The Dazzling Darkness of Unknowing

Reflecting on the wisdom of the mystical traditions, theologian Douglas Christie writes of spiritual darkness: 

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” says Theodore Roethke. [1]… This brings us close to the heart of how Christian mystics have long understood the task of seeing, especially the seeing that becomes possible in darkness. Gregory of Nyssa refers to this as the “seeing that consists of not seeing.” [2] Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of the “brilliant darkness” that one enters “through not seeing and not knowing.” [3]… The contemplative gaze nourished in the night is open, receptive, and free. Darkness subverts the all-too-common inclination to determine (or overdetermine) reality to fit our own narrow understanding of things. It invites instead a way of seeing rooted in simplicity, humility, and awe….  

Is this perhaps a kind of faith? Not simply a denial of faith or an assertion of faith’s impossibility, but a way of thinking about and struggling with the most difficult questions, especially those arising from fragility, pain, and absence?…. What emerges instead is an awareness that we must let them go and learn, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing put it, to “rest in the darkness.” [4]  

This sounds, perhaps, too simple. As if such rest can be found without difficulty, or that all the night asks of us is to let it surround us with its gentle, healing presence. There is little in our experience to suggest that this is so…. The experience of the night can be terrifying, bewildering, less a place to rest and heal than a dispiriting struggle with pain and absence. Still, there is also something about the enveloping darkness, its silence and stillness and depth, its inscrutability and ineffability, that comforts and soothes, that releases us from our compulsive need to account for everything, explain everything. [5]  

Translator of the mystics Mirabai Starr guides us in the wisdom of Spanish mystic John of the Cross (1542–1591): 

When the dark night descends on the soul, its radiance blinds the intellect. She can no longer formulate concepts; she doesn’t even want to. It is tempting to consider this inability to engage the intellect as a failing. It is easy to assume that you are wasting time.  

Do not force it, John wrote. Stop trying to figure it out. Drop down into a state of guileless quietude and abide there. This is no time for discursive meditation, no time for pondering theological doctrines or asserting articles of faith.  

Your only task now is to set your soul free. Take a break from ideas and knowledge…. Content yourself with a loving attentiveness toward the Holy One. This requires no effort, no agitation, no desire to taste her or feel her or understand her. Patiently persevere in this state of prayer that has no name.  

“Trust in God,” John wrote, “who does not abandon those who seek him with a simple and righteous heart.” By doing nothing now, the soul accomplishes great things

TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO JESUS WAS A LIVING EXPRESSION OF PERFECT THEOLOGY. HIS LIFE, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION REVEALED EXACTLY WHAT GOD IS LIKE.

And God was not like what we thought He was like.

Jesus seemed to do stuff God wouldn’t do. He also often seemed to contradict scripture. He was counter-cultural, challenged cruel ideology, and confronted punishing theology. He was simply better than our best understanding, and often offensively so.

For instance.

He healed people on the Sabbath, something many were convinced God wouldn’t do. “Stretch out your hand,” Jesus said, and the man with a shriveled hand “stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored.” And many of those who believed they knew best what God was like, were murderously offended. They “went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.”(See Mark 3:1-6)

Jesus seemed to value children more than His disciples thought God would. “Let the little children come to me…” He said, confronting His disciples who were in the midst of rebuking parents. “Do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (See Matt 19:14)

Jesus’ kindness and mercy toward women, especially those most oppressed, was offensively better than what the Pharisees thought about God’s kindness and mercy. “If Jesus were a prophet, he would know that the woman touching him is a sinner!” they thought with their hierarchy of disdain. (Luke 7:39)

Jesus even valued gentile women in a way God surely wouldn’t, “tell her to go away… she is bothering us” the disciples said. But Jesus ignored his disciple’s offense, engaged with the woman’s faith, and released eternal life. He was offensively better than how His followers thought God should be. (See Matt 15:21-28)

And remember when Jesus didn’t call down fire on that village? Remember when He didn’t savagely rain down holy hell on men, women, and children even though His disciples not only believed it was something God would do, they wanted God to do it. They even had biblical precedence to support their malicious offense when Jesus confronted them saying, “you know not what kind of spirit you are of.” (See Luke 9:55)

And Jesus didn’t cruelly punish that woman caught in adultery even though those who had dragged her naked before Him were certain that’s what God would do. They were so convinced that they had already picked up rocks as willing accomplices. They too pointed to scripture to justify the us or them, for or against, punishing spirit they participated in. And yet Jesus said, “where are your accusers” and there were none, not even God. (See John 8:10)

Even on the cross, torn flesh, bones out of joint, a death rattle in His lungs, Jesus just kept offending us with God’s goodness. “Father forgive them, they know not what they do,”He said, even though it sure as shit seemed like they knew what they were doing. (See Luke 23:34)

Jesus constantly did things that were better than how humanity believed God would do them. Even better than how the Bible seemed to describe what God was like. And all along the way, in every act of Greater Love, in every expression of kindness, in every interaction of forgiveness, mercy, and grace, Jesus offended people with how good He believed God was. Especially those who thought they knew God best.

And nothing has changed.

Humanity has always had ‘god-boxes.’ We have often demanded God’s goodness fit within our capacity to comprehend. We measure His forgiveness through our insecurity, fear, and shame. We balance His grace with our often-cruel thoughts about Him and ourselves. We determine the measure of His mercy and kindness based on our finite thoughts about mercy and kindness. And we use the word justice to make God small.

Mankind has been submitting the goodness of God to our broken experiences since the fall. But thankfully, Jesus is the goodness of God revealed, and He climbs inside every god-box we create and blows them up from the inside with His goodness.

Jesus continues to reveal that God is better than our best understanding, even better than our best Biblical interpretations. And He continues to confront our certainties with the Cornerstone of all certainty, Greater Love…

This article is excerpted from my book, Leaving and Finding Jesus. Jason Clark

The Questions That Come at Dusk

I will love the light for it shows me the way; yet I will love the darkness for it shows me the stars.
—Og Mandino, The Greatest Secret in the World  

Sister Joan Chittister describes darkness as a fertile place for our questions with no easy answers: 

There is a part of the soul that stirs at night, in the dark and soundless times of day, when our defenses are down and our daylight distractions no longer serve to protect us from ourselves. What we suppress in the light emerges clearly in the dusk. It’s then, in the still of life, when we least expect it, that questions emerge from the damp murkiness of our inner underworld…. These questions do not call for the discovery of data; they call for the contemplation of possibility.   

Unable to answer the questions life asks of us, we come to humble clarity and service to others.  

There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate. It is the glowing calm that comes over us when we finally surrender to the ultimate truth of creation: that there is a God and we are not it…. The clarity of it all is startling. Life is not about us; we are about the project of finding Life. At that moment, spiritual vision illuminates all the rest of life. And it is that light that shines in darkness. 

Only the experience of our own darkness gives us the light we need to be of help to others whose journey into the dark spots of life is only just beginning. It’s then that our own taste of darkness qualifies us to be an illuminating part of the human expedition. Without that, we are only words, only false witnesses to the truth of what it means to be pressed to the ground and rise again. Darkness is a mentor of what it means to carry the light we ourselves have brought to blaze into the unknown parts of life so that others may also see and take hope….  

The light we gain in darkness is the awareness that, however bleak the place of darkness was for us, we did not die there. We know now that life begins again on the other side of the darkness. Another life. A new life. After the death, the loss, the rejection, the failure, life does go on. Differently, but on. Having been sunk into the cold night of black despair—and having survived it—we rise to new light, calm and clear and confident that what will be, will be enough for us. 

Growth is the boundary between the darkness of unknowing and the light of new wisdom, new insight, new vision of who and what we ourselves have become. After darkness we are never the same again. We are only stronger, simpler, surer than ever before that there is nothing in life we cannot survive, because though life is bigger than we are, we are meant to grow to our fullest dimensions in it.  

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Learning from the Mystics: Thomas Merton Quote of the Week:  “We make ourselves real by telling the truth.  Man can hardly forget that he needs to know the truth, for the instinct to know is too strong in us to be destroyed.  But he can forget how badly he also needs to tell the truth.  We cannot know truth unless we ourselves are conformed to it.” – from No Man is an Island, p.198. Reflection  There is no freedom where there is no truth. The spiritual traditions of the world, both East and West, value the importance of truth.  Why?  Because deceit, half-truths, and lies are things that block our ability to live within reality. Within Christianity, there is Christ, the singular person around whom all Christian thought and practice center.  It is right there in the title. Christ-ianity. This Christ of faith is spoken of as “the Truth” in the Gospel of John.  “Jesus answered them, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)   Now, there is more than one way to interpret this verse, but for now let us focus on the radical claim that Jesus is “the Truth” in light of Merton’s words. Note the difference, though, that John’s Gospel often capitalizes “Truth” but here Merton does not… Merton reminds us, We are made real by the truth.We need to know the truth.We instinctually need the truth.We can forget that we need to tell the truth.We must conform to the truth to know it.  Now, why is the capitalization important?  Because all little truths help us to recognize the Truth. As we are made unreal by untruths, seek to know untruths, work against our wiring and pursue untruths, desire to tell untruths, and conform ourselves to untruths… the more and more we insulate ourselves from the Christ.  Christ is the Logos, the logic, the reason, the blueprint for everything and everyone everywhere, and even the small truths that appear to be unspiritual or non-religious find their ground of being in the Divine Truth.  So all this goes to say, as we acclimate ourselves to small truths, the more and more able we are to be free to live within and to be liberated on a larger scale by the Truth, who is Jesus of Nazareth. Prayer  Heavenly Father, we confess that we are addicted to untruths.  We ground and find our being in deceit and we can recognize the slavery that results from it.  By your Truth, set us free to become the Children of God.  Allow us the ability to notice truth, to value it, to know it, to speak it, and to cherish it, that we might, through those smaller truths, come to know You as our Truth.  Amen and amen.

Life Overview:  Who is He: Thomas Merton, OCSO (Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance)  When and Where: Born in Prades, France on January 31, 1915.  Died in Samut Prakan, Thailand on December 10, 1968.  Why He is Important: Merton is one of the clearest examples of action and contemplation of the 20th century.  Most Known For: Merton was a prolific writer and commentator on the contemplative life and global issues.  He was good friends with the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, and Thich Nhat Hahn, all while living as a Trappist monk in the cloistered monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Trappist, Kentucky. Notable Works to Check Out: Merton’s Palace of Nowhere The Contemplative HeartChristian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God Turning to the Mystics Podcast

The Gift of Darkness

Father Richard Rohr reflects on spiritual transformation and the metaphor of moving from darkness to light:  

Spiritual transformation is often thought of as movement from darkness to light. In one sense that’s true, while in another sense, it’s totally false. We forget that darkness is always present alongside the light. We know the light most fully in contrast with its opposite—the dark. Pure light blinds; shadows are required for our seeing. There is something that can only be known by going through “the night sea journey” into the belly of the whale, from which we are spit up on an utterly new shore. Western civilization as a whole has failed to learn how to honor the wisdom of darkness. Rather than teaching a path of descent, Western Christianity preached a system of winners and losers, a “prosperity gospel.” Few Christians have been taught to hold the paschal mystery of both death and resurrection.  

In many ways, the struggle with darkness has been the church’s constant dilemma. It wants to exist in perfect light, where God alone lives (see James 1:17). It does not like the shadowland of our human reality. It seems that all of us are trying to find ways to avoid the mystery of human life—that we are all a mixture of darkness and light—instead of learning how to carry it patiently through to resurrection, as Jesus did. 

There are no perfect structures and no perfect people. There is only the struggle to be whole. It is Christ’s passion (patior, the “suffering of reality”) that will save the world. Jesus says, “Your patient endurance will win you your lives” (Luke 21:19). He shows us the way of redemptive suffering instead of redemptive violence. Patience comes from our attempts to hold together an always-mixed reality. Perfectionism only makes us resentful and judgmental. Grateful people emerge in a world rightly defined, where even darkness is no surprise but an opportunity. 

Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer explores the dance between darkness and light in her poem Before Winter Solstice, I Remember: 

This, too, is what we are born for, 
this waking in darkness, unable 
to see, but still able to hear the shush 
of wind in bare branches, able to feel 
the charge of our heartbeat, the swell 
of our belly as it fills with borrowed air. 
I have spent my life learning to love 
these shapeless hours before the light 
finds us, these shadowsome nights when 
my whole being seems to stretch beyond 
the bed, beyond the room, beyond the home, 
beyond the valley, beyond even the globe, 
as if I rhyme with the dark all around us, 
the dark that holds us, the dark that surrounds 
this whole swirling spiral of galaxy. 
Sometimes, I feel how that infinite darkness 
calls to the darkness inside me as if to say, 
remember, remember where you come from, 
remember what you are. And the darkness 
inside me sings back. [2] 

Two Sides of Darkness

It is very important, friends, not to think of the soul as dark. We are conditioned to perceive only external light. We forget that there is such a thing as inner light, illuminating our soul.
—Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle 

Richard Rohr describes periods of darkness, confusion, and struggle as necessary for our transformation and growth: 

Experiences of darkness are good and necessary teachers. They are not to be avoided, denied, run from, or explained away. Even if we don’t experience clinical or diagnosed depression, most of us will go through at least one period of darkness, doubt, and malaise in our lives. I hope during these times we can reach out to someone—a therapist, spiritual director, friend—to support us. And when we feel strong, may we be the shoulder someone else can lean on. 

There’s a darkness where we are led by our own stupidity, our own sin (the illusion of separation), our own selfishness, by living out of the false or separate self. We have to work our way back out of this kind of darkness with brutal honesty, confession, surrender, forgiveness, apology, and restitution. It may feel simultaneously like dying and being liberated.  

But there’s another darkness that we’re led into by God, grace, and the nature of life itself. In many ways, the loss of meaning here is even greater, and sometimes the loss of motivation, purpose, and direction might be even greater too. It really feels like the total absence of light, and thus the saints and mystics called it “the dark night.” Yet even while we may feel alone and abandoned by God, we can also sense that we have been led here intentionally. We know we’re in liminal space, betwixt and between, on the threshold—and we have to stay here until we have learned something essential. It is still no fun—filled with doubt and “demons” of every sort—but it is the darkness of being held closely by God without our awareness. This is where transformation happens. 

Of course, the dark night we get ourselves into by our own “sinful” choices can also become the darkness of God. Regardless of the cause, the dark night is an opportunity to look for and find God—in new forms and ways. Neither God nor goodness exist only in the light but permeate all places, seen and unseen. It seems we have to “unknow” a bit every time we want to know in a new way. It’s like putting your car in reverse in the mud and snow so that you can gain a new track and better traction.  

Periods of seemingly fruitless darkness may in fact highlight all the ways we rob ourselves of wisdom by clinging to the light. Who grows by only looking on the bright side of things? It is only when we lose our certainties that will we be able to deconstruct our false images of God to discover the Absolute Reality beneath all our egoic fantasies and fears. 

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God’s Etch-a-Sketch

A prison sermon on the healing of Simon’s mother in law

NADIA BOLZ-WEBERJUL 13

As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed by demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. – Mark 1

Years ago there was an episode of The Simpsons where Homer tries to say something theological, and I’ve always loved it. They are standing around looking at a huge church when he says, Well, I may not know much about God, but I have to say we built a pretty nice cage for Him.

Anyhow, our reading for today starts exactly 26 verses into the book of Mark.

Here’s a little re-cap to catch you up to speed on what’s happened in the previous 25 verses of this Gospel.

It starts with the words, The Beginning of the Good news of Jesus Christ.

Then John the Baptist appears in the wilderness with his questionable wardrobe and dietary choices and baptizes Jesus. Then the heavens torn open and God says This is my beloved. For which Jesus is rewarded with 40 days in the wilderness with the wild beasts and angels.

Repent and believe the good news of the kingdom.

On his way to Capernum he picks up some smelly fishermen.

Then on the Sabbath he’s teaching in the synagogue – and everyone’s like “wow. That Jesus isn’t totally full of it like the other guys”

Finally he casts out an unclean spirit after commanding it to shut the hell up.

And that’s pretty much where we pick up the story today.

As soon as they leave the Synagogue they entered Simon’s house and Simon’s mother in law was sick in bed with a fever. Jesus came and took her by the hand, lifted her up. Then the fever left her and she began to serve them.

For the record: My first reaction to a bunch of young men showing up at the house of one of their mamas who, by the way, is sick, then healing her so that she gets up and “serves them”, was like isn’t that typical – rather than scrounging around for themselves they heal the Woman Of The House so she can make them a snack.

So don’t feel bad if that’s how you heard this story too.

But I started to see the healing of Simon’s mother in law story differently after sitting with it awhile.

It’s true that Mark doesn’t tell us her name so let’s just agree to make one up for her so she has an identity other than mother in law. We’re going to call her Betty.

See, I don’t actually think Jesus healed Betty so she could make them lunch. Because the thing is, for a male Jew in 1^st century, it was considered taboo to even touch an unrelated woman. And it was considered ritually unclean to touch someone who was sick. And it was considered a religious violation to do any kind of work on the Sabbath.

So I can’t imagine that Jesus would defile himself on so many levels just so he wouldn’t have to make his own sandwich.

I think this scene with Betty is a demonstration of what Jesus was talking about 11 verses earlier. See, just 11 verses earlier is the point in when Jesus speaks for the very first time in the Gospel of Mark – and his first words were the kingdom of God has come near – repent and believe the good news.

Listen up, friends. “The kingdom of God has come near – repent and believe the good news” is like Jesus is saying “No more cages for God and while I’m at it, no more cages for you either”

Remember what a Etch-a-Sketch is? Now it seems like a Caveman’s iPad, but as kids it was cool. You know, that toy with a screen that you can draw on by turning two knobs—one moves the line up and down, the other side to side. To erase the drawing, you just shake it.

Well, in Mark’s Gospel it’s like Jesus starts his ministry by trying to shake our religious etch a sketch . All those lines we draw between us and God, all those lines that we draw between us and other people and between others and God….all the cages we construct through religion well…Jesus shows up and shakes everything up so that those lines disappear.

Of course I have my hands on the knobs ready to keep drawing more lines so you know…that keeps Jesus pretty busy.

The point is that Jesus starts his ministry by saying forget what you thought you knew because God is near in a whole new way – and then he goes on what is like the weirdest recruiting trip ever.

It kinda looked like this: Jesus starts by gathering up some rank fishermen and then he enters the synagogue with them where his next recruit is a demoniac – a dude with a demon. After which he makes sure he gets a sick old lady on board. Yeah, that’s Jesus dream team.

With most of the characters in scripture who only show up for a verse or two we never find out what really happens after they encounter Jesus, But that’s the cool thing about Betty, see…when Jesus reaches down and touches someone his culture had deemed unclean – when his hand touches a sick old lady – more than just a fever leaves her. The cages of culture and religion fall away and the world according to God bursts through. And the thing I love about Betty is that Betty knew exactly you do with hands which have received the healing touch of God….Betty used those very same hands to serve. She immediately became an agent of what she had just received. 

You may have heard the saying that hurt people hurt people. But what is also true is that healed people heal people. Not as an act of obligation, or law or social expectation but as an act of freedom. Which means the boundaries that Jesus transgresses allows the most unlikely and broken people to give what they have received. We see again and again Jesus literally touching the untouchable and giving them a whole new identity. It’s like he was deputizing them. Because Jesus was about more than just healing certain sick people…the gospel tell us that Jesus greatest desire was to restore all that has been broken. So every person who Jesus healed was conscripted into the Kingdom of God so that they may go and do likewise.

This is why the next part of the text is so great. It says that evening they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons and then the next verse literally says this: the whole city was gathered around the door. THE WHOLE CITY.

Which means that there is no separate category of people called the sick and possessed. Jesus knew this. Some people just hide their sickness more than others and as human beings we prefer to have certain people be the identified problems so that we can look healthy or sane or good. But Jesus shook that etch a sketch.

When Betty sees a whole city’s worth of sick and demon possessed outside her door, I like to imagine her pushing up her sleeves and touching and healing and loving and speaking truth to all of them. She transmits what was given to her. She gets up and serves. She’s been deputized. 

That’s the thing with the kingdom of God, there is no personal treasure to be had…there are only gifts to be shared. God’s desire for the healing of all creation was inaugurated in a world changing way in the life of Jesus and it continues through you. I’ve seen it in this place. I’ve seen healing happen through your hands on which still rest the waters of your baptism and the hands which, extend here at the Lord’s table, to receive Christ’s own body and blood. Your hands are what God has to work with here. Hands that, no matter what your story is, have as much to receive as they have to give. Just by merit of being here, you’ve been recruited into this beautiful, redemptive story of God’s love for all of humanity along with smelly fishermen, demoniacs and sick old ladies. We, every single one of us here today, we are part of Jesus’ Dream Team.

Because no matter what society says or the church says or prison culture says, there is no ranking system in God’s kingdom –no category of inmate worse than another, no gender or sexual identity worse than another. When here at new Beginnings we say all are welcome, that is what we mean. And just so you know, it is not as a result of our niceness, or our inclusive beliefs. It is a result of Jesus Christ. Everyone without exception is welcome here because Christ has a made it so.

In other words, the kingdom of God has indeed come near. So rethink all the cages and believe the good news. Amen.

A Story of Transformation

Friday, July 11, 2025

In the CAC’s Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation, Father Richard shares how the story of Jonah became so important to him and his framework of transformation:  

Soon after I moved to New Mexico in the late 1980s, I began my studies for what would become the men’s rites of passage. I read everything I could on why every ancient culture deemed it necessary in to initiate the male. It seemed that no culture assumed that men would grow up naturally, because nothing in the male wants to descend. He wants to ascend; he wants to be number one. It’s the competitive nature of masculinity, which has totally informed our culture, no matter who we are. Something has to break through that level of consciousness.  

For me, there is no story—other than the Jesus story itself—which has made that quite as clear as Jonah’s story. Here we have a man who is running from God, running from his own vocation, and God sends a fish to swallow him and take him where he would rather not go. That’s perfect! That’s initiation! We have to be swallowed by something bigger than ourselves. The phrase used by many, including Thomas Merton, was that we have to go into the “belly of the beast”—a place where we are not in control, where we can’t fix it, explain it, understand it, or even like it. Our lack of control, our lack of preference isn’t important. We just have to learn from it.  

I’ve always made a great deal of the passage where Jesus says, “This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given except the sign of Jonah” (Luke 11:29). He is saying that his message is simple and clear: You’ve got to die before you die. In rites of initiation we teach people that they have to go down before they can possibly go up. In modern psychological language, we call it the death of the ego or the separate self……perhaps even surrender. What has to die is our sense of separateness, because what goes with separateness is superiority. Once we define ourselves according to our nationality, culture, religion, or identity, then we feel we have to defend each one of those. What a waste of energy! We sink to scolding and blaming; not just are we “number one,” but everybody else is a second-class citizen.  

That’s how dualistic our thoughts become. When the private ego didn’t die, Christianity even made salvation into a victory trip, thinking we knew who “won.” To undergo the sign of Jonah feels like losing, and by worldly standards, it looks like it, too. The sign of Jonah is a symbol of surrender, of letting go, of giving up. Most of us wouldn’t describe those as the stages of the journey of enlightenment, but they’re much closer to the real truth and the real journey.  

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John Chaffee 5 on Friday

1.

“Hope is optimism with a broken heart.”

– Nick Cave, American Songwriter

Hope is often seen as the inverse of despair.

This makes sense, too.  Despair is often seen as demobilizing, as something that takes away our initiative.  Hope is understood as giving more energy to a task.

However, optimism can seem immature or ungrounded in reality.  Sometimes optimism feels as though it operates in a reality that does not exist.  Optimism can seem as though it fails to see the difficulties in life.

That may be why I like this quote.  Or, perhaps it is because I know what it is like to have a broken heart at the state of the world.

Hope looks at the world with eyes wide open, recognizing that the world can be a mix of beauty and disappointment.

2.

“It takes such holy audacity to choose a new path when the old ways turn into dead ends for you.”

– Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk

The idea of starting over from scratch, even after decades of walking down a particular path, can feel terrifying.

However, for Thomas Keating to say that it takes “holy audacity”?  Yeah.  I can jive with that.

To start completely over and to course correct is no easy task, but it is a holy one.  In my lifetime, I can look back and see several points at which I was given the choice to either double down on what I thought I knew or allow my worldview to be rewritten entirely.

This has happened to me not only in my actual life but also in my spiritual life.

So yes, “holy audacity” feels like the right thing to call it.

3.

“Everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that is illuminated becomes a light itself.”

– Ephesians 5:13, NIV

We tend to keep things in the dark, don’t we?

We often fear that keeping something in the dark will cause it to grow when we expose it to the light.  But this is always how monsters grow, in the shadows.

What is beautiful about this passage of Scripture is the second half.

“Everything that is illuminated becomes a light itself.”

By shining a light on the dark things, they do not grow…  Rather, they are transformed into lights themselves.  Perhaps this is what the Christian mystics mean when they say that Christ’s wounds have become his glory?  The very things that we wish to avoid might be the thing that lights our path to something better, if we allow the light of God to expose, illuminate, and transform them.

4.

“The metamorphosis of Jesus Christ from a humble servant of the abject poor to a symbol that stands for gun rights, prosperity theology, anti-science, limited government that neglects the destitute, and fierce nationalism is truly the strangest transformation in human history.”

– Rainn Wilson, Actor (Best Known as Dwight Schrute from The Office)

Well, what do you think about that?

A famous actor, who does not identify as a Christian, can speak a hard truth that many other Christians in the West cannot.

We all can make God in our image, but it feels as though things have hit a fever pitch in the West.  I say this because some people who believe that Jesus stands for what Rainn says above, cannot even seem to engage Bible passages that challenge them.

It is almost as if we want a Jesus who validates our presuppositions and pre-conceived values rather than a Jesus who topples our idols and redefines the loves of our hearts…

Am I off on my own in this train of thought?  What do you think?

5.

“Those who believe that they have ‘arrived’ have merely found another way to wrap themselves up in filthy, stinking pride.”

– The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous (Trans. by Carmen Acevedo Butcher)

Ooof.  This was a good one.

For nearly two decades, I worked in Church ministry.  I honestly loved it, and still miss certain aspects of it.  However, one thing I don’t miss is the pressure to feel like I’ve “arrived.”  I never fully felt free to say that I, myself, was still learning and growing.

So what would that be called?  Is that a form of impostor syndrome?  Except that on top of that, it was also dependent on my paycheck to seem like I had all the final answers!  Imagine going down that road another 2 decades?  That did not feel spiritually healthy to me.

The best thing, it seems, we can do is to constantly confess and profess that we are beginners on this spiritual path.  This does not mean not to have a tradition, mine always has been and always will be the Christian tradition.  But I will say that it has been enormously liberating to settle into the fact that I barely know anything at all.

Did you know that the French word “amateur”  comes from the Latin “amator” which means “lover”?

Never be an expert, always be an amateur; they are still in love with what they are chasing after.

Jonah: Religion, Politics, Prophecy

Thursday, July 10, 2025

Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz describes Jonah’s actions as a protest, driven by both faith and politics:  

What does it mean to protest? Protesting expresses the opinion that there is something wrong with the ways of the world. At the same time, an act of protest is also an optimistic step to take, signifying our conviction that human actions can be held accountable, human institutions fixed, and society changed. Protest attempts to fight inequity, hatred, greed, and maybe even fear. Why is this relevant?   

The Book of Jonah opens with the idea that religious actions can be politically subversive. In the first two verses, God calls upon Jonah to become a religiously motivated political activist: God speaks to Jonah and implores him to remonstrate against an unjust society. While we often imagine public political protest to be a secular phenomenon, in the Book of Jonah God calls upon the prophet to initiate religious action. [1]  

Richard Rohr considers how prophets are often criticized for being “political”:   

We must not be discouraged when people say, You are making the message political and not spiritual! The prophets speak about misuse of power, but always from an inspired basis, and at a higher level of morality. Think of Martin Luther King Jr. calling for civil rights; Catherine of Siena’s advocacy for reform of the clergy and peacemaking; Sojourner Truth’s activism for the abolition of slavery and civil rights for African Americans and women; César Chávez’s work in organizing farmworkers. Their critiques and promises were stated in concrete historical terms, but with a clear spiritual meaning and motivation. Their messages were received gladly by the powerless and then exploited or rejected by prideful profiteers and narrow nationalists.   

Jonah was a patriotic nationalist who wanted Nineveh to suffer; true prophets are always internationalists working to realize what Jesus will call the “reign of God.” In their “political” advocacy, prophets point out and confront the power equations that are always corrupting human relations and the divine relationship, too. [2]

Yanklowitz honors the weight that prophets carry:   

Many of us may feel that we do not do enough. We may feel exhausted and tired of carrying the heavy weight of that universal responsibility. That’s not just us. We see that even a prophet can feel similarly, and in response, he tries to run away from his responsibility. [3] Jonah is us. We are Jonah.   

It is not easy to be a prophet. The prophet is neither cool nor popular; the prophet is not the life of the party. The prophet is an anxious personality juggling the demands of God with the needs of humans. Constantly risking alienation or even death, the prophet is isolated and lonely. But we are not allowed to turn away. [4] 

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Jesus Calling; Sarah Young

 I speak to you continually. My nature is to communicate, though not always in words. I fling glorious sunsets across the sky, day after day after day. I speak in the faces and voices of loved ones. I caress you with a gentle breeze that refreshes and delights you. I speak softly in the depths of your spirit, where I have taken up residence.
     You can find Me in each moment, when you have eyes that see and ears that hear. Ask My Spirit to sharpen your spiritual eyesight and hearing. I rejoice each time you discover My Presence. Practice looking and listening for Me during quiet intervals. Gradually you will find Me in more and more of your moments. You will seek Me and find Me, when you seek Me above all else.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Psalm 8:1-4 (NLT)
1 O Lord, our Lord, your majestic name fills the earth!
    Your glory is higher than the heavens.
2 You have taught children and infants
    to tell of your strength,
silencing your enemies
    and all who oppose you.
3 When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers—
    the moon and the stars you set in place—
4 what are mere mortals that you should think about them,
    human beings that you should care for them?

Psalm 19:1-2 (NLT)
1 The heavens proclaim the glory of God.
    The skies display his craftsmanship.
2 Day after day they continue to speak;
    night after night they make him known.

1 Corinthians 6:19 (NLT)
19 Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself…

Jeremiah 29:13 (NLT)
13 If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me.

Additional insight regarding Jeremiah 29:13: According to God’s wise plan, his people were to have a future and a hope; consequently, they could call upon him with confidence. Although the exiles were in a difficult place and time, they need not despair because they had God’s presence, the privilege of prayer, and God’s grace. If we seek him wholeheartedly, he will be found. Neither a strange land, sorrow, persecution, nor physical problems can break our fellowship with God.

When God Changes the Rules

Theologian Bruce Epperly sympathizes with Jonah’s reluctance to become a prophet to the Assyrians.  

What would you do if God asked you to challenge everything you thought was true? What if God told you to turn your back on the religious values you learned in church and in the Bible?…. Worse yet, what if God changed God’s mind to expand the circle of grace to include our nation’s worst enemies…?  

Moreover, what if the God you believed in … changed the rules of the faith, threw out the spiritual guidebook that shaped your life, and commanded you to adopt a different, and unprecedented, approach to life? Would you follow God’s new directions, stay put, or run away from this rule-changing God?…

In the past few decades, committed Christians have struggled with theologically radical ways of reconceiving marriage and divorce, equal rights, war and peace, the insights of other religions, homosexuality and marriage equality, and the nature of mission in light of changing understandings of God’s vision for our world. If God is still speaking, then God can surprise us with new insights for changing times. Like Jonah, we must decide how we will respond to a god whose ways are different than we imagined. 

Epperly invites us to consider how God is calling us to move beyond fear of the other:  

In a world in which politicians fan the flames of fear and anger, Jonah presents a provocative possibility: What if God loves our enemies as much as God loves our friends? What if God’s revelation comes to outsiders as well as persons from our own faith tradition?…

We are all tempted to create a God of our own making, who will uphold the status quo and baptize our values as God’s definitive word. When God challenges our way of life and the religious and cultural values we hold dear, we are tempted to run away in search of a new god—a god of our own making—who will support our privileges and prejudices and lead us into battle against our foes. In contrast to nationalist and parochial images of God, the Book of Jonah portrays a different vision of God: God, the iconoclast; God, the lover of our enemies; and God, who cares for non-humans with the same devotion as God cares for humankind. Constantly doing a new thing, God calls us to be innovative and iconoclastic as we embrace new understandings of God’s vision for humankind and the world….  

[Jonah] believes that God changed God’s mind, and he doesn’t know which way to go. His running away is a running from a new, more universal and loving, vision of God…. 

Jonah asks us what it means to follow God’s way in a world of terrorism, xenophobia (fear of strangers), and fear-based politics. God calls us toward world-changing discipleship in our time. Will we run away from God’s vision or follow God’s call to embrace otherness, with all our ambivalence and anxiety, or will we baptize our prejudice and hatred in the waters of religious faith?  

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Jesus Has Prepared a Place for You…Through the Cross

Yesterday, we saw how the popular view of heavenly mansions along streets of gold misses the true intent of Jesus’ words to his disciples on the night of his arrest. His concern was to comfort them with the assurance of their place with him and his Father forever. If that’s the case, however, why does Jesus say, “I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2)? It certainly sounds like he has work to do building palaces in some distant heavenly realm. While that imagery might spark the imaginations of children in Sunday school and appeal to the cultural materialism of religious consumers, it’s not what Jesus had in mind. Still, this Jesus-as-heaven’s-homebuilder view remains popular in large part because it conforms nicely to a view of the future held by many contemporary Christians. Sometimes called the “evacuation theory,” it teaches that the earth is destined for destruction, but Jesus is going to rescue us off this sinking ship just in time and resettle us safely in a shiny new place he’s currently working on. This eschatology—or theology of last things—is why some Christians dismiss efforts to reform this world, and why they focus their faith and imaginations on heaven. That is, after all, where they plan to spend eternity and the place they think Jesus really cares about. There are many errors with this theology, but let me highlight just two.First, this view incorrectly believes Jesus is focused on preparing a new world rather than ruling over this one. This contradicts the central message of the gospel. Jesus has not surrendered this world to false kings and illegitimate rulers so that he can build and rule over a new one, nor is God’s mission to discard the first creation as a mistake so he can reign in the next one. On this point, Scripture could not be more clear—we do not worship a God who replaces but a God who redeems. The New Testament declares Jesus to be Lord over this creation and that he is even now ruling over the world at the right hand of the Father as he works to redeem all things (see 1 Corinthians 15:24ff). And the day is approaching when all of creation and everyone in it will acknowledge his true identity as Lord. Second, pop Christianity’s view of Jesus as heaven’s contractor and urban planner misses the point of his farewell discourse altogether. When Jesus speaks in John’s gospel of leaving his disciples, returning to his Father, being lifted up, or being glorified, these are all ways of speaking about the same event—his death and resurrection. So, when he tells his disciples “I go to prepare a place for you,” it does not mean that after he leaves via the cross he’ll begin his next project of preparing a place for them. Rather, Jesus is saying that his departure via the cross is precisely how he will prepare a place for them. Jesus’ leaving and his preparing are not sequential (leave first and then prepare a place), but rather simultaneous (leaving and preparing a place happen at the same time). In other words, through Jesus’ death and resurrection he will prepare a place for them in God’s house; to dwell forever in God’s presence. So many of us are quick to jump over the cross and focus our faith entirely on heaven. Our cultural bias is to emphasize the glory and diminish the agony, to declare victory rather than carry the cross. To escape this world to find comfort in the next one. That instinct also causes us to misread Jesus’ final words to his followers. We think he’s talking about a heavenly construction project when in truth he was pointing them, and us, to the far greater work he accomplished through his death and resurrection. Like the gospels themselves, our faith would be far stronger if we spent less time contemplating heaven and far more time contemplating the cross.

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Author Debie Thomas considers how Jonah’s story challenges our notions of God’s mercy:  

Following his preposterous marine adventure, Jonah grudgingly obeys God’s instructions and warns the people of Nineveh that their wickedness is about to be punished. But then the impossible happens.  

The Ninevites listen to Jonah’s warning, take it seriously, and repent. And God, seeing their penitence, changes God’s mind and shows them mercy. In other words, Jonah preaches a sermon, and his congregation responds to it!… You’d think that Jonah would be thrilled. But no. He’s furious, and he tells God so.  

After hearing Jonah’s complaints, God asks, “What right do you have to get angry?” (Jonah 4:9). Thomas continues: 

To Jonah, then, God’s question is a ridiculous one. Of course he has a right to be angry. Isn’t it right to be angry that God’s mercy extends to killers? Isn’t it right to be angry when people who break the rules don’t get the comeuppance they deserve? Isn’t it right to be angry about a grace so reckless and wasteful that it challenges our most cherished assumptions about justice?  

God doesn’t scold Jonah for his anger. Instead, God engages it with compassion. God even goads it in a playful attempt to broaden Jonah’s horizons. God wants the grumpy preacher to see the Ninevites as God sees them. For while the Assyrians are everything Jonah believes them to be—violent, depraved, and wicked—they are also more…. They’re human beings made in God’s image, but they’re lost and broken. What they deserve is neither here nor there. What they need is compassion….  

God challenges Jonah to consider the hard truth that even his worst enemies are God’s beloved children…. Should God not care for God’s own? Is it right for Jonah to be angry? The story wisely ends with these questions unanswered. We’re left with Jonah still sulking…. 

All too often, we are also left to wrestle with the scandalous goodness of God, a goodness that calls us to become instruments of grace even to those who offend us most deeply. God’s goodness gently probes beneath our pieties and asks why we often prefer vindication to rehabilitation—prison cells and death sentences to hospitality and compassion. It exposes our smallness and stinginess, our reluctance to embrace the radical kinship God calls us to embrace. Why do we grab at the second chances God gives us, even as we deny those second chances to others? God’s goodness dares us to do the braver and riskier thing: to hold out for the hearts of those who belong to God, whether we like them or not.  

Do we have a right to be angry? God knows that the only way to answer this question, and so many others like it, is to wrestle it to the ground. God meets us in the ring, openhanded, willing, forbearing. God’s hand rests on us in love, even as we prepare to attack. God’s patient love enfolds us, absorbing our anger into God’s all-sufficient self.  

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Jesus Didn’t Promise You a Mansion. from Skye Jethani, With God Daily

In his book, The King Jesus Gospel, New Testament scholar Scot McKnight makes a simple but stunning observation. The Book of Acts, in which Jesus’ Apostles travel broadly proclaiming his gospel, contains no mention of heaven. Not one of the seven gospel sermons in Acts speaks of salvation as entering heaven after death. (Hell is also never mentioned in Acts, in case you were wondering.) This raises an important question—If going to heaven was not part of the gospel Jesus and his Apostles proclaimed, why is it so central to the one we often hear? It’s hard to imagine a gospel sermon today that doesn’t emphasize the centrality of one’s postmortem residence. Since at least the Middle Ages, much of Christianity has been obsessed with avoiding hell’s eternal slum and entering the gated community of heaven.This ironically unbiblical fixation on heaven is why we see endless religious movies about the coming apocalypse, and why travel guides written by those who claim to have returned from heaven become best-sellers. American pop Christianity is enamored by heaven’s golden streets, pearly gates, or other opulent architecture while dismissing their scriptural symbolism to create a virtual map of the afterlife. We also do this with Jesus’ words in John 14:2-3. There he speaks of his Father’s house having many rooms, and that he is going to prepare a place for his followers. The old King James Version, which poorly translated “many rooms” as “many mansions,” has caused Christians for centuries to view the afterlife as merely an idealized version of earthly life, but without the nuisance of taxes, health care, or non-Christian neighbors. We’ve even composed hymns about the mansions and palaces that await us as if the greatest reward of the gospel is an upgrade in real estate.Just like the golden streets or pearly gates spoken of in Revelation, in John 14, we tend to focus on the metaphor rather than its meaning. We want to know about literal mansions or rooms in heaven rather than what Jesus was communicating about himself and the Father. The word Jesus used is difficult to translate because it only occurs one other time in the New Testament, and it’s just a few verses later in John 14:23. There, Jesus speaks of the Father and the Son making their “home” or “dwelling” within those who keep his word. The word has nothing to do with mansions or rooms in a palace; it’s simply referring to where one resides. And the context eliminates the silly idea of Jesus literally building a house inside our bodies. Instead, he is speaking of the intimacy and unity that will exist between us and him.Remember, Jesus’ disciples were confused and distraught about his announcement that he was leaving them. His words about preparing a place for them in his Father’s house were meant to comfort their anxiety about losing Jesus. In other words, these verses aren’t about mansions, houses, or even heaven (which, like Acts, is never mentioned in Jesus’ farewell discourse). It’s about Jesus promising his frightened friends they would have a permanent place in God’s presence with him. John 14, like the gospel itself, isn’t ultimately about heaven; it’s about God and living in unity with him.Our common misreading of these verses exposes the pervasive misunderstanding of Jesus’ gospel altogether. The goal of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension was not to get us into heaven. His goal was to reconcile us to God. He is the goal. He is our reward. When we make heaven or avoiding hell the goal we’ve exchanged the true gospel of Jesus Christ for a false gospel of pop-Christianity. If we make a celestial mansion our true desire we’ve reduced Jesus into a broker who merely secures it for us. Such a gospel makes Jesus instrumental rather than ultimate in our hearts. As one theologian put it, “People who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there.” In John 14 Jesus isn’t promising his followers a mansion in heaven. He’s promising us something infinitely better—himself.

An Imperfect Messenger

The story [of Jonah] is glorious because it reveals unerringly a universal God of mercy and justice and because it pokes holes in the self-righteousness of those who think themselves religious while blaming others for the evil in the world and taking pleasure in their suffering.  
—Megan McKenna, Prophets: Words of Fire 

Father Richard Rohr has always felt a deep connection to the story of the prophet Jonah, while recognizing how imperfectly Jonah follows his call:  

Even though I love Jonah, he is what I call an unfinished prophet. He rejects his divine commission at first, refusing to preach God’s mercy to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria and Israel’s ancient enemy. After he flees and boards a ship going the wrong way, he’s cast overboard in a storm, swallowed by a great fish, and rescued in a marvelous manner. Only then does he obey God’s call and go to Nineveh. The people repent upon hearing his message and thus are saved from God’s wrath. But Jonah complains, angry because the Lord spared them. He is so detached from his own real message that he’s disappointed when it succeeds!  

From that point on, poor Jonah is simultaneously angry, lamenting, and praising YHWH for four full chapters. His problem is that he cannot move beyond a dualistic reward-punishment worldview. Jonah thinks only Israel deserves mercy, whereas God extends total mercy to Jonah, to the pagan Ninevites who persecuted Jonah’s people, and to those “who cannot tell their right hand from their left.” To make the story complete, this mercy is even given to “all the animals” (Jonah 4:11)! The world of predictable good guys and always-awful bad guys collapses into God’s unfathomable grace.  

I love this story so much that I have collected images of a man in the belly of the whale for much of my adult life. I think I live in that whale’s belly permanently, with loads of unresolved questions and painful paradoxes in my life. Yet God is always “vomiting” me up in the right place—in the complete opposite direction that I’ve been trying to run, like Jonah himself (Jonah 2:10).  

Jonah’s story breaks all the expectations of who is right and then remakes those expectations in favor of grace. It is a brilliant morality play, not a piece of dogmatic theology, as some try to make it. Yet it does have political implications, in the sense that it provokes us to change our notions of who deserves power and who doesn’t. 

Jonah thought he had the exclusive cachet of truth and thus could despise those to whom he was preaching. He wanted them to be wrong so that he could be right, yet in his anger at Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire, he failed to appreciate God’s desire to offer forgiveness and grace even to Jonah’s enemies. In fact, he even resented their joining his “belief club.” He struggled mightily to accept the new “political” arrangement. 

Have We Listened to God’s Call?

At the CAC’s CONSPIRE 2018 conference, Dr. Barbara Holmes (1943–2024) shared her own personal “Jonah story”:  

There is a crisis of disobedience when we choose to disobey God’s will for our lives. In this instance, I think of Jonah…. He thinks he’s right. He hates the Assyrians, and understandably so. After all, they were a marauding, land-grabbing nation, a real threat to Israel. He had national pride. He wanted to see them destroyed. When he gets the call from God, he travels 2,500 miles to the southern area of Spain. He couldn’t get much further away. Why does he flee? He flees, he says at the end of chapter four, because he knows God is merciful. There is no worse situation than a merciful God when you want to see your enemies get what’s coming to them. Jonah wants to do things his way and ends up in the belly of a sea monster.    

Do you have a Jonah story? I do. From the age of ten through my twenties, I knew I had a call of God on my life. Through dreams, waking visions, and moments of surprising attunement with the Divine, I knew God was calling me. But there I was, a ten-year-old girl, with a call to something I didn’t understand. I’d never seen a woman in ministry. For that matter, I’d never seen a woman leading in any spiritual capacity. So, what was I to do?   

Well, I went on with my life. I got married, had two children, and after a decade heard the call again even more strongly. This time I turned my head to where I thought God lived (up there) and I said, “Excuse me, sir, or ma’am”—I wanted to cover my bases—“I don’t know if you know about the divorce, but I have two children, I’ve got to feed them and ministers don’t make any money. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to law school.” [1]  

It took time, but Holmes eventually said “yes” to God’s call. At CONSPIRE 2021, she encouraged listeners to remain open and faithful to God’s invitations to serve:   

As I was standing at my law school graduation ceremony, I heard a voice say to me, “This isn’t it.” I was startled, and I said to my girlfriend who was standing in line with me to get our degrees, “I just heard a voice say, ‘This is not it.’” She started laughing and said, “Well, you sure have wasted a lot of time.”… There was nothing to do but hear the whispering and continue my practices. I now allow life to lead me to the precipice of the newness that was already seeded in my life….  

Trust God, trust Holy Spirit to lead you into all truth. Make your intention clear that you will follow as called, without exception. Make your intention known to God and wait for the Holy Spirit to lead you into the fulfillment of your vocation. [2]  

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God Never Wanted Kings

The establishment of monarchy in ancient Israel was a theological disaster that God explicitly opposed—which should fundamentally challenge how we conceptualize divine authority today.

The establishment of monarchy in ancient Israel was a theological disaster that God explicitly opposed—which should fundamentally challenge how we conceptualize divine authority today.

First, let me start with something that’s always bothered me about 1 Samuel. As we talked about earlier, Eli’s sons are corrupt priests who steal from sacrifices and abuse their religious authority. God’s response? The entire lineage gets cut off. Divine judgment, full stop. 

But fast forward a few chapters, and Samuel’s sons are taking bribes and perverting justice as judges. The consequence for Samuel? Absolutely nothing. The text never addresses this glaring double standard, never explains why one father faces devastating judgment while the other walks away unscathed. 

Sometimes scripture’s inconsistencies are worth sitting with rather than explaining away.

But this smaller inconsistency points us toward a much larger theological tension. When Israel demands a king after Samuel’s sons fail, God’s response should shake any simplistic theology that claims everything happens according to divine plan. God explicitly tells Samuel: “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Samuel 8:7). The people are literally rejecting God’s kingship in favor of human monarchy.

What follows in 1 Samuel 8 reads like dystopian political theory. God, through Samuel, lays out exactly what monarchy will mean. There’s a 4x repetition of the Hebrew verb יִקָּח/yiqqāḥ, “he will take” (which correlates with what Samuel’s own sons are doing, “taking bribes”). Samuel says, “Your sons conscripted for war and forced to run before royal chariots, your daughters taken as perfumers and cooks and bakers, your best fields and vineyards and olive orchards confiscated and given to royal officials. A tenth of your grain, your vineyards, your flocks—all flowing upward to sustain the machinery of monarchy.”

God essentially says, “You want hierarchical human power structures? Here’s your future.”

And they choose it anyway. Not everything happens according to divine plan.

Redactors

From a textual perspective, this is super interesting. The biblical editors who had to make decisions about what was included in the Bible—we call them redactors—had to make choices about what to include and what to leave out. These ancient editors were working during or after the monarchic period, when kings were simply a fact of life in Israel and Judah. Many of them, particularly those we call the Deuteronomistic historians, clearly favored David and worked to legitimize dynastic succession.

Yet they kept this blistering anti-monarchy critique right at the foundation of the monarchy narrative. They could have smoothed over this tension, could have edited the story to make monarchy look like God’s idea all along. Instead, they preserved this text that essentially says kings were never part of the plan. The Hebrew Bible’s ambivalence toward monarchy isn’t an accident or an oversight—it’s theological resistance preserved in canonical form.

This preservation of competing perspectives matters enormously for how we read scripture today. The Bible isn’t a monolithic document with a single perspective on power. It’s a collection of texts that argue with each other, that preserve minority reports and dissenting opinions. The same tradition that gives us royal psalms and Davidic covenant theology also maintains this fundamental critique that God never wanted human kings in the first place.

Jesus is…Lord?

Which brings us to contemporary theology and the language we use for the divine. Hebrew scholar Dr. Wil Gafney points out that even the word “Lord” in our prayer language emerges from slaveholding contexts. The Greek kyrios, the Latin dominus, the English “master”—these are terms from imperial and slaveholding societies. When we exclusively use imperial metaphors for the divine, we’re theologically legitimizing the very power structures that significant portions of scripture critique.

Think about how often our God-language relies on metaphors of domination: King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Sovereign, Ruler. We’ve so internalized these power metaphors that we rarely stop to ask whether they actually align with the God revealed in scripture—the God who warns against human kings, who sides with the oppressed, who shows up as a refugee baby rather than a conquering emperor.

The biblical editors understood something we sometimes forget: divine authority and human power structures are not synonymous. In fact, scripture often presents them as opposed to each other. The prophets consistently critique royal power. Jesus explicitly rejects the devil’s offer of all the kingdoms of the world. The early church proclaimed “Jesus is Lord” as a direct challenge to “Caesar is Lord,” not as an endorsement of lordship as a concept.

If scripture itself preserves skepticism toward concentrated power, then reimagining our God-language isn’t liberal revisionism or theological innovation. It’s fidelity to what the Bible itself does—preserving tension, maintaining critique, refusing to let power structures go unchallenged. 

The God who warned against kings might not be thrilled with our imperial Christologies either.

Real theological imagination means finding language that sounds like liberation rather than domination. It means taking seriously scripture’s own skepticism about power rather than selectively reading only the texts that reinforce hierarchical authority. It means being honest about the ways our traditional God-language might actually work against the liberation that God desires for creation.

The ancient redactors left us a gift: a sacred text that argues with itself about power, that refuses to resolve the tension between divine sovereignty and human authority. Maybe it’s time we stopped trying to resolve that tension and started learning from it instead.

What Is Emancipation?

Richard Rohr teaches that a deeper understanding of freedom and liberation are needed today:  

I would use the word “emancipation” to describe the kinds of freedom and liberation that are needed today. Instead of focusing on personal freedoms only, emancipation directs our attention to a systemic level of freedom. With the exception of a very few who are fully emancipated, we each live inside our own smaller security systems of culture, era, political opinion, and even some quiet, subtle agreements of which we may not even be aware.  

Political and economic liberties such as free speech, free markets, and the freedom to be secure and defend ourselves can only offer us as much freedom as we ourselves have earned from the inside. If we haven’t achieved the inner freedom to love, we are totally dependent on outer systems which, paradoxically, can never fully deliver the very freedoms they promise. Our inability to recognize this has made our so-called freedoms very selective, class-based, often dishonest, and open to bias.  

For example, are we really free to imagine that there could be better alternatives to our free-market system? We’re likely to be called dangerous or un-American if we dare broach the topic. Does our freedom to protect ourselves with gun rights and limitless military spending give us the right and freedom to use the vast majority of the economic resources of our country for our protection? Even if it means not providing food, healthcare, or education for the same people we say we are securing?  

When we place all our identity in our one country, security system, religion, or ethnic group, we are unable to imagine another way of thinking. Only citizenship in a much larger “Realm of God” can emancipate us from the confinement of certain well-hidden, yet agreed-upon, boxes we have labeled “freedom.” In fact, because these are foundational cultural agreements, we hardly even recognize them as boxes.  

Such boxes are good, helpful, and even necessary sometimes, but my job, and the job of Christian wisdom, is to remind us that “We are fellow citizens with the saints and part of God’s household” (Ephesians 2:19). We have been called to live in the biggest box of all, while still working and living practically inside the smaller boxes of society. That is a necessarily creative and difficult tension, yet it is really the only way we can enjoy all levels of freedom. “In the world, but not of the world” was the historic phrase commonly used by many Christians, whereas today most of us tend to be in the system, of the system, and for the system—without even realizing it!  

So, let’s use the word emancipation to describe a deeper, bigger, and scarier level of freedom: inner, outer, personal, economic, structural, and spiritual. Surely this is the task of our entire lifetime. 

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Homeland Ambiguity

The question of faith and citizenship never go away

DIANA BUTLER BASS. JUL 3

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National holidays always give me pause. As a Christian, I’m never entirely sure how to engage patriotism. I’ve waved many a flag in my life, hung a few upside down, pretended to be Canadian to avoid the issue, shouted Frederick Douglass’ famous speech from the rooftops, and refrained from such celebrations altogether. 

July 4 is my day of national ambiguity.

Today, I’m sharing a reflection I wrote in 2003 in response to 9/11 and the dangers of mistaking one’s homeland for God’s city. 

It is interesting re-reading this now. My writing voice has developed — as well as my theology (which has become much more inclusive). But, in the twenty-two years since it first appeared in Broken We Kneel, the issues have only become clearer and more pointed. 

And it still represents a central concern that I’ve struggled with for my entire adult life. 

Whether you live in the United States or another nation, perhaps you feel this struggle too. Because it isn’t exclusive to a single country. It is a fundamental tension in Christianity, expressed differently in different nations through the centuries. 

I think that the poem below from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “Dear America,” best “gets” my sense of homeland these days.

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Homeland security. Until very recently, those words were not about politics, they were about faith. In the phrase, I inwardly heard the longing echoes of “Land of Rest,” a traditional American folk hymn:

Jerusalem, my happy home,
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end? 
Thy joys when shall I see?

As a Christian, I trust that I have a homeland, one that is secure in God’s care. But that homeland is not a political nation. Theologically, I am a sojourner, an alien citizen of the United States; by virtue of my baptism in Christian faith, my primary citizenship is in God’s city.

Throughout church history, Christians in many nations have tried to associate their geography with God’s holy city (for example, the Byzantine Empire, the medieval Holy Roman Empire, or the realm of Russian tsars), but such biblical territorial claims have always resulted in some tragic corruption of Christianity. The homeland of Jesus’ followers is God’s city, a non-geographical city embodied in the way of life of its people in the present — and a city whose full revelation awaits some future time. The city is, as much of Christian theology has affirmed, “already and not yet.” Today, some people identify the biblical homeland as the state of Israel or the United States of America. But neither can truly claim that title. The homeland of God’s faithful remains a promise, both a way of life and a place of rest for which God’s people still long.

I do hope for a land of rest, as described in the traditional American hymn, a peaceful homeland. This is a holy hope, the same hope expressed by biblical patriarchs and prophets. The Scriptures and Christian tradition teach that the hope for a homeland is theologically fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. And that one day the long awaited city will be more clearly manifest in creation. In the meanwhile, however, God’s people are promised neither an earthly homeland nor security. I am not convinced that a government department can deliver either — when God’s people have been waiting since the time of Abraham for both. To seek homeland security is, at best, a misguided quest.

New Testament writers seem ambivalent about the whole idea of a homeland. To describe it, which they rarely did, they used the Greek term, patris, the root for the English word patriotic, which refers to one’s fatherland or one’s own native place.

The most significant homeland story in the Gospels appears in Luke 4:18, where Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth and preaches: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” His fellow townspeople rejected his claim, leading Jesus to conclude, “No prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown” (Luke 4:24). This criticism did not go over well with his neighbors. They responded by driving him out of town and trying to hurl him off a cliff. For Jesus, his earthly homeland was a dangerous place for someone choosing to do God’s work. 

Indeed, in Hebrews 11:13–16, the writer describes those living the life of faith as people who “were strangers and foreigners on the earth,” men and women who were “seeking a homeland . . . a better country, a heavenly one.” Or according to Philippians 3:20, “our commonwealth is in heaven.”

Although some Christians have used these ideas to justify antiworldliness or withdrawal from society, the fundamental truth remains: the homeland of God’s people is not a theocratic earthly nation.

Occasionally, as was the case for medieval Catholics and nineteenth-century Protestants, Christians have rejected the otherworldly orientation of God’s realm by making the kingdom of God coterminous with human society. In both cases, the body politic — or the hoped-for body politic — is identified as God’s political order. Medieval popes believed they ruled over the earth in Christ’s stead. Earnest American Protestants thought they were bringing God’s city to earth through prayer and democratic politics. Throughout history, identifying one’s homeland as God’s formed the basis for Christendom, the earthly reign of the church. The confusion started with the Emperor Constantine in 313 and, in Europe and America, continued well into our times. The most recent manifestation of the tendency is the political objective of some evangelical Protestants to reclaim, redeem, or retake America as a Christian nation. 

Historically, the United States proved uniquely poised to interpret itself as God’s homeland, a kind of New World Israel, given to European Christians by God as a second chance at Eden. Our forebears busily refashioned Christian tradition to support their colonial project and justify American ideals of freedom, democracy, liberty, and capitalism. But there was a price to be paid for that accommodation. For most American Christians, pulling apart the interwoven threads of “Christian” and “American” has proved difficult. Indeed, the relationship between faith and nation has been so confusing that, in the minds of many, despite the separation of church and state, America is a Christian nation. There may be no established national church, but God himself guides, blesses, and oversees the American experiment, “the last great hope of earth.” In America, the government may not start or sponsor a church, but the nation itself is an embodiment of the will and plan of the biblical God.

In recent years, as evangelical Protestants articulated a political theology of American Christian nationhood, some mainline Protestant theologians have begun to recover the idea of God’s heavenly reign and reject the cozy worldliness that had been the hallmark of their denominations. In an ironic reversal, many mainline Protestants now tend toward Scripture’s exile tradition, “that the church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief” (Stanley Hauerwas, Will Willimon). They have returned to the biblical idea of the church as a community of strangers and foreigners whose commonwealth is heaven.

That Christians are an exile people seems an apt—and even providential—reminder in light of so-called homeland security. The Christian patris is a distant realm, and our loyalty to any secular homeland is that of an exile community. We work, have children, raise families, care for the poor, work for the betterment of our communities, pay taxes. We try to figure out what Jesus meant when he said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God, the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). That is harder than it seems.

Christians believe, like Jews, that as the Psalmist says, “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein” (Ps. 24:1). Thus at the heart of Christian citizenship is a dilemma: Christians submit to Caesar so long as Caesar’s laws do not conflict with the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Christian patriotism is practicing a way of life based in the virtues of faith, hope, and love. We are citizens, only secondarily, of our earthly homelands. As Christians, we may or may not appreciate the ideals, politics, or policies of the country in which we reside. Patriotism is often a matter of lament, prophetic challenge, and protest.

That means, of course, that there are no easy answers when it comes to issues of faithful citizenship. Christians must consider every political issue theologically in light of the tradition, authority, practice, and wisdom of the faith community, with a keen sense of their primary status as alien citizens. Faith is a kind of risk culture, lending itself to what theologian Barry Harvey calls “holy insecurity,” as the citizens of God’s city “must always struggle to detect the delicate counterpoint of the Spirit” to mediate between engaging the world and challenging it.

(adapted from Broken We Kneel: Reflections on Faith and Citizenship, pp. 99-105)

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INSPIRATION

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
—Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”

A Leading Voice for Liberation

Thursday, July 3, 2025

CAC’s We Conspire publication explores the work of Brazilian Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara (1909–1999), an advocate of liberation theology.  

Despite standing no taller than 5’1”, Dom Câmara was a giant in his convictions. He did not begin his career, though, as a champion of justice and nonviolence. In his early years as a priest, Câmara offered a faith-based voice for an authoritarian political movement in Brazil called “Brazilian Integralist Action.” A momentous exchange took place when the French Catholic Cardinal Gerlier urged Câmara to prioritize poverty as part of his work. The encounter became a transforming event in Câmara’s faith that he described as being “thrown to the ground like Saul on the road to Damascus” (Acts 9:1–19). [1] Câmara dedicated the rest of his life to organizing the wider church to consider the systemic causes of poverty and violence…. Considered a leading voice for peace and justice in the twentieth-century Catholic Church, Dom Hélder Câmara was informally called the “bishop of the slums” for his steadfast commitment to the urban poor and economic justice. [2] 

Here are a few of the convictions that Dom Câmara lived by:  

I would like to say to everyone: 

• Where [humanity] is, the church must be present. 
• The egoism of the rich presents a more serious problem than Communism.  
• Today’s world is threatened by the atom bomb of squalid poverty.  
• Profound changes must be made in order to establish justice in every sphere throughout the world.  
• Without a deep personal conversion, no one can become an instrument for the conversion of the world….  
• To revolutionize the world, the only thing needed is for us to live and to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ with real conviction.  
• Dire poverty is revolting and degrading; it taints the image of God in every [human]….
• My door and my heart are open to all—to all without exception.  
• Christ has prophesied what will happen at the last judgment: we shall be judged according to the way we have treated him in the persons of the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden. [3] 

Banned by the media in his own country, Dom Hélder Câmara traveled the world spreading the message of the gospel and liberation. He urged contemplative, inner transformation as necessary for structural changes in our systems and world. Câmara connected the work of liberation with the liberation that God provides:  

Just as the Father, the Creator, wants us to be co-creators, so the Son, the Redeemer, wants us to be co-redeemers. So, it is up to us to continue the work of liberation begun by the Son: the liberation from sin and the consequences of sin, the liberation from egoism and the consequences of egoism. That is what the theology of liberation means to us, and I see no reason why anyone should be afraid of a true, authentic theology of liberation. [4]   

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Sarah Young, Jesus Calling

My children make it a pastime of judging one another–and themselves. But I am the only capable Judge, and I have acquitted you through My own blood. Your acquittal came at the price of My unparalleled sacrifice. That is why I am highly offended when I hear My children judge one another or indulge in self-hatred.
     If you live close to Me and absorb My Word, the Holy Spirit will guide and correct you as needed. There is no condemnation for those who belong to Me.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Luke 6:37 (NLT)
Do Not Judge Others
37 “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn others, or it will all come back against you. Forgive others, and you will be forgiven.

Additional insight regarding Luke 6:37: A forgiving spirit demonstrates that a person has received God’s forgiveness. If we are critical rather than compassionate, we will also receive criticism. If we treat others generously, graciously, and compassionately, however, these qualities will come back to us in full measure. We are to love others, not judge them.

2 Timothy 4:8 (NLT)
8 And now the prize awaits me—the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on the day of his return. And the prize is not just for me but for all who eagerly look forward to his appearing.

Additional insight regarding 2nd Timothy 4:8: Whatever we face – discouragement, persecution, or even death – we know we will receive a reward with Christ in Heaven.

Titus 3:5 (NLT)
5 He saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit.

Additional insight regarding Titus 3:4-6: All three persons of the Trinity are mentioned in these verses because all three participate in the work of salvation. Based upon the redemptive work of his Son, the Father forgives us and sends the Holy Spirit to wash away our sins and continually renew us.