What is it with God and blood? What is it with Jesus and suffering? Blood speaks of violence. Blood speaks of pain. Blood speaks of death. Likewise, the cross speaks of the same violence, the same pain, and the same death. If God is supposed to be a God of life and love, what is this obsession with blood? How can the Apostle Paul claim that God is “pleased to reconcile” all things in heaven and on earth, “making peace through the blood of [Jesus’] cross”?

Sometimes I think that repentance as active change is hard not just because of the difficulties of unlearning old habits and implementing new ones but because on some level, we identify ourselves with the way we’ve been living. Our private and public failures come to define who we are, so in moving past them, we feel like we’re losing parts of ourselves. And some of that is true: we are choosing to leave portions of our past behind.

Unfortunately, a lot of Christians spend their entire lives in a similar state of fear—paranoia, really—one connected to two little words in today’s epistle reading: “the world.”

…what if this story isn’t necessarily about divine judgment? What if God didn’t send the flood? What if we read this as God simply giving humanity the very thing it proved itself to have most desired?

A lot of people, even within the Church, aren’t particularly fond of the Apostle Paul. Frankly, it isn’t all that hard to see why. He’s confusing. He can be harsh. And he often sounds pretty full of himself. When you add the enshrining of some Roman-era cultural norms into what eventually became a sacred text, he comes across as pretty legalistic, too.

So, well beyond the visuals we imagine and applications we often take from the phrase “fishers of men,” Jesus proves himself a masterful poet, uniting the ideas of overcoming chaos with the work of life and resurrection in a single word.

…I look around, and honestly, I don’t know how to fix any of this. I don’t know how to help people I’ve known most of my life, much less the rest of the country. I’m neither Jesus nor any other kind of miracle worker. I don’t have the skill to make the blind see. I can’t restore hearing to those who have gouged out their own ears.

Advent is like Lent in that it’s a time of preparation, hence the traditional purple color. But Advent is Lent’s reflection. Because of its subtle but significant differences, churches have decided it’s important to distinguish it with blue.

So between the slave marching up with a litany of accusations and then not even having made an effort with the ruler’s money, it’s pretty easy to understand why someone would get so angry in response.

If they’re angry at all.

“People. Only people.” is rewiring a lot about what I’ve understood Jesus to say, too. Statements I always viewed as a little bit hyperbolic or needlessly expository have taken on a completely new significance.

The things we long and live for—the things we even steal or kill for—hold no importance whatsoever. What we view as common is where God puts the most attention. What we ignore, misuse, or treat as expendable is what God views as precious. You don’t have to mine, mint, or print the currency of God’s kingdom.

…we’ll need to deal with at least two questions today. First, what is the greater context of this parable? And second, what was it about the last being first and the first being last that our scripture writers hoped would help people faithfully live out the Gospel?

In the traditional rendering of today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “you cannot serve God and Mammon.” Mammon was an ancient personification of the economy or wealth. But frankly, Mammon isn’t the only god Jesus would want to warn us about.

I began to realize that much of what I had deemed to be Biblical was actually theological. The Bible makes statements and tells stories—those things are biblical. In addition, faithful, well-meaning people have used logic, experience, and philosophy to draw additional conclusions from what the Bible says—that’s theology.

If you listen to alternative radio, you’ve probably heard [“Hero”] in frequent rotation over the last few months. The band Weezer emerged around the time I was in high school and hit its heyday during my first round of grad school. This, their newest song, captures some of the deeply rooted cynicism of my era. Generation X has tried pretty much everything to get some attention.

We Americans have a very weird way of viewing the world. “Rugged individualism” is normal to us, but it’s a fairly recent philosophical development in the grand scheme of history. Because our society tends to focus on every person as an individual, we often think of statements we read in the Bible as applying to each one of us personally. But that’s not the way people understood life when the Bible was written.

Overall, the point of a wisdom text—and all Scripture, regardless of its literary genre, is inherently bent toward wisdom—is to guide its readers along a general pathway through life.

So what about ourselves? Who do we serve? To whom—or what—are we sacrificing those around us today? What do our actions tell us about the nature of the one from whom we take our commands?

The Gospel is a radical message, and it is not what we so often try to turn it into. It is not necessarily the “good news” we want to hear. It doesn’t sit well trapped behind church walls. It does not inherently approve of our perceptions and presuppositions. The Gospel is not designed to support or bring stability to our version of reality or truth. It’s meant to challenge us, to undermine the perceived authority of the present, and to reshape it into God’s image. It’s an announcement of peace and a battle cry rolled into one: comfort for the oppressed and judgment for those of us reckless enough to think that God is on our side.

“…despite her subtlety, despite her habit of evading our senses just as we notice her, Spirit—breath—does have a mysterious, nearly immeasurable power. Breath never forces itself upon anyone, yet every body desires it. Small as it is, common as it is, unremarkable as it is, breath is the key difference between life and death. It’s all that separates a human body from a human being. Holding all the potential of a newborn’s cry, the promise of youth and growth and maturity still too come, it retains its brittleness and frailty, the easy loss caused by a knee choking the spirit from a man’s body.”