God’s love nullifies every hierarchy based on ancestry and ethnicity, since birth does not determine status in the eyes of God. With equal measure it rejects the idea that some are above accountability and some do not deserve justice.
Even with mounting evil and manipulative tactics to conceal evil, Lent reminds us that in order to fight death, our weapons must be truth and justice.
Psalm 2 presents the ways in which the powerful paint themselves as simultaneous victor and victim–and, more hopefully, it depicts a God who interrupts these fictions.
Decolonising Christian proclamation, therefore, is measured not by the charisma of the preacher or the spectacle of performance, but by its fidelity to the incarnational logic of God’s self-giving and its capacity to engender liberative transformation in lived contexts.
As a corrective to their corruption and total misconception of God’s character, Micah puts forth the disposition God requires – the triad to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.
This Third Sunday of Epiphany is a celebration of light breaking into darkness, but as I write, my friends and neighbors are reeling from the death of a legal observer—shot and killed by a federal agent blocks from my home.
Eventually, we all need others, leaving cooperation, humility, and patience the only lasting realities of human access to power. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that power can abandon any of us, at any moment – even and especially on a debate stage, in full view of the entire planet. We all forget this lesson at our peril.
Jesus’ call to a ‘let-it-be righteousness,’ awash in basileia imperatives, upends despotic designs. Resistant to rule-following, a let-it-be righteousness confounds and dismantles the 3 P’s of oppressive regimes: propriety, purity, and piety.
The joy of Christmas is always mixed up with the grief of the world’s suffering. One need only look today at the very town the magi came to visit.
Whose job is it to praise God? Does praise require language or agency? Psalm 148 answers these questions in surprising ways, relativizing human uniqueness and inviting its readers to view themselves as part and parcel of the larger cosmic community of praise.
What happens when kings and rulers are confronted by a child whose very presence boldly proclaims that God is with us? Sometimes children have an astounding ability to disrupt the status quo. They resist passivity and compliance, they dream boldly and they demand justice. Who are our Immanuels today? And what do we do when we encounter them?
Kingship is an irredeemably hierarchical, patriarchal form of rule, right? Maybe not, says Psalm 146—if the king is God.