Frankly, the story makes Sarah look more like a potential cast member for The Real Housewives of Canaan County than a dutiful and submissive wife.
In other words, the prophets are weirdos. More than anyone else in Scripture, they remind us that those odd ducks shouting from the margins of society may see things more clearly than the political and religious leaders with the inside track. We ignore them at our own peril.
And what they find is when they bring their pain or their doubt or their uncomfortable truth to church, someone immediately grabs it out of their hands to try and fix it, to try and make it go away. Bible verses are quoted. Assurances are given. Plans with ten steps and measurable results are made. With good intentions tinged with fear, Christians scour their inventory for a cure.
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been. How gloriously different are the saints! – C. S. Lewis.
The annoying thing about being human is that to be fully engaged with the world, we must be vulnerable. And the annoying thing about being vulnerable is that sometimes it means we get hurt. And when your family includes the universal church, you’re going to get hurt. Probably more than once.
I am writing because sometimes we are closer to the truth in our vulnerability than in our safe certainties, and because in spite of all my doubt and insecurity, in spite of my abiding impulse to sleep in on Sunday mornings, I have seen the first few ribbons of dawn’s light seep through my bedroom window, and there is a dim, hopeful glow kissing the horizon. Even when I don’t believe in church, I believe in resurrection. I believe in the hope of Sunday morning.
But to a woman for whom the mere mention of a “ladies’ tea” elicits a nervous sweat, sometimes being plugged in felt a bit like being assimilated.
I may be wrong, but I think the point is this: what each of us longs for the most is to be both fully known and fully loved. Miraculously, God feels the same way about us. God, too, wants to be fully known and fully loved.
I can’t be a Christian on my own. Like it or not, following Jesus is a group activity, something we’re supposed to do together... We’re going to need each other’s help.
Sometimes the most radical act of Christian obedience is to share a meal with someone new.
No one ever said the fruit of the Spirit is relevance or impact or even revival. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control – the sort of stuff that, let’s face it, doesn’t always sell.
If we did nothing else,” writes Nora Gallagher, “if nothing was placed in our hands, we would have done two-thirds of what needed to be done. Which is to admit that we simply do not have all the answers; we simply do not have all the power. It is, as the saying goes, ’out of our hands.
Faith,” she says, “is a catch-and-release sport. And standing at the altar receiving the bread and wine is the release part.
Like it or not, you can’t be a Christian on your own. Following Jesus is a group activity, and from the beginning, it’s been a messy one; it’s been an incarnated one.
Jesus invites us into a story that is bigger than ourselves, bigger than our culture, bigger even than our imaginations, and yet we get to tell that story with the scandalous particularity of our particular moment and place in time. We are storytelling creatures because we are fashioned in the image of a storytelling God. May we never neglect the gift of that. May we never lose our love for telling the tale.
Many of the first baptismal fonts were shaped as coffins, and baptisms took place just before sunrise on Easter morning to recall Christ’s triumph over the grave.
To demand that the Bible meet our demands is to put ourselves and our own interests at the center of the story, which is one of the first traps we must learn to avoid if we are to engage the Bible with integrity or care.
And the notion that a single tradition owns the lockbox on truth is laughable, especially when the truth we’re talking is God.
I do theology as a matter of survival,” explained Rev. Broderick Greer, who is black and gay, “because if people can do theology that produces brutality against black, transgender, queer, and other minority bodies, then we can do theology that leads to our common liberation.
If I’ve learned anything from thirty-five years of doubt and belief, it’s that faith is not passive intellectual assent to a set of propositions. It’s a rough-and-tumble, no-holds-barred, all-night-long struggle, and sometimes you have to demand your blessing rather than wait around for it.