The Painted Door Church - Chicago: Recent Episodes

The Painted Door Church

The Painted Door Church is church family that gathers in Chicago, IL. We are a people who share the same story; we are sinner, saved by grace. We draw our name from the Exodus account in the Hebrew Scriptures, when God spared his people from judgement, passing over all homes that had the blood of a spotless lamb painted across their doorways. Jesus is the new spotless lamb, his death on a Roman cross sparing the people of God from judgment once for all. He reconnects us to our Maker and to each other and invites us to participate in his grand work of restoring all things.

Ash Wednesday Service - The Final Gathering of The Painted Door Church

At the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, God began to openly reveal the true identity of his Son. He spoke to John the Baptist of who this man Jesus of Nazareth truly was. And John testified of his identity: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” What a strange unveiling! The long awaited Messiah, the Savior of God’s people, announced as a lamb. Jesus was a lamb. This is a very different kind of savior. In this world, we are caught in our grasping for control, our quests for vinication, our struggles for power. And we look for salvation in strength. Who is fierce enough to come to our aid, to conquer? But God sends a lamb. Because God knows the salvation we long for is not the one we need. He did not come to teach us to roar like lions. He came to teach us to die like lambs. He came to make us into who we truly are.

We were made to be approved. When God first formed humanity from the dust, he pronounced us very good. And in that pronouncement, we have life. But our first parents, and all of us after them, have stepped away from God’s free approval to go in search of something we might earn, something that might differentiate us from the rest of our dust-born clan, something that would elevate us to the place of the approving one. We have tried to be God and approve ourselves. And from this vapid quest flows all that is dark in our world: malice, deceit, pride. We scratch and claw for the power we need to make something of ourselves, to prove that we are more worthy than our neighbor. But then a man from Galilee came to the Jordan River and was baptized there. And the Spirit of God descended and came to rest on Him like a dove. And a voice from heaven spoke again with the approval that is our life: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Jesus came into the world to bring these words to our ears. Not to lord his divine approval over us, but to invite each of us to live in it with him.

Epiphany is the day in the historic Christian Church Calendar when we celebrate the manifestation of God as man on earth. Jesus is God-in-the-flesh and so was the first real “jar of clay” containing the inestimable treasure of Divine Life. Paul’s cruciform lifestyle was patterned directly after his Master’s, and while unattractive and unrecognizable to unspiritual eyes, the Cruciform Glory of the Indwelling Christ shines brilliantly through the many cracks in the apostle’s “jar of clay.” That same indwelling Christ will hold our cracked earthen vessels together, comfort us, and get us through, as we, like Paul, follow the Way of the Cross, through Death, into Resurrection and Eternal Life and Bliss with Jesus.

The Apostle Peter knew what it was to betray Jesus. He denied the Lord three times in an attempt to save himself from the agony of the cross. But after Jesus died and rose, Peter was filled an other-wordly courage. For he saw not only that Jesus is the Christ, but also that he is the sort of Christ who rules all things. He saw that he is Lord even over the grave. And what fear can remain in service to a Lord such as this? What resistance would keep us from following him? Only the blind folly of calling ourselves lords and seeking our own salvation as if we were Christ.

The Apostle Peter calls the readers of his second letter “beloved.” This word, which occurs four times, is in New Testament Greek, agapetos. It denotes Divine Love, characteristic of the indwelling Christ and that is experienced in genuine Christian community. It is out of this other-centered love that Peter warns his readers against the error of “lawless people”--error that can be overt or subtle. In order to avoid the faith disruption and instability that following error brings, Peter urges his flock, instead, to dwell and rest in the grace and knowledge of the one, true Antidote to error’s poison--the Lord Jesus Christ. Knowing Jesus brings his followers a durable, otherworldly stability which shall have no end.

In waiting for Jesus to return, we are waiting for a new heavens and a new earth. But we are not only waiting. We are also receiving manifestations of that new creation right now. In fact, we are becoming manifestations of it. The Apostle Peter calls us to be diligent in becoming people without spot or blemish and at peace. In other words, be diligent to let the new creation manifest in us. The reason Jesus has not returned, the reason people are left in this place to live these lives, is for the very purpose of becoming new creation ready. God is patiently waiting for us to receive his new life, to grow up into all that he made us to be, to let all the false things fall away. He is waiting for us to be people who can run with him. And his patience is for our salvation.

In our present age, all people are infected with an insatiable desire to be right and feel wronged. And so we labor to prove that our way of life is right and that we are victims of those whose way is wrong. We believe that if we succeed in proving this to the world, to our communities, to ourselves, then we will be at peace. But our efforts are misdirected. Because proving our own righteousness is a fool’s errand. We have no righteousness in us. Jesus told us, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Where will this satisfaction come from? What is the true longing of our hearts? It is for righteousness to reign. For the heavens and the earth and every force of the air and every creature of the dust to bow before it. We were not made to rest in the rightness of ourselves or to be consumed with solving our wrongness. We were made to rest in the righteousness of God. To bow before him. To live in his kingdom, under the reign of his Son, where righteousness dwells. This is the true and deepest longing of every human heart. It is our great hope. And it will be our eternal delight.

The scriptures speak of the return of Christ in harrowing terms. He is said to be coming like a thief, like one who will steal our most precious possessions without warning. Indeed, the promise of Christ’s return is a promise that God will finally consume all those things that grab our affections and keep our hearts from him. He will rid the world of the chains that bind us, even if we love those chains. But we need not wait for Christ’s return to begin this liberation. In fact, Christ is waiting to return to give us every chance to develop an appetite for liberation. He is waiting for people to embrace his liberation in a way that will make us embrace his second coming. We were made to live in the love of God. It is our attachment to self-protection that keeps us from receiving that love. But he is waiting, knocking, promising to return. And he bids us to let go, to be exposed, to surrender to his love.

The first century church was not so different from the church of our time. As it was then, so too now, the desire to hold onto sin is what compels people to scoff at the doctrines of God. First century scoffers denied that Jesus would come back to the earth, so that they could live according to whatever passions they desired. Similarly, in our day, we can easily neglect consideration of the second coming in order to hold onto our visions of the good life. We want to pursue our dreams, fill up our experiences, and make something of ourselves. But we forget Christ’s return at our own peril. He is coming back. And he is coming to burn up everything false. He is coming to expose our lies, to rid the world of our ruinous ways. We can enter this fire now through the gift of repentance, receiving God’s fiery rescue from folly. Or we can go on stacking lies like kindling for the fiery rescue to come. The only thing that will not burn is the life of Jesus. Thanks be to God that his life is ours to live.

When the body senses that some harmful element has entered it, an involuntary retching takes place. And the toxin is expelled. This physiological reality mirrors a spiritual one. When people learn of Christ and see something of his value, they begin to vomit out those toxic thoughts and behaviors that poisoned their souls. But the Apostle Peter warns that false teachers are those who return to their vomit and then lure others to join them there. False teachers are those who look back longingly at the ruin of life without Christ. And then turn back to revel in their vomit again. Peter warns Christians to be on guard for these kind of teachers. For they will entice with promises of freedom, when in truth all they offer is slavery. We must not presume that knowing about Christ, being in church, and reforming our behavior will keep us from danger. We must also be ever vigilant to consider whether we’ve left any vomit easily within reach.

The Apostle Peter writes the letter we know as 2 Peter to root Christians in their faith, to warn them against dangers that would lead them astray. False teachers loom large among those dangers. And so Peter seeks to expose their motivations and practices. He tells us they are waterless springs. That is, they teach in a way that appears to offer refreshment, but winds up leaving their hearers dry. They do not offer the living water that flows from the Spirit of Christ. They cannot offer it, because they have not received it. And they have not received it, because they have not received Him. The living water of Christ is for those who receive Jesus as he is and tremble before their king. False teachers do not tremble. With irreverence and cavalier arrogance, they entice thirsty souls to follow them into ruin. Adultery. Greed. Blasphemy. Yet God would steady our souls to ignore these empty wells. He would fill us with living water that we would have no thirst to quench.

The prophets of God who pointed to the coming of Christ were not speculating. They were inspired by the Spirit to see and speak the truth. By contrast, false prophets trade exclusively in speculation. They reject authority and so do not yield to the inspiration of Scripture, the Lordship of Christ, nor the conviction of the Spirit. Their only authority is their own desires. The Apostle Peter warns the church that such false teachers will deceive many people. How? By appealing to unrestricted sensuality. Every human person has sensual desires that are good when pursued in submission to God’s wisdom. Yet subjecting our sensuality to God’s law is costly in the short term. We must give up some of our strongest passions. False teachers prey on this costliness. Reject authority, they tell us. Listen to the authority of your own mind, your own body, and you can have whatever you desire. These are the great deceptions of every age: to malign the authority God places in our lives and chase after our every whim. These deceptions are always a package deal. And their end is destruction.

God made us to participate in his life with him. But we chose to go searching for life on our own. We found none. Nevertheless, God didn’t leave us wandering in death. He sent his Son into that death to rescue us from it. Jesus lived a human life the way his Father always intended, in full communion with the divine. In so doing, Jesus brought the pleasure of his Father to the human race. The Father had always been pleased with the Son. Now, that pleasure fell on human shoulders. In his letter to all Christians, the Apostle Peter charges people of faith to make every effort to walk in the life Jesus gives us. Why? So that we would live in the pleasure of the Father. Peter saw firsthand how pleased the Father is with Jesus. And all God’s prophets share the same testimony as revealed to them by the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the beloved one. To live anywhere outside of him is to spend your days forfeiting the most precious gift of all -- the pleasure of the Father.

To know Jesus is to experience his transforming power. He rescues us from our slavery to self-reliance and invites us into the mystery of life in God. In knowing him, we become fully alive, partakers of the divine nature. So then, what better endeavor to give our every effort to than walking out this new reality? The Apostle Peter invites us to make every effort to supplement our faith with virtue and knowledge and self-control and steadfastness and godliness and brotherly affection and love. He invites us to pursue the fullness of what Christ’s power has purchased for us. Anyone who does not pursue these qualities forfeits what is ours in Christ. But those who do step into the very purpose of our being: to be filled with the very will of God. We were made to live in this way. And when we do, all of our despair and half-heartedness is swallowed up in the lavish satisfaction of pure love.

We are all born into corruption, full of disordered desire. But God made us for something far sweeter. He made us to desire what is pure and true and beautiful. He made us for life to the full. So how is it that we are to move from the effects of corruption, our own and that around us, into the riches of what God gives? The answer is not complex, but it is painful: God means to replace our nature with the nature of Christ. That is, he means to slaughter our sinful person, and raise the person of Christ within us. He means to kill everything false about us until we become partakers of the divine nature. This is the only way into life. And there are no half measures.

Peter rebuked Jesus for prophesying of the cross. He drew his sword and sought to keep Jesus from the cross by way of violence. Finally, he abandoned and denied Jesus when the cross became inevitable. At every turn, Peter resisted the march of Jesus to the cross. He didn’t want Jesus to go, because he himself was unwilling to go. Peter wanted to follow his Lord to victory, not death. But Jesus was undeterred, both in his mission to face the cross and in his love for Peter. After the resurrection, Peter had nothing to prove his devotion to Christ. He was empty-handed, stripped bare of any pretense that he was a loyal disciple. And there in that wretched place, Peter still heard the same invitation his Lord had always given: “Do you love me?” Though all the evidence of Peter’s life shouted of his failure to love Christ, Jesus simply asked again. And again. And again. This is the question that the one who loves us will never stop asking. Because no matter our failures his love and invitation never fails.

To become a Christian is to become a body part of Jesus. All people who put their faith in Christ become hands and feet and ears and eyes of his spiritual body. That means that everything happening in our lives is also happening in the life of Christ. And in the lives of one another. We are all connected. So we suffer together and rejoice together. And we need each other. Hands have no purpose if they are disconnected from arms. They are lifeless and without strength. But when each part is connected to the whole, the body begins to function beautifully and full life is known. We were made to live this way, to be connected to each other, to share one Spirit and one body.

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? What does it profit a woman to have reputation and family and health and forfeit her very purpose of being? What does it profit anyone to gain anything if they do not gain Christ? Riches, relationships, success, vitality, they are all nothing compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. We were made to know this Christ. And to be known by him. Everything in this world is only here so that we would know Christ. Everything we are is designed for union with him, to be married to him, to love him, to be loved by him. He is every treasure you have ever chased. He is the only light you have ever needed. He is always worth losing everything for. Because he is more worthy than all things combined. He is what you long for. He is life itself. And we belong to him.

At times some may diminish the life and passion (suffering) of Christ in light of emphasizing his death. Christ did, indeed, die on our behalf, and that allows us to proclaim with joy that he has redeemed and reconciled us. But what we often forget is that he reconciled and redeemed by suffering with us. His mutual suffering with broken humankind is the way in which he healed us. His compassion, his taking on a suffering that was not his own, gave us life and healing, and it tells us something about what it means for us to live in compassion towards each other.

God has promised that he will meet every confession of sin with forgiveness and cleansing. But how do we know when we have truly confessed? Is a verbal acknowledgement of sin always a confession? Hardly. True confession proves itself only in obedience. Because true confession is change in allegiance, a turning from some false master to the true master of our souls. To confess truly is to step into the hands of Christ, to obtain his mercy, to be filled with his light, and to walk in his ways. A person who claims to have confessed and yet persists in disobedience has neither confessed not received mercy. The forgiveness of God always bears the fruit of obedience. Our obedience never earns forgiveness but always follows it.

God has dealt with sin. He has gutted its power to separate humanity from him. Therefore, all people can be reconciled to God and experience the peace of communion with him. That true peace is very different than the false peace that comes from pretending we never needed reconciliation. Yet only those who have experienced reconciliation know the difference. Christian, you are a witness to a kind of peace the world does not know but desperately needs. So do not trade in false peace. Do not seek to appease those who reject the commands of God or undermine the authority of his word. On the contrary, offer reconciliation. Be ministers of grace. Not lies.

Becoming a whole person is not an individual project. Nor is it a team project. It is a relational project. We become whole in relationship, because perfect relationship is wholeness. And what is perfect relationship? It is knowing God and one another even as we are fully known. Often in Christian community, we share the best of ourselves. We let others see our light. This allows for some relationship. But we are then confused as to why our sense of loneliness and isolation remains. The reason is unwillingness to share the worst of ourselves, to let others see our darkness. So we go on half-known, half healed. It is good for the light in us to be affirmed. But it is even more important for the darkness in us to be crucified. And it has been crucified. Now if only we would begin the funeral proceedings.

Relationships define us. We only exist to the extent that we are known. Thanks be to God that he knows us fully. Our life and being, therefore, is secure in his knowledge of us. Yet for us to taste all of that life and being, for us to step into its fullness, we must know God. And he invites us to know him through worship. Worship is the means by which a human person moves toward fullness. In worship, we receive revelation of who God is, we glimpse his glory, we see true life and love. In worship, we envision what we were made for and where we are going. Worship takes our eyes off our present condition and sets our gaze on a new way of being. Worship is imagining that the heavens have come to earth. And the more we imagine it, the more we realize that indeed they have. We can taste full life and being now -- if only we would stop worshiping ourselves.

So many young people throughout our great city are given little opportunity to discover Chicago’s greatness. Overlooked, ignored, abandoned, many have no one who will show them care; no one who will listen when life becomes overwhelming; no one who will encourage, embrace, love. But God has not forgotten these precious children. He has sent his church to show them his love. The only question is whether his church will obey him.

God made all things by speaking them into existence. Yet when he set out to make persons, ones stamped in his own image, his voice only began the story. God formed humanity from the dust and then began to mold us into the fullness of life. He introduced drama and choice and conflict. And when we wandered into death, he introduced curse and pain and promise. In all these things, God invited his image bearers to step toward fullness, to realize the true capacity that he had planted in humanity. And finally, one man did.

We often think of ourselves as individuals, separate entities with individuated definition who then interact with one another in meaningful ways. Yet both the book of nature and the book of Scripture indicate otherwise. The more our scientists study the functions of the natural order, the more they discover how all things are contingent, how everything is interwoven, interdependent, interrelated. Scripture, likewise, testifies that in Christ all things hold together. The whole of the universe is a complex web of relationships. Nothing exists on its own. And why would we expect any different, given that the God of this universe is himself a web of relationships? He is Trinity, three in one. His world echoes this reality, nowhere more than among those who bear his image. Our very being, our personhood, is bound up in relationships. We are relationships. Therefore, when we reject or misuse relationship with God or others, our personhood is malformed, even lost. But in embracing relationship with God and others, we discover the path to fullness of personhood, even sharing in the divine life.

To be a person of Christian faith is to set your identity at the right hand of God. Everything Christians are is hidden in Christ, who is seated in the heavens. Therefore, we cannot go searching for ourselves according to the wisdom of this age. We cannot define ourselves according to the standards and measures of this broken world. We must enter a different world and see in an entirely different way. The scriptures testify of that different world and way. They are records of how people of faith have lived in the kingdom of God, receiving wisdom and counsel from God, being defined and directed by God. The scriptures are a window into the truer world that faith opens to us. When we look into the stories and songs and prophecies contained there, we are peering into the world God invites us to live in. We are learning the shape and texture of the divine kingdom. We are witnessing the reign of Christ. Apart from such study, our imaginations run dry and vision of the kingdom grows dim. But in returning to the word, faith is reignited. And we imagine the truth again.

When life presents us with great moments of decision, we often then look for some guidance beyond our shores, some transcendent wisdom, even the voice of God. Trouble is, hearing God’s voice is unlike hearing any other counsel. His voice speaks only to ears of faith. When we have practiced so long and so hard to hear only with natural ears, to run every bit of counsel through the sieve of natural reason, our ability to hear in faith grows faint. The sound of God’s voice and the absurdity of God’s wisdom cannot simply be accepted on a whim. We must practice to hear. We must learn his register. Like sheep who develop fine attunement to the voice of their shepherd through much time in his presence, we too must attune ourselves. As we listen day by day, as we follow him in all things, we prepare to hear his counsel in our greatest moments of decision.

All of creation is a celebration. The trees wave their arms. The rivers rush to gather. The foxes run. The bees dance. The birds sing. It is as it should be, a festival in honor of the Creator, borne of his beauty. A spectacle of color and sound and divine flourish. Yet, there is a greater celebration still, one where light shines even brighter. It is the celebration of lost and found. For as much as the Maker of all things delights in the splendor of his worlds, he delights far more when the sorrow of broken things comes untrue. At his heart, God is more than a creator. He is a redeemer. And our stories of redemption are his glory.

Finances fail. Relationships sour. Our bodies sag. This life is a whirlwind of trials and glories, and the noise of it all is unceasing. And so we withdraw. We find places to take shelter and hide. We pour ourselves a drink and unlock the screen and checkout for a moment or two. And that is not evil. But the breaks we take from life’s swirl are just that -- breaks. When break time is over and we return to the story, nothing has changed, least of all our perspective. Jesus lived in this whirlwind, too. And, like us, he took breaks. The scriptures record that he often withdrew to quiet places away from the noise. Yet his times away effected change, not of circumstance but of perspective. When Jesus withdrew, it was not to escape his life but to practice being more present in it. In his solitude, Jesus sought the heart of his Father. How do you see all of this? How do you see me? Jesus learned to look at his story with his Father’s eyes. He learned faith, that is, the imagination to see what only God can see. That we have nothing to fear. That a gracious king ever reigns. And that even death cannot destroy us.

It is so easy and so natural for us to believe that control is the source of the greatest joy. If I have power to direct my own life, if I can order my days, if my resources expand to provide limitless choices, then I can have what I want and experience joy. Jesus said and lived the opposite. He told the religious leaders of his day that he did nothing of his accord, but entirely submitted himself to the will and mission of his Father. Even when that will and mission led him into pain, even when he longed for another way, he yielded. And his call to us is to follow him in this way of life, to obey what God has revealed, to submit to divine pruning. Why? “That your joy may be full.” Learning obedience to God is the pathway into deep intimacy with him and each other. It is the pathway into the full and joy-filled life we were made for.

A local church is a communal expression of a dynamic body. So then just as a single person’s body is never static, a church likewise is always changing. Whether that change is toward greater maturity or greater folly hinges on how much the members of the church body are receiving the gifts of God. Christ ascended into the heavenly realm in order that he might be present in all things by his Spirit. He ascended in order that his gifts might be received by his all flesh. This is why the church is filled with all kinds of teachers and evangelists and prophets. Not so that a select few can take hold of the gifts of Christ, but so that those who have can equip all to take hold of these gifts. The church cannot mature into the fullness of Christ until all its members learn to receive and minister his gifts. We were all made to support each other. And every person has a vital and meaningful role to play.

God is the only source of life, and an abundant, overflowing source at that. So when we spend our days unaware of him, we forget just how much life we have. We begin to count the hours and preserve our energy and guard our possessions. We mistake these gifts of life for its source. And we then conclude that life is in short supply. The hours will run out. The energy will fade. The possessions will age and need replacement. We fall into the trap of racing death, feverishly collecting and hoarding as many memories and satisfactions as we can before the sun sets and life escapes us. But the Christ invites us back to reality. Jesus came into the world and spent himself with abandon, because he knew life was not in short supply. He didn’t race death, but rather allowed it to overtake him in full confidence that it would pass by and give way to life again. And when he ascended, Jesus poured out all that is in him that he might fill all things with that same unyielding stream of life. By faith, we are filled. By faith, we have endless gifts to share.

Throughout the scriptures the practice of fasting is commended to God’s people. Why? What is the purpose of abstaining from food or drink or some other good thing? Often, we think of fasting as a discipline for the mature, some mysterious conjuring of divine presence for those who are deeply spiritual. But, in truth, fasting is not a tool for increasing divine presence, but rather one for revealing His presence with us all the while. It is not reserved for those who want more of God, but instead offered to anyone who would discover that all of God is all of ours. He has poured out his Spirit on all flesh. He has lavished us with himself. Fasting is the removal of lesser comforts so that we might discover the ever-present eternal Comforter.

It seems God enjoys meeting us in our food. Time and time again God has offered spiritual food to His people. The Lord’s Supper belongs to a shared family energy that unite all believers, not just all believers now, but all believers on both sides of the Cross, Old Testament and New Testament. Continually flowing from the Cross onto the Church, the sacraments are bursting with energy for our conformity to Christ. All the other sacraments and spiritual disciplines build up to the Lord’s Supper. It is the pinnacle of the spiritual life this side of heaven. It completes the ritual of faith and repentance. So take Christ however He comes to you. Desire Him more than you fear the consequences of your actions. In rebuke, He is your Savior. In gentleness, He is your Savior. In life, in death, He is your Savior.

In Christ’s history, He saved us. In our history, He heals us. We have been received by God, so we now begin receiving from God, from the inside out. From the center of our souls, Christ makes His first move for healing through the gift of faith. Faith is a gift and faith is a healing. Faith is the beginning of a lifetime, an eternity, of healing from Christ, freely given to us. Healing for free, but not healing for whatever idea of freedom we might have in our heads. Healing in this life, and the next, means conformity to Christ. Conformity to both the glory of Christ and the suffering of Christ. In faith, we step into the glory, but our next step is into suffering. That suffering is a lifetime of repentance. With faith comes repentance, with repentance comes confession, confession that happens in community. We are not just given experience in relationship with Jesus, we are also given Christ’s very own experience. So that repentance feels the way Christ felt under the burden of our sin. We join Him in the suffering of repentance and confession together, because we are alive together with His resurrection life.

Over our church’s nine-year history, we have witnessed God baptize many individual people. We have watched with joy as these lovely souls were dunked under the water and so buried with Christ, only then to be lifted up in the glory of resurrection. This is what God does. He saves people from the death upon death of ourselves into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And baptism is his sign and seal of that salvation. But what of whole congregations? Can God baptize an entire church? And if so, what might that look like? In the story of the Exodus, God led the Israelite people out of slavery in Egypt and into safety from the Egyptian army by passing them through the Red Sea. The Apostle Paul writes that in this miraculous rescue Israel was “baptized into Moses.” Yet, Paul says, God was not pleased with the people of Israel, because they walked straight from their baptism into idolatry. Our church has undergone a community-wide baptism of sorts over the past several years. We’ve gone underwater. We’ve known the swirling darkness of chaos and sorrow. And now we are here, Easter Sunday, having emerged from those waters. New life is before us. Will we walk into it? Or will we choose idolatry? Israel was baptized into Moses, a prophet of God’s law. We have been baptized into Jesus, a gracious Lord. Let’s follow him.

**Please Note: the recording begins a few moments into the sermon.

The prophet Isaiah proclaims that by the wounds of Christ, God’s people are healed. Does he mean that because Jesus was wounded, we won’t be? Does he mean that the suffering of Christ somehow spares us from any suffering? Certainly not. The Apostles read and interpreted Isaiah for us. Peter quotes this very promise amid his letter on suffering. He tells Christians that they have been called to follow in the footsteps of Christ’s suffering. That Christians should expect to suffer more than others, not less. So in what sense, then, do the wounds of Jesus heal us? Peter writes: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” Jesus forged the way out of sin’s grip by facing all of sin’s sorrow and pain. And he now says to us, “Follow me.” He invites us to walk out of sin’ grip by facing all of sin’s sorrow and pain with him. In Christ, every wound is a source of healing.

When Jesus began his ministry, he went about healing people of their bodily afflictions and emotional burdens. Yet as his ministry neared its end, as he set his face toward Jerusalem, he began to offer a very different sort of healing: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.” With these words, Jesus made it clear to his followers that in all of his preceding miracles he was providing healing for the cross. He healed people so that they might follow him to Calvary. And now, in the second act of his ministry, he meant to heal people through Calvary. First, he healed for the cross. Now, he would heal by the cross. First, he made people whole. Now, he invited them to be wholly poured out. The crowds on Palm Sunday celebrated Christ’s first act of healing, but they balked as the second act became clear. Who will we follow? The crowd or the Christ?

Everything is grace. You can run. You can hide. You can fight. Sin it up day and night. Christ will have the last word. Whatever you throw at Him, He can take it. His mercy knows no end. Your pain cannot surpass His healing power. Christian, Christ has always been with you. In death. In life. Nothing can stop Christ from saving you. Everything is grace.

In this broken world, to lose ones we love is a guarantee. Sooner or later, we will all know the deep pain of loss. Yet there is something else to know amid loss, something surprising and even sweet. Loss is where love lives. That’s why the scars in the hands and feet of our Lord Jesus are eternal. He was crucified before the foundation of the world, the scriptures tell us. He has always borne those scars, and he always will. Because hidden within them is not only the great loss of Christ’s death but also the great love of God. God’s love lives in the scars of Christ. And in our every loss, he invites us into those scars. He invites us into his love.

When Jesus calls people to follow him, he calls them to begin walking out of whatever broken family story they have been living in to that point. Every one of us receives some story-formed brokenness from our birth family’s dynamics. For some, it is the experience of being neglected or abused. For others, it may be the weight of expectation or the withholding of affection. For James and John, it was a lust for power. The sons of Zebedee were born to a man who ran things, a man who had strived to climb above his peers. And their mother had similar plans for the boys. “Tell me they will sit at your right hand and your left,” she demanded of Jesus. But Jesus was calling James and John into a very different kind of story. He meant to heal them of their family’s lust for power. And his means of healing would be a cross. “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?” he asked them. In calling us to walk out of our broken family stories, Jesus first heals us for the cross. And then heals us by it.

If you have called on the name of the Lord, you have been rescued. If you have called on the name of the Lord, you have been forgiven. If you have called on the name of the Lord, you are loved! These are statements that cannot be be received simply through teaching; they must be believed. They must be received in faith. The fight of faith is a fight to surrender our lives to the God of all comfort. We have not been forsaken. He has made His home among us!

A conversation with Renewal church discussing how believers can faithfully engage with the issue.

Lent is a time for giving up some luxury that we find has obscured our vision of God. A luxury, by definition, is something that we don’t need. Sugar, social media, and television would all qualify. But there are some luxuries that masquerade as needs so well that we may never even notice them. Despair is one such luxury. The Christian mystic Thomas Merton calls is a “rotten luxury.” Indeed all luxuries that obscure our vision of God are rotten. Yet despair is particularly so. Because in our despair, we bask in the false glory that our view of things is ultimate. Despair depends on us believing that we can see the whole picture, that our calculation that there is no way out is absolutely dependable. This is the hubris of pride, the stroking of ego. And the only way out is through the courage of humility that comes by faith. I may not see a way through, but there is an author to this story who is far more creative than I could ever imagine.

Pastor Confessor shares and leads us into the beginning of the Lenten Season.

Refugees are left homeless. Religious minorities are persecuted. Women are assaulted. Men are lost. Children are abandoned. Marriages wither. Families implode. Too many are lonely, afraid, unseen, unloved. But this story is not yet over. Stories are lovely arcs of meaning when read from above. That’s why we obsess over them, why we read novels and binge television. Yet that loveliness is much harder to see from inside the story. And we are all inside this present story. We’re somewhere in the middle, still too far from the end to see the whole. That’s what makes our pain so painful. What is the purpose? Where is it all heading? Through his servant James, God tells us, “Be patient; endure.” And he gives us good reason: Harvest only comes at the end of the season.

Anger is the first reaction to injustice for all who care, especially God. God cares for his creation more than anyone. And so he is more angry at injustice than anyone. In the opening passages of chapter 5, James takes on the persona of an Old Testament prophet, embodying the hot fury of God against oppression. To witness this anger of God is unnerving. But it also should comfort us. God sees the injustice of this world. And he cares more than we do. Yet, God has very different plans for his anger than we do for our own. So he invites us to care about injustice as much as he does, yes. And he invites us to express anger over it, yes. Then, the invitation turns: “Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord.”

What do you know? Very little. And all the knowledge we call our own, is not our own, but it’s hard to let it go. To know is to control, right? To know is to stay in control of our wants and needs. Keep telling yourself that. Fear is a powerful drug. Fantasy is a powerful drug. Narcissism is a powerful drug. Who can let go of lovers like these? No one can. Yet no matter how faithful you are, these lovers will betray and abandon you. Take heart, there is a knowing that is real and forever. Knowing the love and friendship of Jesus Christ. Know nothing but Christ. Everything else will leave you in eternal darkness. Christ will bring you into eternal light.

God gave us his law, because we were lost in our own visions of right and wrong. He gave it to show us true righteousness, his righteousness. But rather than obey his law, we have wielded it as a weapon against each other. We have used it to condemn our neighbor. What a dead end this is! When the law is wielded to condemn, it condemns us all. This is why James tells us that there is only one judge capable of handling the law and that is the lawgiver himself. He alone uses the law not to condemn but to reveal. In the hands of God, the law shows us our brokenness and points us toward a new way of life. In the hands of God, the law is not a weapon but a scalpel. For he is the judge who saves.

Annual State of the Communion

Very few people know what they want. Yet what we want is always leading us. We are slaves to our desires. So then looking at our lives, how we spend our time, our money, our energy, gives us a glimpse into those desires. And often, the picture is not a pretty one. We tend to spend our time, our money, and our energy on self-promotion, self-satisfaction, self-protection. Turns out, what most of us want is just to feel pleasure and avoid pain. But there is something deeper in us. We were not made for such shallow living as to obsess over our personal little kingdoms. We were made to be swept up into a story far grander, into desires far richer. We were made for the adventure of love -- with all its pains and hardships. So how then do we loosen our grip on our shallow wants and dive deep into the epic of love? Simply: We receive it. God’s story of love is always knocking on the door of our little castles. He is always pouring out his love, in every relationship, in every circumstance. Look there, in that broken friendship, in that thankless job, in that ride on the bus, the epic of love is calling you. Go, run, leap into the life of God, This is what you were made for.

Every Christian can mature in Christ to a place where they are able to teach and lead others in the faith. But that process of maturation does not happen overnight. The signs of maturity emerge over time as the Christian receives all that Christ is. Chief among these signs, according to James, is the work to make peace. Those who harbor bitterness or are quick to compare status lack the wisdom that comes from the heavens. More maturation is needed in order that they might come to know the things that make for peace -- gentleness, openness, mercy, impartiality, sincerity. Wisdom is not a series of mastered ideas. It is the way of being Christ in the world. And the journey into his way often follows the path of pain.

Never in the history of humanity have more people had more opportunity to speak more words to more ears. Everyone can say anything to the whole world. Is it any wonder then that we find ourselves so routinely offended, so regularly outraged? Words have power. And when they are set loose to fly without regard to where they might land, they often crash and destroy. What then? Must we lay our hands over our mouths? No, there is no safety in silence either. Words must be spoken. But for the people of God, our words cannot be simply our own. They must be the words of God spoken through our particular personalities and vocabularies. And for the words of God to dwell in us, the heart and mind of God must fill us. We can only offer those divine words that we have received, digested, and lived on. That is why we gather around the table of Jesus. Not merely to nourish ourselves. But to become nourishment for the world.

Who will disciple you in 2019? That question matters far more than any goal you might set for the year. And to answer that question, first look back at the year just passed: Who discipled you in 2018? Was it yourself? Was it the fashions of our time? Was it some political or cultural or social leader? Identifying who or what has led you to where you are now provides a starting point for the journey ahead. In the ancient near east, a group of wise men began their journey from somewhere east of Jerusalem. They followed a star to Bethlehem, found the Christ child there, and worshiped him. We are in need of a similar pilgrimage, from wherever we are now toward closer presence with Jesus. Do you know the way? Have you studied the skies? Have you heard the prophets?

The Christ child that was born to us is God with us, clothed in infant’s weakness. The Creator and Savior of worlds, Jesus Christ Himself, held in the arms of Mary and Joseph. Christmas is the end of Advent, the end of our waiting for God to appear, and a time for celebration. But there is still plenty of waiting in this story of Christ, because it is not yet finished. The Christ-child has come, but there is a mission before Him that He has only just begun. The incarnation of Christ is the beginning of His humiliation, a life time of sorrow, where only wounds can heal. Where the sin of the world is met with the pain of Christ. Pain that opens the flesh of God to us, healing us from our sin. So there is a perfect and full human life needing to be lived by Him. There is a suffering and broken human life needing to be lived by Him. There is a healing and restoring human life needing to be lived by Him. And when Christ has lived all those lives, when He is perfect, He is broken on the Cross for all of us. His life in place of all our lives. This infant is headed that way. Come and let us adore Him.

Jesus loved his Father in heaven. But his love of God was not was not self-generated. It was reciprocal. In other words, Jesus loved the Father with the same love he received as a Son. We can only love God with the love he pours out on us. In John’s Gospel, we are compared to the branches of a vine. All of our life, all of our fruit, all that is good in us only comes from the vine. Jesus is the vine and God the Father is the attentive vine dresser. He pours out his love on Jesus, who then bears fruit and reaches upward in a response of love. Our only hope for knowing love, for receiving love, for giving love is bound up in abiding in that vine. We are invited to participate not only in the way Jesus loved his Father but also in the way the Father loves his Son. We are hidden in the Son. We are God’s beloved.

God’s love is strange. The more we fight him, the more his heart breaks for us. The more we make him an enemy, the more he moves tenderly toward us. He simply will not accept our declarations of war as the final word. In fact, he will stop at nothing to convince us to lay down our arms. Even if it requires letting us slaughter him. Anything for the rage to pass, and an opportunity for open-hearted relationship to begin. That’s why the Father sent his Son into the world, to take all of our hostility into his body and bury it in the ground. He came so that our warring with God could cease, and we could just say to our Father what we’ve been hiding all along: “Our hearts are sick. None of our home remedies have worked. There seems to be no cure. Will you heal us?”

Jesus was born into a Jewish family, a descendent of the great Jewish king David. God had long promised to restore the throne of David, to send a successor who would reign over the Jewish people in the love of God. Jesus was that promised king. Yet his own people rejected him. Familiarity tends to breed contempt. And a prophet receives no honor is his hometown and in his household. Jesus was sent into the world as God’s greatest act of love toward his chosen people. But how could he love a family that would not receive him? What good is love if it is unwanted? The answer to that question lies hidden in the very heart of God. His love is the sort that does not ask permission and does not turn when unrequited. His love is ever knocking, ever hoping, ever waiting. And it is this love that he promises to perfect in us.

Slow movement in the spiritual life, in your spiritual walk, is normal. Day by day is normal. The way Christ transforms us most often is a slow process of reminders and repetition. Each of us are deeply fractured. Most of us, all of us, would prefer a redemption that lets us pass over any feelings of loss, brokenness, or bankruptcy. Christ keeps it real. He is making us more real, more alive, and nothing goes to waste in His hands. All the bits and pieces of our lives are being realigned around Him. In this realignment, we need reminders of the life Christ lived and the salvation Christ accomplished. We need guidance in the repetitious cycle of faith and repentance that happens over and over in the presence of God. The Church is a community for that process, and we have a calendar for that, too! So hold fast to this Gospel that first saved you. The Gospel is God and God is Christ. Christ is not fractured like us. Everything Christ did is everything that Christ is. His body is scarred for life with suffering, but He is whole. You, Christian, are becoming whole, in Him and through Him.

Strength. Independence. Perseverance. We aspire to these traits and think of them as signs of a healthy personhood. We love stories of personal triumph over exponential odds. We enjoy our visions of autonomy and independence that promise joy. Yet, who among us has found the fruit of love in our own stories of standing strong? Who here has seen love birthed from staying true to ourselves? Self-love perhaps, but that kind of love hates God, it doesn’t know God, it cannot. The humility and dependence of Christ carried him to us in joy. Brothers and sisters, let us take up this mind of Christ, let us live and love, let us cherish wisdom.

The Christian faith is not merely a set of doctrines to be accepted. It is a way of life to be embraced. And Jesus lived that way of life for us. He filled up faith with good works, courageous acts of love, mercy, and service. So when we enter into the faith, we do not enter into an idea. We enter into a life already lived. We enter into a finished work. We are mysteriously grafted into the very life Jesus. If Christian faith were simply an idea, it would be a terrible one -- an elusive trust impossible to sustain. But Christian faith is the faithfulness of Christ given to us. And what freedom it is that his faithfulness is his alone to sustain.

We devote much energy to projecting our image of uprightness to the world and almost as much energy giving attention to others who successfully do the same. We want to be thought of as good and so we surround ourselves with those who’ve achieved that status in hopes of obtaining credit by association. But the way of Jesus is different. He associated with the lowly, the unsuccessful, the poor. And it was not pity that moved him to do so, but solidarity. Jesus knew his own lowliness, his own poverty. He knew that to be human is to be a beggar, one who depends on another for life. It is until we know and love our poverty that we will know and love our people. We belong among the poor, where mercy triumphs over judgment.

What we often think of as freedom is mere slavery to our vanity. We are addicted to those things that make us feel free -- the rush of indignant outrage, the euphoria of vindication, the savor of being right. Like self-conscious teenagers who cannot pass by a store window without glancing again at their reflection, double and triple-checking that their curated look remains intact, so too we are all consumed with our image. If we can only identify with the right people, hold to the right opinions, pay lip service to the right causes, then maybe we can be counted among the righteous. Just one more peek at my reflection, one last reassurance. How terrible is our idea of freedom. But true freedom is not an idea. True freedom is not bound up in feeling free. It’s not connected to our appetite for feeling righteous. True freedom is an escape from vanity into the giving and receiving of mercy. True freedom is slavery to mercy and the Merciful One.

God is not double-minded. He never considers pursuing those things that lead to ruin and death. On the contrary, he is consumed with giving and fostering life, and life to the full. That is his only agenda with people, to give and foster the fullness of life in us. That was his agenda in creating us. It remains his agenda in redeeming us. And it is his only aim amid the various trials that befall us. By contrast, we are often double-minded. We quickly abandon those things that lead to life. When trials come, we ignore the gifts of God and are so overcome by the discomfort that we rush toward death in the pursuit of relief. James would wake us up. See the gifts of God, he implores. Don’t mistake trials for God’s absence. Stop running. Hold fast. Trust the Lord. And receive his gifts.

The book of James in the New Testament has one main theme: Live in the Wisdom of God. For James, wisdom is the manifestation of Christian maturity. It’s the sort of being that God means to rescue people into, because it’s the sort of being that Christ brought into the human story. In other words, Jesus lived his human life in divine wisdom, so that God could give that divine wisdom to his people. This is salvation, the receiving of the life and wisdom of Christ as our own. And James has much to say on the art of receiving that life. He is opposed to conceptions of salvation that do not give rise to wisdom, as though God’s grace were simply some abstract idea to make us feel better about our failures. No James says, God’s grace is Christ alive in us. Not an idea. But a person.

How much do you spend on self protection? Self protection isn’t inherently bad. All of creation is designed to take refuge in something stronger than itself. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. Some of it is true. Some of it is false. In His wisdom, God allows us to waste time, live in falsehood, and learn lessons in the freedom of His love. And then he invites us to put down the false armor. You are protected by God’s love. Faith becomes ill in sin and fear but blooms in hope and love. God’s love overflows to you, and God’s love overflows within you. Do not settle for any protection less than that.

Rules tell us the right thing to do. But rules cannot turn us into the right thing to be. We can follow all the rules and still be full of hate or fear or shame. So rules are important, because they keep us from doing hurtful things. But they aren’t the most important, because they don’t heal our insides. We’re all sick on the inside, and we all need healing. That’s why Jesus came into the world, to heal us. And the way he heals us isn’t by giving us a bunch of rules. Instead, he gives us himself. Jesus is a healthy person. And he invites all of us sick people to come live in his health with him. That’s what baptism is. It’s going into the health of Jesus. It’s being dipped in Jesus, so that we are covered with his health and his life. Then we can follow the rules without thinking we need them to heal us. And when we break the rules, we can know that even the worst things we do can’t separate us from Jesus.

Who am I? This is the defining question of the human experience. Without an identity, our lives lack meaning, direction, even coherence. We must know who we are. Yet careful examination of our own personhood--our passions, abilities, fears, hopes, etc.--can provide a disconcerting answer. In and of myself, I have many deviant passions, many lacking abilities, many crippling fears, many misplaced hopes. On my own, my identity is in shambles. But what if who I am was never meant to be determined independently? What if I was always meant to be defined in relation to others--and most importantly, in relation to God? The message of the Christian gospel is that my independent and broken self, the shambles that is me, is not my true identity. All of my crumbling personhood has been sutured into the very body of Jesus Christ. And attached to him, all of that inadequacy is overwhelmed by his more than adequate body. Every passion in him is pure, every ability present, every fear overcome, every hope sure. All that Jesus is defines me, because I am united to him.

The word compassion means “to suffer with.” Compassionate people, then, are not those who merely express sentiments of care for the hurting, but rather those who step into that very hurt and sit alongside the wounded. It is quite easy to consider ourselves compassionate until we see compassion defined for the ages. Jesus left the glory of the heavens to sit in the mire of our broken world. He came to join us in all this pain. And for what purpose? It was not to prove himself compassionate. On the contrary, with disregard for his own reputation, he came to embody and minister a mysterious healing. He came to lead humanity to the shores of divinity. And to our awful surprise, divinity bore the shape of a cross.

Jesus faced false charges, a phony conviction, and an unjust crucifixion. Yet, as the Roman soldiers nailed him to the cross, he thought nothing of his own salvation. His accusers and the soldiers and even one of the criminals at his side challenged him to prove his divine identity by rescuing himself. Instead, Jesus proved his divine identity by giving up himself for the salvation of others. “Father, forgive them,” he prayed and then became the very answer to his prayer. Jesus on the cross is forgiveness. He is forgiveness made flesh. He is the laying down of all rights to self-preservation and self-salvation for the sake of preserving and saving God’s relationship with us. This is who God is: one who gives up everything to know and love even those who hate him. Jesus lived and died in that divine way. His cross is an emblem for all times and all peoples that the forgiveness of God is ours. It is ours to receive and ours to give. We have been rescued from self-preservation into the cruciform freedom of love.

Imprisoned, his life in peril, John the Baptizer sends his disciples to ask Jesus a question: “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” What was once certain to John is now clouded with doubt and fear. He needs a word, a reminder of who Jesus is and what he has done. And perhaps especially, what Jesus has done for John. It is only when we remember who Jesus is and what he has done for us that we can face the doubts and fears that our world provokes in us. We must remember that we are not of this world, that we live hidden in Jesus. Only then can we push forward into the most terrifying places. Only then can we face our fears and stand awkwardly with nothing in our hands but love.

God reveals himself in the genders of people. The book of Genesis teaches that God created all people, male and female, in his image. Therefore, no matter a person's gender or whether someone is unsure of their gender, every person can rest in the surety of their equal dignity and worth as an image bearer of God. We all reflect divinity. And God has given us gender as a means to structure our churches and homes for the flourishing of all. He calls men and women to serve their spiritual and biological families in different and complementary roles. This distinction between men and women is fire. It burns up our egos and requires that we lay down our lives for one another. Gender is not a means for self-assertion; it is a means for self denial. It is a cross. Yet, from that death, joy rises.

Why are you a Christian? Family? Duty? Fear? Dunno? The answer to this question can either lead to an increase in faith or an increase in doubt. Faith grows from the inside out. Doubt turns you inside out. The Christian life is a life of self and Christ in process, and you're surrounded by a bunch of people going through the same thing. There’s nothing better that we can do for the whole than know and love our Lord Jesus. To be most loving to others, you need to forget all others, even yourself, and know only Christ. Your faith is not your project. Your doubt is not your project. Your life is not your project. Surrender to the call of Christ. Admit you are a Christian. Submit to the people He has appointed you to. Run into eternity with Him.

Can there be any greater dividing wall than the one that exists between parents and their children? As parents we often strive to do “the very best we can” for our children but often our hypocrisy speaks louder than our actions. Without a doubt parenting questions our sanity, our integrity and our resolve. How is God the Father different from our biological parents? Certainly we have been let down by Him. Or have we?

Whatever we do shapes us. And we are always being shaped. When we eat breakfast every morning, we shape our bellies to be hungry when we first wake up. When we do our school work, we shape our minds to think more sharply. And when we exercise, we shape our muscles into better, well... shape. So what we do really matters. God tells us that there are ways to live that shape us to forget his love and rely only on ourselves. But he also tells us there are ways to live that shape us to remember his love and trust him more. What a good thing it is that no matter how we live God never forgets his love for us. His love is always there, protecting us, holding us, and waiting to be remembered again.

The term “self care” began to enter the popular lexicon in the 1970s and has surged in use over the past two years. The idea is simple enough: people must care for their own emotional, physical, and spiritual health in order to function well in their relationships and pursuits. But what is it that leads to true health. Often self care is relegated to helpful but shallow ideas of wellness -- diet, exercise, vacation. Such activities do benefit people, but the danger is in mistaking the shallow end of the pool for the whole pool. That can lead to the false belief that wholeness and health requires little more than some greet tea and a Yoga mat. In truth, the deepest self care requires facing our deepest pain. It requires tearing down the dividing walls we use to block painful relationships and memories from our minds. It requires journeying with the One who cares for us most as He leads us into the places we least want to go.

This audio was recorded during the Chicago memorial for our dear sister Anna Parr. We share it here for all to hear the many tributes given in her honor.

Human sexuality is a confusing jumble of desire and restraint. At times, cultures embrace a desire free-for-all, wherein almost anything goes. But inevitably the abuses that such lawlessness produces cry out for new restraints. Our present moment in North America is filled with such cries. We long for an expression of sexuality that protects the vulnerable, honors personhood, and fosters deep intimacy. And this is what God has for us. The sexual ethic of the Christian faith calls for our desires and restraints to be subsumed in love, a process that cannot bloom apart from the rich soil and repeating seasons of lifelong marriage. Sex is the sacrament of marriage. Much like the communion meal that the church receives in her marriage to Christ, sex is a tangible and bodily manifestation of the mystery of marital union between husband and wife.

The Christian life is not lived out primarily in the church or the Bible study or the prayer time. The Christian life is lived out primarily in our vocations; that is, in whatever way we spend the bulk of our time and emotional energy. Yet many of our workplaces would discourage overt expressions of faith as divisive. And indeed, they can be. So how then is the Christian to work in faith? Jesus said that the greatest two commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor. These commands tell us who we are: By faith, we are people who do not live or work for ourselves. We are people who pour ourselves out for others, for our bosses, for our colleagues, for our clients. That self-emptying way of life is the only way that church or Bible study or prayer time will make any sense. Just as a person who never drives will never have use for a gas station, so a Christian who never loves will never have need to be filled.

Political movements, like all human efforts to solve problems, can achieve only two possible outcomes: punishment or pardon. Historically, those movements primarily concerned with punishment are deemed right wing, while those movements primarily concerned with pardon are deemed left wing. Trouble is, neither punishment nor pardon can truly solve the world’s problems. And when either right wing or left wing movements get their way, totalitarianism or chaos invariably follows. So what then? Should Christians sit out of the political morass since our hope is not of this world? May it never be. It is precisely because our hope is not of this world that Christians can dive into the messy political sphere with open ears and open hands. When we are not compelled to hope in a particular political ideology, we can learn to see both its strengths and weaknesses. And when our fears and pains find comfort in a heavenly kingdom, we can endure the fears and pains of any earthly kingdom. It is those with nothing to lose and nothing to gain who are most free to hear truth, even from the mouths of their opponents. And to discern lies, even from the mouths of their allies.

We tend to believe that any disdain we may have for other people stems from our commitment to righteousness. In ancient Palestine, Jews often disdained gentiles because they considered them ceremonially unclean. In other words, the Jewish commitment to cleanliness before God, to what they considered righteousness, compelled them to disparage people who did not share that commitment. People groups in our time are no different. Democrats disdain Republicans from a self-righteous sense of greater care for the poor and marginalized. Republicans disdain Democrats from a self-righteous sense of greater concern for liberty and responsibility. But, in truth, our disdain for others does not stem from righteousness or our connection to God. On the contrary, our disdain for others stems from our disdain for God. Whenever we set ourselves up as the righteous party crusading to conquer those evil people over there, we are not fighting with God but against him. We are aiming to defeat those that he aims to love. And we are aiming to exalt ourselves when he aims to humble us.

The life of faith is not ours to live according to personal whim. It is rather the very life of Christ being made alive in us. It is his finished and perfected life taking root in our souls and bodies so that it sprouts from our dirt and bears the fruit of love. Receiving Christ, then, is receiving the very life of God. All of him consuming all of us.

Take life by the horns. Seize the moment. Life is what you make of it. These are the maxims of rugged individualists. They are declarations of independence. Yet for all our will and grit, the life we forge for ourselves is perilously feeble. We spend decades erecting towers that can topple in minutes. We take great care to steer ourselves around pain, only to find that the road is made of it. We build walls and lock doors to protect ourselves and then fall out a window to our death. As it turns out, we are not the author of our story but characters within it. The only life we have is the one given. And all our taking and seizing and making is mere distraction from the single act meant to define us: Receive.

“Jesus Christ heals you.” These are the words that are echoing throughout the universe and the words Jesus Christ is always speaking. We know Christ because we have been made alive in Christ. Resurrection healing power has arrived to us, but hidden within, hidden in faith, clothed in decay. All the other newness and restoration we’d expect in resurrection has been given to us by promise. So believe on Jesus Christ. He will not break His promise. Ourselves and all of creation await His return. Lord, please come to us without delay.

Jesus is always stepping into our suffering. He moves beyond empathy and into compassion. With Jesus, that compassion compels him to action. The characters in the story proclaim, “God has visited his people!” He didn’t just visit; he moved in. A beautiful story has unfolded. We see Jesus fully human and fully divine. Once again, we see Him performing miracles not for himself but for the benefit of others.

Jesus came to the earth to share his life with us. But his life is more than just walking and breathing and playing. His life is peace with God. And he means to share it with us, even if we don’t know we need it.

We are quick to associate death with loss. And for good reason. The passing of a loved one leaves a hole in our lives and our hearts. But God does not mean for that hole to go unfilled. He has plans for death, plans to demonstrate his glory and win a final victory. The impending death of the prophet Elisha seemed to threaten the health and stability of the kingdom of Israel. Yet, in truth, the only threat was to Israel’s enemies. God had more life and victory stored up in Elisha’s dead bones than he’d ever shown through his living flesh. The passing of Elisha was no defeat. It was a sign of the victory to come.

The modern world tells us that doubt is more authentic than faith. That uncertainty is the noblest disposition. Yet God would lead us to the ignoble place of desperation, where we have no choice but to cast ourselves fully onto his mercy. The story of a mother grieving the loss of her only son is our story, everyone of us. We are all that desperate, all in that much need of a miracle. And embarrassing as it may be to put all our hope in the power of Jesus, there is life to be had there. Desperate, risky faith will never be in fashion. It’s too pathetic, too weak, too irrational. But grieving mothers care little for fashion. Just give us life, Lord.

The prophet Elijah was often faithless. He questioned the care and provision of God when hardship befell him. Yet his faithlessness had no bearing on God’s commitment to him. Repeatedly, God met Elijah’s faithless heart and faithless words with acts of faithful mercy. No matter how much Elijah seemed to give up on God, God never gave up on him. No matter the trial or the depth of the miracle needed, God’s persistence in care for Elijah prevailed. So unrelenting was God’s fatherly love that it filled Elijah to overflowing and watered the scorched earth wherever he went. Even the fiercest drought could not dry up the life within him.

Everyone gets Jesus wrong. Yet he does not rebuke our broken worship nor mock our blindness nor belittle our immaturity. Instead, he accepts our praise in all its feeble lack of understanding. And he accepts us. For he sees our longings and knows they will be satisfied in him. We may not come to Jesus for the right reasons. But if we simply come to him, we can be assured that he will embrace us and teach us the ways that make for peace. Jesus did not enter Jerusalem to rebuke the Palm Sunday crowds for their folly. He entered Jerusalem to be with them, to be among them, and finally to die for them.

God did not make us to face life alone. And he has not left us to face death alone. In Christ, he is with us and for us. No matter what may come, God hears us; God sees us; God loves us.

The only sure things in life are pain and death. And our Christian faith does not offer a way around these hardships. In fact, our Lord promised we would face great trials as we follow him. Yet he also promised to be a great source of hope. This is the tension of life in Christ. It is simultaneously full of groaning and full of hope. Indeed, we cannot have one without the other. Hope can only exist within groaning. To ignore or mask our groaning then is to ignore or mask our hope. But to face our trials and endure the suffering with Christ is to live in the place of hope. These birth pangs will not be long now. Our head has broken through. His body is sure to follow soon.

We do not own ourselves. The impulses and desires of our bodies do not rule us; we are dead to them. Rather the spirit of Christ rules in us making us alive to God. Indeed, we are children of God, and if children then we are heirs, and if we are heirs then we lack no good thing. Our Father is here in front of you. And he has not brought condemnation in his brow but power in his hand—all the power we need to participate in the sufferings of Christ—to know joy in the life of God.

Part of what it means to be a Christian is to be filled with a desire to please God. He is our Father, and we want to live in his pleasure. But what pleases God? Is it seeing us better ourselves, watching us pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and really make something of our lives? No, the Apostle Paul tells us that it is impossible to please God with such labor in our own strength. God is holy, and the only thing that pleases him is perfection. He will not settle for anything less for us. So it is that self-improvement winds up being a dead end. To please God, we need something beyond ourselves. We need a whole new way of being. And he has given that to us in the Spirit of Christ.

God’s plan to rescue people from the slavery and ruin of sin is not a game of carrots and sticks. He has no interest in reforming our broken flesh into a more disciplined version of itself. Instead, he gives us his Son. The gift of Jesus is a gift of something finished, a new way of life already completed. By faith, we receive this gift of new life. And by faith, the gift of new life manifests in us. Yet we often forget that this gift is ours. We turn back to our broken flesh and live according to old patterns. It’s as though we have two identities at war within us -- a perfect, whole identity in Christ and a fractured, irredeemable identity in the flesh. Salvation is not in mixing the two together, but rather in trusting that the new is more real than the old.

There are objective aspects to our faith and there are subjective aspects to our faith. It is both safe and dangerous. Free and spoken for. The free gift of union with Jesus Christ is not meant to belittle, or make void, the moment by moment mess that is the individual experience of grace. It makes experience safe. It makes experience alive. It makes experience begin and end in the love of our heavenly Father, not a Divine taskmaster. But also dangerous. This union with Christ does not take away from our upward call into glory, rather, the Cross unleashed the very Divine Lifeblood that makes us alive and carries us upward. This Divine Life is Cross shaped, heals through death, saves souls by losing lives. Surrender and be sanctified.

If God simply told the whole world that he was not going to hold us accountable for our sin, that would be cruel and dangerous news. But God has said much more than that. He has told us that he means to cover us in his Son. So yes, he will not hold us accountable for our sin, but only because we are united to Jesus Christ. This union to Christ certainly spares us from the dreadful cosmic consequences of our sin. And beyond that, it transforms us into the very image of divine life. We cannot receive Jesus as merely a get-out-of-jail-free card. He is not an idea or certificate. He is a person. And when we receive this person, we are caught up into all the fullness of his personhood. In him, our sin can neither condemn us nor enslave us nor define us. In him, our sin is brought to nothing.

God created humanity to flourish in his life. But from the beginning, we went looking for life on our own, life apart from our Maker. There is no such life, only death. And all who walk in that way of Adam are perishing. But God has forged a way out for us in Christ. Jesus is a new Adam, who entered into the path of the perishing and through obedience re-created the way of being human that God had always intended for us. Jesus flourished in the life of his Father. And this finished work of obedience is ours to trust, ours to learn, ours to live out. God has given us the flourishing human life of Christ. No longer seek life anywhere else.

All people have gone our own way and wandered off into darkness. God's rescue of us is not merely to forgive that foolishness; it is also to guide us back into the light. By connecting us to the atoning life and death of Jesus, God both swallows up the penalty of our sin and transforms us into the obedience of his Son. He marries us into the finished work of Christ, so that everything we are is now defined by this One Man. In oneness with him, we are justified and sanctified.

The way forward with Christ is often an issue of time and time spent with Christ. So here’s to another year with Christ and everything that got us to this point. We are free and Christ is more free. And the life we live we live by the faithfulness of the Son of God. So receive God’s love in Christ. Return to God’s love in Christ. Mature in God’s love in Christ. Life with Christ will always mean life with each other. Christ and the Church cannot be separated. So love one another.

Jesus Christ, our strange king, was the friend of sinners. Tax collectors, prostitutes, and social outcasts were drawn to Him to hear about the Kingdom of God. This King not only received the "dregs of society" and ate with them, but reached out and invited them to follow him. What's astounding is that being God Incarnate, Jesus is God's Holiness or Righteousness Incarnate. What may have attracted sinners was their experiencing, in Jesus, God's authentic Righteousness, in contrast to the perverted caricature of it the Pharisees displayed. Righteousness was now a Person who proclaimed mercy not judgment, and came not to condemn, but to seek and save that which was lost. Christians are Christ's Body, indwelt by, and united to Him, who is True Eternal Righteousness. Our Strange King invites us, then, to be His welcoming and forgiving Righteousness, the very Righteousness of God enfleshed, to the broken, fallen world of outcasts around us.

Life is hard. With the threat of nuclear war looming over our heads and needing to wait till next year for the new season of Game of Thrones to drop, who has time to add drama or tension into our lives? We live to relax, to take it easy, to just chill, to hang out with friends over a cold one and perhaps a cigar. We are already inundated with our social media feeds over-informing us on all the goings-on around the world and in our neighborhoods. It’s just overwhelming at times. In his prison letter to the Philippian church, the Apostle Paul paints this picture of Jesus as one who intentionally inserts himself into the tension and drama of people's lives. Paul writes of a person who pours himself out for the sake of others, and Paul encourages us to be of the same mindset. How can we do this? How can we live that way as the collective church and also as individual members of it? it won't be by winning.

When David was king in ancient Israel, the kingdom flourished. Enemies folded under his military leadership. And wealth soared. David recognized these great benefits and thanked God for them. But also he wondered why God had not yet directed the construction of a proper temple. The Ark of the Covenant, God's sacred dwelling, was still housed in a tent as it had been during Israel's nomadic years. Then the word of the Lord came to the prophet Nathan: "When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son." David's son Solomon would go on to build a temple of God in Jerusalem. But that temple would fall and rise and fall again. Not until the arrival of God's Son Jesus, who was likewise the offspring of David, would a temple emerge that would rise and fall and rise again. God's eternal dwelling was not to be a structure of stone and cedar but a living body, impervious to death.

To walk in our own strength is to live in the dark, asleep to the new kingdom realities forged in the lordship of Jesus Christ. But we can wake from this slumber. Daylight has broken into our world, and he is offering himself to us. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, therefore, and walk as one fully awake. Receive this king; obey this king; know this king. He rules in righteousness. His words are light.

Is Jesus alive in our church community? If so, where do we look to find his pulse? Is it in our budgets and facilities? Is it in classes and group meetings? Our prayers and worship? Our eating and drinking? Our friendships and families? Yes, the pulse of Christ beats in all these things. The only question is whether we will look for it in faith, whether we will feel his heartbeat through the thick lull of business as usual. As it turns out, it is in the usual business that Christ dwells. He is alive in all our comings and goings. He is alive in us. No longer quench this Spirit. Rejoice, serve, love. And receive the care of one another with thanksgiving.

We are all born into a broken state of personhood, one bent toward self-preservation to the detriment of others. But this way of being is death. Jesus offers a new way, one bent toward the good of the whole, consumed with sacrifice and love. To receive Jesus is to receive his way, to walk in his steps, to think his thoughts, to feel his heart. Sacrifice and love are the shape of divine life. And as we live in Christ, they are the shape of us. We belong in this divine life. It's who we now are. So then, let's live it out. Let's pour ourselves out in sacrifice and love, laying down our preferences and comforts for the sake of one another. Let's submit to one another, bear the burdens of one another, honor the authorities God has placed over us, and in all these things rejoice in the hope of deliverance from our broken state. God is shaping us to run with him.

Jesus brought divine life into the human story. And he offers this life to all peoples. That means peoples of privileged status in the world have no advantage over marginalized peoples in receiving Christ. In fact, privilege often turns out to be a great disadvantage in receiving a kingdom wherein the last shall be first and receiving a king who came only for the sick, poor, lost, and oppressed. The only means to receive this kingdom and its king is by faith, that is, by empty-handed dependence and trust. This sort of faith is humiliating and dignifying all at the same time -- humiliating in that we must acknowledge our neediness, dignifying in that we are invited to participate in divine life. All who embrace this faith find themselves on equal footing, equally in need, equally beloved. Could this be the great source of solidarity our world craves?

Real rescue from God has broken into history. And his name is Jesus. In him, we are no longer under the wrath of God, no longer slaves to sin, no longer cursed with the burden of the law, no longer sentenced to death. In Jesus, we are new creations, participants in divine righteousness, partakers of divine freedom, and recipients of divine life, also known as life eternal. All these treasures, all this salvation, is given freely in Christ. By faith, his humanity is realized in us.

God gave his law to a chosen people, the descendants of Abraham, to reveal divine righteousness to them. But the law proved powerless to effect divine righteousness in them. So the law condemned the people of Israel, upholding a standard too high for them to reach. Yet God did not condemn them. More than four centuries before giving his law, God had established another means by which Abraham's descendants might partake in divine righteousness: "Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness." This was a righteousness by faith, a promise that for those who put their confidence in God, righteousness would be given to them -- not through the law, which condemns, but through a new and better covenant. Jesus was that new covenant. His life was the righteousness of the law manifest in human form. He took what was written in stone and stamped it onto human flesh. He brought the law to life. This was the righteousness counted to Abraham, and it is the righteousness counted to all who believe. It is a righteousness that not only reveals the beauty of God but invites all people to enter that beauty by faith in one new man.

God created a good world and very good people. All the material of the universe is laden with his beauty and human persons are stamped with his image. But the corruption of sin has choked all that goodness and shrouded its light. We have turned love into lust and passion into envy and justice into malice. We have rejected the harmony and simplicity of life with God and embraced the fractures and chaos of life apart from him. What we have chosen is not life, but death. We have ripped apart the fine woven fabric of creation. And what hope now remains for this pile of tattered rags in the menacing hands of its destroyers? Can we mend what we have rent? No. The goodness of our humanity is damaged beyond repair. We need a new humanity. We need fresh life to recover the mantle of our original design. We need a gift from beyond our shores.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ rescues people from the most deadly trap of the human frame -- self-righteousness. Because in Jesus, the righteousness of God is revealed. Jesus shows us a righteousness of shimmering light that renders our conceptions of our own decency rather dark by comparison. We are not righteous. We have within us, each one, all of the shadowy material responsible for the world's great evils. Dark seeds of bitterness, envy, malice, and fear are planted in the soil of our broken flesh. And when watered in the rain of politics and culture, they sprout into racism, classism, fascism, and lies. We are the enemies we claim to oppose. But a true righteousness has emerged from within this soup of human ruin. And he is Christ Jesus -- the righteousness of heaven breaking into our twisted history. His righteousness is ours to walk in, if only we would forsake every confidence in ourselves and receive his life as our own.

00The Apostle Paul was born Saul of Tarsus, a Roman citizen educated in the most prestigious of Jewish schools. In his early adult life, he was a man of fierce conviction, who thought nothing of destroying others for the sake of advancing his cause. But meeting Jesus broke him. Mighty Saul became suffering Paul. And in the latter half of his adult life, he poured out his days not to trample others but to build them up. Paul lost reputation, comfort, freedom, and finally his life for the sake of one aim: to live in Christ and invite others to do the same.

When the Apostle Paul wrote his great letter to the church in Rome, he was addressing only several dozen Christian converts, who would have gathered in homes in the city's poorest districts. Surrounding this humble church, hundreds of thousands of pagan Romans, many of them hostile to the Jewish religion and its offshoots, made up the largest and most powerful city in the world. How could so few Christian believers, with no historic tradition to guide them and overwhelming cultural pressure to abandon their faith, become the first building block to an eruption of Christian converts in the decades to follow? How could this fledgling group even have survived the sweeping public executions of Christians that would come by order of the Emperor Nero just a few years later? The answer to those questions is contained in the content of Paul's letter. "Those who have never been told of him will see," the apostle writes, quoting the prophet Isaiah. The story of Christianity in Rome defies historical explanation or precedent. It is a story of God's power to save.

We cannot know who we are apart from relationships. There is no such thing as an independent person. Personhood only exists in relation to others. So it is that true identity is not discovered by looking inward but rather in moving outward. We find ourselves not in the recesses of self-referential naval-gazing , but in the risky glory of love. Love is the height of personal relationship. It binds persons together eternally, such that those caught up in its grasp are ever defined by one another. The three persons of God, Father, Son, and Spirit eternally live in such love. And God has shared this love with us. Jesus has entered the human story so that we might discover who we are in relationship to Him. He has bound himself to us in love. To receive this love, then, is to be caught up in him, to be one with him, to be defined by him. Indeed, all who receive the love of Christ are bound eternally to God and to each other. We know who we are. We are the body of God’s beloved Son.

Our God is a compassionate God. We know this only because he has entered our suffering with us. That is the very definition of compassion -- "to suffer with." How then can we consider ourselves the body of Christ if we fail to enter the suffering of our neighbors? Many among us relish the thought of being compassionate people, but whose suffering are we sharing in? We live in a cultural moment when the dogmatic teachings of the church largely fall on deaf ears. Our pronouncements of judgment against sin are like clanging gongs in an echo chamber, ever ricocheting off hardened surfaces, finding no soft places to land. Yet mercy and compassion are the instruments of God's Spirit to turn stone into clay. Our church has a mission: to participate in the life and death of Jesus, to suffer with sinners as he did, to offer this Christ within us.

Jesus spoke as one with authority, and his miraculous acts of healing validated that authority. But the greatest exercise of authority in his earthly ministry was the audacious act of forgiving sins. For who has power to forgive sins but God alone?

Our country is divided. Rage and fear abound. And people line up across these divisions convinced of their righteous position. Are we convinced, too? Is The Painted Door Church convinced that we are among those who get it? That we are among the enlightened, the compassionate, the inclusive? God forbid that such delusion would fog our minds and hearts. A record of misdeeds towers in our wake. We have no moral high ground. In the wretched public theater of American race relations, we are complacent villains. Yet, this condemnation and folly has no power to define our future. We are not subject to its demands for atonement. Nor do we have any reason to spin our wheels in self-justification. We are guilty and forgiven, shameful and covered. Repentance is ours. We are free to be new.

When Mary Magdalene anointed the feet of Jesus with expensive perfume, many of the onlookers were indignant. After all, her act of adoration was unnecessary, a costly use of resources that might have gone to nobler purposes. But Jesus rebuked this indignation and welcomed his disciple's flourish. In much the same way, artists throughout history are often seen as superfluous, their work an unnecessary luxury. Accordingly, they are often unappreciated. Yet this dismissive attitude cannot undermine the value of artists' work. Jesus himself is pleased with every creative endeavor that celebrates the beauty of his world. Since ultimately, it all celebrates of his Father.

Every person experiences trauma at some point in life. And when this trauma takes place in a context of heightened vulnerability, say during childhood or within a trusting relationship, its devastating effects often reverberate for decades. Trauma can so alter a person’s view of themselves and the world that relating to others can prove near impossible. Like communication between alien species, misunderstandings abound. That difficulty tempts many of us to withdraw from the traumatized, or perhaps to offer glib fixes. But doing so forfeits seeing one of the great glories of God -- namely, that he is re-creating all things from the very fiber of trauma. God is remaking the world through the cross of Christ. In other words, apart from the trauma of Christ we are incomplete. But as his trauma manifests in us, we learn the language of heaven.

We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.” For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

Our present culture hails the bootstrapper (one who gets into or out of a situation using existing resources instead of external resources) as the epitome of the American Experiment -- without need, resilient, self reliant. The super Dad, the super Mom, the super Coworker. We often hear “God helps those who help themselves.”

I offer another definition of bootstrapper -- Coward. One who actually lacks the courage to do or endure dangerous or unpleasant things. Even in our attempted bootstrapping ways, we’re not calmly pausing to look around at available options and resources for solutions. We’re desperately fighting to get out of the perceived weight we’re stuck under. The story of cowardly Gideon in Judges is much the same. Just like Gideon, we need help beyond ourselves, we need rescue. Thanks be to God that “The Lord was with Gideon” just as He is with us. And thanks to the Lord’s holy wisdom: Weak cowards are exactly who Jesus is looking for. We’re plan A. He loves cowards at the end of our rope, and He moves toward us, wants to be present with us. We who were given faith are his tangible presence on earth as the Holy Spirit moves within us. He gives us life abundant beyond any resources we have available, any scheme we can think up, and anything we can see here in our earthly reality.

The Christian life is anything but the exemplar of ease and comfort that many of us seek. But what we receive, what we have, is God himself. Particularly, in times of dire affliction and distress, the LORD promises us himself, unconditionally and unreservedly. He is with us in our deepest anguish, heartache, and despair. And he will never leave nor forsake us! Yes, Jesus Christ is the Good News for the Hurting, and he is Good News even unto death; because Jesus, the destroyer of Death, is with us.

Children enter this world wide-eyed and curious. And when nurtured and protected, they’re sense of wonder mixes with developing skills and understanding to birth dreams. They want to be astronauts or rock stars or Olympians or all of the above. But then they outgrow the safety of parental nurture, and the world’s cruelties rain on their parade. Dreams become a casualty of maturity, filed away alongside unicorns and fairy tales in a folder of the mind marked “former naiveties”. Turns out, life isn’t fair or sensible or trustworthy. The celebrity public service announcements got it wrong: you can’t be whatever you put your mind to. But what if somewhere amid this abyss of disillusionment, there was something even better than dreams -- something that cynicism and apathy could never quench. What if everything weak and lowly and pitiful proved to be the very substance of hope. What if being a nobody placed us in the company of kings.

For many, résumé building is far more than a professional activity. It is a way of life. Adding bullet points to our running list of accomplishments feels like salvation, a way to assuage those haunting doubts of our self-worth. With each new achievement, we add a layer of protection, more proof that we matter, more distance between us and the terrifying prospect of being a nobody. But for all the successes our strengths can produce, they cannot erase our frailty. And when the pressure of racing to credential ourselves finally outstrips those frailties, we burn out. We crack at our weakest points and the whole building crumbles. It is the very fear of such a moment that drives us toward it at breakneck speed. Who would you be if your résumé were suddenly a blank page? To answer that question on your own is to know panic and self-deceit. But God has an answer for us: Who you are has nothing to do with what you’ve done. Breathe. Beloved children have no need for résumés.

We live in a never ending game of hide and seek with our Father. The good news for us all is that we always hide in plain sight whether we know it or not. Our Father sees us, knows us, and loves us, no matter how unlovely we consider ourselves to be.

Jesus is good news for all people. We see it in his incarnation, his atonement, his resurrection. He took up residency here among us and flipped the script on us: the power structures and motivations of his present time didn’t seem to hold sway on him--he lived in an upside down sort of way. He embodied perfection, too; the religious leaders were always trying to corner him on something with no success--he lived at peace with God from the inside out in a sort of way that people were drawn to. He also thought he was rich. No, he was wholeheartedly convinced that the power and glory of his Father was present even though it led him into death. Yes, Jesus lived an inside out, upside down, now but not yet life; he is Lord of us all, and that is good news indeed.

Let us not take ourselves so seriously as to think we can grasp reality. All evil stems from the belief that we can understand all things, that we can put the pieces of the whole puzzle together, that we can arrive at clarity. In fact, clarity is always an illusion. It is the erroneous absence of need, the end of dependence, the death of God. If we have clarity, we no longer need God. We have built Babel. In such a state, we may give God credit, but only in the past tense, as if his contribution has run its course. We'll take it from here, thank you very much. After all, we have clarity. May it never be so among us. Rather, may we always know this: There are chasms of mystery beyond us, transcendent realities to which we have no comprehending access, but only the chance to wonder and worship. Laughter and praise are the fitting offerings of dependent, beloved children. And so we are.

This week is Trinity Sunday, the first week of Ordinary Time in the Christian calendar.

Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? Everything in salvation and the life of faith is so utterly Christ conditioned, that we are not only connected to His present, but also His past and His future. He goes first. So follow Him, even to a Cross. He is perfect God and perfect Man, so that His place can be your place just as you are, a sinner saved by grace.

Through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, God has provided hope for the world and for all our lives. But so much of life seems tied up in our fragility, stress, inadequacy, and failures. So often, we do not feel or sense the Spirit of Pentecost, and hope seems a hoax. But the Spirit of God doesn't abide by worldly wisdom, but by a divine and cruciform wisdom -- a wisdom that leads us to feel both ours and others' regrets and suffering deeply, even as God had felt the regret and suffering of us all.

When God made the world, he filled it with mirrors. And the largest of these mirrors is us, human people. The purpose of these mirrors is to reflect the beauty, goodness, and truth of God, so that the creation might enjoy and thrive in the love of its creator. But there's a problem. All the mirrors are marred now. Some are twisted. Others cracked. And many have shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. In this state, our experience and vision of God is distorted at best and more often wrong altogether. We have all sought to fix this problem. We've pursued healing, both for themselves and the rest of the world, seeking to restore our view of God and rediscover a pure vision of his love. And some have done great work. Some mirrors have moved back toward their true shape decidedly. Trouble is, even if some mirror somewhere could reach full restoration -- and none yet have -- what benefit is it to insert a few true mirrors into the circus funhouse of distortion that is our world? Once reflection becomes as bent as it is here, no amount of true reflection can unbend the light. Truth is, we need something more than better mirrors. We need the light source himself. Reflection will not do here. We must have flesh and blood.

The things we make say a lot about us. They reveal what we like, and therefore reveal something of what we are like. So too with our God. This world he made reveals what he likes, and therefore something of what he is like. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” the psalmist writes. And again: “The heavens proclaim his righteousness, and all the peoples see his glory.” In the many varied ways that this world glimmers to us, we are given opportunity to marvel at the glory of God, to wonder at his creativity and imagination. And it is only in being awestruck by him that we rightly see the value of his creation. When our awe wanes, we mistreat the creation -- either by over-valuing it and asking some piece of it to be our god; or by devaluing it and subjugating some piece of it to be our slave. But God would rescue us from those swamps of ruin. If what he has made cannot hold our gaze, then perhaps he can do so in the flesh. Jesus came into the world not to reflect God like the rest of creation, but to embody him. He came to arrest our hearts and fill us with awe to everlasting.

God has promised that those who look to him will lack no good thing and never be ashamed. But how can this be? The history of God’s people seems to be little more than one long, meandering story of lack and shame. And when we look at the evidence of our own lives, we see more of the same. What, then, do these promises of God mean? The answer is in Jesus. “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit,” the psalmist declares. “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.” In other words, a life with God is a life like that of Jesus. He was crushed and afflicted. Yet amid all these pains, he remained secure under the watchful eye of his Father. So it is for all people united to Jesus by faith. The Father treasures and watches over us with all the care and steadfastness he provided his beloved Son. We are just as secure as Jesus, though often crushed with him.

For Christians, victorious living is defined by the life of Jesus. His way is the way of victory. Yet, in looking at how Jesus spent his days, victory is not the first word that comes to mind. He was born in a stable to a mother slandered as unfaithful. As a toddler, he and his family fled their home country as refugees. He grew up poor, the son of a tradesman, in a region mocked for its lowly station. As an adult, he kept company with the dregs of society -- cheats, prostitutes, drunkards. The most noble leaders of his own people and creed condemned him. His own family considered him a fool. A dear companion sold him out for bag of silver. And his closest friends abandoned him to spare themselves. Jesus was crucified as a common thief. Meanwhile, the wicked sprout like grass and evildoers flourish. In what possible sort of world can this way of Christ be called victorious? Only one: the sort of world pregnant with resurrection.

God in Christ has declared all things new and we believe Him, but all we know of this is an inner whisper. At the moment, the evidence is severely lacking. Hope and change continue to slip back into perversion and violence. The formation of faith, hope, and love do not bring the personal glory we had hoped, but cut us open to know the sufferings of our Christ. Is He worth it? Yes! So in unfulfilled longing, rejoice. Every promise will be fulfilled and every tear wiped away.

From the moment of his Transfiguration, Jesus began a journey down from the mountain of glory, toward Jerusalem, and ultimately to the upside down glory of the cross. He flipped the world on its head, demonstrating forever that true divine glory works itself out in the self-sacrifice of love. Jesus was eternally destined for this journey to Jerusalem. He was sent to bring God's love to Zion and establish a heavenly culture there. He entered Jerusalem to great adulation and yet also riding a donkey, foreshadowing both the conquest and humiliation of the cross. In the kingdom of God, conquest is won through humiliation. Jesus achieved his greatest victory by way of his greatest defeat. He was anointed to spend himself in love for the sake of re-creating God's city and redeeming God's people. This anointing covered Jesus from head to toe. And it likewise covers all people who are baptized into his body. In baptism, Christians are anointed to participate in the life and death of Jesus. In baptism, we are anointed to minister redemption through the great gain and loss of love.

Our world is broken. Nothing holds together. Everything dies. The order and authority that we struggle to impose on this fractured reality amount to temporary band-aids, at best. More often, our efforts to fix the mess only make matters worse. Nevertheless, God so loved this world that he sent his Son into its mire. And Jesus humbled himself, entering even the most devastated quarters of this burned out place. He bore the shame of sin, heard the lies of Satan, and knew the darkness of death. Yet, he did not enter these things only to endure them. He entered to defeat them. Jesus undid the power of shame. He crushed the head of Satan. And he flooded the black of death with light. Jesus imposed order and authority in ways we cannot. For there is only one true King. And his kingdom is boundless.

On Holy Saturday we contemplate the silence of Christ in the grave.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Lord, you know the weight of true darkness. Your bones have been broken and you have cried out in affliction Let us remember the darkness.

Lord, you know deafening silence. You were buried and laid to rest for three days. Let us remember the silence.

In moments of darkness and silence you plant seeds of hope. Today we wait quietly for the hope of the salvation of the Lord.

For you will not cast us off forever, nor hold your goodness from us. In silence, our souls seek after the Lord. In silence, we anticipate the glory of new life. In silence, we ponder your faithfulness across the generations.

For the Lord is good to those who wait for him and brings new life to those who seek after his salvation.

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CREDITS

Call to Worship - Allie Watson Matthew 27:57-66 - Cassandra Fowler Lamentations 3:1-9, 19-24 - Carrie Thompson Reflection on Holy Saturday - Mark Bergin "Raise Us to New Life" - written by Kaitlyn Kleffman & Samantha Connour Benediction - Wes Oaks

music mixed & mastered by Alec Watson produced at edited by David MacKay

On Good Friday we reflect on the day Jesus willingly suffered and died by crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice for our sins.

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CALL TO WORSHIP

What we wanted was simple: A political revolution The payment of our bills The fixing of our oh so mundane problems A genie and a self help book Eat Pray Love Instead He gave a cross Two unlikely pieces of wood And a man to hang there A crown of thorns The king of Jews With a kingdom unseen, untouched So quickly did we give Him up Still give Him up Abandoned the man who came to testify to the Truth A Truth that gets stuck in our throats Catches in our mouths We can barely comprehend it Struggle to say it Fail to believe it We heap blame With Stockholm syndrome we prefer our cage Like babies we are dependent on Him to feed us Yet used the breath He gave us to find Him superfluous But it is finished. Pierced feet, pierced hands The blood-stained son of man Who traded his perfection for our sin His righteousness for our selfishness And these two unlikely pieces of wood Become a symbol of his sacrifice A picture of what love looks like More painful than we can bare to witness So real it stirs our hearts within us It is that blood-stained son of man Who traded his perfection for our sin We have no need for genies.

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Credits Call to Worship - Cassandra Fowler John 18:1-19:42 - Acacia Bergin Reflection on Good Friday - David MacKay "Kingdom's Kin" - written by Kaitlyn Kleffman Benediction - Wes Oaks

music mixed & mastered by Alec Watson produced at edited by David MacKay

PSALM 22 READING

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.
Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In you our fathers trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame.

But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by the people.
All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads;
“He trusts in the LORD; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him!”

Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother's breasts.
On you was I cast from my birth, and from my mother's womb you have been my God.
Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help.

Many bulls encompass me; strong bulls of Bashan surround me;
they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion.
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast;
my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws;
you lay me in the dust of death.

For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me;
they have pierced my hands and feet—I can count all my bones—they stare and gloat over me;
they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.

But you, O LORD, do not be far off!
O you my help, come quickly to my aid!
Deliver my soul from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dog!
Save me from the mouth of the lion!
You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen!

I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:
You who fear the LORD, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted,
and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.

From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will perform before those who fear him.
The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the LORD!
May your hearts live forever!

All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD,
and all the families of the nations shall worship before you.
For kingship belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations.

All the prosperous of the earth eat and worship;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
even the one who could not keep himself alive.
Posterity shall serve him;
it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation;
they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it.

Today we reflect on Maundy Thursday, which commemorates the Last Supper and Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

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CALL TO WORSHIP

Children, come and receive Jesus Christ. He has come wearing flesh, the one mediator between God and man, offering peace with God in Himself. Take and eat and delight in fellowship with your Father. He has come drawing near to sinners, offering life to the very ones who would doubt and betray him. His life of obedience and faith is given freely, repent and believe! Drink and rejoice, Christ’s righteousness is yours! He has come taking sin upon himself, submitting to the way of the cross, crucifying and resurrecting our fallen humanity. Come and live in his resurrected life, for this is his body and blood given for you. Children, come and behold our self-giving Lord. May we trust in the true nourishment of this feast that leads to eternal life.

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CREDITS

Call to Worship - Carrie Thompson Matthew 26:17-30 - Liann Jensen Reflection on Maundy Thursday - Confesor Martinez "Help My Unbelief" - written by Samantha Connour Benediction - Wes Oaks

music mixed & mastered by Alec Watson produced at edited by David MacKay

During this most Holy Week, members of our church have prepared daily meditations on the movements of Christ into death. We invite you to listen and reflect as we prepare for the celebration of new dawn on Easter Sunday.

There is no one like Jesus. And his love is ours!

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CALL TO WORSHIP

Brothers and Sisters, our God is a loving Father We come boldly to you, God. We are safe in your arms.

He invites us all to sit, none are turned away from this table. We are hungry for life, God, fill us with yourself.

Our God is vulnerable with us, He embraces us as we continue to throw punches, He takes off his armor though we do not lay down our swords. You alone are love, O God, and to you we cry out Abba, Father.

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CREDITS

Call to Worship - Abbey Kosterman Matthew 26:14-25 - Blinn Connour Reflection on Spy Wednesday - Stan Dyl "Psalm 92" - written by Samantha Connour Benediction - Wes Oaks

music mixed & mastered by Alec Watson produced at edited by David MacKay

During this most Holy Week, members of our church have prepared daily meditations on the movements of Christ into death. We invite you to listen and reflect as we prepare for the celebration of new dawn on Easter Sunday. There is no one like Jesus. And his love is ours!

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CALL TO WORSHIP

Let all the earth be silent before the Lord our God. Though we accuse Him of being far off, He is our Shepherd. Though we trust in our efforts, He is our salvation. Though we deny Him, He is our peace. When death loomed before Him, he did not look for an escape. When he was wrongfully accused, He did not seek vindication. When the wrath of God was upon Him, He bore it unto death. Who is like him in all the earth? Where else can hope be found? Our Father, as we prepare to worship, teach us to forsake our self-preserving and self-exalting thoughts. We need to be saved in the name of the one who gave himself over to death to defeat it. He is Jesus: our perfect sacrifice, and the light of the World.

We look to Him, Amen.

//

CREDITS

Call to Worship - Liann Jensen Scripture Reading - Abbey Kosterman Reflection on Holy Tuesday - Jordan Koczot "Psalm 23" - written by Alec Watson Benediction - Wes Oaks

music mixed & mastered by Alec Watson produced at edited by David MacKay

During this most Holy Week, members of our church have prepared daily meditations on the movements of Christ into death. We invite you to listen and reflect as we prepare for the celebration of new dawn on Easter Sunday .

There is no one like Jesus. And his love is ours!

//

CALL TO WORSHIP People of God, rejoice! Your King is here! He is Jesus, the true King of Israel! Hosanna to the son of David!

Jesus is the promised one, the Savior we have longed for! Hosanna in the highest heaven! Hosanna to Jesus our King!

Praise God! He has come! We celebrate and shout for joy to our God! King Jesus, bring Israel to glory! Show us the power of God! Set us free that we may flourish as your people!

Gentle and riding a donkey, he comes. We are stirred to worship, for in Jesus we see the ancient words of prophecy fulfilled. We are stirred, for this gentle King brings us hope that a new day is dawning!

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Come, Lord Jesus! Establish us as your people. May we never seek out another ruler or judge, but ever follow you!

Jesus, lead us into your Kingdom. We know you are from God and we delight to call you King. We lay everything before you. May your kingdom come!

//

Credits Call to Worship - Erin Bourne Scripture Reading - Avery Bergin Reflection on Holy Monday - Morgan Gagne "Hosanna" - written by Alec Watson Benediction - Wes Oaks

music mixed & mastered by Alec Watson produced at edited by David MacKay

Interaction with God is not defined by principles and formulas. God is a personal being. Therefore, in prayer, we do not have a means for obtaining clarity from God, but rather an avenue for expressing relationship with him. This is troubling to us. We would prefer that in our prayers God meet us with clear explanations about why certain events are happening in our lives or about how best to navigate through them. What he most often meets us with instead is silence. God listens to our prayers. He hears us. But the language of his answers is a mysterious tongue from a far-off country inaudible to the natural ear. We must learn to hear him. And the discomfort and discipline required for that process tempts us to abandon personal relationship for mechanistic principles. It is so much easier to receive God as a list of decrees than it is to engage him as friend and Father. It is so much more comfortable to explain theology than it is to know this untamed God.

For people of faith, the seeming inaction of God amid our trouble is humiliating. The one we have trusted and heralded and staked our reputation to can seem to leave us flapping in the wind. In such moments, those who would deride our faith are given ammunition to snicker under their breath or even openly mock us. Being a Christian can be quite embarrassing. And the current trajectory of our Western culture indicates there will be greater embarrassments to come. Yet these dreadful incidents, when our faces blush and our heads droop, are not what they seem. God's apparent absence is nothing of the sort. He is profoundly present in our embarrassment. In fact, the place of embarrassment is where he daily lives. No one is more derided, snickered at, or mocked than our God. We see that historically in the life and death of Jesus. And we witness it firsthand when people in our day scoff at God's power or love. "He cannot save himself," they sneered at Jesus on the cross. "He must be weak or not care," they say dismissively of God today. The life of faith steps into that same place of being ridiculed alongside our God. Jesus came to bear human shame with us, so that we all might bear divine humiliation with him.

In our zeal to forge the good life apart from God, we trample one another and we trample ourselves. Our strivings to build wealth and carve out easy living often come at the expense of noticing what really matters. We don't see how much destruction we are leaving in our wake. But there are moments when the horrible reality of our broken hearts and our broken world insists on being known -- moments when God removes the veil and shows us ourselves. These are desperate moments. And the only faithful act when confronted with our desperate condition is to give up. This is where the Spirit leads us, to give up on trusting our judgments, to give up on leaning into our strengths, to give up on believing in our goodness. He leads us to resignation, to letting go of the false life we have propped up with cardboard and duct tape. And when the fraud crumbles, we discover that there in the rubble of our failures, a sure and true life awaits us. Because it is there, in the scrap heap of humiliation, that a sure and true savior has come to meet us.

Every waking moment of life in this world is wearisome. From your very birth, you were driven toward sleep by the tiring experience of simply being awake. And sleep has remained a constant and necessary friend ever since. This is no accident. God has given you the liturgy of waking and sleeping to forge understanding within your bones of the frailty of humanity. You are always wearying, ever passing away. You have come from dust and to dust you will return. Yet, your dusty life is not without beauty. God himself has infused your frail members with his glory. He has given you these days to know joy and sorrow, love and hate. The time is yours to spend, to weary yourself with the rich and meaningful business of being. You need not despise weariness; it is a sign of life spent. And God is faithful. He gives you sleep and new morning. And one day soon, he will give you death and resurrection. Rejoice you weary! Eternal rest nears.

The hard places of our lives often trigger memories of lighter days and longings to return there. We recall times when our world felt more like home. Hours spent swinging with childhood friends in the school yard. Prayers and laughter offered up around the family dinner table. Conversation and romance on the front stoop stretching well beyond sundown. We are sick for home. Yet this ache for the good ole days is not rooted in the sweetness of the past as we suppose. In truth, our past is most often no sweeter than our present; it's only buffed to a rosy sheen by selective forgetfulness. This ache then, this homesickness, stems from elsewhere. Could it be that we are most nostalgic for a home we have never known? Could it be that our ache has more to do with hope than memory? The people of God have always looked back on the goodness of God's past provision and found resource for faith in those stories. But those stories, no matter how good, are mere shadows of the provision to come. When Jesus looked back on time spent with his dear friend Lazarus, he wept. And then he imagined in hope, called Lazarus from the grave, and proved for all time that even death cannot prevent us getting home.

Every person in this broken world is guilty of wrongdoing. And, at times, we can even admit it. The question is what to do in the wake of our misdeeds, when people are hurting on account of us and we feel the weight of responsibility. The default reaction of our twisted hearts is regret. We expend much time and energy wishing we had done right, even fantasizing about what might have been. This regret often leads into vain attempts at balancing scales. We try to atone for our sin with acts of charity or sacrifice. But God offers us another way, an untwisting of the heart. In the Psalms, we are given prayers not of regret, but contrition. Whereas regret traffics in self-preservation and damage control, contrition yields broken-heartedness and love. Regretful people want nothing more than to wipe failures off their record by any means possible. Contrite people, on the other hand, have given up on salvaging their record and have cast themselves into the mercy and humiliation of God's love.

We are afraid, all of us. And it is no use pretending otherwise. The stoics who lean hard on such pretense wind up dismantling their souls and cutting off the tender places of the heart until love and mercy wither. That is folly. The alternative is to acknowledge our fear, which is no easy thing. Our fears encircle and overwhelm us. They fester in the soil of our rotting flesh, spawning nausea and panic. And with good reason. Our world threatens loss and exposure and insignificance. We might come to ruin or be found out or maybe even be forgotten. These fears are very real. And faith in God is not a some clever means to help us avoid them. On the contrary, faith in God only forms as the nausea and panic from our fears run their course. In other words, the comfort of faith can only attend the fearful. To deny fear is to reject faith. Jesus shows us a better way. "Join me on the fear-filled road to the cross," he bids us, "and God will meet us there."

Our God is a consuming fire. He is dangerous, fearless, fully alive. And he will stop at nothing to make persons of that same cloth. Look at the heroes of our faith: Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab. Who among them lived in quiet safety? None. They were murdered, displaced, mocked, threatened, and abandoned. They died in faith, having not yet laid hold of the promises they hoped for. Yet in death, they escaped exile in this world that they might enter the city God had prepared for them. This is the life of faith, experiencing the abandonment and alienation of this world in hope for a new world to come. We are consumed in fire here that we might live in fire there. Jesus cried from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." And this author and finisher of our faith now cries those same words through us. Our head has broken through. Surely, his body will follow.

All people are stamped with the divine image and capable of much beauty. But we are also twisted, broken and tied up in knots within ourselves. And this brokenness haunts us. We want so badly to be rid of it that we cover it over with an artificial version of ourselves, an imposter who masquerades as the righteous hero we all wish to be. For those who wear the mask well, the broken soul within is left to sink deeper into insecurity and fear. Who would love me, we wonder, if my greatest flaws were known? Who could embrace such a ruinous person as me? In Psalm 69, the ancient King David is horrified to discover that even his best imposter has failed to secure the love and embrace of those around him. All his acts of righteousness have yielded nothing but reproach. His image now a tattered mess, he is left with only the insecure and weary self that he had sought so fiercely to be rid of. Yet it is that very needy person who discovers the care of God, a tender mercy no mask could provide.

The saddest things are always connected in some way to what is most beautiful, most joyful, most sacred. We weep over the loss of what is most worth possessing. So then, to spurn grief is to diminish the value and meaning of life. When we suppress our tears, we suppress acknowledging just how precious the gifts of creation truly are. A broken marriage is worthy of sorrow. Likewise, estrangement from friends or family deserves heartache. In fact, it is only from within these anguished places that we can fully see the treasures God has given. Just as absence can make the heart grow fonder, grief can fill the heart with worship. Jesus knew this and so let his great sorrows wash over him. He wept often, whenever the loss of something worthy cried out for it. And from his vantage point behind these many tears, he learned to see the world and the people in it for all they are -- lovely, needy, tender. Being familiar with grief taught Jesus to love.

Our world teems with beauty and opportunity. There is much good here. But it is not our home. We are exiles in this place, sojourners passing through on our way to a new and better world. Lest we forget this reality and seek more from our natural life than it can ever give, we are haunted by loneliness. Every person has experienced loneliness, and it is an ever present ghost within us. There are times when we cannot deny its presence. Times when the noise of life quiets and we are alone with our thoughts and our fears and our longings. Many of us spend much effort avoiding such times. Yet it is precisely those moments when we receive the clearest sign from the heavens. God is speaking in our loneliness. And he is telling us that all the love and care of our families and dearest friends cannot rescue us from this exile. He is telling us that we were made for much closer contact than even these relationships can provide. He is calling us into his very being. He is calling us home. Loneliness is holy, indeed.

The desire for vengeance in the face of injustice is an undeniable part of the human experience. And this desire reflects the divine. God himself desires vengeance and has every right to carry it out. But God is also merciful -- so merciful that he ultimately absorbs his desire for vengeance into his very person. That's the cross. That's forgiveness. Yet the road to forgiveness is not short. It winds through that swampy longing for vengeance. In fact, unless a person is willing to admit their longing for vengeance and give voice to it, they cannot make their way to forgiveness. The Psalms of vengeance are God's provision for anyone who has experienced injustice -- and that's all of us. He invites us to pray these Psalms and give voice to our vengeful longings so that we might begin walking the same long road to forgiveness that he did before us. He invites us to stop pretending that we are more gracious than him and instead simply follow his Son to the cross.

Invariably, the turn of the year highlights human longing. What are New Year's resolutions except attempts to grab hold of some fulfillment, to satisfy our longings for slimmer frames and fatter wallets and deeper loves. These pursuits are not evil. But they also are not the highest good that our longings offer us. There are far weightier jewels to be found in the throes of longing than in the quenching of it. In truth, our longings are words from our Maker. They signal to us that this broken world is not as it should be, that we were not made to make our home amid ashes. They point us to hope beyond what we can see, to imagine relief that is not here to grasp. So pursue fitness and prosperity and romance, yes! But, more importantly, peer through those tattered goods to glimpse a new home rising from the ashes, and a Holy One bidding us come.

The kings of the earth give us little more than ruin. Even their greatest strengths will fail. But their is a king of heaven who has made the earth his concern. And he has brought the kingdom of heaven to us -- all the way to us. It is a kingdom that requires no toil, since its king is ever at rest and ever sharing his rest with us. Do you know this rest? It is not some distant reality, but rather a present and manifest gift for every hour. King Jesus is true, and his rest is here and now and all around -- in the heart-lifting joy of laughter, and the body-soothing peace of sleep, and the soul-filling presence of children. These are gifts that no earthly king need ruin. Only look and see.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

— Albert Camus

Everywhere we look in our city, we encounter needs. The children of our city need better education. The impoverished in our city need more support. The marginalized people groups in our city need swift and consistent justice. The immigrants and refugees in our city need hospitality. These realities provoke many of us to anger or despair. And some of us rage at the cruel disdain we hear from those in positions of power. Yet, righteous as this indignation may be, we often fail to turn its barbs on ourselves. We, too, are people in positions of power who levy cruel disdain at the needy, maligning those from beyond our urban scope who possess different sorts of needs than we typically know or see. We are what we hate, the rightful objects of our righteous rage. But deliverance is close at hand, if only the zeal of our self-righteous crusading would push us toward meeting needs. It is there, in the kindness and generosity of attending those who hurt, that we will discover our own poverty. In fact, it is in the blooming of generosity, not rage, that we discover we belong among the most needy of all. This is our rescue, to bleed.

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF SERMON

The Generous Will Bleed
A sermon delivered by Pastor Mark Bergin at The Painted Door Church in Chicago

What a month this November is shaping up to be. Anybody else feeling emotionally exhausted? It seems like we've done enough gut-wrenching, score-watching for a lifetime. Between the World Series and the election, and the results of both, at least from my perspective, they were rather surprising. And now, here we are. The Cubs are world champions. And Mr. Trump is president-elect and nothing really makes sense anymore, does it? It's as though the whole world's been turned upside down. Lovable Losers, now an emerging Dynasty it seems, and all of the familiar kind of political party lines of the last century are now bent and twisted into new shapes, perhaps irrevocably.

It's a very different world. It feels rather suddenly like a whole new order has been ushered in, and in a very short period of time. And I have no doubt that there are some among our number who are anxious about this new landscape, even fearful about what this new landscape might bring with it. Surely, there are also some among us who are hopeful, who are optimistic that perhaps these changes will shake loose some of the entrenched brokenness in our political system. But either way, emotions are charged and there is great potential in this moment for divisiveness. Great potential for us to find ourselves at odds with one another, even here among our number, and definitely throughout our nation.

So what I want to do today is look to the Psalms, as we have been looking to the Psalms, and seek to map some of those anxieties, some of those fears, some of those hopes, onto the Prayer-Book of the Psalms in hopes that we might find some unifying force there. Something that would tamp down on our rushing to political ideologies that would divide us. Something that would call us back to what is our true identity in Christ, our true identity in the love of Christ, and life together in that love. Now it just so happens that our preaching calendar has us looking at Psalm 49 today. And there could hardly be a more appropriate Psalm to read for this particular moment than this one.

Listen to these early lines in this Psalm verses 5 through 9 of Psalm 49:

Why should I fear in times of trouble, when the iniquity of those who cheat me surrounds me, those who trust in their wealth and boast of the abundance of their riches? Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson God has filled his world with reflections of himself. And he stamped his very image onto the frame of our humanity. Yet for all this commonality and shared identity in Him, we are perpetually given to divisiveness. We see our differences not as varied pieces in a mosaic of God's image, but rather as opportunities to differentiate ourselves. Each of us holds our particular expression of God's life in highest esteem. And we make threats that if others fail to become more like us, we will reject or abandon them. But it is not sameness that will finally bring us together. It is oil. God anointed His Son in His Spirit, and the oil of that Spirit grew Jesus up into full maturity to move toward impoverished, broken, and even criminal people with healing. And when Jesus poured out that same Spirit of healing on all flesh, people from every tribe and background began to discover a love and forbearance for one another that is nothing less than the fullness of God alive in them.

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Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

— Igor Stravinsky Every victim of betrayal or cruelty knows that forgiveness is near impossible to give. But when the roles reverse and we are the perpetrator of betrayal or cruelty, we are surprised to discover that forgiveness is just as hard to receive. God has done the near impossible in laying down his life to forgive sinners. Now, the question is whether those sinners will receive it. Many will not, since the experience of being forgiven reduces our standing in the world; it undercuts our significance and demotes our egos. Yet, for those driven to a place where forgiveness offers the only way out, this humiliation becomes the doorway into blessing. Forgiveness demands that we give up hope in the goodness and grandeur of ourselves. And having relinquished such dead and empty hopes, we are free to discover the fullness and life of hope in the Forgiving One.

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To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

— Simone Weil In the incarnation, God did not burst into the world out of nowhere. He was born of a woman, given a name, and therein inextricably connected to a family and national identity that stretched back generations. When God became a man, he rooted himself in human history. The stories of the Israelites became his heritage. Their longings become his longings. Their hopes, his hopes. Jesus attached his well-being, his vocation, and his destiny to a people and a place. And everything he did sprung up from there. In fact, God had prepared this people and place specifically for his Son to be rooted in. Never mind that Israelite history was riddled with unfaithfulness. Never mind that the Jews rejected Jesus as their messiah. Never mind that this story of his life led him to crucifixion. Despite all that, Jesus never tried to escape his roots. He never tried to write a different story for himself. He remained true to who he was and faced all that came along with it. And ultimately, his roots yielded life as the story ended in resurrection.

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Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

— Corrie ten Boom We know far less about the world and our lives than we admit to others or even ourselves. We prefer to pretend that with enough careful observation and rational thought, we can discern the dangers and opportunities around us. In fact, our condition is far more desperate than that. We are as drivers caught in a dense fog with only the next few yards of road lines visible ahead. To depend on only what we can see will bring sure ruin. But we are not alone in this journey. The Lord of the fog is with us and for us. He makes no promise that he will burn away the mist to grant us clarity, nor that he will clear obstacles to spare us from calamity. What he does promise is to love us, preserve us, and finally lead us home. No fables. No propaganda. Just trustworthy promises from a trustworthy God.

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I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, ‘An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul;’ for there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror.

— John Calvin on The Psalms Jesus grew up as a Jew, praying and singing The Psalms. These prayers and songs defined his spiritual life in communion with his Father. They became his thoughts, his words, his cries of anguish and of joy. To read the Psalms, then, is to read the heart of Jesus. And to pray and sing the Psalms is to participate in the humanity of Jesus. The Psalms include the full range of human experience, longing, vengeance, comfort, delight, nostalgia, weariness, grief, etc. And Jesus lived into that full humanity. As he went, he shared every aspect of it with his Father. He offered up his life completely, holding nothing back. We, likewise, are invited into that journey, to step into the full humanity of Jesus and his communion with God along the way. We are invited to become fully human, to manifest the full anatomy of the human soul. And in so doing, to know and be known by the God and Father of us all.

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God made all people to live in relationship with him and harmony with one another. The fracturing of that beautiful world is borne of human rebellion, our rejection of dependence on God and insistence that we can forge a life on our own. Nevertheless, God cares for his creatures. He loves us and comes to save us. He is the Good Shepherd, who will risk everything to chase down even a single wayward sheep. And when he catches us, the angels sing. In our running from God, we never wanted to get caught. We dreaded it. Yet somehow, the heavenly celebration of the moment can turn our dread into dancing. The music of God can sweep as up into hope and faith and remembrance of who we were made to be. This is salvation, when repentance becomes our song and death in Jesus our new life.

Suffering hurts. Suffering alone hurts like hell. The sting of suffering, the real harm of it, is in its capacity to isolate us. When we are mired in some agony, we are sure that our plight has disqualified us from communing with any other person. After all, who would climb down into this mess with me? Who could be bothered to hear or know of my pitiable state? Jesus once told of a man who found himself in just that condition -- bleeding, abandoned, left for dead. And it was not the self-styled do-gooders who proved willing to help. They were too concerned with being on the right side of history. As it turned out, the one willing to help was the one without regard for reputation, the one moved by compassion, not rightness. The Good Samaritan broke the religious and cultural codes of ancient Palestine, engaging in shameful, impure deeds to meet a lonely sufferer with love. Such is the love of God. He breaks taboos, loses reputation, and enters shame to meet us in our pain. He takes us by the hand and speaks good news: "You are not alone. Therefore suffer, hurt, join others in their place of shame. And you will not be burned."

The Kingdom of Heaven is not like our kingdoms here on earth. In our kingdoms, goods and services are exchanged according to their value. To acquire something, one must pay something. This transactional economy requires careful attention to worth and merit. We must determine the value of things in order to rightly do business. But in the Kingdom of Heaven, business is done quite differently. This is due to all the riches of heaven belonging to a most generous God who shares them freely and indiscriminately. He gives everything away without regard to repayment or who is more deserving. So then, in the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no reason to track worth or merit. That careful practice of determining value, which we have so long mastered here, will be of no help to us there. In fact, all judgments of our own value will be trampled in a rush of extravagant, heavenly celebration -- a fitting end to us all.

These two parables occur so quickly you could easily just pass them by in the text. But they both speak a potent message of the abundant joy at the heart of the hidden mystery of Christ. The mystery is hidden, not because it is a secret, but because it is so much at odds with the predilections and reasonings of the human heart and society. It is hidden, because it is does not seem to fit our framework of cause and effect; and so we keep blindly operating as if it does not exist. But when someone does discover it, the deal seems so good that it can scarcely be believed. Even at the cost of literally everything, it seems but a small price to pay. No buyer’s remorse, no second thoughts; acquiring this treasure is unequivocally worthwhile and satisfying. And to pile mystery upon mystery, this treasure people so gladly pay everything for? It is being given away for free.

Our world teems with beauty and goodness and food. It is a verdant, lush field, planted by its Master. Many of the creatures who walk the pathways of this field eat its produce and are filled with life. But the Master has an enemy who sows weeds among the crops, and leads many creatures into sickness and even death. What is to be done? The servants of the Master long to rid the field of its weeds, to restore it to its proper glory. Yet the Master will not bless their efforts. "Let the wheat and weeds grow together," he tells them. "And I will sort it out in the end." These are hard words for his servants to hear. They see the pain and sorrow that the weeds cause. And plucking just a few here or there seems such a ready solution. "No," the Master says, "You're no good at farming and will wind up destroying too much wheat by mistake."

What right does a judge have to ignore evidence and rule on the basis of whim? Such a judge would not remain on the bench for long. Public outcry would demand a resignation. And so it goes in the story of God. Jesus compared his Father to an unrighteous judge, one who renders verdicts according to his desires rather than the merits of a case. Jesus said this judge, like his Father, is one who disregards reputation and forfeits position, if only to be spared hearing plaintiffs blather on with their self-justifying arguments any longer. Turns out, God is not interested in weighing what the parties in his court deserve. He means to rule in their favor, no matter the cost to himself or his family. And that cost has proven quite high. God has lost the public's respect and been rejected by those more upright than him. He has suffered great shame and wound up slumming for friends among sinners. Yet for all that, the queue outside his courthouse still stretches around the block as earnest citizens take turns making their case to an empty room. The verdict is already in: There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus!

There is only one God, maker and king of the heavens and the earth. But for all that glory and power and prestige, he's no elitist. In fact, in social engagements, he's happy to slum it. He throws parties that would make other deities blush. And he spares no expense for food and drink so fine that his boorish guests couldn't appreciate it if they tried. Jesus spoke in parable of such a party, where the king opened his doors to anyone who would come. And when only riffraff arrived, reeking of whatever gutters and taverns they'd crawled from, the host had little choice but to bring out fine new clothes. Even the most disreputable kings would have their guests feel refreshed for meal time. So then, when one man declined the new outfit, he suffered the same terrible judgment as those who had declined the invitation altogether. God is no elitist. All are welcome in his home and freely given proper dress to be there. But that may be bad news for some, since his home includes every corner of the heavens and the earth; and he has plans to make it all shine.

Best as we can see it, there is always ample reason to pretend we are doing well. The discomfort of exposed weakness presses us toward self-righteousness and feigned decency. We live out our days aiming to convince this world and God and mostly ourselves that we are on track. But all of this religious posturing is worthless. Jesus once told of two brothers, one who openly defied his father only to relent later, the other who took a posture of obedience only to never follow through. "Which of the two did the will of his father?" Jesus asked. A lifetime of folly is swallowed up if only the will of the Father is carried out. By the same token, a lifetime of good intention is of no value if the will of the Father is rejected. "And this is the will of my Father," Jesus said, "that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." The final judgment of God will not be between those who looked the heavenly part and those who didn't. His final judgment will concern only this: belief in his Son.

Like a man scattering seeds in every direction, God the Father sows the death of his son into every crevice of humanity. In this parable, it is the way humanity responds that is highlighted. And the less we interfere, the more fully will that death yield its new life in us.

Cries for justice feel so right as they rush from our guts into the air of this unjust world. They feel right, because they are right. When we have been wronged or witnessed some wrong, it's as though all the cosmos lifts its voice with us in a chorus of indignation. This is the problem of forgiveness. How can we shut our mouths when our words drip with righteous judgments and demand that the world be made better. Why should we even care to try? It is only when we find ourselves standing opposite that chorus, looking down the barrel of cosmic judgments against our own misdeeds, that we are pressed to search the skies for something kinder than justice. And to our great surprise, when we care to look closely, the chorus of the heavens turns out to be mercy. Jesus invites the world to sing this new and foolish song, lest we cling to our rightness and remain forever out of tune with life himself.

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Learn more Our coming Master is long delayed. And the world is torn to pieces in waiting. Violence and hate swell in the hearts of us all and spill into the public square as divisive sloganeering and smug self-righteousness and rivers of blood. Jesus told us we would face this moment. He told us he may not come until the second or third watch of the night, long after our eyes grow heavy with sleep and our hearts weary of hope. But he warned us to endure even then, even now, to keep serving his meal to all the house. He warned us against abandoning our culinary post to thrash about in the revelry of the faithless. Especially for those of us who have known the nourishment of body and blood and tasted the life of the divine table, may we never go searching for more fortified food or more potent drink. Though all the world would neglect this meal, may we remain and be found as servers when the Master suddenly returns.

God is unimpressed with the labor done in his fields. He keeps no time clock. He measures no yields. Thus, his workers cannot differentiate themselves from one another. And at the end of the day, they're all paid well. Overachievers and slackers, the ambitious and the lazy, are all lumped together side by side and given equal share. Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to a vineyard operated in this manner, wherein the master is bent on displaying outrageous generosity to any old bum who may stumble into work. In fact, the only qualification for receiving full pay from this nutty master seems to be showing up by quitting time. That's great news for anyone who stinks at life. Now, if only the winners could get over themselves, everyone might enjoy happy hour together.

God alone possesses the knowledge of good and evil. And the attempts by his creatures to grasp it from him have proven ruinous. There will come a day when God unveils fully what he calls good and what he calls evil. Until that day, the veil continues to obscure this knowledge from us. So then, much of what we think good will turn out to be evil, in the eyes of God. And likewise, much of what we think evil will turn out to be good. The truth is, we cannot ever be sure whether we are doing good or doing evil. We are too blind. But we can respond to God's revelation of himself in faith. Apart from me, you can do nothing, he tells us. To trust these words is to cast yourself onto God's Christ, to depend with all you are on his kind acts toward you and his loving acts through you. The people of God are sheep, their only hope found in the good shepherd who leads them.

The Kingdom of God cannot be seen with the natural eye nor understood with the natural mind. It is all around us and even within us, yet it is hidden and will remain so until its King returns to earth. The life of faith, then, is a life spent in waiting. And only those who expect and accept such waiting will persevere to the end. Jesus once told of ten maidens left waiting for the start of a wedding celebration due to the delayed arrival of the groom. Five of the maidens brought extra oil for their lamps in anticipation of a long wait. The five others did not. When the groom finally arrived, only the five with extra oil were ready for him. These five were not particularly kind maidens, refusing to share their oil with the others. And they weren't even particularly resilient, having fallen asleep during the wait, just like the rest. What distinguished them from the others was only that they came ready for a long wait. When the wait was over, the five empty-handed maidens scurried off in search of an all-hours oil shop, while the five with oil in hand were there to receive the groom in gladness and go inside to the feast.

The parable of the coins, recorded with some variation by Luke and Matthew, is not investment advice. In both accounts of Jesus' teaching, the parable slows down and zooms in when the unfaithful servant seeks to justify his refusal to invest the money his king provided him. "I was afraid of you, because you are a severe man," the servant says in Luke's telling. Likewise, in Matthew, the servant accuses his king of cruelty. This false belief about a king that is truly generous explains the unfaithful servant's behavior. He thought his king severe and so lived a cautious and fearful life, tiptoeing to avoid missteps and loss. He hoped this sort of risk aversion would spare him from the wrath of his king. But he had it all wrong. This was a king who despised caution for its own sake, one who much preferred risking everything for the grandest of possible payoffs. That's why he provided his servants with house money, so they'd go for broke. As it turned out, this king had no wrath for those who played fast and loose with his generosity. His wrath was for those who did all they could to avoid it.

Why did Jesus teach in parables? He told us why: "So that those outside may see but not perceive and hear but not understand." Parables tell secrets in a way that keeps them secret. They are simple stories that point to the life and peace and joy of another kingdom, all the while keeping that kingdom hidden from public view. So, then, we cannot listen to the parables in the same way we listen to other earthly stories. We cannot look at them from a distance, nor assess their validity from outside their grip. Jesus said, "Take care how you hear." By this, he did not mean that his teaching was only for those clever enough to solve a riddle. On the contrary, cleverness is our greatest obstacle. To hear the secrets of the parables, we need only enter the secret ourselves. After all, a lamp is placed on it stand only for those who would come inside to see.

Most of us have built up, or at least inherited, an image of Jesus that portrays him as a super hero, handling temptations and dispensing miracles out of the power of his divinity. But in his flesh Jesus was truly a man, who suffered and grew and learned just like all the rest of us. Hebrews 12 describes him as the “author and perfecter” of our faith. And faith, by its very nature, is blind. For all the expectations of deliverance and triumph that people placed, and that we still place, on him as Messiah, Jesus’ faith led him to fulfill them all and more - but in the most perplexing and mysterious of ways: by dying on a cross.

God is one, yet he is three. He is a complete and whole communion, in whom there is distinction without division, submission without subjugation, authority without hubris. This life of the Trinity is perfect love, not some abstract ideal but a lived out reality. The relationships between Father, Son, and Spirit are the definition of love. And there is no such thing as love apart from them. Creation, then, is an invitation for other beings to join into the divine dance, to exist within the triune communion. And re-creation, the rescue of a world that has rejected that communion, demonstrates that God's invitation stands. Live in me, He says. Share in my life, my love, my being. And not as fourth, fifth, or sixth persons of the triune communion, but as participants in the second person, as one flesh with the Son of God. All the contours and texture of divine life and love are at hand for the body of Christ. Every resource of the cosmos is ours to overcome division, subjugation, and hubris. We are partakers of the Trinitarian life. Nothing can separate us from God or one another.

At Pentecost, God poured out his Spirit on all flesh, sharing the life and humanity of Christ with the whole world. But the world does not readily receive him. We resist, fighting to preserve our independent lives, to hold up our private dreams and comforts. We don't want the weakness of Christ to overtake us or make us new. We'd rather be a miserable somebody than a joyful nobody. And so we look for teachers and leaders that will allow us to justify our self-preservation. The Apostle Paul was no such teacher or leader. He insisted on death to self and life in Christ. And he would not abide people deluding themselves into thinking they could have Christ without his cross. "Test yourselves," he wrote to the Corinthians, charging them to see and acknowledge whether Jesus was their all.

The Apostle Paul knew that churches must appoint and follow qualified leaders to flourish in Christ. But what constitutes a qualified leader. Paul lists qualifications for elders and deacons in some of his New Testament letters. And those lists reflect hard lessons learned in his own leadership experience. Qualification of leadership is not foremost about upholding a standard of conduct. Rather, it is about winning a hearing with people. Qualified leaders do conduct themselves uprightly, but only for the sake of building relational trust within the church. Leaders who no one trusts cannot lead, no matter how upright their conduct may be. The only way finally to win the trust of any people or person is to be mistreated by them and endure that sorrow all the way through--until laughter returns.

God's grace lives and breaths in a consuming fire that burns up our declarations of independence. To receive grace is to lose all the merits and demerits we've been propping ourselves up with all these years. To receive grace is to be stripped bare with no safe place to find shelter. To receive grace is to sit in the flames of God and be scorched in the holy. But who among us would face such heat of our own volition. None, of course. We are driven to grace, backed in against our natural wills. In loss, in sorrow, in failure, in regret, we finally give in. Our clutching fingers loosen. Our shouts to be spared fade like vapor. And there, in that quiet surrender, as the flames engulf our bodies and lick at our poisoned flesh, we see him. Jesus, the Christ of God, standing there in holy fire. He is the Son of Fire, a whole person forged in divine grace. And he is speaking to us now: "My grace is sufficient for you."

Our world understands only those ministries borne of strength. It is licensed doctors who care for the sick, trained psychologists who tend to the grieving, wealthy philanthropists who serve the poor. But the ministry of Christ is borne of weakness. And his ministers must learn to minister in it. The Apostle Paul was a man of great strengths, yet God nurtured him into weakness through suffering. And Paul embraced this weakness in both his life and ministry. He came to understand that his weakness was his greatest asset in loving people, his greatest qualification for pastoral care, his greatest boast for apostolic legitimacy. For it was only in his weakness, that Paul could offer Christ.

The only false gospels worth worrying about are the ones that sound good, feel right, and taste delicious. The Apostle Paul warned the Christians in Corinth to be on guard against those who disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, yet preach a different Jesus in a different spirit. He compared these false apostles to Satan, who disguises himself as an angel of light and deceives people into seeking life apart from God. The point: false gospels don't come with warning labels. In fact, they come glowing with warmth and light. By contrast, the true spiritual food of Christ often lacks in apparent luster by comparison. A steady diet of the true apostolic gospel will not often exhilarate those who eat it. It enters the body like daily bread and table wine. No fanfare. No celebration. Just honest food unto life.

The Apostle Paul cared deeply about the Christians in Corinth. He wanted them to walk in Christ, to let go of the false hopes of prestige and hedonism that so gripped their first century culture. Yet, he had a growing sense that he was losing their collective ear. How to get people to trust you again when you have hard words to speak to them? This is among the most awkward places a leader can be. And Paul's uncertainty and insecurity is apparent. Should he cite his accomplishments and credentials to assert his legitimacy and win back authority? He's not sure. Leaders never are. And that's just how God seems to like it.

The meekness and gentleness of Jesus are like fire to a lofty world. They are divine weaponry, toppling the fortresses of vanity and self-reliance. Jesus knows who he is, and there is nothing more dangerous to desperately faceless people. We don't who we are, and so we grasp after costumes of achievers, victims, stoics. But Jesus would save us. Live in me, he pleads. Surrender, and wear my face. We will be children of God together. Nothing to prove. Unafraid. Free. This is the life Jesus brings to us, a reckless and unleashed obedience to disarm our hostile land.

Generosity is not a virtue that is actively pursued in our culture. By and large, wealth is the virtue, not generosity. Even for billionaire philanthropists, the wealth comes first, then the generosity. We are much better at defending what is ours than at giving it away, and not only in the area of finances. Many of us feel starved for time, desperate for rest, or depleted of relational energy. But this passage makes little of our poverty. In the midst of our lack, God is giving generously, abundantly, and cheerfully, to supply every good thing. Most of which we didn’t even know was missing!

The salvation of God is the life of his Son made manifest in his people. Jesus lives in us. And so his way breaks out among us. The Apostle Paul had seen this salvation in the Corinthian Christians before. And he told of it to all who would listen. What's more, his previous witness of Christ in the Corinthians filled him with confidence that yet another manifestation was close at hand. He knew of their readiness to live in the Son. So too our church. We have seen Jesus alive in our midst. There is no denying it, nor setting it aside. He has vindicated his promise of new life in us. And we cannot pretend otherwise. Make ready therefore. A north wind will blow again.

Churches are to honor their pastors. But if that honor amounts to blind approval or loyalty, great harm is done both to churches and pastors. The honoring of pastors is not to spare them from critique or provide space for them to retain and cultivate their folly. Rather, the honoring of pastors is an appeal to the honorable Spirit within them. Churches can honor their pastors in hope that they will grow up into the honorable life of Christ. Accordingly, the honoring of pastors is not a passive overlooking of flesh and sin, but an active and expectant watching for God to overcome.

God cares for the needs of his people, even amid their unfaithfulness. He is a compassionate provider who does not withhold help from us, no matter the cost to himself. Yet, for all this lavish grace toward us, he asks for no payment in return. He has no need of such payment, because to spend himself for others is his joy. He is left
with no deficit. This is the mystery of the life of God, that self-emptying is fullness, that impoverishing love is the greatest wealth. Jesus lived this life, going to the cross for the joy set before him. And he now invites us, through the word of his apostle Paul, to join him. He invites us to participate in the divine and give. He invites us to excel in grace.

We all have regrets, whether big or small. Foolish decisions, lost opportunities, costly mistakes, bridges burned, words said or left unsaid. Regrets can plague us and torment us and seemingly eat us alive at times. Yet as we live long with them we find they also have a certain comfort and usefulness. The Apostle Paul delivers the hopeful but unsettling news that regrets have no place in salvation. They are not easily discarded, but there is a better comfort to be had: Jesus has borne our guilt and our grief.

The Apostle Paul spent the early half of his life mastering respectability. He spent the latter half forfeiting what he had mastered, as the fruit of the Spirit led him to a cross. He is concerned for the Corinthians that they have received the grace of God in vain, refusing to live according to that grace, holding onto respectability. Paul pleads with the people of Corinth to widen their hearts, to abandon the self-preserving ways of this world, and receive the life of faith. For we are not graced by God so that we can go on living our independent lives unmolested. We are graced by God so that he might reside in us. He has made us his temple that we would know our father and commune with Him.

God's Christ will not participate in our project of expunging our weakness. On the contrary, he has swallowed our weakness into himself, imbibing our sin and death such that it has become a part of him. And he now carries the wounds and sorrows of our failures into the new creation. Jesus is a basin into which all the broken horrors of this world are poured, even us. He takes us into himself as we are, making our many deaths his own. Resurrection, then, is not the shedding of death but the eruption of new life shaped by it. Jesus knows what it is to be a sinner, to bear the burden shame, the weight of guilt, and the cross of repentance.

God is hidden from sight amid unbelief. He is seen only through eyes of faith. To seek out proof of the treasures of God is to miss them. For they are housed in cracked vessels of clay, even the brokenness of our own frames. We rush to cover or correct our weakness and flaws. And we avert our eyes from the weakness and flaws of others, too ashamed to see or be seen. Yet it is those very weak places where the light of God shines most brightly. Only with the assurance of faith can we stare into the most frail parts of ourselves and one another. And only with those eyes of faith can our flinching, recoiling horror be transformed into delight at seeing God there.

The law is a ministry of death. The Spirit is a ministry of life. Both are needed. Both are glorious. But quite often every one of us mistakes the law's ministry of death for a life source. We look to the law with its objective standards of right and wrong to lead us into green pastures, rather than looking to the one whom the law reveals. In these moments, the ministry of the Spirit can become a foul stench, an affront to our supposed life source of letters carved in stone. Indeed, the glory of the Spirit of God is a foreign glory to our law-addicted minds. In all of this, God is patient with us. Just as he provided a veil to cover the face of Moses and obscure the glory of the law, he likewise now veils the glory of the Spirit. In mercy, he waits until the ministry of the law has done its work of condemnation and driven us into the grave. Only then does he lift the veil. For the Spirit of God is a stench of death to those who are perishing but an aroma of life to those who are already dead.

The relationship between Paul and the Corinthians is strained to such degree that he worries a change in his travel itinerary might provoke further mistrust. Paul explains that his decision not to visit the Corinthians was motivated by a desire to be patient and gracious with a particular member of their congregation. It seems Paul had directed a public and stern rebuke toward someone in a previous letter and is concerned now that his presence in Corinth might further shame this person. Paul also instructs the Corinthians to comfort and affirm love for the man in repentance, "or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow." Paul knows that whatever power shame may have to restrain immoral behavior, it is truly a design of Satan to shut people off from relationship with one another.

Is the Apostle Paul's life and the things he speaks of normative for the Christian life, or is he a super Christian? Paul wrote 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament, spelled out the gospel in the most detailed form, and experienced hardships beyond compare and heights beyond knowledge. Seeing that most of what we call doctrine in the Christian church is shaped by the words of Paul, how are we to interact with him as we read his letter to the Corinthians?

For all his grand experience, Paul is first and foremost a pastor. He feels "a divine jealousy" for the church at Corinth, wanting "to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.” That same jealousy for a pure church is apparent throughout Paul's epistles and extends to all churches in the body of Christ. Paul wants us to walk in the purity of Christ. Likewise, he advocates a Christian experience that might seem foreign but could and should be quite familiar to us. This experience is a life marked by suffering for the name of Jesus, yet with indescribable joy. Where does this life come from? Is Paul a stand out? By no means! The life that Paul lived was the life of Christ living through him. And through the great mystery of the Gospel that same life lives in us right now!

Demanding trust is a rather untrustworthy act. In fact, leaders who demand that others trust them should not be trusted at all. The Apostle Paul wanted very much for the Christians in Corinth to trust him. Somehow, perhaps through slander against Paul, that trust had eroded. But Paul would not demand it back. Instead, he wrote the letter now known as 2 Corinthians, detailing the heart, methods, and trials and of his ministry in hopes of commending himself as trustworthy. In the letter, he is eager for the church in Corinth to regain confidence in him and his fellow minister Timothy, so "that on the day of our Lord Jesus you will boast of us as we will boast of you.