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.

A Different Kind of Revolution--September 23, 2026

A Different Kind of Revolution--September 23, 2026

[Jesus said:] “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (Matthew 20:16)

So Jesus is in the business of turning things upside-down, is he? Hmmm… the first shall be last, huh? The last shall be first? Whether that sounds like good or bad news to you depends on two things: (1) whether you see yourself as among “the first” or “the last,” and then (2) whether the last being first means that the last-who-are-now-first are going to be jerks who lord it over the new last place people, or whether the cycle is going to be broken once and for all.

And that second question is what makes the Reign of God we learn from Jesus different from history’s long line of revolutionaries-turned-dictators and reform-movements-turned-stifling-regimes. Come on, let’s be honest here: a lot of human history, especially in the last hundred years, has shown us that the last can become first. And often enough, it starts out with good intentions: the cry for justice from an oppressed people, refusing to be stepped on anymore. It usually starts out with beautiful and noble visions of freedom, or the righteous anger of people who have been mistreated and wronged. This was the sales-pitch of Marxism and communism, after all: the poor and oppressed workers could overthrow the shackles put on them by their rich and decadent bosses and finally create a “just” society. And if you were one of the people who felt you were last in line, and you were wondering how you were going to feed your family tomorrow, the promise of no longer being at the end of the line sounded pretty good. All it would take was a little blood-letting in a revolution, and then things would finally be put right. You can at least understand why the sales-pitch was appealing to people who were working themselves to death but couldn’t put food on the table while other people seemed to sit in the lap of luxury.

The problem was, of course, that even after the revolutions were done, the people who used to be the lowly oppressed people on the bottom decided that they liked power once they got a taste of it, and decided to use it to stomp on the new people on the bottom. The cycle just started all over again—the “old” last becoming the “new” first in a perpetual game of King of the Hill. The popular, charismatic folk-hero leaders of the movements became the power-hungry, oppressive tyrants and Supreme Leaders of the next generation, stomping on a new round of “bottom rung” people who are the new “last.” As George Orwell famously described the cycle in his allegory Animal Farm, it starts with the animals taking over their farm from their human owners with the cheer, “All animals are equal,” and then ends with the chant, “All animals are equal… but some are more equal than others!” As plenty of philosophers have noted, you have to be careful what you fight against, because you will become the very thing you hate. (Nietzsche said it hauntingly: “Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster—and if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”)

So, not to get all ramblingly philosophical, but the question we have to ask when we hear Jesus say “the last will be first and the first will be last,” is, Is Jesus just setting us up for another round of King of the Hill? Because if that’s all the Kingdom is, we have seen the wreckage that kind of thinking leaves behind. We have heard the stories of the millions who were imprisoned, “disappeared,” or killed by the revolutions-turned-dictatorships of the 20th century, and the plight of those who still live under the thumbs of the “old last” who are now the power-hungry “new first.” And we are not interested, if that is all we are talking about here in Matthew 20:16, at the end of his parable about workers who are all paid the same at the end of the work day, no matter how many hours they had worked.

But let’s give Jesus the benefit of the doubt. Does he sound like someone who hasn’t thought his teaching through? Does he sound like someone who will settle for just replacing one set of dictators who used to be “first” with another set of dictators who used to be “last”? No, not the Jesus we have met so far in the Gospel. What Jesus offers us in the Kingdom is a whole new order of things, where the lowly are raised up, but where no one steps on top of a new group of “lowly” people. The revolutions in the dustbin of history all put one new greedy human on the top of the heap to replace the old greedy human on top of the heap. But Jesus offers us the Reign of God, where the One who rules over all is also the One who washes the feet of his disciples and dies for their sins. The Kingdom Jesus offers us can turn the old order upside down and make the last first, and even let the puffed-up, proud, and powerful be taken down a few pegs, all without starting the old cycle of stepping on people all over again. That is because the God who reigns and does this re-ordering of things is also the God who loves selflessly and risks being “stepped on” at the cross. That makes all the difference.  Jesus' vision is revolutionary, to be sure, but it is a different kind of revolution from history's sad examples.

So, when angry, upset voices start talking about putting "Me and My Group First," it is probably bad news all around, because the new dictators turn out to be just as bad as the old ones. But when Jesus talks about the last being made first, it is, strangely enough, good news all around, because he is creating a new kind of community where all are lifted up and all become servants at the very same time. 

And that is the kind of life that we Christians, we people of God, are invited into right now—that we would care for one another’s needs and let our needs be cared for in an ongoing circle where all put themselves second to the needs of others around them, and all find themselves put first by the other people in the circle. That kind of love—where we all let ourselves be last so that someone else can be first, and where other people put you first so that you can be lifted up, too—that is something we get to live in now, even if only in glimpses, in the Christian community. And that, even if practiced in little gestures and small moments between you and one other person, has the power to turn the world upside down… or maybe, from God’s perspective, to turn it right-side up.

Lord God, your reign overturns all our old thinking and competing with each other, but still we strive and struggle to learn to see the world through your love. Give us the eyes to see the world right-side-up, even if it seems upside down at first.

The Love You Take--Devotion for September 23, 2026

The Love You Take--September 23, 2026

"When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, 'Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.' When those hired about five o'clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, 'These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.' But he replied to one of them, 'Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?' Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?'" (Matthew 20:8-15)

I don't often say this, but it is unavoidable in this instance: the Beatles were wrong.

At the tail end of the last album they recorded together, Abbey Road, after a brilliant two minutes of volleying guitar licks to lead up to it, the Beatles offer this lone couplet:

"And in the end, the love you take

Is equal to the love you make."

This is another instance of the life-principle "Don't believe something is true just because it rhymes." How much bad theology has been done over two thousand years just because some writer's-blocked pious poet reached for an easy rhyme rather than thinking out what he or she was writing? Well, same thing here: if we are to believe Jesus (and I believe he is indeed the authority on the subject of... anything), the way God runs the universe is decidedly NOT to only reward people based on what they have put in. The economy of God is, from start to finish an economy of grace. And therefore, in the end the paychecks are given out not based on who sweated the most during their shift, but based on a commitment from the landowner that everybody should be able to feed their kids the next day.

In the end, it would seem, the love you take is always way beyond what you deserved. Always.

Now, as long as I am the one receiving the windfall, that will sound pretty good. But we humans have a way of getting envious of when someone else receives a gift that puts them on equal footing with us. We have a way of getting angry, upset, and bent out of shape when someone else is given the same amount we have--we start fussing about what is "right" and what is "just" and what's "fair" because we feel threatened.

And that's the thing--to the ones with more than others, any gracious gesture to put people on equal footing feels like a threat.

So here's a quick rule of thumb: if I find myself getting all bent out of shape with anxious indignation because someone else has been given a leg up so that they are at the same starting point as I am, I am probably unaware of just how privileged I have been all along. It's funny--in that way things that are awful can also be funny--how when I look at my own life, I have a tendency to assume that I am entitled to all the advantages I have... but when I look at someone else's situation and see that someone has given them grace, I can start bemoaning them as undeserving and unworthy.

The good news in all of that (if you want to call it that)--I guess I should realize I'm not alone in that. The workers hired first in Jesus' provocative story here are lodging the same complaint. "You have made them equal to us!" That's their problem. They wouldn't have minded the last ones getting an inflated paycheck so long as the first hired workers got their own paychecks pumped up--so they could still see themselves as "better." To the ones first hired, it's fine if the next guy gets a bonus, as long as mine is bigger--that's how I compare myself to them and tell myself I'm better than all of them, after all.

But when they see that the landowner has treated them all the same--paid them all the same amount--they get upset. Turns out they and I are kindred spirits sometimes. And you, too, I'll wager. We who fancy ourselves the "first hired" have a way of forgetting that we have been graced, too--we forget that someone reached out to give us a leg up, and that we didn't earn the good in our lives, either. The talents you were born with--grace. The family that taught you, supported you, and encouraged you--grace. The wealth that gave you the creature comforts you assumed "everybody" had growing up--grace. The conveniences and advantages we have had, some of which you and I don't even recognize we have--guess what: not your achievement! It has all been grace, all along. The whole universe is run on God's irrepressible itch to give out good things to people who didn't do a thing to deserve them first.

So one day, Jesus' parable hints, we will all stand before God and realize that everything in this life has been a gift all along. The privileges I have had in my life were not something I "deserved"--they were there already before any talk of my "working" for them. But God chose, not only to give me blessings and benefits in this life, but also to grace other people, too--and that means that God reserves the right to lift people up and fill their empty hands with good things the same as me. If I am still stuck in the old thinking of earning and winning and climbing over top of everybody else to get to the top, I am going to feel threatened and insecure when God blesses other people.

Today is the day for you and me to see things differently. Today is the day for us to see the end of the story--the end of all things in this life and this world--and how, all the way to the very end, God has a way of blessing the people we deem least deserving. And then we can begin to realize that there is surely someone who looks at me and has decided that I am least deserving of grace, too--and yet, that doesn't stop God from lavishing grace upon grace on me... on you... on a whole world full of the last-picked and seemingly least-deserving.

We can either rail against that divine economy of mercy in this life--we can pretend that we are more deserving of what we have, and keep on feeling threatened when the group that came at noon, or the group that came at three, or the group that came just a minute ago, have good things provided to them so that they can care for their families, too--or, we can see that this is the logic of divine grace at work. We can see that "they" and "we" alike have been given all we have as a gift of God, and that means there is no room for me to fuss that someone else got a handout... when I have been living off of divine handouts every day of my life, too. We can let go of our awfully smug "I did this all myself" attitudes and instead see that we have all been graced beyond our deserving. And when that dawns on me, then a windfall for you doesn't have to feel like a threat to me. You getting to have equal standing and footing with me doesn't have to scare me anymore, because I realize we have both been placed at that point by a goodness we did not deserve.

In the end, the love you take... well, turns out always to have been the love that God has given us freely, way beyond what any of us made or deserved or earned. The whole ride has been grace, all along. That's how the story will end when our labor for this life is done, and that's how God runs the show right now.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to love your gracious giving to others, and to see ourselves as people who have been graced and blessed beyond our earning.

That All May Eat--September 22, 2026

That All May Eat--September 22, 2026

[Jesus said to the disciples:] “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard....’"  (Matthew 20:1-7)

Like most of Jesus' stories, this parable, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, is meant to be a glimpse of how God runs things.  It is a sketch of how the particular God we know in Jesus operates: what values are most important to God, which policies are priorities for God's agenda, and what means God uses to accomplish those things. We sometimes sing a song in worship that draws inspiration from the parables of Jesus, and each verse begins with a recurring question: "What is the world like where God's will is done?"  Something like that is what Jesus intends with his frequent opening line to his parables, "The kingdom of heaven is like..."  This is another snapshot meant to give us an impression of God's character, and of how the world operates when it is in line with that character.

So... what is God's Reign like, according to the story?  Well, we'll take a look at the opening of the story today, and then follow up with the table-turning plot-twist at the end tomorrow.  But for starters, Jesus asks us to imagine a scene familiar to the people in Jesus' audience (and Matthew's audience, too): a landowner looking to hire day-laborers to do farm work.  Like the migrant workers today who still depend on finding work in a farmer's field to be able to provide for their families, these people are living day to day, working today for the pay that will buy tomorrow's food.  They understand all too well what Jesus means when he teaches us to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," because they too have to go out with each new sunrise to find a way to bring home something to feed their families.  These are the people Jesus has already announced are among the "blessed" in Luke's version of the Beatitudes ["Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled," he says]. And these are the ones he will identify himself with by the end of the Gospel, ["I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat... when you did it for one of the least of these, you did it to me"].  Jesus says that the Reign of God has to do the likes of these people, not just the well-heeled folks with financial security and plentiful savings.  God's kingdom has to do with those who struggle to make ends meet, and those who provide for them, not just the prosperous and the comfortable.

In Jesus' story, the landowner goes to hire people to work for the day in the vineyard, and he promises them a fair deal.  A denarius was a coin that was a standard day's pay for a subsistence worker--think of it as a promise to give minimum wage for their day's work.  It's not a fortune, but it would be enough to feed their families at the end of the day.  And that was the goal: make enough at work that you could feed your family tomorrow, and then tomorrow you go out and do it all over again hoping to get hired for the day in order to earn the next day's bread.  If you are a day-laborer, of course, just getting hired is at least something of a relief: it means that you will bring some money home at the end of the day, which means there will be food on the table tomorrow.  Don't get hired, and when the sun comes up tomorrow, someone in your family will go hungry.  So even this crew that is hired at the very start of the workday might feel lucky to know that they will not have to go back home at day's end hanging their heads in shame and sorrow that there will not be enough to go around.

So far this story has just been a day-in-the-life of a farm at harvest time, with a landowner hiring workers for the day.  But this landowner does something strange: he keeps going out over the course of the day looking for more and more workers, but Jesus doesn't give us any indication that the farmer himself has a particularly pressing reason for needing them.  He doesn't say, "The landowner needed to get the grapes harvested by the end of the day, so he really needed extra help," or "There was a clear deadline that justified these extra shifts of workers."  Jesus, of course, lives in the mild and Mediterranean climate of Galilee and Judea, where it rarely gets below freezing, so the grapes are not going to be ruined by an unexpected cold snap--at least Jesus gives us no reason to think so.  

But if the landowner doesn't need to get these extra workers because of his own interests or some urgent viticultural necessity, then why does he go out repeatedly to the marketplace looking for additional workers--and why does he keep sending them out into his vineyard?  Why not find the guys who hadn't been hired and say, "Hey, the early bird gets the worm. Sorry about your luck not getting hired today, but if you're here first thing in the morning I might hire you tomorrow for tomorrow's harvest work"? Why keep adding more and more workers in the labor force, especially when it is becoming painfully clear how little time is left in the work day?

I have a hunch that this is the beginning of Jesus showing his hand.  Even before the great and glorious plot twist that is in store that will put the last first and the first last, Jesus' landowner is starting to act... curiously.  It's almost like he's not primarily (or at least exclusively) interested in maximizing his profits, and more like he cares about what those guys standing around unhired will do to feed their families if nobody else comes along and hires them.  It's almost like he is deliberately going out to the marketplace... and maybe the parking lot of the local Big Box hardware store, too... looking for workers who need to get hired in order to pay for the food their children will need to eat tomorrow.  It's almost like this landowner is going out, not because the grapes so urgently need to be picked right now, but because he wants to make sure everybody in town gets to feed their families when the day is over.  He is already modeling a different kind of economy: one that is centered on everybody having enough, rather than just on his own narrow self-interest.  And it really will point your head in a different direction if you are not just concerned to make a bigger profit, but rather are concerned that all may eat.

And here already I think we are beginning to get a sense of how God's ordering of things is different from what passes for "conventional wisdom" in our economy.  Jesus describes this landowner (who, according to Jesus, is somehow what "the kingdom of heaven is like") as someone who sees the world from a different perspective compared to just about everybody else.  The conventional wisdom would say the landowner should only care about what will make him the biggest profits, and presumably what will cost him the least in business expenses.  The conventional wisdom would say you hire the minimum number of employees it would take to get the job done, because extra paychecks mean less cash in your bank accounts.  The conventional wisdom says that it's the people standing around the marketplace who are to blame for not having gotten hired earlier, or not being more appealing as potential employees, or just not being "the right kind of people" to get the job.  But the landowner instead appears to be asking ahead of time, "What will happen to the children of the ones standing in the marketplace if they remain unhired?"  He seems to asking himself, "Who will go hungry if these workers do not make a living wage at the end of the day?"  And he already seems to be thinking that he is in a position to do something about their predicament ahead of time by hiring people, even with a mere hour left in the workday.  Jesus seems to be telling us that from the perspective of God's Reign, we are no longer satisfied merely to ask, "What is most profitable for me?" but instead to ask, "What can I do so that everybody gets to eat?"  Like Dr. King famously suggested of the parable we call the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite pass the man lying in the road because they ask, "What might happen to me if I stop to help him?" while the foreigner comes to his aid because he has been asking himself, "What might happen to this man if I do not stop to help him?"  That is a decidedly different perspective--and that is precisely the point.

To see the world through the lens of what matters to God will change how we view every part of our lives, every interaction, and every choice we make.  To focus on "the kingdom of heaven" is not to become obsessed with pearly gates, streets of gold, or angel harps, but rather to see the whole world from the perspective of the God who gives daily bread to all.  It means we will see other people and not merely ask, "What can I get out of this person?" but also, "What can I give to this person?"  It means we will see all of our choices, actions, and priorities through the eyes of love, rather than greed... or efficiency... or a "Me and My Group First" mindset.

How might our vision be changed today by taking even just the first half of this parable seriously?  Where have we been reducing the world down to "What's in it for me?" calculations when God has been inviting us into an expansive, "How can we be mindful of the good of all?"  What choices would we make differently if our driving concern was not simply getting or keeping more money for ourselves, but making sure that everybody around gets to eat?  Already you can begin to see how subversive Jesus' stories really are--they intend to turn our old priorities upside down, and to take these inward-bent hardened hearts of ours and pull them right-side-out.

May we be people who see the world through such eyes today.  May we see every face, every choice, and every action through the lens of God's own goodness.

Lord God, teach us to see the world as you do, and to act in the world in light of your generosity.

Lessons from a Shrub--September 21, 2026

Lessons from a Shrub--September 21, 2026

"The LORD God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, 'It is better for me to die than to live.' But God said to Jonah, 'Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?' And he said, 'Yes, angry enough to die.' Then the LORD said, 'You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?'" (Jonah 4:6-11)

It really makes a difference to get the whole way through a story.

Fans of mid 1990s "Must See TV" from NBC's old classic line-up will know that. If you were a fan of the show Friends at all, you are likely familiar with the classic episode where Phoebe (played by Lisa Kudrow on the sitcom) says how much she hates that "sad movie" called It's A Wonderful Life, and how much she loves the happy story of Old Yeller, because she has only ever seen the first two-thirds of both movies. And of course, there's the joke--she has never seen the classic Frank Capra happy ending of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas classic, complete with Clarence getting his wings, and so she doesn't know that It's A Wonderful Life leaves everybody smiling. And she has never made it to the end of Old Yeller, so she has never had to see the good and loyal dog be put down when he gets rabies at the end. Phoebe has her movie reviews backwards, because she has never made it the whole way through either story. And in both of those cases, the ending is really what the whole story drives toward.

That's not only a helpful hint for your movie viewing, but it's also essential for reading the stories of the Bible. And Jonah's story is a classic case in point, as many of us heard this past Sunday in worship. If you stop halfway through, you will likely assume Jonah's story is a morality tale about doing what God says or else risking punishment (like getting swallowed by a great fish). But that's not what the point of the story was ever really about. Making it all the way to the end of Jonah's story is much more dangerous to our sense of religious self-righteous. Be careful--if you keep on reading past the famous fish scene, Jonah's story just might make you rethink your whole faith and revise the way you see "the other."

It's a shame that in a lot of church life, we stop at the part of the story where Jonah gets spit up by the great fish. That much, almost everybody knows. The Sunday School flannelboard version of Jonah's story that I grew up with boiled down to something like this:

"God told Jonah to go to Nineveh.

Jonah said, 'No,' and went as far away in the other direction as he could.

God punished Jonah for disobeying by first sending a storm at sea and then sending a great big fish to swallow Jonah up.

God only let Jonah out when he finally promised to do what God said.

And the moral of the story is--do what God says or else you'll be punished."

Nobody in my recollection ever bothered pointing out that there was another two chapters to the story, and that maybe, just maybe, the actual turning point of the story was yet to be told. In the Respectable Religious version of Jonah's story, Jonah is basically Goofus from the old Highlights magazine feature, "Goofus and Gallant," giving us an example of what not to do if we wanted to avoid God's wrath.

But really, once the great fish vomits Jonah out at the city limits of Nineveh, the story takes a couple of unexpected turns. Once we get beyond the whale, Jonah goes into the city of Nineveh--the capital city of Israel's sworn enemy, the cruel Assyrians--and he begrudgingly announces God's judgment on their cruelty and wickedness... only to have these terrible, no-good, hopeless, pagan Ninevites... change. They turn from their wickedness and cruelty, so the story goes, and God decides to be merciful.

That was exactly what Jonah had been afraid of.

Seriously. Jonah is angry with God, because he knew--he just knew--that if he did as God told him and announced his message to Nineveh, that they would turn from their wickedness and God would be merciful to them. And Jonah didn't want that. He complains to God, saying, "I knew it--I knew you would do this, because I know that you are gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love!" Jonah gets upset that God is gracious to these... others... these enemies.

This is the real issue of the story: Jonah wants permission to hate these people because they are from a hostile foreign country. They are "the enemy."  And he doesn't want to listen to God's summons to speak to them, because he doesn't want them to be eligible for mercy. He just wants a justification for his own hatred of "the other." And that willful ignoring of God's love for these enemies consumes Jonah. Truthfully, he has been swallowed up long before any whales get to him.

So after Jonah has his hissyfit with God, the last scene of the story unfolds. Jonah is wallowing in his own bitterness over God's choice to show mercy to the people Jonah hated, and so God gives another chance to Jonah to "get it," just as God had given the people of Nineveh another chance to "get it," too. God shades the self-pitying, miserable prophet with a miraculous bush that grows overnight (take that, Jack and the Beanstalk!), and Jonah loves the plant for its shade. Then, when God lets a worm eat the plant in a second night, Jonah is upset at the loss of this random shrubbery. This is God's entry--this is where divine mercy gets a toe in the door.

"You are upset about this plant, Jonah?" says God. "You are sad for the loss of a shrub, which grew up in a night and which you had nothing to do with taking care of--and yet you wanted me to destroy a whole city full of people?" God forces Jonah to see how divine love for "the other" really works. Jonah has felt compassion for a plant--so how much more should Jonah have been concerned for the lives of men and women and children (and many animals, as the text notes, too!) in Nineveh? Jonah had wanted to see divine wrath consume the city in fire and brimstone... and instead he saw divine grace envelop the city with love and mercy. So God refuses to give up--not on the despicable Ninevites, and not on the despairing prophet, either. And the last line, the question that God puts to Jonah, becomes a question put to us, too--can we dare to allow that God loves the people we have sworn off as our enemies? Could we bear the thought that God just might send us to be the means of redemption for the people we wanted to hate?  Could we possibly learn that lesson from a shrub?

This is what the whole story of Jonah has always really been about. It's just that most of the time, we never make it beyond the whale. But what a dramatic turn, if we actually make it through to the end of the story. What at first sounds like a straightforward morality fable about what bad things will happen to those who disobey an angry and almighty God turns out to be a story about a grace that will not stay contained within the boundaries we want to put up.

Look, let's be honest: we are burning with our own personal hatreds for people we don't like and don't want to like. There is a near daily ritual on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media in which we collectively post angry words about how "Nobody else sees what's going on!" while we rattle off our personal list of our favorite villains to hate--the political party you despise, the dangerous outsiders you want to get rid of, the dangerous influences affecting our children... the whole nine yards. I'm pretty sure Jonah gave a speech like that to God listing all the reasons that God was not allowed to forgive the Ninevites. You can easily imagine the reluctant prophet lecturing God about "those godless people of Nineveh" and how big a threat they are to Israel's national security--how they must be gotten rid of, not forgiven, and how anyone who shows mercy to "those people" must be hopelessly naïve or brainwashed. Jonah is basically everybody's one rage-filled bigoted uncle who goes off on tirades about all the dangerous bad people we all ought to be afraid of.

And in a wonderfully ironic twist of grace, even that bigot of a prophet is given mercy, too. Rather than just zap Jonah with a final lightning bolt or have the big fish just digest him at the bottom of the sea, God gives Jonah the chance to be changed by grace, just as much as the Ninevites are changed by grace and set free.

See, here's the thing about grace: the moment--the very moment--that we set up a boundaries beyond which we say grace is not allowed to go, God deliberately goes there and showers mercy on the people we were hell-bent on hating. Godless, conniving Ninevites? Grace. Bitter, hateful Jonah? Grace. The people you and I are damn sure are beyond the reach of God's love? Grace. You and me for thinking that someone else was beyond the reach of God's love in the first place? Guess what--grace, too. Jonah's story is precisely about how God chooses to take the side of the "other," even when we don't want to see it.

If we stop at the great fish, we'll never get any further than tired old moralizing that reinforces our old hatreds and justifies our old bigotry.

But if we go beyond the whale, we will find God has been leaning against castor bean plants and standing with the people we wanted to hate.

It really makes a difference to make it all the way through the story.

Lord God, whether it's by fish or plant or the voice of a friend, get our attention to love the ones we want to ignore or hate, and lead us to see the ways you have been gracious with us, too.

Letting Go of the Gavel--September 18, 2026

Letting Go of the Gavel--September 18, 2026

Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.”  So then, each one of us will be held accountable. (Romans 14:10-12)

So... good news, bad news (kind of).

The bad news (of sorts) is that God reserves the right to be our judge, and God sees all the evidence.  There's no use in hiding our sins or pretending we are perfect peaches, because God already knows the truth.

But the good news is really good:  if God is the One who holds the gavel, nobody else gets to be the judge over us.  No one else has the authority to condemn us, and of course also, none of us has the authority to condemn somebody else.  That is God's prerogative, not ours.

It's worth noting that these words, which come from the same reading in Romans 14 that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday and which we've been looking at in our devotions over the last couple of days, are from a larger passage that is focused on making space within the Christian community for those with whom we disagree. Whether it was about food restrictions, celebrating different holidays, observing different festivals, or other differences of opinion, Paul directs the Christians in Rome to let people act according to their consciences rather than forcing others to fit your personal scruples.  And it's that train of thought which leads him to ask, "Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?" He mentions that all of us will end up in front of God's judgment seat, which is to say, none of us gets to be the judge. In other words, the driving point is that none of us gets to be the judge over the rest, because "judge" is a role to which God has exclusive rights.  The point here is not to make us afraid of God judging us, but rather that because God is the sole judge we ultimately have to keep in mind, we don't get to deputize ourselves judges over others--and we don't have to worry about someone else's verdict over us, either.

This is important for us to notice. Sometimes in our Bible reading, we get the words right but still get the meaning wrong because we are placing the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble, if you get my drift. We put our focus in the wrong place and end up distorting the thrust of a passage rather than listening to the Scriptures on their own terms.  So, for example, here in this passage, yes, it is true that Paul talks about all of us standing before "the judgment seat of God." And certainly, over the centuries, plenty of people have gotten hung upon that image with the assumption that Paul is primarily trying to scare us into good behavior or to paralyze us with fear of getting zapped by a vindictive deity throwing lightning bolts at sinners.  But actually, the thrust of his argument is in the opposite direction--to move us away from being afraid of being condemned, because we know that other people who want to criticize or judge us don't have the standing to render a verdict--only God.  And this is the same Paul, I'll remind you, who just six chapters earlier in this same letter, wrote to these same Christians, "There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1).  In fact, that same passage that we call the eighth chapter of Romans builds to a crescendo with this powerful set of claims: "What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son but gave him up for all of us, how will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ who died, or rather, who was raised, who is also at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us." And then famously Paul concludes that "nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus."  Taken together, Paul sure seems to be saying that nobody else gets to put themselves in the role of judge over us (and we don't get to put ourselves in the role of judge over others), because that is solely God's prerogative.  And God has already committed not to condemn us but instead to come to our defense and to take all the condemnation into God's own self through Christ.  The One Person who has the right to judge us has already told us that condemnation is not the end of the story for us because of Christ.

In that sense, this passage feels like something of a riff on that well-known story in John 8 about the woman caught in adultery who is brought to Jesus.  And when Jesus puts it to the lynch-mob that "the one who is without sin gets to throw the first stone," the accusers all leave, one by one, until Jesus alone remains.  He, of course, is the one person who could claim to have a right to throw stones, but he deliberately refuses.  "Where are your accusers?" he asks the woman, and when she responds that no one is left who condemns her, he says, "Neither do I condemn you."  Paul is simply daring us to take this kind of story seriously and to trust that the One who has the right to be our judge has already promised us mercy.  So you don't have to stay awake at night in fear of what somebody else--even somebody else who acts "religious"--says about you or thinks about you.  Nobody else gets to be your judge--only God, the same God about whom Paul has already said, "There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

Once we are freed from worrying about whether or not we live up to the expectations of some other Respectable Religious People, we can face the truth of our lives, even when that truth involves acknowledging our mess-ups, sins, and rotten choices.  We can face those truths, acknowledge them, and turn in new directions, because we are confident that the God who sees them all already has assured us "There is no condemnation" because of Christ Jesus.  We are united to him, and God is not looking to zap us, or to let our failures get the last word.  Like Bryan Stevenson has said in his work against the death penalty, "Each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done."  Paul would seem to agree: God will not let condemnation be the last word over us, and because of that we are actually freed and empowered to face the truth about our worst actions and start over.  We can begin again as forgiven and freed people because we know that the other people who want to be our critics and judges do not get to sit on the bench.  Only God gets to be the judge, and God has already promised that "there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

Where have each of us been trying to make ourselves judge over someone else--and what would it look like if we stepped back from that today?

Where have each of us been running away from the judgment of others, or our fear that they will condemn us for not fitting their expectations--and what would it mean for us if we didn't have to keep running anymore?

Today's a day for each of us to let go of the imaginary gavels in our hands and to drop the stones.  We will find that we are free.

Lord Jesus, give us the confidence of knowing that no one else gets to be our judge but you, and you have promised to be our defender and not to let condemnation be the end of our stories.

Belonging No Matter What--September 17, 2026

Belonging No Matter What--September 17, 2026

"We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the living and the dead." [Romans 14:7-9]

There's an old Patsy Cline song that has had more than its shares of covers and re-makes, but whose words come to mind when I read these verses from Romans. The lyrics go like this:

"See the pyramids along the Nile,

Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle,

Just remember, darling, all the while--you belong to me.

"See the marketplace in old Algiers

Send me photographs and souvenirs,

Just remember till your dream appears--you belong to me.

"Fly the ocean in a silver plane,

See the jungle when it's wet with rain,

Just remember till you're home again--you belong to me."

Well, you get the gist--wherever the beloved finds themselves, no matter what happens, the singer says, "You belong to me."

And this is the beautiful thing that the apostle claims for us, too: none other than Christ himself says to you, and to me, "You belong to me." There is no condition under which we stop belonging to him. There is no place you can travel beyond his grip. There is no jurisdiction which will not recognize his claim on us. There is nothing you can do to dissolve the bond. There is no way to fall "from grace," as though you were outside of Christ's reach--not even in death. And so, Paul can say without an asterisk or fine print or catch, "whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." You can almost hear Patsy Cline in the background, "Just remember till you're home again... you belong to me."

That claim means two things for us on an ordinary Thursday. First off, Christ's claim on us gives us a relentless assurance that we will never be abandoned, never be let go of, and never find ourselves outside of Christ's own grip. If there's nothing in life that can separate us from him, and there's nothing in death that can separate us from him, then all of a sudden, nothing--literally nothing--needs to paralyze us with fear any longer. The one thing that matters above all else is knowing that we are claimed, that we are beloved, and that we belong.

And that is true regardless of whether anybody else thinks we are "worthy" of it--in fact, throughout his ministry Jesus seemed to make a point of especially claiming that the folks others deemed "unworthy" were the ones who most preciously belonged to him. While everyone else is bad-mouthing Zacchaeus and scandalized that Jesus has gone to his house, Jesus says of the Chief Sell-out of Jericho, "Today salvation has come to this house, for he, too, is a son of Abraham" (see Luke 19). Or there's the woman who is anointing Jesus' feet--and while everyone else is scandalized by her actions and wants to stop her, ostensibly in the name of decorum and prudence, Jesus goes out of his way to call attention to how good her gesture is, and insists that she, rather than anybody else there in the peanut gallery that day, will be remembered (see Mark 14). Jesus' whole story in the Gospels is spent creating a beloved community out of people who have been marginalized, ostracized, rejected, and cast out, and saying to each of them, "You belong to me." Paul the apostle just says that here on the other side of the resurrection, nothing changed about that. The risen Christ says the very same to an endlessly varied gathering of hims and hers and theys and wes and us-es and thems and you and me, and regardless of what anybody else says or thinks, the living Jesus says, "Just remember... You belong to me." Once we get that straight then all of a sudden, all the scowling faces of the Respectable Religious Crowd who want to keep out the "riff-raff" and the "sinners" just fade into the background, and all that matters is what Jesus says of us. And he says we belong... every last one.

Now, there is a second truth that emerges from knowing that "whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's," and it is this: because we belong to Christ, we don't belong to ourselves anymore. (Maybe honestly we never did--we have always been selling ourselves to other lesser loves and lords; Jesus is just the first one to really love us as we are and to rightly be called our Lord.) Paul is as clear about this as he is about the assurance that nothing, not even death, can separate us from belonging to Christ. "None of us lives to ourselves, and none of us dies to ourselves," he says. The nonsense that folks like to quote from Henley's poem, "Invictus," about being the "master of my own soul" and "the captain of my own fate" is a load of hot fertilizer fresh from the horse. We sometimes tell ourselves the myth (and that's all it is, a myth) that each of us should aspire to a sort of "Don't-tread-on-me"/"You-can't-tell-me-what-to-do"/"I-did-it-MY-way!" mentality, and think that's what we mean by "freedom." Well, my apologies, dearies, but it just ain't so, on two counts. For one, to quote the Eagles, "Freedom? That's just some people talkin'... your prison is walkin' through this world all alone," and more to the point, the living Christ says we belong to him. The point of life ain't for me to look out for ME--you can try it if you like, but you'll find yourself one day an empty hollow husk even if you're surrounded by piles of money and a garage full of new cars.

When that wretched impulse inside us cries out, "Me and My Group First!" the living Christ just says, "Ah, no... you belong to me. You don't live for yourself--that's a damnable lie. You are mine." When the voices around us and within us say, "But we HAVE to look out for our own first!" the living Christ says, "No, in fact, you don't. I'm looking out for you, and that is precisely why I went through death and out the other side into resurrection--to keep hold on you no matter what, so that you don't have to waste your energy focused all on you!" And when the presence of fear chimes in and says, "You have to protect your self and your own interests in this life, because the world is full of scary things and people who are out to get you!" the living Christ says, "No--even if they do their worst, they cannot overcome the resurrecting power of my love. You are freed to give yourself away all the more exactly because you don't have to worry or be ruled by fear of what anybody else can do to you anymore!"

To belong to Jesus is both a gift and a calling, a blessing and a charge (a "blarge," if you like). It calls us out from our myopic and self-centered little worlds where we were trapped, only living for "Me," and it assures us that no matter where else we go or what else happens to us, we are the Lord's.

"Just remember," says the risen Christ, "you belong to me." And indeed, we do.

Lord Jesus, we are yours and you are ours. Let us live to you as you give us life today, and let us trust that we belong to you no matter what anybody else says or thinks.