Remember that we are all on a journey and that the great thing about the universal love of Christ is that one doesn’t have to believe in it to experience it.
— Derek Ryan Kubilus, Holy Hell, p. 165
Photo: Karlstalschlucht, Germany, June 17, 2024
Salvation is an act of reclamation and restoration. When Jesus saves us, he helps us reclaim the bits of humanity we’ve lost. Jesus gives us the ability to imagine good things and the power to realize them here and now. Community without exploitation. A sense of wealth that doesn’t demand scarcity. A love that doesn’t bleed us dry, but makes us whole. If only we imagine them, we can experience all these things. That’s what we were made to do. That’s what it means to be human.
If Jesus has the power to save, then we have the power to imagine again. We have the ability to theologize bigger. That is the image of God in us.
— Trey Ferguson, Theologizin’ Bigger, p. 186
Photo: Burnside Farms, Nokesville, Virginia, April 7, 2026
Jesus did not die in order to win God’s love for us, but to win us over with God’s love. God’s love went to the limit for us, dove into the depths of the human condition, suffered the consequences of our sin by dying a terrible death as an innocent man. And in the midst of that suffering love, Jesus revealed the greatest love of all — forgiving his enemies and praying to God to do the same. Through the incarnation, God took on human flesh and gave human flesh the life of God.
— Sharon L. Baker, Executing God, p. 147
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 16, 2026
Just as Middle-earth could not be saved, only enslaved, by the Ring of Power, so Christianity cannot save the world by political power; it can only be corrupted by it. Jesus Christ crucified is the everlasting indictment on those who forsake the way of the cross to reach for the ring of political power. The power we are promised by our Lord is the power of the Holy Spirit – the power to love, forgive, and heal. If we try to wield the Ring of Power (or Caesar’s sword), it will only corrupt us.
— Brian Zahnd, The Wood Between the Worlds, p. 97
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 16, 2026
But Jesus gave up power and privilege to stand in solidarity with humanity. In this way, the Spirit of God sets aside power-over in favor of power-with for the sake of justice. Where power-over is marked by dominance, coercion, and control, power-with is marked by collaboration and cocreation. It is a power rooted in collective action and relationship. A God who invites us to “argue it out” is a God of power-with, power shared. This God is dynamic: one who feels, who responds to our pleas, and who can be accessed by humans. This is a God many of us were not introduced to but had to discover on our own.
— Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging, p. 62
Photo: Bluebells at Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, April 3, 2026
Salvation is not about choosing the right theological beliefs to avoid hell. It’s about recognizing the goodness and divinity in the despised “other” and joining in on the party God is throwing, where everybody is invited. Jesus never tells people they need to change their doctrine or convert to another religion in order to be saved from hell. Jesus doesn’t defend theology, he defends humanity of the vulnerable and the marginal. Jesus doesn’t explain the one correct statement of faith to his disciples; he meets real human needs, while calling out religious leaders for the hypocrisy of caring more about dogma than justice and mercy.
Hell is not a good Christian doctrine because it makes it impossible to show up in relationships with others like Jesus did. The spirituality of hell excludes and others people; Jesus includes the “other” and shows us that we are all more similar than we thought. We are connected, whether we are aware of it or not. Refusing to see this – that is hell. The true hell is exclusion and denying our shared belovedness. It is living in the delusion of superiority and separation. It is refusing to join the banquet where everyone is invited.
— Brian Recker, Hell Bent, p. 58-59
Photo: Tulips, Burnside Farms, Nokesville, Virginia, April 7, 2026
We often see rest as a tool to help us be more efficient later or as a way to prevent burnout, as if burnout is the natural order of things. But here’s a truth I find pressing for our time: Never did Jesus say “rest now so you can work harder later.” Rest was never framed as something we do only to be more productive afterward. In a world obsessed with efficiency, where rest is seen as a way to recharge for more labor, Jesus shows us something else. He offers rest as an end in itself, as a way of being, a gift that is not earned but given freely. His rest is not about being more useful tomorrow; it’s about being fully human today.
— Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire, p. 124
Photo: Tulips at Burnside Farms, Nokesville, Virginia, April 8, 2026
By using the word “whoever,” Jesus expands the borders of who’s in and who’s out, scrambling their notions of who gets to receive the grace of God and how they get to receive it. By opening eternal life to “whoever eats of this bread,” Jesus begins to deconstruct that old bureaucratic system of circles and opens up eternal life to . . . well . . . whoever! It isn’t about blood or lineage or culture or tradition. It has nothing at all to do with any of the circles the people of God had previously drawn. Perhaps the disciples were scandalized because they wondered, “Could it be just anybody who eats the bread?” Maybe they even worried, “Could it be . . . everybody?”
Exclusion is easy. Walking around thinking that we are the special ones, that we are justified simply by virtue of who we are or what we believe, some identity or another, is comforting. Cutting more and more people out of that circle isn’t a problem as long as we stay nestled safely inside of it.
Expanding the circle, however, is a “hard teaching.” Expand it too far and we start to wonder if there’s anything special about us at all.
By that measure, universalism might just be the hardest teaching because it expands the circle all the way.
— Derek Ryan Kubilus, Holy Hell, p. 126
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 21, 2026
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
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