Power With

Compassion, God, Jesus, Love 0

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

Everybody Is Invited.

Compassion, Jesus, Universalism 0

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

Rest

Jesus, Life, Peace, Rest 0

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

Whoever

Grace, Jesus, Universalism 0

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

The Power of Imagination

God, Imagination, Jesus 0

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

Atonement, Forgiveness, God, Grace, Jesus, Love 0

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

Forgiveness, God, Jesus, Universalism 0

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