Not Our Mascot, But Our Master--November 12, 2026

Not Our Mascot, But Our Master--November 12, 2026

"I hate, I despise your festivals,
 and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
 I will not accept them,
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
 I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
 I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like water
 and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." (Amos 5:21-24)

Here's an important (and likely provocative) reminder from the prophet Amos for us: God doesn't need religion.

In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, God is actively opposed to religion when it is used as a cover for crookedness, greed, and justice.

For someone like me, who as a pastor is by all accounts a professional religious person, all of this is a difficult truth to take in.  It also runs counter to our conventional thinking, right?  Religion--whether in the form of rituals, religious services, festival liturgies, sacrifices and offerings, big tent revivals, or national days of prayer--seems like the sort of thing God should unequivocally like.  You would think that God would always be in favor of extra church services, prayer vigils, and praise song, right?  Isn't all of that stuff meant for God in the first place?

Well, yes and no.  We may tell ourselves that our hymns, litanies, and ceremonies are acts of worship meant to honor God... but the prophet Amos reminds us (as many of us heard this past Sunday) that God isn't interested in any of it if those things are a distraction for us to avoid the harder lifelong work of treating others rightly, doing business fairly, and putting our own interests above the needs of others.  When any of those things happen, or any other form of injustice occurs, and religion is used in the attempt to buy God off with offerings or appease God with displays of devotion, God won't even listen to a note of it.  God, after all, doesn't need religion--God isn't powered by our prayers, fueled by our faith, or persuaded by our public performance of piety.

Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan once put it this way: "In the Hebrew Bible, God says, 'I reject your worship because of your lack of justice.' God never says, 'I reject your justice because of your lack of worship'."  In other words, God is not obligated to our accept our hymns, listen to our anthems, receive our offerings, or watch our prayer rallies and Sunday services. And if we have allowed any of those things to become a smokescreen so that we can ignore the ways we treat other people, God will actively reject all of our rigorous religiosity.  Worst of all, Amos seems to say, if we tell ourselves that our displays of performed piety necessarily mean that God endorses whatever other crooked things we are doing, the prophet makes it very clear that God wants nothing to do with such devotional theatrics.

Of course, it's even harder for us to admit that this isn't just a problem of ancient Israel, but a continuing problem for followers of Jesus even millennia later.  During the pre-Civil War era in the United States, plenty of preachers led their congregations in praise of God and held revivals for folks to come to Jesus while endorsing slavery and the horrendous notion that someone could own another human being and treat them like chattel.  During the 1930s in Germany, plenty of pastors presided over worship services naming Jesus Lord and then giving allegiance to the Fuhrer.  In the Jim Crow decades, plenty of churchgoers sang loud anthems to the Lord and then showed up at lynchings, promoted segregation, or kept out their neighbors and fellow Christians whose skin was darker than their own, all convinced that they had God on their side because they were so devout in their praise and prayer.  And even in the present moment, it is terrifyingly easy to convince ourselves we have God's support because we are saying all the right "religious" words, while looking the other way as people are stepped on and taken advantage of, as neighbors go hungry, or as wars claim the lives of innocents. And as Amos insists, God won't have it. It wasn't just in ancient Bible times: Amos reminds us that even today God reserves the right to say a loud "No" to our attempts to co-opt divine support for our self-serving agendas and crooked ways.

Ultimately, the prophet reminds us, we cannot sever our worship of God from the character of God--and when we try to do that, we end up treating God like our mascot rather than our Master.  In Amos' day, the conventional wisdom said, "You'll know who has God on their side because they'll be the ones putting on the best religious show," and the prophet said instead, "You'll know who is on God's side because they'll be the ones doing justice and practicing decency toward their neighbors." When we forget that, we end up thinking that God needs or wants more big faith-themed rallies, displays of religion in the public square, or national days of prayer--when God has made it very clear that God doesn't need any of those things, especially if those things come at the expense of actually treating others rightly or rationalizing our greed.

So today, here's the question: can we be honest enough with ourselves to look truthfully at where we might be letting our own agendas co-opt our religious devotion? Can we allow the voices of prophets to point out to us where we have been using performed piety to cover over our crooked ways?  Will we dare to listen when Amos and his 21st-century heirs call us out for being indifferent to the needs of the most vulnerable and the abuse of power? And most of all, will we be will open to changing our ways, reorienting our hearts and actions toward God's commitment to justice, and letting God redirect our lives as a result?  Or will we insist on just singing another verse of the same old song, thinking it impresses the Almighty?

Today, in other words, will we take it seriously that God doesn't need religion, but that God wants us to do justice all around?

Lord God, keep raising up the voices who will tell us the truths about ourselves we need to hear, and open our ears to hear what they say.

Christ's Homecoming--November 11, 2026

Christ's Homecoming--November 11, 2026

"Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever." (1 Thessalonians 4:17)

On some days during the week, if I get home first before my wife, when I hear her car pulling into the driveway and the garage door opening, I will come outside to the back door, meet her at her car to see if she's got anything to bring in--groceries or shopping bags or school work or the like--and will walk with her back into our house together. Even though it might look at first like I am walking out of the house to leave, the whole ritual is really about welcoming her back in. When she pulls into the driveway, I don't walk out the back door to get in the car with her and then leave our house behind, usually, but rather I go out to meet her to walk alongside her as she comes home for the day. She may not have been at the house for the whole day, but of course, it was her house already--she has just been at work. When she comes home and I meet her in the driveway, it is to come back--with a certain sense of victory at having made it through another day--to the place that we share together.

You'll have your own particulars, of course, but I'm betting that kind of scene is pretty familiar to you. Whether you have been more frequently on the welcoming side or the being-welcomed side, I'm willing to bet that at least the meaning of that moment makes sense to you, and that it is clear when I walk out the door into the garage as my wife's vehicle pulls in, it is not for my wife to whisk me off to some other location (unless we are, say, going out to eat straight from work), but for her to come home to the place that was already hers.

Well, keep that picture in mind to consider one other scene before we jump into the verse for today, which continues the passage many of us heard this past Sunday in worship. In the ancient world, especially in the practice of the Roman empire, when the emperor was coming to visit a Roman city or colony or a king was visiting a city within the kingdom, a very similar ceremony of welcome unfolded. Citizens from the city--who understood the emperor to be their ruler--would go out through the city gates and walls and stand waiting to greet the emperor, who would then be escorted with this entourage back into the city. The city was understood to already belong to the emperor, and he was the rightful ruler. He was simply being welcomed back into what was his own, perhaps as he returned from some far-off military campaign, or as he toured his territory. But what always happened was that the loyal citizens of that city would gather outside the city so that they could meet the emperor or the king and accompany him back into the city--the city, mind you, from which they had just left, in order immediately to come back in as part of a triumphal procession. There was never a scene where the emperor would come near to one of his own cities, and then have the citizens standing outside like they were waiting for a bus to be picked up and taken somewhere else. The emperor didn't take his own citizens out of their various cities (which were all under Roman rule) to bring them all to Rome. No, the scene was always the other way around--the emperor is met by loyal crowds who welcome him into their city, which they all agree is under his authority already. So this scene, which was played out again and again across the empire, was both a moment of celebration, but it was also a statement of allegiance. Those who welcomed the emperor into their city were, in effect, saying that he was the rightful ruler of their city and that he was coming back to a place that was his own already.

Well, both of these scenes help make sense of what's going on in this passage from 1 Thessalonians--as well as some of what is going on in the triumphal entry in all four Gospels when Jesus comes into Jerusalem riding on a donkey on the day we call Palm Sunday, when the people of the city "took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him" (John 12:13) before escorting him back into Jerusalem. On both Palm Sunday and here in 1 Thessalonians, the idea is that Jesus is being escorted into a place, and that people have come to welcome him--and by doing that, they are pledging their allegiance to his authority and lordship. It turned out to be rather fickle allegiance on Palm Sunday, but the idea is the same. Just as the emperor or other imperial dignitaries would have triumphal entries to Jerusalem as shows of their power, Jesus has a parallel entry, and it was a statement of a different reign than Caesar's.  Jesus is, once again, shown to be a sort of anti-Caesar.

This is the way Paul talks about what will happen at Jesus' return. The whole scene here is of a triumphal entry, or a homecoming celebration--not a rescue mission to retrieve people and whisk them away somewhere else. The same word Paul uses for "meeting" Jesus in the air is the same technical word used in Greek for that political procession of welcome when the emperor came to a Roman city. The idea is that Jesus, when he comes, will be met by his people, who will then accompany him back into the world that is rightfully his--the place that he shares with us, and where we will dwell together. This idea of meeting Jesus in the air is all about a triumphal return to the world, not a secret rescue or rapture out of the world. Yep, you read that right: there is no "secret rapture" in the Bible where people are whisked away or beamed out of the world to go somewhere else while the wicked world goes to hell in a handbasket. Instead, there is the image of Jesus' people welcoming him back into the world that was always his, as God's Reign comes fully "on earth as it is in heaven." It's about God's loving reign among us, with us, forever--not an escape to go somewhere else.  This is about Christ's homecoming to this world, not our evacuation out of it.

That's because ultimately, Christ is not going to give up on his claim over this world. Sure, now it looks like the world is not interested in God's rule, but that will not stop God. To borrow one more image, when the Allies liberated France in the D-Day campaign to win World War II, the goal of the mission was not just to cut their losses, gather as many displaced French citizens, and settle for rescuing them out of occupied France to give them new lives in England permanently. The mission was to liberate and to restore the rightful rule of the country, because the Allies never gave up on the conviction that France did not really belong to the Nazis, but to the French. The Allied invasion was, in many ways, about the rightful rulers returning to their own places. This is the way Paul talks about Jesus' coming--except, for him, the victory is already won. In Jesus' death and resurrection, the battle is fought, won, and over, and now what remains is for Jesus to be welcomed back home in triumphal procession back to what is his already.  That is to say, it is about Christ's homecoming.

What does any of this mean today for us? For one, it means that God does not think this world is disposable or something God will give up on. Jesus still claims this world of ours as his own rightful property. And God's love for all creation doesn't just give up on it because we keep turning away or rebelling. God's love reserves the right not to let our rejection of God be the last word on the subject.

Second, it means that our hope is not to be beamed out of trouble so that we do not have to face trials or suffering in this life--our hope is to welcome Jesus back to this world that has been his all along. We are not only missing the point of this Bible passage if we insist that it is about a "secret rapture" where true Christians will disappear while the world goes to hell in a handbasket, but we are also settling for less than God is apparently willing to settle for. The Allies would not give up on France and leave it to Nazi occupation--and God will not give up on the world and leave it to the rebellious, idolatrous emperors and Caesars of human arrogance. God will not settle for plucking a few good people out of the world and then letting it fall apart--God is committed to restoring, reclaiming, and redeeming the whole thing. That is what we wait for. That is why we live our lives now with an eye out the window and on the driveway, with our ears listening for the sound of the garage door opening. We are waiting to pledge our allegiance to our Lord in celebration of his coming. We are waiting to welcome home our Beloved to the place where we will dwell together.

Come, Lord Jesus. Reclaim, restore, and redeem, and keep our eyes watching to greet you and welcome you home in the mean time.

Tethered to Jesus--November 10, 2026

Tethered to Jesus--November 10, 2026

"For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.  For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first." (1 Thessalonians 4:14-16)

The long and the short of it is that we are tethered to Jesus.

This is both our call to cross-shaped discipleship and our hope of life beyond the grip of death.  We have been bound to Jesus, so wherever he goes, we go.  Whatever Jesus has endured, we will endure--and whatever Jesus been brought through, we will be brought through, too.

In so many words, that's the point Paul is making here in this passage that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.  The apostle is writing to folks in his congregation in Thessalonica who were worried that their loved ones who had died would miss out on Jesus' coming in glory.  That might seem strange to our ears, since we tend to immediately assume that our loved ones who have died are already in the blessed rest of being in the presence of God.  But in Paul's day, the Christians in Thessalonica were all convinced that Jesus would come back at any moment, any day now--so if Great Aunt Matilda died last month, they worried, would she miss out on that great and glorious day when Jesus came to reign on earth?  Did she--and all the others who had died in faith--miss out, in other words?

Well, Paul offers an answer here--and it's not concocted out of wishful thinking or empty cliches about heaven needing another angel or some terrible attempt to make it sound like God deliberately willed Aunt Matilda's death on such-and-such a day as part of a cosmic plan.  Paul pins his hopes--and all of us, really--onto Jesus.  Paul's answer is that since Jesus has died and risen, he will bring with him all those who have died and are bound to him.  What he has gone through, they will go through as well--and for those who have already died, they will be pulled from death into life at his coming in glory.  In other words, Great Aunt Matilda will not miss out on the great day of Jesus' coming to reign: she will have one of the spots at the front of the parade!

Now, I realize in our own day, our questions about death, dying, resurrection and Jesus' return may be different from those Paul's readers were asking.  For us, it has been two millennia since Jesus' earthly ministry, and I suspect that at some point, we all just assumed that God was not going to leave out all those who had died in faith before Jesus' coming again.  But we do have real questions about how we can have hope right now in a world full of death--both the specter of our own death and the painful reality of others' deaths, and the heartache of being separated from them in between. I learned long ago not to play the game of "Whose-Pain-Is-Worse-Than-Whose?" among our various kinds of loss, grief, and heartache--they all feel like a wound that will not heal, and each in its own way. And while I know that no single paragraph from the pen of an apostle (nor a blog post devotional from a decidedly lesser pastor) can take away those heartaches while we are living with them, I do think that Paul's words give us a way to frame this experience of death in such a way that we can bear the reality of grief and loss in our present-lives and keep putting one foot in front of the other. And as I said at the beginning, it all comes back to the central claim that we are tethered to Jesus. Wherever he goes, we go--even if the length of the cord between us is such that sometimes it feels like he is in one place and we haven't arrived yet.  

For us in the midst of our day-to-day lives, part of what that means is that we are bound to end up in situations of suffering--because he went through suffering, too. Jesus constantly and deliberately put himself in places where he would encounter the sick and the dying, the outcast and the ignored, the condemned and the lowly.  And he always called his followers to be in those places with them--sharing the sufferings and sorrows of others while bringing relief and healing to them, but also sometimes just bearing their grief.  Jesus goes deliberately to the cemetery where his friend Lazarus has been laid in a tomb, and he takes all of Mary and Martha's angriest questions and fiercest accusations--and his disciples come along for that journey, too.  He goes among those harassed by evil spirits, those ostracized by their diagnoses or their means of making money, and those deemed untouchable for whatever reason--and he commissions his followers to do the same.  He takes up a cross, bearing the rejection of the Respectable Religious Establishment and the cruelty of the Politically Powerful, and he explicitly calls us to carry a cross in his footsteps as well.  That's part of what it looks like to be tethered to Jesus--if we go where he goes, then we will go into the place of suffering, too.  That's where Jesus chose to go first.

So let's put away once and for all any notion that the Christian life is only a matter of good feelings and positive thinking.  Let's disabuse ourselves of the self-help version of the gospel that says Jesus is just here to help our kids get on the honor roll, our family life look like a 1950s sitcom, or our careers climb the corporate ladder ever higher.  Jesus has not called us to and easier and easier life--he has called us to go with him. And that will also always mean going downward, into the role of serving with the basin and the towel rather than ascending to the positions of power. It will mean going outward to the margins, among the people pushed out of polite circles, rather than making ourselves the center of attention. It will mean going on the way of the cross rather than the way of comfort--all because we are bound to Christ.

But the flipside is also true, and that's a word we cannot forget, either.   Because the same Jesus who went to the cross also rose from the dead, then we know that we will also be pulled from death's despair, pain, loneliness, and heartache into resurrection life.  Because Jesus leads us onward--even yanking us when we are nothing but dead weight--we will find ourselves drawn into his risen presence.  Because each of us--along with Saint Paul, dearly departed Great Aunt Matilda, and all the members of the First Church of Thessalonica--have been joined to Christ, death is not the end of the line but a point along the way that leads beyond into resurrection life.  Jesus has gone all the way through, and we are tied up with him--we will be pulled into new life as well. That does not negate the pain or heartache of grief in this life, but it does insist that such grief is not the end of the story.  And if in the meantime our lives are marked with sorrow and suffering, that may not be a sign that Jesus' grip on us is slacking--it may mean that he is very tightly holding onto us, and pulling us through what he always told us was in store. Ain't no way to follow Jesus that doesn't involve a cross--but there also ain't no way to follow Jesus that doesn't also come busting out of a borrowed grave eventually, too.

For wherever you are today, that's the truth: we are tethered to Jesus, and so we will find our lives going in all the places he has gone. If you are in the valley of the shadow of death today, here is good news: Jesus has tied us to himself almost like Odysseus to the mast of the ship, and he will not let us go.  If we were hoping for a secret detour on this Christian journey that went around the pain and heartache stuff, my sincere apologies for whoever it was that sold you that load of malarkey.  Whatever comes in this day or this season of life, and wherever we go, we are bound to Jesus. So we entrust ourselves today to the cord that pulls us forward, sometimes through death, and eventually into life.

Lord Jesus, hold onto us and assure us that your love will not let us go--even when it takes us through the way of suffering and loss.

Hope Holds Onto Us--November 9, 2026

Hope Holds Onto Us--November 9, 2026

"But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope." [1 Thessalonians 4:13]

The last phrase in that sentence makes a world of difference, and we need to spend some time with it. We Christians do not grieve as others do, Paul says--or at least we do not have to. But that does not mean we do not grieve--it is simply that we grieve differently. We do not grieve as though we "have no hope," Paul says. But we do grieve. We do feel loss. We just cling to the conviction that even that loss does not get the last word with us.  We hold onto hope--or perhaps it turns out that hope holds onto us, even when we are mourning.

You really need both halves of that to get a complete picture of how we in the found family of God think about death. We grieve and we hope--it can't be just one piece or the other, or else you'll lose something important. On the one hand, we don't believe that death gets the final say over us. We all constantly lean on the promise that God does not let go of us even through death--as Robert Farrar Capon says, in death, all we lose is our ability to hold onto our own lives, but Jesus emphatically does not lose his ability to hold onto them. We are convinced--at least on the days our faith has not taken a beating--that we will be reunited with those saints who have gone before us. And we are further convinced that those "saints" are simply all those who have been loved into faith in Jesus, not a special elite class or a select few. So, not because God owes it to us to reunite us with those we love, or because the human spirit is somehow just unthwartable and keeps coming back, buoyant as ever, but rather because God is just determined not to let us go, we believe that death is not the end of us. And that means death is not the end of our relationships with others. We await both the resurrection of our friends, and the resurrection of our friendships--the restoration of our relatives, and the restoration of our relationships with them. That is to say that we believe that even when death separates us, we will one day be able to relate to and love those we have lost. Once again, we will be reunited and rejoined to those we love, and so our memories of them do not have to have the despairingly heavy weight of finality. We are never at the end--at least, so we have come to believe, because we believe in the God of Lazarus, the God who raises the dead. And so, just as Paul says, we don't grieve the way the world grieves--we do not grieve as people who have no hope. We do have hope. It is real, and we bank on it.

But that said, we do grieve when death separates us from those whom we have loved. That's important to hear--it's not that Christians don't grieve, but that we are free to grieve differently. That keeps us honest, because it does hurt when we are separated from those we love. It does hurt--it rips us open--to lose a loved one to death. We may eventually land and settle in a place of peace about the God who promises to raise the dead and to roll away the stone, but the way to that place of peace is through honesty about our loss. There's just no way around it. So it's a distortion of our faith if we tell those who grieve, "Don't feel sad. They're in heaven now." We have that confident hope, yes, that our loved ones, those "brothers and sisters" in the faith whose lives God has not let go of, are indeed in the presence of God. But we still feel sad. We feel sorrow. We feel helpless. We feel hurt--and to be honest, it is precisely because "they are in heaven now" and we are in our lives as usual. It is the separation, our being pulled away from them, that makes us sorrowful, even if not the thought that their lives are lost. Easter people still weep for those they love and have lost--there were tears, after all, on that Easter morning on the way to the tomb, and there were still sorrows even on Easter evening as those two walked the Emmaus Road.

In fact, it is because people matter, and matter so deeply, that we grieve when we are parted in death. It is because we believe a human life is so precious and valuable that we hurt so much when their lives are separated from ours. Even when we know full well by faith, even when we have rock solid confidence, that we will be reunited at the last with those whom we have loved in Christ, we hurt to be pulled away from them, exactly because they matter so much to us and we have loved them. You could say it this way, I suppose: it is because people matter to us that we grieve, and it is because we are convinced that people matter to God that we have hope.

That surely gives a different spin to our way of talking about death and separation as Christians. If all we had to offer the world was a forced, candy-coated, smile and the insistence that we are happy all the time even when we lose people we love, the world would see right through it and know it was a lie. And for that matter, the watching world would ask whether we really cared about those for whom we grieve, even with our hope of seeing them again, if we never let our guard down or never admitted that it hurt.

But that cannot be the last word for us, either--Christianity is not just a program for learning how to be sad honestly. There is hope--the hope that as much as we have loved those we have lost, the living God loves, and continues to love, them even more deeply, and has an even tighter grip on them. That is how we talk about our hope and our grief together--with the honest confession of our wounds, and with the truthful hope, not just that there is one who will tend to our wounds, but who will never let go of those who have been pulled from us, and who indeed, will mend us all back together, on that day when "God will be all in all," as Paul says elsewhere, at the last. Whatever of each of those two, grief and hope, you bring with you today on your way, in any case, what we are invited to do with both of them is to bring them to God. We hold them in our hands, and we say, "You take these, and you make something out of them." And we trust... with tears of one kind or another (grief and hope sometimes each take that form, as you know) that will be enough.

O Lord, for whatever losses we have known, we offer to you both our sorrow at the pain of separation, and our hope that your grip will not let go of us. Mend all things, as you have promised, Lord--both the rips between us and the tears within us.

What God Says We Are--November 6, 2026

What God Says We Are--November 6, 2026

"Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is." (1 John 3:2)

The whole Christian life is about becoming who and what God says we already are.

If that seems like a bit of a brain twister, it's probably a sign that we're onto something.

After all, most of the really important things we believe as Christians boggle our minds if we spend any time at thinking about them. (In his book, Everything Belongs, Richard Rohr quotes some of the great Eastern fathers as saying, "If you can explain it, it isn't true," meaning that ultimately we can't completely unravel the mystery of the faith, and that if we think we understand it all, it's a sign we have probably missed the boat somewhere.) So, back to the mystery du jour: the Christian life is a matter of becoming who we are.

Again and again throughout the Bible, Christians find themselves bumping up against the idea of things being already-and-not-yet with us and God. Jesus is Lord of the entire universe, and yet there is still coming a day when he will be revealed fully to all as Lord. The Reign of God is among us, Jesus said two thousand years ago, and yet the same Jesus also still taught us to pray for that same very Reign to come, and for God's will to be done on earth the way it is done already in heaven. Eternal life begins now, the New Testament writers say, but it also yet to come beyond the bounds of death. There are lots of places where we live in that already-but-not-yet tension as believers in Jesus.

Well, here's one more for the pile: John tells us here we are God's children now, and he says it plainly and assertively as something we can take to the bank, But John also points us forward to something that is yet in store for us, something that is to come, something we are not yet experiencing fully. "We will be like him," John says, referring to Jesus here in these words many of us heard this past Sunday. We will be like Jesus, the One in whom we have met the face of God. In other words, we are God's children already, but we will be made to be fully like God's Son at the last.

That's really what this whole life is about--being formed into the likeness of Jesus--the "Son of Man," which is really a way of saying, "the Truly Human One." It's all about being shaped more and more fully into the likeness of Christ. It always has been. Not beards and sandals of course, but becoming like Jesus in the ways that matter.

This life--which also then includes this day--is part of how God is shaping us to be made like Jesus, so that, as John says, "when he is revealed, we will be like him." That is an important thing for us to remember, because it is very easy for us to slip into thinking that this life is just a matter of biding our time until we get to heaven, or that we just have to trudge through the days and keep our nose down as much as possible so that we can just skip ahead to the good part of life after death. But Jesus, it turns out, is just as much interested in life before death. And in fact, Jesus has gifted us with a community of people who are placed around us in this life-before-death to be used as instruments whom God uses to shape us to be like Christ. That community is called church. Sinners though we are, every last one of us, in God's great cosmic genius, the Spirit uses each of us to work on all of the rest of us. And together in community as the found family of God, we learn how to love like Jesus, how to be courageous truth-tellers in like Jesus, how to serve in humility like Jesus, how to embrace those deemed "unacceptable" and share a table with those on the margins like Jesus, and how to weep and rejoice like Jesus.

When we go out to serve others--whether on far-out mission trips or just down the road to the clothes closet or working side by side in our own church buildings--part of what is happening is that you and I are being changed, too. For whatever other good we are doing for others on our mission trips and with our clothing drives, God is using those moments to form the kind of people we are becoming--so that we will come to look like the kind of children God says we are already. When we hold hands together to pray in a circle, when we come to the Table to receive the bread and the cup, when we are gathered around the Word each Sunday, God is shaping us to make us to be like Jesus. God has already called us and claimed us as "children of God," but that is not the end of things--God continues to make us to be what God says we are already. We become more fully what we already are--like the Velveteen Rabbit become real as the stuffing is loved out of him and the fur is rubbed off of him.

So for today, we look out on the hours in front of us before we go to bed again, and we can see the open possibility that God will be at work on us today--and through us at the same time, too--to make us all more fully to become like Jesus. The question, then, to ask, over any given moment, any given action, any given word, any given choice in the day, is, "Does this make me more like Christ... or less?" Does this reflect who Jesus is faithfully, or distort his face with my own self-interest? Does this bring out what is of Mercy in me, or push his presence down under layers of apathy and indifference?

We rarely get around to asking questions like that in our day. We have a way of asking less and less these days, and shouting or declaring more and more--talking (yelling, really) past each other, rather than asking ourselves the difficult probing questions, like, "What will this choice do to me? How will it shape me?" Instead, we have a way of shouting instead, "I have a right to...!" or "People who don't see things the way I do must be godless heathens and disrespectful ingrates!" rather than asking, honestly and vulnerably, whether our own attitudes, words, and choices are really aligned with Christ or not. Each of us likes to imagine, "I am already a fully perfected, spittin'-image-of-Jesus full-baked saint, and anybody different is clearly out of step with The Truth," rather than allowing the possibility that God has put other people in our lives--people who may think through their faith differently from the way I do and arrive at some conclusions different from mine, no less!--deliberately, in order to shape me. We have a hard time imagining that God might have put people in my life, with whom I disagree sometimes, in order to shape me into the likeness of Christ in ways I may not be ready yet to see that I need. But that is part of the infinite genius of the living God--God reserves the right, and has the cleverness, to work through people I am not prepared to see that I can learn from... much less to learn the ways of Jesus from. (Of course, Jesus himself has a way of calling attention to the way the religious so-and-sos of his day needed to learn a thing or two from the tax collectors and prostitutes...)

The challenge in this day is allowing the possibility that the living God is not only working through you--like you are already a fully formed, perfect vessel for channeling Jesus--but also that this same God is working on you at the same time, always both at the same time, like a riverbed channels water along and is also shaped by that water at the same time.

We, children of God already, are being made to be more fully like the Son of God. And it will be happening, if perhaps in small ways that we will have to be vigilant to notice and recognize, even today.

O Great and Gracious God, we pray for your presence and blessing today on us, to make us more fully to become who and what you say we are. Let us be your children, and let us live as your children as you keep shaping us in the image of Jesus today.

The God Who Shelters--November 5, 2026

The God Who Shelters--November 5, 2026

"For this reason they are before the throne of God
 and worship him day and night within his temple,
 and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.
 They will hunger no more and thirst no more;
 the sun will not strike them,
 nor any scorching heat..." (Revelation 7:15-16)

Some folks who occupy seats of power use their status only for their own advantage and self-promotion... but not God.  The visionary writer of Revelation says that God almighty who reigns in heaven and earth chooses to use that position to protect and provide for us--indeed, the living God chooses to be our shelter.

What an utterly beautiful contrast to the self-serving autocrats of history, ancient and modern, who only care about serving themselves with their offices.  The real and living God uses the position of divine authority to meet our needs, not to have God's ego stroked.

And what an image John of Patmos uses in these verses, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, to describe God's tender care.  "The One who is seated on the throne will shelter them," he says.  The Greek is even more evocative--it suggests God is pitching a tent, or even that God becomes the tent itself that provides the shade so that "the sun will not strike them, no any scorching heat" (something John and his readers, all living in sultry Mediterranean climate, could surely appreciate).  It's also the same word underneath the claim in the poetic prologue of John's Gospel, that in Jesus, "the Word became flesh and dwelled among us"--again, carrying the imagery of a tent, or the ancient tabernacle of Israel which symbolized God's presence dwelling among the people in a tent-like structure they would set up and tear down as they moved through the wilderness.

This, John says, is what God's kind of "kingship" and "reigning" look like--not a golden parachute to cover God's narrow self-interest, but a canopy spread out over all of us to protect us. The living God is fundamentally other-centered rather than self-centered.  And God's way of using power is always pointed outward at caring for and protecting those who are vulnerable, not merely being surrounded by fawning sycophants.  In fact, as John points out, it is exactly because God chooses to shelter us from the divine throne that makes God worthy of our worship--it is because God is different from the self-serving autocrats, emperors, and ruler from the dustbin of history that God is truly worthy of our allegiance and worship.  Caesar wants more glory, territory, and power for himself.  Same with Alexander the Great of Greece and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon before him.  Same with Pharaoh in Egypt and every other tinpot tyrant of every era.  None of them are truly worthy of our devotion--but the living God is, because the living God chooses to be our shelter, come what may, so that whatever else is out there to threaten us, God will absorb it and keep us from feeling its fury.

That's the other thing implicit in this image.  If God--in God's own being, God's own self--becomes the canopy to shelter us or the tent to enfold us, then whatever dangers or troubles may be around will hit God, who offers God's own presence to protect us like a mother hen with her brood under her wings.  That promise of the sun not striking us, or any scorching heat--that is possible only if God chooses to be the shelter who takes all of that fire and holds it at bay so that we are spared.  It is fundamentally an image of self-giving and sacrifice--a God who is willing to take the hit so that we may live.  It is the sort of God who goes to a cross, isn't it?

When I hear these words from Revelation's seventh chapter, then, I hear it like a love song, earnest and courageous.  It reminds me, actually, of a song by Ray LaMontagne, titled appropriately, "Shelter," and whose refrain has this line to it: "Listen, when all of this around us will fall over/ Tell you what we're gonna do/ You will shelter me, my love/ And I... I will shelter you."  It sounds rather like the promise of God here in Revelation--but of course with one notable exception: the living God doesn't need our help to shelter the divine.  God makes a decidedly one-sided promise here, offered freely to that innumerable crowd in white robes from every nation, language, and people group, to be our shelter, but without seeking our help, protection, or power in return. That's the beauty of our God: being our shelter and our refuge simply because we are the ones who need it, and not in order to get something from us. That is the God whom we worship.

And that is why God is worthy.

All praise to you, O God, who shelters us. We give you thanks for offering your own life to be our refuge.

The Real Stain-Fighter--November 4, 2026

The Real Stain-Fighter--November 4, 2026

"Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, 'Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?'  I said to him, 'Sir, you are the one who knows.' Then he said to me, 'These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb'." (Revelation 7:13-14)

This is a detail worth mentioning: the central defining feature of all those innumerable people gathered around the throne of God, for all their differences, is that Jesus' blood has cleansed their robes.  That is to say, the sole qualification for belonging mentioned here in this scene from the book of Revelation (which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday) is what Jesus has done for us, rather than what we have done for Jesus.  In the end, the reason we can stand in the presence of God in the new creation is that Jesus has laid down his life for us, rather than our accomplishments, permanent records, or public performances of piety.

Now, on the one hand, especially for Lutheran Christians, this might seem perfectly obvious.  After all, we belong to a tradition that is centered on the affirmation that we are "justified by grace through faith, apart from the works of the law." And we didn't make that up ourselves: we learned it from the apostle Paul, who makes that idea a core conviction of faith.  And once you see it in Paul's letters, you can recognize the same truth running throughout the story of the Scriptures: our standing before God is NOT a matter of our achievements, but is a gift made possible through the cross and resurrection of Jesus.  God repeatedly saves and claims people, and only then are they called to live a new way in response--not as a precondition for earning divine approval.  God rescues and delivers people in the midst of their messiness, not only after they have racked up enough good deeds to outweigh their bad ones.  God sets free and restores us as we are, not contingent upon our moral progress, but simply on the basis of God's goodness that makes it possible for us to trust God's promise. Once you know that tune, you start to recognize how often the biblical writers are singing it.

The one wrinkle for many of us, however, seems to be the end of the story and the last verse of the song.  "Wait!  In the end, aren't we judged on the basis of our actions?"  "What about my list of vices and virtues?"  "Isn't God going to do a worthiness check at the door to make sure that only the truly holy and righteous get into heaven?"  We have somehow told ourselves that all of this "justified by grace through faith" is a lovely thing to hold onto in this life, but surely at the end of the story, it will still come down to "Who has been a good boy or girl, and who has not?"  We have been led to believe that in the last act of the play, the One introduced to us as "gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love," will turn out to have been a miserly bean-counter after all, posting angelic bouncers to keep out the riff-raff and the ones with soiled garments.  All the tired jokes and cartoons depicting the long line at the pearly gates as a white-bearded Saint Peter checks the heavenly account books have given us the impression that at the last, The Rules must change, and God will suddenly demand we audition for a spot or present our papers at the entrance to heaven.  But for all those pop-religion assumptions, that's not what we actually hear from the book of Revelation here, is it?

Rather, when the visionary John of Patmos describes the crowd from every nation, tribe, language, and people there in the heavenly throne room, he doesn't mention anything THEY did to make themselves presentable.  There's no secret formula of "Good-deeds-and-spritz-of-club-soda" to get out the stains of sin.  There's no discussion of these countless throngs having "prayed the sinner's prayer," or "gone to church regularly," or "helped enough elderly neighbors across busy intersections." The thing that defines this group is not what they have done, but what Jesus, the Lamb, has done for them.  The Lamb has shed his blood--that is, Jesus has gone to the cross and given his life--and these people's robes have been made clean on the basis of Jesus' blood. He's the reason they belong.  He's the reason their clothes are clean--Jesus is the real stain-fighter, so to speak.  He is the reason they all find themselves in the presence of God.  It's all been a gift.

From beginning to end, this is the hope on which the Christian faith really hangs: our standing before God isn't something we have achieved, but rather something we have been given.  It is something you discover has been put in your hands already, not something you have to go out and get.  And there will be no last-second bait-and-switch or changing of the rules, as Revelation tells it.  We depend on grace every day of our lives now, and we will still rely on grace in the new creation, too. We, along with everybody else who will be there in the new creation from every language, culture, and nation, will find ourselves found by grace--because of what God has done for us in Christ, rather than what we do for God as payment.

That's news worth staking our lives on, even right now.

Lord Jesus, grant us to trust in your goodness all our days, and into all of our tomorrows.