In the Image of God

Core Value, God 0

Notice that some of your most interesting attributes are not outcomes of decisions you made. They are present because of what God infused into your life from the very beginning. Your life is unique. It holds certain abilities, certain superpowers present from the very beginning as you were formed in the image of God. You uniquely bless the world. Lavish love calls us to examine our own lives so we can identify all the ways God, as the master gardener, both supported and pruned us so that we could become the people we are today.

— Tom Berlin, Reckless Love, p. 62

Photo: Tree swallow, South Riding, Virginia, May 3, 2020

Scapegoating God

God, Jesus, Redemption 0

Once again, since Jesus perfectly reveals God to us, and since Jesus was perfectly innocent of all the crimes for which He was accused, we can know, therefore, that God also is perfectly innocent of all the crimes against humanity for which He is accused. Just as Jesus was innocent of all wrongdoing, so also is God. Jesus always loved and only forgave, and the same is true of God. Jesus never killed anyone, nor did He command anyone to do so. The same is true of God. One of the greatest revelations we received from Jesus is the revelation of scapegoating, and not just how we scapegoat others, but also how we have scapegoated God. This idea alone will allow you to read your Bible with brand new eyes. When the Bible is read with the revelation about scapegoating that we have in Jesus Christ, we see that all the violence and bloodshed attributed to God in the Old Testament is nothing more than people making a scapegoat out of God.

— J. D. Myers, Nothing But the Blood of Jesus, p. 178

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 3, 2020

Resurrecting Word

Calling, Community, Compassion, God, Redemption 0

To those who believe, the call from the depths of their relationship with God is to bend every effort to stand with God in solidarity with those who suffer; to right the wrongs, counter injustice, relieve the pain, and create situations where life can flourish. Then a resurrecting word can gain a foothold in this fractured world.

— Elizabeth A. Johnson, Creation and the Cross, p. 108

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 3, 2020

Purity Systems

God, Life 0

The desire to live a holy life that is pleasing to God is understandable, but this desire is also fraught with pitfalls.

Our purity systems, even those established with the best of intentions, do not make us holy. They only create insiders and outsiders. They are mechanisms for delivering our drug of choice: self-righteousness, as juice from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil runs down our chins. And these purity systems affect far more than our relationship to sex and booze: they show up in political ideology, in the way people shame each other on social media, in the way we obsess about “eating clean.” Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not to holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from.

–Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shameless, p. 26

Photo: Paris, France, April 2001

The Holy City

God, Healing, Hope, Joy 0

God’s beloved city in Revelation 21-22 is not primarily a vision for after we die, or for after Jesus returns. It is rather a vision that can transform the way we live out God’s reign in the world today. It is a vision of the healing leaves that God wants to lay on every broken heart, on every war-torn landscape. It is a vision of Lamb power in the world. And we are part of that vision. Once we have seen the new creation, the joy of that experience must inform everything we do.

— Barbara R. Rossing, The Rapture Exposed, p. 164

Photo: Potzbach, Germany, April 1997

Generous Love

God, Jesus, Obedience, Redemption 0

The true point of the text is summarized in Hebrews 10:5-10. The truth is stated twice that God never wanted or desired sacrifices, nor did He take any pleasure in them. Instead, what God wanted was someone who would do His will. Jesus perfectly obeyed God’s will, which made Jesus the perfect living sacrifice. Yet Jesus did die. He died a sacrificial death. Through His death, He shed His blood for the sins of all mankind. The Bible clearly reveals this truth, as does the book of Hebrews. But the question is Why? Why did Jesus die? Why did Jesus shed His blood? Why did the shed blood of Jesus accomplish what bulls and goats never could?

The author of Hebrews has the answer. Jesus did not die because God required or needed sacrifice. He died to take away and bring an end to sacrifice. Jesus did this by revealing through His own sacrifice at the hands of men that God does not want sacrifice; we do. People sacrifice to God, even though God didn’t want such sacrifices. We sacrificed to God because we wanted sacrifice, and because sacrifice seemed to bring peace into our lives and communities. But when Jesus died and rose from the dead, He revealed that God does not want sacrifices, but instead wants people to live their lives in faithful obedience to Him, as He told Saul so long ago, “To obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam 15:22). Living in a relationship with God is what God has always wanted (cf. Heb 10:16). The sacrifices of the Mosaic Law were given as a substitute for relationship, but now that we have seen from Scripture and through Jesus that God never wanted or desired sacrifices, but only wanted us to live in a loving relationship with Him and each other, we can put away all sacrifices and live as God desires. Best of all, this is the only true way to find the peace we all seek. When we generously love and freely forgive as God has done for us, we then find peace with God and with one another.

— J. D. Myers, Nothing But the Blood of Jesus, p. 153-154

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, April 6, 2020

Walking With the World

God, Jesus, Redemption 0

It beggars belief to think that this Jewish prophet who announced and enacted the joyful reign of the gracious and merciful God of Israel decided to go to Jerusalem to die in order to pay back the debt sinners owed to the offended honor of God, who could not forgive sin without the death of an innocent man. Not in your wildest dreams….

What our trek through the scriptures gives us instead, to use alternative language, is a theology of accompaniment. It fosters the idea of salvation as the divine gift of “I am with you,” even in the throes of suffering and death. Redemption comes to mean the presence of God walking with the world through its traumas and travail, even unto death.

— Elizabeth A. Johnson, Creation and the Cross, p. 106

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, April 19, 2020

Lamb Power

God, Jesus, Love, Redemption 0

The slain Lamb’s victory through suffering love is the heart of the Revelation story. I want to say again that this theology, this counter-understanding of victory in the Lamb, is more relevant today than ever. In the face of terrorism and the glorification of war, we need the vision of “Lamb power” to remind us that true victory comes in our world not through military might but through self-giving love. Revelation’s conquering Messiah is the slain but standing Lamb, the very opposite of Rome’s victory image. In Revelation, Jesus conquers not by inflicting violence but by accepting the violence inflicted upon him in crucifixion.

— Barbara R. Rossing, The Rapture Exposed, p. 135

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, April 5, 2020

While We’re Still Sinners

God, Love, Universalism 0

Romans 5 says that God showed His love for us while we were still sinners and that we were reconciled to God while we were still His enemies. If He did this for you and me, why should He not do it for everybody? This passage says to me that God has already overcome His children’s evil with good, even if we haven’t had enough time to observe it yet. Luke 6:35, the one quoted above about loving your enemies in order to be sons of the Most High finishes by saying, “… for [God] Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men.”

If that’s true, then why would we who have been overcome by His mercy be considered any more worthy, special, or privileged than someone who hasn’t yet been overcome by it? Why do we believe that death magically makes God’s love and mercy disappear for most of His children, especially when Scripture teaches that Jesus defeated death for all, the evidence to be seen in due season? What would compel enemies of God to be lured by some kind of “unconditional love” offered until the moment they die, only to then turn into unquenchable hate?

— Julie Ferwerda, Raising Hell, p. 92

Photo: Paris, France, April 2001

Rich Diversity

Acceptance, Community, God, Love 0

Our distinctions of race, gender, orientation, and place of origin all shape how easy or difficult it has been for us to claim the same inherent needs we have to be seen and heard and respected, and they craft the specific lens through which we filter the world. The very specific intersection of our various differences alters how we individually have experienced life, and so we need to bring these all to bear as we build community, each being informed by one another. The color of someone’s skin, their inclination to love, their gender identity, the culture of their upbringing, and every other facet of their humanity matter, because these all work in concert to compose the once-in-history expression of life they manifest. These things are the unique lines of their original stories.

And as a person of faith, these distinctions all reveal the unlimited beauty of One who is the source of each of us, so this rich diversity is the very holy ground where God speaks. Bigotry doesn’t happen when we notice other people’s differences. It happens when we believe or act as if those differences make another less worthy of love or opportunity or compassion or respect. We need to learn to dance together.

— John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table, p. 94

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, April 7, 2020