That May Be Enough (Deuteronomy 34:1-12)

Moses could tell us: only God knows where it all leads, what it finally means. We are the story God writes. God only knows. Whatever we or our lives as preachers, homemakers, executives, factory workers, or second sopranos means is ultimately up to God. We live therefore with the conviction that God really does put us to good purposes, even though we may not see clearly, even though we may not enter the promised land of concrete results and visible fulfillment in our exodus from here to there.

This is God’s rodeo, after all, not yours or mine.

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There's No Place Like Home (Jeremiah 24:1, 4-7)

It’s so easy to think that the safest place to be ... would be ... to be ... where we’d been ... where we used to be.

It feels so simple to think that if we could just recapture what was here before, we’d be able to handle what was happening now.

The message of Jeremiah, however, is that the safest place to be is the place where God has placed us—which is to say, where God has made a place for us. .

A World Worth Working for (Matthew 22:1-14)

And if the King is unworthy to rule his subjects, how do we who follow Jesus challenge such a leader? What is our responsibility in standing athwart one ruler's unjust treatment of his own subjects?

What this parable invites us to do in our context isn't necessarily to equate God and the King, but to contrast them. And if the King is unworthy to rule his subjects, how do we who follow Jesus challenge such a leader? What is our responsibility in standing athwart one ruler's unjust treatment of his own subjects?

What this parable invites us to do in our context isn't necessarily to equate God and the King, but to contrast them.

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Telling the Truth (Matthew 21:33-46)

As those who follow Jesus, our job is also to read the world in which we live, and to hold it up against the world God intends in God’s new creation. In other words, it’s our job to help paint a picture of the way we’re truly meant to live together—where everyone is taken care of, not just the high-rollers who have the power and the money live it up while making everyone else’s life miserable—those able to avoid paying their taxes and skate past the consequences of their actions, those able to get the best healthcare (the kind denied to the masses), those able to use or ignore those they consider beneath themselves.

Telling the truth about the world isn’t “divisive,” since true unity can’t be realized without truth-telling.

When Words Aren't Enough (Matthew 21:23-32)

The reign of God does not exist where black people have to cry out against state-sanctioned violence against them … sometimes, even in their own homes … where they have to live with a justice system that is designed to punish them disproportionately, where black families have to walk out into a world every day that has shown time and time again that they’re not valued, not welcome, and therefore, not safe.

We keep working on behalf of those who’ve been turned away by the very people who are supposed to be tending the vineyard—but who’ve proven themselves inadequate to the task by their continued failure to actually pull the weeds and dress the vines.

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Collective Bargaining in the Reign of God (Matthew 20:1-16)

To the peasants Jesus was addressing, this is how the story would have been heard: the rich vineyard owner goes out to exploit the expendable people who otherwise can't feed themselves. (They are literally some of the most vulnerable people in the world.) Then the vineyard owner humiliates them by forcing them all to take the same pittance—regardless of how much they’d worked. In essence, the owner said to these desperate workers: “Your labor has only the value I give it.”

Rich landowners, in other words, would have been difficult to imagine as the hero in any story about peasants in Jesus' day. It would be like Jesus speaking to an immigrant community in New York City, and starting it by saying, "For the kingdom of heaven is like a sweatshop owner … or a payday lender.”

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What Does Forgiveness Even Mean? (Matthew 18:21-35)

So, what does that forgiveness look like? When, and under what circumstances should I offer it?

I wish there were an algorithm into which I could plug my experience, the depth of the hurt, the nature of the offender’s remorse and recovery, and have it spit out answers to those questions.

But I don’t have such an algorithm. All I have is a community—a community that, paradoxically, teaches me both that I’m always in need of forgiveness for my own boneheadedness and my complicity in systems that abuse and neglect those who are more vulnerable than me, as well as my own need to learn how to forgive others.

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The Truth Necessary for Community (Matthew 18:15-20)

This thickheaded shepherd is missing one sheep. He’s got 99 other sheep.

What does he do?

Does he write off the one lost sheep on his tax returns?

Does he casually post on other people’s Facebook page, “All sheep matter?” I mean, he’s got 99 well-behaved sheep, ones that haven’t given him heartache. Why risk losing anymore by going out hunting the one wayward sheep?

Who knows why he does it? But he leaves the 99, looking with knowing, loving eyes for that one inveterate, wandering little sheep—as a way of saying that this one is worth risking all the rest.

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The Geography of Revolution (Matthew 16:13-20)

Jesus announces a new reign that will stand in stark contrast to the empire of Rome.

In the old empire, the first shall be first, and the last shall mind their p's and q's and stay in their place.

In the new realm, conventional wisdom—and the social arrangements that ensure it—will be turned on its head. The first will be last, and the last will finally get the red carpet treatment to the front of the line.

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The Bread of Mercy (Matthew 15:21-28)

There are people who’ve been red-lined clean out of the conversation about what a just society might look like, people who’ve effectively been barred from the voting booth where they might be heard about what equity might entail, people who’ve seen the dreams of their children squashed under the boot of those who’ve been told some people don’t matter.

But Jesus shows us by example that that’s not only not right—it’s the exact opposite of the new creation God is busy preparing.

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The Teeth of the Storm (Matthew 14:22-33)

According to the text, Jesus says to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"

Generally, we’re tempted to interpret this as a scolding, as Jesus' annoyance with Peter for not keeping his eyes on the one who walks on water.

And yet, it may not be a scolding at all. It sounds so much more like pleading: "How could you not know it was me? How could you not believe that as you walked into the terrifying darkness that there was a hand to hold you up? The hand that formed creation from chaos, the hand that brought forth water from the rock, is the hand that reaches out to you as you walk into the teeth of the storm."

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A Different Kind of Party (Matthew 14:13-21)

Matthew shows us something about the way the rulers and the powerful of this world usually operate: there’s often more than enough for everybody to enjoy, but somebody always ends up dead. But when God gets the world God wants, though scarcity seems to rule, there’s more than enough to give life to everyone.

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More Than Conquerors (Romans 8:26-39)

In God's story, we don't sit passively waiting for an apocalypse in which God comes to smite God's enemies and reward the faithful. In the story God tells about what's real and what's not, we work in the midst of suffering to help the world begin to see what God's reign of peace and justice will look like when it's finally accomplished.

We're not a people who sit waiting for the chaos to be tamed, for a little stability, the relief that comes when the pain stops. We are more than conquerors who work with God in Christ to proclaim a new story of welcome and abundance, of truth over lies, of equity for all over access for a few, of just laws over the self-interested edicts of the powerful. We work with God to tame the chaos for everyone, not just for the few at the top of the heap.

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Our Cross to Bear (Matthew 16:13-28)

In a world obsessed with its own private longings, following Jesus frees us from ourselves, and redirects our longings, focusing them no longer on ourselves, but onto the people who need our passion most—the despised and rejected, the misused and forgotten, the voiceless and the vulnerable. In other words, the people who are always at the mercy of the powers who make crosses.

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Reckless Farming (Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23)

In following Jesus, our lives lived in hope are a clenched fist in the face of the systems of domination and death that screams out, “You do not own us! You will not have your way with us! We live for one who does not live in fear!"

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The Beauty of Anger (John 2:13-22)

If you happen to be one of the people kicked to the curb by the folks in charge, Jesus’ anger down at the Temple may just be what love sounds like.

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Not Like Any Family I've Ever Seen (Matthew 10.24-39)

The reign of God announces a new kind of family, the beloved community, one that doesn’t underwrite a system built on racism, patriarchy, cisgender heterosexual norms, or wealth, or social position.

It’s a different kind of family—one that makes room for those for whom there never seems to be enough room.

The family Jesus announces isn’t first about destroying what you love; it’s about destroying that which—because of its need to retain power, to keep those in control … in control—could never love you back.

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Protesting in Publice (Mark 2:23-3:6)

But it’s important to remember that Jesus’ protest, his public testimony, isn’t just a “no” to the folks in power; it’s a resounding “yes” to people who need the powers and principalities to step off the necks of the powerless, to work for the vulnerable—not against them.

Jesus’ ministry is about laying out for us a vision of what God desires for all humanity, not just those who believe they can afford to look the other way at injustice.

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The Voice of God (Genesis 1:1-2:4a)

We need to find our own voice in the voice of God who cries out for a new creation, a new world, formed from the chaos—a world where the poor and the powerless finally have the seats of honor at the table…

—a new world where immigrants are treated with the respect and dignity of those who are native born…

—a new world where LGBBTQ people can flourish as full participants in this beautiful dance of community and solidarity…

—a new world where poor black people and poor white people are no longer pitted against one another by the people who have a heavy stake in their continued division…

—a new world where the needs of the many are taken more seriously than the demands of the few…

We plead with God to create something new, and to give us the responsibility to help see it birthed.

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For the Common Good (1 Corinthians 12:3b-13)

Paul says that the beloved community is about community. If someone is only concerned with “What’s in it for me?” the body will be miserable, just to the extent that a body cannot withstand an eye, an ear, or a pancreas that acts as though its function has no impact—except on itself.

We are bound together you and I, a community given the task of living out the good news that Jesus seeks out those who’ve too often been cast aside, left to rot in the convenient waste bins of a disinterested world.

The body of Christ, the community of faith anticipates the beloved community in which it is impossible to say to people of color, to the poor, the sick, the aged, the spat on, the pepper-sprayed, the victims of state-sanctioned terror, the forgotten ones: “‘I have no need of you.”

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