or-loss zero-sum-game, and it will never cross your mind that you could end the conflict not by killing the enemy or beating them in a campaign or a plundering their treasures, but by transforming them into friends. But God sees the game board differently. Just adding more layers to the chessboard isn't enough for God--God changes the game entirely, by making our wars to end. God clears the table of the old knights and castles and pawns and sets up a new game altogether.

God offers us a new way of thinking, a new way of winning, and a new kind of victory. It will always be a tough go to seek that kind of victory, especially if you are still engaged with folks who don't understand, or won't understand, and can still only think in terms of Cain 'winning' against Abel and one player kill the other player's king in chess. For the people of God, it will always feel like a struggle in which we have fewer "weapons" than those who see themselves as enemies, because being a part of the Reign of God means we don't use their weapons or fight on their terms. It means we are not looking to 'get rid' of anybody, but to be transformed together in the likeness of Christ. I cannot share the news of the extravagant love of God with you if I can only see you as an enemy, and I certainly would not be willing to let you help me see my own blind spots if I can only see you as an opponent. But the people of God dare to believe that God doesn't just win wars by picking Side A over Side B--the Scriptures talk about God ending wars all together--bringing an end to the rotten old zero-sum-game kind of thinking. The Scriptures want us to see the world in a very different way from what we were used to--and the world around us can only think in terms of beating the opponent, rather than being transformed by the victory of grace.

The followers of Jesus are taught to look for a different kind of winning altogether. We don't plunder from the "losers." We don't gloat over the defeated. We don't use violence or threats to get our way. We don't kick the defeated ones out onto the margins on the sidelines or banish them forever into the penalty box. We don't even look at ordinary 'wins' and 'losses' as the world sees them as God's way of picking sides--God, after all, has a way of siding with the losers, rather than the so-called "winners" in the story of the Bible. We aren't looking to solve our problems by cornering the opponent's king on the chessboard--for us, the last checkmate has already taken place, when our King sacrificed himself to break open the whole old order of us-against-them that had been writing the rulebook since Cain and Abel. And the resurrection is the evidence that God's way of winning worked--instead of destroying enemies, God has destroyed the old order of things so that enemies can become beloved. And thus Jesus' great prayer of victory is, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do," rather than a gloating cry that God must be on the winning side. Jesus wasn't, to any outside observer, on the winning side at the cross--but that is exactly the point. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it once, at the cross, "God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross." God's kind of victory doesn't kill the enemy; it absorbs death and hate and breaks their power and the cycles of revenge they keep feeding. For us, the last checkmate has already happened. God has begun a new game altogether.

Today, how will we treat people differently if we are caught up in God's new kind of victory? It's your move.

Lord Jesus, let us be transformed by your wonderfully upside-down way of winning the victory, and let us love those whom we have seen as our enemies, not to appease or endorse, but to return good to them even when we have received evil.

The Refuge in Our Ribcages--October 28, 2025

The Refuge in Our Ribcages--October 28, 2025

"There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.
     God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved;
     God will help it when the morning dawns.
The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter;
     he utters his voice, the earth melts.
The Lord of hosts is with us;
    the God of Jacob is our refuge." [Psalm 46:4-7]

Lately, the words of this ancient psalm, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, have been mingling in my mind with two unlikely collaborators: Billy Joel and a relatively obscure medieval Icelandic hymn-writer named Kolbeinn Tumason. Yeah--the running playlist in my head is a real grab-bag.

But there's a common thread. There's a tune of Billy Joel's I have loved for decades, called "And So It Goes." It's less piano-pounding or storytelling than a lot of Joel's classics, and more like a hymn. He starts with this simple metaphor:

"In every heart there is a room,

A sanctuary safe and strong,

To heal the wounds from lovers past,

Until a new one comes along."

I suppose you can either read that lyric hopefully--as though the next new love in the singer's life will finally be "The One"--or more cynically, as if to say that there's no such thing as "The One," but that we humans just keep living through relationships until they blow up and then wait for someone else to fill that empty space in our lives and do the same thing all over again. Honestly, I'm not sure on which side Billy Joel would come down for that question--maybe it would depend on the day... or the album.

But the image that has been sticking in my head is his image of the heart as a sanctuary, or a stronghold. It reminds me of a 13th century hymn text called (in the Icelandic) "Heyr Himna Smidur," and which is often translated "Hear, Smith of the Heavens." It's a prayer to God who is both the "smith of constellations" and yet who cares about the cry of the suffering soul. And in the second stanza of the hymn (again, in translation), the author calls on God to "drive out every human sorrow from the city of the heart," or "from the heart's keep." It's again that image of the heart as a fortified place--like an ancient city or a stronghold.

Sometimes I forget that ancient cities were primarily defined, not by their sports franchises or skyscrapers, but for the defense they offered inside fortifications, bulwarks, walls, and ramparts. People today like to complain about cities for being crowded and congested, or even crime-infested, or for being overflowing with ornery people pushing and shoving their way through traffic, but in the ancient (or even medieval) mind, the city was an image of refuge. Cities were safe places because when an invading army came, you could safely live inside its defenses and outlast the besieging enemy. Cities were places you went, not just for the cosmopolitan commerce, but because you could be relatively safe from outside attack once you were inside.

On top of that, there were a number of cities set aside in the Torah as "cities of refuge" or sanctuary, where people could go if they had accidentally committed a serious crime like manslaughter and start a new life. There were apparently no other requirements or conditions for finding refuge in one of those cities, other than that you were in need of a place to start over. It is interesting to me that, for as much as we may associate the Old Testament with a bloody "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" kind of retaliatory justice, how much the Torah itself actually makes surprisingly merciful provisions for bad situations like this--that you could simply present yourself at one of these "cities of refuge" and they would take you in, no questions asked, so you would not have to fear someone seeking vengeance coming after you. It is one more image of the city as a place of safety rather than of fear, and of sanctuary rather than anxiety--all of it right from the Bible.

And so it strikes me that the ancient psalmist describes God dwelling among the people in a city, and seeing that as an image of refuge, of safety, and of relief. God is in the city--with the people--and therefore, they don't have to be afraid, even when there are scary things going on outside the fortifications. The nations may rage outside, but within the gates of the city, there is sanctuary for those who are afraid. The angry enemy seeking revenge may be off in the distance, but you can find a home and a new beginning in the city of refuge. No wonder the ancient people of Israel and Judah thought of the city as an image of comfort and safety. God was there, welcoming the weary and defending the fearful.  In a sense, the poet here is describing God as the place of refuge, like we heard yesterday in our devotion from the opening verses of this psalm, where God is call "our refuge" or "our stronghold." The ancient psalmist invites us all, whatever we have been running from and whatever troubles have been hounding us, to come to God, who is our sanctuary city, and who doesn't blush at all over that invitation.

Well all of that brings me back to Billy Joel and the old Icelandic hymn, too. We don't live in walled fortresses anymore, because we don't live in an era of medieval threats like horse-mounted armies or battering rams anymore. Those kinds of defenses are not practically useful anymore, but the idea of finding refuge in God, of taking comfort in God's presence, still has staying power. And I rather think that the psalmist would be OK with us making that move--of saying that God isn't limited to literal cities or physical fortresses, but that as God dwells in our hearts, there is a refuge within us there, too. God still creates cities of refuge and sanctuary within each heart--yours and mine--and gives us strength from the inside out when it feels like everything around us is swirling around in chaos and anger.

So Billy Joel is on to something when he sings that "in every heart there is a room, a sanctuary safe and strong." But the most he seems to be able to hope for is that some new lover will "come along" to fill the empty space of that sanctuary. But maybe that's not enough to hope for--with all due respect to the Piano Man. Maybe the right prayer is more like the voice of "Heyr Himna Smidur," that calls out to God to cast out sorrow from the "city of the heart," and to be our refuge by being right there in the midst of the darkness with us.

The psalmist seems to point us in that direction, too. God isn't just the one we rely on "on the rebound" in between lovers, like Billy Joel suggests, but God is the one who hallows the sanctuary space within us and strengthens our hearts like a fortified city, so that we can face whatever else is going on outside.

That's ultimately the promise that keeps me going--that for whatever things are going around outside, that the living God is with us, making even our own hearts into cities of refuge and sanctuary. God doesn't fill in the empty space in your heart or mine--no, that room needs to be held sacred and sturdy for the times we'll need to find refuge there when it feels like the rest of the world is falling apart or beating down the door. But there inside that space, the living God speaks the words, "Be still, and know that I am God," and makes us able to endure.

Thanks be to the God who is here among us now, creating a refuge in our ribcages, and setting up a home within the city of the human heart.

Lord God, be our refuge today--for whatever we have been running from. Lord God, be our stronghold today--for whatever we have been afraid of.  Be our sanctuary city.

Good News for Refugees--October 27, 2025

Good News for Refugees--October 27, 2025

"God is our refuge and strength,
    a very present help in time of trouble.
 Therefore we will not fear,
    though the earth should change,
    though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
    though the mountains tremble with its tumult." [Psalm 46:1-3]

Let's get the promise straight: God is our refuge through trouble, not our hall-pass or get-out-of-jail-free-card to avoid trouble altogether.

The difference is important. God's love for us endures and sees us through the times when everything else in our lives feels like it's been shaken to its core. But that is not the same thing as saying, "If you believe in God, nothing in your life will ever get shaken like that in the first place." It does. Sometimes everything else comes crumbling down, and sometimes the waters really do rage and roar. Sometimes the things we thought were solid and unchanging buckle under pressure, and that reality does not mean God's love has faltered, faded, or given out on us. It means that God's love is not bound to the durability of anything else in our lives. There is no fine print, no expiration date, no set of cleverly-worded loopholes, and no escape clauses for God to squirm out of enduring it all with us. God's love doesn't keep us out of the turmoil and tumult--it holds us safe through all of that, like a castle, a fortress, or... a refuge.

These verses from Psalm 46, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday for Reformation Sunday (or maybe even sang in paraphrase form, if you sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"), offer a beautiful and comforting image that way.  God is depicted as a "refuge," or like a "stronghold," or even an ancient walled city inside of which people can be safe from whatever dangers are whirling around beyond it.  The idea, of course, is that we are held within the protection of those castle walls, but of course, the fortress takes the pummeling from whatever is outside.  Earthquakes or landslides?  The fortress will keep us from being swallowed up by tumbling mountains.  Swirling seas or raging storms?  The fortress will absorb the fury of the wind and the waves.  Enemies with flaming arrows or catapulted projectiles?  They will hit the castle in which we have taken refuge, so that we are held safe because we have fled there for protection.  It's a beautiful image of God's willingness to take the hit for us, but it also means acknowledging that there will be times when all other defenses have failed and no other shelter is reliable.  And we will find ourselves as refugees seeking a safe place within the embrace of a God who welcomes people from out on the margins, outlands, and unsafe places on the edges to be gathered inside.

I suppose that's the implication of calling God our "refuge"--it means we're going to find ourselves in the position of refugees at some point and in some way in our lives. There will be times that the other things we had counted on for security (we don't have to list them all, but our money and investments, our property and possessions, our health and if we're lucky our health-care, and our relative insulation from the hardships of the world) fail on us. And when that happens, the Scriptures point us to God's love as a safe place to find shelter, like townspeople hiding inside the castle walls of a fortress while the war rages outside the gates.  That's the picture: God is the castle who bears the incoming arrows and projectiles of the attacking enemy outside the walls, the one whose love endures all the bombardment and bears the damage for our sake. God is the shelter when the storm comes... but that is different than saying it will never rain. It's like that achingly beautiful lyric of Leonard Cohen, "Every heart, every heart, to love will come--but like a refugee."

It's important for our faith to get this clear, both to make sure we're not imagining Christianity as some kind of silver bullet or magic charm that keeps bad things from happening to us, but also because it reminds us that God is willing to bear the fury of whatever trouble or turmoil is swirling around us. The image of a refuge is exactly that of a place that gets beaten by the wind and hail so the people under its shelter are not hurt, or the walls of the fortress that keep the people inside safe from fiery arrows by absorbing their impact into its own stone. To say that God's love endures means that God is willing to bear all that damage and destruction for our sake. And that also means that, if you find yourself going through a time of stress and storm, it's not a sign that God has failed you or abandoned you. It means God is willing to go through it with you and bear the trouble along with you while you go through it.

Someone you cross paths with this week needs to hear that. Someone you will talk with could use the reminder that God will be with them through their storm at the moment. Someone you can check in with might just need your voice assuring them that if they feel like a refugee, fleeing from trouble to find some place to shelter them, that God has already signed up to be our refuge.

Whatever comes today, that's the promise of God. Whatever comes, God is our refuge and strength.  That's good news for refugees--if only we can dare to admit that's what we are.

Lord God, help us today with the troubles roaring around us and in the world, and be a refuge for all who are in need of shelter from harm today.

Blessed and Broken--October 24, 2025

Blessed and Broken--October 24, 2025

The same night [Jacob] got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. (Genesis 32:22-31)

Reading strange and ancient stories like this one feels like paging through the old family albums of the people of God.  

Just like every family has its own curious stories from generations past--how they left the "old country" and decided to settle here, who met a famous person from history in a chance encounter, or what it was like to survive an earthquake or a blizzard, and the like--the Scriptures are full of these wild and weird stories we don't quite know what to do with.  They aren't really fables with a moral lesson, and they are often mysterious with ambiguous endings.  But earlier generations held on to them and passed them along to us, and sometimes all we can do is just tell it to the next generation with a look of bewilderment as if to say, "I don't quite know what this all means, but I have more than a hunch that you might encounter God here," and trust that they'll retell the story to the ones who come after them.

This story from Genesis, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, is one of those stories, with all the dials for strangeness and mystery turned up to eleven.  Here we meet the figure of Jacob, who will eventually become known as a great patriarch and founding figure of the people of Israel, who will trace their lineage through his many sons back to him, his father Isaac, and his grandfather Abraham as the covenant people of God.  At this point, though, Jacob is on the run and out of options.  As a young man he had ruined his relationship with his parents and brother Esau by conning the family birthright out of Esau and tricking his father to give him the family blessing.  So he ran away, as fast as his little legs could carry him, and found some long-lost relatives in a far country, where he worked for a number of years for his uncle Laban.  There, Jacob and Laban went back and forth scheming and tricking each other over a number of years, with the upshot being that they eventually decided they had better part company before one of them did something truly rotten to the other. So, with another bridge burned and nowhere else to go, Jacob decided to go back to the land where he had last seen his brother and parents. Now, the older man Jacob has two wives and two concubines, a mess of kids, a decent list of assets, and an existential dread about what will happen when he finally does have to face his brother Esau (who did want to kill him, the last time they were in the same place). So, on the night before he will have to face his family again, and all the danger it is likely to bring, Jacob sends his family across the Jabbok River ahead of him (in what amounts to a sort of human-shield situation--Jake isn't very brave at this point).

And there, Jacob is left--alone.  He is as out on the margins as one can be: cut off from every relative he had tricked, conned, or swindled, and now even separated from all of his possessions and kids, as he sits in the dark stewing.  Jacob has never been much of a moral example, and a more respectable deity wouldn't want to be caught dead around a guy like him.  Blessedly for Jacob, there is a God who doesn't particularly care about looking respectable, and who is willing to meet him on the margins so that Jacob can wrestle with who he really is--or who he could become.

Of course, that's the really weird part of this story: out of nowhere, a figure comes to wrestle with Jacob, literally. Like honest-to-goodness rolling around on the ground, pinning and holding and struggling, real wrestling.  And all night long, nobody seems to come out on top--until, just before dawn, the mysterious Stranger punches Jacob in the hip socket, putting it out of joint.  In the exchange that follows, Jacob wants to know the identity of his opponent and tries to scheme a blessing out of him in the mean-time (Jacob is really all about taking as much as he can from the world at this point). And there, the anonymous assailant both blesses Jacob and gives him a new name: Israel, which means something like "strives with God," with the explanation that he has "striven with God and with humans and prevailed." Jacob takes it to mean that he has been in the very presence of God this whole time somehow in the one wrestling with him, and he names the spot "Peniel," which means "Face of God," since he believes he has seen the very face of God there. And now, as the sun comes up, he heads in the direction of his waiting family on the other side of the river, and the encounter with his estranged brother that is waiting beyond.  The outcome of that encounter is still very much uncertain, and there is still plenty of reason to be fearful of what will happen next.  But he is a new man--Israel, the wrestler-with-God--and no longer has to be defined by his old identity (the name "Jacob," by the way, means something like "usurper" or "guy who takes other people's stuff").  

And there is one other change in this patriarch of the children of Israel: he is walking with a limp now, and for the rest of his life in fact.  While that might seem like a punishment or a curse, I'm not so sure.  For one, it means he cannot run away anymore.  He just isn't fast enough for that. Jacob/Israel will walk with a limp as both a sign that he has been touched by God in the very act of being blessed, and a way of preventing him from running away from his problems anymore.  He won't catch the last train out of town every time he strains a relationship with someone else anymore, and he won't be able to burn bridges with people as a coping strategy.  Jacob will now be in a position to face the consequences of his actions, to make different decisions with the people in his life, and maybe to be mature enough now not to ruin things with other people anymore.  The change has come because he is, simultaneously, broken and blessed at the same time.  And God has met Jacob right where he was, out on the margins, in that liminal space by the side of the Jabbok between all of his past failures and a new chapter of his future.

Like I say, it's a strange story, but not one without hope.  It doesn't offer a formulaic promise to us for how to get a new lease on life, nor a moral lesson threatening a comeuppance for schemers and swindlers.  But it does give us a glimpse of the living God as One who is willing to show up in spite of our worst choices and bad habits, in our deepest desperation, and through both blessedness and brokenness.  And maybe in that we discover that we could meet God in our own experiences of brokenness, and that God might just transform those broken places into marks of blessing.  Maybe we discover that, like the bread every Sunday, we can ourselves only be blessed at the very same time that we are broken, as the loaf is fractured and shared to be given to empty hands.  And maybe whatever frightening, anxious Jabbok moment you are facing is not godforsaken, but could be the very place where God comes to meet you in a way you did not expect, and bring something new out of you that you did not know was there, waiting to be called into existence.  Maybe in the place of brokenness, God will show up mysteriously, anonymously, and call you by a new name. Like I say, a more respectable deity might not show up in those marginal places in the midst of our messes--but lucky for us, our is a God who doesn't particularly care about looking respectable. 

So may you find blessedness in your brokenness.  May you see God meeting you in those times of utter aloneness and the times of struggle.  And may you hear your new name called when the voice tells you that you are a new creation, even if it means walking with a limp, too.

Lord God, meet us in our desperation and loneliness, and bless us in the place of our brokenness, to be new creations.

Jesus' Words on Jesus' Terms--October 23, 2025

Jesus' Words on Jesus' Terms--October 23, 2025

"For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but, having their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, be sober in everything, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully." (2 Timothy 2:3-5)

It is fascinating--and in all honesty, more than a little terrifying--how many times I've heard folks put their own words into Jesus' mouth.  And part of the terror, I'll confess, is that when I see it around me from others, it reminds me (with a hard gulp) that I had better check myself for the ways I'm tempted to put my own words, my own wishes, my own pet priorities, and my own agendas into Jesus' mouth, rather than letting his way, his message, and his gospel flow out of mine.

Some examples are obvious, and I bet you've heard some of them, too.

"God helps those who help themselves." (Sorry, that's Ben Franklin, not Jesus.)

"Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime." (This one has been attributed to writers as varied as Lao Tzu to Maimonides to Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, but none of them are Jesus.)

"Everything happens for a reason, and God won't give you more than you can handle." (Both of those are really sort of faux-inspirational generalities that could mean anything or nothing, but you won't find Jesus saying either sin the Gospels.)

And of course, deep down, I suspect a lot of us secretly operate with the unspoken assumption that Jesus said, "I hate all the same people you do, and my politics align perfectly with your registered party."  But that one's a lie, too--maybe the most insidious of them all.

On the flip side, I've also heard plenty of folks dismiss as dangerous nonsense or unpatriotic subversiveness the actual words of Jesus, and I'll bet you have, too.  

"What are we supposed to do when someone wrongs us?  Love our enemies?  Turn the other cheek?"  (Uh, yes, actually.)

"Now you're telling us to share our abundance?  What are you, a Marxist?"  (No, that's Jesus, quite literally on numerous occasions.)

"Blessed are the poor?  And the peacemakers? Well, that won't make for a very fierce military culture or train kids to be ambitious!"  (Maybe not, but the question at hand is about what Jesus teaches....)

You get my drift.  It seems that a great many of us Respectable Religious Folks want Jesus, but really only as sort of a figurehead--we'd like him to endorse our personal philosophies, political platforms, and economic priorities with his stamp of approval, and we'd like the editorial right to censor out the things we don't care for from his message and way of life.  Then, if someone criticizes our opinions, we can tell ourselves "They're attacking Jesus, God, and all that's holy! They're persecuting Christians!" when really, they might just be pointing out the ways we've tried to make Jesus our ventriloquist's dummy.

Well, it's worth noting that this is not a new concern, and ours certainly isn't the first generation of Christians to be tempted to listen only to the messaging we want to hear.  That concern is here in the New Testament itself, in this passage that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday.  The apostle, speaking to a young pastor-in-training, warns, "For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but, having their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths."  You know, I used to hear these verses like it was some sort of bold and ominous prediction of some distant future (and plenty of TV preachers and self-deputized parachurch spokesmen always seemed to think this was just about the contemporary era, and their preferred targets!).  But the more I read the Scriptures, and the more I study history, the more it seems like this is a perennial and pernicious temptation of every age--and we keep wanting to do it!  Apparently the early church struggled with the impulse to distort or twist the Gospel into something else other than the audacious message of the grace of God in Christ.  

And ever since, each generation has faced new counterfeits: from "Let's make Jesus the official mascot of the Roman Empire!" in the time of Constantine to "Jesus needs us to conquer and take back the Holy Land, so we're going to war in his name!" during the Crusades, to "You can buy your loved ones out of a post-mortem period of suffering in purgatory with sufficient donations to the church" in the era leading up to the Reformation, to "Jesus will rapture away his chosen saints while the rest of the world suffers through misery in the end times" when that notion was invented in the 19th century in England, to "Everything is just going to get better and better until we create the perfect Kingdom of God on earth through the help of good morals and human ingenuity" in the years before the first World War proved that one wrong.  Of course, there are plenty of other examples--these are just some easy, low-hanging fruit. The point is that the temptation to listen only to the messages we want to hear, and to selectively cultivate the messengers we want to hear from, has been around basically since the day after Easter Sunday.  Heck, even on the day of Jesus' ascension into heaven, some of his disciples were asking him if he was planning on setting up a kingdom on earth right then, and he had to do a last-minute course-correction on the spot!

So what do we do about this "ear-tickling" temptation to self-select only the parts of Jesus' way that we already like or agree with?  What do we do, once we have named how often and how easily folks like us, who name the name of Jesus, dress our own agendas and philosophies in a robe, sandals, and fake beard to claim to be Christ-like--assuming, of course, that we don't want to fall into that trap? Well, maybe that's the first thing we need to establish: if we are sincerely seeking to be disciples of Jesus, rather than exploiters of Jesus, then we need to start by agreeing that we are not going to actively try to co-opt Jesus to back our pre-existing political, economic, or personal commitments.  It may well be that what I already think turns out to line up with Jesus on X or Y or Z matters, but we don't select which parts of the way of Jesus we like based on what I want to be true, but rather, we let Jesus be the one to shape us, even when that means unlearning old, crooked, unjust, unkind, or ungracious habits and beliefs in order to let Jesus re-form us, as often as he needs to.

Once we can agree on that point, I think the next point is exactly what these verses from 2 Timothy model for us: a commitment to mutual accountability.  In other words, we commit to one another to help see the ways that each of us attempts to remake Jesus in our own image, rather than letting him shape us in his way.  And when you catch me covering my ears to some part of Jesus' teaching (say, maybe I'm having a hard time with showing kindness to that person who really irritates me, even though Jesus makes love for enemies a clear priority of his way of life), you can step up and help me to hear what I've been ignoring.  When you have been confusing your political party's talking points with the Gospel of Jesus, then other disciples may step up and ask you to re-examine where your commitments come from--even just to get you to start raising questions about things you had never thought to ask about.  We do this together, back and forth, helping one another to identify the things we couldn't see in ourselves, and helping one another to hear the voice of Jesus more clearly above the other noise competing for our attention.  And we do it, not to be mean, or to catch someone else in an embarrassing "gotcha" moment, but so that all of us can more faithfully and authentically follow Jesus.

That's what the goal of all of this is--for all of us, who already claim to be disciples of Jesus, striving to live the Jesus way of life--to more and more fully be formed in his likeness.  It's for all of us to come to listen, wholly and fully, to the Gospel's good news, even in the places where that Gospel stretches us, challenges us, and turns our old view of the world upside-down. 

Maybe the more we help each other to listen to Jesus on his own terms, the less we'll feel the impulse to put our own words in his mouth. Maybe we will realize we don't have to.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to listen to you before trying to speak for you.

In the End, Jesus--October 22, 2025

In the End, Jesus--October 22, 2025

"In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage with the utmost patience in teaching." (2 Timothy 4:1-2) 

In the end, it will be Jesus' verdict that matters, not Caesar's.  In the end, it will be the Reign of God that endures, not Rome's empire or whatever other regimes come and go in the mean-time.  In the end, it is the character of Christ that is the true measure of how we have spent our lives, and not anybody else's definition of "winning" or "greatness" or "success." Remembering that gives us a great deal of guidance as we step out into the world to face another day.

I think that's the underlying message here in these verses from Second Timothy, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday.  When the apostle reminds his young protege in ministry that "Christ Jesus... is to judge the living and the dead," and that it is Christ's kingdom and coming for which they wait, it's not to scare young Pastor Tim. It's to remind him whose voice to listen to, and whose values to hold onto.  I've got to admit, an earlier version of me would have heard these verses as something of a veiled threat, along the lines of, "You had better do a good enough job preaching and toeing the line with the right message, Timothy, because after all, Jesus is a-comin' and will judge the world!"  But because of who Jesus actually is, I don't hear these words as intimidation any longer, but rather encouragement.  I think it is a reminder that even though there are a LOT of other voices out there, clamoring for our attention and allegiance, it is only Jesus' voice that is worth listening to.  I think it is the apostle's way of saying, "There are a lot of other folks who think they are Big Deals out there, and they will look at the way of Jesus and call you a loser, a weakling, or a dangerous subversive for following it--don't listen to 'em. Jesus is the One whose opinion matters when all is said and done."  And I think it's a reminder, both for a young pastor just starting out back in the late first century, as well as for us in the middling days of the twenty-first, that the powers of the day will rise and fall, come and go, and they are not worth us building our lives on.  Neither the folks in power today, nor the party in power after the next election cycle, nor the administration coming down the pike in twenty years, do not get to tell us who to be or how to spend our lives.  We are called to live in light of Jesus' kind of kingdom, in which the towel and basin are the signs of true leadership rather than Caesar's crown, and in which we shower even our enemies with goodness and mercy, rather than the sewage of hatred and the filth of cruelty.

In the late first century, when this letter was written, that would have been a word of encouragement to keep telling the news of Jesus, practicing the way of Jesus, and welcoming people into the community of Jesus, even though the Empire was increasingly hostile toward them.  It would have meant choosing to believe that it is still worth giving your life to following Jesus even if that doesn't translate to more power, status, wealth, or comfort.  It would have meant a commitment to the Gospel's message of God's grace even to a culture that dismissed it as nonsense and foolishness. These words have the thrust of saying, "I know that the ones who are currently on the throne arrogantly think they will rule forever, but we know differently--we know that in the end, Jesus is the One who reigns, and that his kind of authority looks like a cross rather than conquest."  That means we are always called to think in longer-range terms than "How can we curry favor with the current regime?" since emperors come and go, but rather to think in terms of, "What will truly matter, and what will really last, in light of God's Reign and the authority of Jesus?"

Now, that doesn't just mean that we should pay attention to Jesus' kingdom because it will endure when other regimes have gone into the dustbin of history; it's also a reminder that because of the kind of king Jesus is, we don't have to be afraid.  Jesus will indeed "judge the living and the dead," but he is the same one who, when he was condemned under the judgment of Pontius Pilate, prayed for forgiveness for his executioners. He is the same one who restored Simon Peter back to belonging after Ol' Pete denied even knowing Jesus, and who showed up to convince Thomas he was alive, even when Tommy Boy declared he couldn't belief unless he got to poke around in Jesus' wounds.  He is the same one who invited himself over to dinner at tax collector (and outcast) Zacchaeus' house, who refused to condemn a woman caught in the act of adultery as the story in John's Gospel tells it, and who didn't zap Saul of Tarsus for ferociously persecuting the early church, but instead claimed him to become a leader within that church.  If Jesus is the judge, we don't have to worry about merciless condemnation. If Jesus is the king whose opinion counts, we don't have to fear being oppressed or intimidated under a tyrant's heel. If Jesus is the One who tells us, ultimately, what really matters, then we don't need to care one bit what the other voices bark and bellow about. 

To read these verses and remember that it is Jesus whose verdict matters in the end also calls to mind just how upside-down Jesus' values are from the conventional wisdom of the world.  When the common sense of our culture uplifts the rich, the well-connected, the ambitious, the comfortable, and the vindictive ones who hate their enemies as the models of "success" and "winning," we remember that Jesus declares God's blessing in the opposite direction: on the poor, the grieving, the meek, the persecuted, the peacemakers, and the merciful. We recall that Jesus regularly declared that the first will be last and the last will be first, that the exalted will be humbled while the humble will be exalted, and that the way to show your greatness is to become the servant of all. Jesus' ordering of things really does flip the script on what the powers of the day think is really important.  So at some point, we really do have to decide whose voice we will listen to: the powerful and influential Big Deals of the moment, or the voice of Jesus.  The letter of Second Timothy calls us to keep the bigger-picture perspective in mind, and to remember that the kingdom we truly belong to, in the end, is Jesus' reign.  All these centuries later, and nobody really remembers who happened to be on the throne in Rome when this letter was written--the Caesars all blur together in the haze of history.  But Jesus' reign, as countercultural and upside-down as it is compared the world's empires, is the one we pin our hopes on.  In the end, Jesus is the One by whom we measure our lives.  And because Jesus is both just and merciful, we do not have to be afraid.

Lord Jesus, keep us oriented around your kind of reign and your way of being in the world.

Shaped Like Jesus--October 21, 2025

Shaped Like Jesus--October 21, 2025

"But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have known sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work." (2 Timothy 3:14-17)

The perpetual complaint of schoolchildren goes something like this: "But we'll never have to USE this stuff in REAL life!" 

I bet you have heard it before, whether from the mouths of your own children or grandchildren, students you have known, or out of your own mouth. They don't know why they must learn what seem to them merely random facts or obscure trivia just for a test, only to forget them and never use them again for the rest of their lives.  State capitals, the periodic table, Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, or whatever else they are being tested on, it all gets lumped in with "stuff we'll never use in real life" in the minds of a lot of kids.  And in fairness, I'm sure there are plenty of things I was taught in school that I could have gotten by in life never really needing to know.  I still know the ten lines from Macbeth I had to memorize in 12th Grade English, but it has never helped me in a direct practical sense with raising my kids, doing my job, or paying my bills.  I remember a smattering of 9th Grade Geometry or 8th Grade Algebra, but typically I only realize I still know it when my kids have homework that forces me to dust off the old polynomial skills while they now ask ME, "When will I ever need this in life?"

Now we might quibble, between one generation to the next, about what information is really needed to get by in life.  After all, math that I had to learn to do by hand my kids are used to doing on a computer, or with the assistance of AI... and things that I learned with the help of a calculator were things that a previous generation had to use a slide rule in order to calculate.  Knowledge that I think is important might be dismissed by the generation to come, and practices I had to work hard at learning might well become obsolete with the next technological revolution (card catalogs, anyone?).  But that said, I have a certain sympathy for those who ask the question, "Why do we need to know this?"  And I do believe that just memorizing facts for the sake of filling our brain with them misses the point of real learning.  Somewhere along the way, a great many of us slipped into thinking that the point of education was just to do well on a test... so that we could get a good grade... so that we could get hired for a better job... so that we could make more money.  But I think there is something deeper we may have lost, and which we may need to recover, about the real purpose of learning: formation.  We learn in order to be formed as people in a certain way--to be shaped both with particular skills and specific knowledge, but also with a certain character and way of seeing the world.

I think that's also true for why we read the Scriptures, too.  If we have forgotten that the Scriptures themselves are not an endpoint, but rather a means by which God shapes us into the likeness of Christ, we are at risk of turning the Bible into mere trivia to be memorized for "the test" and then forgotten.  But the New Testament writers themselves, like this passage from Second Timothy that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, don't make that mistake.  They know that the Scriptures are meant to do something to us: they are not merely textbooks meant to be gleaned for head-knowledge. They are a tool by which God still shapes us, like a woodworker with chisels, rasps, and sandpaper.

That's something we might not have noticed in this passage at first.  I have heard these verses trotted out plenty of times over the years when Respectable Religious People have wanted to build a case for the infallibility or the inerrancy of the Bible, since this is one of the few places where a Biblical writer actually speaks about "the scriptures" and uses the language of being "inspired" (the Greek is even lovelier, meaning literally more like, "God-breathed"). And I'm not here to belittle the Bible or cast aspersions on the Bible's authority.  But the thing I notice here in the actual passage from 2 Timothy is that the writer doesn't just talk about scripture as a source of facts to be stored in the brain, but as a tool for training... us.  Scripture is inspired, yes, and useful, yes, but for what purpose?  "For training in righteousness (or "justice" would be just as accurate a translation)," and to be "equipped for every good work."   In other words, the Scriptures are given to form us into becoming a certain kind of people, who act in certain kinds of ways, who love in the particular way of Jesus, and who see the world (and all people in it) from a Jesus-shaped point of view.  The Bible, in other words, isn't a subject we can ever "master" like you can memorize the list of US presidents or the world's tallest mountains, but rather something through which God makes us into new creations.  The Bible isn't so much an end-point in and of itself, so much as it always points us to Christ and forms us to be more like Christ.  Any version of Christianity that merely uses the Bible as a repository of facts to be memorized or as a weapon to attack people with, rather than as a means by which Christ comes to us and transforms us in his likeness has missed the point.  The Bible isn't here just to be memorized in our heads, shouted at others we don't like, or used to justify our own agendas.  Rather, the Scriptures have been given to us so that we love the way Jesus loves, see people as neighbors the way Jesus sees, and serve the way Jesus serves.  The list of dates you had to memorize in history class might not make a difference in the way you live you life today.  But the God of the Scriptures is intent on forming us into a new kind of people by shaping us in the Story they tell.

There is wisdom, in other words, in that meme you see floating around the internet these days that says, "Don't go around with a mouth full of Bible verses and a heart full of hate."  That may seem a bit blunt, but it's a fair point.  The Bible will do something to us, because God has not only breathed out these ancient texts with which we wrestle, inspiring poets, prophets, and storytellers to write their experiences with God, but also because God continues to work through those words and stories to make us like Jesus, as well as to ground us in the truth that we are beloved by Jesus, too.  But none of that is mere head knowledge, and none of that will leave us the way we were.  I can memorize the periodic table of elements and still be a rude, selfish jerk to other people.  The Scriptures, by contrast, intend to make a new creation out of me, by forming the love of Christ in me.  I can't walk away from engaging the Scriptures and be the same--like Jacob, I may find myself both blessed by the encounter and also walking with a limp.  So if we have told ourselves that the point of the Bible is to give us the essential facts we need to memorize so that we can get into heaven, I think we may have missed the boat.  Rather, these verses from Second Timothy see the Scriptures as one more way God makes us more and more fully shaped like Jesus--so that we are trained to do justice in the world, and so that we are equipped to do good to neighbor, stranger, and enemy, just like Jesus.  

That's the goal, in other words: not that we would become people who know certain facts about God, but that we would become people in whom Christ's presence is ever clearer, in the ways we love, the ways we speak, the ways we serve, and the ways we lay down our lives.

I have spent a great deal of my life already doing a lot of reading of Bible stories, books, commentaries, and translations. And I do not think that time has been a waste, not for a moment.  But I am not interested in being merely a head that knows Bible facts.  I hope that, when my time on earth is done and I breathe my last, people don't say of me, "That guy knew a lot of Bible verses," but rather, "God brought forth Christ-like love through him--I bet some of that came from the influence of the Scriptures."  In the end, we aren't going to be masters of Bible knowledge, but that was never really the point.  God's desire with all of us is that the time we spent studying, reading, reflecting, and wrestling with the Scriptures will form us to be more fully in the likeness of the One who is the Word Made Flesh, Jesus himself.

Lord God, shape us by the Scriptures and the Story to make us love like Jesus.

Pulling at the Threads--October 20, 2025

Pulling at the Threads--October 20, 2025

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my accuser.’ For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:1-8)

Jesus takes it as a given that God cares about justice in the world--this world, the one in which we live, here and now.  And Jesus seems intent on convincing us to believe that God cares about justice, too.

I suppose you could say that "God is always on the side of justice," except that so often in our time everyone assumes that their own side is always the "just" and "righteous" one, and therefore that the matter of justice is reducible to an US-versus-THEM conflict.  And even more dangerously, we tend to assume that since we have told ourselves we are on the "side of justice," therefore any means are permissible to accomplish that justice--and history shows us a terrible list of people who committed atrocities because they were convinced in the righteousness of their cause and the justice of their goals.  So maybe it's not so helpful to think about justice as a matter of pitting one "side" against another, or putting the interests of "Me and My Group First" because we have convinced ourselves that God and justice are with "us," rather than with "them."

Maybe we would do better if we thought of God's commitment to "granting justice" in terms of making all things whole in the world.  We are so quick to define "justice" in terms of who gets zapped for stepping out of line, or how big of a punishment is meted out for the breaking of the rules, but really, the Scriptures offer a much bigger picture of what justice really is.  It's more about putting thing right, restoring what is lost, mending what is broken, and healing what is wounded.  Justice is more about repairing what has been harmed, lifting up those who have been stepped on, and seeking the good of all rather than just a select few--and that will never quite fit rightly within a framework that can only see life as a zero-sum game, where good for you is a threat to me and my group, and where my victory can only come by means of your loss. Jesus isn't suggesting that God is anybody's mascot when he says that God is committed to granting justice; rather, God's kind of justice is about making all people whole and putting all things right.

That means when we are looking to recognize God's presence or work in the world today (because, again, Jesus doesn't rope off God's concern about justice to being just for the afterlife or up in heaven, but seems very much about this world as well), we can't just oversimplify God's work to taking sides.  It's not that God is on the "side" of the Russians against the Ukrainians in that war (much to the chagrin of the clerics and patriarchs of the Russian state church that have publicly declared God on their "side"), or the other way around, but rather that God doesn't want anybody killing anybody over who owns pieces of land, and God doesn't want anybody to be afraid of incoming bombs or drones in the night.  It's not that God is on the "side" of the nation-state of Israel or that God is only on the "side" of the Palestinian people who live in Gaza and the West Bank, but rather that God doesn't want to see anyone taken hostage, or anyone's home to be bulldozed or blown up.  God's kind of justice isn't about making one side win and another side lose, so much as it is about remaking our whole way of relating to one another, so that I can see you as a neighbor, even across the lines we have drawn between us, and I can seek your well-being just as you are called to seek mine.  God's kind of justice isn't about getting my party in office at the next election so that we can just hold onto power, but rather about how we lay down our need for power and status so that instead we can serve one another.  God's kind of justice is much less interested in damning people for being rule-breakers, and much more invested in restoring people who are suffering in some way.  And it is for everyone, because God's intention is to make the world itself whole. That just doesn't work with the us-against-them kind of vitriol that labels anybody you don't agree with as terrorists or criminals.  God's kind of justice is committed to restoring all of us, and making all of us whole.

That's what Jesus says we can count on God to grant.  We can't put a leash on God to serve only on "my side" or work for "my agenda," but we can depend on God always to be committed to putting things right in the world, wherever things have gone wrong.  Sometimes that work is slow, tedious, and difficult to see, rather like watching someone untangle a messy knot might look for a good long while like nothing is being done, because the progress is small and often messy.  But if you've ever untangled a knot before, you know that the slow and steady work of pulling at the threads and loosening the tangles is worth it.  And if you want to save the whole piece of string rather than just cut your losses and settle for giving up on some of the tangled cord, then you have to take the time to get the whole thing unraveled rightly.  That's what God's kind of justice is like--the deliberate, dedicated work of undoing all the ugly knots we have gotten ourselves tied up into, because God knows that we are all bound up together in the same skein of yarn.  Your well-being is connected to mine, just as mine is tethered to everyone else's.  God isn't willing to give up on some part of the ball of string by just cutting a segment out--God is intent on setting the whole thing free again. That's our hope.

Today, the question to ask is this: how can I be a part of God's work to untie the knots around me, and how can we see the work of "justice" as something bigger than sides trying to defeat each other? How might we let ourselves be a part of God's work to mend the whole creation?

Lord God, bring your kind of justice to us, and allow us to be a part of your work in this tangled world.

Without Our Clapping--October 17, 2025

Without Our Clapping--October 17, 2025

"Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. The saying is sure:
 If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
 if we endure, we will also reign with him;
 if we deny him, he will also deny us;
 if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
 he cannot deny himself." (2 Timothy 2:10-13)

When they tell you they need your support in the cause of "saving God," let it be clear to you that they don't know what they're talking about.  When they say that "It's up to us (whoever they allow into the group they label as "us") to save Christianity," you can be certain it's false.  And when the loud voices claiming to speak for Respectable Religion claim that God needs their movement, their influence, their power, or their culture war leverage for things to come out all right in the world, your Gospel-configured "Baloney Detector" should be going off with sirens and alarm bells.  None of it is so, no matter what they say... no matter who the "they" happens to be at the moment.

I've been thinking about this since this past Sunday, when many of us heard this passage from 2 Timothy read in worship, and how the New Testament-era church was clear that it's never Jesus who needs our help to accomplish his purposes, but rather, we are the fickle (and often faithless) ones who rely on Christ.  Whether or not we flake out on Jesus may well be an open question; Jesus, however, is not at risk of running out of energy or giving out on us.  At no point is there a concern that Jesus will bail out, give up, or depend on us to save him; there is, on the other hand, constantly the possibility that we will do any of those things toward him.  And yet--amazingly--the writer of Second Timothy insists that even "if we are faithless, he remains faithful." Even when we blow it, even when we don't live up to our calling, even when we bring wobbly faith, scandalous sins, or a track record of selling out, Jesus remains faithful.  He never needs our help to step up and save the day for him; we always need his.

Or, as I sometimes tell our confirmation students, the position of the Holy Scriptures is that God is not Tinker Bell. 

Yeah, that Tinker Bell.  You know, the winged fairy character from the Peter Pan stories.  The one whose cartoon version graced the opening titles of many of Disney movie over the decades.  God ain't like her... at least in one very important way.  In the classic stage retelling of Peter Pan, there comes a point at which Tinker Bell drinks the poison that was intended for Peter Pan, in order to save the life of the Boy Who Could Fly.  When Peter finds her and discovers what she has done, he realizes she is dying, and then breaks the fourth wall to address the audience for help.  "You have to help save her!" Pan insists.  "You have to bring her back! If you all in the audience will clap your hands, believe really hard, and say out loud that you believe in fairies, Tinker Bell can be revived and come back to life!"  In other words, the magical supernatural pixie creature needs our help to save the day, and to save her life.  Fortunately for the fictional fairy, it always turns out that the exact amount of applause the audience gives is precisely the quantity that will resuscitate Tinker Bell, and the play can move on toward its inevitable happy ending. Captain Hook is defeated, and all is well with Never Land, all because when Tinker Bell needed saving, we in the audience did our part.

And, as I say, as much as it works for a theatrical version of a children's story, that ain't how the Scriptures teach us to picture God.  It might be tempting to think that God needs our help, or Jesus is enlisting us to fight a culture war for him, or that it's up to us to rescue Christianity from whatever nefarious forces they say are out there. But the Scriptures insist that Jesus doesn't need saving, God's Reign doesn't depend on our political machinations, and the Spirit does not need our help to make the Good News "great" or the church "successful." God isn't Tinker Bell, and Christ does not need our assistance to come through in a pinch.  It is always the other way around: we are the ones who need God to be reliable, and we are always the ones dependent on Jesus to be faithful even when we are not.  Blessedly, that is precisely what the Gospel gives us.

So the next time you hear the talking heads at a podium, lectern, or TV studio hawking their plan for how we can help save God, or bring back Christianity, or rescue the church, let these verses from Second Timoty come back to your mind.  God has never needed our measures of "success," "greatness," "power," or "influence." Rather, God's way of saving us--and indeed the world--comes through precisely the things that look like loss and lowliness, weakness and insignificance. When we get it backwards, we lose what makes the Gospel actually good news, and we sell it out for more of the world's typical power-grabbing dressed up in religiosity. 

And you know what?  Even when that happens--even when we turn out to be faithless in God's way and sell out for some counterfeit--Jesus still doesn't sell out, bail out, or give out.  He remains faithful, even when we are faithless, and even without our clapping from the seats.

Lord Jesus, be your faithful self and keep us from selling out for cheap counterfeits of your good news.