Elias Chacour is a Palestinian Arab-Israeli and a former archbishop of the Melkite Greek Catholic church in Palestine. At one point in his ministry, Chacour went against the orders of local authorities to build a secondary school to educate the youth in his community in Galilee. He drew on his understanding of the Beatitudes to strengthen him in overcoming many challenges to its completion:
Knowing Aramaic, the language of Jesus, has greatly enriched my understanding of Jesus’ teaching. Because the Bible as we know it is a translation of a translation, we sometimes get a wrong impression. For example, we are accustomed to hearing the Beatitudes expressed passively:
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
“Blessed” is the translation of the word makarioi, used in the Greek New Testament. However, when I look further back to Jesus’ Aramaic, I find that the original word was ashray, from the verb yashar. Ashray does not have this passive quality to it at all. Instead, it means “to set yourself on the right way for the rightgoal; to turn around, repent; to become straight or righteous.”
How could I go to a persecuted young man in a Palestinian refugee camp, for instance, and say, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” or “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”? That man would revile me, saying neither I nor my God understood his plight, and he would be right.
When I understand Jesus’ words in Aramaic, I translate like this:
Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you who are hungry and thirsty for justice, for you shall be satisfied.
Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you peacemakers, for you shall be called children of God.
To me this reflects Jesus’ words and teachings much more accurately. I can hear him saying, “Get your hands dirty to build a human society for human beings; otherwise, others will torture and murder the poor, the voiceless, and the powerless.” Christianity is not passive but active, energetic, alive, going beyond despair….
“Get up, go ahead, do something, move,” Jesus said to his disciples.
Ultimately, the secondary school was completed and allowed to stand, despite the lack of official permits for water and electricity.
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5 on Friday John Chaffee
1.
“Food is not evil, but gluttony is. Childbearing is not evil, but fornication is. Money is not evil, but avarice is. Glory is not evil, but vainglory is. Indeed, there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse.”
One thing I enjoy about the early patristics and monastics is that they actually had a relatively well-developed understanding of good and evil.
For many of them, the distinction that matters most is how a thing is used. We are prone to think that things are evil in themselves, but God looked at the whole creation and called it “Tov Me’od/Strongly Good.” What is potentially evil is how we use the things God has called “Strongly Good.”
The actual difficulty arises when we start avoiding things that can be used for the wrong reasons. Things such as money, alcohol, sex, food, etc., are then avoided because they might tempt us. What really needs to happen is for us to re-examine the attachments we have to such things.
2.
“When a system is not dominated by anxiety, everyone is free to speak truthfully, everyone is free to listen curiously.”
Unhealthy, reactive, and anxiety-driven families or workplaces do not allow people the freedom to speak their mind. In such systems, there is no such thing as a “feedback loop” in which the system has channels for people to share their experiences.
It is not uncommon for me to hear that a church system does not have annual reviews or exit interviews for its staff or for congregants who leave for another church. Sometimes the fear of conflict leads us to cut off even the chance for a disagreement, even if it could lead to healthy learning and then healthy course correcting.
For a system to be healthy, its members need to grow in their own health, their own non-reactivity, and their own non-anxious presence. Once there are enough of that type of maturity, a tipping point can be reached, and the larger family, community, or workplace can adopt that same level of health.
3.
“We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
The goal is not to excise or cut out all the darker, heavier emotions. The goal is actually to feel them appropriately. To avoid them is to only delay their eventual explosion or “seeping out” when we do not want them to make themselves known.
I am a couple of years into this task of learning to integrate all the emotions. I used to be dominated entirely by existing on the intellectual level. It was as a result of some severe pain that I learned the secondhand destruction that can come from not integrating my own emotions without judging myself.
As a reminder, I repeat three words to myself…
“Integrate, integrate, integrate.”
Or, in other words…
“Make-whole, make-whole, make-whole.”
Or, in other words…
“Holy, holy, holy.”
4.
“It is only through shadows that one comes to know the light.”
We want to know God by the via positiva, through the good things, the pleasant things, the enjoyable or easy things.
There is a strange paradox: we are most aware of God’s presence because of the experience of God’s absence. Likewise, we are most aware of our need for love because of the lack of love we experience from those we might most expect it from.
Years ago, I took some high school guys out for wings. These three chaps did not come to my youth group or Sunday school with any regularity, and yet we sat and talked about God and faith for close to 3.5 hours.
During that time, I said, “You know, I only came around to appreciating and wanting the holy life because I got tired and frustrated enough of the opposite that I began wanting the holy life for myself, and not because others wanted it for me.”
Again, as Catherine would say, “It is only through shadows that one comes to know the light.”
5.
“Anything touched by the light becomes a light itself.”
Perhaps all the world needs is enough of us to risk believing and putting the beatitudes into practice. —Megan McKenna, Blessings and Woes
Theologian Megan McKenna focuses on the way Luke’s Gospel presents Jesus and the Beatitudes, known as the “blessings and woes.”
[In Matthew’s Gospel], Jesus, the new Moses, is the law-giver who goes up the mountain with his disciples around him, while the crowd remains. In Matthew Jesus teaches them from the mountain. In Luke [6:17–35], Jesus … comes down with [the disciples] to a level place that is crowded with hordes of people from all parts of the region and beyond to the coastal cities: believers, unbelievers, outsiders, and probably many not welcome in religious society.
Before he teaches, he heals; or perhaps as he heals, he teaches. Those who have come to him are ill, diseased, troubled by evil spirits, despised by society. They are desperate, seeking to touch him…. The scene is one of motion, reaching, grabbing, and we are told simply that “the power which went out from him healed them all.” This power, his spirit and presence, is healing, comforting, soothing, calming, promising. But the most startling line of all is the last one: “Then lifting up his eyes to his disciples, Jesus said….”
He lifts up his eyes: he is positioned below them, probably kneeling on the ground, tending to those in pain and suffering, attentive to the needs of those reaching for him…. He is in a position of vulnerability, of solidarity with the masses of people in need. From this position he speaks the beatitudes: the blessings and the woes…. In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is more comfort-giver than teacher; more attentive than discursive; more tender than instructive; more embracing of the pain of others than distant as law-giver.
The blessings and woes are taught from this place of vulnerable solidarity and are meant to be put into practice.
These few lines of blessings and woes are followed by a staggering sermon that is … seemingly impossible to put into practice. There are exhortations to love your enemies and do good to those who persecute you and malign you, to turn the other cheek and go an extra mile….
It seems that the blessings and woes and what follows from them in practical action form the foundation of the kingdom of God in the world…. The words of Jesus empower and sustain those called to be responsible for the new public order and common good, the defense of the poor, the care of the despised and diseased…. When the words of Jesus are put into practice the kingdom comes.
Thich Nhat Hanh has said: “The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now…. It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.” [1] We need to practice reading and hearing the beatitudes; we need to put them into practice.
Seek to please Me above all else. As you journey through today, there will be many choice-points along your way. Most of the day’s decisions will be small ones you have to make quickly. You need some rule of thumb to help you make good choices. Many people’s decisions are a combination of their habitual responses and their desire to please themselves or others. This is not My way for you. Strive to please Me in everything, not just in major decisions. This is possible only to the extent that you are living inclose communion with Me. When My Presence is your deepest delight, you know almost instinctively what will please Me. A quick glance at Me is all you need to make the right choice. Delight yourself in Me more and more; seek My pleasure in all you do.
RELATED SCRIPTURE: John 8:29 (NIV) 29 The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.”
Hebrews 11:5-6 (NIV) 5 By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. 6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Psalm 37:4 (NIV) 4 Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
In 1942, Clarence Jordan established Koinonia Farm in Georgia as a pacifist, interracial “demonstration plot” for the kingdom of God. Jordan understood the gospel as something Christians must consciously choose to live out.
The kingdom of God on earth is Jesus’ specific proposal to humanity. While the Sermon on the Mount is not a complete statement of the proposal (it takes all four Gospels for that), it does contain many of the major points. So it is quite natural at the very beginning for Jesus to deal with the question of how to enter the kingdom, or how to become a citizen of it.
The first seven Beatitudes [Matthew 5:3–9] do just that. They are steps into the kingdom, the stairway to spiritual life…. These are not blessings pronounced upon different kinds of people—the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, and so on. Rather, they are stages in the experience of only one class of people—those who are entering the kingdom and who at each stage are blessed. The kingdom, of course, is the blessing, and each step into it partakes of its blessedness. This blessedness comes with the taking of the step, and is not postponed as a future reward. Jesus said, “Blessed are…”.
The first step in becoming a son or daughter, or being begotten from above, or in entering the kingdom, or being saved, or finding eternal life—whatever term you wish to use—is stated by Jesus as:
“The poor in spirit are partakers of the divine blessing, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” [Jordan’s translation].
What does Jesus mean by “poor in spirit”? In Luke’s account it is simply “you poor.” What kind of poverty is he talking about? If you have a lot of money, you’ll probably say spiritual poverty. If you have little or no money, you’ll probably say physical poverty. The rich will thank God for Matthew; the poor will thank God for Luke. Both will say, “He blessed me!” Well, then, who really did get the blessing?
Chances are, neither one. For it is exactly this attitude of self-praise and self-justification and self-satisfaction that robs people of a sense of great need for the kingdom and its blessings. When one says, “I don’t need to be poor in things; I’m poor in spirit,” and another says, “I don’t need to be poor in spirit, I’m poor in things,” both are justifying themselves as they are, and are saying in unison, “I don’t need.” With that cry on their lips, no one can repent….
It is neither wealth nor poverty that keeps people out of the kingdom—it is pride.
So the poor in spirit are not the proud in spirit. They know that in themselves—in all people—there are few, if any, spiritual resources. They must have help from above. They desperately need the kingdom of heaven. And feeling their great need for the kingdom, they get it.
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NOV 5, 2025 No Rest for the Weary. Skye Jethani
Christ has called pastors to care for his sheep. That’s what the word pastor means—a pastor is a shepherd. The metaphor certainly includes feeding, leading, and protecting the flock of Christ, but we often overlook the shepherd’s role in providing rest. “He makes me lie down in green pastures… He restores my soul,” David said of his Shepherd in Psalm 23. Looking back on my years as a pastor, I will confess that providing rest for God’s people never registered as part of my calling. Instead, I thought my job was to extract more labor from them. Often, I functioned more like a plowman, yoking and driving oxen to accomplish my work, rather than a shepherd creating space for God’s people to rest from theirs.
After leaving my full-time pastoral role in 2008, I discovered what life was really like among the sheep. I began keeping track of my time in a journal. What I found surprised me. Between my work, my family, and the responsibility to maintain a home and a body, I estimated about 12 percent of my time was flexible. With this 12 percent, I could read a book, volunteer at the homeless shelter, or take a nap. This 12 percent was also targeted by my church.It was often indirect and subtle, but from the moment I entered the church building on Sunday morning, I felt like my 12 percent needed constant protection. Whether it was the children’s ministry seeking volunteers, or the upcoming missionary dinner, or the new property committee—everyone wanted my time and energy. Between the songs and Scripture, the morning was crammed with ads. Sometimes they were even cleverly embedded in the sermon itself.
In the contemporary ministry world, R&R doesn’t mean “rest and relaxation,” but “recruit and replace.” There is a never-ending need for new church volunteers to replace those who’ve burned out. I was now seeing—and feeling—the unsustainability of the system from the other side.Ultimately, it was my responsibility to say yes or no to these service opportunities, and I can’t fault the church leaders for making me aware of the important work happening in our community. After all, I preached for many years, pushing the very same activities with the very same good intentions, but after a few months in the pews rather than the pulpit, I felt exhausted.
After a challenging week at work, there were some Sundays when attending a worship service brought more stress than sabbath into my life.I wonder if our culture’s addiction to work, including within the church, is contributing to the church dropout rates. Based on conversations I’ve had with former church attenders, I think it is.
Of course, the work we’re calling people to in the church is good, godly, and important, but when neither the culture nor the church models a redemptive pattern of work and rest anymore, eventually the sheep will leave to find a pasture where they can lie down—even if it’s in front of a television on Sunday morning. WEEKLY PRAYER. From Richard of Chichester (1198 – 1253)
Thanks be to you, my Lord Jesus Christ, For all the benefits you have won for me. For all the pains and insults you have borne for me. O most merciful Redeemer, Friend, and Brother, May I know you more clearly, Love you more dearly, And follow you more nearly, Day by day. Amen.
Heaven begins now, for any saints willing to sign up. —Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest
Spiritual writer Barbara Brown Taylor considers the promise of “blessing” that is central to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:
We don’t have to wonder what a blessed life looks like. Jesus laid that out right at the beginning of his most famous sermon, though his description is so far from what some of us had hoped that we would rather discuss the teaching than act on it…. In this life, most of us pedal pretty hard to avoid going in the direction of Jesus’ Beatitudes. We read books that promise to enrich our spirits. We find all kinds of ways to sedate our mournfulness.
According to Jesus, the blessings of the kingdom are available here and now—and later:
The first words out of Jesus’ mouth are not “Blessed shall be” but “Blessed are.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—not because of something that will happen to them later but because of what their poverty opens up in them right now. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”—not because God is going to fill them up later but because their appetites are so fine-tuned right now….
When people who can’t stop crying hear Jesus call them blessed right in the basement of their grief, they realize this isn’t something they are supposed to get over soon. This is what it looks like to have a blessed and broken heart….
When people who are getting beat up for doing the right thing hear Jesus call them blessed while the blows are still coming, they are freed to feel the pain in a different way. The bruises won’t hurt any less, but the new meaning in them can make them easier to bear. Who knows? They may even change the hearts of those landing the blows, while they bring the black-and-blue into communion with each other like almost nothing else can.
This is what the Beatitudes have to do with real life. They describe a view of reality in which the least likely candidates are revealed to be extremely fortunate in the divine economy of things, not only later but right now. They are Jesus’ truth claims for all time, the basis of everything that follows, which everyone who hears them is free to accept, reject, or neglect. Whatever you believe about him, believe this about you: the things that seem to be going most wrong for you may in fact be the things that are going most right. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to fix them. It just means they may need blessing as much as they need fixing, since the blessing is already right there.
If you can breathe into it—well, that’s when heaven comes to earth, because earth is where heaven starts, for all who are willing to live into it right now.
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Everything in Its Right Place
Creation and the book of Job
Mark Longhurst
Everything fits together perfectly. Job’s world makes sense. He fears God, shuns evil, and is blameless and upright. He even sacrifices after feast days for his children, just in case any of them happen to sin. What a guy! As a reflection of Job’s life, the natural world fits together perfectly as well—at least the portions of it within Job’s control.
Domesticated animals live fruitful lives under Job’s watch. In his house, 7,000 sheep graze, 3,000 camels roam, and 500 yoke of oxen work the fields. Job is a good and righteous man. He’s a wise choice for a church moderator, a town selectman, or a local non-profit board member. The chaos of creation has not yet hit him; the shattering power of storms and disasters and crushing loss have held themselves at bay. Everything in Job’s world, as Thom Yorke from Radiohead sings, is in its right place.
The Protective Fence Falls
But we know the story. The Adversary, Satan, presents himself before God in the heavenly court as a “prosecuting attorney.” Satan makes the accusation that Job’s fear of God depends on God’s protection. “You have fenced him in,” the Satan points out to God, “but if you take away all that he has, Job will surely blaspheme you to your face.” And so God grants the adversary-accuser permission to turn Job’s life over to forces of chaos. God removes the protective fence around Job, and his household begins to disintegrate.
Fire falls from heaven; it burns Job’s sheep and his servants. Bandits raid the camels and put Job’s other men to the sword. A mighty wind disrupts a family feast, causing a building to collapse on the remaining family; a severe inflammation spreads through Job’s entire body. His friends later will strive hard to explain away Job’s plight, but when they first witness Job’s suffering, they can only sit in silence and weep.
Instead of ‘Let there be light,’ Job declares, ‘Let there be darkness.’”
Job’s despair and anger eventually overcome his pious reputation. He curses the day he was born. But what’s more is that he curses creation itself. He sings a lament in chapter 3, full of depression and self-absorption, identifying his own life’s collapse with the undoing and destruction of God’s very good creation.
Instead of “Let there be light,” Job declares, “Let there be darkness!” (Job 3:4). Instead of two great lights separating night and day, Job curses stars to fall. Instead of sea monsters swimming and creatures creeping and wild birds flying, Job calls for Leviathan—the primordial monster—to be captured and put down. And instead of Sabbath rest on the seventh day, Job only has eyes for the repose of the grave.
God’s protective fence around Job’s life has become a suffocating prison.
Our hearts go out to Job, and we only have silence and tears to offer when the lives of people we love fall apart. We dare not attempt, like Job’s friends in the rest of the book, the false comfort of religious answers. The first lesson they teach budding ministers in hospital chaplaincy is simply to shut up and listen.
And yet Job’s wisdom folktale asks more than the perennial question of innocent suffering. Sermons will continue to be preached about the unanswerable groan, “Why, God?” But, in a time of environmental catastrophe, when, as Bill McKibben puts it, we are running Genesis backwards, this Hebrew tale also tells of the universe and the human’s place within it
“In a time of environmental catastrophe, when we are running Genesis backwards, Job tells us of the universe and the human’s place within it.”
Job’s happy days, it turns out, glided along on the dangerous belief that nature’s role is to serve, to be domesticated for human purpose. The only non-human living beings identified in Job chapter 1 are the sheep, camels, oxen, and donkeys that toil on Job’s land. Just as Job is fenced in, protected, and blessed, the wild and unkempt aspects of creation are fenced out and ignored.
In a consumerist economy such as ours, Job’s and our ignorant bliss is sustained at the expense of the unseen earth and its living creatures. If nature only exists to enhance the temporary stability of our lives, nature becomes merely an extension of our own ego’s consciousness. It becomes permissible, then, to scour the globe for oil, remove environmental protections, and rollback use of renewable energies.
To be honest, Job’s narcissism didn’t diminish once his life fell apart. In Job’s lamentation he still places himself as the center around which creation revolves. Job certainly could not have envisioned the era of the Anthropocene—and yet even today, it is perhaps the height of arrogant anthropomorphism to think that the universe will cease breathing simply because we will.
God in the Whirlwind
Yet 35 chapters, two soliloquies, and three cycles of rambling dialogue later, God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. God’s voice thunders through creation itself to tell another creation story through pointed rhetorical questions: “Where were you when I laid earth’s foundations? Who set its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together?” In modern language: Where were you at the Big Bang? Where was Western Civilization during the Ice Age? It’s God who birthed gushing waters and swaddled them in clouds, God who assigned dawn its place, God who peered into the gates of deep darkness and death—not Job, not us.
Behind the terror of Job’s plight and the tempest containing God’s voice lies a humbler view of humanity’s place on earth. Multiple Bible passages such as Genesis 1 picture humanity as the “crown” of creation, the rulers or stewards of earth, the mini-kings and queens in God’s image, watching over earth’s realm with either benevolence or terror. And yet after several thousand years of empire-building, resource procuring, world creating, and earth destroying, God’s whirlwind speech downsizes us to a smaller cosmic role.
We consistently confuse our place with God’s place, but humanity in Job’s book is not the crown of creation. Rather, we are simply one part of creation’s expansive, wild, diverse community.
Father Richard Rohr writes about the radical message of the Sermon on the Mount.
In his teachings, and in the Sermon on the Mount in particular, Jesus critiques and reorders the values of his culture from the bottom up. He “betrays” the prevailing institutions of family, religion, power, and resource control by his loyalty to another world vision, which he calls the reign of God. Such loyalty costs him general popularity, the support of the authorities, immense inner agony, and finally his own life. By putting the picture in the largest possible frame, he calls into question all smaller frames and invites his hearers into a radical transformation of consciousness. Many were not ready for it—nor are many of us today.
To understand the Sermon on the Mount, we need to clarify where Jesus is leading us.
It’s not to the old self on the old path, which would be non-conversion and non-enlightenment.
It’s not to the old self on a new path, which is where most religion begins and ends. It involves new behavior, new language, and practices that are sincere, but the underlying myth/worldview/motivation and goals are never really changed. My anger, fear, and ego are merely transferred to now defend my idea of God or religion.
Jesus is leading us to the new self on a new path, which is the total transformation of consciousness, worldview, motivation, goals, and rewards that characterize one who loves and is loved by God.
Matthew sets the stage for the Sermon with three simple sentences: “Seeing the crowds, he went onto the mountain. And when he was seated his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak” (Matthew 5:1–2). Remember, Moses came down from the mountaintop with the Ten Commandments. For Matthew’s Jewish audience, the message is clear: This is the new Moses going back to the mountaintop, reproclaiming the truth, bringing down the new law. That is a very important context: In a certain sense, the Sermon is Jesus’ revisioning of the Ten Commandments.
The Beatitudes (sometimes translated as “happy attitudes,” or even congratulations in a secular sense) are addressed not to the crowds but to Jesus’ disciples. Later in the Gospel, the most demanding teaching— “take up your cross”—is reserved for an even smaller group, the twelve apostles. The Sermon is addressed to the larger second circle of disciples, those who are still being initiated. That’s us!
It seems there is a very real plan in Jesus’ initiation. He is aware of timing, readiness, and maturation. At the early stages, we are not ready for the hard words of the gospel; we are unable to hear the message of the cross. It is only in the second half of life that we come to understand that dying is not opposed to life. Dying is a part of a greater mystery—and we are a part of that mystery. In my experience, it is usually the older psyche that is ready to hear such sober truth.
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A Teaching to Be Lived Out
Father Richard considers how challenging it is to live out Jesus’ teaching on the Sermon on the Mount:
I am told that the Sermon on the Mount—the essence of Jesus’ teaching—is the least quoted Scripture in official Catholic Church documents. We must be honest and admit that most of Christianity has focused very little on what Jesus himself taught and spent most of his time doing: healing people, doing acts of justice and inclusion, embodying compassionate and nonviolent ways of living.
I’m grateful that my spiritual father, St. Francis of Assisi, took the Sermon on the Mount seriously and spent his life trying to imitate Jesus. Likewise, Francis’ followers, especially in the beginning, tried to imitate Francis. At its best, Franciscanism offers a simple return to the gospel as an alternative lifestyle more than an orthodox belief system. That example continues to be lived out by the Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, the Catholic Worker Movement, and others. For these groups, the Sermon on the Mount is not just words! At their best, they include the outsider, prefer the margins to the center, are committed to nonviolence, and choose social poverty and divine union over any private perfection or sense of moral superiority.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives us this short but effective image so we will know that we are to act on his words and live the teachings, instead of only believing things about God:
Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built a house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock. And everyone who listens to these words of mine but does not act on them will be like a fool who built a house on sand. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. And it collapsed and was completely ruined (Matthew 7:24–27; Richard’s emphasis).
Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, understood the Sermon on the Mount as the foundational plan for following Jesus: “Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers.” [1] She observed that “we are trying to lead a good life. We are trying to talk about and write about the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the social principles of the church, and it is most astounding, the things that happen when you start trying to live this way. To perform the works of mercy becomes a dangerous practice.” [2]
Jesus taught an alternative wisdom that shakes the social order instead of upholding the conventional wisdom that maintains it. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is not about preserving the status quo! It’s about living here on earth as if the reign of God has already begun (see Luke 17:21). In this reign, the Sermon tells us, the poor are blessed, the hungry are filled, the grieving are filled with joy, and enemies are loved.
Richard Rohr honors the significance of “thin times” that draw us nearer to the threshold between this realm and the next:
What some call “liminal space” or threshold space (in Latin, limen means a threshold) is a very good phrase for those special times, events, and places that open us up to the sacred. It seems we need special (sacred) days to open us up to all days being special and sacred. This has always been the case and didn’t originate with Christianity. Ancient initiation rites were intensely sacred time and space that sent the initiate into a newly discovered sacred universe.
What became All Saints Day and All Souls Day (November 1–2) was already called “thin times” by the ancient Celts (as were February 1–2: St. Bridget’s Day and Candlemas Day, when candles were blessed and lit). The veil between this world and the next world was considered most “thin” and easily traversed during these times. On these days, we are invited to be aware of deep time—that is, past, present, and future time gathered into one especially holy moment. We are reminded that our ancestors are still in us and work with us and through us. We call it the “communion of saints.” The New Testament phrase for this is “when time came to a fullness,” as when Jesus first announces the reign of God (Mark 1:15) or when Mary comes to the moment of birth (Luke 2:6). We are in liminal space whenever past, present, and future time come together in a full moment of readiness. We are in liminal space whenever the division between “right here” and “over there” is obliterated in our consciousness.
Deep time, along with the communion of saints professed in Christian creeds, means that our goodnessis not just our own, nor is our badness just our own. We are intrinsically social animals. We carry the lived and the unlived (and unhealed) lives of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents as far back as DNA and genomes can trace them—which is pretty far back. It does take a village to create a person. We are the very first generation to know that this is literally and genetically true. There is deep healing and understanding when we honor the full cycle of life. No wonder so many are intrigued today by genealogy searches and ancestry test kits.
Living in the communion of saints means that we can take ourselves very seriously (we are part of a Great Whole) and not take ourselves too seriously at all (we are just a part of the Great Whole) at the very same time. I hope this frees us from any unnecessary individual guilt—and, more importantly, frees us to be full “partners in God’s triumphant parade” through time and history (2 Corinthians 2:14). We are in on the deal and, yes, the really Big Deal. We are all a very small part of a very Big Thing!
Thomas Merton frequents these Friday newsletters, I know, I know.
You can’t deny it, though, this one is still just golden. It is almost a Christian version of a Koan…
It is not that someone “gives up faith” to find God, it is more that God is larger than our concepts, frameworks, rites, and rituals. God is willing to be experienced within them, but at some point, we butt up against the limitations of those things.
For me, there is a season in which it makes sense to “learn” religion, and then to “unlearn” it, to then “relearn” it in a larger, more mysterious sense. (This might be similar to Brueggemann’s idea of “orientation, disorientation, reorientation”, which Rohr then calls “order, disorder, reorder.”)
It may be the wisdom of the Dark Night of the Soul that first formulated it, but there is a point at which we may need to “repent” of our own limiting understandings of God!
2.
“Individuation is the process of becoming a ‘person,’ a fully integrated and relational being… That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of one’s inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”
The possibility that all of our external conflict is the result of externalization of internal conflict is striking. That which we cannot handle within ourselves, we seek to eliminate outside of ourselves.
Every division, every separation, every conflict, and every war is the result of an internal division, separation, conflict, or war we are dealing with. This means that for there to be world peace that lasts, there must be the teaching of internal peace/shalom.
The book leans heavily into the idea of the Whole and how to be properly “catholic” means to be concerned (kata) with the whole (holos) of everything.
3.
“For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”
“I take my cue from Jesus Christ who told me and told all of us to love each other, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and visit those in prison. If you can’t do that, you’re not a believer—I don’t care what church you go to.”
Any “Christianity” that does not lead toward loving one’s neighbor enough that one can’t help but do acts of compassionate justice while respecting the inherent dignity of the other… is not Christianity.
5.
“You’ve made a holy fool of me and I’ve thanked You ever since.”
Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands. —Linda Hogan, Dwellings
Chickasaw poet and author Linda Hogan describes how a sweat lodge ceremony draws together elements of the earth to accompany those inside:
In a sweat lodge ceremony, the entire world is brought inside the enclosure. The soft odor of smoking cedar accompanies this arrival. It is all called in. The animals come from the warm and sunny distances…. Wind arrives from the four directions. It has moved through caves and breathed through our bodies…. The sky is there with all the stars whose lights we see long after the stars themselves have gone back to nothing. It is a place grown intense and holy. It is a place of immense community and of humbled solitude; we sit together in our aloneness and speak, one at a time, our deepest language of need, hope, loss, and survival. We remember that all things are connected.
The ceremony seeks to repair any disconnections:
Remembering this is the purpose of the ceremony. It is part of a healing and restoration. It is the mending of a broken connection between us and the rest. The participants in a ceremony say the words “All my relations” before and after we pray; those words create a relationship with other people, with animals, with the land. To have health it is necessary to keep all these relations in mind.The intention of a ceremony is to put a person back together by restructuring the human mind…. We make whole our broken-off pieces of self and world. Within ourselves, we bring together the fragments of our lives in a sacred act of renewal, and we reestablish our connections with others. The ceremony … takes us toward the place of balance, our place in the community of all things. It is an event that sets us back upright. But it is not a finished thing. The real ceremony begins where the formal one ends, when we take up a new way, our minds and hearts filled with the vision of earth that holds us within it, in compassionate relationship to and with our world.
We speak. We sing. We swallow water and breathe smoke. By the end of the ceremony, it is as if skin contains land and birds. The places within us have become filled. As inside the enclosure of the lodge, the animals and ancestors move into the human body, into skin and blood. The land merges with us. The stones come to dwell inside the person. Gold rolling hills take up residence…. We who easily grow apart from the world are returned to the great store of life all around us, and there is the deepest sense of being at home here in this intimate kinship. There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger.
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Sarah Young Jesus Calling
To live in My Presence consistently, you must expose and expel your rebellious tendencies. When something interferes with your plans or desires, you tend to resent the interference. Try to become aware of each resentment, however petty it may seem. Don’t push those unpleasant feelings down; instead, let them come to the surface where you can deal with them. Ask My Spirit to increase your awareness of resentful feelings. Bring them boldly into the Light of My Presence, so that I can free you from them. The ultimate solution to rebellious tendencies is submission to My authority over you. Intellectually you rejoice in My sovereignty, without which the world would be a terrifying place. But when My sovereign will encroaches on your little domain of control, you often react with telltale resentment. The best response to losses or thwarted hopes is praise: The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Remember that all good things–your possessions, your family and friends, your health and abilities, your time–are gifts from Me. Instead of feeling entitled to all these blessings, respond to them with gratitude. Be prepared to let go of anything I take from you, but never let go of My hand!
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Psalm 139:23-24 (NLT) 23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.
Additional insight regarding Psalm 139:23-24: David asked God to search for sin and point it out, even to the level of testing his thoughts. This is exploratory surgery for sin. How are we to recognize sin unless God points it out? Then, when God shows us, we can repent and be forgiven. Make this verse your prayer. If you ask the Lord to search your heart and your thoughts to reveal your sin, you will be continuing on “the path of everlasting life.”
1st Peter 5:6 (NLT) 6 So humble yourselves under the mighty power of God, and at the right time he will lift you up in honor.
Additional insight regarding 1st Peter 5:6: We often worry about our position and status, hoping to get proper recognition for what we do. But Peter advises us to remember that God’s recognition counts more than human praise. God is able and willing to bless us according to his timing. Humbly obey God regardless of present circumstances, and in his good time – either in this life or the next – he will honor you.
Additional insight regarding 1st Peter 5:7: Carrying your worries, stresses, and daily struggles by yourself shows that you have not trusted God fully with your life. It takes humility, however, to recognize that God cares, to admit your need, and to let others in God’s family help you. Sometimes we think that struggles caused by our own sin and foolishness are not God’s concern. But when we turn to God in repentance, he will bear the weight even of those struggles. Letting God have your anxieties calls for action, not passivity. Don’t submit to circumstances but to the Lord, who controls circumstances.
Job 1:21 (NLT) 21 He said, “I came naked from my mother’s womb, and I will be naked when I leave. The Lord gave me what I had, and the Lord has taken it away. Praise the name of the Lord!”
Additional insight regarding Job 1:21: Job did not hide his overwhelming grief. He had not lost his faith in God; instead, his emotions showed that he was human and that he loved his family. God created our emotions, and it is not sinful or inappropriate to express them as Job did. If you have experienced a deep loss, a disappointment, or a heartbreak, admit your feelings to yourself and others, and grieve.
Additional insight regarding Job 1:21: Job had lost his possessions and family in this first of Satan’s tests, but he reacted rightly toward God by acknowledging God’s sovereign authority over everything God had given him. Satan lost this first round. Job passed the test and proved that people can love God for who he is, not for what he gives.
When we die, we don’t go anywhere, but rather, we cross over into unmediated, infinite union with God. We cross over into loving God, with God’s own love for God, which is the Holy Spirit. We cross over into knowing God, with God’s own knowledge of God, which is Christ. —James Finley, Turning to the Mystics, podcast
James Finley leads us through a meditation to help us experience the immediate presence and intimacy of God’s love and those who have joined God before us:
I invite you to imagine that you are sitting alone in the middle of a well-lit room. There are no windows and no furniture in the room other than the chair you are sitting in…. As you sit there alone in silence, the light in the room slowly begins to dim. As the room dims, a light on the other side of the wall you are facing slowly becomes brighter and brighter. You begin to realize that the wall you are facing is not really a solid wall, as you had imagined, but is rather a gossamer veil that is becoming increasingly translucent in the light that is shining through it, filling the darkness of your room with an unfamiliar light.
In the light shining out from the other side of the veil you see God, the angels, and the saints. They are all laughing and waving at you, letting you know how delighted they are that you can see them. You start laughing and waving back at them.
Then God, the angels, and the saints pass through the veil to join you, rendering the room radiant with communal joy and delight in which your very presence begins to glow with the presence of God. Illumined and transformed in this way, God and the angels and saints carry you with them into heaven, just on the other side of the veil, where all are dwelling who have died and crossed over into God. Then God and the angels and saints carry you with them back through the veil, back to the room, now aglow with heavenly wonder and delight. Then, once again, they transport you back into the celestial realm, and then back again into the room….
You are left once again in the familiarity of your earthly experience of yourself sitting there alone in the room, facing the wall. But while everything is the same as before, everything is, in an interior way, radically different. For you now realize that while, yes, it is true that, on one level, the wall you are facing really is a wall, … yet in the afterglow of the unitive experience that has just graced your life, you now know in the depths of your awakened heart that, ultimately speaking, the wall is no wall at all…. You have been graced with a fleeting experience of being immersed in God-immersed-in-you in a boundless communion that utterly transcends, even as it utterly permeates, the darkness and fragmentations of this world.
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Eight Lessons from Charlie Kirk’s Life
Put God First Charlie never shied away from declaring his faith. “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). Every decision we make must flow from that starting point. If we’re not putting Christ first, we’re building on sand.
Be Bold Charlie embodied Romans 1:16: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation.” He wasn’t timid, he wasn’t quiet, and he certainly wasn’t “safe.” He was bold. And that boldness shook the foundations of a society addicted to lies.
Go Into Hostile Territory Who else but Charlie would walk into the lion’s den of a liberal college campus and speak truth to young minds being discipled by secularism? “Go into all the world and preach the gospel” (Mark 16:15). That command doesn’t say “go only where you’re welcome.” We need more warriors willing to storm enemy ground with the banner of Christ.
Stand on Your Principles In a world where compromise is currency, Charlie stood tall. He knew who he was and Whose he was. Jesus said, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (Matthew 7:24). That’s the call: principles anchored in Scripture, not popularity.
Fight Back with Ideas, Not Weapons Charlie never raised a fist; he raised ideas. He armed himself with words, debates, logic, and truth. Paul wrote, “The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:4). Let us wield ideas and the Word of God with just as much courage.
Challenge the Status Quo Charlie rattled cages. He asked hard questions. He dismantled long-held assumptions. And guess what? That’s what Christians are called to do. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2). If your faith isn’t shaking up the world, you’re doing it wrong.
Be Devoted to Your Country and Family Charlie loved America. He loved his family. He saw both as gifts from God to be cherished and defended. “If anyone does not provide for his relatives… he has denied the faith” (1 Timothy 5:8). Let us emulate his devotion at home and in our nation.
Create Change Charlie was just 18 years old when he launched Turning Point USA out of his parents’ garage. From that humble beginning came a movement that impacted millions. “Who dares despise the day of small things?” (Zechariah 4:10). What’s stopping you from creating something for Christ that will outlive you?
Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking abouthis exodus, which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem. —Luke 9:30–31
In a small Christian community in Nicaragua, everyday people reflect on the meaning of Jesus’ transfiguration, especially his conversation with Moses and Elijah. Writing from within the liberation movement, priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal shares their insights:
TOMÁS: “And those two dead men that appear beside him and that are very happy, it’s to make us see that they hadn’t died, and they were not only alive, they had a better life.”
FELIPE, Tomás’s son: “That was also to give them courage, because Jesus was going to be like the two of them….”
They asked me [the priest] why Moses and Elijah appeared, and I said that Moses was the great liberator of the people, that he brought them out of Egyptian slavery, and Elijah was a great prophet, a defender of the poor and the oppressed, when Israel again fell into slavery, with social classes. Both of them were closely identified with the Messiah, for it had been said that the Messiah would be a second Moses and that Elijah would come back to earth to denounce injustices as a precursor of the Messiah (and Jesus said that Elijah had already arrived in the person of John the Baptist).
The people gathered continue reflecting together on the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, and what it means to suffer, hope, and rise with Christ together.
WILLIAM: “They’re talking about his death, and they’re in glory too, sharing that glory of his. It seems to me it’s because all people who share the sufferings of Christ and struggle for his cause (for freedom) will share in that same glory of his, like those two prophets. And I believe that when they were talking about his death they weren’t talking just about him but also about all people who together with him were going to enjoy that same happy ending.”
OLIVIA: “As I see it, the resurrection is something you can already begin to have in this life. Christ was still made of mortal flesh, and they already see him with that brightness, that light so beautiful, the way he’d be after his death, resurrected.… They’ve seen Jesus this way, already transfigured in life because of the death he was going to have. And what they saw there you can apply to the people, the people still suffering. They’re transfigured like Christ even though we can’t see it, because the people are Christ himself.”…
WILLIAM: “It seems to me the victory over death is when somebody, because of the good he’s done for others, becomes part of future humanity, which will be resurrected. Even though your death is obscure and nobody remembers it, you stay alive in the consciousness of humanity. And what the disciples saw in that little moment is the glory of that future humanity.”
How ignoring context turns Scripture into a weapon against the poor.
If you haven’t heard yet, millions of low-income Americans will lose access to food aid on Nov. 1, when half of states plan to cut off benefits due to the government shutdown.
Twenty-five states have said they are issuing notices informing participants of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the nation’s largest anti-hunger initiative, that they won’t receive checks next month. Those states include California, Arkansas, Hawaii, Indiana, Mississippi and New Jersey.¹
Christians should be the loudest voices against this, but too many are busy justifying it with a single verse of Scripture.
The Verse They Love to Quote
I am no stranger to this rhetoric. I grew up hearing 2 Thessalonians 3:10 weaponized. “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” Case closed. Scripture said it. The lazy can starve. It wasn’t until years later, when I actually began reading the letter to the Thessalonians in context, that I realized how catastrophically we’d missed the point. Paul wasn’t writing public policy recommendations for a 21st-century democracy. He was addressing a very specific problem in a very specific church where some believers had stopped working because they thought Jesus was coming back at any moment. They’d quit their jobs and were mooching off the generosity of other church members while they waited for the Second Coming. Paul’s response wasn’t “cut off all social safety nets and let the poor starve.” It was “hey, get back to work and stop being a burden on your church family while you wait.”
The context matters. Paul had just spent the previous chapter talking about how believers should encourage each other and support the weak. He’d been clear throughout his letters about the church’s responsibility to care for those genuinely in need.
The Verses They Conveniently Forget
Here’s what kills me about watching politicians, pundits, and Christians pull out this one verse to justify gutting SNAP benefits: they act like it’s the only thing Scripture has to say about hunger and poverty. They quote Paul’s one corrective to a specific situation and ignore the thundering chorus of over 2,000 verses commanding God’s people to care for the poor, feed the hungry, and defend the vulnerable. It’s not even close. The Bible is practically obsessed with how we treat those who have nothing.
Leviticus 19:10 commands farmers to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so the poor can eat. Deuteronomy 15:11 says “there will always be poor people in the land, therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy.” Proverbs 19:17 goes so far as to say that whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord himself. Isaiah 58 tells us that the kind of fasting God desires isn’t religious performance but sharing our food with the hungry and bringing the poor into our homes. Jesus launches his ministry in Luke 4 by announcing good news to the poor and kicks off the Sermon on the Mount by blessing them. He feeds thousands with loaves and fish, and he promises in Matthew 25 that how we treat the hungry, the stranger, the naked, and the imprisoned is how we treat him.
The biblical witness isn’t ambiguous here. God is unequivocally, passionately, relentlessly on the side of the poor. Every major prophet rails against societies that neglect the vulnerable. The psalms repeatedly celebrate God as the defender of the fatherless and the widow. The early church in Acts shares everything in common so that no one goes without. James says that religion that doesn’t care for orphans and widows is worthless. This isn’t a side issue in Scripture. This is the issue. You cannot read the Bible honestly and come away thinking God is fine with people going hungry.
Selective Literalism and the Politics of Scarcity
What we’re watching is selective literalism in service of a political agenda. The same voices that want to apply 2 Thessalonians 3:10 with rigid literalism to justify cutting food assistance have no interest in applying that same literalism to Jesus’s command to sell all you have and give to the poor, or his warning that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. They don’t want to talk about Amos pronouncing judgment on those who “trample on the needy and bring ruin to the poor of the land.” They’re not quoting Ezekiel 16:49, where the sin of Sodom is described as having “excess of food” while not helping “the poor and needy.”
When we take one verse and use it to build walls, justify scarcity, or to punish people, we’re not reading Scripture faithfully. We’re conscripting it into our culture wars. We’re making Paul say things he never meant to advance policies that directly contradict the heart of the God he served.
The “Church’s Job” Dodge
The other line I hear constantly is this: “It’s the church’s job to feed the poor, not the government’s.” It sounds spiritual. It sounds like we’re defending the proper role of the church. But it’s mostly just a way to absolve ourselves of responsibility while feeling righteous about it.
Let’s be honest about what this argument actually means in practice. The church in America, for all our buildings and budgets and good intentions, is not currently feeding the hungry at anywhere near the scale needed. We’re not even close. According to Feeding America, over 47 million Americans face food insecurity.² The church runs food pantries and soup kitchens, and that work is beautiful and necessary, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the need. SNAP serves roughly 42 million people.³ There is no universe in which the American church could suddenly absorb that responsibility if the government cuts the program. We don’t have the infrastructure, the volunteers, or the funding.
But here’s the deeper problem with the “church’s job” argument: it creates a false dichotomy. Who says it has to be either-or? The biblical command to care for the poor doesn’t come with a footnote that says “only through religious institutions.” When Scripture tells us to feed the hungry, it’s speaking to all of us, in all the ways we organize our common life together. Government is simply one of the ways we do things collectively. We pool resources through taxes to build roads, fund schools, provide fire departments, and yes, help people eat. That’s not opposed to biblical values. That’s biblical values being lived out through civic structures.
The prophets didn’t just call individuals to personal charity. They called nations and kings to establish justice. They demanded that societies create systems where the vulnerable are protected. Jeremiah 22 says that King Josiah was righteous because “he defended the cause of the poor and needy.” Isaiah 10 pronounces woe on “those who make unjust laws, to deprive the poor of their rights.” This is about more than individual acts of kindness. This is about how we structure our communities and our countries.
Besides, let’s name the game being played here. The people who say “it’s the church’s job” are often the same people who don’t want to fund the church’s work either. They’re not writing bigger checks to their local food bank. They’re not volunteering at soup kitchens. They just don’t want anyone to be fed if it costs them anything, and they’ve found a religious-sounding way to justify it. It’s spiritualized selfishness, and we should call it what it is.
The Reality They Don’t Want to See
Let me tell you about the first few years of my ministry. I was working part-time at a church in Iowa and full-time in the local school district. Two jobs. Nobody could accuse me of being lazy or unwilling to work. I was doing everything right according to the bootstrap gospel that gets preached from too many pulpits. But here’s what that verse about “if you don’t work, you don’t eat” doesn’t account for: the cost of healthcare and daycare alone wiped us out. Completely. If it weren’t for WIC, my family wouldn’t have eaten. That’s not hyperbole, that was the simple math.
This is the reality for millions of Americans that the “you don’t work, you don’t eat” crowd conveniently ignores. Most people receiving SNAP benefits are working. They’re working full-time jobs that don’t pay enough to cover rent and groceries and medical bills and childcare. They’re working multiple part-time jobs because their employers won’t give them full-time hours specifically to avoid providing benefits. They’re disabled or elderly or caring for family members who are. The lazy freeloader narrative is a myth we tell ourselves to justify our lack of compassion. It’s a story we invented to make ourselves feel better about letting people go hungry.
The people who quote 2 Thessalonians 3:10 like it’s an economic policy have never had to choose between paying for insulin and buying groceries. They’ve never stood in line at the WIC office feeling the weight of judgment from people who assume you’re gaming the system instead of just trying to feed your kids. They’ve never done the mental math at the grocery store, putting items back because you’re five dollars over what your EBT card will cover. And because they’ve never lived that reality, they can reduce poverty to a simple moral failing. Work harder. Make better choices. Pull yourself up. As if the problem is effort and not a system designed to keep people on the edge of survival.
What Paul Actually Cared About
I digress, but if we’re going to quote Paul, let’s at least be honest about what he actually cared about. In Romans 12:13, he tells believers to “share with the Lord’s people who are in need” and “practice hospitality.” In Galatians 2:10, he says the apostles’ only request was that he “remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.” In 2 Corinthians 9, he spends an entire chapter encouraging generous giving to help those in need. Paul organized a massive collection effort across multiple churches to support the poor believers in Jerusalem. The man was laser-focused on making sure nobody in the church family went hungry.
So when Paul writes to the Thessalonians about people who won’t work, he’s not advocating for dismantling social safety nets in a modern nation-state. He’s addressing church discipline for members who are exploiting community generosity. That’s pastoral counsel for a specific congregation, not a universal economic policy.
The Heart We’re Missing
Here’s the deeper issue: when we use Scripture to justify letting people go hungry, we reveal that we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the character of God. The God of the Bible is one who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field. The God who invites us to a banquet and tells us to go out into the streets and compel the poor and crippled and blind to come in. The God who cares so much about hungry people that he promises blessing to those who feed them and judgment to those who don’t.
Jesus never asks “are you deserving?” before he feeds the five thousand. He doesn’t run background checks or require proof of job applications. He sees people who are hungry, has compassion on them, and provides. That’s the heart of God. That’s what it looks like when divine love encounters human need.
The Invitation
So here’s what I’m asking: before we quote one verse from Paul to justify our attitude, maybe we should sit with the 2,000 verses that command generosity. Maybe we should ask ourselves whether our theology is being shaped by Scripture or by our politics. Maybe we should consider that when we use the Bible to build walls around the table instead of expanding it, we’re missing the entire point.
The God who became flesh and dwelt among us, who had nowhere to lay his head, who fed the hungry and welcomed the outcast, is still inviting us to participate in the abundant life of the kingdom. That kingdom doesn’t operate on scarcity and suspicion. It operates on grace and generosity. And it has always, always made room for the hungry.
The question isn’t whether we can afford to feed people. The question is whether we can afford to call ourselves followers of Jesus while we let them starve.
If you’re wondering what to do next:
Call your U.S. Representative and Senators and urge them to fully fund SNAP and end the shutdown.
Call your pastor and ask how your church can help meet the need in your own community.
Volunteer with a local food bank or meal program.
Give to an organization feeding families in your city.
Share this story with someone who still thinks hunger is a “choice.”
I’m grateful to be part of a church that is stepping up in a big way. You can see the news story here.
Father Richard Rohr reflects on our universal participation in life and the connectedness to which Christ invites us:
We all need to feel and know, at the cellular level, that we are not the first ones who have suffered, nor will we be the last. Instead, we are in one universal parade—God’s “triumphal procession,” as Paul calls it, using the metaphor of a Roman triumph after a great victory (2 Corinthians 2:14). In this parade, he says, we are all partners with both the living and the dead, walking alongside countless ancestors and descendants who were wounded and longed for healing. This idea, “the communion of saints,” became the last phrase added to the Apostles’ Creed centuries later, almost as if it took us a while to recognize its importance. Someday, maybe we will have the courage to add “the communion of sinners,” too. The body of Christ is one great and shared sadness and one continuous joy, and we are saved just by remaining connected to it.
Since the Enlightenment, however, we have been trained to believe that we each can “do it my way,” like Frank Sinatra’s song, instead of participating in everybody else’s great parade. As I often say,if we do not mythologize our pain, all we can do is pathologize it. We Westerners have lost the ability to frame the significance of our own little lives. I suspect that those who grew up with the richness of the myths and sacred stories of Ulysses and Athena or the Corn Mothers or Kali may have found meaning and consolation for their pain more readily than many of us do today. They knew they weren’t alone on the journey, while we no longer believe or live as if we are an inherent part of a much bigger story. We believe ourselves separate from the cosmic dance that created Greek comedy and tragedy and led the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest to dance and carve kachinas as a way of marking human events or emotions. Helping people see that they are cooperating members of a performance that is already showing—and will keep showing—is surely why so many of the religions of Indigenous people were, at their heart, ancestor worship.
We are invited to realize I am not the first nor the last to feel this suffering. I can now choose to be a weak but willing member of the whole communion of saints!Surely such solidarity is our salvation, rather than private purity or personal wholeness. Paul called it living “en Cristo,” a phrase that he used multiple times to name the shape and coherence of our collective participation.
Maybe hope needs to be cosmic hope to be hope at all. Maybe pain needs to be borne together, and for all time; it is very hard to bear alone, or in the moment. We fight it as unfair and undeserved when we could instead carry it as an act of human and loving solidarity.
Community Continues
Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes describes the gifts and wisdom she has received from the ancestors of her faith and culture:
Although some folks use a very narrow definition of the word ancestor, I use the word as an indicator of legacy and interconnections. The ancestors are elders who pour their lives into the community as a libation of love and commitment. They live and die well, and when they transition, they do so in full connection with an engaged community. Thereafter, they dwell in the spaces carved out by our spiritual and cultural expectations. They may be in another life dimension, but they connect with us in dreams, in memories, and in stories….
The stories reveal a promise that the community will continue beyond the breath of one individual and that all transitions will be well attended by relatives from the other side. This is a cosmology of connection that values but also transcends cultural contexts; life is considered to be a continuum of transitions, ruptures, and returns. Those who admit that the “ordinary” is punctuated by the ineffable cherish those indescribable and nonrational events as an enigmatic but welcome gift. The fact that I grew up in a family that included the presumptions of transcendence and the unseen in our everyday lives has affected my journey in powerful ways….
The end result is that I know that I am not alone. I am connected to the past and the future by the ligatures of well-lived lives, the mysteries of “beyondness,” and the memories and narratives that lovingly bind and support me. While I hope that when I die, one of the elders in my family who have crossed over to the realm of the ancestors will be at my bedside, I certainly did not expect contact prior to that time. And yet here I am, [in my work] hearing from liberation leaders I have never personally met. As it turns out, they are also my elders as certainly as if they occupied a branch of my family tree. They have bequeathed to all of us a legacy of resolve, resistance, and spiritual expansiveness.
Holmes points to Jesus’ experience with his ancestors in faith:
Christianity hides its ancestors in plain view. Those familiar with the Bible know that Jesus had a very public conversation with ancestors in full view of chosen disciples [Matthew 17:1–13]…. We choose safe words and images like prayerand transfiguration to soothe our discomfort with ancestor contacts that require the crossing of dimensions…
Ancestors within the context of African Diasporan legacies are those family members who have poured out their lives for the good of the family. In life, they live well and for others. Although they are human and fail often, they are seldom deluded by the distractions of ego or the desire for earthly acquisitions. They also transition well to the other side and continue their intercession and prayers for the living.
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily “My Utmost For His Highest” in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It’s been a blessing for both of us.
If you’d like to start a CO2, we’d be glad to help you and your partner get started. Also click the link below to see how others are doing CO2.Odds Monkey
Steve Harvey Introduces Jesus To A Secular Audience
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Christ has called pastors to care for his sheep. That’s what the word pastor means—a pastor is a shepherd. The metaphor certainly includes feeding, leading, and protecting the flock of Christ, but we often overlook the shepherd’s role in providing rest. “He makes me lie down in green pastures… He restores my soul,” David said of his Shepherd in Psalm 23. Looking back on my years as a pastor, I will confess that providing rest for God’s people never registered as part of my calling. Instead, I thought my job was to extract more labor from them. Often, I functioned more like a plowman, yoking and driving oxen to accomplish my work, rather than a shepherd creating space for God’s people to rest from theirs.