an open and affirming community of faith
n open and affirming community where faith is questioned and formed, as relationships are made and upheld.
When we refuse to worship at the altar of consumerism, when we choose justice over profit, when we stand with the oppressed against their oppressors, and speak truth in the face of lies, we’re going to face resistance. We’ll be called naive, idealistic, unrealistic. We’ll be told that this is just the way the world works, that we can't change anything, that our efforts don't matter.
But remember: we are not of this world.
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Of course, it's not always easy. Some days, the world drags you into the courtroom and puts your soul on trial. You get accused—by others, by your own failures, by that nagging voice in your head. But you don't have to argue your case. You've got someone who already knows the truth and stands by you anyway. The Spirit shows up like a defense attorney who's not afraid of a messy past, someone who doesn't need to prove you innocent to love you.
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Living this way isn’t easy. It means turning away from all the ways we’ve weaponized faith and marginalized people in God’s name. It means learning to see people as Jesus sees them, not as projects or enemies or obstacles, but as beloved children of God.
In a world full of hate, fear, and division, love isn’t just our calling … it’s our superpower, our secret weapon. It’s our most authentic sermon, the sign that points the way home.
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I find it fascinating, and not a little bit instructive, to think that God can make something out of us that nobody ever thought we could be. Knowing ourselves as we do—that God chooses us to embody the love and justice envisioned in this new reign is confounding. But if, when God tells us to get up, we get up and go, the story of the gospel is that God can change the world through us.
And that’s the thing: The world, as chaotic and torn as it is right now, needs a little resurrection—needs people like you and me to get up and bring new life to folks who feel like everybody else has given up on them.
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Jesus didn't say, "I've overthrown Rome! Now we'll have peace!" He simply said, "Peace be with you," while showing them his wounds. His peace bears the marks of suffering. It doesn’t deny pain; it transforms it. It doesn’t require the elimination of enemies; it embraces them.
This is why passing the peace is indeed a political act. Every time we say to one another, "Peace be with you," we’re rejecting the peace of empires. We’re declaring our allegiance to a different realm with a different sovereign who rules in a different way. After Easter, we acknowledge that true peace, God’s peace, can’t come through domination or be secured through violence.
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We’re the kind of Easter people who don't just decorate the sanctuary once a year, but who live with rolled-away stones and open doors and trembling joy. We practice resurrection in how we vote, how we spend, how we welcome the stranger, how we care for creation, how we speak to and about one another.
We’re people who know that the most powerful force in the universe isn't military might or market value or majority rule. It's love that gives itself away. The kind that doesn't cling to power but empties itself for others. The kind that turns the other cheek, not out of weakness but from a strength so secure it doesn't need to dominate to prove itself.
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Words can heal and bring life: “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.”
There’s nothing quite so wonderful in the world as when you’re told that you’re loved and appreciated, or that despite your belief that you’re alone and despised, someone sees you, that someone cares even when you remain convinced that nobody even knows you’re alive.
“I love you. I see you,” can raise people from the dead.
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Jesus wants his disciples to understand that poor and low-wealth people aren’t some distinct underclass that we can shuffle off to the shadows because they make us uncomfortable. They’re not a problem to be dealt with, not just a reminder of a broken system that renders some people disposable; they’re our neighbors, part of our community.
We need to feed them, not fix them.
They’re subjects to be embraced as friends and family, not objects to be embarrassed about
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This parable is a story about bad parenting, about a father who’s willing to give it all away … even to kids who’ve proven they don’t deserve it. It’s a story about the love of a parent who persists in pursuing us, even though we continue to run away from home or continue to turn our faces from the music, even after we’ve been ceaselessly invited into the party.
It’s a story about lousy parenting. I mean, just think what would happen if we started following that example and loving everybody—even though they don’t deserve it. Try to get that one through the Supreme Court right now.
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We peer into the distance for the one who will execute justice and righteousness in the land, who will redeem God’s children from ordinary days, filled with the soul-crushing fear that this world of pain and fear, of injustice and bigotry is all there is. We steel ourselves for the call to live as just and righteous right now … in anticipation of that day.
The days in which we live may be grim.
But the days are surely coming, says the Lord.
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We trivialize the gospel when we convince ourselves that it’s possible to be a disciple of Jesus without it ever costing us anything.
Following Jesus is hard. He asks so much. And he fails to provide us with turn-by-turn directions. He’s a moving target. Can’t pin him down. Can’t control him.
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First, like so many people since Tuesday, the church constantly needs to be asking, “Is this the best we can do?” Then, we need to advocate for a just economic system that protects the vulnerable and refuses to devour widows’ houses. We need to demand a system that refuses to make the poor feel like they’re not full participants until they cough up their last five bucks until payday.
Second, in the meantime, we followers of Jesus need to work like crazy to be worthy of the hope people place in us.
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Love, you see, requires activity. Love isn’t an abstraction; it’s a way of living with other people that takes their needs as seriously as we take our own.
The way we treat those who are hungry, the way we treat the laborer, the way we treat the disabled, the way we pursue justice—these all have to do with love.
What we care about and what we refuse to remain silent about, who we see and whose voice we hear, how we offer compassion and how we stand up for those who’ve been knocked down—those are all about love. Back bent, hands dirty, feet sore…love.
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Popular Christianity promises a Jesus who only wants to be your pal, a Jesus who doesn’t want you to be inconvenienced, a Jesus whose real concern is that all your biases are continually reconfirmed for you. A Jesus who knows what true glory looks like. And, let me tell you, that would be a whole lot easier on me.
But unfortunately, I’m not good enough figure out how to give you that Jesus.
Instead, I’m so incompetent at my job that all I can manage to figure out how to give you is a Jesus who seeks out the small, the irrelevant, and the marginal. I’m only skilled enough to show up on Sunday mornings with a Jesus who thinks glory looks like losing, sacrificing, and dying. I hope you’ll forgive me my vocational inadequacies.
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How do we stand with Jesus against a world that too often tramples the best interests of women and the needs of children, that regularly ignores the plight of the hungry, the houseless, the addicted, the stranger, and the outcast?”
After all, the world we inhabit wasn’t created just to bless people like us; it was created to carve out space so that all whom God loves can live and flourish with dignity.
And if we want to be like God, our vocation is to learn to participate in such a world—not to try to remake it in our own image.
https://www.notion.so/derekpenwell/A-Radically-Different-World-Mark-10-2-16-1178fca125b9809c8b9eceef6f2b60fb?pvs=4Subscribe to us on iTunes!
Therefore, as Jesus embraced the child as a symbol of powerlessness and death, we’re called to embrace our own lack of power, relying on the love and grace of the most merciful parent of all.
Moreover, embracing powerlessness in ourselves opens us up to the welcome we must now extend to the little ones, those who’ve been left behind by the rest of the world.
Only in that realization can we become great. Because, after we realize that—sterling stock portfolios and winning personalities aside—any greatness that emerges isn’t something we ginned up on our own; it's God's.
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Photo credit: Wikimedia.org
We no longer have to wonder whether we have any responsibility for our brothers and sisters, those who can’t stand up any longer by themselves.
We no longer need to ask whether those who’ve been forgotten, abused, or kicked to the curb are our people.
Through the grace of the cross, we’re able to see not competitors in the food chain, not threats to our individual projects, not nuisances for which we have neither the time nor the energy, but family ... family everywhere we look.
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So, requiring us to live lives that look like Jesus is a pretty tough thing to ask of us. But if I, who claim to follow Jesus, won’t live a life struggling to be faithful, how can I continue to call myself a follower of Jesus?
If I, who claim to live a life shaped by the cross, don’t speak up for the weak, the poor, the forgotten, the bankrupt, those to whom medical services have been denied, to whom injustice is woven into the fibers of existence—if I don’t lift my voice—even knowing that I don’t have all the answers—then how can I ask anyone else to follow Jesus?
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And even after all this time, the church is often just as quick to erect barriers to keep people out, turning customs into dogma, human precepts into doctrine.
Unfortunately, many people’s experience of the church is having the ladder pulled up just as they reach for it.
“Thanks for inquiring. But we’re just fine. We’ve already got things pretty much the way we want them … I mean, the way God wants them.”
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