The Power of Imagination

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Where other people see jars for water, Jesus sees vats of new wine and hels others to experience his vision in fullness. When a village sees a woman with a history they feel she ought to be ashamed of, Jesus sees an evangelist and brings those same villagers to belief through her. What people saw as a mere five loaves of bread and two fish, Jesus saw as an all-you-can-eat buffet. Jesus’s miracles are rooted in the power of realized imagination that God shows in creation.

To be made in the image of God is to possess the power of imagination.

Imagination is an essential part of our humanity. It is our imagination that built cities and civilizations. Our imagination brought us countless genres of music. People have imagined timeless creations into reality through the culinary, visual, and dramatic arts. Literature born of our God-given imaginations has endured for millennia, across time, space, language, and culture. Imagination brought us the Flintstones and Super Soakers. It brought us more sports than we care to name. Nothing worthwhile came without someone first imagining it.

— Trey Ferguson, Theologizin’ Bigger, p. 180

Photo: Rainbow over South Riding, Virginia, March 11, 2026

Winning Us with Love

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These metaphors do not mean that he literally took on our sin or our infirmities as a mysterious imputation or had our punishmet transferred to his person and, consequently, by his suffering satisfied the justice of God. That kind of penal suffering would only satisfy the very worst injustice. And think about it. If Jesus did take on the punishment for our sin, why would anyone need to suffer in an eternal hell? According to the penal and satisfaction theories, Jesus suffered for all humanity. He paid the price, satisfied the debt, and said “it is finished.” So it would be a grave injustice if God required two punishments for sin – one paid by Jesus and one paid by eternal suffering. Instead, Jesus took upon himself our sinning enmity by bearing all the abuse we handed ut to him. He was painfully burdened by our fallen and broken condition, and he agonized with us in the most profound way possible – he suffered on account of our sin. Jesus knows how to treat his enemies – he suffers with them (us) as a friend. He suffers all our wickedness in order to win us with his love.

— Sharon L. Baker, Executing God, p. 136

Photo: Sunrise in South Riding, Virginia, March 10, 2026

Sheep and Goats

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Also, notice that the sheep to the right of the shepherd are considered praiseworthy precisely because they do not think of the world in a dualistic way. They are sheep not because they were born as sheep but because they have chosen to respond to their neighbors in a very specific way. What grants them their identity as sheep i that they are precisely the kind of people who do not split the world up into sheep and goats….

The sheep respond to need and otherness with hospitality and love. They are sheep precisely because they are capable of recognizing a common humanity in their neighbors and having empathy for those who might be different from them or marginalized by society. They choose to cross the boundaries and break through the walls that might otherwise divide people – even the walls of a prison cell. Their “sheepyness” is defined by their refusal to accept the divisions of social or immigration status, health, wealth, or even (most ironically) the consequences of punitive justice.

Notice that the King does not say, “I was innocent and you came to prison to visit me.” He does not seem to care about the particular guilt or innocence of the one who is incarcerated. He simply identifies himself with whoever might be in prison, saying, “I was in prison and you visited me.” As the last detail mentioned in a series, the fact that sheep go to visit prisoners carries the most emphasis in the text. Caring for those who are imprisoned actually epitomizes what it means to be a sheep. Yet, some will argue that we are to understand this passage to be saying that God imprisons souls in a torture dungeon and withdraws God’s presence from them for all eternity! Are we to believe that God is praising the sheep for their enduring presence with those who are in prison, and at the same time, God withdraws God’s own eternal presence from those whom God sends to prison? If that were true, then Christianity would simply be a terrible religion worthy of our rejection, because the Christian God would be the biggest hypocrite of all.

— Derek Ryan Kubilus, Holy Hell, p. 98-99

Photo: Gray winter sky, South Riding, Virginia, December 31, 2025

Invited to Joy

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Jesus invites us to joy. The holiness to which we are called is to know joy in its fullness. We let ourselves be drawn to the Tender One whose face is unbridled joy. We are beckoned to this locus of joy, not a reckoning with the error of our ways but God saying, unabashedly smiling, “Get over here.”

— Gregory Boyle, Forgive Everyone Everything, p. 18

Photo: Cardinal, South Riding, Virginia, December 31, 2026

The Incarnation

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A God who not only understands but experiences hunger, thirst, weariness, joy, sadness, physical pain, growth, interpersonal relationships, intimacy, betrayal, offense, occasions for celebration, grief, and the full gamut of the human experience is a great deal different from a God who is content to sit on high while looking down low.

In the incarnation, we are confronted with a bizarre proposition. The God that existed before the beginning of time chose to walk among the people as one of their own. What was once thought of as imperceptible became a tangible reality that people could see with their own eyes. Converse with. Even touch. The incarnation suggests that God is indeed living. And, for some of us, all of this is a little difficult to square with a God who exists outside the boundaries of time and space.

— Trey Ferguson, Theologizin’ Bigger, p. 158

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 20, 2024

Forgiveness, not Punishment

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Actually, we might say that sin condemned and punished through retribution is sin condemned without hope for redemption. But sin exposed through righteousness, with the intent to restore the sinner to God, is grounded in the hope of salvation. So instead of saying that God inflicted the pain of the cross on Jesus as a penalty for our sin, we can say that the horrific nature of the cross exposed and condemned the gravity of our sin. After all, human beings are the ones who put Jesus to death, not God.

And remember, Jesus never said anything about coming to receive punishment for sin, but he said quite a bit about forgiving it. The righteousness of God in Jesus transcended the retributive aspects of the law and brought about our forgiveness – think about Jesus’ prayer for our forgiveness from the cross. In this manner, Jesus gave us his life and revealed to us the law of love that restores us to God and to each other. The Bible tells us that no greater love exists than this (John 15:13).

— Sharon L. Baker, Executing God, p. 134

Photo: Sunset at Blackwater Canyon, WV, April 23, 2025

Opposite of Disgust

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We aren’t so much afraid of one another as disgusted – a much harder truth to face. We don’t resist the foreigner, orphan, and widow out of fear for our lives and well-being so much as out of a fear that they will contaminate us – change us into something we do not want to become. It’s a very human and very normal reaction but not one that Jesus seemed to follow. The Way of Jesus runs in the opposite direction of the exclusion that disgust instigates: it welcomes instead of rejecting, integrates instead of segregating, and loves instead of fearing.

–Paul Hoard and Billie Hoard, Eucontamination, p. xiii

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, November 22, 2025

Blessed Are the Poor.

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It’s true that the gospel of Luke records Jesus as saying, “Blessed are you who are poor” – period. In Luke’s Beatitudes, Jesus simply blesses the poor, and the further categorization of “in spirit” is omitted. In Luke, Jesus blesses the poor without reference to what kind of poverty it is. The truth is this: Jesus meets us at our point of poverty, not our place of strength. If we want to position ourselves to receive Christ’s blessing, we must identify an area of need and cry out for grace from there. If we think we have no area of weakness, need, or poverty, we essentially have no need for Jesus. This is why in the Book of Revelation Jesus condemns the people in the church of Laodicea for arrogantly confessing, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” They were essentially saying, “Thank you very much, Jesus, but I really don’t need you right now because I’m not poor.” So be it. Jesus has no blessing for them. The grace of Christ is perfected in weakness and poverty, not in strength and wealth. As Mary said of Messiah in her prophetic Magnificat, “He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” This is the spirit of the first beatitude – and to the poor it is beautiful.

–Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World, p. 190-191

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, August 16, 2025

Becoming Lowly

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On the last night of his life, at his last supper, Jesus puts into words what we’ve seen throughout the entire Gospel. This is what he’s done in befriending outsiders and outcasts, in seeking to lift up the lowly. He came as a servant-king. Everything we’ve seen to this point in the Gospel is a picture of Jesus doing what finally now he puts into words. He gave himself to love, heal, and care for the broken and hurting. He sought to show mercy and grace to the marginalized and those far from God. He came to see those who were often overlooked or unseen. And if he did that for us, as his disciples this must be our posture and the mission we are called to as well. This is what it means to be his disciple: we follow him, and we lift up the lowly.

Lifting up the lowly requires becoming lowly. Greatness is defined by lowering ourselves and serving others. In our world, this is utterly countercultural, but it is absolutely the culture of the Kingdom.

If the disciples, who spent three years with Jesus, were still focused on status and power at the Last Supper, it should not surprise us that we struggle with those same things at times as well. But nearly every one of the conversations Jesus had over his final week were on this same theme. He encouraged a rich young ruler to lay down the source of his status. He blessed and healed a blind beggar. He befriended a wealthy and powerful tax collector who gave up half of what he had to the poor. He praised the poor widow while castigating the powerful and status-loving religious elite. “The greatest among you must become like a person of lower status and the leader like a servant” (Luke 22:6).

–Adam Hamilton, Luke: Jesus and the Outsiders, Outcasts, and Outlaws, p. 107

Photo: pink Mandevilla flowers, August 6, 2025.