God Gets Past Our Defenses--October 5, 2026

 God Gets Past Our Defenses--October 5, 2026

"Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard:

My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.

He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines;

he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it;

he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.

And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem, and people of Judah,

judge between me and my vineyard.

What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?

When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?

And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard.

I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured;

I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down.

I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed,

and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;

I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel,

and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting;

he expected justice, but saw bloodshed;

righteousness, but heard a cry! "(Isaiah 5:1-7)

T.S. Eliot famously wrote, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." He was right.

As a species, we seem to want to dodge, ignore, and spin the things that make us squirm--especially the things about ourselves that make us uncomfortable. We have a way of set up blind-spots to miss our weaknesses, and we develop selective memories about our past, all to guard us from having to deal with unpleasant truths. It's the impulse evident when a long-married couple starts arguing over who said what to start the fight (and each has very distinct recollections of how it happened), and it's the same instinct of alcoholics or drug addicts in denial, who convince themselves (and really do believe what they tell themselves) that they don't have a problem... that they can stop any time they want, and that things are fine the way they are. And on a larger scale, it's how nations and people-group willfully forget things from their histories that would make them uncomfortable... and choose to ignore realities that are staring them in the face but which they do not want to see.

What a pitiable species we are: so afraid of being made uncomfortable that we willfully ignore or deny what is in front of us.

How is someone supposed to get through to us when we are in that willful, blissful ignorance? How does any voice of truth ever get through? Or are we doomed forever, we human beings, to live inside the anesthetized insulation of our own creation, like sleepers who cannot wake up from their own dream?

Maybe a difficult truth can be snuck in--like a parent sneaking vegetables into the pasta sauce to get their kids to eat more vitamins--when our guard is down. Maybe, like Emily Dickinson's famous bit of verse puts it, you have to:

"Tell all the truth, but tell it slant

Success in circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm delight

As lightning to the children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind."

In other words, sometimes we need someone to tell us the unpleasant truths we don't want to face, but in a way that gets past our defenses. Then we can deal with it.

That's actually what the prophet Isaiah is doing here. This passage (which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship) is an old dreamer's attempt to get his people to see the truth about themselves and their history in a way that they can bear without running away or sticking their heads in the sand. He tells a story, hoping that his hearers won't realize until they are already hooked that it is a story about them, and their whole nation. He makes it into a song--a love song--with the hope that his people will hear the deep love of God alongside the heartbreaking disappointment of God at how they have turned away from God's good ways.

As stories go, this little scene Isaiah sketched out isn't very complicated. The "beloved" (God) plants a vineyard, and he does what any decent farmer raising grapes would do: he clears a plot of land with good soil, plants good vines, and sets up all the necessary structures on it a watchtower, a wine vat a hedge, and a garden wall. And having done all that, the vine-grower expects good grapes--and gets bad ones!

Well, what's a vintner to do? Isaiah asks his audience--what would you do if this were you? And the moment they start to formulate their answers, the prophet has them hooked. "You would tear down your vineyard, and maybe try and start over somewhere else!" you can hear them mouthing under their breath. "You would give up and try raising cattle--or goats--or zucchini!" Now Isaiah comes to the conclusion of his slanted-telling of the truth: this is a dull story of disappointment from a grape-grower, but rather the history of Israel and Judah. This is the history they don't want to face about themselves. Isaiah pulls off the mask like he's ripping off a band-aid: "This story isn't just about grapes!" he says, "The vineyard is the people of Israel and Judah--you are the ones God was expecting good fruit from, and instead all you've given back to God is sour grapes!" Isaiah wants his people to see that their whole national history is rooted in "bloodshed" instead of "justice," and that where God wanted "righteousness," there were only the cries of victims. He goes on in the verses after this passage calling out the ways the wealthy squeezed out the poor, making their McMansions and estates bigger and bigger so there was no room for low-income housing and small farms (see Isaiah 5:8-10). And then after that, Isaiah forces his audience to come face to face with the ways they cheat and steal and use their wealth to avoid prosecution (Isaiah 5:22-23). It's all an uncomfortable truth that the people don't want to hear, but he's already got them hooked from his love-song; now they will have to bear the truth about themselves and their national history.

I know this doesn't sound like a very cheery passage to read on a Monday morning. But let's be clear: Isaiah is coming from a place of love. And that's because he's convinced that God is coming from a place of love. It is because God loves the people--including the ones who have been repeatedly stepped on for too long in their national history--that God provokes the prophet to say the things no one wants to admit. It is because God is the lover of Israel and Judah that God prompts Isaiah to write his love-song to get the people's attention and help them to face their past and present, so that they can create new systems, new ways of living together, and new patterns for life. It is because God loves us that God insists we come face to face with our own histories--individual, communal, and national--and own the patterns of crookedness, violence, and injustice in those stories, even if we have made a great effort to pretend they are not there. Love doesn't let us off the hook for facing the truth, even when the truth is unpleasant or convicting; to hear the prophets tell it, sometimes the greatest mark of love for their people is when they compel them to face the ghosts of their past and the injustices in their present. It is not because the prophets don't love their own nations of Israel and Judah that they raise their criticisms; it is precisely because they love their people--and because they believe God loves them, too--that they will not let them turn away from their past any longer.

This is a reality we need to be really clear about, because the impulse to turn away from the unresolved messes of our past isn't just an ancient-Israelite thing: it's a human thing. And sometimes we fall for the very tempting lie (let's call it what it is) that if we really love our communities we will only see the positive in our stories, not the broken places. Sometimes we get so afraid of dealing with the ways our past has set up and perpetuated that brokenness in the present that we just get defensive when God raises up a prophet to tell our stories honestly to us. But love never means a selective, happy-and-easy-things-only view of those we love, the same way you expect a doctor to tell you the whole truth about what your diagnosis is.

In these days, it seems we are being invited once again to engage in an honest retelling of our own histories--the histories of our families, our churches and denominational bodies, and our nation as well. It is tempting to cover our ears any time someone raises a part of our history that makes us uncomfortable. It is tempting to just shout and interrupt any time someone calls us out on something we did not want to have to face. And it is just as tempting to imagine that the failures and hurts of past are all dealt with and done, rather than lingering and languishing in the present still. Part of what Isaiah did in his time was to compel his listeners to see that their patterns of greed and violence in the past had ongoing consequences that over time didn't go away, but just became socially acceptable. Maybe we need to have some uncomfortable truth-telling as well where we are, and then have the important second half of the conversation by addressing the question, "What do we do about it now?" as well.

Whether it's an individual finally coming face to face with their addiction, a congregation dealing with the decades of dysfunction that have turned it into an exclusive social club, or a nation dealing with the undead threat of racism and white supremacy, it's always scary to face the truths we had spent a long time burying. But as much as Isaiah's incisive story here forces us to see that we'll have to work up the nerve to face our own past and present, Isaiah also reminds us that we don't face them alone. God insists we face the realities we didn't want to deal with, but the same God promises to face them with us and to give us the courage to do it. That's what real love does: it empowers us to face the truth rather than helping us to hide from it.

And in that sense, even having to wrestle with the things we are not proud of (or should not be proud of) is a way, not of punishing us, but of bringing us more fully to life. Like Baldwin says, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." Today, may we be given the courage to face what we have been afraid to see, and may we be given the prophetic voices like Isaiah's to point us in the right direction.

Lord God, give us the courage we need to own our past and our present honestly, as individuals, in our communities, in our country, and in our church.

All the Difference--October 2, 2026

All the Difference--October 2, 2026

"Let the same mind be in your that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in  appearance as a human,  he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross." (Philippians 2:5-8)

If I stop and think about it, this is really why I am a Christian.

This verse, this sentence, this idea, and the radical notion it conveys are why, for all the ways that organized religion can be such a disappointment (plus, we're not all that organized! Ba-dum-bum!), this is why I continue to be a part of the community called the church and a Christian, rather than just an admirer of the teachings of Jesus. And the crux of the matter--quite literally--is that it is no less than God who has come to us in the person of Jesus.

Look, the world is full of other role models and positive examples. If my only reason for being a Christian is that Jesus gives me a hero to look up to, well, the glut of superhero movies and movie universes has given me plenty more "heroes." There's a new flavor every week. I can have my own personal favorites, my spouse can have her own, and my kids can each pick a favorite or two. We can pore over the pages of history and find heroes to look up to as well, or to our favorite figures from literature (I've always been fond of Don Quixote and Cyrano de Bergerac, for example, and tenth-grade me was greatly impacted by meeting early Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird).

But for whichever role models, fictional or historical or some of both, on whom we pattern our lives, let's be honest, we will always be chasing after some impossible goal of being "enough like them" to be worthy, to be good enough, to be acceptable. And we're never going to do it. I'm never going to have Bruce Wayne's vast fortune or tech savvy; I'm never going to work up the never to actually fight a windmill; and I will never have the physical strength or agility to be Black Panther. And if saving the day requires me to be adequately good enough or close enough to any of them, I will fail... and the day will not be saved.

And honestly, if all religion is boils own to, "Keep trying to be good enough--here, look at another biblical role model," then we should be honest that religion is about saving ourselves with good behavior.

But that's not how this passage from Philippians, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, opens. This ancient passage from the hand of Saint Paul himself, which is actually probably a quotation of an even earlier hymn or prayer, starts with God. And that makes all the difference. Yes, Paul's point includes us patterning our minds and mindsets on how Jesus is an example for us to follow. But the first move is God's, not ours. The outrageous claim of the Gospel is that none other than God came to us in Jesus, walked barefoot and homeless in Jesus, and was executed by the state as a threat to the empire and Respectable Religion in Jesus. The radical claim of Christianity is not, first, that we have to try to be as good as God in order to get into God's good graces, but rather that God has become one of us because we are already held in the goodness of grace. And that means, further, that at the heart of God's character is the choice NOT to maximize privilege or status for God's own sake, but for the good of others--including us. At the heart of who God is is decidedly NOT the motto, "Me First" or the song "My Way," but rather the choice to put others first--and a whole world full of us others, too.

Before we get to how we respond to that (and we are called to respond), it's important that we get the horse before the cart. What makes the Gospel different from every form of self-help religion in human history is that it starts with God's choice not to preserve privilege, not to pull rank, and not to stay safe, but to lose everything for the sake of what is not God--us. It's not about us reaching "up," but about God coming close, even though that means letting go of power, comfort, prestige, glory, and respectability.

The heart of the Christian gospel is a God who goes to a cross for us in Christ, rather than crucify his enemies.  That means, too, that it is theologically right to substitute the word "God" everywhere you see the name "Jesus," in the central story of our faith--the cross and resurrection.  It is God who endures suffering for us, from the torture at police headquarters to the shame of the cross to being buried in a borrowed grave. It is God who gets mocked by the religious and politically powerful (who are afraid of losing that power, while God was willing to surrender power in Christ). It is God who is stripped naked and strung up on a tree. It is God who cries out in godforsakenness. It is God who moves first in Jesus. 

Whatever else we say about ourselves, then, is always a response to grace, never a prerequisite for it. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Jesus is more than a hero, and more than a self-help role model. Jesus is what it looks like when God is prepared to lose it all for the love of us.

Lord Jesus, let us recognize in your face the very face of God... even when it wears a crown of thorns.

A Realignment of Our Minds--October 1, 2026

A Realignment of Our Minds--October 1, 2026

"If, then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus..." (Philippians 2:1-5)

When we say that the gospel is counter-cultural in a society with slogans like "Me-and-My-Group First," this is what we mean.

When we profess that the way of Jesus points in the opposite direction of those who insist on pursuing their own "greatness," this is what we mean.

When we confess that God directs us to seek the good of other people even before we seek our own interests, this is what we mean.

And of course, all of this sounds subversive, foolish, and completely against the grain of what passes for conventional wisdom, whether in the first century or the twenty-first.  But here it is, right from the pen of the apostle in these words that many of us heard this past Sunday. To follow the way of Jesus will mean a reorientation of our minds to be pointed in the way of Jesus, which will always mean seeking the good of others before ourselves.  

In the ancient Roman empire, this sounded ridiculous.  The Greeks and Romans didn't consider "humility" a virtue, certainly not the way Paul (and the rest of the New Testament) thinks of it.  The word that gets translated for us as "humility" here has the feel of "lowliness," "submission," "being put lower," or "being a nobody."  By contrast, the Greeks and Romans thought it was better to make a big deal about yourself, to boast of your accomplishments, and to bring glory and fame to you and your family name.  The people associated with "humility" (again, read "lowliness" in their minds) were the ones they called "weak," "losers," and "backward."  It would have sounded preposterous to the "common sense" of the imperial mindset to suggest that being "humble" was something to strive for, and it would have sounded like lunacy to put others' interests before your own.  After all, how was an empire to grow unless it put its own success ahead of the lives of those it conquered? How was Rome to rule ever greater territory if it didn't think its interests matter more than the kings and kingdoms it subjugated?  How would anybody recognize how "great" you were unless you were constantly promoting yourself and drowning out the other voices around you?  Paul's counsel here completely flies in the face of the whole mindset of the Roman Empire.

Not that things are any different twenty centuries later, honestly.  We still live in a time when the loudest voices are often the ones barking about putting "Me-and-My-Group-First!" as though it were a self-evident truth that needed no explanation.  We still live in a world where self-interest is seen to be the unquestioned and unquestionable bedrock principle of "how things work." And we still live in a culture that teaches us to see everybody else on the planet as a threat to be eliminated, a competitor to be defeated, or a danger to be suspicious of, rather than neighbors to be loved.  For twenty centuries now, the New Testament has been calling us to a very different way of life--one which puts others' interests ahead of our own, because it is Jesus' mindset.

I think it would have been baffling to the apostle Paul if he could have somehow seen the way plenty of churchgoing Respectable Religious people today try to completely ignore this message.  I think he would be dumbstruck to hear people who name the name of Jesus and confess Jesus as their "Lord and Savior" also insisting that their interests were more important than those of the homeless in their city, or the refugees seeking a home in their country, or those whose homes have been reduced to ash and rubble from wars being fought half a world away.  I think Paul would sit us down and ask us, "Have you actually read ANY of what I wrote?  What part of 'seek the interests of others' is unclear to you?  How can you not see the direction that Christ's mindset points us in?" And if the apostle did give us that sort of a talking-to, I think he would be spot-on.  One can either shout "Me-and-My-Group-First" or one can confess, "Jesus is Lord," but you can't do both and mean it, because the way of Jesus inescapably involves a realignment of our hearts to seek the interests of others before our own.

If we take that seriously, yes, it will change everything about our lives. We will be less invested in making bigger piles of money for ourselves and more committed to making sure our neighbors get to eat.  We will be less envious or suspicious of the strangers who cross our path and more attuned to seeing the face of Christ in them.  We will be less obsessed with the fear that other people are taking "our share of the pie," and more convinced that the world is not a zero-sum game where your gain must mean my loss. We will indeed be changed.

But what did we think would happen by letting Christ not only onto our lips and not only into our hearts, but also into our minds?  

How could he not transform the entire way we see the world?  

And what sort of Lord would he be if he did not?

Lord Jesus, come transform and reorient our minds to seek the interests of others the way you did, and the way you still do.

The Parade of Beloved Mess-Ups--September 30, 2026

The Parade of Beloved Mess-Ups--September 30, 2026

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him, and even after you saw it you did not change your minds and believe him.” (Matthew 21:31b-32)

How's that for proof that God doesn't hold our past against us? Jesus pictures the line of people queued up into the kingdom, and says the prostitutes and tax collectors are at the front of the parade, while the Respectable Religious people are at the back of the procession. The folks everyone in Jesus' day would have branded as the most notoriously sinful and salacious people around were the ones who took up the invitation to a new beginning when it was offered to them, and God was willing to put aside any hindrances that would have stopped them from coming. Meanwhile, it was the people who projected piety in public who never thought they had a need to start over, and so they passed by the chance to begin again.

"Follow the prostitutes!" What an invitation from Jesus!  Follow the prostitutes into the kingdom--they were the ones who took the offer of grace, while the Celebrity Spiritual So-and-Sos never wanted to admit they were desperate for that same grace.  So often we look down on people we see as irredeemable or assume that they have chosen the lives they are currently in--but quite often, people end up in unsavory situations in life because they felt like they had to choose between two bad options.  Do I starve, or make a living at the world's oldest profession?  Do I give up on the hope of putting a roof over my head and the heads of my children, or do I sell out and work for the empire collecting taxes? Lots of people find themselves in the position of not feeling like they have any options, and they would just love the chance to start over, to be free, and to be relieved of the stigma of everybody else's glaring eyes of condemnation.  Jesus simply says here that's exactly what he's been giving--and John the Baptizer before him, too.

And notice here, Jesus doesn't make those who were labeled notorious sinners into second-class citizens of the Reign of God. He doesn't say, "Well, of course, the religious people still get top billing, because they were already so holy. I'll pity you sell-outs and sex workers and let you in the gate, but you'll have to be at the back of the link after all the truly 'good' people are in..." Jesus really is convinced that God isn't holding anybody's past messes against them, no matter how complicated or deep-rooted those messes have been. When the invitation to turn in a new direction, to be a part of the Reign of God, was offered, the people who felt most at a dead end were the quickest to take the offer. And so, like the thief on the cross next to Jesus, desperate for a lifeline and leaping out into the arms of grace, it was the outcast and ostracized folks who jumped at the chance to be included after spending so long on the outside looking in.

This is what makes the Gospel good news, and not just a program for self-improvement. It's in God's promises to give us a truly brand-new lease on life that frees us from the things others don't want to let go of. It's not about having to feel a certain amount of guilt or jump through enough hoops of remorse to rid ourselves of the shame of where we've been--it's all about the promise of God not to keep track of how many times we got lost on our own in the far country. It's rather like that line from Mumford and Sons' song, "Roll Away Your Stone," which goes:

"It seems that all my bridges have been burned,

But you say that's exactly how this grace thing works.

It's not the long walk home that will change this heart,

But the welcome I receive with the restart."

That's just it--the Reign of God offers a welcome and a new beginning, despite the ways we've gotten ourselves stuck in dead ends and ditches. And by releasing us from those things, it really is like a brand-new life offered to us, a resurrection in the present moment, rolling away the stone that had kept us in the grave and letting us at last be free.

Now, here's the thing: someone you know is just aching to know that kind of new beginning. Someone who might cross your path tomorrow, maybe even today, has been looked down on for so long and written off as a hopeless screw-up, and they have a hard time not agreeing. But you could be the one who speaks the new beginning--you could be the one making the invitation to them into God's grace. You might be the one today who doesn't treat them like a second-class citizen or a "less-than" sort of person, and you can be the one who tells them they have permission to begin again.

Maybe as church, too, it's time for us to stop once and for all trying to make ourselves look holier by kicking out the ones with too much scandal attached to their stories. Maybe it's time to quit pretending we don't need the new start of grace ourselves. Maybe it's time to set aside our starched and saintly black and white dress clothes and to follow behind the motley and multicolored rainbow procession of anybodies and everybodies, the "dropouts, the losers, the sinners, the failures, and the fools," as Jon Foreman sings it in "The Beautiful Letdown." Maybe today's a day to quit pretending we're holier than anybody and just take the free offer of a new beginning, even if we've been playing the religion game for decades.

Maybe today's the day to get in line behind the tax-collecting schemers and sellouts, and follow the prostitutes in the parade of beloved mess-ups into the kingdom of God.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to believe you are not holding our failures against us, and give us the love to help others set aside the baggage they are ready to leave behind, too.

Beyond the Performances--September 29, 2026

Beyond the Performances--September 29, 2026

[Jesus said:] “What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not,’ but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same, and he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first...." (Matthew 21:28-31a)

So here's the thing: Jesus is just not interested in performative piety. He never has been, and he still isn't today.

That much comes through loud and clear from these verse that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.  Whether it's the folks who make a big to-do out of praying in public, to the cars plastered with religious bumper stickers (that then don't align with the character of the people who drive in those cars), to the impulse to "virtue signal" with the right "Christian" posts on social media, to talking in church jargon without living in ways that reflect God's love, Jesus is just not interested in a show where we say all the right words, but don't actually live in line with God's heart with our actions.

Of course, a lot of Jesus' teaching and commentary is directed to the folks who posture themselves as Spiritual Experts and Members of the Respectable Religious People's Guild. He sees through the hypocrisy of the people in his own day who make a point of going out to the street corners to pray in big loud displays so that they can be seen, or who get melodramatic about their practice of fasting, or who make big donations so that they'll be recognized for their generosity and get their names engraved on monuments and such.  And he regularly criticizes the people who like to say they are committed to doing God's will, but whose actions don't really seem to align with what actually matters to God.  Jesus just has no use for that sort of play-acting (which is really what the word "hypocrite" originally meant, as it turns out).

You have to guess that Jesus still sees through all of our modern-day religious performances, too.  Sometimes it's framed as "We Christians need to reclaim the public square and pray to take back our dominance," while folks make a big deal of being seen praying in various public places.  Sometimes it's dressing up a political party's agenda in religious language to make it sound devout--and to imply that people on the other side of the aisle can't really love God by virtue of the fact that they are members of the wrong party.  Sometimes it's just making a show of wearing faith-branded jewelry, clothes, or accessories as a way of trying to look pious.  We keep inventing new ways of doing the same old song-and-dance, but Jesus was never really a fan of any version of it in the first place.

That's the gist of this short little parable, I think--or at least, it is a part of its meaning.  (We'll look at more sides of it tomorrow with the verses that follow.)  Jesus points out that if one has to choose between saying-the-right-words and actually doing-the-right-actions, between putting on a performance and authentically doing God's will, it's always better to get the actions right rather than putting on a show.  Saying the right words is empty if it's not backed up with actually doing what we have said.  So if we are going to publicly say we care about doing God's will, but then instead we try and baptize our same old selfish "Me-and-My-Group-First" nonsense, Jesus is sure to tell us, "No thanks--not interested." But if we realize that we've been turned the wrong direction and finally decide we are ready to let God's way of self-giving love become our way, then we've got something.  Hence his story about two sons, one of whom says all the right words but doesn't ever get around to actually helping Dad out in the vineyard, and the other of whom at first rejects his father's request but later actually goes and does the farm chores.  If you have to make a call about which one of these sons has actually done the father's will, it's clearly the one who actually goes, regardless of whether he said the right words at the start.  Jesus simply dares us to take that seriously in our own lives, too.

Now, let me also be clear about what is not being said by this parable.  This is not about who gets "in" to heaven or who is kicked "out" of God's family based on poor performance.  After all, the metaphor Jesus has chosen in this story is about a father with two sons--and you cannot lose your belonging in a family, no matter how useless you are.  If the other story Jesus tells about a man with two sons (you know, the one where the younger runs off with his share of the inheritance and comes home after wasting it all, only to find the arms of his father wrapping him up in love) assures us that you cannot lose your son-ship for actively bad behavior, then surely one cannot lose your place in the family for doing nothing, like the son in this story who says he will work but then does not.  This is not a veiled threat from Jesus that if we don't pull our weight he will cast us out into the pit of hell.  This is not a theological thesis teaching that one is saved by their good works.  Rather it is Jesus' way of saying, well, that if you actually care about doing God's will, he is not interested in our just paying lip-service.  Both the son who goes to work in the vineyard and the son who says he will but stays home still belong in the family--but only one of them has actually lived in accordance with the will of their father.  And when you love someone--as presumably children and parents love one another--you would think you would want to do the things that bring them joy.  You cannot lose your belonging in the family, but you can make choices that either do or do not align with the priorities of the parents.  And apparently, in both the fictional family of Jesus' story and the household of God, the Father would rather we live out God's kind of love, generosity, and goodness instead of just putting on a loud show of our piety in the public square. It may be that we have been turned the wrong way for a long time, but right now we are given the chance to turn a new way, beyond the performances, to actually practice God's kind of mercy, kindness, and peaceableness (what we sometimes call "the fruit of the Spirit").

Today, if you and I see places in our own lives where we have just been mouthing the "right" words but not acting in light of God's character, we have the chance to begin again--not because we are trying to earn our way into (or back into) a club, but because we want people to be able to recognize the family resemblance with the God who has already claimed us as children.

Lord God, move us today from empty words and shows of religiosity to authentic love in our words and actions.

Who Does Jesus Think He Is?--September 28, 2026

Who Does Jesus Think He Is?--September 28, 2026

When [Jesus] entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” Jesus said to them, “I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” And they argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why, then, did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd, for all regard John as a prophet.” So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things...." (Matthew 21:23-27)

Come on now, who does Jesus think he is?

I mean that question quite literally--or at least, the Respectable Religious Leaders did when they approached Jesus in this scene that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday.  They want to know where Jesus gets off thinking that he has the authority to do and say the kinds of things he is doing and saying.  They, after all, have credentials--they are card-carrying members of the Religious Establishment.  They have the pedigrees and certification that they "know a lot about God."  They run the Temple, and they grant access to the Temple's services to whichever people they deem worthy.  And they will tell the world what God is really like, thank-you-very-much.

And along comes Jesus, this itinerant rabbi from the outlying territory of Galilee, who does not come from one of the official "priestly" families and who does not have a diploma from an approved Expert.  And Jesus doesn't just start giving harmless, bland sermons--he starts upsetting all the religious and political arrangements that the Respectable Ones have tried to put in a delicate balance.  These "chief priests and elders" are provoked by Jesus enough to ask him where he gets the authority to be "doing these things," namely, the two provocative actions immediately preceding this passage.  These verses come right on the heels of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem riding a borrowed donkey and then his deliberate and planned protest in the Temple that led him to overturn the tables of the moneychangers and chase out the sacrificial animals.  That's what they are all hot and bothered about, which is completely understandable, honestly. Both of those actions are like symbolic shots across the bow, both to the Romans and to the Temple leadership.  

Jesus' entry into Jerusalem was a calculated mockery and parody of the Romans' military parade into the city, in which he rides not on a war horse but on a lowly (and untrained) donkey.  The people cry out "Hosanna!" which is like saying, "Deliver us!" and the Romans can't help but hear that as borderline seditious against their occupation of the land.  The religious leaders are upset especially because this is the kind of language that could spark a riot, and they know that the Romans would be ruthless in snuffing out any kind of situation like that.  And when Jesus overturns the tables in the Temple complex, he is essentially staging a protest by forcing sacrifices to stop for the day--it has the feel of a sit-in held in a segregated lunch counter back in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, or a human chain surrounding a building to keep it from being bulldozed.  And again, the Respectable Religious Leaders want to know where Jesus gets the sheer chutzpah to do these kinds of things.  So they ask him directly, "By what authority are you doing these things?"  That is to say, "Who do you think you are?" 

And before we go any further that that, maybe that's a question we need to sit with ourselves.  Who do we actually think Jesus is?  And do we actually believe he speaks and acts with authority--even when he says and does things that make us uncomfortable... or yank us from our complacency... or challenge our old view of the world?  Because, to be honest, it's not just the Palm Sunday parade or the Temple Tables episode that are controversial acts on Jesus' part.  He is always saying things that turn our old way of life on its head, welcoming people we had decided to exclude from the party, and rearranging our values in light of his. Now, if Jesus is simply one random guy offering his opinions, then we are free to ignore him when we disagree with him.  But if he speaks with God's authority, then we have no choice but to let him turn our world upside-down.

This is the same Jesus, after all, who up-ends so many other of our assumptions about how the world works. Instead of reaffirming our belief that wealth, status, power, and comfort are sure signs of God's approval and blessing, Jesus goes and declares that the poor, the grieving, the hungry, and the persecuted are "blessed." Instead of endorsing our need for revenge, payback, and violence against those we deem as enemies, Jesus commands us to love our enemies and to pray for the ones who are set against us. Instead of encouraging us to seize the trappings of "greatness" for ourselves, Jesus calls us to become servants of all who seek the interests of others before our own.  And yes, instead of raising up an army to overthrow the Empire and replace it with his own regime, Jesus borrow a donkey to ridicule that whole way of thinking and to say, effectively that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes.  For that matter, Jesus doesn't just vaguely support the Temple's transactional form of piety--he protests the Temple's whole set-up and offers himself instead as a living, walking, talking Temple and meeting-place between God and humanity.  So yeah, Jesus is pretty much subverting our worldview all the time.  So we might well find ourselves asking the same question as the chief priests: Who is this guy?  And where does he get the authority to do and say what does?

The bottom line, then, is this: we can safely ignore Jesus if he is only a religious teacher offering free opinions.  In that case we can dismiss him as a harmless pundit and only trot him out when he says something we like.  But if Jesus really does speak as the Word-of-God-Made-Flesh, then we have no choice but to let him turn our view of the world inside out.  If Jesus really is God's Chosen One, then not only does he have the authority to provoke the Romans on Palm Sunday and upset the tables in the Temple the next day, but he has the authority to rearrange our priorities, our loves, and our values.  He has the authority to point us in a new direction.  He has the authority to change everything for us.

Now, maybe we should be clear about what we church folk say on any given Sunday when we name Jesus our "Lord" and confess him to be "Son of God." And when we profess the ancient words of the Creed that identify Jesus as "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God," then we are definitely ruling out the option of treating him as just a random stranger offering religious "hot takes." We are declaring that we are prepared to have Jesus overturn the tables in our hearts as well, and to call us out when we have crowned ourselves Emperors and need to be shown that we are wearing no clothes, either.  

Are we prepared to let Jesus do that? Not just once, mind you, but every day?  

If not, perhaps we should reconsider whether we can actually call Jesus our "Lord" at all.

But if we dare to name him "Lord" as well as "Savior" and "Son of God," then we should be prepared to let Jesus turn our lives right-side up, even if it feels like he is shaking everything we thought was solid.

Lord Jesus, because of who you are, we dare to trust your word. Come, speak to us, and let your voice change our lives.

Christ Either Way--September 25, 2026

Christ Either Way--September 25, 2026

"For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain." (Philippians 1:21)

Ten little words in English, but they sure are powerful.

Surprising, too, maybe. And against the grain of our usual thinking. But powerful ones nevertheless.

Let’s be clear, though: Paul isn’t just mismatching opposites here in this verse which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship. He isn’t just saying “black is white and up is down” to sound profound like some caricature of a Zen master. There is an underlying logic, even if it sounds like the opposite of common sense at first.

Let’s start at the end: dying is gain. At first blush, that doesn’t sound right at all! Dying is sorrowful. Dying is heartbreaking. Dying means pain and separation. And loss. Certainly not “gain.” Think of how we even talk about death: “He lost his battle with cancer,” we say, or the doctor comes into the family waiting room and says, “We tried everything we could, but we lost her and couldn’t get her back.” Death doesn’t seem like it’s about gaining anything.

At first, we might want to be angry at Paul for saying such a thing. How insensitive, Paul! Don’t you know that kind of remark is going to rub salt in the wounds for anyone who has felt the sting of grief? How can you so glibly say that “dying is gain” when we, who have lived through the deaths of people we have loved continue to feel such loss over it?

Ah, but Paul has lost people, too. Paul knows that death involves loss. Paul has wept over friends and fellow brothers and sisters in Christ who have died. Paul even knows the unshakable guilt of having blood on his hands from his earlier days detaining and disappearing Christians and carting them off to their deaths (see the story of Stephen, for example). Even Jesus wept over the death of his friend Lazarus—mere moments before he was to raise him from the dead! But, of course, all the pain of that loss is really for us who remain alive. We feel the pain of loss. We feel the empty place in our hearts.  So of course, Paul knows that death means pain and loss when we miss those for whom we grieve.  Whatever else Paul means when he says that "dying is gain," he says it as someone who is still very much aware of the pain of losing people to death--and yet, he insists that there is a "gain" to be spoken of.

It makes a difference, of course, to know that in today's verse, Paul is talking about himself here, and his own death, however near or far that might be fore him. He is saying, “When the time comes for me to die, it will really be for my gain!” Death is loss, but it is also the end of loss—it is the point at which there is nothing left to lose. And Janis Joplin is not too far off the mark on her refrain that “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Paul got that and said as much 1,900 years before “Me and Bobby McGee” hit the charts.  The Romans might think that death is what cinches their triumph over a person, but Paul reminds us that God is just getting started with us at the point of our death--the Romans cannot touch us at that point, but God can (and will) raise us to life beyond the reach of any empire.  There, no enemy can get us and no threat can touch us.  We cannot lose anything at the point of death, and we have everything to gain.

Or to put it differently, for someone whose life is hid in Christ, dying means freedom. It means release from the weights we carry, the burdens of life, and the responsibilities we shoulder. For us who have found our hope in Christ, death really is gain, because it means death can’t do anything more to us—the power of sickness, of separation, of sorrow, they are all broken, and we will find ourselves in the immediate presence of the God whose love was so strong as to face death for us, too. If we did not have that hope of a God who will not lose his grip on us, then sure, death would be nothing but loss—the ultimate loss of our grip on ourselves. But because of Christ, death becomes not a stopping point, but a gateway. It doesn’t mean we seek out death, of course. And of course, the world may not understand it, but for us who have found our hope in Christ, dying really does mean gain.

But now, here’s the thing that gets me about Paul’s powerful little sentence in Philippians 1:21—the first half of his little pair is not “To live is loss.” You might expect that, given the way it ends with “dying is gain.” That would have had a nice rhythm to it, a nice balance and symmetry. We might expect Paul to say something like, “Since dying is really about gaining eternity, this life is awful and miserable by comparison,” or something like Thomas Hobbes’ famous decree: “Life is nasty, brutish, and short.” And to be truthful, sometimes Christians do get sloppy and say things like that—that because we’re going to heaven one day, this life is just a waste, or just a practice, or just a matter of putting your time in until the streets of gold and gates of pearl.

Paul doesn’t say that. In fact he goes out of his way and breaks what would have been a neat and tidying pairing in order not to say that. Instead of saying, that “living is loss and dying is gain,” he says that living is Christ. Now, what on earth could he mean?

Well, he’s really only saying the other half of what allows him to say that “dying is gain.” Dying is only gain for us because we are joined to Christ’s death and resurrection. Death’s power is broken over us because we have been united with Jesus’ death and his new risen life. So when we die, our lives are still held in Christ, who never dropped us or loosened his grip on us even for a moment. And when we continue to live, we are still living with Christ in us. So at every moment, even right now as you read and as I write, Christ dwells in us, and living this moment is a matter of letting Christ live more and more fully in us.  It's Christ either way.  And we are Christ's, either way, too.

But see how that changes our perspective on this life. It’s not meant to be tragic, dire drudgery. It’s not meant to be just putting our time in or paying our dues. It’s Christ himself, active in us, equipping us, recharging us, renewing us, and working through us. It means that every moment of this life, and every minute of this day is filled with divine purpose and beauty. Yes, dying may be gain—the gain of freedom from having to carry the weights of this life. But for us, living is not drudgery, either—it is the privilege of being allowed to have Christ live and move and act through us. And that, if you ask me, is some pretty powerful stuff in its own right.

So today, no matter what happens in this day, there is good news to be spoken. If we live through this day, Christ will be present in us, working through us and filling us to fullness, because we are indwelt by Christ. And if it should happen that you or I breathe our last on this day, we know that there is nothing death can do to us any longer, and its power is broken, because we are held by Christ.

On the one hand, filled by Christ. On the other, held by Christ. No matter what today, you and I will be brought right into the very presence of Christ. Let us have our eyes open.

Lord Jesus, we give you this and all that will happen in it. Grant us to see the gain for us no matter what is in store in this day.