Unexpected Epiphanies--July 7, 2026

Unexpected Epiphanies--July 7, 2026

At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will." (Matthew 11:25-26)

You can't deduce the Reign of God like a geometric proof.

You can't prove the Good News of the Gospel with a laboratory experiment.

And you can't reason your way into the community of Jesus by a philosophical debate.

It's not like that.

I don't mean to say that the Christian message is nonsense, or that is merely wishful thinking like a fairy tale.  I mean that some things in life--perhaps often the best and most important things, in fact--are not accessible by sheer brain power or human logic.  

Brilliant economists can calculate the ideal interest rate for the purposes of holding off inflation while promoting commerce, but they cannot use the same tools to explain the economy of mutual flourishing between the trees, the birds, the insects, and the fungi in the forest.  Astronomers can tell us how far away a particular star is in the night sky, and even how much longer it will keep shining, but they cannot thereby explain to us why we find ourselves captivated by the night sky and universally call these points of light "beautiful." Evolutionary biologists and experts in anthropology can give us plausible theories to explain why humans (and other creatures) live in groups, care for children, or even tend to the sick within our tribe, but not a scandalous notion like love for one's enemies.  And yet, all of those things are real and present on any given day.

Jesus is convinced that this is God's calling card. God has a way of acting beyond the bounds of what human logic considers reasonable, and yet in ways that are receivable by the foolish, uneducated, and childlike.  That's clear from these verses many of us heard this past Sunday from Matthew's Gospel, as Jesus continues to reflect on why his message (and that of his predecessor, John the Baptizer) was rejected by so many people when they came on the scene.  Whether it was John's raw and bombastic declaration, "The Kingdom of God has come near!" from the shores of the Jordan River, or Jesus' invitation to sinners and outcasts, "The Kingdom of God has come near!" (funny, how both had the same message, isn't it?), the Respectable Religious Leaders scoffed at both of them and dismissed their words.  So... why didn't they get it?  Why did so many supposedly educated, scholarly, and credentialed "God experts" ignore the news of God's Reign breaking in around them?

Well, Jesus' answer here is basically, "Because they treat God like an academic subject to be mastered, rather than always beyond our complete grasp."  Maybe we can't reduce knowledge of God to a set list of facts like learning your state capitals or the periodic table of elements.  Maybe we can't circumscribe God's actions within the bounds of laws and rules we have reached by logical conclusion--maybe God is not confined like the laws of planetary motion and orbital gravitation.  And yet, maybe God can still choose to be revealed, known, and encountered without any advanced degrees at all, in the least intellectual places around: a sprouting seed, a broken loaf, or open arms.

In fact, maybe the clearest and most powerful expression of God's very nature and presence is in something that looks utterly foolish, weak, and unworthy of the divine--say, a man nailed to a Roman cross.  This, of course, is exactly the point that Paul the apostle will make in his letter to the Corinthians when he says that God's wisdom looks like foolishness to the world and God's strength looks like weakness, since those are revealed ultimately in the Crucified Christ.  Our older brother in the faith Martin Luther would take that idea and run with it, saying that ultimately we don't find God in the places we expect, but precisely in the one place no respectable deity would go: the cross.  All the proofs of the scholastic theologians, and all the philosophical arguments meant to demonstrate the existence of God fall apart in the face of the cross and resurrection--nobody would predict the Creator of the universe to save all of us by becoming one of us and then getting killed by the worst in us.  And yet... there is the cross and the empty tomb, defiantly overturning our logic and reason.

Being a Christian, then, is really about a new kind of vision. Jesus intends to teach us his way of seeing things. We don't try and reason our way into understanding how God works, calculate the limits of where God's love is allowed to go, or deduce rules which God must follow because we say so.  In fact, we give up on trying to "master" God like multiplication tables, and instead allow God's love to reshape the way we see everything else.  

That's the invitation of this day: can we allow God to be revealed to us beyond our cleverness, right in the midst of the things the worlds calls foolish, weak, and small? Could we allow such unexpected epiphanies today?

Because God is already there, waiting to be seen--if only we will adjust our eyes.

Lord God, let us see you in unexpected ways, even when that means you defy our assumptions and conclusions about where to find you.

More Than a Shrug--July 6, 2026

More Than a Shrug--July 6, 2026

[Jesus spoke to the crowd saying:] “To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,
  ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
  we wailed, and you did not mourn.’

 “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” (Matthew 11:16-19)

T.S. Eliot once wrote, "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." I wonder if his criticism of our time would be that we would meet the end of the world with a shrug either way.

Ours is a time of profound indifference and often willful ignorance--when terrible things happen around the world on any given day, and often our go-to response is to change the channel, turn away, deny it is actually happening, or otherwise bury our heads in the sand.  Wars rage, while we simply complain about the impact on gas prices rather than those killed and injured.  Neighborhoods in our cities and communities struggle with poverty and access to good food, and we obsess over when the next chain restaurant or coffee franchise will come to our area.  Masked white supremacists march on the nation's capital during the 250th anniversary of our founding (with white face masks as contemporary versions of the old white hoods of an earlier time), and we can so easily dismiss it as merely "just another day's news." For all the ways that 24/7 news channels and the relentless barrage of social media posts keep us agitated and anxious, we are also increasingly desensitized to all of it and encouraged to tell ourselves, "This is fine" (like the famous cartoon of the dog sitting in a room that is on fire). And when someone speaks up to get our attention to see what is going wrong around us, it is very easy for us to dismiss them with a shrug as "just being dramatic" or "overreacting." We can always change the channel to something else, right? As the famous title of Neil Postman put it back in the 1980s, we are endlessly "amusing ourselves to death."

Jesus seems to have been prepared for addressing people in such an apathetic mindset.  Here in these words from Matthew 11, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, Jesus laments that so many people in his day ignored both the jarring prophetic speech of John the Baptizer and the gentler dinner-party approach of Jesus himself. Both John and Jesus brought the same core message, the Gospels note: "The Reign of God has come near!" Both declared God's inbreaking kingdom and called people to turn their lives to be a part of it--John with his stark wilderness declarations, and Jesus with his personal invitations to the outcasts and sinners. But by and large, the crowds and the Respectable Religious Leaders rejected John and Jesus alike. The announcement of God's kingdom was like the end of an old order, an old world, and the beginning of something brand new, and yet, no matter how Jesus or John announced it, their listeners shrugged with indifference.  That seems to be Jesus' concern here: how can we just look the other way and continue on with business as usual if this news is true?  How can we remain unchanged and unmoved in the wake of their message?

Jesus' words, both to his own time and to ours, are meant to wake us up and jar us out of our indifference.  The people of Jesus' day shrugged off both the fiery speeches of John and the winsome welcome of Jesus with the same apathetic, "So what?" response, and perhaps we are just as numb in our own time. We have learned to tune out the suffering of others and the facts that don't fit our preferred perspectives. We have taught ourselves we can ignore Jesus any time his words would challenge us or interrupt our routines, even if he is also bringing us the Good News of God's Reign. We have made ourselves unresponsive to the voices God keeps raising up to get us to pay attention, to see when things are not "just fine," and also to respond when we are summoned to participate in God's new thing.

The challenge for us today is to let Jesus unsettle us. Instead of shrugging off the people God sends to wake us up, we can listen.  Instead of muttering "This is fine" to ourselves when the house is on fire, we can get up and start putting out the flames.  Instead of finding ever newer ways of distracting ourselves, we can look where Jesus directs our attention.  It can be difficult--and scary--but the alternative is a zombie sort of life in which we are unmoved or unaware of what is going on around us.  Today is a day to let Jesus get our attention, and see what he would have us see.

As God's Reign breaks in among us even now, day by day, it is like an old world coming to an end and a whole new creation beginning.  That is worth more than a shrug.

Lord Jesus, help us to see what you would have us see, and to respond along with you.

The Often-Overlooked Anybodies--July 3, 2026

The Often-Overlooked Anybodies--July 3, 2026

[Jesus said:] "Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous, and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.” (Matthew 10:41-42)

It's a beautiful but surprising collection of people you find gathered at God's table. It's not so much the folks from the covers of magazines, the celebrities on the red carpet, the tycoons on the Forbes 500 list, or the big names carved into marble or put up in obnoxious gold letters, but more the often-overlooked anybodies who care about speaking the truth, doing right by their neighbors, and simple acts of kindness. Like Kurt Vonnegut put it, "You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society."

Rarely do those sorts of people make headlines or become famous, but Jesus says that he is building a community of people learning to see--and to welcome--those kinds of unsung saints.  And he also seems to know that the wider world may not see the worth or beauty of these blessedly ordinary people, but that God certainly does.  

These few verses from Matthew 10 might sound familiar, since many of us heard them in worship this past Sunday.  Jesus has been preparing his disciples for going out into the surrounding towns and villages where he is sending them, basically, to be his representatives all around: they will do what he does and speak his same message. They'll heal people, cast out evil spirits, raise the dead, relieve illness, and announce Jesus' message that "the Reign of God has come near."  And even though he has warned them that there will be some places they might not be welcomed or well-received, there will definitely be others who receive them with open arms.  Those will be the people who realize that when they are welcoming Jesus' disciples, they are really opening their homes to Jesus himself, and to the God who sent him.  And then Jesus goes on, here in today's verses, to describe an even broader welcome: there are indeed people who will recognize the truth-telling prophets who come across their path, and they will listen.  There will be people who take notice when other do the right thing and act for justice in the world around them--and they will open their doors to such decent people doing decent things in the world.  There will be folks who will show compassion and hospitality as simple as a cup of cold water, simply because they recognize that they are in the presence of someone God has sent into their lives.  The world may not think much of any of these people, but Jesus insists that God does... and God keeps opening the eyes of folks to recognize them, too.

That's how we have to hear this business about "rewards"--whether for "prophets" or "the righteous" or even those coming "in the name of a disciple;" the world may not see any of these people as worthy of noting, but God sees, and God will be sure to honor and care for them all.  Prophets, after all, were not often well-received by their initial listeners, and in the Bible at least, the prophets were often rejected, insulted, run out of town, or even killed because they spoke truth to power and made the complacent uncomfortable. The same is true about those who are truly committed to doing "justice" or "righteousness" (one word means both in Greek): often, those who do what is right and call out wrongdoing around them get labeled "divisive" or "disagreeable" or "troublemaking." Jesus, of course, also famously announced "blessing" on "those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake," which tells us that Jesus certainly knew that the world does not always applaud the folks who care about justice. And yet Jesus also is confident that God still sees... and vindicates the ones who are dismissed or harassed by the world for speaking up against bullies or doing what is right but unpopular. In fact, God's goodness overflows so abundantly that even the ones who welcome a prophet will be regarded as prophets themselves in God's eyes. Even those who just offer a cup of water to another person as an act of kindness to a disciple of Jesus will be honored, Jesus says.  The wider world may look on such people as nobodies being welcomed by other nobodies, but Jesus says that God sees differently, and treasures them all.

And so you end up here with a glimpse of a different kind of community at the center of Jesus' vision.  He's not interested in establishing some exclusive country club for the Big Deals and Important People, but rather in gathering folks who would be otherwise ignored, dismissed, or excluded by the world. Jesus is interested in creating a found family in which we listen to prophets and pay attention to the ones committed to decency even when it is costly, a beloved community in which we take the time and make the effort to extend basic kindnesses to one another without obsessing over "what we will get in return." Such a community will always be attuned to interests wider than just "Me and My Group First," because it will be willing to listen to those prophets who help them see the people on the outside who have been overlooked, and it will be willing to see the example of those who do what is right even when it is inconvenient.  And in the company of such people, we will be changed.  We will become more like Jesus, and at the very same time more fully who we were meant to be all along.

Honestly, that kind of life in community seems pretty compelling to me. Jesus is teaching us how to be such a saintly people, in Kurt Vonnegut's sense--who try to be "decent people in indecent times," who tell difficult truths even when it makes them into gadflies, who do the right thing when nobody is looking, and who gladly open their tables to strangers without worrying about getting paid back. If that kind of life seems compelling to you, too, I've got good news for you. This is what Jesus has brought us into.

Lord Jesus, shape us into people who reflect your goodness by placing us alongside others you are shaping, too.

What Sort of Witnesses--July 2, 2026

What Sort of Witnesses--July 2, 2026

[Jesus said to the twelve:] “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. (Matthew 10:40)

In yesterday's devotion, we were reminded from the letter to the Romans (and Bob Dylan) that we cannot not serve someone in this life--the real question, instead, is whom we will serve.  Well, today, these words of Jesus (which are also likely to have been ones you heard this past Sunday) add a corollary: we cannot not be a witness with our lives.  The real question is what impression we will make with our lives, or what picture people will get of the God we represent.  But since people will know we are followers of Jesus--whether by our cross necklace jewelry, fish bumper stickers, attendance on Sunday mornings, or the words that come out of our mouths--the issue is what sort of glimpse of Jesus people will get from what they see in our lives.  And on that count, we have an ambiguous track record.

Jesus sends his disciples out as his ambassadors in Matthew 10 with this awareness that people will draw conclusions about what Jesus is all about based on what his representatives are like.  And beyond that, the world will make some assumptions about what God is like, based on the way this people who speak about God and speak in God's name act in the world.  We are all, in a sense, walking billboards with our very lives.  The question is what message we will hold up to be seen by the world from what they see in us.  But there is no option of not being a witness--only what sort of a witness we will be.

That doesn't mean we are supposed to put on a fake self or project some manufactured air of moral perfection so that we can impress other people into believing in Jesus.  It doesn't mean we need to be the people who curate their social media posts with memes that look religious or present us as being perpetually pious.  Jesus isn't asking us to pretend to be people we're not.  But he is calling us to remember that our actions are often a more powerful witness of the Christ we follow than any religious pamphlets, tracts, or memes we might share.  And he does challenge us to remember that the watching world will draw conclusions about what Jesus is really like from what they see in us.  And that means we have to ask ourselves regularly what sort of God we hope people can glimpse in us.

When I am mean, self-centered, and petty in my interactions with other people, they'll come to the conclusion that either (a) the Christ I confess as Lord must also think that mindset is an acceptable way to live, or (b) that our faith in Jesus really doesn't make a whiff of difference in our actual lives, and therefore isn't worth paying any attention to.  When we are indifferent to people on the margins and ignore folks who feel overlooked, we give the impression that those folks don't matter much to God, either.  When we base our decisions on what makes us the most money rather than what love should look like in any given moment, we tell the world that our God is just as stingy as we are.  When we obsess over whom we keep out rather than on ways to bring people in, we are already preaching a wordless sermon that God is a curmudgeonly gatekeeper rather than the hospitable host at a big table.  When we say "Jesus loves you" but then act like there is fine-print, conditions, or limits to that love, people will take our actions more seriously than our lip service.  We cannot not be witnesses, but it is very much an open question what people will come to believe about Jesus from what they see in us.

On the other hand, the other side of this amazing truth is that you and I really can offer people a compelling glimpse of what God is like from what they see in us.  Jesus is not ashamed of being represented by us--us, in all our ordinariness, all of our fragility, all of our weaknesses, and all of the ways we struggle and stumble.  And beyond that, Jesus is convinced that God's own glory can be conveyed through the medium of our humanity--these lives, these words, these actions. That's amazing when you consider what it's like to stand beneath a starry night sky or the splendor of the Grand Canyon and to think to yourself, "Even as majestic as this is, God is even greater!" and then to realize that Jesus doesn't say, "You people are too plain and common to be representatives of the glory of God." Jesus doesn't tell his disciples, "If you want to introduce people to God, take them to this really lovely landscape or show them the power of a waterfall." He doesn't say, "We must build magnificent towers in marble and gold to convey the grandeur of God," either.  He says to his very earthy, very ordinary disciples (comprised largely of peasant fishermen and tax collectors of questionable repute), "You are ones I choose to represent God for the world.  You, as you are.  You, without needing any dressing up or spin-doctoring, you are the ones who will give people a glimpse of God's goodness."

And with that in mind, it really is amazing to consider that we have the opportunity every day to be reflections of the goodness of God. Beyond our accessorizing or empty slogans, we can be witnesses of what God is really like, simply in the ways we love. The willingness to go out of our way for a neighbor in trouble... the time taken to sit with someone in their sorrow... the care shown to a stranger when it would have been easier to look away... all of these and a million other actions that might not look very "dazzling" are ways we represent God to the world.  And when people catch a glimpse of that kind of generosity, welcome, empathy, compassion, and integrity from us, they might just realize they have seen a hint of what God is like. They might just realize, like Jacob after his dream of angels, "Surely God was in this place, and I did not know it!"

All of that brings us back to the question that might offer some guidance for the day: if we can't help but be witnesses for something in our day, what sort of witnesses will we be?  If we have the chance to send one message to the world with our lives in this day, what will convey the goodness of God? If, as the old saying goes, "You might be the only Bible someone else ever reads," how can we try to let our lives embody the Good News to be read by others?

Jesus is convinced that we are the right people to be his representatives--what if we lived today as if we believed he was right?

Lord Jesus, let your goodness be seen in us, rather than in spite of us.

The One Worth Serving--July 1, 2026

The One Worth Serving--July 1, 2026

"But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the fruit you have leads to sanctification, and the end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 6:22-23)

To hear the apostle tell it, Bob Dylan was right, and Frank Sinatra was wrong.

Old Blue Eyes famously sang about the importance of doing things "My Way," without anybody else telling him what do to, and how to do it, while Bob Dylan (riffing on Jesus) said, "You gotta serve someone--it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve someone." Once singer imagined that it is possible (and even good!) to be captain of your own soul and master of your own fate, without any allegiance or ties to anybody. And the other said, rather honestly, that no matter what we think we are choosing in this life, we are always giving our allegiance to somebody or another. Sinatra's song suggests that the goal of life is to somehow disentangle yourself from having to live under anybody else's direction, authority, or "lordship," and Dylan seems to say "You can't be free of serving somebody--the only question is who is worthy of giving your allegiance."

Paul the apostle would seem to agree.  In these words that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, he offers two choices to his readers in Rome, the beating heart of the Empire itself:  they had been enslaved to sin and under the dominion and tyranny of sin's grip of them, but now they have become servants of God. There is no third option of running around untethered and unclaimed by someone's reign.  There is no "I did it MY WAY," as Paul sees it. Or maybe more accurately, he would say that the "I did it MY WAY" philosophy, along with its cousin, "Me and My Group First," are both ways of being sold out to sin and under the dictatorship of self-centeredness.  And again, the only real alternative to being enslaved to sin is to be dedicated to God.  You can hear Bob Dylan underneath it all: You gotta serve someone.

But Paul goes one further than just telling us it's either God or sin that we end up serving.  He points out that the benefits packages between the two choices are completely different.  "The wages of sin is death," he says, "but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."  If we spend our lives forever giving in to the demands of that voice that leads us to greed, indifference, hatred, violence, and fear, the outcome is a dead-end.  But to be oriented toward God in Christ is different--it doesn't operate by the logic of earning and deserving, but by the logic of grace. And therefore, belonging to the lordship of Jesus' community yields not "wages," but a "free gift."  Dylan may be right that "you gotta serve someone," but Paul makes it very clear which option actually brings us to life.  As Paul sees it, serving God isn't bondage but our deepest fulfillment.

See, the dirty little secret about the "I did it MY WAY" mentality is that it advertises itself as some great life where you don't have to care about other people and don't have to listen to anybody else's directions, but it ends up being permanently unsatisfied and disconnected from both God and neighbor--the two primary relationships that give us deepest fulfillment and identity.  To see ourselves as servants of God--which always also includes serving our neighbors, because of who God is--is actually what makes us truly free, because it allows us to be fully alive in relationship with others, rather than constantly withdrawn behind barriers and walls inscribed with the words, "You can't tell me what to do!"  And as our older brother in the faith Martin Luthern once insisted (in his treatise on Christian Freedom), we are simultaneously most free when we step into our identity as servants of all.

I know that in the week leading up to our annual celebration of Independence Day (especially in the 250th anniversary of that date) it is tempting to believe that there is some way to live that comes without strings, without allegiances, and without reliance on someone else.  But the Gospel insists that whatever freedom really is, it comes precisely as we let go of "Me and My Group First" sloganeering and give our allegiance to the God we meet in Jesus, who summons us to serve all people the way he served and still serves. All of our insistence on doing it "My Way" ends up futile and unconvincing, but when our lives are spent serving God and neighbor, we find ourselves more fully alive.

If indeed it is true that we've all "gotta serve someone," Paul sure does make it clear who is worth giving our lives to.  The living God doesn't deal in terms of wages and earning, but in giving the free gift of life.  That's the One worth serving.

Lord Jesus, pull us always out of sin-centered orientation in our lives and pull us toward serving you and the people you place in our lives.  Make us truly free.

Whose Jurisdiction--June 30, 2026

Whose Jurisdiction--June 30, 2026

"Do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies, so that you obey their desires. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace." (Romans 6:12-14)

There's a reason that I don't typically pay attention to legal changes in Poland, or Uzbekistan, or Papua New Guinea: simply put, I do not live under their jurisdiction.  I don't keep track of who has been elected to Parliament in the UK most of the time, and I don't really have a finger on the pulse of who is next in line of succession for the throne of Monaco--again, because I do not live under their reign.

I do, however, care about whose jurisdiction I am under, and to whose dominion I belong.  So, if I am going to be an informed good citizen about the place I live, I would do well to pay attention to what is, or is not, the law, and I would even rightly voice my input and opinions on what the law should be.  That seems pretty straightforward, I hope.

So it makes sense then that the apostle Paul uses a similar train of thought to speak to the Christian community in Rome, as many of us heard in this passage this past Sunday.  Notice how many times he speaks in the language of who or what has rightful authority over us:  "Do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies..." "Sin will have no dominion over you..." "You are not under law but under grace."  These are questions of jurisdiction.  It's a question of whose "reign" we live within--whose kingdom we belong to, so to speak.  And Paul's point here is to say, "If you know that you don't have to obey the decrees of the Supreme Leader of North Korea because you are not under his jurisdiction, then you also should know that you don't have to obey the impulses of sin in your life, either, because you do not have to live under sin's authority any longer."  And with that, Paul offers stunning clarity to how we live our lives: we are freed from having to comply with every sinful whim, every crooked notion, and every rotten impulse in our lives, because we do not have to let ourselves be ruled by sin any longer. We belong to God's Reign, and we are shaped by God's design for our lives rather than in the mold of greed, apathy, bigotry, spite, and violence. In other words, more and more we will find ourselves being formed in the likeness of Christ, and less and less in the pattern of sin's distortions.

So often, we don't even realize we have the capacity to say "no" to the pull of sin in our lives.  We so easily just give in to every impulse, every mean thought, every self-centered action that we don't stop to think, "Wait a minute--this is not the kingdom I belong to!  I don't have to go along with this!  I don't have to comply with the dictates of sin! I am free from living under its authority!" That doesn't mean we'll always get it right, or that we'll always be able to properly rebel against the tyranny of sin's decrees.  But when we stop and ask these questions, at least we will hopefully remember whose reign we really belong to... and that can free us to make different choices.

It's also interesting here that Paul says sin no longer has dominion over us because "you are not under law but under grace."  That is to say, living under God's Reign also means that we live under the jurisdiction of grace, rather than fearfully worrying all the time whether we measure up to the law's demands.  That's important, because Paul wants us to understand that living within God's Reign isn't like suffering under a dictatorship, but a life that is beautifully free and good.  God's way of ruling isn't like the decrees of Caesar or the hegemony of an empire. God doesn't resort to governmental fiat or coercive threats, like nation-states and monarchs do, either. God's Reign doesn't demand that all citizens of a country must pray so many times a day or require mandatory Bible reading as signs of compliance. That's not how God operates, Paul says. Rather, by grace God invites--but does not coerce. It is a different kind of kingdom, because we have a different kind of ruler.

All of this is good news for us: because we do not live under sin's dominion, we don't have to succumb to its impulses in our lives.  And because we do not live under the intimidating threat of "law" but rather under the dominion of grace, we don't have to resort to the empire's tactics to enforce Christianity on anybody, either. We live under the Reign of God as we have met this God in Christ, and Christ has freed us both from the old order of the Empire and the ancient tyranny of sin.  All of this is what it means to belong to the Reign of God.  We are free, precisely because we are "under" the lordship of Jesus.  We are liberated, exactly because we have been dedicated to the way of Christ.

In those times when we struggle to know what to do or whose demands to obey, it's worth remembering this question: whose jurisdiction do I live under?  And whose kingdom do I belong to?

Lord Jesus, enable us to live in your way and in your reign, free from the demands of other empires and the impulses of sin.

A Community of Hard Truth-Tellers--June 29, 2026

A Community of Hard Truth-Tellers--June 29, 2026

The prophet Jeremiah spoke to the prophet Hananiah in the presence of the priests and all the people who were standing in the house of the Lord, and the prophet Jeremiah said, “Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord fulfill the words that you have prophesied and bring back to this place from Babylon the vessels of the house of the Lord and all the exiles. But listen now to this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people. The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.” (Jeremiah 28:5-9)

To be a part of God's people will require that we do the hard work of telling the truth to each other, and hearing it from each other, even when it is uncomfortable. 

That is true today, and as this passage from Jeremiah which many of us heard this past Sunday reminds us, it has always been true.  Sometimes we might wish for the ability to ignore disagreements, or we might tell ourselves that the "godly" thing is to sweep all of our sources of conflict under some convenient religious rug, but it turns out that those strategies are like letting a wound fester rather than cleaning it.  Just because you are afraid of touching the tender spot, or that it will be painful to disinfect, it is still unwise to ignore the injury and just hope it goes away untreated.  Like James Baldwin put it so aptly, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is face." If we are going to be the authentic people of God in this found-family we call "church," we will need at least that much courage--the same way the prophet Jeremiah dared to face difficult truths and to tell them, even when there was plenty of peer pressure to just nod his head along with the voices who said everything was fine.

This passage from Jeremiah 28 picks up as the people of Judah were staring down the reality of exile.  The Babylonians were not just at the gates: they had already plundered the Temple in Jerusalem, deposed the previous king and taken him captive to Babylon as their trophy, and begun to destroy the whole kingdom.  Jeremiah had warned the people that there was no chance to avert this disaster: their repeated turning away from God's ways of justice and mercy, and their perpetual trust in military might and political gamesmanship, rather than in God's provision, had pushed the situation to the brink. And now, there was no way to prevent or avoid exile.  The Babylonians would not be stopped; their pagan empire would be allowed to run roughshod over the nation of Judah, including its government, its temple, and its capital city.  Now, as you can imagine, that was not a very popular message to tell people (especially the remaining leadership in Jerusalem), and they did not like Jeremiah insisting on speaking it.  The accusations would have been obvious: "Jeremiah is unpatriotic!  He doesn't love his country if he's announcing that they cannot win a war against Babylon!  He hates God because he doesn't want God's holy vessels from the Temple returned, or at least he doesn't think we'll ever get them back!" If you're the one burdened with announcing bad news, people will assume you are reveling in it and rooting for the destruction, even if you are actually saying it with tears in your eyes.

Over against Jeremiah and his bad news, there was another prophet--well, someone who had deputized himself to be a prophet at any rate--named Hananiah.  Hananiah didn't like all that gloomy talk of destruction, and he couldn't imagine that God was really going to allow the nation to go into exile.  Hananiah seemed to think that God was only around to prop up the status quo, and that because his nation saw itself as "God's people," it therefore couldn't be defeated or destroyed. So he announced a message that was the opposite of Jeremiah's: basically, "Everything's fine.  It will all blow over. And pretty soon everything will go back to the way it was before, easy-peasy."  This, of course, was a lot more popular, and people really liked what Hananiah had to say... because they wanted it to be true.  In a way, Hananiah is the prototype for every TV evangelist promising health, wealth, and prosperity from God, along with every Christian nationalist preacher who says that "We will always succeed because we have God on our side!" As popular as such messages may be (and sometimes they are VERY popular), the true prophets like Jeremiah insisted that they just aren't true.

So here in this passage, we finally get Jeremiah's response to all of Hananiah's comforting (but wrong) malarkey.  Jeremiah says, essentially, "Look, I would love it if you were right and everything was going to fine. I would love it if we didn't have to go through exile, and if the Babylonians just brought back everything and everyone they have taken into captivity already. But here's the thing--we don't judge prophets authentic or not based on whether they said what we wanted to hear. We judged the prophets based on whether their messages actually came true or not."  In other words, "Hananiah's message sounds great, but it also seems like wishful thinking. And I think God is calling us to face the harder truth that we are going to have to endure exile rather than wishing it away."  That took courage--both for Jeremiah to say it, and for anybody else in the room to hear it and truly listen.

It's always going to be tempting to be the Hananiah of the moment--to say the things that everyone wants to hear and wishes were true. Complicating things further is that nobody wants to admit that they actually are the Hananiah du jour; we all want to picture ourselves as the true and right prophet Jeremiah, and we never want to admit the possibility that we are wrong. It is always going to be more alluring to tell ourselves that we won't have to face the difficult stuff, or that there will be some deus ex machina fix to prevent us from having to deal with suffering.  But Jeremiah reminds us that we belong to a community of people learning to be brave enough to tell and hear difficult truths. God will keep raising up people to face what we would rather ignore; the question is whether we will be courageous enough to listen... or to be those truth-tellers when we are the ones God is raising up.

I can only imagine how hard it would have been to be Jeremiah: being branded an unpatriotic traitor for saying that his nation did not have God on a leash and that their Babylonian opponents would defeat them would surely have been unpleasant.  Ultimately, though, Jeremiah--like all authentic prophets--trusted that the God who gave him that difficult message would also give him the strength to speak it.  Jeremiah's witness dares us, too, to speak difficult truths even when they are unpopular, and to face even hearing those truths when someone else is speaking them.  It's hard to be the boy declaring that the emperor is wearing no clothes, and it's hard to be one of the townspeople listening to his message when it would mean admitting you'd been swept up in the Big Lie that the emperor was truly wearing a magnificent robe.  It was hard to be the voice like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, speaking up against the Reich's fascism in his day, when there were so many other Christian voices saying that everything was fine.  It was hard to be the voice like Dr. King's, calling out Jim Crow as the sin that it was, especially when there were so many White preachers looking the other way or declaring that it was "too political" to speak against segregation. 

It continues to be daunting today to know where and when to speak up, and where and when we need to listen to those with whom we disagree.  After all, if everybody imagines themselves to be the "true prophet" like Jeremiah then we will never admit even the possibility that we might be the self-appointed counterfeit like Hananiah.  It takes courage, both to be the one to speak the difficult truth that you don't want to have to say, and it to be the one to hear such a truth from someone else.  Being open to both possibilities is important--even essential--for us as the people of God.  When we allow our faith simply to become a support for wishful thinking, we are headed down the path of Hananiah; when we are convinced that we are being led to speak up even when it is inconvenient or difficult, it is more likely we are at least in the ballpark of Jeremiah. But a good rule of thumb is to ask, "Is this message on my heart something I just wish were true, or something I am convinced needs to be said because it is true?" Even asking that question requires us to be brave.

So today, Jeremiah's example reminds us of the importance of honest listening, bravery in speaking, and the courage to face things so that they can be addressed, even when they are unpleasant. May we be given such bravery today from the same One who has raised up prophets throughout the past so that we might face this present moment and whatever it brings.

Lord God, give us the gift of courage, both to speak where you would have us speak, to listen to those you have raised up to tell us the truth.