Mercy All Around--August 20, 2026

Mercy All Around--August 20, 2026

"Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so also they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they also may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all." (Romans 11:30-32)

In the last chapter of the whodunnit, you finally find out the identity of the culprit, the details of their clever plot, and the underlying reason for their scheme.  The detective, whether Miss Marples, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, or a modern cinematic invention like Benoit Blanc from the Knives Out movies, finally unravels the motive for whatever elaborate ploy the criminal mastermind devised over the course of the story. We find out which clues were red herrings meant to misdirect us, which details were important all along, and, of course, the real question driving us to get to the last page:  why?  Why did the killer do it?  What was the purpose behind the conspiracy?  What was the motive for the caper?  And, of course, a good mystery writer can keep you guessing all the way until the final reveal. And once the "why" has been answered with a "because," readers of good mysteries typically find themselves satisfied, now able to see connections they had missed before, recognize the reasons for the twists and turns, and relish how the whole plot drove toward that one inexorable conclusion.

Well, in a manner of speaking, Paul has been doing the same thing here in this section of his letter to the Romans, spun out over the course of three whole chapters (ch. 9 through 11) as he reflects on what was surely a pretty thorny theological mystery.  The question was this:  If Jesus really is the long-awaited Messiah of Israel promised to the descendants of Abraham and Sarah from long ago, and if by and large most of those descendants (the people of the Jewish faith in which Paul himself had been raised) had rejected that claim, then what on earth was God up to?  Did God not see that rejection coming?  Did God make a mistake and somehow incorrectly assume that the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would recognize Jesus as the Messiah, only to get it colossally wrong when the mob called for his crucifixion?  Or, was God giving up on those people because they rejected Jesus, and no longer going to keep the ancient promises to love and bless them forever?  What was really going on?

It really was a pretty frustrating puzzle, especially in the first century when Christianity was still very much figuring itself out and discerning whether it was a movement within Judaism (like the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, or Essenes) or something new and different.  At first, when the church was mostly made up of Jewish believers, with just a few Gentile (non-Jewish) newcomers, it was easy to treat those outsiders as exceptions, but still to say that Christianity was "aimed" at reaching only people within Judaism.  But as more and more Gentiles came to faith and wanted to be followers of Jesus, the question became more and more pressing: what was God doing here?  Why would God allow so many of the covenant people to miss the One they'd been waiting for?  And what did it mean for them--was their hope, blessedness, and salvation now rescinded because they didn't believe in Jesus?  

Neither option sounded very appealing, theologically: one seemed to be saying that God was not intelligent enough to realize that Jesus would be rejected by so many of his own people, and the other sounded like it was saying that the promises of the covenant were not reliable if God was just going to break off relationship with the covenant people who had rejected Jesus.  Neither seemed to "fit" with the character of God revealed in the Scriptures, who is portrayed as knowing us better than we know ourselves and also deeply faithful in keeping promises, even in the face of our unfaithfulness.

Paul spends three chapters raising the issue, framing the question, offering data from Scripture, presenting premises, and building toward what we hope will be a whodunnit-style unmasking like the end of an episode of Scooby Doo. And finally at the end of what we call Chapter Eleven in the Letter to the Romans, Paul comes to a conclusion.  Addressing the largely Gentile audience of the Christians in Rome, he says this:

"Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so also they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they also may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all."

These Gentile/outsider Christians hearing his letter see that prior to their coming to faith in Jesus, they had been pointed away from God and estranged from God's goodness in their old devotion to the gods of the empire like Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, Jupiter, Artemis, Mars, and even Caesar himself.  But God showed mercy to them and had pulled them into the divine embrace as they had heard the news about Jesus and God's love that went to a cross for them.  And how had those Gentile Christians come to hear about Jesus in the first place? Well, in many cases, it had been that when traveling apostles like Paul had come to their towns, they had first gone to bring the message to the Jewish community in the local synagogue and were often met with rejection there, which led the apostles to spread the news to everyone else, too.  In other words, the Gentile "outsiders" came to hear about Jesus typically because the message had first been rejected by the "insiders." Paul sees this as a bit of divine jiujitsu: God used the rejection of the gospel by one group to become the vehicle that leads to the inclusion of outsiders in the gospel's embrace.  Like Jesus' story about the guests to the wedding banquet who refuse to come to the party, leading the host to find other guests who will come even if they are poor, sick, homeless, or underdressed, Paul says that the "disobedience" of the religious insiders (rejecting the news about Jesus) is the thing that leads to the "mercy" shown to the religious outsiders.

But wait--that's not the only reveal!  Like a clever mystery wrapped inside an enigma, or a plot with a double-twist in the final pages, Paul keeps going.  He says that since the rejection of the Gospel by so many of the ancient covenant people led to the inclusion of the Gentiles, God will now also be able to include those who have rejected Jesus on the same terms.  The Gentiles had formerly been turned away from God but had been drawn close to God through the Gospel, and so in the very same motion, God can choose to show mercy on the covenant people who have rejected Jesus and still drawn them into God's love yet. That's the ultimate reveal at the end of this long and twisty section of Romans: "God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all." 

The goal, Paul says, all along, from God's perspective, has been to "be merciful to all." It may have taken a great many unexpected plot twists and curve balls to get there, but that has been God's grand design all along. God's motive in allowing history to unfold the way it has, including the manifold rejection of Jesus and the surprising embrace of outcasts and outsiders, has been to hand out mercy all around.  To all.  Religious "insiders" secretly covering over their hypocrisy and impious "outsiders" who were pointed completely the wrong way.  The ancient covenant people who had still managed to miss the Messiah when he came into their midst, and the brand-new still-dripping-wet-from-their-baptism-yesterday Gentile newbies who were still learning the story of Jesus.  The folks who had been keeping kosher all their lives but who couldn't bring themselves to believe in a crucified Christ, and the ones who had been sacrificing goats to Zeus the other day before hearing a new story that changed their lives.  God's real motivation all along--throughout the entire course of biblical and world history--has been to show mercy to everybody in the end.  That's the destination Paul sees everything driving toward, even when it took a winding path to get there.

That might surprise us if we have been picturing God as primarily an angry and vengeful executioner looking for any excuse to lob a lightning bolt at sinners. But like you experience when you get to the end of a mystery story and see how all the threads and all the clues had been there all along, in a sense, it is no surprise that the God of the Bible intends to show mercy to all.  That seems to be God's modus operandi all throughout the Scriptures: always pushing the boundaries wider, always reaching out to include the unworthy and unacceptable, always extending grace to sinners and providing grace for the mess-ups.  Here in these verses Paul just comes out and says that this is not a curious fluke that crops up in a couple of places in the Scriptures, but rather this has been God's design all along.  The whole goal has been to show mercy to all, by God's design.

When you see it laid out that way, it is both a startling surprise and also somehow the most natural thing in the world, you know?  And when we take Paul's claim seriously it shapes our understanding for how we live out our lives of faith, too.  The whole goal, always, is for ways to show mercy.  God's intention is to reach everybody.  God's design is to show all of us the truth that none of us can earn our way into God's good graces, so that when God's love does reach everybody we won't be foolish enough to think it was something we had to achieve.  

Maybe it takes a while to reach that conclusion, but that's how a good story works. Like making our way through the plot twists of a mystery novel, we eventually come to the big reveal at the end. God has been leading the whole human saga to the place where God could show mercy all around.

You and I have just gotten a two-thousand-year-old spoiler about the last page of The Story: Paul says it has all been leading to mercy for all, all along.

How will that change the way you see every face who crosses your path today?

Lord God, prepare our hearts for your surprising mercy and the breadth of its reach.

Despite Our Flip-Floppery--August 19, 2026

Despite Our Flip-Floppery--August 19, 2026

"For the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable." (Romans 11:29)

One of the most exhausting things about parenting for me is how frequently and yet unpredictably children change their minds. I think it's a human thing, and children are unapologetically, undeniably human, but it can be particularly difficult to be a grown-up and deciding how much flip-flopping the family can abide with.

It's the ever-changing wish lists for Christmas or birthday presents, and the things they said they wanted last week may not be the things that capture their interest this week, much less by the time Christmas rolls around.

It's the fussiness about foods, where the dinner they loved last time you made it all of a sudden they don't like this time (or say they don't like).

It's the cliquishness of friendships as they get older--the person who was their seemingly close friend last month might now no longer be talking with them because the winds changed about who is "cool" or what off-hand comment got said in the hallway at school.

It's the flightiness of following trends, where the brand or style of clothes that "everyone" was wearing last season is no longer popular, as a new look becomes all the rage.

My guess is you've lived through some or all of those, and maybe some more of your own, whether from when you were the kid or you were the grown-up. The bottom line is that we human beings are notorious for un-choosing what we have previously chosen, even when we say things like, "I won't change my mind about THIS--I swear it!" Every discarded toy, unworn clothes left in a drawer, uneaten meal left on the plate, and broken friendship is a testament to how fickle our kind can be. We may grow out of the worst of it as we become adults, but that impulse is always inside us.

God, however, does not unchoose what or who is chosen. God may well reveal in time that a lot more or wider circle of people end up being included in the "chosen," but God doesn't flip-flop and un-call those who are called or de-gift a gift already given. There are no "givesies-backsies" with God. Or, to borrow the apostle's more polished way of saying it in the verse that many of us heard this past Sunday, "The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable."

In Paul's mind as he is writing this particular line to the church in Rome, he's talking about the ancient covenant people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--a group of whom Paul himself was a member, as he points out elsewhere, "a Hebrew born of Hebrews." (Now, this would be a good moment to note that for Paul the Apostle and the whole of the New Testament, "Israel" isn't the modern nation-state, which of course, wasn't created until 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust and World War II, but of all the collective community of the covenant people who traced their story through the tribes of Israel and the Torah-way-of-life. When Paul talks about God being faithful to "Israel" that is NOT a blanket assertion that everything the modern nation-state of Israel, or any other nation-state, does is endorsed with a divine stamp of approval. Even in the Old Testament periods when there was a king and a kingdom, God always reserved the right to critique, judge, and challenge the decisions of the government or the nation as a whole. Just so we are clear.) In Paul's mind, he's trying to assert that God hasn't given up on the collective people of Israel even though the crowds and Religious Leaders in Judea rejected Jesus and handed him over to the Romans to be crucified. Paul is saying, "Even though we have rejected God (or God's Messiah), God does not reject us." It's a declaration of assurance that God's promise and claim can be counted on, despite the frequent flakiness and flip-floppery of our choices as humans. Paul is decidedly NOT saying that God approves of everything the "chosen" ones do, but almost the opposite: that God can still choose and call people even when God is NOT happy with their choices. God can still correct, redirect, and challenge those whom God chooses, even while they remain "chosen."

Now, in our day and time, the context in our minds may be different, but the claim is the same. We can count on God's love not to end or run out on us, because God's calling and gifts are irrevocable. God's mind doesn't change to un-love us, un-choose us, or un-claim us, unlike the childishly flighty hate-it-love-it-hate-it ways we often do things. God never shouts, "I don't love you!" in a fit of momentary anger just to be spiteful. And God never abandons us because we've fallen out of style or lost popularity. So when we dare to tell someone else, "You are beloved of God," it is not, like the day's weather forecast, gasoline prices, or a stock quote, just a snapshot in time that's only true for the moment. It is a promise you can stake a life on. It is a statement about God's unchanging choice for us, not our unreliable flakiness.

Of course, God's unwavering choice for us doesn't mean God is obligated to endorse our most rotten impulses and selfish choices. Just as we said that God's persistent calling of the ancient people of Israel that Paul talked about doesn't mean that God must support any given action by the government of the modern nation-state of Israel (or any other country or administration, just so we're clear), God can still claim us and correct us. God can still say "I love you" while also not signing off on our pet bigotries, habits of greed, structures and systems of injustice, and our impulse for violence and revenge. God's love for us doesn't end just because we are hot messes who keep adding to the messiness, nor does God's love prevent God from saying "No!" to our crooked and cruel ways. Both can be true.

Today, then, it's worth holding onto two truths--you can carry one in each pocket. On the one hand, when we say you are beloved of God, know that you can take that to the bank like an ironclad promise. God will not back out, rethink, or undo the choice to love you, claim you, and give grace to you. On the other hand, it's important to remember that just because God loves me doesn't mean every idea, impulse, or action I do get a divine thumbs up. You and I are forever beloved, but always correctable. We are unchangingly claimed by God, but that claim will keep changing us as we grow, mature, and deepen our own Christ-like love. Hold those two together as we face the world today.

Lord Jesus, assure us of your unshakable love, and continue to point us in your direction.

The Lord Who Listens--August 18, 2026

The Lord Who Listens--August 18, 2026

“Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’ He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for your as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.’” (Matthew 15:21-28)

Let me tell you one reason I love Jesus: he listens.

That by itself—the act of listening—is a radical, and powerful, act. And to be truthful, it is unexpected, really, for someone in a position of power and authority. Most powerful people—kings, pharaohs, Roman governors, high priests, and presidents—have a way of thinking themselves to be the be-all, end-all, and to be the final word on any given subject. They have no need to listen to those who are “beneath” them, after all. Most people in authority—well-educated scribes and Sadducees, Pharisees and royalty-approved prophets, well-respected pastors, preachers, and rabbis, scholars, and so-called “experts”—are the same, too. They figure that they are “in the know” already and therefore must be right in their conclusions on any given subject. You tell yourself you don’t need to listen to anybody else if you let political power and intellectual authority go to your head.

And Jesus, by all accounts in the Gospels, is someone who has the Right to claim both Power and Authority. For whatever other details they envisioned, one thing the ancient prophets of Israel all agreed on was that the promised coming Messiah would command power and authority. The great and future descendant of King David would carry the old David’s mantle of wisdom and strength, and in that case, everybody would have expected the Messiah to be powerful and bold when he made official pronouncements. Everybody would have expected the Messiah to speak like he was the final word on the subject, and therefore that there was no real need to listen to anybody else. The Gospel-writers are clear that they are all convinced that Jesus is none other than the Messiah—the anointed rightful ruler of God’s people Israel—and therefore you could imagine someone saying, “Jesus is the Messiah: he doesn’t need to listen to anybody. He’s the king, after all.”

But wonder of wonders, even though every other person with power and authority we have known has a way of getting enclosed in an echo chamber where all they can hear are their own powerful, authoritative words, Jesus is different. Jesus listens.

And listening, genuinely listening to someone else, is a radical, courageous, world-changing act. And it is much harder than simply making loud, blustering pronouncements with your ears covered; much harder than we give it credit for, usually.  This is the surprising difference about the kind of reign Jesus brings: he listens. 

It is always easier to deal with messy situations by simply declaring that you are right and reciting a list of pre-learned talking points to back yourself up, than it is to actually listen to someone else, wherever the conversation may take you both.

It is always easier to just stick to the accepted conventional wisdom that everyone expects you to agree with, than to let Mercy move you to pause… to be still… and to hear someone else where they are at.

And this is where Jesus is different—and where Jesus shows us an entirely different way of being the Messiah than we ever expected from any other Power or Authority. Jesus owns his power and authority… by listening.

This story is one of those case in point moments. The conventional wisdom of the day is that Messiahs don’t have to listen to anybody, especially not outsiders of no standing, no power, no authority, and no leverage. And yet here is this blessedly persistent woman—who is first warned, and then given an explanation, and who yet persists in speaking to Jesus nevertheless.

Jesus could have pulled rank. He could have said, “Look, lady, I decide who I heal and who I don’t, and you can’t tell me what to do.” We have all known voices of Power and Authority who sound like that, who simply decree they don’t have to listen to anybody outside their own echo chamber.

Jesus could have insisted he had come to help only Israel First—in fact, he sort of gives this one-off comment that suggests he would be well within his “rights” only to care for people of the “in-group” of fellow Jews like Jesus himself and his disciples. We have all known voices of Power and Authority like that, too, who are so damned obsessed (and yes, I mean that literally—it is a “damnable” obsession) with looking out for their own self-interest that they will not even consider the needs of someone outside their own group or their own agenda.

Jesus could have just appealed to his having the “right” theological answer and made an Official Statement declaring his rightness. After all, yes, it was possible to read the Prophets of Israel’s past and to conclude that the Messiah’s official mission was only to gather in the “lost sheep of Israel.” Jesus could have just left it with his Official Statement and declared that helping any outsiders (and this woman is an outsider—living outside Israel in the district of Tyre and Sidon, and from Canaanite ancestry) was sliding into mission creep, and he just couldn’t help. Jesus could have said, “Sorry, lady, I know your child didn’t choose to be an outsider, and I know that there’s nothing she did to deserve this rotten turn, but hey, I am only here to help the citizens of Judea, and not Gentiles. I’m not here to look out for the interests of Canaanites—only the Kosher people.” We have all known voices of Power and Authority who said as much to the Canaanite women and their children in our own day. “Nothing personal, but I’m just not here to help the likes of… YOU,” they say, insisting at the same time that it’s nothing personal, and that they are just following the letter of their official duty to look out for their own first. We have all known voices of Power and Authority who take their need to sound right and orthodox and turn it into an idol of pride without noticing it has become a golden calf right under their noses.

And even though Jesus appears to head down each of those paths at the start of this story, it turns out that Jesus—like a fox—has a way of leaving false trails, too, as signs of ways he could have gone, but didn’t.

Most importantly—and most powerfully and most authoritatively of all—Jesus never stops listening. In all of this story, Jesus never stops listening to the woman on her own terms. He even keeps the conversation going when all of Jesus’ would-be advisors (the disciples) say that he should end the discussion and just leave the woman alone. He engages in the back-and-forth with her, almost winking as he pushes back on her replies, to see what she really thinks and what she thinks she has come for. Jesus keeps listening, even though this woman, as a “Canaanite,” was born to the wrong group of people in the wrong place. Jesus keeps listening, when every other voice of Power and Authority would just call it a day, dust off their hands, and say, “I’ve made my decision. There’s no help for you. That settles it.”

Jesus keeps listening. And there is the wonder—there is the shocking moment of this story. Honestly, by the fifteenth chapter here in Matthew’s Gospel, it’s already abundantly clear that Jesus CAN do miracles and wonders. He has been casting out demons practically from day one, and he has even shown evidence of healing people from a distance with a simple word, too. All of that is established.

What is surprising here is that Jesus listens to this woman when he had reason to ignore her, and when the majority opinion of his inner circle would have been saying, “She’s too demanding. She’s being rude. She’s refusing to stay in her place. She’s acting like she’s entitled…” What is surprising is that Jesus, even though this anonymous woman has no leverage, no credentials, no pull, and nothing she can offer Jesus in return, stops to consider the needs of a young girl who has been put in a situation of desperation that she never asked for or chose for herself. To all the other voices of Power and Authority, this young woman’s daughter is a nobody, and therefore, she is expendable. Who cares what happens to her, right? For that matter, if Jesus had stuck with taking a hard line against this foreigner woman and told her a decisive, unyielding NO, it might have boosted Jesus’ favorability ratings with the Pharisees back in Judea, and might have increased Jesus’ popularity in the next round of Galilean polls.

But still Jesus listens.

And because he listens, he acts. He heals the woman’s daughter—creating a miracle that never would have happened if Jesus had been a Messiah like every other voice of Power and Authority in history. Any standard-model Messiah would have silenced the woman and walked the other way with an indifferent shrug. Any lesser savior would have said, “Look, I’ll consider her case with heart,” and then just blew her off anyway. Any other Lord would have said, “Since you can’t do anything FOR me, you don’t MATTER to me,” and would have basked in the sound of his own voice as he made the pronouncement.

But because Jesus listens, the second wonder—the actual healing—can happen. The girl, who was a faceless nobody as far as anybody else could tell, is made well. The woman, who was ignorable at best and an “unworthy foreigner”—one of “the dogs,” even!—at worst, is listened to and extended the same level of respect and honor that 1st century society only reserved for men of the right class and standing. Because Jesus listens, the old lines are erased, old walls are broken down, and it becomes clear that Jesus’ messianic mission is wider than anybody had guessed up until that moment.

Jesus listens, and all of a sudden, everything is different—yes, for this woman, and yes, for her innocent daughter, caught up in a dire situation she did not choose, but for all of us. I am an outsider in the story of the people of God—and a Gentile like me can only say I get to belong in the great Story of God’s grace because this Jesus has shown grace to an outsider, a foreigner, like me. I only belong in this community we call the Church because this same Jesus has a way of widening the circle and crossing boundaries, even if there was an orthodox “right” answer that Jesus could have recited to shut the door on me.

This is why I love Jesus. He listens.

Look, dear friends, we are going to continue to face situations—maybe even daily—where it will be easy simply to retreat to reciting the talking points we have learned before, the “right” answers that conveniently reinforce what we already think. It will be tempting in those moments, when we run into a voice like this Canaanite woman’s that challenges our neat-and-tidy correctness, to ignore them, or to un-friend them on social media, to refuse to listen because we have told ourselves we already HAVE the right answers, and to dismiss people who complicate our picture of the world because they are expendable to us. It is always easier in this life to make pronouncements that we have told ourselves are already the “right” answers and stay in the echo chamber where we only ever even hear things we already agree with, than it will be to take the time and let someone complicate our world… by listening to them.

But this Jesus, whom we say we love, he does the hard thing. Jesus listens. And that makes all the difference.

Be one who listens today, too.

Lord Jesus, when we are quick to shout out our final answers, stop us up short and make us to listen where you speak, so that your Mercy may grow wider than we ever dared imagine.

Now Welcomed In--August 17, 2026

Now Welcomed In--August 17, 2026

"And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant—these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord GOD, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them, besides those already gathered.” (Isaiah 56:6-8)

Imagine being told all your life, “This is the way things are. Don’t question it.” and then somehow you become convinced that God is telling you, “I’m doing a new thing—it will shake up everything you thought you knew.”

Imagine having been taught, “God’s Word decrees that People-Like-Us are acceptable, but People-Like-Them are not,” and then hearing a voice you were sure was from God saying, “I am welcoming the People-Like-Them, on my own authority.”

Imagine growing up with your family, your teachers, your leaders, and your whole culture telling you that no less than God almighty hated some whole groups of people, and then getting a message from that very same God saying, “I have invited those very folks to my house.”

Now you’re getting close to what a scandalous thing the prophet is doing here in what we call Isaiah 56. The prophet is telling people who have heard all their lives—and then taught the same to their children—that they weren’t supposed to have anything to do with people from other nations. Gentiles (foreigners) were not to mix with them, worship with them, associate with them, or intermarry with them—and they had a stack of Bible verses to back up those claims. And on top of that, there were folks who were so convinced that foreigners were a danger to the people of Israel and Judah that they drove out all the foreigners they found living among them and tried to split up or cancel marriages where Israelites had married foreign spouses (see Nehemiah 13 if you want to check that I’m not making that part up).

So you had people convinced they had the backing of Bible verses telling them that foreigners were all bad, that they could never belong to God’s people, and that marriages with them had to be stopped. They were certain they were just following the commandments of God, and that was the end of the discussion—sort of an ancient equivalent of the “The Bible said it. I believe it. That settles it.” kind of mentality. And then along comes Isaiah 56—these words many of us heard on this past Sunday—who says, “God is doing a new thing, and the people who had previously been excluded will now be welcomed.” That’s not just about the gutsiest thing I can imagine—it’s also a leap of faith.

The prophet speaking in Isaiah 56 is convinced that he’s not just making stuff up; he dares to believe that the voice prompting him to say that God is now welcoming “foreigners” and “outcasts” is the very Spirit of God. He’s not looking to stir the pot, become famous as a provocateur, or advance his own personal agenda. He would probably rather have lived a quiet life keeping his head down and not upsetting people’s assumptions—he would have gotten in less trouble. And for that matter, Isaiah knows his Bible; he knew the commandments from Deuteronomy about foreigners, and he knew that it was Respectable Religious Leaders who were now trying to split up marriages and kick out foreigners from Judah. The prophet in Isaiah 56 knew he would be accused of “rejecting the Bible” or “disobeying the authorities” by announcing that God was now welcoming foreigners, but he did it anyway—because he was convinced that it was exactly what the living God was directing him to say. It was an act of faith, not an attack on faith, to say that God was doing a new thing.

And yet he did it anyway. That’s exactly what we mean when we talk about faith making love possible. Isaiah didn’t reject his faith in God in order to say that foreigners and outcasts were now to be welcomed—he was sure down to his bones that it was exactly what his faith in God was leading him to say. We Lutherans sometimes talk about having a “Here I stand—I can do no other” kind of moment: those times when you are convinced that God is leading you in a certain direction, even if everybody else in the Respectable Religious community thinks it’s wrong and is threatening you over it. Luther faced excommunication and threats on his life for his moment of conviction; and tradition holds that Isaiah met with even harsher resistance (the Talmud records a tradition that the king had Isaiah sawn in half for his message!). But Isaiah found the courage to speak a word of love to those deemed unacceptable, not by giving up on his faith in God, but exactly because he dared to trust that it was God who had spoken to him with a new word, in spite of what everybody else was sure “the Bible said.” That can’t have been easy; it never is.

Sometimes I think it’s helpful in our own day to re-discover these kinds of passages in the Bible, and to realize that they were all over the place. The prophets were constantly taking what conventional wisdom said about God, even when it was backed up by Bible verses, slogans of the day, or the official decrees of the powerful, and they were always saying some variation on, “But now God is doing a new thing.” That had to be difficult, not just because of the fear of what others might do to them, but because it often meant breaking with what they had always been told was “God’s decree.” The prophets were never looking to start their own religion, reject God, or make themselves leaders of some new cult. They were striving to listen for the voice of God—and maybe that’s exactly what set them apart. Rather than just assuming they already knew what God was going to say and reciting those assumptions (like the way the auto-text function on your phone or computer will sometimes make wildly incorrect assumptions about what you are trying to write!), the prophets listened… and they trusted. They were willing to let God surprise them, and that openness to God doing a new thing is exactly what faith really looks like. Once God can’t surprise you any more, it’s a sure sign you’ve replaced the real God with a lifeless idol, whether made out of gold, carbon-steel, or ideology. Isaiah allowed his faith in God to let him listen when God was speaking a new thing, and that new thing meant a loving welcome to foreigners who used to be deemed not-good-enough and unworthy.

If we are going to be people of faith on this day, it’s going to mean following the lead of Isaiah 56—that is, we’re going to have to dare to listen and let God speak on God’s terms, rather than assuming we already know what God is allowed to say. It’s going to mean asking God for the courage, not just to be surprised, but to speak what God tells us, even if it points in a wider direction than we expected, and even if other folks swear up and down they’ve got a stack of Bible verses why God isn’t “allowed” to do what God says God is going to do. And for us who are followers of Jesus, it’s going to mean we keep going back to Jesus to let him redefine our understanding of God and our pre-conceptions about God’s ways, rather than forcing Jesus to fit into what we have already decided.

That’s a big ask of any of us, but prophets like Isaiah tell us it’s worth it. When we actually trust God enough to let God surprise us, we often find that the new thing God is doing is an even more expansive love than we dared to imagine. And for those of us, like myself, who would have been counted among the “foreigners” and “outcasts” in Isaiah’s day (since, at the very least, I’m not of Jewish ancestry), I realize that my own belonging is only possible because at some point a brave prophet started listening when God said, “I’m up to something new—the excluded ones are now welcomed in.”

How might God surprise us today… if we listen?

Lord God, give us the faith to let you surprise us, and then the courage to speak what you tell us when you do.

In the Sheer Silence--August 14, 2026

In the Sheer Silence--August 14, 2026

"He said, 'Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.' Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind and earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, 'What are you doing here, Elijah?'" (1 Kings 19:11-13)

God is everywhere, that much is surely true. And yet it takes a certain kind of vision--what we usually call "faith"--to recognize God in the places that don't seem majestic... or marvelous... or mighty. Anybody can look at a mountain and say, "That is so big and grand--it makes me think that God is big and grand, too." Anybody can look at a glorious sunrise as the glowing orb of the dawning sun scatters pinks and oranges and purples across the blues of the fading night, and conclude, "A beautiful God has created such beauty." Those are all true and lovely observations, but they are also pretty slow and easy pitches right across the plate.

It is harder, however, to recognize God's presence in the ICU waiting room, as nervous relatives pace and sit in awkward silence over bad vending machine coffee, waiting for news and fearing to hear it when it actually comes.

It is more difficult to sense God in a jail cell, or in the rubble where your bombed out village was when the invading army attacked, or in the uncomfortable quiet before an intervention for a family member who is drinking themselves to death.  It is hard to feel God's presence in the midst of absence--the empty chair at the dinner table when someone we love has died, the migrant neighbor who has vanished without a trace even though you knew and recognized them as a good member of your community, the elderly grandparent or aging spouse whose mind is receding into dementia.  Those are all situations in which it is hard to see God's presence, and I'm sure you could add plenty more from your own experience.

And in a culture obsessed with "winning" and "greatness" it is hard to spot God among the losers (or--gasp!--as a loser himself with nail marks on his hands), the left-out, and the least.

We tend to want our deities to show up in obvious ways: with power and glory, and a side of shock and awe. A God who makes an entrance with a whirlwind, or an earthquake, or a fire would command respect and impress the neighbors. But Elijah has been given the peculiar kind of vision that comes with faith, and he knows to recognize God in all the least-likely and unexpected places where respectable deities don't even bother making an appearance. Elijah's God--and ours--has never needed to impress, and so has never been afraid of leaving behind the special effect and CGI and just comes to be with us in silence.  Yes, even in the sheer silence, God is there.

I'm convinced that's because God is less interested in "wowing" us than in loving us, and because God isn't trying to kindle fear in us but to call forth faith in us. And when you are acting out of love, you don't really care whether anybody else thinks you are foolish, silly, weak, or a "loser." You just care about meeting the ones you care about right where they are, just as they are. That's why God shows up where Elijah needs him--in the sound of sheer silence, and then with a voice that asks questions rather than shouting slogans or barking orders.

So God meets Elijah where the poor prophet's weary heart needs God to be--in silence, smallness, and weakness. And for Elijah's part, Elijah dares to believe that God is meeting him there, rather than in all the overtly obvious places that speak of power and majesty, like a wind, an earthquake, or a fire. God is reaching out to Elijah without the pomp and circumstance everyone expects for the divine, and without leading some heavenly military parade to intimidate the fearful prophet into getting back to work. But rather God meets Elijah after all the hullaballoo has come and gone--in the stillness. That's a mark of love, I think. Anger needs to throw plates at the wall or kick the furniture (or if you're God, lob a lightning bolt). Grief needs to scream sometimes. But compassion is able to enter a situation in quiet, because the quiet allows for listening--and sometimes the other person in the room (or cave, in this story) needs to speak. God creates a point in time and space where it is quiet enough for Elijah to say what he needs to say, because God cares for Elijah. Love doesn't always need to go banging around on the pots and pans to get our attention; love can show up without fanfare in the silence.

And Elijah has trust enough to see that silence as a gift of grace. He has trained his peculiar vision of faith so that he knows how to interpret the silence after the noisy things have passed. When it gets quiet, Elijah believes that it doesn't mean God has left and Elijah's missed his chance to say what he needs to say; rather, he believes the silence is God's gift and that God is inviting him into the conversation. And when even the silence itself isn't enough to prompt Elijah to vent what he has to vent, the voice comes with the invitation, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" like a nudge to him that it's now time for him to unburden himself. God creates the gift of a safe space for Elijah to pour out all that he's been keeping in. And Elijah recognizes by faith what God is doing.

A great deal of the Christian faith is that kind of learning how to recognize God's presence in all the unexpected places: in silence rather than noise, in weakness rather than in shows of brute force and raw power, in listening rather than in barking threats or issuing decrees, in the nail-wounds of someone on a cross rather than in the proud mockery of the ones with the hammer. But once we realize that God approaches us in utter love, we begin to see that God really is everywhere--even in places a respectable deity wouldn't be caught dead, like a borrowed grave outside Jerusalem for a couple of days one weekend. Today, then, our task is to learn (or keep learning) to see faith as more than just reciting the approved set of theological propositions, but rather as the practice of learning to see God at work, even where we least expect.

Where might God meet you today?

Lord God, give us the eyes and the vision to see you where you are reaching out to meet us.

Angels All Along--August 13, 2026

Angels All Along--August 13, 2026

At [Horeb, the mount of God,][Elijah] came to a cave and spent the night there. Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He answered, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” (1 Kings 19:9-10)

It can be a lonely job to serve as God's messenger--especially when you are questioning if you even have God at your side.

That's where Elijah is at the start of this scene from 1 Kings, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday.  Elijah is on the run, fleeing for his life, as a result of challenging the king and queen for leading the people into worshipping idols like the Canaanite god Baal.  He feels utterly alone, and with good reason.  After a showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal, the queen issued a vendetta against Elijah and essentially put a hit on him as if she were a mafia boss.  Elijah has seen the power of the palace used to kill those who were faithful to Israel's God, YHWH, and he is now afraid that he will be next.  Elijah is afraid, to be sure, but also feels like he is the only one left, as though there is no one else in his corner, since he believes that all the other faithful prophets of YHWH have been killed or secretly driven into hiding.

And all of that raises the uncomfortable question of where God is in the midst of all this.  After all, if God, YHWH, has allowed all these other faithful and true prophets to be killed, is Elijah safe?  Is God on Elijah's side, or has YHWH abandoned Elijah and left him to fend for himself?  From the prophet's standpoint, he certainly feels like he is on his own, without the support of friends and allies, and uncertain about where God is to be found.

So he goes to the one place the old stories talked about meeting God--he goes to Mount Horeb.  Horeb, in case you had forgotten this little detail, was another name for Mount Sinai, the famous summit where Moses had met God in the burning bush (back in Exodus 3) and then later where the Israelites gathered once they had been set free and received the covenant and the commandments carved in stone. In other words, it was THE quintessential meeting place for God.  If God was anywhere to be found, Elijah seems to have told himself, it should be on this mountain.  This was where that other great solitary hero of Israel's legendary past, Moses, had met God and been encouraged to take on a different king, the Pharaoh of Egypt.  This was the place known colloquially as "the mount of God." This was the place where a lonely and despondent prophet would look to find some divinely-given courage and reinforcements.

When God asks Elijah why he has come, it's not that God needs to know the answer. It's that God knows Elijah needs to say it.  He has come a long way--probably between three and four hundred miles--convinced that he needed to get to this spot on the map in order to have his face-to-face meeting with God.  Along that journey, as he got weary, God had sent angels to accompany him (and to cook pancakes for him) and helped him regain his strength to finish the trek. So God has been with Elijah all along, even when Elijah could not feel it or see it--and even when he was clearly being given divine assistance (like angelic short-order cooks) but could not recognize it.  Even when the only thing that seems real to Elijah is the persistent pain of loneliness, God has been with him all along. And yet God knows that Elijah needs to vent the hurt, to name the wound, and to pour out his aching heart--even when that takes the form of accusing God of abandoning him. The living and real God can take such accusations, and does in fact bear them, because that is what Elijah needs.

In fact, I think that's even really what this whole journey has been about:  Elijah goes all the way out to "The Mountain Where People Meet God," not because God somehow requires it, or because God is only holding office hours at Mount Horeb, but because Elijah has convinced himself that's where he needs to go in order to have his one-on-one meeting with God.  God is willing to accommodate Elijah's self-imposed need to go on this pilgrimage, because the important thing for God is to finally get through to him, since he has convinced himself he is otherwise alone and that he can only meet God on the mountain.  In other words, God meets Elijah on the mountain, not because that's the only place you can find God, but because at least at this point in the prophet's life, he has told himself that's where he'll be able to experience God's presence.

Of course, we do our own versions of this, too.  Sometimes we tell ourselves that we'll ONLY meet God if we go on a trip to some special place, whether a famous cathedral, or your old childhood hometown church, or the Holy Land, or your local congregation's Sunday service.  Or sometimes we say we'll only really have an encounter with God if we go on an "official" pilgrimage, like the famous Camino de Santiago in Spain, or to see the sights of a Bible-themed tour, or whatever else we might decide.  Other times, we insist that we've really only "met" God if we had a spiritual "high" or felt something supernatural happen.  Or maybe it's that one spot in the woods, or that place along the shore, where you like to watch sunrises or go for walks. We all have places we tell ourselves (or maybe just hint to ourselves?) are somehow closer to God, or where we have felt a connection to God before... so we go back to them like salmon swimming upstream to get to the old spawning grounds where they were born.  

And while we can certainly encounter God in any of those "special" places (or, as the old Celtic spirituality would put it, "thin places,"), the truth is that God is also already there accompanying us along the way to the Official Place to Meet God, during the whole journey.  God is not only waiting to be discovered at a Special Destination, but goes with us all along the way, even empowering us to keep going on the way, because God knows that sometimes this is what we need... or what we have told ourselves we need.  And in hindsight, we end up seeing that God was with us, sending pancake angels all along, waking us up to eat and drink, encouraging us when we need it, all so that we could finally reach the point where we would be ready to see God's presence (which has been there anyway all the time).

I don't know whether you are feeling like Elijah these days, but at some point we all do.  We will feel alone and despondent, whether because of death or divorce, a move across country, a change of careers, disappointment with church, or some other life-event that shakes us to our core.  In those times, we may well feel like even God's presence is in question. And we may find ourselves going to some place, some particular point on the map, to try and meet the God we are doubting and seeking at the same time.  When that happens, remember what Elijah discovered: the God we are looking for and hoping to meet at Point B is with us all along the way from when we first headed out from Point A.  And that God remains with us, all the while willing to take whatever accusations we can lob, even when we can't feel it or sense it.

Just ask Elijah.

Lord God, help us to know your presence here, and give to us along the way what you see that we need.

Love for the Little-faiths--August 12, 2026

Love for the Little-faiths--August 12, 2026

"When [Peter and Jesus] got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him saying, 'Truly you are the Son of God.'" (Matthew 14:32-33)

Sure, Jesus does amazing things--downright miraculous wonders that boggle our minds and transcend our understanding of the rules of the universe. And yes, it seems that at the end of this story about Jesus walking on water, his disciples conclude that this amazing feat of supernatural ability must mean Jesus is the Son of God. So, indeed, witnessing this wonder led them to conclude something about Jesus' identity; their reasoning seems to be: "Jesus has authority over the wind and waves--therefore he must be divine." But the flip-side is also true: they are learning something about what God is like.

Jesus doesn't only show power in this story--he shows love. When he stoops to rescue a doubting Peter who has begun to sink beneath the waves, he shows compassion and mercy. So this isn't just a story that "proves" Jesus is God because Jesus shows supernatural power over the sea; it's a story that reveals God's care for those who are in trouble (even if they've gotten themselves into that trouble). The "moral of the story" of Jesus' rescuing Peter while walking on water isn't just "Jesus is God because he can do powerful things," but "God is compassionate because Jesus does merciful things." Both can be true at the same time, of course, but we are so quick to equate God with being powerful when Jesus goes to great lengths to show us God's deep kindness. And that may be just what we need to be reminded of. For many of us, our default assumption is that God has power beyond our own; the thing we really struggle to believe sometimes is that God has compassion beyond our own as well.

When the disciples "worship" Jesus, they are certainly showing honor and ascribing divinity to Jesus (after all, the Number One Rule of first-century Judaism is "We don't worship anything or anyone other than God!" so if you worship Jesus, you are making claims about Jesus and God), but they are also making a claim about who God is: God is like Jesus. Jesus shows us God's care for small-faithed doubters like Peter, God's compassion for the harassed and helpless, and God's mercy toward the desperate. Bowing down to Jesus points in both directions--it says Jesus is worthy of the kind of adoration and homage that is reserved only for God, and it says that God is the sort of Person who won't leave Peter to fend for himself when he's gotten in deep water and deeper trouble. In Jesus, God shows love to the little-faiths.

Sometimes, church folk assume that faith in God is mostly about believing that God can do impossible things, when Jesus keeps revealing to us a God who is not merely powerful but merciful. It's true that the ancient creeds of the Christian faith start by professing God's infinite creative power in making the universe, but the real reason the early church spent the time hashing out those documents like the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed was to make it clear that what Jesus is like, God is like. They weren't just saying, "Jesus turns out to have all the powers of God," but also, "God has all the compassion of Jesus, all the way down to the core of God's heart."

So when it comes to a story like this one from Matthew, the takeaway for our faith isn't just "Jesus must be God because he can do things we can't," but also, "God must be like Jesus, including when he pulls little-faithed Peter out of the waves." This scene dares us to believe that God must be Someone who loves and rescues the doubter in the water, rather than Someone who condemns people for inadequate faith. It tells us as much about the heart of God as it does about the power of Jesus.

It's worth remembering that as we head out into the world today. We Christians don't simply believe that God is an all-powerful force who goes around coercing people to do the divine will and zapping people who refuse or fail. We believe that we have seen the fullness of God in Jesus, who saves Peter rather than leaving him in the water as punishment for not believing in him well enough. And believing that, we let ourselves become people who are more interested in mercy than in brute force.

In other words, if we say we believe in the God revealed in Jesus, our faith should make us more compassionate, particularly for the people who have gotten themselves into deeper trouble by their own doing and don't "measure up," rather than more critical and callous. We become like what we worship, after all, so if our faith in God doesn't make us more loving, then our faith isn't really in Jesus, but in an idol of our own making.

What difference might it make for you in this week to let Jesus be both our best understanding of God and our template for love?

Lord Jesus, help us to see the very heart of God in you.