The Goodness of God

We seem to want to focus on the end. What will the end look like? Who wins? Who loses? Jesus and the other voices of the New Testament have a very different idea of what we should care about. Consistently, they tell us to live our lives staying focused on God, loving and serving others, and holding onto our faith. We want to think about the fireworks, but what we are called to in discipleship. Yes, we need to be alert, but stay alert by staying connected to God.

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It is good to believe in God. God calls on us to live our beliefs out loud, to be a light in a dark world, and to let our actions be a meaningful point of invitation. For some folks, they connect with God in elaborate and formal rituals. For others, something more akin to modern concert creates the right environment. All of that can be good and faithful. All of that can be a show to show off how religious and cool that we are and not really point to God. It's not about style. It's about the substance. It's...

(Content warning for intimate partner violence and self harm)

Netflix's Death of the Pastor's Wife details a relationship between a pastor and his wife and ends in the death of the wife. It's a tale of abuse, weaponized religion, and a lack of protective structures. This story is an extreme example of something that keeps happening. An unhealthy Christian leaders leverages their institutional power for their own ends rather than God's. The institution doesn't have strength to resist. Someone gets deeply harmed. It doesn't have to be like this, but it does mean that we have...

If you're the Roman Emperor, you probably expect to dominate people's thoughts. They certainly dominated a huge percentage of the known world. A whole image of the Messiah grew up around said Messiah kicking the Romans out of the promised land. Yet, Jesus doesn't seem to care at all. Sure. Pay taxes to Caesar. Who care? God is doing something completely different - something much larger, more powerful, and long lasting. Petty earthly empires just don't rate.

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God performed some truly amazing miracle: parting the Red Sea, unleashing plagues on Egypt, sending mana from Heaven, bringing forth water from a stone. Still, the people, when left alone for a few days, create an entire separate religion based on a powerless golden object. We can easily think that we are not like that. We know that's there's only one God. But, do we act like it? Or, do we act like there are a lot of competing priorities, of which God is on on the list?

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Paul had all the right and proper religious credentials. He was born the right way. He studied the right way. He had all the right opinions. He followed the Law. If anyone had a right to boast, he did. Paul earned it. However, compared to his encounter with Christ and the power that held for him al of his hard earned correct check boxes were basically trash. They didn't matter because it turns out that Christ is the most important thing.

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Jonah is hilarious. It's pure comedy with the deeply profound point. Jonah acts in ways that constantly subvert your expectation, while God subverts his. He wants a God that will zap Nineveh, or at least, if he's going to have to go declare some zapping, he wants there to be zapping. Instead, God shows mercy and grace in light of their redemption.

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All of the Bible can feel equally ancient to us. It's all more than 2,000 years ago from our perspective. What's the difference. Well, the distance from the first New Testament writer and the last Old Testament writer is the same distance as we are from the English settlement at Jamestown. It goes even further back to the song celebrating the defeat of Pharoah by God in the parting of the Red Sea. It's difficult to date it, but it's probably more than 3,000 years old, or for the New Testament writers, about the same distance as we are from the Crusades...

If you got asked, "Are you like Moses?" You would probably say, "No." Statically, not that many of y'all are Biblical prophets with massive beards, walk with a cool staff, and have murder on your rap sheet. So, in those ways, at least not that many people are like Moses, but that misses the point of the story. We are like Moses in the critical dimensions - our innate humanity, our connection to God, and our receipt of a piece divine power. In those ways, we can all be EXACTLY like Moses.

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Turns out, with God's help, we can be good. We can take the high ground. We don't have to stoop to their level. We are not destined to repay violence with violence. Instead, we can see even our enemies as humans. Paul instructs us to do this in Romans echoing Jesus's words and actions in the Gospels. These instructions aren't meant to be abstract aspirations. They're a concrete guide to action. With God, we be legitimately better.

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It sounds like the Roman church had issues that we can resonate. A group of older timers and a group of newcomers faced rising tensions over who belongs. As a way to introduce himself to this congregation, Paul writes a letter, Romans, to hopefully help resolve this. He breaks down, in detail, how all belong, and then gets to the point. Since everyone belongs, we are all one body, and we all have something, a spiritual gift, to contribute. It was true for them then and is true for us now.

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We like to turn out noses up at the Pharisees. Who could possibility think that if you won't eat the right things, you doing belong? We say this to ourselves smugly as we move through a world full of brand advertising and images of the respectable good life. To all of us, Jesus issues a reminder that it's the things that we do, how we treat others and ourselves that matter. It's not what we consume but what comes from our hearts.

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His brothers really do a number on Joseph. He lands the role of family narc, and this snitch got something far more than stitches. They sell him into slavery, and as that caravan carries him far from home, we can imagine that Joseph had to wonder what was going to become of his life. He goes on to save God's people and Egypt from a horrific famine, but he doesn't know any of that. His story is a reminder that just because it looks bad, it doesn't mean that God isn't there and that God can do amazing things.

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Picture this. You see someone do something good. You feel good. You feel inspired. You do something good. Turns out, doing good can literally go viral - like a meme. It can be memetic. It's also at the core of the Feeding of Five Thousand. Jesus does miraculously multiply food, but the original food came from somewhere. It came from someone offering it up, and then, Jesus takes it and does something even bigger. It should challenge us to start but offering up what we can and see where God takes it.

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Each parable about the Kingdom of God adds a different piece of the picture. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed or yeast. It may not look like much but is incredibly powerful. It's something of incomprehensible and irrational value. It's something that not everyone will embrace. When we look at each of those pieces, we should get a portrait of what God is doing. It may not look like much. I may not always be the most popular thing, but it is God always at work in our world.

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Back in the dark ages of 2024, we did a sermon series called The Throne of God telling the story of King Saul, King David, and King Solomon like it was Game of Thrones and put out into the universe that someone should make that show. MGM Studios (Amazon) and Wonder Project (the guy who directed I Can Only Imagine, Jesus Revolution, and Young Washington) did essentially that or almost, kind of did that. It's a show that puts on screen the way the throne gets contested, the political machinery, and the faithlessness of Saul, but its Achilles Heal is its...

Not everyone who is in the Bible or gets ancestor status is a role model. Sometimes, we need to learn that God has been working with kind of lousy people all along and so won't be derailed by the kind of lousy people of today. Jacob is one of those people. He's kind of lousy. The Bible is pretty upfront about that. He steals, lies, and plays tricks. Jacob stands in for broken/chaotic side of human nature, and God finds away around.

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It's hard to be vulnerable in public. So much of our world runs on pretending to be cooler, more put together, more dramatic, or more interesting that you really are. Trillions of dollars of our economy runs on presenting a highly curated window into our lives. In introducing himself to the Romans, a church that did not know him, Paul chooses the opposite tactic. He presents an honest and unvarnished image of his sinfulness and his need for grace.

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At some point while reading Genesis 22, you have to make a fundamental choice. Do you think that Abraham would have made a good serial killer? To phrase it another way, you either think that Abraham believed God was not going to make him kill his son, or you think that Abraham is a degree of stone cold killer that is dangerous to society. If you choose the former, you see a man who understands the character of God, and how, even when the way isn't clear, believes that God will lead him out of the chaos of life.

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There's always this temptation to look at God's grace as the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free card. You know that God loves you. You know, thanks to God's grace, anything can be forgiven. So, we can just do whatever, knowing that it'll be forgiven, right? Right? To quote Paul directly, "By no means." God's grace is amazing gift and a powerful opportunity to change. To misuse the gift is to deeply mistreat someone who love you a lot and sacrificed greatly for you.

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We like it when we see Jesus dealing so well and graciously with human chaos. He's so kind and loving. People reject him, harm him, ignore him, sin against him, and Jesus greets the world with love. It's truly awesome. By Matthew 9-10, Jesus begins the process of making it clear that it's not just him who will have to face all that chaos. He sends the disciples out into the world - completely empowered to do what he does - and with the reminder that these humans can be SUPER chaotic. We face the same and should at least...

Matthew writes a Gospel. Matthew walks with Jesus. Matthew was a tax collector. One of those facts should absolutely shock you. In the Roman Empire, tax collectors were not pedantic role enforcers. They were traitors to their own people who leveraged the the power of the evil empire for their own sordid gain. So, eating with a tax collect ranks right up there with being touched by a woman with a medical condition that rendered her ritually unclean and touching the dead. It shows that Jesus sees beauty where the world often doesn't.

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Bang! God sweeps over the waves of chaos, and then, all of sudden, a universe explodes into intricate and beautiful being. The author of the opening of Genesis knew that they were writing the introduction to an anthology of God's early history with humanity, and he opens with a powerful poem - an ode to God's ability to transform chaos into beauty, into something that God can behold and declare good. This creative and transformational power is who God is.

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It's Pentecost again! Every year, we look at the moment that the Holy Spirit descended and everything changed. It kicked off the age that we still live in, where the Holy Spirit is present, and we can do the same amazing things that we see in Acts of the Apostles. In fact, that's probably why Luke wrote the book at all, so you, a normal person, could look at what all of these other normal people did with the Holy Spirit as their power and feel the pull go to an do likewise.

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Jesus gives his core group of disciples some last marching orders, and then, we ascend into the sky. What he wanted them to do was simple: get out there and preach the good news. Christ had been preparing them for this moment the whole time, but he did one last thing that was incredibly important. He got out of the way. He shifted what it meant to be the Body of Christ. It was no longer the body of a man but a body of empowered believers.

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In his journeys, Paul finds himself called right into the center of Athenian culture with one opportunity to make his case. Standing before Athens' ruling council, he artfully uses a combination of pieces of Greco-Roman culture to make a convincing and intelligent argument to a group of people who appreciate that exact kind of thing. Paul got to that point because the early church didn't have the option to sit in buildings of their own hoping that a skeptical world will wander in looking for something. He had to go out there and reach the people where they already were. <...

There are some real highs and lows to the religious experience. Stephen experiences all of them at once. He has this moment of direct connection with God and gets killed by a mob for speaking out against the religious authorities. Pushing forward God's Kingdom has always been difficult and remains so. We don't have to seek out the suffering. It just comes with the territory sometimes.

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At some point, when asked, "what is church?" we end up with architecture. Even if we know on some level that the Church is people and not a building, we still probably picture those people in a building. Maybe, it's a grand steepled structure, a modern theater looking space, or something clapboard and down home. At the start, 2,000 years ago, there were no buildings that belonged to the church. They met in homes and the Temple. Instead, when it all went right at first, it was purely about devotion to God and devotion to each. That's what got it all...

Every once and while, we catch that moment of clarity. "Oh geez, I need to change." Reams of self help books and the bowels of the Internet will gladly give you some advice, but there's something much more ancient (and reliable) - God's Holy Spirit. At the tail end of his sermon in Acts 2, we see Peter striking a fine balance. He shows the crowd that they have a need to change. He hopes to lead them to that moment of clarity, but because of God's power and grace, we never to stay there. There's a better way forward.

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For his first ever sermon, Peter became the first person to face a new a troubling questions: "How do I tell people about Jesus?" Peter had walked with Jesus, talked with Jesus, and bore direct witness to the resurrection. The crowd of thousands that he now stared down had done none of that. When Jesus did all the talking, this was easy. Now, Peter is in charge and has the proverbial microphone, so he finds a point of commonality and points the crowd to the eternally scared thing that Jesus did.

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The way that we tell the Easter story has at least a couple of problems. First, we read it as if every one is perfectly calm and in command of themselves, so we lose the impact that it most of had on the people at the time. Second, the meaning of Easter isn't contained in the accounts of the resurrection. For each Gospel, we get an account that Jesus rose, but it's the rest of the New Testament that explores that meaning. So, we often fail to appreciate Easter for what it is - a profound turning point in human...

The entire setup for the Last Supper sheds important light on what really matters. Jesus only has a few hours before his arrest. He decides to spend it teaching his closest friend about the importance of loving and serving one another. Jesus even washes the feet of the man who had already betrayed him. This should put life and faith into perspective. With limited time, Jesus stressed to his friends the deep spiritual significance of loving each other.

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Our tendency, as Jesus triumphally enters Jerusalem, is to keep our eyes on Jesus. Fair enough. He's the protagonist for the entire Gospel narrative. He's also the Son of God, the Divine Logos, etc. If anyone deserves our attention, it's Christ. However, if we look beyond who is in the center of the shot, we see something powerful - a massive group of disparate people coming together to spontaneous worship and begin to understand who this Jesus guy is. This is a potent image of the fulfilled Kingdom of God: Jesus at the center, victorious and people being brought together...

During the long Exile, God's people faced a reasonable question: can things get better? How does it all go back together. To answer this, God led the prophet, Ezekiel, out to the desert to observe some dry bones coming back to life. God can breathe new life into God's people. That was true 2,500 years ago, and through God's sanctifying grace, is true in your life as well. God can breathe new life into you and transform you into something truly new.

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The remarkable rhythm that keeps playing out between humanity and God is that God starts by loving us. Christ's death on the cross is the most extreme example of that. Humanity kept failing. Humanity put Jesus on that cross. He bore that out of love for us all - even though we were not worthy of that love. It is that love that unleashed God's grace into the world. Even before we are even the tiniest bit righteous, we get counted that way.

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John 3:16 is an incredibly recognizable piece of Scripture. We hold it up as a Gospel in miniature. We memorize. We emblazon it on t-shirts, lettermen jackets, mugs, and wall art. It's at the top of the list of hit Scriptures. So, what is this Pharisee doing in this scene? We know the Scripture so well that we can lose sight of its context. Jesus lays it on in a respectful but pointed debate with Nicodemus - a leading Pharisee. What about Jesus drew him into this conversation? How did it change him?

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The snake, Eve, and Adam, each in their own way, find fascinating ways to mess up. The snake attempts to tempt another. Eve gives into ambition and gives Adam a chance eat as well. Adam neither tries to stop Eve nor heads God's instruction himself. We view this series of events as the origin of sin, and theologians, including John Wesley, have wrestled with how to guide folks through their own moments of temptation. For Wesley, he broke down three general rules: 1. Do no harm. 2. Do good. 3. Stay in touch with God. If only ANYONE, snake, Eve, or Adam had...

It's one of those scene that we see every year. Jesus goes up the mountain with Peter, James, and John. Moses and Elijah show up. God speaks claiming Jesus as God's Son. Then, they all have go back down the mountain and back to work. Matthew says that Jesus is "transfigured" before them. Yes, he looked different, but it was reality that was revealed. Peter, James, and John caught a glimpse of who Christ really is, and it is that power of God that is transforming our world.

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If asked some version of "What do you think God wants you to do?" we could all probably spit out something like "God's will" or "Follow Christ" or "Answer the Great Commission" or "Be a good person." The Prophet Isaiah puts a lot more meat onto the bones of what God really wants. God wants us to stop fighting with each other and instead liberate the oppressed, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. He lays it out directly and in black and white. Religious ceremonies aren't the core. Caring about people often left behind sits there right alongside having...

How do we really change things? We might feel powerless or angry. We might feel paralyzed or the urge to rush out into the street. God calls us to seek justice, but in our hyperpolarized world, perspectives on justice vary wildly. It's a wrestling process - wrestling with God and your place in the world. It's a discerning process - thinking about where you are capable of making an impact. It's also back recognizing that people change more often in relationship than in an argument with a stranger.

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