Think And Let Think

There is a tremendous difference between loving one another (like Christ), and being nice. Being nice often means being quiet, and not calling out the behavior of others. Loving like Jesus however, often means speaking up and actually calling someone out. Easier said than done.

God loves us and there's nothing we can do about it.

Jesus’ peace is greater than any earthly vision we could possibly imagine. It is more powerful than any political policy, it is mightier than any magistrate’s order, it is more life giving than any piece of legislation. Jesus’ peace is revolutionary.

This country, and our love of it, flirts very closely with what Jesus called idolatry. When the country we live in becomes more important than the God who created us, when the lights in the sky on the 4th of July shine brighter than the bread and cup on this table, when we care more about what’s happening in Washington DC than what’s happening in our local community, then we have a problem. And part of the problem is that, like with David, we forget the tremendous cost of our victory.

We need Jesus to smack us across the head not with smooth stones from the wadi but with the hard wood of the cross. We need to be brought low to the ground before we can be raised high. We need to be defeated in order to be redeemed.

We complain about politics all the time. We hold our elected leaders to standards that we ourselves do not adhere to. And when they disappoint us we act as if no one could have predicted this. But we get the politicians we deserve.

Words are important. What we say often shapes what we believe and, perhaps even more importantly, it shapes how we behave.

Most of us have come of age in a world where the God of scripture has been conveyed to us through analogy after analogy, where professional Christians like me have endeavored to bring people like you closer to the divine, when the truth of the matter is that we cannot describe God, and God is the One who encounters us.

Easter boldly proclaims that at the end of our possibilities God creates a new beginning – Pentecost shows us how we take the first steps.

The whole truth of God’s testimony is that God gives us eternal life through Jesus Christ. It is that simple, yet truly profound witness that gives us the power and the courage to speak our whole truth regardless of the consequences.

Right now the contemporary church, from the realm of United Methodism to conservative evangelicalism, is struggling. The church struggles, in large part, because of our failure to recognize how we are bound to God and not to the world – such that many churches take their theological cues from the powers and principalities and assert them on scripture, rather than the other way around. It is precisely why our divisions are growing wider and our walls are growing taller.

It is in the loving of the other that we, and they, are made both human and holy. And this is at the heart of it all. We can talk about how much we love God because God loves us, but without loving our fellow human beings, we cannot know God! Let that sink in for just a moment – without love for one another, we cannot know God.

If you could saying anything to your/the church, without consequences, what would you say?

For some reason, as we mature into adulthood, our joyful play begins to fade and for some of us it completely stops. We just accept things the way they are, we make peace with the labels placed on us by society, we accept the love we think we deserve. And, more often than not, we'd rather relax than play. But not today...

All of us, particularly those of us with a self-righteous leaning, are sinners in need of God’s grace. From the racists to those who abandon their racist family members. One of the harshest realities this side of Easter is that most of us believe we are without sin, and we deceive ourselves.

Hear the Good News, the best news. Hear the three most important words you will ever hear: He is risen!

On Easter we have reason to celebrate; death has been defeated! But Easter is also a reminder that God has inaugurated a strange new world, in which all of our priorities have been flipped upside down. Are we afraid? If not, maybe we should be.

According to the strange and mysterious wisdom of God, it is in the crucified death of Jesus that all of the cosmos is altered (and altar-ed). This death makes our lives possible. This death is what makes the Christian experience intelligible. This death is at the heart of who God is. The generosity of God means the crucifixion of the Son.

We don’t gather to contemplate how Jesus would respond to a certain situation, we don’t wonder about what Jesus would do, instead we ask ourselves What Did Jesus Do? Because that question, and the struggle to answer it, is at the heart of the mystery we call faith. This night, tomorrow night, Easter Sunday, every Sunday, they’re not about what we should do. It’s about what Christ did.

During the March For Our Lives, one of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School proclaimed, "Today the revolution begins!" But he was wrong. The revolution began a long time ago, when a poor Jewish rabbi entered Jerusalem on the back of a colt.