The Importance of the Plural--June 4, 2026

 

The Importance of the Plural--June 4, 2026

[Jesus said:] "And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." (Matthew 28:20)

So... in the end... where is Jesus?

Well, in his own words, the risen Jesus says, "with you." And of course, he adds the vitally important adverb, "always." That is to say, he doesn't just pop in for a minute, make his appearance for the photo op, and then beam up to heaven. But presumably, with Jesus at least, always is always. And that means Jesus has made the promise to all of these disciples to be with them all... always.

Now, before we even get to the billion or so followers of Jesus who span the globe today, let's just start with those eleven up on the mountain. Where is Jesus promising to be? Who is he riding along with? Which one of them is Jesus going to be with first as they head down the mountain... and then where does he go after that?

I bet you can see where this is going: the disciples are headed in different directions from here, right? I mean, sure we know the Pentecost story from Acts that they all hung around in Jerusalem for a while until the Spirit was given to them (although, interestingly, Matthew doesn't tell us that story). But basically, it wasn't going to be long before each of those disciples was headed exactly where Jesus had sent them: "to all nations." Some stayed in Judea, and others went out to Samaria, or further across other boundaries. Tradition says that Thomas eventually headed east to India, and eventually, other traditions put Simon Peter in the heart of the Empire in Rome itself. In other words, even when it was just a relatively small group of eleven, Jesus had just promised to be present in places on opposite sides of the map... at the same time... always.

And yes, that really is the promise Jesus intends to make. It is one of the upshots of the resurrection that Jesus is no longer bound to being in one place at one time. Me, I've got to decide how to divide my time like you do. I can be in Place A or in Place B at once, but not both at the same time. I can give my attention to Situation X or Y, but if I try to give myself to both at the same time, I'll be giving everybody short shrift. I can only be in one place at on time, and I can only spend my time one way, but Jesus can be present here and there, all at the same time. He really means it. He really can be with us, even going to "all nations," at the same time. Always, in fact.  When he says, "I am with you always," the you in question is plural.  It is to "all of you," or as they say in the South, "all y'all."

That is both a source of encouragement, and also a challenge we are going to have to wrestle with. On the one hand, I hope the encouragement is clear. We aren't in this alone. We never have been, and we never will be. We are sent out into whatever corner of the world we are in with the living and risen Christ at all times. And that means, further, that there is no spot in creation that is so disreputable, so messy, so dirty, so broken, or so unexpected that Jesus isn't already there with us. You can't go anywhere that Jesus will be afraid to enter. And that also means we don't get to have the excuse, "But Jesus wouldn't want me to talk to those people..." or "But Jesus doesn't want to be associated with the likes of them..." Jesus, it turns out, made a habit of hanging out with all sorts of people the Respectable Religious Crowd didn't like, and that never stopped him before.

So, we're not in this alone, and we never will be. Whatever is on your agenda today, you go with the living Jesus who makes "always" kind of promises, and who can back up those promises with the actual ability to be with you where you are, with me where I am, and with countless other people in countless other places. That is good news everyday of the week.

But here's the additional challenge we can't escape. If Jesus is with each of those followers, both the eleven from Matthew 28 and the billion or so today, then none of us gets to turn Jesus into our private possession or corporate mascot. I don't get to say that Jesus is only with me, or only with my town, or my county, or my state or country. He's not. He's with all of us... always. He said so. Jesus deliberately made a point of saying he's not just "mine" or "ours" here where I am, however I draw the lines. Jesus insists that he is with Simon Peter in Rome while he's with James in Jerusalem and with the eunuch down in Ethiopia and with Paul in Athens... and he's with you as well as disciples half a world away. He is with "us all"--it's just we don't often consider just how wide the scope of "us" really is.  But the "you" is always plural.

If we take that seriously, that will mean we don't get to assume that Jesus is cheering for my land or my territory or my little world just because it is mine--Jesus is with me, but he isn't only with me. And I don't get to assume that Jesus is only rooting for my immediate interests--even if I pray hard, even if I wish upon a star, even if I really, really want something. Jesus doesn't just root for my home team--it turns out there are people on the other team who are asking for his help, too. Jesus doesn't only want my town to get the new factory, either--it's not that Jesus rewards the towns that pray the hardest with the new job openings, or that Jesus only cares about the place where I live. From the beginning, Jesus has insisted that he is with me, sure, and yet also that he is with all of his people, scattered all over God's green earth, into, as Jesus himself puts it, "all nations."

And that means then end of trying to baptize the tired old "Me and My Group First!" thinking we often try to wrap up with Jesus. It is awfully tempting to say, "My side/my group/my team/my country should be put first, because we have Jesus on our side!" as though Jesus had not also promised to be with those on other sides/groups/teams/countries, too. It is diabolically easy to try and prop up "My Group First!" by assuming Jesus is our exclusive possession--as though the risen Jesus is here with me, but NOT with you over there.

That's just the thing: we keep drawing new dividing lines and assuming Jesus is exclusively within "my" side of them. (And of course, we assume Jesus would never step a toe over the line, right?) You hear it as "My country first..." because we assume, I guess, that Jesus isn't as fully "with" people from some other nation. Or when that seems too wide, we make it my state first, my county first, my town first, my skin color first, my immediate family first, and on and on, unless it's just me on an iceberg alone, convinced that Jesus is mine and mine alone.

But that was never the promise. When Jesus promises, "I will be with you always," it is spoken not just to me, or just to the folks around me, or just to the people who look like me, or just the people in the same tax bracket or demographic group. Jesus is with me, while at the same time, Jesus insists on being with "us all" even in to "all nations." That was always the promise, and that was always how Jesus envisioned it.

So today, go into the world, wherever Jesus has placed you, knowing that his promise still holds and Christ himself is indeed still with you. But at the same time, we go knowing that Jesus is not any of our exclusive possession, and that he insists on being with us all at the same time... always. For Jesus and the people who follow him, there is no more "Me and My Group First"--there is only the promise spoken in the plural, "I will be with you--all of you--always, to the ends of the earth."

Lord Jesus, be with us, and let us see today just how wide that "us" really is.

Straight from the Top--June 3, 2026

Straight from the Top--June 3, 2026

[Jesus said to the disciples on the mountain:] "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you." (Matthew 28:19-20a)

The instructions come all the way from the top.

Jesus himself is the one who directs his followers to cross boundaries and invite everyone to share in the Jesus Way of Life. That's important to remember. The disciples didn't make this call on their own.  It wasn't ever that Jesus set a policy of strict restrictions not to allow "outsiders" or "THOSE people" into his little group, but then Simon Peter and Andrew decided to overrule him after he ascended into heaven.  It has always been Jesus--and then the Holy Spirit following Jesus' ascension--who was leading the charge to welcome outsiders, foreigners, strangers, and the ones labeled "those people" to join in the community of disciples.  We are the ones who are constantly dragging our feet and needing to be pulled along in the movement God was leading.

And to be clear, it really would have been a scandalous thing to hear Jesus say "all nations" here in this passage that many of us heard this past Sunday.  Because "the nations" is another way of saying "the Gentiles."  In the worldview of first-century Judaism, there are really only two kinds of people in the world: "us" and "them."  There are the in-group members of the people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob... and then everybody else is "the Gentiles." In fact, just about everyone in the New Testament you see the phrase "the Gentiles," the literal words in the Greek are "the nations." It's anybody else in the whole world--they're all outsiders.  And, of course, it was terribly easy to envision those Gentile outsiders all as wicked, decadent, sinful and abominable people.  As long as you don't have to picture the actual faces of real people, you can imagine them as cartoon caricatures of the worst possible stereotypes.  And being Gentile was also, of course, something you just are. It's not a sin you can repent of like robbing a bank or coveting your neighbor's donkey.  It's who you are.  So it was just very easy for "insiders" to look down on "outsiders" as hopeless doomed and outside the realm of God's acceptance.  They were bad people who couldn't stop being bad, because it was in their very make-up--so went the conventional wisdom of the day. That's why it's such a huge thing for Jesus to now so clearly and explicitly overturn the old conventional wisdom and say, "The very ones you thought were unacceptable are the very ones I am sending you to. Go welcome them into this new life in my love and my way."

Jesus very clearly tells his circle of first disciples--all of whom had the ancestry and lineage of belonging in that group of "insiders"--that he was the one directing them to cross the biggest boundary they could imagine, the one that separated "insiders" and "outsiders."  The community of Jesus' followers was not going to be homogenous, made up of identical people who all ate, dressed, spoke, and thought alike.  From the beginning--and by Jesus' explicit direction--this was going to be a new kind of community.  This was going to be a found family of people who did not share the same DNA, but instead shared a common life of discipleship learning the way of Jesus.

This is really important, because sometimes Respectable Religious folks forget that Jesus is really the one who put us on this trajectory.  Sometimes church folk will say, "You can't really accept THOSE PEOPLE into your church, can you?" each with their own personal list of who they have deemed unworthy, unacceptable, and abominable. And then sometimes you'll hear folks say, "This idea of welcoming everybody is just some pushy modern impulse!" But of course, the moment we read Jesus' actual final instructions to the disciples here in Matthew 28, it becomes clear that the directions come all the way from the top.  It is Jesus, the one to whom all authority in heaven and on earth have been given, who dares his followers to push past old boundaries, cross old border lines, and invite everybody they meet to share in this new life in Christ.  In other words, if we have a problem with the notion that EVERYBODY really is welcome in the found family of Jesus (yes, even "those people" we had been told were unworthy and unacceptable), then our problem is really with Jesus himself, who has been sending us to "all nations" scandalously for the past two thousand years. It's not us in the modern day who are pushing the envelope; it is Jesus. Jesus is the one being radical; we are the ones who will have to get accustomed to his bold vision and wide welcome.  

I wonder how that might change the way we live out our faith today.  I wonder who we have been looking down our noses at, closing our hearts and doors to, or writing off as unacceptable, whom Jesus would send us directly out to.  I wonder where we have gotten things all backward and thought we were defending the cause of righteousness in the name of "keeping the riff-raff out" because we thought that's what God wanted, when it turns out Jesus has told us very clearly, "These are the folks I want you to reach."  Who might you be sent to today? Whom might we be led to welcome, to invite, to love?

Because the instructions don't come from me, from some present-day bishop, or from some religious-trend-analyzer.  They come straight from the top: from Jesus.

Lord Jesus, enable us to follow your directions and reach out to everyone we meet, across whatever boundaries we have imposed in between us, so that all will know your love.

We Are the Evidence--June 2, 2026

We Are the Evidence--June 2, 2026

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you...." (Matthew 28:18-20a)

This is one of those times where what Jesus doesn't say carries as much weight as what he does say. These words, often called the Great Commission, begin with a pretty hefty claim on Jesus' part: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me."  That's not the sort of thing one jokes about or brags about--unless one really can back it up. Here the risen Jesus effectively tells his circle of disciples that his resurrection from the dead is evidence that he is Lord over all things, even over the now-broken power of the grave, and with it, everything else in all creation.  But that, of course, is just the beginning of the sentence.

What is surprising to me (or maybe, knowing Jesus' character, not really all that surprising after all--just different from the world's way of doing things) is the way Jesus completes this thought.  The rest of Jesus' declaration is: go make disciples of everybody else you can find, wherever they're from, and whatever their background.  Jesus is interested in building a community, not in burnishing his reputation or inflating his status. Or to put it differently, the proper response to recognizing Jesus really does have "all authority in heaven and on earth" is for our lives to be formed in Jesus-shaped ways.  Jesus is interested in making us into a certain kind of people, whose lives reflect what he says about how the world really works.

In other words, if we really believe that Jesus is Lord of all things, we will take him seriously when he teaches us to love our enemies, share our abundance generously, speak truthfully, avoid making a show of our piety, and welcome others lavishly. If Jesus is right when he says all authority has been given to him, then he knows what he is talking about when he says thigs like "Blessed are the peacemakers" and "Blessed are the merciful."  If Jesus truly is sovereign over all creation, then "When you did it to the least of these, you did it to me" is not just an optional suggestion, but a description of how the world really is.  The risen Jesus doesn't give any hint of changing the policies or priorities he taught and spoke about during his ministry; if anything, he doubles down on them and now tells the disciples to teach everybody--insiders and Judeans like them, and outsiders and Gentiles as well!--to practice this same way of life.  The authority of Jesus will be visible, Jesus says, in the way people live their lives as they become his disciples. (Or, as John's Gospel says it similarly, "By this will all people know you are my disciples: if you have love for one another.")

But like I say, it is also striking what Jesus does not say here.  Jesus' claim to have "all authority in heaven and on earth" doesn't conclude with, "So therefore build statues of me to impress the nations." The Lord of all creation does not say, "Therefore erect monuments in my honor with my name engraved in big, impressive letters." The Risen One, unlike Caesar, doesn't even want his face stamped on a coin. All of those kinds of gestures were the Empire's standard tactics for claiming to have "authority," along with occupying armies, bread-and-circus distractions, and gladiator battles in the Emperor's honor.  Jesus will have none of those things; instead, he is interested in seeing people taught and shaped to live in his particular way of love, justice, and compassion.  Emperors like Caesar always want to project their own sense of self-importance with monuments, statues, and hoopla to cover up their own raging insecurity and nagging awareness that they will one day be consigned to the dustbin of history. Jesus, however, would have us recognize his authority by practicing his kind of enemy-embracing, outcast-welcoming, abundance-sharing love. We are the evidence that Jesus is Lord, not a building, sculpture, parade, or propaganda.

It is worth admitting, of course, that over the course of the past twenty centuries, we who name the name of Jesus have not always done a great job of following Jesus' instructions here.  There have certainly been eras in which "being a Christian" was reduced to "reciting a creed and then going on your merry way unchanged." There have certainly been times when we built monuments and statues of Jesus carved out of marble and covered in gold leaf rather than building our lives on Jesus' teachings or shaping our choices on his priorities.  We have not done a fantastic job, by any stretch of the imagination, of "making disciples of all nations" so much as we have more frequently just "added church members to official rosters" or built humungous edifices. We easily slip into the Empire's same old list of "looking impressive" rather than what Jesus has specifically directed us to do.

But still his words remain, and they still call us to take him seriously.  For us who dare to believe Jesus' claim that "all authority in heaven and on earth" have been given to him, then we are indeed called to both live the Jesus-shaped way of life and to apprentice others to share in it.  It is a joyful life--with loaves and fish abounding, towel and basin passed around as we wash one another's feet, outcasts and "sinners" treated as honored guests and friends, and the lowly lifted up.  There is every reason for us to spend our whole lives letting Jesus train our hands, feet, and hearts to live in his way.  But ultimately, Jesus is entirely uninterested in the world's trappings of authority--power, monuments, wealth, pomp and circumstance--and wholly invested in making disciples out of us... and making more disciples through us.

You might well know the old line of Gandhi's; when he was asked what he thought of Christianity, he responded: "I like your Christ; I do not care for your Christians--your Christians are so unlike your Christ." Jesus is much more interested in making us to reflect his character and to shine his light than in the standard displays of power and might that the world obsesses over.  What if today we let Jesus' shape us in his likeness, and to see if that isn't a better way of pointing to his authority?  What if we let our practice of Christ-like love be the most compelling evidence that he really is Lord?

Lord Jesus, let our lives reveal to the world that you hold all authority. Let us love in ways that embody your love.

At the Very Same Time--June 1, 2026

 

At the Very Same Time--June 1, 2026

"Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.  When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted." (Matthew 28:16-17)

We don't get to divide the world into two separate piles of "wholly devout, unwavering believers" on the one hand and "impious, incredulous doubters" on the other.  At least not if we take the Gospel seriously.  We are always simultaneously both: the faithful and the fickle, the devout and the doubtful, the trusting and the skeptic.  And that means our belonging in the family of Jesus isn't a reward for being staunch believers with unquestionable and unquestioning faith.  Our belonging comes because Jesus has claimed us, knowing full well that even in our best moments our sincere worship is laced with honest doubt, too.

That's a detail we sometimes overlook here in these final verses of Matthew's Gospel, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.  Often we are quick to skip ahead to the so-called "Great Commission," when Jesus charges his disciples to go and "make disciples of all nations," which sends us galavanting off to share our faith with others, tell people the Good News and to "bring a friend" to church with us (if we dare to do any of those things).  But before we get to that high-minded mission, let's spend a moment with the introduction Matthew gives us to this final scene of his movie.

When Jesus had appeared at the empty tomb at the beginning of Matthew 28, back on what we call Easter Sunday, the risen Christ told the women at the tomb to pass along the message to the disciples to meet him in Galilee, and now here they are assembled at the particular spot Jesus had told them about.  They see him--and in Matthew's telling, this is the first time they have seen him alive and risen from the dead--and their response is two-fold: "they worshiped him, but they doubted."  Both, presumably at the same time.  And perhaps that is completely understandable, because this moment must have been simply overwhelming.  The last these disciples had seen Jesus was either the night of his arrest in the garden before they abandoned him, or from the cross as he died--and now he was alive!  It seemed quite literally too good to be true.  They were overjoyed and dumbfounded at the same time. They were beginning to realize that if indeed Jesus was risen from the dead, he wasn't simply a good man, a wise rabbi, or a new prophet.  Maybe he wasn't even merely a human messiah coming to set up a kingdom. It was beginning to dawn on them that this Jesus really had been "God-with-us" all along, and the thought blew their minds.  It was an impossibility that was happening right before their eyes--either Jesus really was the presence of God in their midst, and therefore worthy of their utter worship, or it was all an illusion.  So they do two things at the same time: they worship, and they doubt.  They believe, and they question. I suspect you and I would do the same thing as well in their sandals.

And honestly, I think that's part of the point of why Matthew tells his story this way.  He's not trying to get us to sort each other into piles of "good Christians" who only believe and "bad Christians" or impostors who only doubt.  I think he's reminding us, as he's shown us throughout his gospel's account, that we are always both believers and doubters--"ye of little faith," as Jesus so often calls his disciples in Matthew's storytelling.  This is an important part of getting the translation correct in these verses for today, because other English translations (including the one I grew up with in church, and maybe you did, too) tried to segregate doubt and worship into different categories of people.  I grew up hearing these verses saying, "they worshipped him, but SOME doubted," as if there was a subset of doubters.  But the Greek of Matthew's Gospel doesn't say that.  There's no word "some" in there, and the verb "doubted" presumably takes the same subject as the verb "worshipped."  In other words, the clearest reading of this passage in Matthew's original Greek is saying that the same ones who are worshipping Jesus are the same ones who are also doubting, in that very same moment.  

Thta's important to be clear about, because that's us. We are always wobbly-faithed, struggling to believe, hesitant to trust, wrestling with the impossibly good news right before our eyes, doubtful-believers.  We are Peter, simultaneously calling out to Jesus, "If it is you, Lord, call me out onto the waves to walk on the water to you," and starting to sink the moment we see that we are doing it.  We are the disciples all swearing up and down that we will never abandon Jesus and then bailing out on him when the authorities come to arrest him in the Garden.  We are the ones confessing that Jesus is the Messiah and the very Son of God, only to rebuke him for insisting that his way of being those things is to lay down his life on a cross rather than conquering the world in triumph. We are always struggling to believe Jesus' good news that he is welcoming sinners, outcasts, and mess-ups into the Kingdom of God and then doubting it could be true as we scowl and shoo away the folks we think are "too bad" for God to love.  This is us: the faithful followers and double-talking doubters, all at once.

It is always a temptation in church life to want to weed out the folks we don't think should make the cut: the ones who can't articulate their faith with the precision we might wish for, the ones who don't show up on Sundays as often as we would like, the ones whose families, style of parenting, or politics don't match our own, or the ones who, we tell ourselves, "just don't fit in." It is always alluring to want to draw a line between the good and dedicated True Believers (and we always put ourselves in that category, don't we?) and the unworthy, uncommitted Reprobates, Sinners, and Doubters.  We do that because that lets us believe that we've earned our spot in God's good graces because of our excellence in believing, the strength of our faith, and the high quality of our devotion, rather than admitting it's not something we've achieved.  We want to tell ourselves we deserve our spot in heaven, because we believed the right things, and we believed the fervently enough, rather than hearing the real Good News that God's trustworthy grip on us is what holds us, rather than the strength of our grip on God.  But that's how it really works for the followers of Jesus: our grip on him is always rather precarious.  

Ultimately, though, we don't put our trust in the strength of our belief in Jesus; we put our trust in Jesus himself.  And Jesus himself is the one who holds us, who won't let us go, and who still holds onto us at our points of deepest devotion and committed worship as well as our points of greatest doubt and deepest disillusionment.  Even when those are all happening at the very same time.

Lord Jesus, hold onto us today--all of us--in this mix of doubt and faith, struggle and worship, where we find ourselves today. Assure us that no matter what, you will not let us go.

Not for Sale--May 29, 2026

Not for Sale--May 29, 2026

"For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit." (1 Corinthians 12:12-13)

In a world where just about everything is treated as a commodity, there are countless ways for us to be consumers. 

We choose not only which groceries we buy (and which brand of green beans or energy drink to put in our carts) but also which brand of grocery to buy them from.  We choose which platforms of social media to use, clicking buttons of approval and teaching algorithms how to market more products in front of our eyes to buy.  We consume news sources (and more often, opinion sources that dress themselves up as selling news), movies, TV shows, and which streaming services on which to watch them all. And of course, we select our which politicians we support, which representatives we elect, and which influencers we allow to shape our thinking.  All of them are viewed in our culture as products to be consumed, purchases we make with our money, time, and attention, and commodities for sale.

And the thing about buying a product is that you, the individual customer, are free to come and go from the transaction as you like.  You have no obligation to stay with any particular brand, style, or store. You can be a repeat customer if you wish, or you can go somewhere new with every shopping trip.  You can buy what is popular, or you can choose something that you alone happen to like.  And the moment you get tired of it, you can throw away the still half-full box into the trash and get something new--maybe even "ranch" or "nacho-cheese-flavored." And once your transaction is complete, the relationship with the store, its suppliers, and the cashier is over. No strings. No lingering requirements of connection. We have built a whole way of life around having impersonal and interchangeable transactions of consumption, and it has a way of making us see everything in the world in those same terms.

But the Christian community is different.  In fact, it is different in a great many ways and at multiple levels, compared to the modes of consumption in the world's grand marketplace.  For one, we are not ever merely customers shopping for a preferred "religious experience."  It is, of course, tempting to think of ourselves that way--sometimes, folks even talk about "church shopping" like they are browsing for a new dishwasher or deciding which Mexican restaurant to try out next weekend.  But the writers of the New Testament don't think of it like that.  These words which many of us heard this past Sunday make that certainly clear.  You don't hear Paul say, "Just as the shopping mall has many stores, and you are each individually customers choosing which one to shop at."  He doesn't write, "You are all consumers of church, and you can come and go as you please from one franchise to another, because you're the customer, and you're always right!"  And neither does the apostle claim, "With your membership in Christco, you can each choose to drink whatever flavor of whatever beverage you wish!" We aren't consumers paying for a product or an experience; we are members of a body who belong to one another and are interconnected with one another. That makes the Christian community unlike any commodity or club.  We are a family bound by the Spirit.

And at least part of what that means is that we don't just walk away from Sunday mornings like satisfied customers, having filled up our "religion gas tanks" until we decide which different brand, station, or grade of fuel to get next week.  We belong to a community together, sharing both joys and sorrows together, bringing each of our differences, and making space for one another's gifts.  In Paul's imagery we are members of a body, and the parts of a body are attached to one another; you don't quite know where the hand stops and the wrist or the arm begins. The nerves that run through our legs connect back up to our brain.  Each eye needs the other in order for our brains to make a full and three-dimensional picture for our senses.  And in the body of Christ as well, we are not just a random assemblage of isolated parts or individual customers.  We are connected to each other, in such a way that your unique experience and perspective helps me to see things I would not have noticed otherwise.  My gifts help meet the needs that you bring.  That's a very different way of experiencing the world compared with the never-ending shopping experience of our commodified culture.

When you walk into a grocery or department store, you don't have to interact with any other customers if you don't want to. You are an individual on a mission to buy bananas and shampoo (or whatever else is on your list), and it doesn't affect your goal one way or another if the next customer pushing the cart behind you gets what they are looking for or not. The Law of the Big Box Store is It's Every Shopper For Himself, right? But in the community called "church," we do have an obligation to help one another to be nourished, strengthened, fed, and forgiven.  We do have a commitment to honor one another's gifts, bind one another's wounds, and help shape one another in the likeness of Christ. We aren't just here to consume (and then rate the experience of what we have consumed); we are here to build one another up.  It is unlike so much of our lives these days, and it is just the kind of counter-cultural way of living that the world needs.

Today, what would it look like for us to see the world, not as a colossal shopping experience where we each scavenge alone for what we want, and instead as a communal enterprise to help each of us grow and all of us to mature in love? That's the invitation of this day--and every day. That's not a product; it's a gift. And it's not for sale.

Lord Jesus, deepen our connections to one another, and help us to resist the impulse to see everything as a commodity for sale.

The Community of the Re-Storied--May 28, 2026

The Community of the Re-Storied--May 28, 2026

"Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, 'Let Jesus be cursed!' and no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit." (1 Corinthians 12:3)

Let's clear something up: treating Jesus like your mascot or personal possession is easy. It's cheap. It's popular. And anybody can do that. They can even dress it up in the language of piety to sound deeply devout--but it's still about trying to use Jesus to endorse your own agenda. And, to be even more honest [perhaps uncomfortably so], it's a really common thing to do, even among Respectable Religious folk.

But to make the claim that Jesus is "Lord"--well, that's really saying something. Or at least to mean that claim, rather than just mouthing it as pious lip-service or reciting a creed from memory like a parrot that doesn't understand the sounds it has been trained to mimic, that's a big deal. To name Jesus as Lord isn't about invoking Jesus' power or status to back up our own agendas, but rather it is about declaring our allegiance to his agenda. And that is something that we need the Spirit's help to do--on our own, we keep trying to crown ourselves sovereigns over our own lives like Napoleon. It takes the pull of the Spirit in our lives to redirect our hearts and hands to give our allegiance to Jesus and his upside-down Reign where the last are first and the lowly are lifted up.

That was certainly even more evident in the first century when Paul first wrote these words that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship. We have become so familiar with the phrase "Jesus is Lord," and we can so callously utter them without consequence in our lives, that we might well miss just how radical a claim it really is to confess Jesus as Lord--if we dare to take that claim seriously. In Paul's world, it was as stark a statement as saying that up is down or day is night. It was as risky--and counter-cultural--a claim as Copernicus saying that the Earth went around the Sun rather than the accepted conventional wisdom [insisted on by the Keepers of Respectable Religion in his day, mind you] that the Earth was the center of the universe, with the Sun and all the planets orbiting it. To say that Jesus was and is "Lord" was a clear rejection of the Empire's claim that Caesar was Lord--in fact, it was that very statement that the Empire demanded its subjects, including Christians, affirm. And it was that very claim that ancient Christians refused to endorse--they would not mouth the words, "Caesar is Lord" or offer even a pinch of incense to Caesar on an imperial altar, even though that defiance cost many Christians their lives. From Paul's perspective, nobody just glibly said "Jesus is Lord," because everybody in his world knew that saying those words risked a death sentence--and nobody gambles with their life so recklessly if they don't really believe the words they are saying. [To borrow an insight of C.S. Lewis, while plenty of people in history have died for things they believed in that turned out to be incorrect or outright lies, nobody dies for a lie that they know is a lie.]

For that matter, even to people who weren't big fans of the Empire, it looked simply absurd to claim that a man who had been crucified by the Empire was actually the Lord of the universe. To the watching world, it seemed obvious that whoever is doing the crucifying is really in charge, and whoever is getting crucified must be weak, foolish, and defeated. But Christians, from the very beginning, made the outrageous claim, not only that Jesus was and is the true Lord of all, but that his way of accomplishing victory and establishing his Reign was precisely at the point that looked like an utter loss: the cross. Nobody says something like that by logical deduction. Nobody, at least not in Paul's time, makes a claim like that because it is popular. Nobody who heard the story of a homeless, weaponless rabbi getting executed on Caesar's orders would have said, "That's predictable. It sounds exactly like the rabbi won and the Empire lost"--well, nobody except someone who had been given the eyes to recognize it by the Spirit of God.

That's actually what Paul had said back in the very first chapter of this same letter (see First Corinthians 1:18 and following). The message about the cross sounds like weakness and foolishness--utter nonsense!--to the watching world, but to those who have been called by God and given the eyes of faith to recognize it, we see in the cross the power and wisdom of God. By sheer logic, conventional wisdom, and "common sense," it looks like Jesus is a loser who got crushed by the powers of the day, but by the direction of the Spirit, we can see a completely different understanding: that the Crucified One is indeed the Lord of all creation, and his way of reigning is the power of self-giving love that was willing to be killed by his enemies [and for their sake] rather than to kill them.

In a sense, that means being a part of the Christian family means being "re-storied." To be a Christian is to learn to tell a different story from what the rest of the world tells--about Jesus, about true power, about the world, and about who is really Lord. Emperors like Caesar are so insecure about themselves and their legacies that they need to build monuments and stage gladiator fights to try and convince people they are powerful.  The Spirit shows us that Jesus is Lord from a cross. They are two totally different stories. To a world that just keeps rehashing the same old tale of "Might makes right," and "You've got to look out for your own interests first," the story we call the gospel sounds ridiculous. But we have been shown by the very Spirit of God a different story--one in which the loser turns out to be the victor, the cross turns out to be Jesus' triumph, and the powers of the day are exposed to be empty husks.

In our time, the trouble is that church folks have gotten so used to reciting the phrase, "Jesus is Lord" that we run the risk of forgetting how radical a notion that really is. We keep wanting to take the title "Lord Jesus" and slap it on our same old notions of power, and Respectable Religious folks keep wanting to let Jesus get co-opted to prop up their political agendas [often to support things that don't sound very Christ-like, at that], or to pretend that Jesus blesses our selfishness. But when Paul talks about confessing "Jesus is Lord," he doesn't mean just reciting those words as an empty slogan or magic words to guarantee we will get what we want or have divine endorsement on our power-grabs. The only way to really mean "Jesus is Lord" is to recognize that the One you are calling "Lord" is the One who laid down his life and endured execution by the Superpower of his day, and that his kind of lordship doesn't look like imperial conquests but the washing of feet, the welcoming of outcasts, and the love of his enemies. Jesus' lordship doesn't come at the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun, but with a towel and basin and nail-scarred hands. The only way anybody can possibly see such an outlandish claim as the God's-honest truth is if the Spirit of God shows it to us. When it finally clicks for us that this surprising claim is the truth, we'll realize that the Spirit has brought us into the Community of the Re-Storied at last.

Today, then, let's be done with the cheap ways we try to misuse the name of Jesus on our own personal or partisan agendas. Let's be done with using Jesus as a mascot to endorse our own wishes for control, money, or status, and instead allow Jesus' upside-down reign to surprise the world, ourselves included.

In other words, let us dare to confess that Jesus is Lord... and let us dare to mean it.

Lord Jesus, let us mean what we say about you in the ways we live this life according to your upside-down Reign where the last are put first and the lowly are lifted up.

New Eyes for a New World--May 27, 2026

New Eyes for a New World--May 27, 2026

[Peter said to the crowd in Jerusalem:] "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 'In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even on my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved'." (Acts 2:14b-21)

It's like a whole world ending... and a whole new one coming to life.

That may sound overly dramatic to our ears. But in all honesty, if we take seriously what the Reign of God in Jesus is all about, it will sound to us like the ending and the beginning of a whole new world, a whole new order of things. And once you are cued in on the new thing that God's Spirit is up to in the world, you cannot help but see things differently--like you are living at the overlap of the ends of the ages.... like the whole world is being made new.

Peter gets that.

In fact, what our narrator Luke gives us here as Peter's off-the-cuff speech on the day of Pentecost is all about seeing the ending of an old world order and the beginning of a whole new creation... right in the midst of the world looking like it always had. These words of Peter's, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, are framed as Peter's response to the confused crowds in Jerusalem after the Spirit had been poured out on the followers of Jesus to gather in people from all languages and nations, all customs and cultures (yes, side note, that is always how the community of Jesus has been intended to look--it was multilingual and multinational from Day One).

And as Pete sees that happening, as he hears the different languages, as he sees visitors from foreign nations all across the empire coming to hear the Good News of Jesus, he sees that this is what God had been promising all along. And Peter finally understands that even the ancient prophets of old looked ahead to a day when God would act to welcome all, to send he Spirit on all sorts of surprising folks, and to change the vision of people in unexpected places from unexpected corners.

This passage from Acts, as you might be able to tell, is largely Peter quoting from the prophet Joel, and Joel himself had been describing some future moment he calls "the Day of the Lord." And at least on Joel's lips, that sounds at first blush like a scary moment. The sun goes dark, the moon goes blood red--it's like the most solid, most constant things you could think of in the ancient world all suddenly get wobbly. And Joel sees these as going hand in hand with the moment when God pours out the Spirit "on all flesh." Men and women. Old and young. Rich and poor. Even those still caught under the wheel of slavery. All people, not just a select few, or the priests, or the religious professionals. As Joel saw it, when God would do something like that, it would feel like the whole tired mess of the old world was coming to an end, and a whole new creation was being born.

Now flash forward about... oh, maybe seven hundred years, and there is Simon Peter watching the Spirit rush through his previously scaredy-cat friends (we usually call them "the Apostles," but come on, until this moment, they were all pretty cowardly when push came to shove). And Peter sees the way even these uneducated fisherman, ex-revolutionaries and former tax collectors are given the presence of the Spirit and the ability for others to understand their words in many languages. And Peter realizes that this is what it looks like when God sends the Spirit--everybody is welcomed. Everybody in their own language. Everybody as they are. And Peter says, in effect, "This is what Joel was talking about! This is it happening before your very eyes!" even if, to everybody else's eyes, it was just an ordinary Sunday morning at 9:00am.

It's funny to me: Peter has no problem seeing this moment, with the many languages and the wind of the Spirit rushing through them, as the fulfillment of Joel's vision--even though there are none of the scary signs that Joel had talked about. No sun into darkness--not even a partial eclipse. No red moon. No blood or fire. Not even a whiff of "smoky mist." None of the scary celestial signs or astronomical anomalies happened that day--but still Peter is convinced that this is what Joel was talking about all along. (This is perhaps a warning to us about how we read the prophets ourselves--sometimes religious folks want to turn the prophets into fortune tellers or Nostradamus-types, but they are just as often poets who are describing touchable, tangible human events with the startling language they need to use to get people's attention.) Peter sees that the coming of the Spirit really is like the ending of an old, tired, and miserable regime and the beginning of something new, like the whole world was born all over again.

And maybe even Peter himself doesn't quite grasp yet just how radical a moment this is. But it won't be long in the book of Acts before God uses this same Peter to reach out even wider to include and welcome outsiders, Gentiles, and even members of the enemy occupying army (like Cornelius the centurion, to whom Peter will be sent soon in the book of Acts). Peter is witnessing the creation of a whole new way of being human--one that is no longer bound up with separate ethnicities or exclusion based on language. He sees that God is creating a new kind of community based on the grip of grace, not on our DNA. And that floors him. That is like the end of a world and the start of a new humanity. Peter says, "That's what Joel was getting at all along." Peter took his Bible seriously... but he was able to see that Joel was less interested in predicting eclipses as he was in envisioning God's Reign breaking in.

We have a way sometimes of missing the boat, we Christians. (Surprise, surprise, right?) We have a way of not being able to see the forest for the trees when it comes to the words of these ancient poets and dreamers we call the prophets. Instead of trying to sift through their visions looking for clues about the "end times" or trying to tie in yesterday's eclipse with some ancient scripture passage, perhaps we could listen the way Peter did--to see that the real end-of-the-world moment was also the beginning of a whole new creation, the inauguration of the Spirit-led movement of the followers of Jesus. So often, we stifle and squelch what God has been trying to do--we end up further dividing ourselves, and acting like the old lines of language, nationality, and culture still must divide us, like the old allegiances still claim us. So often we accept those as givens, while trying to figure out what astronomical signs some old prophet was trying to predict. Instead, we ought to be hearing the prophets tell us together that God is doing a new thing--a thing meant for all, for me... for you... and for people you don't particularly like, too.

If we listen to Peter there on the day of Pentecost, we will find our eyes are changed. We will begin to see, with him, how God has begun a new creation right in the midst of the old order. We will see that God has breathed a new breath into the universe, and just like the Spirit brooded over the waters at creation, now the same God has breathed the Spirit onto the motley crew that makes up the Kingdom. We will see, as we look at how varied the faces, how different the voices, how many the languages and cultures and customs of people who are being gathered into God's New Thing. We will see that the old way of living in the world--divided and segregated and isolated from one another, viewing the other with suspicion and fear--is coming to an end. We will see that God has begun a new order of the day, and it is taking shape among us right now... right here... right before our very eyes.

That's what Peter says we are offered as well: new eyes to see a new world unfolding now.  That's what the Spirit gives among us, too--the gift of a new way of seeing that changes everything and includes everyone. We will get to see signs that God is doing something new and wonderful ... and then we will get to be a part of it, too.

Great God, do your new thing among us, and help us to see it.