Truth Beyond Literalism

Friday, January 30, 2026

Writer Liz Charlotte Grant describes how she has moved beyond the literal and “inerrant” way she was taught to read the Bible through her religious upbringing:

I used to read the Bible in binary terms—inerrant versus errant, fallible versus infallible. This led me and many American Christians to believe that the whole of our spirituality could be slotted into binaries. We could read a passage either rightly or wrongly. Our interpretation could be true or false. We ourselves could be classed as good or bad, damned or redeemed, friend or enemy. Reading the Bible like this also encouraged us to believe in one single interpretation, … the “plain reading,” because God would not try to keep Godself from us. We flattened the Bible for the sake of simplicity.

Grant discovered a way to reapproach the Bible with curiosity and respect for its history:

I believe this book still deserves our attention—even when it refuses to submit to our age’s demand for historicity, even if we readers leave literalism behind. Truth is not the same as fact. To refuse ourselves these stories is a death by starvation. These spiritual stories sustained our spiritual forebears; without these stories, I suggest that we cannot maintain the imagination required to nurture belief….

I am returning to the Scriptures … but I am reading it slant. I attend to the sky and the ground with free-ranging curiosity, comingling origin stories from science and art with the Bible’s account of God’s first encounters with humanity in the book of Genesis.… Rather than flat-footed rejection, I encourage wandering. Our best questions often sound like doubts, yet I believe curiosity is the most reverent stance a human can take. Wandering itself is a spiritual discipline. Far from losing faith, I have found that wandering has allowed me to find it.

I believe the Bible does have the power to tell us what God is like, even to introduce us to the Creator. But I read the Bible differently than I used to. I move more cautiously, listening closely to a variety of careful scholars—theologians, archaeologists, philologists, linguists, and manuscript critics. I am determined to be patient and humble. I myself am a learner, not a scholar….

You too have permission to question the sacred without fearing a backslide into unbelief. Knock loudly. Listen to your gut and let your tears run. Reject answers that do not admit complication. Seek the resonance at the base of the story. The seeking is the point. Because there, in your wandering, God is.

____________________________________________________

1.

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more than they are doing now. Christians should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran Pastor

I am not afraid to say that Bonhoeffer was the first theologian I seriously studied in my early 20s.  His whole life and work are utterly inspiring to me.

One thing most people do not know about Dietrich Bonhoeffer is how adamantly he opposed Christian nationalism in Germany.  If you go back and read his famous book, Discipleship, you will see that throughout he makes comments against fascism and totalitarianism.

If Bonhoeffer were to travel through time and have the opportunity to give a prophetic and pastoral sermon to our current cultural moment in America, I wonder what he would say.  He clearly did not agree with the Church shaking hands with those in power, and believed that the ethics of Christ always sided with the poor, the outcast, the foreigner, the oppressed.

2.

“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.“

– Matthew 26:52

It feels appropriate to reflect on this quote from Jesus.

It happens in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus is arrested by the Roman guard with the Temple leadership’s approval.  Peter, believing it is finally time to start fighting back and overthrow the Romans by force, is corrected by Jesus about his tactics…

Jesus tells Peter to put away his sword, and heals the cut off ear of Malchus.

Rather than endorsing violence, Jesus tells his followers to put away their weapons and then heals the wounds of his enemies.

No wonder there are whole books written about this single verse, and it has become one of the most discussed passages on a Christian approach to conflict management, violence, and enemy-love!

3.

“As the ‘imperial mind’ took over, religion had less to do with Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence and forgiveness, and instead became fully complicit in power, war, and greed.”

– Fr. Richard Rohr, Franciscan Friar

“Imperial Christianity” is a term for that false interpretation of Christianity that believes in the use of empire tactics for the sake of influence and expansion.  This means using force, might, power, and/or intimidation.

However, true Christianity is always a grassroots movement that primarily uses the tools of compassion, welcome, gentleness, and hospitality.

4.

“Do not give yourselves up to party spirit. . . . To live for a political party is unworthy of a man who professes to be a Christian.”

– Charles Spurgeon, Baptist Preacher

Charles Spurgeon is not a figure I am familiar with.

What strikes me about this quote is that he is often quoted by conservative-leaning pastors.  And yet, Spurgeon refused the push/pull of American politics and knew that the ethics of the Kingdom of God utterly transcend bipartisan politics.

The Christian is not allowed to bow to any ideology whatsoever, even if that supposed ideology claims to be more “Christian” than the opposing side.  To profess oneself as a Christian means that one is beholden to Christ alone and not any group or collective in particular.

This reminds me of something else, a basic principle from Soren Kierkegaard…  “If you can’t critique it, then it is already an idol.”  I fear that we all have the tendency to hold our group identities above critique. which means our political parties are almost certainly idols.

5.

“We must not mind insulting men, if by respecting them we offend God.”

– St. John Chrysostom, Early Church Father

John Chrysostom died in 407.  This is just a generation after Christianity was legalized as a religion in the Roman Empire and became its official religion.

At no point in the New Testament does it mandate that Christians are to be “nice.”

The New Testament does tell Christians to be “gentle,” but one can be “gentle” while saying things that others do not consider “nice.”

As we can see here, John Chrysostom seems to endorse insulting/offending people.  As we look back at the words of the Hebrew Prophets, I sincerely doubt their original audiences thought their sermons were “nice.”  No, they poked and prodded and tipped over the “sacred cows.”

Let us not “respect men” if by doing so we “offend God.”

More than One Meaning

Thursday, January 29, 2026

Father Richard recounts how Christians received the wisdom of Scripture through hearing it discussed in many different ways:

Most Christians today don’t know that the early centuries of Christianity—through authoritative teachers like Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, Augustine, and Gregory the Great—encouraged as many as seven “senses” of Scripture. The literal, historical, allegorical, moral, symbolic, eschatological (the trajectory of history and growth), and “primordial” or archetypal (commonly agreed-upon symbolism) levels of a text were often given serious weight among scholars. These levels were gradually picked up by the ordinary Christian through Sunday preaching (as is still true today). Multiple interpretations of Scripture came to be expected by those who heard them.

 These different senses of Scripture were sometimes compared to our human senses of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, and touching, which are five distinct ways of knowing the same thing, but in very different “languages.” After both the Reformation and the Enlightenment, Western Europeans reduced the multiple ways of knowing to one way for all practical purposes—the supposedly rational/literal/historical. At this point, we have largely compacted and limited the Bible to this single sense for several centuries, in both its Catholic and Protestant forms.

Our bandwidth of spiritual access to the Bible was consequently severely narrowed, it seems to me—and as many would say—to the least spiritually helpful level. That something supposedly literally happened in one exact way, in one moment of time, does not, of itself, transfer the experience to now, me, or us. I believe that such transference is the transformative function of any spiritual text.

The narrow, rational/literal/historical approach largely creates an antiquarian society that prefers to look backward instead of forward. In my experience, it creates transactional religion much more than transformational spirituality. It idealizes individual conformity and group belonging over love, service, or actual change of heart.

Actually, literalism was discredited from the beginning of the New Testament by the inclusion of four Gospel accounts of the same Jesus event, which differ in many ways. Which is the “inerrant” one?

Jesus repeatedly chose to teach through story and parable, revealing what God was “like”:

The earlier centuries of Christianity were much closer to the trans-rational world of Jesus and his storytelling style of teaching (which does not lend itself to dogmatic or systematic theology). The Gospel says, “He would never speak to them except in parables” (Matthew 13:34). The indirect, metaphorical, symbolic language of a story or parable seems to be Jesus’s preferred way of teaching spiritual realities.

Almost all of Jesus’s parables begin with the same phrase: “The reign of God is like….” Jesus fully knows he is speaking in simile, metaphor, story, and symbol. But in recent centuries, many Christians have not granted him that freedom, and thus we miss or avoid many of his major messages. We are much poorer for it.

__________________________________________________

Jesus Calling: January 29th, 2026

Jesus Calling: January 29

Keep your focus on Me. I have gifted you with amazing freedom, including the ability to choose the focal point of your mind. Only the crown of My creation has such remarkable capability; this is a sign of being made in My image. Let the goal of this day be to bring every thought captive to Me. Whenever your mind wanders, lasso those thoughts and bring them into My Presence. In My radiant Light, anxious thoughts shrink and shrivel away. Judgmental thoughts are unmasked as you bask in My unconditional Love. Confused ideas are untangled while you reset in the simplicity of My Peace. I will guard you and keep you in constant Peace, as you focus your mind on Me.

RELATED SCRIPTURE: 

Psalm 8:5 NLT

5 Yet you made them only a little lower than God

    and crowned them with glory and honor.

Genesis 1:26-27 NLT

26 Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”

27 So God created human beings in his own image.

    In the image of God he created them;

    male and female he created them.

Additional insight regarding Genesis 1:27: God made both man and woman in his image. Neither man nor woman is made more in the image of God than the other. From the beginning, the Bible places man and woman at the pinnacle of God’s creation. Neither sex is exalted, and neither is depreciated.

2nd Corinthians 10:5 NLT

5 We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.

Additional insight regarding 2nd Corinthians 10:5: Paul uses military terminology to describe this warfare against sin and Satan. God must be the commander in chief – even our thoughts must be submitted to his control as we live for him. Spirit-empowered believers must capture every thought and yield it to Christ. When exposed to ideas or opportunities that might lead to wrong desires, you have a choice. You can recognize the danger and surrender, or you can allow unhealthy thoughts to take you captive. You capture your fantasies and desires when you honestly admit them to the Lord and ask him to redirect your thinking. Ask God to give you the spirit of discernment and conscious acts of surrender to keep your thoughts focused on his truth.

Isaiah 26:3 NLT

3 You will keep in perfect peace

    all who trust in you,

    all whose thoughts are fixed on you!

Additional insight regarding Isaiah 26:3: We can never avoid strife in the world around us, but when we fix our thoughts on God, we can know the perfect peace even in turmoil. As we focus our mind on God and his Word, we become steady and stable. Supported by God’s unchanging love and mighty power, we are not shaken by the surrounding chaos (see Philippians 4:7 – “Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.”). Do you want peace? Keep your thoughts on God and your truth in him!

Wednesday, January 28, 2026 

READ ON CAC.ORG

Father Richard identifies some of the paradoxes we encounter when reading the Bible: 

After reading and studying Scripture for decades, my assumption is that the biblical text mirrors the nature of human consciousness. It includes within itself passages that develop certain great themes and universal patterns, as well as passages that fight and resist those very advances. We might even call it faith and unfaith—both are locked into the text.

The journey into the mystery of God is necessarily a journey into the unfamiliar. While much of the Bible is merely a repetition of familiar terrain, where nothing new is asked of history or nothing new given to the soul, there are also those frequent breakthroughs, which we would rightly call “revelations” from the Spirit (because we would never come to them by our own small minds).

Once we observe the trajectory, we are always ready to be surprised and graced by the Unfamiliar, which is why it is called “faith” to begin with. It might at first feel scary, new, or even exciting, but if we stay with the unfolding texts, we will have the courage to know them also as our own deepest hopes or intuitions. Such is the dance between outer authority and inner authority, the great Tradition and inner experience. This is the balance we seek.

I believe the prime ideas of Scripture are already revealed in capsulated form at the beginning in the Hebrew Scriptures. From that early statement of the theme, the whole middle part of the Bible is something akin to character or theme development. By the end, especially in the Risen Christ of the Gospels and in Paul’s theology of the Risen Christ, we have the crescendo, the full revelation of One we can trust to be a nonviolent and thoroughly gracious God, who is inviting us into loving union.

It takes all the Bible—and sometimes all our lives—to get beyond the punitiveness and pettiness that we project onto God and that we harbor within ourselves. We have to keep connecting the dots of God’s wisdom and grace. Remember, how we get there determines where we will arrive. The process itself is important and gives authority to the outcome. The Bible’s “three-steps-forward, two-steps-back” texts give us a deeper urgency to go forward and a deeper understanding when we get there.

I love the clear continuities between the two Testaments and clearly see Jesus as a Jewish man and rabbi, who brilliantly gave us a wonderful lens by which to love the Jewish tradition and keep moving forward with it in an inclusive way (which became its child, Christianity).

The ecumenical character and future of Christianity become rather obvious when understood in this way. We cannot avoid one another any longer, and we do so only at our own loss (1 Corinthians 12:12–30), and the loss of the gospel.

=================

JAN 28, 2026 Jesus’ Death Exposed the Failure of the Second Temple

The first temple in Jerusalem was built by King Solomon. When it was finished, God’s presence filled the temple and his glory dwelt in the innermost chamber, the Holy of Holies (see 1 Kings 8:10-11). However, after generations of injustice, idolatry, and ignoring the warnings offered by the Lord’s prophets, God’s presence left the temple as a sign that the people had broken their covenant with him. Shortly after, the temple was destroyed by the Babylonian invaders in 586 BC, and the people were carried into exile. When they returned to Jerusalem 70 years later, the people began rebuilding after the destruction. This included erecting a new temple. Despite the resumption of worship and sacrifices, there is no record of God’s presence ever returning to the second temple. Over the following centuries, the second temple was expanded, its furnishings upgraded, and its decor enhanced, yet there was no sign that God’s glory filled the Holy of Holies. Nonetheless, the temple became the centerpiece of Jewish identity, religion, and hope for political liberation. And those who served in the temple—the priests and religious leaders—used their status to exalt themselves and maintain control over the people.The importance of the second temple, but the absence of God’s presence within it, is a tension we see throughout the gospels. On the one hand, Jesus repeatedly criticized the religious leaders for abusing his “Father’s house,” but on the other hand, Jesus also dismissed the temple as irrelevant. Instead, he identified himself as the real temple and the true presence of God on earth. In fact, it was Jesus’ criticism of the temple and his exaltation of himself as greater than the temple which ultimately led the religious leaders to seek his arrest and execution. By challenging the temple, Jesus undermined the foundation on which the religious leaders based their authority.In this reading of the gospels, Jesus’ judgment of the temple and its leaders reaches its climax when he dies on the cross. Matthew, Mark, and Luke each recorded that “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom,” exposing the inner chamber, the Holy of Holies, where God’s presence was supposed to dwell. Of course, God’s glory was not there. It never was. The torn curtain revealed that the second temple, and all of the men who drew their power from it, were frauds. They said they arrested and executed Jesus to defend the temple, the house of the Lord. In truth, they had destroyed the actual temple and murdered the Lord to protect their fragile religious authority. In other words, they were guilty of the very thing they had accused Jesus of.The scene is reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, when Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal the truth. The giant, frightening wizard whose presence was surrounded by smoke and fire, turned out to be a little man talking into a microphone and pulling levers. It was all a charade. Likewise, the second temple and the religious hierarchy it produced were built on an illusion. God’s presence was not there. No smoke or holy fire filled the Most Holy Place behind the curtain, because God’s true glory was to be found somewhere else—on the cross .DAILY SCRIPTURE LUKE 23:44-49 2 CHRONICLES 7:1-3 WEEKLY PRAYER. from Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875) O God, grant that looking upon the face of the Lord, as into a glass, we may be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory. Take out of us all pride and vanity, boasting and forwardness; and give us the true courage which shows itself by gentleness; the true wisdom which shows itself by simplicity; and the true power which shows itself by modesty. Amen.

A Book to Remember

Tuesday, January 27, 2026 

With Scripture, we’ve … been invited to a centuries-long conversation with God and God’s people that has been unfolding since creation, one story at a time.
—Rachel Held Evans, Inspired

Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) recounts the historical circumstances that led to the creation of the Old Testament:

Our Bible was forged from a crisis of faith. Though many of its stories, proverbs, and poems were undoubtedly passed down through oral tradition, scholars believe the writing and compilation of most of Hebrew Scripture, also known as the Old Testament, began during the reign of King David and gained momentum during the Babylonian invasion of Judah and in the wake of the Babylonian exile, when Israel was occupied by that mighty pagan empire….

While the circumstances of the exiled Israelites may seem far removed from us today, the questions raised by that national crisis of faith remain as pressing as ever: Why do bad things happen to good people? Will evil and death continue to prevail? What does it mean to be chosen by God? Is God faithful? Is God present? Is God good?

Rather than answering these questions in propositions, the Spirit spoke the language of stories, quickening the memories of prophets and the pens of scribes to call a lost and searching people to gather together and remember.

The Bible can be understood as a call to remember our shared humanity:

This collective remembering produced the Bible as we know it and explains why it looks the way it does—foreign yet familiar, sacred yet indelibly smudged with human fingerprints. The Bible’s original readers may not share our culture, but they share our humanity, and the God they worshipped invited them to bring that humanity to their theology, prayers, songs, and stories.

And so we have on our hands a Bible that includes psalms of praise, but also psalms of complaint and anger, a Bible that poses big questions about the nature of evil and the cause of suffering without always answering them. We have a Bible that says in one place that “with much wisdom comes much sorrow” (Ecclesiastes 1:18) and in another “wisdom is supreme—so get wisdom” (Proverbs 4:7 HCSB). We have a Bible concerned with what to do when your neighbor’s donkey falls into a pit…. We have a Bible that depicts God as aloof and in control in one moment, and vulnerable and humanlike in the next, a Bible that has frustrated even the best systematic theologians for centuries because it’s a Bible that so rarely behaves.

In short, we have on our hands a Bible as complicated and dynamic as our relationship with God, one that reads less like divine monologue and more like an intimate conversation. Our most sacred stories emerged from a rift in relationship, an intense crisis of faith. Those of us who spend as much time doubting as we do believing can take enormous comfort in that. The Bible is for us too.

==================

BRADLEY JERSAKJAN 26

“Any ‘identity in Christ’ that does not have regard for the fragility of human life 
is anti-Christ and a subversion of the Gospel.” 
—David Goa

‘P.O.S. Theology’

I was part of the generation of young Evangelicals who at last discovered the poverty of any Christian anthropology (our doctrine of humanity) that saw humanity as flawed or even ‘totally depraved’ all the way down to our foundations. This tradition endeavored to give an account for the ‘human condition’ and our need for a Saviour. And rightly so. But in that model, we had reverse-engineered our neediness to such extremes that we literalized and totalized verses like Romans 7:18: “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.” We could then make an easy case for “salvation by grace alone.” In recent years, this dehumanizing interpretation became UNaffectionally known as ‘P.O.S. theology.’ It claimed that we are rotten to the core, that we are dung, and that Christ must cover our shame so that his Father only sees Jesus.

Gratefully, we began to see that this is not the whole story—or even the truth. We remembered from Genesis that we were created in the image of God and declared a delight. Still, we asked, hadn’t human goodness ended with ‘the fall’? But we kept reading. Scriptures like Psalm 8 revealed how God continued to hold humanity in high regard. And the author of Hebrews heard that song as a foreshadowing of the Incarnation, when Christ would dignify the human race. 

We are not simply the ‘snow-covered dung’ as certain Protestants insisted, but ‘pearls of great price’ unearthed from the dirt by the One who ‘sold it all’ to retrieve and restore us. We began to understood that far from worthless objects of God’s disgust (still preached today), we are beloved children of a loving heavenly Father, no matter how lost or dysfunctional we’ve become. In our self-will, we became estranged but never disowned—and by God’s grace we find ourselves meandering our way back home—always accompanied by a clandestine guide, anonymously when necessary.

‘Identity’

With the recovery of this ancient and more beautiful way of seeing ourselves and our neighbors, we began to speak about our ‘identity in Christ.’ The very best version of this is the confident, God-given assurance that we are all God’s beloved children and that will never change. Authors like Paul Young and C. Baxter Kruger often call this the truth of our being. Others use the phrase ‘my true self in Christ’ or ‘Christ in me.’ 

Early in this awakening, we gravitated to “I am” Scriptures that describe our humanity according to our telos (who we are becoming as a transfigured people). For example, we recited long lists that included identity claims such as “I am the righteousness of God in Christ.” We identified as those “set apart” (saints, holy ones). And we resisted belittling and demoralizing identities.

Naturally, we also witnessed this much-needed course correction oversteer in the extreme. Some would say:

• I am not a sinner (because that’s not my identity),
• I don’t need to ask forgiveness (because I’m already forgiven),
• there’s no such thing as sin and
• there’s no need for a Savior.

Okay. I won’t argue. Life will be their teacher.

But others didn’t careen so wildly. To those readers, I want to offer a few tweaks to avoid the dualism of being one person “seated with Christ in the heavenlies” and a disconnect alter-ego that continues to relapse into self-centeredness, selfishness, and self-sabotaging ways of being. My ‘identity in Christ’ must be more than an ethereal abstraction while real-life relational dumpster fires rage on. My friend Paul invites me to think of holiness, not as more perfectionism, but as wholeness—an alignment of the truth of our being and the way of our being. I’m down with that. Ministries such as “Identity Exchange” also help people discover their unique identity—the particular grace gift they are to the world. 

Tweaks

Now for a few supplements:

• The truth of our being is not actually true if it doesn’t transform us from the inside, even incrementally. The truth of our being is not separate from real life. The truth of our being (Christ in us) sets us free. If the truth of our being is not liberating us in some way from the demands of the ego, our attachments and cravings, our judgments and religiosity, then I need to slow down with my claims and examine what’s up.
• If the truth of our being is that we’re beloved children of God (we are!), that assurance make for a stable relationship. But it’s better than that. That truth is ever unfolding and expanding and deepening. It’s stable but never static.
• The word ‘identity’ in popular, cultural, and political use has become incredibly reductive. Identity labels can shrink wondrously complex persons into some thing. When folks say, “I identify as…,” I get it. They are becoming more and more self-aware. But I also want them to beware of reducing who they are to a labeled box the constrains their growth and can’t account for the wildness of human existence. Oppressive forces will always try to weaponize those identity labels to lock us down to scripts and stereotypes, eventually even legislating our freedom. 
• Conversely, I wonder if there’s a way to become all that we are without erasing our beautiful particularity. “Beloved child of God” is true but also too generic. Who we are includes our story, our ancestry, our geography, our people, our culture, our character, our gifts. “Who am I?” can’t be photocopied. We are all unique handwritten sagas of grace, unfolding over a lifetime. 
• I suspect the way forward is to shift from ‘from umbrella identities’ to the language of ‘personhood,’ along with a commitment to seeing John 10:10 ‘human flourishing’ at every stage of our unfolding.
• I opened with a quote from David Goa (today at breakfast), where in view of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, true personhood and the fullness of humanity include the full spectrum of human experience. Jesus did not regard his very real grief and raw lament in any way compromising his identity or sabotaging our faith. His faith, his humanity, his deity (!) was expressed in sorrow and with many tears. It all belongs. Nor did Jesus regard recognition of our need, of our mourning, of our fragility as a negative confession to be repressed or expunged. 

Trust

My friend Elliot ask me what “trust in God” actually means. I’ve been praying about that. I can start by saying I trust that God knows my tears and bears my sorrows. But if I boil it down, maybe trust for me means living as if what God has shown me is true, to an infinite (literally) degree. I also thought about the limits of my capacity to trust. For many, the most severe test is the tragic suffering and death of children. Can I trust God through that? And I don’t need to future-trip made-up scenarios ()counterfactual hypotheticals. The suffering and death of children is real to me and current to my direct experience with grieving friends. Still, I trust God. 

But I have also seen and experienced the real limits of my emotional strength. I remember vividly what “It’s too much!” feels like. Many people who I love dearly know what Paul was describing when he said, “We were under under a great burden far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself.” (2 Cor. 1:8). Then I remembered these verses, which seem so conditional (at least out of context).

“…the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10:32).

“By your endurance you will gain your lives” (Luke 21:19).

“For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end” (Hebrews 3:14)

“Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2:10).

What if I can’t? I know I’m loved and I also know myself. My endurance is limited. I have unravelled before. And if I really must endure—if it’s up to me—in whom is my confidence? But then I thought, I guess I’ll just have trust God to carry me, even if trust in God fails (again). I will act as if its true that “… when I’m faithless, God remains faithful, because he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:15). I will live as if “he will never leave me or forsake me” (Hebrews 13:5).

Anna’s Wool Cap

Maybe God is like my Anna, a master knitter. Yesterday (as I write this), I was out for the day while she was knitting a wool toque (that’s Canadian) using a new pattern she’d not tried before. She estimated it would take 3-4 hours to complete but when I returned to her house, there was nothing to show me. There were issues with the length of the needles and the weight of the wool, causing her to unravel the wool cap and start over—three times. I would have been so frustrated. Not Anna. She enjoyed her day, working with the wool, patiently starting afresh after each unravelling, experiencing the joy of the process. She wasn’t at all angry at the wool, or resentful of the re-knitting, and it never crossed her mind to discard the project. 

Psalm 139 says that God knit me together in my mother’s womb. It feels right and true that God’s knitting of my personhood (or identity if you will) continues to this day. Regardless of my unravellings. In God’s hands, it all belongs. I belong… and I trust that I’m coming along. 

Sunday, January 25, 2026 

READ ON CAC.ORG

Father Richard Rohr encourages us to read the Bible seeking an inner experience instead of authoritative answers: 

The amazing wonder of the biblical revelation is that God is very different than we thought and much better than we feared. To paraphrase what evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote about the universe, “God is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think.” [1] God is not bad news but, in fact, overwhelmingly comforting and good news.

This is what Walter Brueggemann, in Theology of the Old Testament, calls a “credo of five adjectives” that continually recurs in the Hebrew Scriptures: This God that Israel—and Jesus—discovered is consistently seen to be “merciful, gracious, faithful, forgiving, and steadfast in love.” [2]

It’s taken us a long time to even consider that could be true. The only people who really know it to be true for themselves are those who sincerely seek, pray, and often suffer. Outside of inner experience, those are just five more pious words. Outside of our own inner experience of this kind of God, most religion will remain merely ritualistic, moralistic, and doctrinaire.

If we believe in inspiration, and trust that the Spirit was guiding the Bible’s listening and writing—but, like all things human, “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12), we will allow ourselves to be led. We will trust that there is a development of crucial divine wisdom inside this anthology of books we call the Bible. Woven amidst these developing ideas are what I have called the “Great Themes of Scripture.”

When we get to the Risen Jesus, there’s nothing to be afraid of in God. Jesus’s very breath is identified with forgiveness and the Divine Shalom (John 20:20–23). If the Risen Jesus is the final revelation of the nature of God’s heart, then we live in a safe and loving universe. But it’s not that God has changed, or that the Hebrew God is a different God than the God of Jesus. It’s that we are growing up as we move through the biblical texts and deepen our experience. God doesn’t change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change. If we stay with the text and tend to our inner life with God, our capacity for God will increase and deepen. If we read the Bible merely searching for certain conclusions so we can quickly reassure our “false self,” our spiritual growth will just stop. We will also become a rather toxic person for ourselves and others.

Just as the Bible takes us through many stages of consciousness and salvation history, it takes us individually a long time to move beyond our need to be dualistic, judgmental, accusatory, fearful, blaming, egocentric, and earning-oriented. The text in travail mirrors and charts our own human travail and illustrates all these stages from within the Bible. It offers both the mature and immature responses to almost everything—and we have to learn how to recognize the difference.

=====================================

Many Voices; One Text

Monday, January 26, 2026 

READ ON CAC.ORG

Authors Jennifer Garcia Bashaw and Aaron Higashi highlight that the Bible includes stories from many voices across different times and cultures: 

When considering the Bible, it’s important to keep in mind that it is a multivocal text. To be multivocal simply means that something is composed of many different voices or perspectives. The books that make up the Bible, and the texts that were edited together to make up the books of the Bible, were written in different times, in different places, by different people, in different genres, with different theologies. These differences are easy to recognize when you know to look for them. The voice of a tenth-century BCE court history, for instance, is different from the voice of a sixth-century BCE piece of wisdom literature, which is also different from the voice of a late first-century CE gospel. Just as a quilt is made of many different sections, or an anthology is made of many different essays, the Bible is a collection of independent things. [1]

Spiritual writer Carl McColman describes how recognizing multiple voices in the Bible allows us to center those voices that communicate God’s love, mercy, and justice:

A mystical reading of the Bible sees it as a conversation with many voices chiming in. Unfortunately, some of those voices are racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, or comfortable with the authoritarian exercise of power. But other voices also present in the Bible seek to challenge all of the above, promoting a world where privilege is dismantled, nonviolence is an ethical mandate, and compassion is the guiding principle for both individual behavior and social norms. Learning to read the Bible like a mystic includes learning to recognize all those different voices and discern which ones primarily function as “bad” examples and which ones are truly there to inspire us and draw us closer to God. When we read the Bible to connect with those compassionate and just voices, it is not only the Bible that is saved, but we ourselves also become more whole. [2]

Reading Bible like a mystic allows us to enter into transformative reading:

If you long for a deeper, more mystical relationship with the unnameable mystery we call God, then read the Bible like a mystic: like someone whose life has been illuminated and transformed by immersion in the very heart of divine love. Read from the heart of compassionate love, not from fear or any anxious need to please, placate, or control.

If you want to have a meaningful relationship with the wisdom teachings of Jesus, especially to have those teachings liberated from all the ways that institutional religious Christianity has distorted, misunderstood, or weaponized those teachings in the service of power and authority, then read the Bible like a mystic, for a mystical reading of Scripture can be a way for you to reconnect with the uncreated light that shines at the heart of those ancient words of wisdom and love. [3]

God Is Calling Every One

Friday, January 23, 2026

Father Richard reflects on what it means to respond to God’s call:

What, then, does it mean to follow the call of Jesus?

History is continually graced with people who somehow learned to act beyond and outside their self-interest and for the good of the world, people who clearly operated by a power larger than their own. Consider Gandhi, Oskar Schindler, and Martin Luther King Jr. Add to them Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Óscar Romero, César Chávez, and many unsung leaders. Their inspiring witness offers us strong evidence that the mind of Christ still inhabits the world. Most of us are fortunate to have crossed paths with many lesser-known persons who exhibit the same presence. I can’t say how one becomes such a person. All I can presume is that they were all called. They all had their Christ moments, in which they stopped denying their own shadows, stopped projecting those shadows elsewhere, and agreed to own their deepest identity in solidarity with the world. 

But it is not an enviable position, this Christian thing. 

Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. 

To allow what, for some reason, God allows—and uses. 

And to suffer ever so slightly what God suffers eternally. 

Often, this has little to do with believing the right things about God—beyond the fact that God is love itself. 

Those who respond to the call and agree to carry and love what God loves—which is both the good and the bad—and to pay the price for its reconciliation within themselves, these are the followers of Jesus Christ. They are the leaven, the salt, the remnant, the mustard seed that God uses to transform the world. The cross, then, is a very dramatic image of what it takes to be usable for God. It does not mean they are going to heaven and others are not; rather, it means they have entered into heaven much earlier and thus can see things now in a transcendent, whole, and healing way. 

Saints are those who wake up while in this world, instead of waiting for the next one. Francis of Assisi, William Wilberforce, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Harriet Tubman didn’t feel superior to anyone else; they just knew they had been let in on a big divine secret, and they wanted to do their part in revealing it. 

God is calling every one and every thing, not just a few chosen ones, to God’s self (Genesis 8:15–17; Ephesians 1:9–10; Colossians 1:15–20). To get every one and every thing there, God first needs models and images who are willing to be “conformed to the body of Christ’s death” and transformed into the body of Christ’s resurrection (Philippians 3:10). These are the “new creation” (Galatians 6:15), and their transformed state is still seeping into history and ever so slowly transforming it into “life and life more abundantly” (John 10:10).

____________________________________________________

John Chaffee 5 On Friday

1.

“Appoint judges and officials for each of your tribes in every town the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall judge the people fairly. Do not pervert justice or show partiality. Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the innocent. Follow justice and justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you.”

– Deuteronomy 16:18-20, Ancient Hebrew Scriptures

I was reminded of this passage this weekend through a podcast.

We think that Deuteronomy was written either by Moses in the 14th century BCE or by scribes in the 7th century BCE.  In either case, we can see that justice was of high priority for the Hebrew people.  More than that, to include such a passage as this in the Holy Scriptures communicates to me that healthy spirituality INCLUDES a sense of commitment and awareness that justice is a non-negotiable and must be sought out with intentionality.

The last line even seems to indicate that the land will be lost if we do not seek true justice.

This passage from Deuteronomy feels just as applicable today as it was when it was written.

2.

“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

– Julian of Norwich, English Mystic

Within the Christian tradition, there is an ongoing tension between a “theology of glory” and a “theology of the cross.”

Martin Luther made the distinction between the two theologies obvious and completely changed the way I understand theology as a whole.

A “theology of glory” believes that once on the road to glory, everything will be glorious.  This is the idea that after coming to faith, everything will be grand, everything will be lovely, everything will be glorious.  We should expect victory after victory, and a profound sense that we are always on the winning side.

The only problem is that it didn’t even happen for Jesus.

So what, we think we are better than Jesus?  Do we really think that we, as followers, should have a different experience from the Master?

A “theology of the cross” states that we should expect a “crucifixion.”  We should expect that there will be hardships, difficulties, setbacks, etc., and that they will very likely include our humiliation, loneliness, and doubt.  The promise, though, is that on the other side of that “crucifixion” there will be resurrection.  Ultimately, God will win, vindicate, and rescue his people, but there will be a cross on the road to that redemption.

And so, this insight from Julian of Norwich is profound.  She likely saw the death of her whole family and the majority of her community to the Bubonic plague.  Although she arrived at this insight from a different angle than Martin Luther, I believe they are both conveying timeless wisdom…

The life of faith will be difficult, but on the other side of it, there will be unimaginable goodness and love.

3.

“Violence is a way of saying that we don’t have enough time to wait for love.”

– Henri Nouwen, Dutch Priest and Author

I’ll be honest, I see the news, and I sometimes get confused at how we still play the games of power, influence, intimidation, etc.  The use of force is exhausting to my soul, and I wish that we could find alternative ways to settle conflicts other than increasing our volume or increasing the scale of our violence.

Perhaps the only thing to do is to appropriately lament.  We must lament in order to properly repent and thus return to love as our primary means of conflict resolution.

4.

“Seriousness is not a virtue.”

– GK Chesterton, British Novelist and Author

I think I’ll let this one speak for itself.

5.

“Lord, I don’t want You… but I want to want You.”

– Teresa of Avila, Spanish Catholic Reformer

This prayer carried me through a pretty rough 2 years when I lived in Media, PA.  I came across it, wrote it on some cardboard with a thick black marker, and hung it on my wall like some strange form of urban homeless art.  In fact, during that time, I wrote a number of prayers out and hung them on my walls.  It was a massive help to me that no matter what wall I turned toward, there was something to read that pointed me back toward health and holiness.

There are certainly some days when I do not want God, but I believe being honest about that with God is, in some sense, a form of deep devotion.

“Lord, I don’t want You… but I want to want You.”

That’s just brilliant.

What a fantastic prayer of faith in the midst of the experience of faithlessness.

Which Quote Most Jumped Out at You?

Stand and I Will Be With You

Thursday, January 22, 2026

I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on.
—Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recounts the violent threats that grew in response to his work for justice:

Almost immediately after the protest [in Montgomery, Alabama] started we had begun to receive threatening telephone calls and letters. They increased as time went on. By the middle of January, they had risen to thirty and forty a day….

As the weeks passed, I began to see that many of the threats were in earnest. Soon I felt myself faltering and growing in fear…. One night at a mass meeting, I found myself saying, “If one day you find me sprawled out dead, I do not want you to retaliate with a single act of violence. I urge you to continue protesting with the same dignity and discipline you have shown so far.”

After receiving a threatening late-night phone call, King’s resolve was renewed through prayer and an experience of God’s presence and call:

It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point…. I was ready to give up…. I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward…. And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer…. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory: “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now, I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. Now, I am afraid. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you. Even until the end of the world.”

I tell you I’ve seen the lightning flash. I’ve heard the thunder roar. I’ve felt sin breakers dashing trying to conquer my soul. But I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me alone. At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.

___________________________________________

Jesus Calling: January 22

STRIVE TO TRUST ME in more and more areas of your life. Anything that tends to make you anxious is a growth opportunity. Instead of running away from these challenges, embrace them, eager to gain all the blessings I have hidden in the difficulties. If you believe that I am sovereign over every aspect of your life, it is possible to trust Me in all situations. Don’t waste energy regretting the way things are or thinking about what might have been. Start at the present moment–accepting things exactly as they are–and search for My way in the midst of those circumstances.

     Trust is like a staff you can lean on, as you journey uphill with Me. If you are trusting in Me consistently, the staff will bear as much of your weight as needed. Lean on, trust, and be confident in Me with all your heart and mind. 

RELATED SCRIPTURE: 

Psalm 52:8 NLT

8 But I am like an olive tree, thriving in the house of God.

    I will always trust in God’s unfailing love.

Proverbs 3:5-6

5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart;

    do not depend on your own understanding.

6 Seek his will in all you do,

    and he will show you which path to take.

Wednesday, January 21, 2026 

READ ON CAC.ORG

Author Mirabai Starr describes how the histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been shaped by people who were brave enough to listen to and obey God’s call: 

Not all prophets do as they are told. Not at first, anyway. When the call comes, most of them turn left and then right: “Who, me?” they murmur. If the call is a true one, the voice of the Holy Spirit will roar: “Yes, you!”

Even then, the prophet will haggle with the Holy One. “There must be someone better suited to speak for the Divine.” But the God of Love is a patient God. The God of Love calls once, twice, three times. Only then does the prophet square her shoulders, gird her loins, open her hands, and say, “Hineni. Here I am.”

The history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam abounds with accounts of great beings who trembled when they were confronted with the presence of the Divine and given a task of global dimensions. Traditionally, this reluctance is implied, rather than stated, yet when we read the scriptures with an open heart, we can feel the anguish behind the submission.

Responding to God’s call always comes at a cost: 

It is said that the Divine does not choose the wealthy and powerful to be prophets. [God] picks farmers and illiterate caravan drivers, orphans and poor Jewish virgins. [God] favors the ones who stand up…, talk back…, the ones who challenge the divine directive. When the angel of the Lord told the matriarch Sarah that she was going to become the mother of many nations, Sarah laughed. She was long past the age of childbearing, and the patriarch Abraham was even older. When her son was born the following year, they named him Isaac, which means “laughter.”…

“The prophets of Israel,” Karen Armstrong writes in A History of God, “experienced their God as a physical pain that wrenched their every limb and filled them with pain and elation.” Adrienne von Speyr says that the prophets are “inconsolable.” It is easy to see why they might have been reluctant to answer the call.

It is not only the biblical prophets who paid this price for responding to the divine summons. Prominent modern activists, imbued with the teachings of the God of Love, risked their lives on behalf of the most vulnerable among us….

Countless women and men—known and unknown—stand up every day to give voice to the voiceless—not because it seems like the right thing to do, but because they have no choice: The call comes storming through the gates of their hearts like an invading army, and they stand aside. In the act of surrendering to the Divine, the prophet relinquishes comfort, control, and any hope of being understood.

===============

JAN 21, 2026. Skye Jethani Neither on This Mountain Nor on That One

There is an old axiom in the real estate business that applies just as well to the ancient theology of temples: “Location, location, location.” As we explored in our Old Testament study of temples, ancient Near Eastern people believed the barrier between the heavens and the earth, between the domain of the gods and of people, was thinner in certain locations. This is why temples were often built on mountaintops or “high places.”Likewise, it was believed that a particular deity could be properly worshiped and encountered only in a specific location. Ancient temples did not function like wifi hotspots where any worshipper could log on to commune with any god they liked. Instead, temples were like dedicated networks where only the deity residing in that temple could be accessed. In other words, no one entered the temple of Artemis with the intent of worshipping Zeus. The importance of temples and their locations explains the deep division that existed between Jews and Samaritans in the first century. The Jews, of course, believed that YHWH could only be properly worshipped at the temple in Jerusalem. This was where David had built his capital a millennium earlier, where he had brought the Ark of the Covenant, and where his son, Solomon, had built a permanent temple for God’s presence to dwell.The Samaritans, however, rejected the legitimacy of the temple in Jerusalem. They saw its construction by Solomon as a political project to solidify the power of David’s dynasty, and not a location chosen by the Lord. Therefore, based on a different reading of the Torah, the Samaritans argued that Mount Gerizim was the proper location of YHWH’s presence and the only legitimate place to worship him. This deep division is highlighted in John 4 when Jesus passed through Samaria and talked with a woman there beside a well. Recognizing that Jesus was a Jew, she was surprised that he would strike up a conversation with her. After all, the bitter disagreement between their communities about the proper location for God’s temple had gotten violent over the centuries, with each side considering the other heretical and even subhuman.The Samaritan woman addressed the division directly. “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem” (John 4:20). With his response, we see Jesus repeating a tension first seen in John 2 when he drove the animals and merchants out of the temple courtyard. On the one hand, Jesus affirms the legitimacy of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Basically, he says the Samaritans are mistaken about Mount Gerizim being the proper location. But, on the other hand, Jesus is quick to dismiss both locations. Right after affirming the temple in Jerusalem, he says it’s irrelevant because the time has come “when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth” rather than on this mountain or that one.With one sentence, Jesus dismissed a violent, 800-year-old theological division as moot. The place to truly encounter God was now wherever Jesus was, and the true worshippers—the real people of God—are neither Jews nor Samaritans, but anyone from any nation who humbly comes to him. Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well is yet another example of John’s gospel declaring Jesus is the true temple of God who welcomes all people into the presence of his Father. DAILY SCRIPTURE JOHN 4:1-26  WEEKLY PRAYER. From Anselm (1033 – 1109) God of love, whose compassion never fails; we bring before you the troubles and perils of people and nations, the sighing of prisoners and captives, the sorrows of the bereaved, the necessities of strangers, the helplessness of the weak, the despondency of the weary, the failing powers of the aged. O Lord, draw near to each; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

God Calls Those on the Margins

Tuesday, January 20, 2026 

She was an Egyptian slave in a foreign land away from her people and seemingly without anyone’s protection. But God knew Hagar and God called on her to be a part of [God’s] plan.
—Marjorie A. White, The Five Books of Moses

Womanist theologian Delores Williams (1937–2022) connects the call Hagar experienced in the wilderness to the experiences of African American women.  

Although many themes in African-American women’s history correspond with many themes in Hagar’s story in the Bible, nothing links the two women together more securely than their religious experiences in the wilderness [see Genesis 21]…. Many African-American slave women have left behind autobiographies telling how they would slip away to the wilderness or to “the hay-stack where the presence of the Lord overshadowed” them. [1] Some of them governed their lives according to their mothers’ counsel that they would have “nobody in the wide world to look to but God” [2]—as Hagar in the final stages of her story had only God to look to…. 

For many black Christian women today, “wilderness” or “wilderness-experience” is a symbolic term used to represent a near-destruction situation in which God gives personal direction to the believer and thereby helps her make a way out of what she thought was no way.

Williams points to God’s support for Hagar as an ongoing source of inspiration and courage:

In the biblical story Hagar’s wilderness experience happened in a desolate and lonely wilderness where she—pregnant, fleeing from the brutality of her slave owner, Sarai, and without protection—had religious experiences that helped her and her child survive when survival seemed doomed. For both Hagar and the African-American women, the wilderness experience meant standing utterly alone, in the midst of serious trouble, with only God’s support to rely upon. 

As the result of these hard-time experiences and the encounters with God, Hagar and many African-American women manifested a risk-taking faith. Though she obeyed God’s mandate for her life, Hagar dared to give a name to the God she met in the wilderness. In a sense, this God is her God, and possibly not the God of her slave holders Abram and Sarai. No other person in the Bible names God. Many African-American women (slave and free) have taken serious risks in the black community’s liberation struggle. For example, in the midst of the violence and brutality that accompanied slavery in America, Harriet Tubman, with a price on her head, dared to liberate over three hundred slaves. She served as a spy and a general in the Civil War. She is said to have relied solely upon God for help and strength; she had no one else to look to. Thus we can speak of Hagar and many African-American women as sisters in the wilderness struggling for life, and by the help of their God coming to terms with situations that have destructive potential

===========================

Heavenly Fire – Bradley Jersak

Evolving Imagery in Cultural and Biblical Context

JAN 19

Almost a decade ago, I came across the citation from St Athanasius (via creativeorthodox.com) that beautifully compares the resurrection of Christ to a fire that completely consumes death as if it were dry straw. The comparison reminded me of the range and frequent use of fire as imagery associated with the person or acts of God. A brief survey serves as a healthy meditation, not only on the various comparisons, but also how these evolve with our illumination by the Spirit, who is also linked with fire at times.

Ancient peoples would have experienced fire as destruction before they ever learned to employ it for light or heat, and when fire would fall from heaven as lightning or burst from the earth via volcanoes. Our forefathers connected the dots between destructive fire and the person and wrath of God. They assumed the fire that devours was sent by God as punishment, as we see in biblical stories like the end of Sodom and Gomorrah. When that fire is used against one’s enemies, it could serve as a powerful vindication that God is on ‘our side’ — as in 1 Kings 18 in Elisha’s showdown with the prophets of Baal or 2 Kings 1 when he calls for fire to kill Ahaziah’s troops.

But fire was not only seen as destructive. We have other passages where fire is employed for its cleansing properties. Malachi regards the judgements of God as a gold refiner’s furnace, purging the gold or silver of ‘dross’ or impurities. Similarly, Paul in 1 Cor. 3 describes the fire of God consuming all that is combustible in us … poor motives and faulty agendas, for example, as if they were wood, hay and stubble. But again, this is only so the gold, silver and precious stones of our true selves will shine brightly through the old tarnish. Hebrews 12 says that God himself IS this consuming fire. So in the end, the destructive fire is to be welcomed, even if seen as a ‘trial by fire.’

A third sense of fire is associated with the person and work of the Holy Spirit. We hear from John the Baptist that Christ will baptize with the Spirit and with fire, and while I suspect John was thinking of judgement, the New Testament sees that promise fulfilled with the outpouring of the Spirit in tongues of fire on Pentecost. This divine fire not only cleanses but empowers, and gives those who receive it the properties of fire (symbolically light and heat), which is to say, the Spirit inhabits us with glory, transfiguring us from glory to glory, so that we can stand in that glory which is the passionate love of Christ himself.

Some of the early church fathers used the image of a sword being forged in the intense heat that makes for the highest quality steel. Placed in the flames, it’s not that the steel would become other than steel, but while in the flames, it would bear the heat and glow with the light of the fire itself. So it is, they said, with those forged in the fire of God’s Spirit. Thus, the fire was not destructive, but rather instructive and constructive of our participation in the divine nature.

There are many ‘what about this questions’ that attend divine fire analogies. What about those parables of Jesus where unfruitful branches are cut off and thrown into the fire? Or when the wheat and tares are separated by angels and the weeds thrown into the fire. Rather than skirting the force of these texts too quickly, we need to undergo their message — their fire. Such parables remind us of the same point Lewis makes by using lion imagery for Christ. God is ‘good’ but he’s hardly ‘safe,’ much less ‘tame,’ if by that we imagine we can domesticate God!

But in saying this, let us also assert the first point as most important. God is good. God is love. And thus, for all its other properties, the Divine Fire is the unquenchable Flame of Love (also pictured by the Sun) — the One who radiates the Light and Warmth of Love to those coming in from the cold, dark night of winter.

Sunday, January 18, 2026 

READ ON CAC.ORG

They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” —John 1:38–39

Father Richard Rohr considers the invitation to discipleship Jesus extends today:

When Jesus goes out to Galilee, his initial preaching is summed up in the verse, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand” (Matthew 4:17; Mark 1:15). “Repent” (or metanoia in Greek) means to turn around, to change. The first word that comes out of Jesus’s mouth is repent, change.

Jesus calls us to be willing to change, but many of us are not willing to change, simply because we’re not willing to turn away from ourselves! Usually, we’re not in love with God. Instead, we’re in love with our way of thinking, our way of explaining, our way of doing things. One of the greatest ways to protect ourselves from God, from truth and grace, is simply to buy into some kind of cheap conventionalism and call it tradition.   

But great traditions always call people on a journey of faith to keep changing. There’s no other way the human person can open up to all that God is asking of us. There’s no way we can open up to all we have to learn or experience, unless we’re willing to let go of the idols of yesterday and the idols of today. The best protection from the next word of God is the last word of God. We take what we heard from God last year (or from authority figures in our first half of life) and we build a whole system around it—and then we sit there for the rest of our lives.

Immediately after he begins preaching, Jesus calls his first four disciples. Jesus just says, “Follow me” and immediately they leave their nets and follow him (Matthew 4:19–20). But today, the way I see people transformed doesn’t happen this quickly. Maybe it happened that way with Jesus and the disciples; I don’t want to say that it didn’t. A true disciple will have that kind of readiness. Most of us, though, would prefer some process of conversion, a series of conversations over a few weeks, with Jesus saying, “Hey, I’m into something new. Do you want to be a part of it? Let’s go.”

I hope we realize that we’re all called to discipleship. We hope that the point comes when we’re ready to let go of our nets: our sense of self, our security systems, and the way it’s always been. Fishing is Simon (Peter) and Andrew’s economic livelihood, and Jesus says to let go of it. He says essentially, “I’m going to teach you how to fish in a new way, to fish for people” (Matthew 4:19). What he means is that he’s going to give them a new vocation. Hearing this Gospel passage, I hope we’re inspired to ask, “What is God asking us to do? Where is God asking us to go?”  

===============

Abraham’s Call

Monday, January 19, 2026 

READ ON CAC.ORG

The story of Abraham is a mythic, primeval story, so much so that it became the founding myth of the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
—Richard Rohr, Soul Brothers

CAC faculty member Brian McLaren describes how God called Abraham (initially Abram) and Sarah to a new covenant:

According to the ancient stories of Genesis, God is up to something surprising and amazing in our world. While we’re busy plotting evil, God is plotting goodness…. While we plot ways to use God to get blessings for ourselves, God stays focused on the big picture of blessing the world—which includes blessing us in the process.

You see this pattern unfold when God chooses a man named Abram and a woman named Sara. They are from a prominent family in an ancient city-state known as Ur, one of the first ancient Middle Eastern civilizations. Like all civilizations, Ur has a dirty little secret: its affluence is built on violence, oppression, and exploitation….

God tells this couple to leave their life of privilege in this great civilization. He sends them out into the unknown as wanderers and adventurers. No longer will Abram and Sara have the armies and wealth and comforts of Ur at their disposal. All they will have is a promise—that God will be with them and show them a better way. From now on, they will make a new road by walking.

Abraham and Sarah’s trust in God’s call is a model for our faith:

This story also tells us something about true faith. Faith is stepping off the map of what’s known and making a new road by walking into the unknown. It’s responding to God’s call to adventure, stepping out on a quest for goodness, trusting that the status quo isn’t as good as it gets, believing a promise that a better life is possible.

True faith isn’t a deal where we use God to get the inside track or a special advantage or a secret magic formula for success. It isn’t a mark of superiority or exclusion. True faith is about joining God in God’s love for everyone. It’s about seeking goodness with others, not at the expense of others. True faith is seeing a bigger circle in which we are all connected, all included, all loved, all blessed….

Sadly, for many people, faith has been reduced to a list. For some, it’s a list of beliefs: ideas or statements that we have to memorize and assent to if we want to be blessed. For others, it’s a list of dos and don’ts: rituals or rules that we have to perform…. But Abram didn’t have much in the way of beliefs, rules, or rituals. He had no Bibles, doctrines, temples, commandments, or ceremonies. For him, true faith was simply trusting a promise of being blessed to be a blessing. It wasn’t a way of being religious: it was a way of being alive.

================

John Ortberg asked his mentor Dallas Willard what it would take to live the kind of life Dallas was always talking about—a life caught up in the goodness of God, a life lived from the kingdom of God, an abundant life of prayerful love. In short, the life of a disciple.

Dallas paused for a moment and said, “John, you must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

John wrote that down and said, “Okay, I got it, what else?”

Long pause.

“That is all. There is nothing else.”

That’s Dallas Willard for you. But…how can that be all there is? At the risk of trying to speak for Uncle Dallas, perhaps what he meant, in part, is this: All of God’s abundance is there. The grace, the power, the resource of God has already been given. You simply need to become aware of it. And you become aware—and you become transformed—by slowing down. You must slow down into the life of God.