Pre-Emptive Love for Enemies--March 10, 2026

Pre-Emptive Love for Enemies--March 10, 2026

"For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person--though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life." (Romans 5:6-10)

If we didn't know it already, these verses from Romans make it clear: God's way of dealing with enemies is not at all what the world calls "common sense."  This passage, which many of us heard last Sunday in worship, fly in the face of conventional wisdom and its need to hit them before they hit you.

Here's an example. In the last twenty-four hours, I've seen several clips of powerful people at podiums insisting that the only way to deal with your enemies is with unapologetic cruelty and unrelenting intimidation. "Ruthless means were used to get rid of the people" who were deemed as threats and enemies in the past, one said, proudly encouraging the same ruthlessness in the present against whomever is deemed to be an unacceptable danger.  Another said defeating your enemies can't be constrained by any "stupid rules of engagement" (like limiting what kinds of targets one would or wouldn't attack, or where there are rules against pre-emptive attacks without provocations, or whether it is imperative to avoid harm to civilians in war), but only that one's enemies should be afraid that they could be killed at a moment's notice.  (Never mind the fact that throughout most of Christian history, the consensus of theologians has been that even if one finds oneself in a situation of war, there must be limits on attacking civilian targets, no pre-emptive attacks, and clear agreements about how prisoners are treated, and the like.) The conventional wisdom, still shouted from podiums and press conferences today, is that enemies must be crushed, and any means are acceptable in the service of that crushing.

It is worth noting, of course, that the apostle Paul had certainly seen his share of that same logic in his own day, carried out by the Roman Empire against whoever was the enemy of the day for them.  Plenty of people have heard the old story that the Romans salted the ground around the city of Carthage when they attacked it, supposedly so that nothing would ever grow there again. Even if that is more a legend than fact, the Romans were certainly willing to employ ruthless tactics against enemy nations they conquered or the dissidents they crucified to send a message of intimidation. So as Paul wrote to the Roman Christians, he knew full well that emperors and kings often justify cruelty in the name of defeating and destroying their enemies. That has been standard policy of empires throughout history, all convinced that they are accountable to nobody and subject to no restraint from anybody.

And in spite of the empire-logic of "Ruthlessness and cruelty toward your enemies is OK when we're the ones doing it," the apostle says that God has a very different policy toward enemies. In Christ, God deals with enemies, not by killing them, but by dying for them.  In Christ, God responds to those who are turned away in hostility by reaching out to reconcile with them.  In Christ, God does not threaten the ungodly with violence, but rather bears the violence we inflict because of our ungodly and sinful ways.  Paul knows that runs counter to the conventional thinking of the day--in fact, that is precisely why he knows he needs to say it.

This is part of the beautiful scandal of the Christian gospel: God doesn't deal with us in the way we have told ourselves is permissible in dealing with each other.  God doesn't destroy enemies--God absorbs the destruction of death at the cross for the sake of those who are enemies of God.  Paul knows it--and insists on it--because he knows that he himself is one of those enemies whom God has loved.  He knew it from his own days as a fierce and zealous persecutor of the church, when Paul himself received both forgiveness and welcome from the risen Christ himself and from the community of Christians who let him in, cared for him, and took the risk of practicing the same kind of enemy love they had seen in Jesus.  And Paul also understood that he was not a singular special case.  The way God had loved him, even when he was an enemy of God, was in fact the way God loves all of us--yes, particularly us Christians!  In other words, we can never cast ourselves as "worthy" of God's love because we are so good and well-behaved and devoted; rather, Paul says that all of us were loved already even when we were God's enemies, turned completely away from God, and that for those of us who have come to faith in Jesus, it is only because God loved us first, before we did a thing to come to God.  God has a policy of pre-emptive love for enemies, you could say; God doesn't zap us before we can zap first, but rather loves us to the point of dying for us even before we were turned toward God at all.  It is that pre-emptive love of God--what theologians sometimes call "prevenient grace"--which makes it possible for us to be turned toward God in faith in the first place.

Today, how will we face the people we struggle with the most--the ones we find no better label for than "enemy"?  How will we treat the people we have the most difficult time getting along with--and whose logic will we let shape our response?  The loud voices of the world still insist they are allowed to be cruel and ruthless to their adversaries, simply because they "can," but the living God revealed in Jesus shows us an alternative.  Whose way will we follow in?  And can we dare to love others the way God has loved us first--which is to say, can we dare to love our enemies precisely because that is how God treated us when we were God's enemies?

That's the challenge--and the gospel's good news declaration--which meets us in this new day.

Lord God, help us to see how your love reached out to us when we were turned away from you, so that we will love others in the way we have been loved.

Freed from the Old Games--March 9, 2026

Freed from the Old Games--March 9, 2026

"Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing in the glory of God. And not only that, but we boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." [Romans 5:1-5]

In a culture that is practically obsessed with teaching us to brag about our own greatness, it can be difficult to move against the stream without giving in to arrogant ego-inflation. But it's even more difficult to keep your head above water if you do go along with the constant flow of "Look-at-me-I'm-great" messaging we get from everywhere else, from folks showing off the fancy dinner they cooked or ordered and posting photos on social media, to demagogues at podiums preening like peacocks as they take credit for accomplishments they had little to do with, to the voices at work telling us we have to keep doing more and more to make a name for ourselves and get the company more and better PR. It can feel like we are constantly under pressure simultaneously to DO "great" things and to PROMOTE ourselves so that everybody else around will know about just how "great" we are. And it is absolutely exhausting to keep at both. You can try it for a while, but it hollows you out before long, and you find yourself empty inside a highly polished, but eggshell-fragile, surface you've projected for the world to see.

And then along comes a voice like the apostle Paul's, who poses a question that shakes all of that to its foundation by asking, "What if you just didn't have to play their game? What if you didn't have to keep inventing reasons or accomplishments or accolades to boast about?" In fact, Paul turns the tables and suggests that if anything, we can boast about how good God has been to us even in the midst of all of our weakness, struggle, and suffering. Instead of arrogantly advertising to the world, "Look how great I am!" Paul dares us to imagine being the voices who say, "Look at how good God is, since God has loved me as I am, and God's power is able to take even my worst moments and raise up hope in the midst of them like seedlings through cracks in the asphalt."

That's part of the delicious irony of Paul's choice to use the word "boast" here in these verses from Romans 5--words many of us heard this past Sunday. He says that we followers of Jesus have grounds for boasting, but it just about takes the word "boast" and turns it inside out. Instead of "look-at-me-I'm-so-great" kind of thinking, Paul says that even the things others would look down of us for don't need to make us ashamed. We don't have to hide our struggles; we don't have to cover over the messes in our lives, or the sources of our pains. We don't have to invent some fake version of ourselves to make us the envy of our neighbors [and enemies], because we know, fundamentally, that we are already beloved of God as we are--and such love can bring promise from pain. We really are freed from the old games.

The thing is, it's really easy in this life to take our successes and turn them into reasons to get puffed up while looking down on others. It's dangerously tempting to look at your title at work, the degrees on your wall, the size of your house, or the newness of your stuff, and to tell yourself, "I did all this--my awesomeness made this happen!" and from there to tell yourself that all the good things in your life are your just reward for being so great. And from there it's barely a hop, skip, or a jump to infer the opposite--that others who have less, earn less, or struggle more are also getting lesser things as a "just reward" from the universe because they aren't as good as you. It is really easy to take my successes and treat them as proof I'm better than the next person, and their struggles as evidence that they're lazy, or immoral, or just plain bad. Grace has a way of clarifying things, though, and reminding us that the good things we know in this life are gifts of God--and that they are never meant to be hoarded as "just" for me. Grace helps us to see how empty is really is to brag about ourselves or puff ourselves up, but rather to see in our times of deepest struggle that God is committed to staying with us... so that we can hope.

I know it can be hard to read these words about "boasting in our suffering" and how "endurance produces character" and not hear it as another version of that line of Friedrich Nietzsche that says, "Anything that doesn't kill me makes me stronger," just telling us to fake a smile, suck it up, and toughen up so we can keep bearing the beatings life sends us. But I don't think that's really what Paul has in mind here. I think Paul has in mind, rather, that when you are so exhausted from putting up a fake, polished version of yourself in order to impress others, you can finally discover that God is actually building something good, worthy, and solid in us even through the things we used to cover over or hide. It's not that every instance of suffering automatically makes you tougher--it's that God promises not to leave us to fend for ourselves but takes even the hardships of life [that we used to be embarrassed about showing to the world] and makes a new creation out of us. And when we realize that it's all about God's gracious power working through us, we lose all grounds for arrogantly puffing ourselves up, because it's clear that "success" [whatever that means] isn't a reward for our awesomeness, and "failure" [again, whatever that means] isn't punishment for being inadequate, either. But in that very same instant, we are freed from having to gin up applause or "wows" from anybody else, because we are already beloved by God as we are. God's love has never been contingent on us "making the grade" or "becoming a success" or "winning" in life, but rather has been at work all our lives long even taken our most painful experiences and deepest struggles and fashioning a new creation out of them.

Knowing that allows us to simply stop playing the game of approval-seeking that everybody else seems to be stuck in like a hamster wheel going nowhere for all of that furious spinning. So maybe today's the day we can be done with the exhausting and fruitless labor of "looking like successes" and use that newly freed-up energy to let God transform our struggles into something new... like a sprout through the concrete.

Lord Jesus, keep us grounded in your love so that we can let you make new creations out of even our deepest struggles.

Giving the Ending Away--March 6, 2026

Giving the Ending Away--March 6, 2026

The LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-3)

Barely twelve chapters into the entire Bible (page nine out of more than a thousand in my Bible), and God has already given away the ending of the whole saga: all the families of the earth shall be blessed, through what God is about to do beginning with childless and elderly Abram and Sarai.

These are, in fact, the very first words we get from God's mouth to Abram (who will soon enough get a revised name, "Abraham," from the same God). And even though the future father-of-many-nations doesn't get so much as a proper How-de-doo from the Holy One, God tips the divine hand from the get-go and says, "The thread of your whole life story is part of a bigger, wider, and much longer tapestry that will end up bringing blessing for every family, every tribe, every nation, and every people." How about that for an introduction?

Mind you, Abram wasn't looking for God at this point.  He wasn't seeking the true deity amidst all the idols and false gods of his culture (in fact, as Joshua 24:2-3 reminds us, Abraham and his parents "lived beyond the Euphrates River and served other gods") when God got a hold of him.  Abram doesn't have much going for him at this point in his story, honestly.  He's already more than a septuagenarian, and his wife had also just recently qualified for Social Security as well. They don't have children to provide for their needs in their golden years yet. And Abram doesn't own any particular plot of land he can live off of. (Yes, it is noteworthy, too, that even when he first sojourns to the "promised land," Abram does not a legal right to any of it, never has "legal" status to be there, and only ever purchases one small plot of land near the end of his life when he buys a cave to bury Sarah after her death.) Abe has no track record of being particularly virtuous or noble, and it will be centuries before the rules and regulations of The Law are given, so he doesn't even have the opportunity to be a good and obedient commandment keeper as a feather in his cap.

So, with basically no positive accomplishments or assets to list on his resume, out of nowhere, God calls Abram and says, "Hey, Abe--you don't know me yet, but we're going to be friends.  I'm going to do good for you, with descendants and a place for them to life, and eventually my plan is going to result in blessing for every family in the whole world."  A lot of the middle steps and chapters of the story are still unclear to Abraham, but God absolutely gives away the ending from the start.  This story is going to result in blessedness for the whole human family, because (as God is reminding us) God loves the whole human family--and indeed, the whole world.  And that means that Abraham's story isn't strictly just his own personal story, but really it is an entry point into the world's story.  For Christians, we eventually trace the family tree of Abraham and Sarah not just to his son Isaac (and Abraham's other, firstborn son, Ishmael) or to Jacob and his progeny who become the tribes of Israel, but eventually to include Jesus, the One through whom we confess God has indeed brought salvation to the whole world.

And as the very first memories of the early church will attest (see the book of Acts, for example), the community of Jesus' followers has understood that it was meant to include all peoples, all nations, and all families of the earth.  Christianity has never (at least when it's been faithful to our Story) been a matter of one people group against another, one nation against another, or one tribe against any others.  We have always been meant to be a community in whom the world gets a glimpse of that promise to Abraham of blessing for all peoples.  The world, in other words, is meant to see a preview of how the whole story of the world concludes--with blessing for all peoples--because they have seen in us the foreshadowing of that kind of community.  Our very existence as a found family with members from all places, languages, and backgrounds is a sort of "spoiler" that gives away the ending of the whole thing.

We do profound harm to our witness to Christ when we allow our faith to become a weapon for perpetuating "us-versus-them" hostilities, or when we let it be co-opted to sound like saying God is on one side of a war against the other side. God's promise to Abram, made the very first time God spoke to the future-patriarch, reminds us that God has always intended to bless all families, all nations, and all peoples, precisely through the covenant that originally set Abram and his family apart in the first place.  The goal was always to bless and redeem the whole world, through the unfolding promise of God that was first spoken to this particular person, Abram.

When you know that a story is going to have a good and happy ending, it gives you the courage and hope to keep plodding along through the sad and scary parts.  The same is true, it turns out, with the way we live out the story of the world.  Because God has given away the ending already, and we know that God's intention is to bless all the families of the earth through the work God began in Abram and Sarai's family, we can continue to live out our lives now seeking the good of all people, and knowing that's where God's will is oriented. 

At the end of the world's story is blessing, all around.  How will you live your live today knowing that is true?

Lord God, enable us to face the world in all of its pain and violence, knowing you intend to bless and heal every family, tribe, and people.

In the Eyesight of Love--March 5, 2026

In the Eyesight of Love--March 5, 2026

"For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it written, 'I have made you the father of many nations')--in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." [Romans 4:13-17]

In a world obsessed with projecting artificial versions of ourselves to show off to the world, it's really a relief to hear the Scriptures tell us that God doesn't need us to impress anybody.   Our belonging in the family of God does not depend on our ability to "wow" God--not with our accomplishments, not with our rule-following, and not even with our religiosity.  It has everything to do with God's gift, promise, and power to create new things out of our empty-handed nothingness.

In fact, it's the unconditional love of God for us that lets us be honest about our frailties, and from there to love other people as they are in all of their frailties. In the words of James Baldwin, "Love takes off masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." And the Love whom we have met in Jesus has been doing that for generations, even all the way back to old Father Abraham.  This passage from Romans, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, shows it to us again.

It's a matter of learning to see differently--or maybe, of learning to let God train our eyes [and hearts] to see the world through love. When I know I am beloved, I don't have to constantly compare myself to others or try to make myself seem better. When I know that God says I already belong, I don't have to push you down or puff myself up out of some fear that there is a limited number of spots at God's table. Being loved allows me to love others, because I'm no longer obsessed with covering up my own insecurity in a thick wrapper of arrogance as insulation. And that's possible, Paul tells us, because God takes what others might see simply as our liabilities, our weaknesses, or even our dead-ness, and with the eye of a master artist, God raises up beauty... grace... strength... life. Or, like the song by U2 puts it, "Grace makes beauty out of ugly things... grace finds goodness in everything."

That's what I hear in these words from Paul's letter to the Romans as he thinks about our ancestor in the faith, Abraham. Paul recognizes that Abraham isn't really the hero of his story--God is. What Abraham brought to the picture was his near-dead-ness: he was approaching a hundred years old, had been worshiping the idols of the Chaldeans, and had no prospects of continuing the family line through children since he and his wife didn't have any. Abraham didn't even have a perfect permanent record of rule-following, since there was no "Law of Moses" yet, and the commandments hadn't been given yet. In other words, what Abraham had to offer looked only like weakness, nothingness, and near deadness.

But in the eyesight of Love, what seems only like weakness becomes the source of beauty and strength and life. What seems dead becomes the point where resurrection breaks out. And as Paul sees it, it is not any obviously impressive traits or accomplishments of Abraham that puts him in good standing with God--it is only his willingness to trust, even feebly and shakily, that God can bring life out of his near-deadness, and that God can bring beauty out of what looks to anybody else only like ugliness.  It is, you might say, Abraham's openness to letting himself be in God's hands--his willingness to let God love him--that suffices.

Abraham is the subject of the story, but God is the storyteller who lifts up the vitality in what otherwise might seem a tragic life story. It is an act of creation out of nothing, or an act of resurrection if you like. And this is exactly what the God of the Scriptures keeps doing all of the time: finding us just as we are, and, without waiting for us to fit anybody else's definition of being "good enough" or "strong enough" or "great enough" or "beautiful enough," God just brings life from our deathliness. It's not a lie or a fiction, but it is the work of a master artist whose creative eye raises up what otherwise would have gone unseen.

And this is how God keeps operating for each of us. Where the world looks at you or me and sees only our brokenness, our non-good-enough-ness, or our dead-ness, God creates something beautiful and true out of us. God acknowledges the struggles, the setbacks, and the sorrows we bear, but instead of just tossing us away as damaged goods, God raises us up and brings life to the foreground. When we see how God's love accepts us--yes, embraces us--even when all we bring to the table are our liabilities and inadequacies, we no longer need to try and impress others or cut them down to make ourselves feel better. We're already loved as we are. We can just sit with that and know it's true.

Maybe the challenge of this day is not to pretend that our struggles, our weak places, or our needs are not there, but to seek for God to show us ourselves from the viewpoint of God's own Master-Artist perspective, where life comes out of death, and where things come into existence that you'd have sworn weren't there a second ago.

May we have such courage and vision to see things through the resurrection perspective of God, and may that vision enable us to love others as we have been loved already. May we dare to believe, like Father Abraham and Mother Sarah, that we have already been found by God and brought into the family.

Lord God, we offer you ourselves as we are, asking for you with your creative eye to help us to envision life in us where we might have overlooked it, and to bring life out of us where we can see only deadness.

Bigger Than We Knew--March 4, 2026

Bigger Than We Knew--March 4, 2026

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him." (John 3:16-17)

The world is a big place.  There's no way around it.

Sure, astronomers and cosmologists will tell us that even other planets within our solar system are even bigger, not to mention our sun... or other stars which dwarf the sun by comparison... or whole galaxies. But on the human scale, at the frame of reference from which you and I live, the world is indeed a very big place.

And, while we are on the subject, the world is also a pretty diverse place as well.  It's not just big--it's full of astonishing variety.  We don't live in a monolithic place where everything is all vanilla-flavored or one shade of gray in coloring. There are bitter flavors like black coffee and beer, sweet flavors like fresh peaches and raspberries, sour flavors like limes, and salty ones like feta cheese or fresh-baked pretzels.  There is a whole spectrum of colors (including quite a few that our eyes cannot even see, but which other animals can!), and there is an orchestra of sound all around us, too.  Don't even get me started on people: we come in a host of shades and skin tones, speaking a myriad languages, from countless cultures and places, with all sorts of personalities, preferences, interests, and loves. Our families look as different as our faces, and our stories are as varied as our settings. Oh--and there are a lot of us.  Billions, in fact.  All of these details remind us that the world is a big and manifold place.

And it is that particular world, in all its vastness and variety, that God loves.  That is worth saying and sitting with, because we often assume that God's love is more selective, or God's palate more picky, than John's Gospel would have us believe.  These words, which many of us heard this past Sunday, are among some of the most well-known in the whole of the Bible, and yet I have a sneaking suspicion that they are they are words we often struggle to truly take seriously. We keep wanting to add fine print, asterisks, conditions, or exceptions to the vast breadth of "the world" which God loves to somehow make it smaller or narrower, but the Gospel insists on a wideness that embraces the whole thing. People we like, and people we deem our enemies.  People who share our faith in God, and people who do not.  People who are "like us," and people who are startlingly different. So there is no authentic version of the Christian faith in which we get to say it is "God's plan" to destroy certain people, or in which we can write off anybody as "outside the scope of God's care." God's love is as big as the world, John insists--even though that means admitting it is bigger than we knew.

That's crucial for us to take seriously, because it redefines how we see every other person on Planet Earth, no matter how much they are like us or unlike us, and no matter whether we have our own personal animosities between us.  These verses insist on two truths we cannot ignore, no matter how much they complicate our view of the world: one is that God actually loves the WHOLE world, and the second is that God's world-embracing love takes a certain shape--namely, that God's Son has come "not to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." God's love looks like rescue rather than wrath. God's love looks like a cross rather than conquest.  God's love looks like the embrace, even of God's enemies, rather their annihilation. If you know that song that King George sings in the musical Hamilton, "You'll Be Back," we're supposed to recognize the absurdity of the lyric, "And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love." We're supposed to understand that's not how love works--that's not what you do when you love others. When God shows the world the depth of divine love, God doesn't send an army or an aerial bombardment as the means of God's compassion.  God sends the Son, explicitly NOT to condemn but to save. And that Son's way of embodying love looks like dying at our hands rather than killing or condemnation.

So, maybe the question for this day is whether we will dare to hear these familiar words of John 3:16-17 and actually let them shape our perspective and our action.  Will we choose to see the world--and all the people in it, whether we meet them face to face today or hear their stories from across oceans on the news--the way God does, which is to say, with a love that was bigger than we knew?

Lord God, stretch our vision to match the size of your love.

Letting Go of Our "Rightness"--March 3, 2026

Letting Go of Our "Rightness"--March 3, 2026

"Nicodemus said to [Jesus], 'How can these things be?' Jesus answered him, 'Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?'" (John 3:9-12)

I think one of the hardest things for me to realize--and to accept--about this life of faith is that none of us will have all the answers, no matter how faithful we think we are, no matter how pious, how smart, how studious, or how virtuous we imagine ourselves to be.  That's especially hard for me at especially because I'm a pastor, who has been extensively trained in things like theology and biblical texts, and I don't want to admit that those things will still not give me all the puzzle pieces. And on top of that, I think all of us at some level seek for answers, for truth, and for meaning from our faith in God.  And if it turns out that we are not guaranteed we'll be right all the time, we may wonder why we even bother with this faith of ours. Nobody likes to be wrong, and nobody even wants to admit they don't have it all figured out--but it sure seems like following Jesus is going to strip away our masks of "rightness" and compel us to admit how often we just cannot understand God's ways in the world.

This, you might say, is another cost of following Jesus rather than staying in our own little bubbles of personal spirituality and self-help.  If we keep Jesus at arm's length, we can delude ourselves into thinking we have all the answers figured out and all the mysteries of God resolved.  But if we let Jesus draw us in close, we'll discover--like Nicodemus--how much we don't really know after all.  The theologian and former Bishop N.T. Wright once said that he expects when he gets to glory, he'll find out that at least one-third of everything he has believed and taught will turn out to be wrong; he just doesn't know which one-third it is.  And while we can certainly quibble about percentages (I am prepared to admit that a whole lot more of what I think may turn out to be wrong), I think there is something honest, and therefore brave, about Wright's admission.  It's hard to face the reality that we don't have all the answers, and that along with that truth, there are likely a good number of things we think we are right about, which we will learn are at some point are actually incorrect. If our reason for clinging to religion is that we think it promises us unquestionable certainty and rightness, Jesus has some bad news for us.

This section of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, brings that into sharp focus. Nicodemus entered this conversation with Jesus at night fancying himself an Answers Guy. He was a member of the Pharisees--a group within first-century Judaism that was diligent in reading the Scriptures, dedicated to living out the commandments, and zealous in seeking God's will. On top of that, he was a teacher and a leader among that group--he would have had some of the most extensive and thorough religious education, and would have learned from the most learned minds of his faith tradition.  But he gets barely a few sentences into a conversation with Jesus, when Jesus starts taking all he thought he knew and turning it upside down and inside out.  All the answers he thought he had, packaged and ready to dole out to people who came to him seeking The Truth, and here, Jesus comes along and blows them all away like the wind scattering dry leaves.  If Nicodemus is going to continue at all with listening to Jesus, he is going to have to let go, not only of the answers he was sure he had, but of his illusion of "rightness."  You've got to give him credit, I suppose--at least Nicodemus doesn't go running out the door with his ears plugged when Jesus starts knocking over his theological house of cards.

But that begs the question: what about us?  Are we only interested in following Jesus or listening to him if he promises always to reinforce what we already believe about God or want to be true--or are we willing to let him turn our old perspectives upside down and reveal where we have been wrong... possibly about things we have believed for a very long time and about topics that are very important to us (like God)?  That's a tall order.  But ultimately it is worth it, as costly and scary as it may be.  It is worth it to let Jesus rearrange our understanding. It is worth it to admit we've gotten it wrong, so that we can learn and see things anew.  It is worth it to face the possibility that we've wanted to force God into our preconceived notions and boxes rather than letting the Spirit elude our grasp and slide out of every leash we try and put God into.  It is worth it to give up not so much control, but the illusion of control that we have been clinging onto so tightly.  All those things are worth it because they come as we are pulled closer to Jesus. And being where Jesus is? That turns out to be the best possible place to be.

Lord Jesus, draw us close to you, even if it means letting go and leaving behind the answers we thought we had figured out.

The Life We Are Given--March 2, 2026

The Life We Are Given--March 2, 2026

[Jesus said to Nicodemus:] "Do not be astonished that I said to you, 'You must be born from above.' The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." (John 3:7-8)

Quick reminder: you didn't earn your own birth. It was given to you.

So when Jesus uses the language of being "born from above" or "born of the Spirit" to describe how we come to participate in God's "kingdom" or "reign," guess what? That's a gift, too. Sharing life with God isn't something you apply for, achieve, or earn your way into. It's not a reward, a graduation, or an accomplishment. It's a gift from beginning to end, just like our lives are. You can't earn your own birth--you are given it, primarily from a mother who does the labor, maybe with partial supporting credit for the doctors, nurses, or midwives on the scene, and the intangible support of everybody else who isn't pushing but is pacing, waiting, or wringing their hands in the hospital lobby. But you know as well as I do that the one being born doesn't "work" to accomplish the birth--only to receive it. And to hear Jesus tell it, even our coming to faith is a gift of the God who births us into that kind of trust. As surely as our own lives were first given to us by the mothers whose labor brought us into the world, our identity as children of God is a gift made possible by the Spirit's gift, rather than our achievement.

That's a big deal to take seriously, because it completely reframes the way we are used to thinking about the start of our lives of faith. So much of American religious-speak makes it sound like our accomplishment: "Have you been born again?" becomes a question loaded with ominous accusation, probing into whether we've done enough, or prayed the right prayer, said the right words, or believed the correct list of theological propositions to earn a certain status. So much of Respectable Religion in our culture takes the phrase "born again" and completely misses the point of how being born actually works: it's a gift made possible by someone else's labor, and initiated by someone else's choice to love you into being. In other words, it's not something you can brag about--only something you can be grateful for.

Whether it was Nicodemus in the first century in this passage that many of us heard this past Sunday, or the official faces of Respectable Religion in the twenty-first century, we still keep trying to make our relationships with God into something we can brag about or puff ourselves up over. If I've been "born again" and it's my accomplishment, then I can look down on all the people who haven't checked the same boxes I have, and I can use that checklist as a gate to keep out others who don't measure up. If being "born of the Spirit" is something I made happen, then I have grounds to justify my arrogance and treat everybody else like they're unworthy, unlovable, and unacceptable to God. But if--as the metaphor of birth itself certainly implies--this whole notion of being "born from above" is a gift of a gracious God, then all of a sudden the playing field is leveled, and I don't get to look down on anybody. I'm just a recipient of new life by grace, the same as the rest of us. And there's no earning on my part--it's all been God's labor and the Spirit's movement.

How will it affect the way we see other people with that in mind? How might it help us to love people without looking down on them or puffing ourselves up? And how might we be moved simply to gratitude to the Spirit for having birthed us, rather than comparing ourselves or our spiritual status to someone else? It seems to me that all of that comparison and judgment ends up being just an obstacle that gets in the way of genuine love--think of how much more freely we can move without those hindrances today.

O Spirit of God, we give you thanks for having born us into faith--enable us to see that as your gift rather than our accomplishment, so that we can love like you.