Why have the writings of the prophets endured? Because they fearlessly speak truth to power. They call out the injustice and oppression of the system gone wrong. They hold those in leadership accountable for the decisions they make.
But it isn’t a choice, because Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life.” If you come across truth in any form, it isn’t outside your faith as a Christian. Your faith just got bigger. To be a Christian is to claim truth wherever you find it.
God is always present. We’re the ones who show up.
Which leads to another question: When Matthew tells us that some of Jesus’s followers doubted, does this undermine the story, or is this the exact kind of honesty that reflects how people actually are? When each of the Gospel writers includes the part about the women being witnesses, why risk it? What a strange thing to include knowing it would discredit their story, unless women actually were the first witnesses.
He writes to his friends in Ephesus: I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened. When people ask you what the Bible is about, do you answer: It’s about becoming more enlightened? Because that’s how Paul puts it.
Boredom, cynicism, and despair are spiritual diseases because they disconnect us from the most primal truth about ourselves – that we are here.
Be honest about your joy.
We are both large and small, strong and weak, formidable and faint, reflecting the image of the divine, and formed from dust.
When you’re fighting, it’s absolutely crucial to keep remembering that they’re trying to figure it out just like you are.
In those moments when the two of you see things differently, you can hold on to your view, defending it and protecting it and arguing for its superiority, or you can allow your perspective to be broadened, enriched, expanded, and deepened.
Central to this conquest of the world was the belief that military victory is peace. There was even one line from the empire propaganda that went Caesar is the son of God sent to earth to bring about a universal reign of peace and prosperity. You see the problem here, right? It’s only peace if you’re holding the sword; to all those who were conquered by this devastating war machine – and hung on crosses – it wasn’t peace. It was awful. It was oppressive. It was evil.
You just took a breath. You’re about to take another. Inhale, then exhale, then another inhale. In and out. There’s a rhythm to your breathing. It’s the same with nature.
Your marriage will only be as healthy as the least healthy one of you.
To fully appreciate the Bible, you have to let it be what it is.
What the gospel does is confront our version of our story with God’s version of our story. It is a brutally honest, exuberantly liberating story, and it is good news. It begins with the sure and certain truth that we are loved. That in spite of whatever has gone horribly wrong deep in our hearts and has spread to every corner of the world, in spite of our sins, failures, rebellion, and hard hearts, in spite of what’s been done to us or what we’ve done, God has made peace with us.
When people stepped forward and said, “You have heard it interpreted this way, but I tell you it really means this,” it was progressive for their day. They were making new claims about what it means to be true to the Bible. What is accepted today as tradition was at one point in time a break from tradition.
When a leader comes along who eliminates the tension and dodges the paradox and neatly and precisely explains who the enemies are and gives black-and-white answers to questions, leaving little room for the very real mystery of the divine, it should not surprise us when that person gains a large audience. Especially if that person is really, really confident.
You cannot bring a fresh, new word about human flourishing and expect the old, established systems of oppression and power to stand by passively. Or, as Jesus put it, “You can’t put new wine into old wineskins.
But when we talk about God, we’re talking about the very straightforward affirmation that everything has a singular, common source and is infinitely, endlessly, deeply connected.
God has to punish sinners, because God is holy, but Jesus has paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can do is subtly teach people that Jesus rescues us from God.