The part I find most difficult to accept in Jesus’s teaching from Luke 6 is not the extent of the love he commands, but rather his matter-of-fact acknowledgment that his followers will have enemies.
Scripture has acquired a lethal familiarity in our political culture of scattering. Can we listen to its words differently together, so that the generous light of God’s creative Word might shine through them and gather us?
By reimagining belonging as Jesus did—focusing on relationship rather than societal status—we are called to open the doors of God’s family wide, embracing the diversity of God’s creation with love, dignity, and grace.
My hope this All Saints Sunday is that we would fully and faithfully engage in the realities of life and death, so that those who have gone before us will continue to inspire us to work towards love for those around us in the land of the living.
Divine Wisdom calls. It is publicly accessible. We may not recognize the voice because we might not be listening for it. But it is there beckoning to us.
You might be forced to accept your place in a fundamentally unfair world, but you should never take the next step to allow the values of that world to become the values that shape and give meaning and purpose to your life
Paying attention to Herod’s fears about Jesus can keep us from depoliticizing the gospel.
Pentecost experience offers a vision of surplus that allows all people to flourish because the source of meaning and purpose for each society is grounded in a God of surplus.
The unity embodied in this psalm is idealistic, imaginative, and radical, embodying fluidity. It disrupts the exclusivist notion of nationalism common in its contemporary literature and embraces unity, which is symbolized as inherently good and pleasant.
As a motif of Easter grace, the mountain is a place of new beginnings and renewal for all who seek abundant life.
Like the humble talk in the psalm, this hand-wringing fear about a loss of Christian identity in the US masks the devastating power that white Christians wield against others in this country and elsewhere. It is a rhetorical humility in the service of actual power and dominance.
Yet this “good news” – profoundly strange, even apparently morbid – promises that, in relinquishing our supereminent concern for the self, pursuing instead the way of peace and justice, we become so free that even a violent end may be an expression of an ultimately joyful reception of the gift of life – that is, it may be the way to save a life.