God doesn’t play favorites. Everyone in a given area gets the same sunshine, the same rain, the same heat, the same cold. God provides the same food and the same water, making it available for all to use. Humans are the ones that decide who should receive the benefits of the things that God provides and who should go without.

...James’ epistle is often set at odds with those of Paul, largely due to our historic interpretations of the texts that set them into the false dichotomy of “faith versus works.” Once we reclaim the understanding of the term behind “faith” as “faithfulness,” the supposed conflict evaporates.

And that brings us back to our Gospel, where we find Jesus going out of his way to liberate God’s work and presence amongst the people of his day and, eventually, throughout history itself. Jesus, the incarnate Christ, lived as God’s active presence in early 1st Century Palestine. But that presence has never been restricted to one particular time or place, nor was it contained within any one of his miracles.

There’s a tendency among American Christians to interpret certain portions of the Bible with extreme literalism. We then often choose either to ignore other sections or to write them off as some sort of spiritualized metaphor. “God is love”—along with the verses surrounding it—generally falls within that last group.

Although it pardons an offense, forgiveness—even forgiveness directly from God!—does not and will not eliminate repercussions. An action sown will reap its harvest, and one sin’s aftereffects often spread harm far beyond the guilty party. God may have put away David’s sin, but despite his confession and turn toward God, everyone with any connection to the king—from royal family to the nameless slave laboring in the kingdom’s farthest reaches—will be forced to bear aspects of David’s curse.

in our day, it seems impossible to avoid looking at the tale of David and Bathsheba. This is a deeply ugly and troubling story, and I’m going to deal with it as honestly and straightforwardly as I can. That means we’re going to have to deal with challenging topics, including sexual assault.

…”the quest to find true unity within God’s anointing…is part of our journey of love. We make the choice to accept one another where we are and for who we are, not as a passive means of preventing conflict but as an active expression of love. When disagreement arises—which it will—we offer one another the benefit of the doubt and trust God to lead and guide each of us through the direction of the Holy Spirit.”

Early Church theologians had a concept called “theosis”—often translated as “being made” or even “turning into” God, an idea which can sound almost offensively presumptive to our ears. But I suspect they understood this “becoming God” to be a process similar to the responsibilities that fell upon an adopted person.

Within the Church, we often make [the Gospel] far more complex than it needs to be. We pile on so many peripheral descriptions and explanations and theological addendums or asides that what’s supposed to be “good” news ends up so drenched in bad news that anything good is very nearly lost. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Good News doesn’t need to be couched in death and blood and Hell.

God does act, but God tends to operate with an infuriating amount of patience and deliberation. Also, God doesn’t necessarily work for us as much as with us and through us, using our observations, insights, and skills to bend history closer and closer to the Kingdom. Change takes time, work, and energy—and we need to embrace all three if we ever expect to see any results.

“Today’s message is exceedingly simple: love one another. Do you want to know God’s will? That’s it—the whole thing. Is there some sort of secret to resolving conflict? Again, there you have it. What about dealing with people who seem hell-bent on being your enemy? The answer’s the same: love one another.”

“We, the Church, are the Body of Christ still incarnate in this world. We—as a group and as individuals—are responsible to act justly, to deliver God’s messages, uncomfortable as they may be, to work for reconciliation and reunion when—not if—we fall into conflict. We are the ones meant to heal, to welcome, to share with one another and those around us, and to answer when Jesus calls. So we too need to learn to listen.”

“…if you don’t ‘get’ the Trinity, you’re in good company. No one ever has, and it’s pretty much certain that no one ever will. God’s being is one of the foundational mysteries of Christianity—as soon as we think we have a grasp on it, we need to have the humility to recognize that we are, in fact, undoubtedly and completely wrong.”

…humans haven’t always looked at the world the way we do today. We know that modern science and its resulting technologies have rewritten our understanding of the universe, but they’ve remade parts of our lives so thoroughly that we can’t even remember things that were completely normal—even instinctual—for a majority of human existence.

The Ascension is one of those stories from the Bible that isn’t simply strange but genuinely does not make any sense today. We hear it as Jesus pulling a Superman and flying up into the sky, suggesting not only that heaven is found in some sort of alien world or alternate dimension but that Jesus is somehow inherently different from us—more demigod than actual human.

Somewhere along the line…we who inherited the mantle of the Church lost touch with that loving, prophetic Spirit. We found it easier to establish rules and customs justifying the exclusion and even outright rejection of certain groups of people rather than walk in the discomfort of the Spirit’s voice. For centuries we clapped our hands over our ears and squeezed our eyes shut, doing everything we could to avoid God’s vision…

Over this and the past few Sundays you may have noticed the frequent repetition of one of John’s favorite words: “abide.” It’s been showing up in both our Gospel and Epistle readings for several weeks now. For me, the concept behind “abiding” has a kind of passive quality. It conjures up images of waiting for a bus or, more positively, settling into one’s home each evening.

In the modern world most of us have little or no context for what Jesus is talking about [in John 10]—not just the ins and outs of sheep husbandry, but even the immediate situation he’s facing in our passage. He isn’t making isolated statements while cuddling a newborn lamb or resting in a pasture. He’s addressing and trying to make sense of a very real and potentially dangerous experience.

This year our Gospel readings primarily come from the book of Mark. Mark, likely the first Gospel to take written form, tends to focus more on action and interaction than on narration, as we encountered this morning in his singular account of the resurrection. But what we read wasn’t just the resurrection—it actually appears to have been the original ending to the entire book…

The Bible traces these kinds of internal fights and rivalries—this tendency to blame and isolate from one another—all the way back to the beginning of humanity. What we see playing out today in attempts to set “genuine” Christians against undefined “false” ones or “real” Americans against our just-as-American neighbors is simply that original sin playing itself over and over again…