The Days Are Surely Coming (Jeremiah 33:14-16)

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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How Will We Know? (Mark 13:1-8)

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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Is This the Best We Can Do? (Mark 12:38-44)

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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A Pretty Good Place to Start (Mark 12:28-34)

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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Revising Expectations (Mark 10:35-45)

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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A Radically Different World (Mark 10:2-16)

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.

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The Little Ones (9:30-37)

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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Losing Your Life (Mark 8: 27-39)

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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Irreconcilable Differences (James 2:1-10, 14-17)

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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Congruity (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23)

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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What Will They See? (Ephesians 5:15-20)

In a world in which every detail has to be nailed down before we move forward, where every nickel has to be accounted for before we strike out, where every eventuality has to be covered, the notion that God is in charge, that God will provide is seen as naïve—if not ultimately unwise.

But maybe there’s a wisdom that Christians are called to practice that trusts God’s love enough to give thanks—even when giving thanks looks like the last thing any wise person ought to do.

Maybe living as wise in the unfolding reign of God involves a set of practices the rest of the world deems gullible and unrealistic but which signal our hope.

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When the World’s on Fire (Luke 12:49-56)

And as painful as it is, Jesus says that for the fire of transformation to be kindled—the fire of God’s change in the world—we have to speak the truth about our current mess and the new world God desires.

We live in a world where division feels inevitable, but Jesus announces a world where divisions are healed—not by passively ignoring injustice but by shining a light on them.

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The Broom Tree (1 Kings 19:1-15a)

Elijah goes to God seeking relief, a remedy for the great weariness he feels in his bones. He wants God to change the world, but all God offers to do is change him. Presumably, being in God’s presence is of greater value to us in our pain and despair than any stop-gap measures or dime-store remedies we could conjure up on our own.

We often want God to fix the world or take us out of it, but what God offers to do is to sit beside us in it.

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The Walls That Divide Us (Ephesians 2:11-22)

In the face of God, I see one who prefers to tear down walls rather than maintain them, the one who calls to us from near at hand rather than keeping us far off.

In the face of God, I can see one who is not satisfied with the distance that separates us, the distance that keeps us suspicious of and hostile toward one another—but who seeks to reconcile us, to stand among us, to bring us near enough to see one another's faces.

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Being Weak (2 Cor. 12:2-10)

As long as we think that what we have, who we are, and what we’ve endured depend solely upon our initiative and the strength of our own determination and courage, we wind up flailing about, convinced we can do God’s work better than God.

Whenever we start thinking it’s about us, we lose the ability to offer ourselves to the world as a fragrant offering of love and sacrifice.

It’s not until we let go of the idea that something native to our own virtue is what allows us to become the people God wants us to be that we’ll ever be able to taste the life God has in store for us.

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Finding Hope in the Midst of Failure (Mark 6:1-13)

But in the face of failure, Jesus isn’t waiting around. He’s already headed out to the villages to continue doing what God sent him to do. And he’s not content to do it alone. He sends his followers back out into what must have felt like a hostile world to continue the work they’d already been rejected for.

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If It Sounds Too Good to Be True... (Mark 5:21-43)

In the face of a scoffing world, Jesus demonstrates his faith in God’s willingness to snatch life from the jaws of death by ... acting faithfully. Jesus sees the woman and the young girl through the eyes of God and God’s idea of who’s valuable and who’s worth taking a chance on. In the woman who’s been dead in so many crucial ways for twelve years and in the twelve-year-old girl who’s also now dead, God sees the possibilities no one else can see.

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The Economy of God (1 Samuel 15:34-16:13)

In the economy of God, the new creation holds a special place for the powerless, the stepped-on, and the least likely candidates to be social media influencers. In a strange and seemingly indefensible administrative move, God throws out the HR manual and starts employing the ones who show up to the interview in flip-flops and shorts.

And it’s almost never flashy, but it can leave ripples in the pond that seem to go on forever.

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The Courage to Be Disliked (Mark 3:20-35)

Christianity, for too many people today, means “saving souls for Jesus” while often despising those same souls until they have the decency and good sense to become more like you.

But start living like Jesus—challenging the systems that keep only a handful fat and happy, hanging out with people who’ve been forced to live in the shadows to avoid being trampled by the religious folks who otherwise have contempt for them—and the wrath of the self-righteous will fall on you like Bull Connor’s billy club.

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

The body of Christ is principally concerned with embodying the kind of just community that announces the reign of God to a world that needs a great cosmic cleanup of the mess humans have made of things.

Now, if I get blessed in the process—then that’s wonderful. And as difficult as that is for me personally to swallow, the church isn’t just here to bless me; I’m here to bless the world by participating in the beloved community and adding my gifts to the mix … for the common good.

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