The Gospel of Belonging in an Age of Loneliness

Primary Scripture: Acts 2:42–47
Supporting Scriptures: Genesis 2:18; Psalm 68:5–6; Ecclesiastes 4:9–12; Mark 3:31–35; 1 Corinthians 12:12–27; Galatians 3:28

“All who believed were together and had all things in common.” — Acts 2:44

Introduction: Surrounded and Alone

We have never been more connected.

And sometimes we have never felt more alone.

We carry devices capable of reaching almost anyone on Earth.

Thousands of people can follow us.

Hundreds can become our “friends.”

We can know what somebody ate for breakfast three thousand miles away.

We can watch strangers argue at two o’clock in the morning.

We can send photographs across oceans instantly.

And still someone can sit alone in an apartment thinking:

Does anybody actually know me?

There is a difference between being connected and belonging.

A Wi-Fi signal is connection.

Belonging is somebody noticing when you disappear.

Connection says:

I can contact you.

Belonging says:

Your absence changes the room.

And perhaps one of Christianity’s greatest contributions to our fractured age is not another doctrine.

Perhaps it is something much simpler.

A table.

A community.

A place where somebody says:

Sit here.

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I. “It Is Not Good”

The first thing declared “not good” in the Bible is not sin.

Genesis 2 says:

“It is not good that the man should be alone.”

Before murder.

Before empire.

Before idolatry.

Before injustice.

There is isolation.

The story is mythic theology, not scientific anthropology.

But its insight is profound.

Human beings are relational creatures.

We become ourselves through relationship.

Nobody becomes human alone.

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II. The Myth of Radical Independence

Modern culture frequently celebrates independence.

The self-made person.

The lone entrepreneur.

The rugged individual.

The person who needs nobody.

But nobody is self-made.

Someone delivered you.

Someone fed you.

Someone taught you language.

Someone maintained roads.

Someone grew food.

Someone produced medicine.

Someone built electrical systems.

Someone cared for you when you could not care for yourself.

Even the person declaring:

I don’t need anybody

is usually saying it using a language other people taught them.

We are creatures of dependence.

Or better:

interdependence.

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III. Jesus Creates a New Kind of Family

Someone tells Jesus:

“Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you.”

Jesus responds:

“Who are my mother and my brothers?”

Then he looks around.

“Here are my mother and my brothers!”

Jesus is not simply rejecting biological family.

He is expanding kinship.

Family can become something larger than blood.

That matters enormously.

Because not everybody finds safety in biological family.

Some people find family in friendships.

Congregations.

Queer communities.

Recovery groups.

Neighborhoods.

Monastic communities.

Mutual-aid networks.

Sometimes the people who save your life share none of your DNA.

Jesus says:

Family can be chosen into existence.

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IV. Acts Imagines an Alternative Community

Acts describes the early Jesus movement:

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

Then:

“All who believed were together.”

Together.

They ate together.

Prayed together.

Shared possessions.

Helped people in need.

Whatever historical idealization may exist in Luke’s portrait of the earliest church, the theological imagination is unmistakable.

Christianity was never supposed to become:

Me and Jesus.

It was:

Us.

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V. Salvation Was Never Supposed to Be Private

Modern Christianity often reduced salvation to an individual transaction.

Do I personally believe?

Am I personally saved?

Where will I personally go after death?

But biblical salvation is frequently communal.

Exodus liberates a people.

The prophets imagine restored communities.

Jesus announces a Kingdom.

Paul creates assemblies.

Revelation imagines a city.

Christianity’s central image is not merely a saved individual.

It is a body.

Paul writes:

“You are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”

You are individual.

But never isolated.

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VI. Paul Says We Belong to Each Other

First Corinthians 12 gives us one of Scripture’s greatest images.

A body.

Hands.

Feet.

Eyes.

Ears.

Different parts.

Different functions.

One body.

Then Paul says:

“The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.’”

That may be one of the most important political, spiritual, and economic sentences in the Bible.

I have no need of you.

Individualism says that.

Racism says that.

Classism says that.

Ableism says that.

Nationalism can say that.

Religious supremacy says that.

Paul says:

No.

You need one another.

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VII. bell hooks: Love Requires Community

bell hooks understood love as more than emotion.

Love involves care.

Responsibility.

Commitment.

Knowledge.

Trust.

Love must become practice.

That means community cannot survive merely because people occupy the same room.

You can be lonely in church.

You can be lonely in marriage.

You can be lonely inside a crowd.

Belonging requires something deeper:

I see you.

I hear you.

You matter here.

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VIII. Howard Thurman and the Search for Belonging

Howard Thurman understood what happens when societies teach people that they do not belong.

Oppression is not merely economic or political.

It enters the interior life.

People begin asking:

Do I matter?

Does anyone see me?

Is there somewhere I can exist without defending my existence?

Thurman’s spirituality sought an inner freedom capable of resisting the dehumanizing messages of society.

But that inner freedom was never merely private.

It moved toward community.

Toward relationship.

Toward what Martin Luther King Jr. would call the Beloved Community.

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IX. King Did Not Dream of Integration Alone

Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision was larger than ending particular segregation laws.

He spoke of Beloved Community.

That means something beyond tolerance.

Tolerance says:

I will permit you to exist.

Beloved Community says:

Your flourishing concerns me.

That is different.

We do not simply coexist.

We become responsible for one another.

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X. Francis Discovers Universal Kinship

Francis of Assisi pushes belonging even further.

Brother Sun.

Sister Moon.

Brother Fire.

Sister Water.

Francis refuses to stop kinship at the edge of humanity.

Animals become kin.

Earth becomes kin.

Creation becomes family.

Franciscan spirituality therefore asks:

How large can belonging become?

Can it include the poor?

The stranger?

The Muslim?

The leper?

The wolf?

The river?

The forest?

The atmosphere?

The Earth itself?

Francis answers:

Yes.

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XI. Clare Creates an Alternative Household

Clare of Assisi built community outside many of the structures medieval society expected for women.

Her community became a chosen household.

Shared prayer.

Shared resources.

Shared responsibility.

Shared life.

There is something quietly revolutionary about people saying:

We will belong to one another differently.

Community becomes resistance.

Because empire depends upon hierarchy.

Markets can reduce people to consumers.

Institutions can reduce people to categories.

But community says:

You have a name.

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XII. Queer Community Understands Chosen Family

Queer people have long understood something Christianity should appreciate:

Sometimes family must be created.

When biological families reject people, others step forward.

Friends become siblings.

Older community members become parents.

Neighbors become caregivers.

Chosen family becomes survival.

Queer theology therefore offers Christianity an important question:

What makes a family sacred?

Biology?

Law?

Or covenantal love?

Jesus’ answer in Mark 3 should make churches think carefully.

He redraws family around relationship.

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XIII. Caputo: God Happens Between Us

John D. Caputo gives us another way to speak about God.

God does not need to be imagined primarily as a supernatural individual somewhere above the universe.

God insists.

The lonely person calls.

The excluded person calls.

The stranger calls.

The neighbor calls.

And perhaps God happens in the response.

When somebody says:

Come sit with us.

God happens.

When someone remembers a birthday nobody else remembered:

God happens.

When someone brings food:

God happens.

When someone notices the empty chair:

God happens.

God is not merely above community.

God happens between us.

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XIV. Derrida: The Other Always Exceeds My Categories

Jacques Derrida teaches us to distrust closed categories.

The other person always exceeds my description of them.

Christian.

Atheist.

Muslim.

Conservative.

Socialist.

Transgender.

Straight.

Disabled.

Immigrant.

Citizen.

Rich.

Poor.

Every category tells us something.

No category tells us everything.

Hospitality begins when I allow the other person to be more than my label for them.

Community dies when everyone becomes a category.

Community lives when categories become names.

And names become stories.

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XV. Today’s News: Loneliness Is Not Just a Private Problem

Recent U.S. research suggests social disconnection deserves attention as a public concern.

CDC materials published this year describe loneliness and social connection as meaningful dimensions of population well-being. A 2026 study analyzing a nationally representative 2024 survey estimated that roughly one in eight U.S. adults experienced frequent loneliness and about one in five frequently lacked social or emotional support.

Recent research from George Washington University has also found an association between living in communities with little local-news infrastructure and greater reported loneliness, particularly in rural communities.

That finding is fascinating.

Because local news does something besides deliver information.

It tells us:

You live somewhere.

There are people around you.

Events are happening.

Somebody opened a store.

Someone died.

The school board met.

The high-school team played.

A festival is coming.

A road is closing.

Your neighbor did something interesting.

Community requires a shared story.

When common institutions disappear, isolation can deepen.

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XVI. Loneliness Has Political Dimensions

Loneliness is deeply personal.

But it is not only personal.

Community requires infrastructure.

Parks.

Libraries.

Sidewalks.

Public transportation.

Community centers.

Schools.

Churches.

Coffee shops.

Local journalism.

Affordable housing that allows people to remain near friends and family.

Places where human beings encounter one another without being required to purchase expensive admission.

A democratic-socialist perspective emphasizes this dimension of social life:

community itself requires investment.

Markets can create extraordinary things.

But markets do not automatically create belonging.

Sometimes the most important places in a city are places where nobody expects you to buy anything.

A library.

A park.

A public square.

A sidewalk.

A community center.

These are infrastructures of belonging.

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XVII. There Are Other Perspectives

Market-oriented approaches may emphasize voluntary associations, entrepreneurship, religious institutions, families, private philanthropy, local businesses, and civic organizations rather than government provision.

Those institutions can absolutely create community.

The question does not have to become:

Government or community.

The deeper question is:

What arrangements actually help people belong?

Public institutions.

Voluntary associations.

Congregations.

Businesses.

Neighborhood organizations.

Families.

Mutual aid.

We probably need all of them.

Because loneliness is larger than ideology.

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XVIII. Social Media Is Not the Enemy

It is tempting to blame everything on phones.

That is too easy.

Digital communities can create genuine relationships.

Someone isolated geographically may discover friends online.

Disabled people may gain access to communities otherwise unavailable.

Queer teenagers may discover they are not alone.

People with unusual interests may finally find one another.

Technology can connect.

The question is whether connection becomes relationship.

Ten thousand followers cannot guarantee one person who will come when you call at three in the morning.

We need both networks and neighbors.

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XIX. Religious Pluralism Means Building Bigger Tables

A pluralistic society cannot build belonging by requiring everyone to become the same.

Christianity should not demand:

Become like us and then you can belong.

The better invitation is:

Bring your difference to the table.

Muslim.

Jew.

Christian.

Hindu.

Buddhist.

Pagan.

Atheist.

Agnostic.

Humanist.

Searching.

Confused.

Certain.

Uncertain.

The table becomes sacred precisely because nobody owns it.

Unity is not uniformity.

We are one without being the same.

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XX. Christian Atheism: Maybe God Is What Happens When Nobody Gets Abandoned

Suppose there is no supernatural being orchestrating every human encounter.

Fine.

The lonely person still needs somebody.

The elderly neighbor still needs a visitor.

The grieving person still needs companionship.

The stranger still needs welcome.

The child still needs community.

Perhaps Christian atheism can say:

Stop waiting for God to create community.

Become the community you are praying for.

If God exists as insistence rather than intervention, then God’s question becomes:

Who will go?

And our answer becomes:

Here we are.

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XXI. Process Theology: Community Is Always Becoming

Process thought reminds us that relationships are not static.

Community must continually be created.

People arrive.

People leave.

People change.

Traditions evolve.

Conflicts happen.

Forgiveness becomes necessary.

New people challenge old assumptions.

That is not necessarily community failing.

Sometimes that is community.

Living systems change.

The alternative to changing community is not perfect community.

It is usually dead community.

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XXII. International Day of Peace: Peace Begins Smaller Than Nations

Today, September 21, is observed internationally as the International Day of Peace.

When we hear the word peace, we often imagine treaties.

Wars ending.

Weapons falling silent.

Those things matter enormously.

But peace also begins somewhere much smaller.

Two neighbors learning one another’s names.

A Christian sharing a meal with a Muslim.

A conservative and socialist refusing to dehumanize one another.

A queer child discovering a safe community.

A lonely elder receiving a visitor.

A congregation making room for someone who does not believe exactly what everyone else believes.

A stranger becoming neighbor.

Global peace requires political institutions.

But cultures of peace are built through relationships.

Before nations can stop treating one another as abstractions, people must learn to stop treating one another as abstractions.

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Conclusion: Save Me a Seat

Perhaps one of the most beautiful sentences anyone can hear is:

We saved you a seat.

It means:

We expected you.

We noticed you were coming.

There is room.

You belong.

Imagine a church built around that sentence.

Not:

Do you believe everything correctly?

But:

We saved you a seat.

Not:

Are you respectable enough?

But:

We saved you a seat.

Not:

Are you Christian?

But:

Come eat.

Not:

Are you straight?

Not:

Are you cisgender?

Not:

Are you wealthy?

Not:

Are you sober?

Not:

Are you certain about God?

Not:

Did you vote like me?

Simply:

There is room.

Maybe salvation looks more like that than we imagined.

Not evacuation from Earth.

Not admission into a celestial country club.

But belonging.

The lost finding community.

The stranger becoming neighbor.

The excluded receiving a chair.

The lonely discovering their absence would be noticed.

Acts says:

“All who believed were together.”

Together.

That may be the word our age desperately needs.

Not agreement.

Together.

Not sameness.

Together.

Not certainty.

Together.

Not domination.

Together.

Francis calls creation family.

Clare creates alternative community.

King dreams Beloved Community.

hooks teaches love as practice.

Derrida opens the door to the other.

Caputo hears the insistence.

And Jesus looks around the room and says:

Here is my family.

Perhaps God is not hiding somewhere above us.

Perhaps God keeps happening in the space we create between us.

God insists:

Make room.

Move over.

Add another chair.

Cook more food.

Learn another name.

Listen to another story.

Notice who is missing.

Go find them.

And when they arrive—

do not interrogate them at the door.

Tell them:

We saved you a seat.

Because nobody is disposable.

Nobody is merely an outsider.

Nobody becomes fully human alone.

We belong to one another.

We are one.

And perhaps peace on Earth begins when someone pulls out a chair and says:

Sit with us.

Amen.

Care, Dependence, and the Gospel of Human Need

Primary Scripture: Mark 2:1–12
Supporting Scriptures: Genesis 4:8–10; Psalm 41:1–3; Luke 10:25–37; 1 Corinthians 12:12–26; Galatians 6:2

“Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them.” — Mark 2:3

Introduction: Everybody Eventually Needs to Be Carried

There is a lie at the center of modern life.

It sounds like this:

I can take care of myself.

We admire independence.

We praise the self-made person.

We teach children to become self-sufficient.

We sometimes speak about needing help as though dependence were an embarrassing defect we are supposed to overcome.

But there is a problem.

Nobody is independent.

You entered this world completely dependent upon other people.

Someone fed you.

Someone cleaned you.

Someone carried you.

Someone taught you language.

Someone kept you alive while you were unable to keep yourself alive.

And someday, if you live long enough, you may again need someone to carry you.

Between infancy and old age we temporarily experience enough independence to create the illusion that we are self-sufficient.

We are not.

We are interdependent.

And perhaps that is not a defect in human existence.

Perhaps it is something sacred.

Today’s Gospel begins with a person who cannot reach Jesus by himself.

So four people pick him up.

And maybe the miracle begins before Jesus does anything.

Maybe the first miracle is simply this:

Somebody carried him.

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I. The Gospel Begins With Friends Carrying a Body

Mark tells us that Jesus is teaching in a house in Capernaum.

The place is packed.

Then four people arrive carrying a paralyzed man.

They cannot enter.

So they climb onto the roof.

They remove part of it.

And they lower their friend down.

Imagine preaching while pieces of someone’s roof start falling beside you.

Jesus looks up.

A mattress begins descending from the ceiling.

This is one of the Bible’s wonderfully chaotic stories.

But Mark tells us something extraordinary:

“When Jesus saw their faith…”

Their faith.

Not simply his faith.

The faith belongs to the community carrying him.

Sometimes you cannot carry your own faith.

Sometimes somebody else believes tomorrow is possible for you.

Sometimes somebody else carries the stretcher.

---

II. Christianity Has Over-Individualized Faith

Modern Western Christianity often asks:

Do you personally believe?

Have you personally accepted Jesus?

What is your personal relationship with God?

Those questions can have meaning.

But biblical religion is profoundly communal.

Israel is a people.

Jesus creates a community.

Paul describes a body.

The Lord’s Prayer begins:

“Our Father.”

Not:

“My private spiritual provider.”

Christianity was never supposed to become a solitary transaction between an individual soul and heaven.

We belong to one another.

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III. Cain Asked the Wrong Question

Genesis gives us one of humanity’s most haunting questions.

After Cain kills Abel, God asks:

“Where is your brother Abel?”

Cain replies:

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The entire Bible may be answering that question.

Yes.

You are.

And your sister’s keeper.

And your neighbor’s keeper.

And sometimes your enemy’s keeper.

And the stranger’s keeper.

Not because people belong to us.

But because their well-being concerns us.

The opposite of love is not always hatred.

Sometimes it is:

Not my problem.

---

IV. Jesus Refuses the Theology of Blame

In the ancient world, illness and disability could be interpreted morally or religiously.

Even within the Gospel traditions we find people asking questions about sin and suffering.

Who sinned?

What caused this?

Whose fault is it?

Human beings still do this.

Someone becomes sick and we ask:

Did they eat correctly?

Exercise enough?

Take the right supplements?

Pray enough?

Think positively enough?

Sometimes these questions become cruelty disguised as explanation.

Historical-critical interpretation reminds us that ancient healing stories operate within ancient understandings of illness, purity, community and divine activity.

We should not turn them into simplistic modern medical claims.

But the ethical movement of Jesus is clear.

Jesus repeatedly moves toward suffering bodies.

Not away from them.

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V. Bodies Are Not Moral Report Cards

Your body is not a spiritual performance review.

Illness is not proof of moral failure.

Disability is not evidence of insufficient faith.

Aging is not defeat.

Needing assistance is not shameful.

Bodies are vulnerable because bodies are alive.

Christianity’s obsession with perfect bodies has sometimes forgotten something fundamental:

Jesus himself becomes wounded.

Christianity places a wounded body at the center of its symbolism.

Not a body untouched by vulnerability.

A wounded body.

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VI. Paul Says the Weaker Members Are Indispensable

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians:

“The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.”

That is revolutionary.

He does not say:

We tolerate weaker members.

He says:

Indispensable.

A society built entirely around productivity asks:

What can this person contribute?

Paul asks another question:

What kind of community would we become if we discarded part of ourselves?

The answer is obvious.

A wounded body.

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VII. Disability Theology Changes the Question

Disability theologians have challenged churches to stop treating disabled people merely as objects of healing or charity.

That matters enormously.

A disabled person is not a sermon illustration.

Not a tragedy.

Not a theological puzzle.

Not somebody waiting for a miracle so everyone else can applaud.

Disabled people are teachers.

Leaders.

Theologians.

Friends.

Artists.

Workers.

Mystics.

Neighbors.

Members of the body.

Sometimes the problem requiring healing is not the body.

Sometimes it is the staircase.

The inaccessible building.

The prejudice.

The poverty.

The healthcare system.

The social assumption that only certain bodies count as normal.

Perhaps society needs healing too.

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VIII. Judith Butler: Vulnerability Is Shared

Judith Butler has written extensively about vulnerability, precarity, bodies and which lives societies consider worthy of protection.

Her work helps us see something Christianity should already know:

Bodies depend upon social conditions.

Food.

Housing.

Healthcare.

Transportation.

Relationships.

Safety.

A body never exists completely by itself.

Vulnerability therefore becomes political.

Who gets protected?

Who receives care?

Whose pain is believed?

Whose life receives resources?

Those are theological questions as much as political ones.

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IX. Julia Serano: Bodies Are Interpreted Socially

Julia Serano’s work on gender also helps illuminate the ways bodies are not merely biological objects.

Bodies are interpreted.

People make assumptions about them.

Gendered bodies are judged.

Disabled bodies are judged.

Fat bodies are judged.

Old bodies are judged.

Poor bodies are judged.

Trans bodies are judged.

Certain bodies are treated as normal.

Others are treated as problems.

Jesus repeatedly disrupts this sorting system.

He touches bodies society considers unclean.

He eats with people labeled morally suspect.

He places marginalized bodies back inside community.

That may be one of the deepest meanings of healing in the Gospels:

restored belonging.

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X. Francis Embraces the Body He Feared

Francis of Assisi famously remembered his encounter with people suffering from leprosy as transformative.

He had feared and avoided them.

Then something changed.

The person Francis had learned to regard with disgust became the place where Francis discovered another way of being human.

This is not a sentimental story about Francis becoming a heroic caregiver.

The encounter changed Francis.

The marginalized person became teacher.

That reversal matters.

Sometimes the person we think we are helping is actually revealing something about ourselves.

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XI. Clare Builds a Community of Care

Clare’s spirituality was profoundly communal.

Life was shared.

Prayer was shared.

Food was shared.

Illness was shared.

Responsibility was shared.

Nobody became holy alone.

This offers an alternative to the mythology of radical individualism.

Human flourishing is communal.

There will be days when I carry you.

There will be days when you carry me.

And perhaps neither position is superior.

They are simply different moments within relationship.

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XII. Caputo: God Happens in the Act of Carrying

John D. Caputo helps us reinterpret this Gospel without requiring a supernatural interventionist deity.

God does not have to be imagined as a cosmic physician selectively deciding whose illness to cure.

God insists.

The suffering body calls.

The hungry body calls.

The exhausted caregiver calls.

The abandoned elder calls.

The overwhelmed nurse calls.

The person without insurance calls.

And God happens as that call becomes responsibility.

Perhaps God is happening when four people pick up the stretcher.

Not above them.

Between them.

In the carrying.

God insists.

Care responds.

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XIII. Whitehead: God Is the Fellow-Sufferer

Alfred North Whitehead famously described God as:

“the fellow-sufferer who understands.”

That is profoundly different from imagining God as a distant ruler observing suffering from celestial safety.

Process theology imagines God participating relationally in the world’s becoming.

Every joy matters.

Every pain matters.

Every experience enters the ongoing life of reality.

God does not escape suffering.

God receives it.

Perhaps divine compassion is not supernatural rescue from vulnerability.

Perhaps it is the depth within vulnerability calling creation toward healing.

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XIV. Bonhoeffer: God Is Not the Explanation for What Medicine Cannot Explain

Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned Christianity against pushing God into the gaps of human knowledge.

That insight matters in healthcare.

We should not use God to explain what medicine has not yet explained.

Science should investigate.

Doctors should study.

Researchers should research.

Medicine should improve.

Faith does not compete with medical knowledge.

The mystery of God does not shrink every time science learns something.

Perhaps God is not hiding inside the unexplained.

Perhaps God is happening within the human response:

Research.

Care.

Presence.

Compassion.

Medicine.

Solidarity.

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XV. From Today’s News: Who Will Care for the Caregivers?

Today’s news makes this question urgent.

The World Health Organization is warning of a global shortage of healthcare workers as populations and medical workforces age. Its recent analysis projects a worldwide shortfall of about 11.1 million health workers by 2030, with dozens of countries potentially unable to maintain current levels of care.

Meanwhile, a recent U.S. survey found that about 70% of Generation Z healthcare workers were considering looking for another job within the next year, even though many also said they valued long-term employment stability.

These are not merely employment statistics.

They raise a human question:

Who cares for the people who care for everybody else?

Nurses need rest.

Home-health aides need living wages.

Doctors need sustainable workloads.

Nursing assistants need dignity.

Mental-health workers need support.

Family caregivers need respite.

Care cannot survive indefinitely on sacrifice.

A society that applauds caregivers while exhausting them has confused gratitude with justice.

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XVI. Healthcare Is a Moral Question

Political traditions disagree strongly about healthcare.

Some emphasize market competition, consumer choice and private provision.

Others emphasize public financing, universal coverage and healthcare as a social right.

A democratic-socialist perspective argues that access to necessary healthcare should not depend primarily upon wealth, employment status or profitability.

The theological reason is straightforward:

Bodies are not commodities.

Illness is not a luxury market.

A heart attack does not wait for comparison shopping.

Cancer does not negotiate according to income.

A child with an infection does not become less deserving because their parents are poor.

Healthcare inevitably raises the question:

What do we owe one another simply because we share vulnerable bodies?

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XVII. There Are Political Disagreements About How

We should distinguish the moral question from the policy question.

People can agree that everyone deserves care while disagreeing about how healthcare should be financed and delivered.

Single-payer systems.

Public options.

Private insurance.

Employer coverage.

Cooperative systems.

Mixed systems.

Different countries make different choices.

Christianity does not supply an insurance actuarial table.

But it does give us the Good Samaritan.

The Samaritan does not ask:

Is this wounded person in network?

He sees suffering.

And responds.

That establishes at least a moral direction.

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XVIII. Today’s Drug-Pricing Debate Shows the Complexity

Current healthcare policy also demonstrates that political labels do not always predict policy neatly.

The Trump administration recently announced participation by all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico in a Medicaid drug-pricing initiative designed to tie prices for some medicines more closely to prices paid in other developed countries. Supporters argue it could produce substantial public savings, while pharmaceutical-industry critics warn about potential effects on access and future investment.

The specific policy can and should be debated on its evidence and outcomes.

But notice the underlying question.

Should society simply accept whatever price the market produces for medicine?

Or does public need justify collective bargaining and regulation?

That question reaches beyond party identity.

It concerns the relationship between markets and human need.

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XIX. A Democratic-Socialist Theology of Care

Democratic socialism contributes a simple principle:

Some goods are too fundamental to human flourishing to distribute solely according to purchasing power.

Healthcare.

Education.

Housing.

Food security.

Basic utilities.

Public transportation.

Care for children.

Care for elders.

Care for disabled people.

Different democratic-socialist traditions propose different institutions for achieving these goals.

But the moral intuition is communal:

Nobody should be abandoned simply because caring for them is unprofitable.

That sounds remarkably close to Paul’s theology of the body.

“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it.”

Paul apparently did not believe suffering was merely a private matter.

Neither should we.

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XX. Care Work Is Work

Our economies frequently undervalue caregiving.

Who raises children?

Who cares for aging parents?

Who cooks?

Who cleans?

Who provides emotional support?

Who sits beside someone who cannot be left alone?

Historically, much of this labor has been performed disproportionately by women, often unpaid or poorly paid.

Feminist economics has forced societies to ask:

If caregiving stopped tomorrow, how long would the rest of the economy function?

Probably not very long.

Care is not peripheral to the economy.

Care makes the economy possible.

Perhaps budgets should reflect that.

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XXI. bell hooks: Love Is Something We Do

bell hooks repeatedly insisted that love is not merely feeling.

Love requires practice.

Care.

Commitment.

Responsibility.

That fits beautifully with the Gospel.

The four friends carrying the man do not merely say:

We care about you.

They pick him up.

Love acquires muscles.

Love climbs stairs.

Love tears open roofs.

Love finds transportation.

Love makes appointments.

Love brings meals.

Love changes diapers.

Love sits through chemotherapy.

Love fills prescriptions.

Love answers the phone at three in the morning.

Love becomes material.

---

XXII. Religious Pluralism and the Sacred Work of Care

Christianity does not own compassion.

Buddhist traditions cultivate compassion toward suffering beings.

Judaism emphasizes care for community and the preservation of life.

Islam places profound importance on mercy, charity and responsibility toward vulnerable people.

Hindu traditions contain rich traditions of service.

Sikh communities have demonstrated radical hospitality through practices such as langar, feeding people without regard to status or religion.

Humanists care for people without requiring supernatural beliefs.

Good.

Let everyone carry the stretcher.

If an atheist develops a lifesaving medicine, use it.

If a Muslim nurse cares for a Christian patient, give thanks.

If a Buddhist physician heals someone, rejoice.

If a Christian caregiver serves an atheist, do not turn the bedside into a conversion opportunity.

Care first.

Theology can wait outside.

---

XXIII. Christian Atheism: The Miracle May Be Us

Suppose no supernatural hand comes through the ceiling.

What then?

Four people are still standing beside the stretcher.

Perhaps Christian atheism asks us to stop waiting for heaven to perform responsibilities that belong to us.

Someone needs food.

Cook.

Someone needs medicine.

Provide it.

Someone needs transportation.

Drive.

Someone is lonely.

Visit.

Someone is exhausted.

Sit with them.

Someone has fallen.

Lift.

Maybe the miracle is not that supernatural power interrupts nature.

Maybe the miracle is that human beings interrupt indifference.

---

XXIV. The Church as a Community That Carries

Imagine church differently.

Not primarily:

A building where people agree about doctrines.

But:

A community that carries people.

Someone loses a job.

Carry them.

Someone becomes sick.

Carry them.

Someone loses faith.

Carry them.

Someone cannot pay rent.

Carry them.

Someone is grieving.

Carry them.

Someone is exhausted from caregiving.

Carry the caregiver.

Someone cannot believe in God anymore.

Do not throw them off the stretcher.

Carry them anyway.

Perhaps that is faith.

Mark says Jesus saw their faith.

Sometimes the community believes for us.

---

Conclusion: Someday You Will Need the Stretcher

There are seasons when you feel strong.

Enjoy them.

Use your strength.

Carry somebody.

But do not become arrogant.

Because bodies change.

Circumstances change.

Life changes.

Someday the person carrying may become the person carried.

And that is not failure.

That is humanity.

We are born needing care.

We live through relationship.

We become sick.

We recover.

We age.

We grieve.

We depend.

We carry.

We are carried.

We are one.

The great spiritual illusion is independence.

The great spiritual awakening is interdependence.

Cain asks:

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The Gospel answers:

Yes.

But more beautifully:

You are your brother’s brother.

Your sister’s sister.

Your neighbor’s neighbor.

Part of one vulnerable body.

So when someone falls—

pick up the stretcher.

When caregivers become exhausted—

carry them too.

When healthcare becomes inaccessible—

change the system.

When someone’s body does not fit society’s definition of normal—

change the definition.

When medicine becomes unaffordable—

ask why.

When profit conflicts with human life—

choose life.

Not because a supernatural ruler threatens punishment.

Because suffering calls.

And perhaps that call is what we mean when we say:

God.

God insists.

The wounded body calls.

The exhausted worker calls.

The lonely elder calls.

The overwhelmed caregiver calls.

The uninsured patient calls.

The disabled neighbor calls.

And love answers:

We are coming.

Four people arrive.

They cannot find the door.

So they climb onto the roof.

Religion says:

You can’t do that.

Love starts removing tiles.

Because sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is tear a hole in the roof until everybody can get inside.

And perhaps that is the church I still believe in:

Not the church with the perfect doctrine.

The church carrying the stretcher.

Not asking first:

What do you believe?

But:

Where does it hurt?

Not promising:

God will fix everything.

But saying:

You will not face everything alone.

That is incarnation.

That is solidarity.

That is Beloved Community.

That is Franciscan kinship.

That is the Body of Christ.

That is the insistence of God becoming flesh through human care.

So carry one another.

And when your turn comes—

let somebody carry you.

There is no shame in the stretcher.

Sometimes the stretcher is where grace begins.

Amen.

Immigration, Hospitality, and the God Who Arrives as the Other

Primary Scripture: Matthew 25:31–46
Supporting Scriptures: Leviticus 19:33–34; Deuteronomy 10:17–19; Ruth 1:15–18; Matthew 2:13–15; Luke 10:25–37; Hebrews 13:1–3

“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” — Matthew 25:35

Introduction: What If God Arrives Without Papers?

There is something wonderfully inconvenient about the Bible.

Just when religion becomes comfortable, Scripture introduces a stranger.

Abraham entertains strangers.

Israel becomes a nation of former migrants.

Ruth crosses a border.

The prophets defend foreigners.

Jesus tells stories in which outsiders become heroes.

The Holy Family flees political violence.

Paul announces boundaries breaking down.

Hebrews says:

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.”

And Jesus gives us perhaps the most dangerous sentence of all:

“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Notice what Jesus does not say.

“I was a stranger after you verified my usefulness.”

“I was a stranger after I spoke your language.”

“I was a stranger after I adopted your religion.”

“I was a stranger after I proved that I deserved compassion.”

He simply says:

I was a stranger.

And somehow, mysteriously, the stranger becomes the place where Christ is encountered.

So today I want to ask:

What happens when God knocks on the door and we do not recognize the face?

---

I. Israel Was Commanded to Remember

Leviticus says:

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien.”

Then:

“The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you.”

And finally:

“You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

That last sentence is everything.

Remember Egypt.

Israel’s ethics grow from memory.

You know what vulnerability feels like.

You know what empire feels like.

You know what it means to live somewhere without power.

Therefore:

Do not become Pharaoh when you finally acquire power.

Biblical memory is political.

---

II. The Hebrew Bible Keeps Returning to the Stranger

Again and again the Hebrew Scriptures mention a social triad:

The widow.

The orphan.

The stranger.

Why?

Because these groups frequently lacked the ordinary structures of economic and political protection.

The Bible’s concern is therefore not sentimental.

It concerns power.

Who can protect themselves?

Who has property?

Who has family networks?

Who can obtain justice?

Who gets ignored?

The prophets repeatedly judge societies according to what happens to people without power.

That remains a useful theological test.

---

III. Ruth Is an Immigrant

Christians sometimes read Ruth as a sweet romance.

It is.

But it is also an immigration story.

Ruth is a Moabite woman entering Judah.

She is foreign.

Economically vulnerable.

A widow.

She survives partly by gleaning—the ancient practice that required landowners to leave portions of harvest for poor people and foreigners.

That means Ruth survives because Israel had something resembling a social safety net.

And then something deliciously subversive happens.

The foreign woman enters Israel’s sacred story.

According to Matthew’s genealogy, she becomes an ancestor of Jesus.

The stranger becomes family.

---

IV. Jesus Himself Becomes a Refugee in Matthew’s Story

Matthew tells us that Herod seeks the child Jesus.

Joseph takes Mary and Jesus and flees to Egypt.

Historically, we cannot independently verify every detail of Matthew’s infancy narrative, and historical-critical scholarship recognizes that Matthew is also constructing theological parallels between Jesus and Moses.

But the story Matthew chooses to tell matters.

Christian imagination begins with a child fleeing political violence.

Jesus enters the Gospel as someone whose family crosses a border seeking safety.

Whatever our immigration policies, Christians should feel the weight of that image.

---

V. Jesus Makes the Outsider the Hero

Someone asks Jesus:

“Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus responds with the parable we call the Good Samaritan.

We have domesticated the word Samaritan.

Hospitals use it.

Charities use it.

But Jesus deliberately chooses someone his audience could regard as religiously and ethnically suspect.

The outsider becomes the moral center.

The priest passes.

The Levite passes.

The Samaritan stops.

Orthodoxy walks past suffering.

The outsider practices mercy.

Jesus asks:

“Which of these three was a neighbor?”

The answer is not:

The person with the correct theology.

It is:

The one who showed mercy.

---

VI. Religious Pluralism Begins on the Road

That parable should humble Christianity.

Perhaps God is happening outside Christianity all the time.

A Muslim feeding hungry people.

A Buddhist caring for refugees.

A Jewish congregation sheltering strangers.

A Pagan protecting the Earth.

A Hindu doctor treating people who cannot pay.

An atheist defending someone else’s religious freedom.

Do I need to tell them:

“You were secretly Christian”?

No.

Let the other remain other.

God does not require religious plagiarism.

Where love happens—

where mercy happens—

where justice happens—

something sacred is happening.

---

VII. Derrida: Hospitality Is Dangerous

Jacques Derrida wrote profoundly about hospitality.

Hospitality contains a tension.

If I welcome only people I already know, is that really hospitality?

The stranger, by definition, brings uncertainty.

Hospitality involves risk.

This does not mean communities need no laws or borders.

Every society makes practical decisions about migration, citizenship, asylum, employment, security and public resources.

But Derrida keeps asking a deeper question:

What happens to hospitality when we control the guest so completely that the stranger can never truly arrive?

---

VIII. Caputo: God Arrives as the Call of the Stranger

John D. Caputo gives us a beautiful way to hear Matthew 25.

God does not descend as supernatural border patrol.

God insists.

The stranger appears.

And suddenly there is a demand:

Will you welcome me?

The demand has no army.

The stranger may possess no political power whatsoever.

That is the weakness of the call.

God does not force hospitality.

Hospitality must happen through us.

God insists.

The stranger exists.

We decide what happens next.

---

IX. Levinas: The Face Interrupts Me

Emmanuel Levinas placed enormous philosophical importance on encountering the face of another person.

The other person interrupts my self-centered world.

Suddenly there is someone whose existence places a demand upon me.

Before ideology.

Before economic calculation.

Before political category.

A face.

This matters because political language can make human beings disappear.

“Migrants.”

“Illegals.”

“Foreigners.”

“Refugees.”

“Aliens.”

“Cases.”

“Numbers.”

Categories can be administratively necessary.

But theology must keep putting faces back onto categories.

Someone has a mother.

Someone misses home.

Someone is afraid.

Someone wants work.

Someone is fleeing something.

Someone loves someone.

The face returns.

---

X. Francis Meets the Stranger

Francis of Assisi built his spirituality around crossing boundaries.

Rich and poor.

Healthy and sick.

Christian and Muslim.

Human and animal.

Francis repeatedly moved toward those his society taught him to avoid.

His encounter with the leper becomes especially important.

Francis discovered that the person he feared could become the site of transformation.

The stranger changed Francis.

That is another secret of hospitality:

We imagine ourselves helping the stranger.

Then the stranger changes us.

---

XI. Clare Creates Belonging

Clare of Assisi created a community built around shared life rather than status.

That matters because hospitality is more than letting someone temporarily enter your space.

Real hospitality eventually asks:

Can the guest belong?

There is a difference between:

“You may stand here.”

and:

“You are one of us.”

Christian hospitality moves toward belonging.

---

XII. Julia Serano and the Politics of Othering

Julia Serano has written extensively about how social assumptions shape the ways gendered people are interpreted and treated.

Her work helps illuminate a broader mechanism.

Societies construct categories of people who become the other.

Different.

Suspicious.

Abnormal.

Dangerous.

Inferior.

Once someone has been successfully othered, mistreatment becomes easier to justify.

Queer people know this mechanism.

Trans people know it.

Racial minorities know it.

Religious minorities know it.

Immigrants know it.

Different histories should never be collapsed into one another.

But the mechanism of othering deserves attention.

The Gospel continually disrupts it.

---

XIII. Jesus Says the Stranger Is Christ

Matthew 25 goes further than ordinary charity.

Jesus says:

“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

The disciples ask:

When?

Jesus answers:

“Just as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.”

This is extraordinary Christology.

Where is Christ?

Not merely in heaven.

Not merely in church.

Not merely in Eucharistic bread.

Christ is encountered in vulnerable bodies.

Hungry.

Thirsty.

Naked.

Sick.

Imprisoned.

Strange.

Perhaps Christianity has spent too much time asking whether Jesus is in the communion wafer and not enough asking whether Jesus is outside the church door.

---

XIV. From the News: Immigration Is About Actual Human Beings

Current U.S. immigration debates make these theological questions concrete.

Reuters reported in June that the number of people held in U.S. immigration detention had risen to about 60,000, citing U.N. figures based on official data. The U.N. human-rights chief called for independent investigations into deaths in custody; the Department of Homeland Security responded that its death rate remained low relative to the detained population and said it maintains high standards of care. Reuters’ own analysis found that the detention death rate had more than doubled since 2025.

The human complexity is visible in individual stories. In August, Reuters reported that the Nicaraguan-born father of a U.S. Navy sailor serving aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln was taken into immigration detention after a vehicle stop in Florida.

There are genuine political disagreements here.

Governments have responsibilities concerning borders, immigration law, asylum systems, public safety and orderly administration.

People reasonably disagree about enforcement priorities, legal immigration levels, detention, deportation, asylum standards and paths to citizenship.

Christian theology does not magically resolve those policy questions.

But it should establish one moral floor beneath the debate:

No immigration status erases human dignity.

A person does not stop being human when paperwork changes.

---

XV. A Democratic-Socialist Perspective: Do Not Make Workers Fight Each Other

Economic anxiety often enters immigration debates.

People worry about wages.

Jobs.

Housing.

Schools.

Healthcare.

Those concerns deserve serious discussion rather than dismissal.

But a democratic-socialist analysis asks us to look upward as well as sideways.

When wages are low, is the fundamental problem the worker born somewhere else—or the structures determining wages?

When housing is unaffordable, should renters fight one another for scraps, or should society examine housing supply, speculation, zoning, public investment, wages and landlord power?

When healthcare is scarce, should sick people compete over who deserves treatment—or should we ask why healthcare is scarce?

Workers can be divided remarkably effectively when they are encouraged to fear one another.

Solidarity asks another question:

What if workers organized together regardless of birthplace?

---

XVI. The Politics of Scarcity

Politicians across ideological traditions frequently tell people some version of:

There isn’t enough.

Not enough housing.

Not enough healthcare.

Not enough jobs.

Not enough money.

Therefore decide who deserves exclusion.

But sometimes scarcity is real.

And sometimes scarcity is politically produced.

A democratic society must distinguish between the two.

If housing is insufficient, build.

If schools are overcrowded, invest.

If healthcare systems are strained, expand capacity.

If employers exploit undocumented workers because those workers fear reporting abuse, strengthen labor protections and enforcement.

The answer to vulnerable workers should not automatically be making another group of vulnerable workers more vulnerable.

---

XVII. Dorothy Day: Hospitality Without a Résumé

Dorothy Day practiced a radically inconvenient hospitality.

The Catholic Worker tradition did not begin by asking whether hungry people had optimized their lives sufficiently to deserve soup.

Feed them.

Shelter them.

Know their names.

This does not solve every structural problem.

Charity alone is insufficient.

But Dorothy Day understood that political analysis becomes dangerous when it loses actual people.

The revolution begins at the table.

---

XVIII. Howard Thurman: Christianity From the Underside

Howard Thurman asked what Christianity means for people whose backs are against the wall.

That is exactly the perspective immigration theology needs.

Policy looks different from the border checkpoint than from the detention cell.

It looks different from the migrant shelter.

It looks different from the employer’s office.

It looks different from the neighborhood experiencing rapid demographic change.

Christian ethics should listen across these experiences while paying particular attention to people with the least power.

---

XIX. Christian Atheism: Welcome Without Metaphysical Guarantees

Suppose you do not believe Jesus is literally hiding inside every stranger.

Fine.

The ethical challenge remains.

Another human being stands before you.

They experience pain.

Hope.

Fear.

Love.

They possess only one life that we know with certainty they have.

Perhaps that makes hospitality more urgent.

A Christian atheist can hear Matthew 25 without imagining supernatural surveillance.

Jesus’ words become an ethical event:

The stranger matters.

God may be the name we give to that impossible insistence.

Or perhaps you prefer not to use the word God at all.

Welcome the stranger anyway.

---

XX. Process Theology: The Stranger Changes the Future

Process theology understands every encounter as creative.

Nobody enters a relationship and leaves reality exactly unchanged.

The stranger brings possibility.

New food.

New language.

New music.

New ideas.

New relationships.

New conflicts too.

Real pluralism is messy.

Hospitality does not mean pretending difference never creates tension.

It means believing tension can generate something other than domination.

Communities change.

Cultures change.

Religions change.

People change.

The future emerges through encounter.

---

Conclusion: God Has a Strange Accent

Maybe God does not always sound like us.

Maybe God speaks Spanish.

Arabic.

Hebrew.

Swahili.

Tagalog.

Mandarin.

Creole.

Maybe God uses sign language.

Maybe God speaks through someone who believes in another religion.

Maybe God speaks through someone who believes in no religion.

Maybe God uses the wrong pronouns according to somebody’s theology.

Maybe God has no passport.

Maybe God crosses our carefully constructed boundaries and says:

Hello.

And we ask:

Who are you?

Where did you come from?

Why are you here?

Do you belong?

And Matthew 25 whispers:

Pay attention.

You may be asking God for identification.

Because Christ keeps appearing where respectable religion least expects him.

Hungry.

Poor.

Imprisoned.

Foreign.

Excluded.

Strange.

The stranger knocks.

God does not break the door down.

That is Caputo’s weakness of God.

God insists.

Hospitality calls.

The door remains ours to open.

And perhaps the Kingdom begins with something unbelievably ordinary:

A chair.

A meal.

A safe room.

A lawyer.

A job with a fair wage.

A congregation that says:

You can sit here.

A neighbor learning someone’s name.

A society capable of debating immigration law without forgetting immigrants.

Francis discovered Christ in the person he feared.

Ruth crossed the border and became family.

The Samaritan crossed the road and became neighbor.

Jesus crossed every boundary religion built around holiness.

And the Gospel asks us one question:

Will you cross too?

Not because borders are meaningless.

Not because laws do not matter.

Not because every policy question has an easy answer.

But because beneath every policy is a person.

And Christianity begins losing its soul whenever the category becomes more important than the human being.

So welcome the stranger.

Listen to the stranger.

Protect the dignity of the stranger.

Let the stranger challenge you.

And sometimes allow the stranger to become friend.

Because perhaps the stranger is not interrupting the sacred.

Perhaps the interruption is the sacred.

God insists.

The stranger knocks.

Love waits at the threshold.

Open the door.

Amen.

The current-events section reflects reporting available through September 19, 2026.

Human Worth in a World That Measures Everything

Primary Scripture: Matthew 6:25–34
Supporting Scriptures: Exodus 16:13–21; Isaiah 55:1–3; Matthew 20:1–16; Luke 12:13–21; 1 Corinthians 12:12–26

“Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” — Matthew 6:25

Introduction: What Are You Worth?

There is a question capitalism is very good at answering:

What is something worth?

A house is worth what someone will pay for it.

A company is worth its market capitalization.

A worker is worth a wage.

A product is worth its price.

Land is worth its development potential.

Even our attention has become something corporations buy and sell.

But Christianity introduces an enormously inconvenient question:

What if the most important things in life cannot be priced?

What is friendship worth?

What is a child worth?

What is a forest worth?

What is an hour sitting beside someone who is dying worth?

What is a person worth when they can no longer produce anything?

Modern society often whispers:

Your worth is your usefulness.

Jesus announces something very different.

“Consider the lilies.”

Lilies do not have résumés.

Birds do not have LinkedIn profiles.

And apparently God has not evicted either of them for failing to increase productivity.

Maybe creation knows something we have forgotten.

I. Jesus Is Speaking to Economically Anxious People

Matthew 6 is sometimes interpreted as though Jesus were telling comfortable middle-class people:

Stop worrying so much.

But Jesus taught among ordinary people living under Roman imperial rule.

Taxes mattered.

Debt mattered.

Land mattered.

Food mattered.

The petition:

“Give us this day our daily bread”

was not metaphorical spirituality for everyone hearing it.

Some people actually needed bread.

So when Jesus says:

“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink”

he is not mocking anxiety.

He is challenging a social imagination in which scarcity controls human life.

Jesus imagines another world.

He calls it the Kingdom of God.

II. Manna Says Nobody Gets to Hoard Tomorrow

Exodus 16 tells the story of manna.

People gather food.

Some gather more.

Some gather less.

Then something remarkable happens:

“Those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage.”

Enough.

There is that dangerous biblical word again.

Enough.

Then Israel is told not to hoard manna overnight.

Some try.

It rots.

Perhaps Exodus understands economics better than we imagine.

When people accumulate far beyond need while others lack necessities, something begins to rot.

Not merely food.

Community.

III. Isaiah Imagines an Economy Without Price Tags

Isaiah cries:

“Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!”

That is economically absurd.

How do people without money buy?

Exactly.

The prophet imagines abundance escaping the marketplace.

Water.

Food.

Wine.

Milk.

Given.

Not because human labor has no value.

But because life cannot be reduced entirely to exchange.

Some things should exist because people need them.

IV. Jesus Tells a Terrible Business Parable

Matthew 20 tells of workers hired throughout the day.

Some work all day.

Others work only an hour.

At day’s end everybody receives the same wage.

Every management consultant in Jerusalem immediately developed a migraine.

The early workers protest.

Of course they do.

They did more.

But Jesus is not giving employers a payroll manual.

He is destabilizing merit.

The Kingdom refuses to let human worth become identical with productivity.

The late worker still needs dinner.

Their children still need food.

Their humanity did not begin when someone hired them.

V. The Myth of the Self-Made Person

Our culture loves the phrase:

self-made.

But nobody is self-made.

You did not teach yourself language as an infant.

You did not construct the roads you travel.

You did not invent the alphabet.

You did not build the entire electrical grid.

Someone grew your food.

Someone collected garbage.

Someone educated you.

Someone manufactured medicine.

Someone maintained water systems.

Someone cared for you when you could not care for yourself.

The self-made individual is largely a myth.

We are made by relationship.

We are one.

VI. Marx: What Happens When Everything Becomes Commodity?

Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism was not simply that some people have more money than others.

He examined what happens when human relationships themselves become organized through commodities and markets.

Labor becomes something sold.

Time becomes money.

Human activity becomes economically measurable.

You do not have to accept every part of Marxism to recognize the danger.

When everything has a price, we eventually start pricing people.

And when people become commodities, those who generate less profit become easier to discard.

VII. Dorothy Day: The Economy Must Serve the Person

Dorothy Day lived another possibility.

Her Catholic Worker communities practiced hospitality among poor and unhoused people.

People were not asked:

How economically productive are you?

They were hungry.

Therefore food mattered.

They needed shelter.

Therefore shelter mattered.

Day’s radicalism came from a deeply Christian conviction:

Human dignity precedes economic usefulness.

A person does not earn humanity.

VIII. Francis Walks Away From the Merchant Class

Francis of Assisi grew up surrounded by commerce.

His father was a merchant.

Francis eventually rejected the status system that wealth offered him.

That did not make money inherently evil.

It exposed money’s inability to tell us what something is truly worth.

Francis encountered the poor.

The sick.

Creation.

Animals.

Strangers.

And began describing them relationally.

Brother.

Sister.

Kin.

Markets ask:

What can this produce?

Francis asks:

How am I related to this?

That is an entirely different economy.

IX. Clare Refuses to Become a Product

Clare of Assisi also rejected the social script assigned to her.

Her future could have been organized through wealth, marriage, family status and property.

She said no.

Clare’s poverty was not romantic destitution.

It was resistance to possession as identity.

She refused to let society tell her:

Your value depends upon the role we have assigned you.

There is something wonderfully queer about that.

The imposed script breaks.

Another life becomes possible.

X. Judith Butler: Whose Lives Count?

Judith Butler has asked profound questions about which lives societies recognize as valuable, grievable and worthy of protection.

Some lives receive enormous social attention.

Others become statistics.

The refugee.

The prisoner.

The homeless person.

The queer teenager.

The elderly person.

The disabled person.

The poor worker.

The person society labels unsuccessful.

Christian theology should ask:

Who becomes invisible when usefulness determines value?

Paul answers in 1 Corinthians:

“The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.”

Not tolerable.

Not charitable projects.

Indispensable.

XI. Caputo: God Insists Where Profit Cannot

John D. Caputo gives us language for hearing God differently.

God does not arrive as supernatural economic manager.

God insists.

Justice insists.

Mercy insists.

Hospitality insists.

The stranger insists.

The poor insist.

Love insists.

But none of these things guarantees profit.

That is precisely the problem.

Sometimes the divine call says:

Feed someone who cannot repay you.

Welcome someone who cannot advance your career.

Protect something that cannot increase shareholder value.

Care for someone who cannot return the favor.

The Kingdom continually produces terrible quarterly earnings.

And perhaps magnificent humanity.

XII. Derrida and the Gift

Jacques Derrida wrestled philosophically with the idea of the gift.

If I give only because I expect repayment, recognition, influence or advantage, have I actually given?

Or have I invested?

That question haunts philanthropy.

It also haunts religion.

If I feed someone only because I want them to convert, the meal risks becoming advertising.

Hospitality worthy of the name allows the other person to remain other.

No invoice.

No conversion quota.

No debt.

Gift.

XIII. Žižek and Charity That Leaves the Machine Running

Slavoj Žižek has frequently criticized forms of charity that relieve the symptoms of economic injustice while leaving its structures untouched.

That critique should make churches uncomfortable.

Suppose we operate a food pantry.

Good.

People need food today.

Feed them.

But eventually Christianity must also ask:

Why are people who work full-time still coming to food pantries?

Charity asks:

“How can I help this person survive tonight?”

Justice adds:

“Why was survival threatened in the first place?”

We need both questions.

XIV. From Today’s News: What Is a Worker Worth?

This week provides an interesting economic snapshot.

Large employers continue making decisions about wages, compensation, and the distribution of profits.

Workers in different industries are organizing and asking whether the people whose labor generates economic value should have a stronger voice in determining how that value is distributed.

At the same time, millions of Americans continue living below official poverty measures, while access to healthcare, affordable housing, food, and other necessities remains uneven.

Those facts can be interpreted through different political philosophies.

A market-oriented interpretation may emphasize employment, wage competition, investment and economic growth.

A democratic-socialist interpretation emphasizes bargaining power, worker participation, social provision and how the gains from economic production are distributed.

Christian theology contributes another question:

Can we measure an economy only by how much wealth it produces—or must we also ask what kind of lives it produces?

XV. Democratic Socialism and the Meaning of Enough

Democratic socialism begins from a conviction that democracy should have an economic dimension as well as a political one.

Its advocates typically argue for stronger labor rights, collective bargaining, universal or broadly accessible social programs, and greater democratic accountability over concentrations of economic power.

Critics raise concerns about taxation, government inefficiency, reduced market incentives and excessive state power.

Those debates belong to democratic society.

Christianity does not provide a technical blueprint for twenty-first-century macroeconomics.

Jesus never wrote a federal budget.

But Scripture relentlessly asks how economic arrangements affect people at the bottom.

The widow.

The orphan.

The immigrant.

The laborer.

The indebted.

The hungry.

The landless.

That is not incidental biblical decoration.

It is one of Scripture’s central moral concerns.

XVI. Martin Luther King Jr. Saw the Connection

Near the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. increasingly addressed economic inequality.

The Poor People’s Campaign attempted to build solidarity across racial lines around economic injustice.

King understood that civil rights without economic security remained incomplete.

You can legally sit at the lunch counter.

But can you afford lunch?

That question still matters.

Political equality and economic dignity are connected.

XVII. Universal Provision Is Not About Calling People Helpless

There is an important distinction.

Social provision does not have to mean treating people as incapable.

Public libraries do not insult people because they cannot purchase every book.

Fire departments do not shame people because they cannot privately hire firefighters.

Public schools exist because education produces social value beyond an individual’s purchasing power.

Societies already decide that certain things matter enough to provide collectively.

The democratic question is where those boundaries should be drawn.

Healthcare?

Housing assistance?

Childcare?

Public transportation?

Higher education?

Different societies answer differently.

But Isaiah keeps whispering:

“You that have no money, come.”

XVIII. Christian Atheism and Human Worth

Suppose there is no supernatural deity assigning cosmic value to every human being.

Does human dignity disappear?

I don’t think so.

Perhaps it becomes even more urgent.

If this life is the life we know we have, then wasting someone’s life through preventable poverty becomes more—not less—morally serious.

An atheist feeding hungry people may be answering the call of God without believing there is a caller.

That paradox sits comfortably within radical theology.

God insists.

The atheist answers:

People deserve food.

I am not terribly concerned about correcting the vocabulary.

Feed people.

God can survive the semantic disagreement.

XIX. Process Theology: Value Is Relational

Process thought understands reality through relationship and becoming.

Something’s value cannot be understood only in isolation.

A person’s life changes other lives.

A grandmother telling stories.

A child drawing pictures.

A friend listening.

A disabled person building community.

An elderly neighbor remembering history.

A musician making beauty.

A caregiver sitting through the night.

Economics struggles to price these things.

Life does not.

Not everything valuable generates revenue.

And not everything generating revenue is valuable.

XX. Jesus Says Consider the Lilies

Then Jesus points toward flowers.

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin.”

This is not economic policy.

It is spiritual deprogramming.

Look at the flower.

It exists.

That is enough.

Nobody asks the lily for credentials.

Nobody asks whether the sparrow deserves existence.

Creation is filled with beings whose value exceeds usefulness.

And you are one of them.

Conclusion: You Are Not Your Paycheck

Somewhere along the way we learned to introduce ourselves with occupations.

“What do you do?”

It is an innocent question.

But imagine answering:

I breathe.

I love people.

I notice sunsets.

I occasionally make terrible jokes.

I grieve.

I hope.

I am becoming.

I exist.

The interviewer might become nervous.

Good.

Maybe we need different questions.

Not:

What do you produce?

But:

What makes you alive?

Not:

How successful are you?

But:

Who do you love?

Not:

What do you own?

But:

What do you share?

Not:

What are you worth?

But:

What if worth was never something you had to earn?

The market cannot answer that.

Your paycheck cannot answer that.

Your résumé cannot answer that.

Your productivity cannot answer that.

Perhaps God does not answer it either—

because perhaps God is the question refusing to go away.

The insistence that says:

This person matters.

Before achievement.

Before employment.

Before belief.

Before respectability.

Before usefulness.

The hungry person matters.

The worker matters.

The unemployed person matters.

The disabled person matters.

The prisoner matters.

The immigrant matters.

The billionaire matters.

The homeless person matters.

The atheist matters.

The Christian matters.

The stranger matters.

And if everyone matters, economics becomes a moral question.

Politics becomes a moral question.

Housing becomes a moral question.

Healthcare becomes a moral question.

Wages become a moral question.

Not because one political ideology possesses God.

It doesn’t.

But because every economic system eventually reveals what—and whom—it values.

Jesus says:

Consider the lilies.

They do not produce.

They do not accumulate.

They simply bloom.

Maybe there is a sermon growing in the field.

Maybe the lilies are preaching:

You are more than your output.

Life is more than the market.

The world is more than merchandise.

God is more than a cosmic accountant.

And another economy keeps insisting.

An economy of gift.

An economy of enough.

An economy of solidarity.

An economy where nobody is disposable.

An economy where the last worker still receives bread.

An economy where those who seem weakest are called indispensable.

An economy organized around a fuller life for everyone.

Call it the Kingdom.

Call it the Beloved Community.

Call it democratic solidarity.

Call it humanism.

Call it grace.

The name matters less than whether we answer its call.

God insists.

Justice calls.

Love asks for embodiment.

And the lilies keep blooming without asking anyone’s permission.

Amen.

A Franciscan Gospel for a Wounded Earth

Primary Scripture: Psalm 24:1
Supporting Scriptures: Genesis 2:4–15; Leviticus 25:1–7, 23; Job 38:1–18; Romans 8:18–23; Colossians 1:15–20

“The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” — Psalm 24:1

Introduction: What If the Earth Does Not Belong to Us?

We have been taught a dangerous sentence:

This is mine.

My land.

My water.

My minerals.

My forest.

My oil.

My property.

My right to do whatever I want with it.

But Psalm 24 opens with an inconvenient announcement:

“The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.”

Apparently creation never signed the deed over to us.

And perhaps that ancient declaration contains one of the most radical ecological ideas Christianity has forgotten:

We are residents, not owners.

We arrived late.

The oceans were here before us.

The forests were here before us.

The mountains were here before us.

The microorganisms were definitely here before us, and they will probably outlast our theological arguments.

So today I want to ask:

What happens to Christianity when creation stops being scenery behind the human drama and becomes part of the sacred story itself?

What if ecological destruction is not merely a scientific problem?

What if it is a spiritual crisis?

And what if God is heard today not as a supernatural ruler somewhere above the clouds, but as the insistence rising from rivers, forests, workers, farmers, displaced communities and generations not yet born:

Let the Earth live.

I. Genesis Does Not Give Us Permission to Destroy

Genesis 1 has sometimes been used to justify human domination because humanity is told to “have dominion.”

But Scripture interprets Scripture.

Genesis 2 places the human in the garden:

“to till it and keep it.”

The Hebrew verbs carry ideas of serving and guarding.

The human being is not pictured as a landlord arriving to maximize quarterly returns.

Humanity is placed within a living community with responsibility.

And the Hebrew word adam is related to adamah—soil or ground.

The earth-creature comes from Earth.

We are soil that learned to speak.

That should produce humility.

II. Leviticus Says Even the Land Gets Sabbath

Leviticus 25 contains an astonishing command.

Every seventh year:

“the land shall observe a sabbath.”

Think about that.

Not only human beings need rest.

Land needs rest.

Then Leviticus goes further:

“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine.”

There is a direct challenge to absolute ownership.

Biblical theology recognizes limits.

You may use land.

You may cultivate land.

You may receive from land.

But land is never merely merchandise.

Creation exceeds our possession of it.

III. Job Discovers a Universe That Does Not Revolve Around Humanity

Near the end of Job, God takes Job on what amounts to a cosmic field trip.

Where were you when Earth was formed?

Have you commanded the morning?

Do you understand the sea?

Have you visited the snow?

Do you know where mountain goats give birth?

God describes wild animals that have absolutely no economic usefulness to Job.

That is important.

Creation does not exist merely because humans find it useful.

The wild has value beyond us.

Job discovers that reality is enormous.

Humanity is part of it.

Not the center of it.

IV. Francis Called Creation Family

Few Christians understood this as deeply as Francis of Assisi.

Francis did not speak merely of “natural resources.”

He spoke relationally.

Brother Sun.

Sister Moon.

Sister Water.

Brother Fire.

Even Sister Mother Earth.

This is not childish sentimentality.

It is theological revolution.

Because you treat family differently from property.

You do not ask:

“How much profit can I extract from Sister Water before she collapses?”

Francis changes the grammar.

Not ownership.

Kinship.

And kinship creates obligation.

V. Clare and the Spirituality of Enough

Clare of Assisi gives us another ecological gift.

Simplicity.

Our economic culture is built around a dangerous assumption:

More is always better.

More consumption.

More extraction.

More production.

More growth.

But Earth has limits.

An infinite-growth economy on a finite planet eventually encounters mathematics.

Clare’s voluntary simplicity asks another question:

What is enough?

Enough food.

Enough shelter.

Enough clothing.

Enough security.

Enough beauty.

Enough community.

The spirituality of enough does not romanticize involuntary poverty.

Nobody should be forced into deprivation.

Quite the opposite.

If some people consume vastly beyond what they need while others lack necessities, simplicity becomes a form of solidarity.

VI. Tillich: The Sacred Is the Depth of Reality

Paul Tillich helps us move beyond imagining God as one supernatural object among other objects.

God is not another thing inside the universe.

God concerns the depth and ground of being.

That means ecological spirituality does not require imagining a divine person occasionally reaching down from heaven to repair ecosystems.

The sacred can be encountered in the depth of relationship itself.

Soil.

Water.

Creature.

Human.

Atmosphere.

Ocean.

Forest.

Everything exists through relationship.

Nothing lives alone.

VII. Caputo: Listen for the Insistence of the Earth

John D. Caputo gives us another language.

God does not primarily exist as an object.

God insists.

Justice insists.

Hospitality insists.

Mercy insists.

The impossible insists.

Then perhaps Earth itself becomes one location where that insistence becomes audible.

The river says:

Do not poison me.

The forest says:

Do not reduce me entirely to lumber.

The atmosphere says:

There are consequences.

The endangered creature says:

My existence matters too.

Future generations say:

Leave us something.

God does not magically stop the bulldozer.

The call is weaker than the bulldozer.

But the call persists:

Stop.

And somebody must answer.

VIII. Derrida: Justice Includes Those Who Have Not Arrived Yet

Jacques Derrida’s language of justice to come helps ecological ethics.

Justice cannot concern only people currently sitting at the table.

Future people cannot vote today.

They cannot lobby Congress.

They cannot sue us for what we leave behind.

They have no purchasing power.

And yet our choices construct their world.

Ecological justice therefore requires hospitality toward people who do not yet exist.

We are preparing their guest room.

The question is:

What kind of room are we leaving them?

IX. Process Theology: God and Creation Become Together

Process theology radically emphasizes relationship.

Reality is not a collection of isolated substances.

Everything becomes through relationship.

God does not stand outside creation as an engineer operating machinery.

God participates relationally in an unfinished cosmos, luring creation toward richer possibilities of beauty, complexity, justice and life.

That means ecological destruction affects the whole web.

And healing contributes something new to the whole.

Planting a tree is small.

Protecting a wetland is small.

Restoring a stream is small.

But process theology takes small events seriously.

The future is constructed from them.

X. Romans Says Creation Is Groaning

Paul writes:

“The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains.”

We should be careful historically.

Paul was not predicting twenty-first-century climate science.

But his image is remarkably powerful for ecological theology.

Creation groans.

And Paul does not imagine salvation as souls escaping creation.

He imagines creation itself participating in liberation.

Christian salvation is cosmic.

The Earth matters.

Bodies matter.

Creatures matter.

Matter matters.

XI. Christ Is Bigger Than Christianity

Colossians offers an enormous cosmic vision of Christ:

“in him all things hold together.”

Not merely Christians.

Not merely humans.

All things.

Trees.

Whales.

Fungi.

Galaxies.

Bacteria.

Oceans.

Bodies.

Stars.

Whatever metaphysical interpretation we give this ancient hymn, it expands Christ beyond religious tribalism.

Christ becomes a symbol of cosmic reconciliation.

That opens Christianity toward profound religious pluralism.

Indigenous traditions have long understood land as relationship rather than commodity.

Buddhist teachings emphasize interdependence.

Hindu traditions contain deep reverence for sacred manifestations within nature.

Pagan traditions encounter divinity through Earth and seasonal cycles.

Secular ecology teaches us scientifically what mystics have often intuited spiritually:

Everything is connected.

We need not pretend these traditions are identical.

We can learn.

XII. Christian Atheism and Sacred Earth

An atheist does not need to believe a supernatural creator made a forest in order to defend it.

Perhaps the forest is sacred precisely because it does not require supernatural explanation to become worthy of wonder.

Billions of years of cosmic history are inside your body.

Carbon forged in ancient stars.

Water cycling through Earth.

Microorganisms sustaining life.

You are Earth temporarily walking around with a name.

If that does not provoke reverence, another metaphysical argument probably will not help.

A Christian atheist can still kneel before the mystery of existence.

Not necessarily before a being above it.

Before the astonishing depth within it.

XIII. From the News: The Earth Sends Us the Bill

This week, ecological theology is not abstract.

The World Food Programme has warned that the strengthening El Niño pattern could worsen acute hunger across dozens of countries, with climate-driven shocks hitting people who are already most vulnerable.

Meanwhile, communities facing drought, unreliable water infrastructure, pollution, and development pressures continue raising the same fundamental question:

Who receives the resources necessary for life, and who gets left carrying the consequences?

Notice who usually suffers first.

Not the billionaire with several homes.

The poor.

Workers.

Farmers.

People without reliable housing.

Communities already pushed toward the margins.

That is why ecological justice and economic justice cannot be separated.

Climate change has a class dimension.

Pollution has a class dimension.

Access to clean water has a class dimension.

Where toxic industries are located has a class dimension.

Who can afford to relocate after disaster has a class dimension.

The ecological crisis is also a justice crisis.

XIV. A Democratic-Socialist Franciscan Response

A democratic-socialist ecological ethic begins with a simple conviction:

Basic necessities should not become instruments of domination.

Clean water should not depend primarily upon profitability.

Safe housing should not be reserved for the wealthy.

Energy systems should serve communities rather than merely shareholders.

Workers should not have to choose between earning a paycheck and breathing safe air.

And communities most affected by pollution and climate disruption should have meaningful democratic power over decisions affecting their land and bodies.

Markets can be useful tools.

But markets make terrible gods.

If preserving a forest is unprofitable while destroying it is profitable, the market sends one signal.

Ecology sends another.

Sometimes democracy must tell capital:

No.

XV. Labor Is Part of Ecological Justice

Workers organizing for better compensation, safer workplaces, and greater democratic participation in their working lives may seem, at first glance, unrelated to ecological theology.

They are deeply related.

Both ask:

Who controls the conditions of life?

Democratic socialism says workers deserve a meaningful voice in workplaces.

Ecological democracy says communities deserve a meaningful voice over environments.

Franciscan spirituality says creation is relationship rather than domination.

These are variations of one question:

Will power flow only from the top, or will those affected participate in deciding their future?

XVI. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Revolution of Values

Martin Luther King Jr. increasingly connected racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.

That widening vision remains essential.

We cannot build ecological justice while preserving enormous economic inequality.

A transition toward renewable energy must not simply create a greener capitalism where the same communities remain poor.

Workers in fossil-fuel industries deserve secure transitions.

Communities deserve investment.

Public transportation deserves investment.

Clean energy infrastructure deserves investment.

Housing deserves investment.

The transition must be just.

Otherwise environmentalism becomes something wealthy people purchase while working people pay the bill.

XVII. Susun Weed and Relationship With Plants

The Wise Woman herbal tradition associated with Susun Weed also offers a useful intuition when handled critically and without turning folk wisdom into medical dogma:

Plants are not merely products on shelves.

We can develop relationship with them.

Learn them.

Observe them.

Cultivate them.

Respect them.

Herbalism at its healthiest can remind us that healing emerges within ecological relationship.

The medicine cabinet begins, historically, in the garden.

But reverence also means responsibility.

Plants are powerful biological organisms, not magical consumer products.

Relationship requires knowledge, respect, sustainability, and appropriate medical caution.

XVIII. Environmentalism Without People Is Incomplete

We must also avoid romantic environmentalism.

People need housing.

People need electricity.

People need transportation.

People need medicine.

People need jobs.

The answer cannot simply be:

Nobody touch nature.

Humans are nature.

The question is not whether we affect ecosystems.

We inevitably do.

The question is:

What kinds of relationships are we creating?

Extractive?

Regenerative?

Democratic?

Exploitative?

Sustainable?

Justice-centered?

XIX. The Eucharist Is Ecological

Consider the Christian table.

Bread.

Wine.

Neither falls from heaven.

Soil.

Rain.

Sunlight.

Yeast.

Microorganisms.

Farmworkers.

Transportation workers.

Bakers.

Communities.

The Eucharist is already ecological and economic.

Every loaf contains a world of relationships.

When we say:

This is sacred

over bread,

we are inadvertently declaring soil sacred.

Rain sacred.

Labor sacred.

Bodies sacred.

Earth sacred.

Maybe we should start behaving accordingly.

XX. We Are One

Francis called creation family.

Ecology calls it interdependence.

Process thought calls it relation.

Buddhism speaks of dependent arising.

Science describes ecosystems and evolutionary kinship.

Different languages.

A shared insight:

We are one.

Not identical.

Interdependent.

The oxygen entering your lungs has been exchanged through living systems.

The water inside your body has traveled through Earth’s cycles.

The food becoming your body came from soil, sunlight, water, labor, and other life.

The boundary between “me” and “Earth” is much thinner than we imagine.

Conclusion: The Earth Is Not Asking Us to Believe in It

The Earth does not need our theology.

The river does not care whether we call ourselves theists.

The forest does not require baptism.

The atmosphere does not check denominational membership.

Reality simply responds to what we do.

Pollute water—

there are consequences.

Destroy soil—

there are consequences.

Warm atmosphere—

there are consequences.

Protect ecosystems—

there are consequences.

Restore wetlands—

there are consequences.

Build sustainable communities—

there are consequences.

Plant trees—

there are consequences.

The question is not merely:

What do you believe about creation?

The question is:

What kind of ancestor are you becoming?

Will future generations inherit our greed?

Or our courage?

Will they curse us?

Or thank us?

The Earth is the Lord’s.

Which means it isn’t mine.

And it isn’t yours.

We are temporary guests.

So perhaps God insists today through a very ancient command:

Keep the garden.

Protect the water.

Honor workers.

Defend communities.

Consume less where you can.

Share more.

Plant something.

Repair something.

Vote for something larger than your private comfort.

Organize.

Resist systems that turn everything into merchandise.

Listen to Indigenous communities.

Listen to scientists.

Listen to farmers.

Listen to workers.

Listen to the poor.

Listen to the river.

Something is insisting.

Francis heard it and called the world family.

Clare heard it and chose enough.

The prophets heard it and called for justice.

Paul heard creation groaning.

Caputo gives us language for hearing the call without imagining divine coercion.

God does not magically repair the climate.

God insists:

Love this world.

The promise is weak.

The bulldozer is loud.

The corporation has lawyers.

The lobbyist has money.

But the call keeps coming.

Let there be life.

And now the question passes to us.

Will we answer?

For Brother Sun.

For Sister Water.

For Sister Mother Earth.

For the worker.

For the poor.

For the child not yet born.

For creatures whose names we may never know.

For ourselves.

For a fuller life for everyone.

The Earth is not property.

The Earth is relationship.

The Earth is home.

And perhaps when we finally learn to love it as home—

God happens there too.

Amen.

Mercy, Justice, and the Sacred Boundary

Primary Scripture: Matthew 18:21–22
Supporting Scriptures: Amos 5:21–24; Micah 6:8; Matthew 5:43–48; Luke 4:16–21; Luke 23:34; Romans 12:17–21

“How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” — Matthew 18:21

Introduction: Christianity Has Sometimes Weaponized Forgiveness

There is a sentence Christians frequently say to wounded people:

You need to forgive.

Sometimes that sentence opens a door toward healing.

Sometimes it becomes another weapon.

Someone is abused:

You need to forgive.

Someone is betrayed:

You need to forgive.

Someone experiences racism:

Stop being angry. Forgive.

Someone is exploited:

Don’t be bitter. Forgive.

Someone finally establishes a boundary against a harmful person:

But Jesus said forgive seventy times seven.

And suddenly Christianity accomplishes something terrible.

The teachings of Jesus become tools for keeping wounded people quiet.

So today I want to ask a difficult question:

What if forgiveness does not mean surrender?

What if forgiveness does not mean forgetting?

What if forgiveness does not require reconciliation?

What if forgiveness can coexist with anger?

What if forgiveness sometimes requires boundaries?

And what if justice itself can become an expression of love?

Because Jesus said:

“Love your enemies.”

But Jesus never said:

Give your enemies unlimited access to hurt you.

There is a difference.

And that difference can save lives.

I. What Does Forgiveness Mean?

The New Testament uses several different concepts surrounding forgiveness, release, reconciliation, and restoration.

One important Greek verb associated with forgiveness, aphiēmi, can carry the sense of letting go, releasing, or sending away.

That opens an interesting possibility.

Forgiveness does not necessarily mean:

What happened doesn’t matter.

It may mean:

What happened will not possess me forever.

Forgiveness can become release.

I release my need to control the past.

I release the fantasy that yesterday can be rewritten.

I release the hope that hatred will somehow heal what hatred wounded.

But releasing hatred does not require releasing wisdom.

II. Forgiveness Is Not Forgetting

We sometimes hear:

Forgive and forget.

That phrase is not a biblical command.

Memory can be sacred.

Israel constantly remembers slavery.

The prophets remember injustice.

The Psalms remember suffering.

The early Christians remember crucifixion.

The Eucharist itself says:

“Do this in remembrance of me.”

Christianity is a religion built around memory.

Why?

Because forgetting injustice makes repetition easier.

A survivor may forgive while remembering exactly what happened.

A community may seek reconciliation while preserving historical memory.

A nation cannot heal racism by pretending slavery never happened.

A church cannot heal abuse by hiding records.

Memory is not necessarily bitterness.

Sometimes memory is how justice protects the future.

III. Amos Says Justice Must Come First

The prophet Amos confronts religious people who love worship but tolerate exploitation.

God rejects their festivals.

Rejects their songs.

Rejects their ceremonies.

Then comes the thunder:

“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Notice what Amos does not say.

He does not tell the oppressed:

Just forgive everyone and move on.

He confronts the system.

Biblical prophets understood something churches sometimes forget:

There can be no meaningful reconciliation without truth.

Justice names what happened.

Grace asks what might happen next.

We need both.

IV. Howard Thurman: Jesus Among the Disinherited

Howard Thurman asked what Christianity means for people whose backs are against the wall.

That question changes everything.

Christian ethics sound different when preached from a palace than when preached from a prison.

“Love your enemy” sounds different when spoken by the powerful to the oppressed than when spoken among oppressed people searching for freedom from hatred.

Thurman understood that hatred can imprison the person who hates.

But refusing hatred does not mean accepting domination.

Jesus’ nonviolence was not passivity.

It was resistance without becoming what one resisted.

V. Martin Luther King Jr.: Love Is Not Sentimentality

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this distinction profoundly.

Nonviolence was never:

Let people hurt you.

King marched.

Organized.

Boycotted.

Disrupted.

Went to jail.

Challenged unjust laws.

Confronted political leaders.

Supported workers.

Opposed racism, poverty, and militarism.

And still preached love.

Why?

Because enemy-love does not mean approving what enemies do.

It means refusing to surrender their humanity—or your own.

You can love someone while stopping them.

You can love someone while voting against their policies.

You can love someone while organizing workers against their exploitation.

You can love someone while taking away their ability to harm vulnerable people.

Love is not niceness.

Sometimes love says:

No.

VI. Jesus Himself Used Boundaries

Jesus did not remain endlessly available to everyone.

He withdrew.

He left crowds.

He challenged authorities.

He overturned tables.

He refused demands.

He escaped situations where people sought to kill him.

And in the Gospel narratives, Jesus frequently speaks sharply to religious leaders.

Apparently holiness does not require being agreeable.

There is an important spiritual lesson here:

A boundary is not hatred.

Sometimes a boundary is how love protects life.

VII. Clare’s Holy No

Clare of Assisi understood this.

Her spirituality was not simply gentle submission.

She resisted authorities when they threatened the form of life she believed she was called to live.

Her spirituality included a holy No.

No to wealth as the measure of worth.

No to imposed expectations.

No to structures preventing her community from living its vocation.

That matters.

Sometimes spiritual maturity means learning to say:

No.

No, you cannot speak to me that way.

No, you cannot abuse this person.

No, you cannot exploit these workers.

No, you cannot destroy this community.

No, you cannot turn creation into merchandise without consequence.

Sometimes No is a sacred word.

VIII. Francis and the Refusal of Violence

Francis of Assisi offers another dimension.

Francis sought peace.

But Franciscan peace is not merely absence of conflict.

It is the restoration of relationship.

Francis crossed boundaries.

Encountered enemies.

Approached people his society feared.

Recognized kinship throughout creation.

But peace did not mean pretending injustice was harmless.

True peace requires transforming the conditions producing violence.

A starving community is not peaceful merely because nobody is rioting.

Workers trapped in poverty are not experiencing peace simply because the factory is quiet.

A family terrified of eviction is not experiencing peace because the landlord has not heard them complain.

Peace requires justice.

IX. Caputo: Forgiveness as the Impossible

John D. Caputo helps us approach forgiveness differently.

For Caputo, God can be understood as event, insistence, call, promise.

Forgiveness may be one of those impossible things that insists.

Something terrible happened.

Nothing can undo it.

The past is closed.

And yet something whispers:

The future does not have to reproduce the past.

That whisper is grace.

Not supernatural erasure.

Not divine amnesia.

Possibility.

The wound happened.

And still—

another future calls.

God does not force reconciliation.

God does not command victims back into danger.

The divine insistence calls toward fuller life.

Sometimes fuller life includes reconciliation.

Sometimes fuller life requires separation.

Wisdom must discern the difference.

X. Derrida: Forgiveness Beyond Exchange

Jacques Derrida asked difficult philosophical questions about forgiveness.

If I forgive only after someone earns forgiveness, apologizes perfectly, pays everything back, and becomes worthy—

have I forgiven?

Or have I completed a transaction?

That question does not eliminate accountability.

It exposes something deeper.

Forgiveness cannot simply become another marketplace:

You give me repentance, and I sell you forgiveness.

Grace always exceeds calculation.

But forgiveness does not erase justice.

The impossible possibility is holding both together:

I refuse vengeance.

And:

I still demand accountability.

XI. Forgiveness Is Not Reconciliation

This distinction may be one of the most important things churches can teach.

Forgiveness involves what happens within the wounded person’s relationship to the harm.

Reconciliation involves rebuilding a relationship.

Those are not identical.

Reconciliation requires conditions.

Truth.

Accountability.

Safety.

Changed behavior.

Trust rebuilt over time.

Someone can forgive and still say:

You cannot return to my life.

Someone can release hatred and still maintain a restraining order.

Someone can wish another person healing and still refuse contact.

Someone can pray for an enemy while demanding that enemy lose political power.

Forgiveness does not require pretending danger is safe.

XII. Grace Without Cheap Grace

Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned Christianity about cheap grace.

Cheap grace wants forgiveness without transformation.

Religion without discipleship.

Grace without cost.

In public life we might call it:

Apology without restitution.

Statement without reform.

Diversity slogan without redistribution.

Thoughts and prayers without policy.

Cheap grace wants everyone to feel better without changing the conditions that caused suffering.

But biblical reconciliation requires more.

Zacchaeus does not merely say:

Sorry.

Money moves.

Restitution happens.

That is what repentance looks like when it acquires a wallet.

XIII. James Cone: Reconciliation Cannot Preserve Oppression

James H. Cone relentlessly challenged forms of Christianity that spoke about reconciliation while leaving white supremacy intact.

That critique remains essential.

If reconciliation means oppressed people becoming more comfortable with oppression, it is not reconciliation.

If racial harmony means nobody mentions racism, that is silence.

If class peace means workers stop demanding fair wages, that is domination.

If religious unity means marginalized people stop challenging institutions, that is control.

Christian reconciliation cannot simply restore the old arrangement.

Sometimes the old arrangement is precisely what needs to die.

XIV. Gustavo Gutiérrez: Liberation Before Abstraction

Liberation theology reminds us that suffering is not merely personal.

It can be structural.

Poverty is not simply about individual choices.

Housing insecurity is not merely individual failure.

Medical debt is not simply poor budgeting.

Low wages are not automatically evidence that workers failed to work hard enough.

Systems distribute power.

And therefore forgiveness cannot replace politics.

You cannot forgive your way out of an unjust housing market.

You cannot meditate your way out of unaffordable healthcare.

You cannot personally reconcile yourself out of systemic exploitation.

Some problems require collective action.

XV. From the News: Who Gets Forgiven—and Who Pays?

This week provides an uncomfortable context for these questions.

Across the United States, housing affordability remains a serious problem. Current reporting describes mortgage rates remaining elevated while home prices have substantially outpaced income growth since the pandemic. At the same time, debates over rent stabilization and affordable housing have become politically significant in cities such as Providence, Rhode Island.

There is another story.

Federal lawmakers have introduced legislation intended to prevent workers’ wages from being garnished because of medical debt. Current reporting notes that medical debt affects tens of millions of Americans and can force households to cut spending on basic necessities.

Now bring Amos into the newsroom.

“Let justice roll down like waters.”

A democratic-socialist Christian ethic asks:

Why should basic human necessities become mechanisms through which people are disciplined by wealth?

Housing is necessary for life.

Healthcare is necessary for life.

Food is necessary for life.

Education matters for meaningful participation in society.

Workers create the wealth upon which economies depend.

So democratic socialism raises a moral question before it becomes an economic one:

Should access to the necessities of human flourishing depend primarily upon someone’s ability to generate profit?

I believe the Gospel pushes us toward another answer.

A society organized around fuller life would strengthen workers’ bargaining power.

It would treat healthcare as a social good rather than a privilege reserved for those who can afford illness.

It would build and preserve genuinely affordable housing.

It would protect tenants from exploitation.

It would ensure that disabled people, elderly people, children, caregivers, unemployed people, and people unable to participate fully in paid labor still possess dignity and material security.

That is not because government is God.

Government can become oppressive too.

Markets can accomplish useful things.

Private enterprise can create genuine value.

And democratic socialism itself must remain democratic, accountable, pluralistic, and suspicious of concentrated power—including state power.

But the Gospel gives us a standard by which every economic arrangement can be questioned:

Does it produce fuller life?

When markets serve human beings, good.

When markets consume human beings, resist.

When governments protect human dignity, good.

When governments become instruments of domination, resist.

No institution is sacred.

People are.

XVI. Democratic Socialism and the Politics of Mercy

Democratic socialism, at its best, makes an argument remarkably compatible with the biblical insistence on social responsibility:

We belong to one another.

That does not mean abolishing individuality.

It means recognizing interdependence.

Nobody builds a society alone.

Workers build roads.

Teachers educate children.

Nurses care for bodies.

Farmworkers harvest food.

Sanitation workers keep cities functioning.

Caregivers sustain families.

Construction workers build homes.

Society is already collective.

The political question is:

Who receives the benefits of our collective labor?

If wealth flows upward while insecurity flows downward, something is wrong.

The prophets would recognize that problem immediately.

XVII. Forgiveness Cannot Replace Redistribution

Imagine an employer systematically underpaying workers.

Then imagine saying:

Workers should forgive.

No.

First:

Pay them.

Imagine a landlord illegally withholding someone’s security deposit.

Forgive.

No.

Return the money.

Imagine a corporation poisoning a community.

Let’s reconcile.

Clean the water.

Repair the damage.

Compensate the people harmed.

Then perhaps reconciliation becomes possible.

Justice gives forgiveness somewhere honest to stand.

XVIII. Religious Pluralism and Forgiveness

Christianity does not own forgiveness.

Jewish traditions offer profound teachings on repentance, restitution, and teshuvah—return.

Buddhist traditions explore release from hatred and attachment.

Islam places enormous emphasis on mercy while maintaining justice and responsibility.

Hindu traditions contain rich reflections on compassion, duty, karma, and liberation.

Indigenous traditions around the world have developed forms of communal restoration and peacemaking.

Secular restorative-justice movements likewise seek accountability without reducing human beings permanently to their offenses.

We can learn from one another.

Different traditions may use different metaphysical languages.

The shared question remains:

How do wounded people move toward fuller life without denying what happened?

XIX. Christian Atheism and Forgiveness

You do not need belief in supernatural intervention to practice forgiveness.

A Christian atheist can say:

The past cannot be changed.

No cosmic hand will erase it.

No supernatural guarantee promises everything will become fair.

And still—

I refuse to let hatred determine my future.

That refusal can itself become sacred.

Perhaps God happens precisely there:

not as supernatural interference,

but as the impossible insistence that violence does not have to reproduce itself forever.

XX. Process Theology: The Past Is Real, but the Future Is Open

Process thought gives us another beautiful insight.

The past is real.

It cannot be undone.

But the future remains partially open.

Every moment inherits what happened.

And every moment asks:

What can happen next?

Forgiveness does not change yesterday.

It changes our relationship to tomorrow.

The wound remains part of history.

But it does not have to become destiny.

Grace says:

Become otherwise.

Conclusion: Mercy With a Backbone

So forgive—

but do not confuse forgiveness with surrender.

Forgive—

but remember.

Forgive—

but tell the truth.

Forgive—

but protect the vulnerable.

Forgive—

but demand restitution.

Forgive—

but organize.

Forgive—

but vote.

Forgive—

but unionize.

Forgive—

but march.

Forgive—

but establish boundaries.

Forgive—

and overturn tables when tables are crushing people.

Jesus loved enemies.

And confronted empire.

The prophets loved Israel.

And condemned injustice.

King preached nonviolence.

And disrupted segregation.

Francis preached peace.

And rejected the economy of status.

Clare practiced humility.

And told powerful men No.

Mercy needs a backbone.

Because love without justice becomes sentimentality.

Justice without love can become vengeance.

But love and justice together become something powerful.

They become liberation.

So perhaps the divine call today is not:

Forget what happened.

Perhaps it is:

Do not let what happened determine everything that happens next.

Tell the truth.

Protect people.

Repair what can be repaired.

Change the structures that produced the harm.

Release vengeance when you can.

Maintain boundaries when you must.

And keep walking toward fuller life.

God does not coerce reconciliation.

God insists:

Justice.

Mercy.

Truth.

Repair.

Possibility.

The future remains open.

And somewhere beyond revenge and beyond surrender there waits a difficult, beautiful possibility:

peace with justice.

Not cheap peace.

Not silence.

Not domination disguised as unity.

The peace that emerges when dignity is restored.

The peace Amos imagined when justice rolls like water.

The peace Jesus called the Kingdom.

The peace Francis sought.

The peace King called the Beloved Community.

The peace that still insists.

The peace still waiting to happen through us.

Amen.

Primary Scripture: Matthew 20:1–16
Supporting Scriptures: Isaiah 55:1–3; Luke 15:11–32; Romans 5:6–8; Ephesians 2:8–10; 1 John 4:7–12

“Are you envious because I am generous?” — Matthew 20:15

Introduction: We Turned Grace Into a Business Deal

Christianity has a strange talent.

Give us something free, and eventually we will figure out how to charge admission.

We say salvation is a gift—

then immediately start explaining the requirements.

Believe this.

Confess that.

Join this church.

Avoid those people.

Follow these rules.

And perhaps, if your theological paperwork is properly stamped, God will approve you.

Grace becomes a transaction.

We perform.

God rewards.

We fail.

God punishes.

Religion becomes celestial capitalism.

But Jesus tells stories that keep blowing up the accounting department.

One of the most scandalous is Matthew 20.

A landowner hires workers early in the morning.

Others at nine.

Others at noon.

Others at three.

And some almost at closing time.

Then payday comes.

Everybody receives the same wage.

The workers who labored all day are furious.

And if we’re honest—

we understand them.

It doesn’t seem fair.

Jesus knows.

That discomfort is the point.

Grace is not fairness according to our accounting system.

Grace is generosity that refuses to become mathematics.

I. The Kingdom Is Not a Meritocracy

The workers who arrived first believe something most societies teach us from childhood:

More work should mean more reward.

Normally that makes sense.

But Jesus is not teaching payroll policy.

He is exposing something inside us.

We want goodness to be earned.

We especially want our goodness to be earned because then we can compare ourselves with other people.

I prayed longer.

I believed correctly.

I remained faithful.

I followed the rules.

Surely God owes me something.

And suddenly religion becomes competition.

Jesus’ parable destroys that economy.

The landowner asks:

“Are you envious because I am generous?”

Grace means God owes nobody anything.

Yet love keeps giving.

II. Isaiah Opens a Store Where Everything Is Free

Isaiah 55 begins with one of Scripture’s strangest advertisements:

“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.”

Then:

“You that have no money, come, buy and eat!”

Buy—

without money.

Come to the marketplace.

But leave your wallet at home.

Isaiah is imagining divine abundance outside ordinary economic exchange.

Then comes the question:

“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread?”

That question reaches far beyond money.

How much of our lives are spent purchasing worth?

Achievement.

Status.

Approval.

Religious respectability.

Possessions.

Followers.

Titles.

Success.

We keep trying to buy what grace says cannot be purchased:

You already belong.

III. The Prodigal Son Comes Home With a Business Proposal

Luke 15 tells the familiar story.

A younger son wastes his inheritance.

Eventually he returns home.

But notice his speech.

He plans to say:

“Treat me like one of your hired hands.”

The son still thinks transactionally.

He believes relationship must now be earned through labor.

He expects:

I failed as a son, so perhaps I can qualify as an employee.

But the father interrupts the transaction.

Robe.

Ring.

Shoes.

Feast.

No probationary period.

No repayment schedule.

No theological examination.

The son wants employment.

The father restores relationship.

Grace refuses the contract.

IV. Then Religion Walks Into the Story

The older brother arrives.

And he is furious.

Why?

Because he has kept records.

He says:

“For all these years I have been working like a slave for you.”

There is transactional religion.

Look what I did.

Look what he did.

Compare the accounts.

I deserve more.

He deserves less.

The older brother has never left home physically.

But emotionally he has been living as an employee.

He does not know himself as beloved.

And that may be one of religion’s greatest tragedies.

People can spend their entire lives inside God’s house without ever believing they are loved except when they perform correctly.

V. Paul Tillich and the Courage to Accept Acceptance

Paul Tillich described grace in a memorable way: there are moments when we are invited simply to accept that we are accepted.

That sounds easy.

It isn’t.

Many people can believe God loves humanity.

They simply cannot believe love includes them.

Because somewhere inside them lives an accountant.

You failed.

You disappointed people.

You should have known better.

You aren’t spiritual enough.

You aren’t successful enough.

You aren’t pure enough.

Grace walks into that courtroom and says:

The trial is over.

Not because nothing matters.

Not because harm doesn’t require repair.

But because your worth is not the verdict.

Your worth precedes the trial.

VI. Grace Is Not Permission to Harm

We need to say something clearly.

Grace does not mean:

Anything goes.

Grace does not eliminate accountability.

If you hurt someone, repair what can be repaired.

If you exploit people, stop.

If you participate in injustice, change.

If someone is dangerous, boundaries remain necessary.

Grace is not pretending harm never happened.

Grace means nobody is permanently reducible to their worst moment.

That includes victims, who should never be pressured to reconcile with unsafe people.

And it includes offenders, who remain capable of transformation.

Grace says:

What happened matters.

And:

What happened does not exhaust what may yet happen.

VII. Derrida and the Impossible Gift

Jacques Derrida famously complicated our idea of the gift.

The moment I give something expecting recognition, gratitude, repayment or moral credit, exchange sneaks back in.

I give.

You owe.

Even generosity can become a transaction.

Religious charity sometimes works this way.

Here is food—

now listen to my sermon.

Here is shelter—

now accept my religion.

Here is kindness—

now become like me.

That is not unconditional hospitality.

It is marketing.

Grace gives without requiring the recipient to become a customer.

VIII. Caputo: The Gift Is the Call

John D. Caputo helps radical theology push this further.

If God is event rather than a supernatural dispenser of rewards, then grace can be understood as the insistence of possibility.

Life keeps calling us beyond what we have been.

You failed.

Still—

become.

You were rejected.

Still—

belong.

You are grieving.

Still—

love remains possible.

The world is violent.

Still—

peace insists.

Justice seems impossible.

Still—

justice calls.

Grace is the stubborn arrival of another possibility.

Not coercion.

Invitation.

Not guarantee.

Promise.

God insists.

We respond.

IX. Grace Is Weak

We often want grace to be powerful.

We want God to force transformation.

But love cannot force itself without ceasing to be love.

Grace is strangely weak.

It knocks.

It invites.

It whispers.

It waits.

Jesus stands before Jerusalem and laments rather than conquers it.

The cross itself becomes Christianity’s strange symbol of divine weakness.

No imperial army arrives.

No cosmic thunderbolt destroys Rome.

Love remains vulnerable.

Caputo’s “weakness of God” means that the call does not overpower us.

Grace can be refused.

And yet it keeps insisting.

X. Process Theology: Grace as Possibility

Process theology offers another beautiful language for grace.

Every moment contains possibilities.

We inherit the past.

We cannot erase it.

But the past does not completely determine the next moment.

The divine lure presents possibilities toward greater beauty, relationship, justice and life.

That means grace happens continuously.

Not once.

Not only at conversion.

Not only inside church.

Every moment asks:

What can become possible now?

You cannot change yesterday.

But perhaps something different can happen next.

That opening is grace.

XI. Francis Walks Away From the Marketplace

Francis of Assisi lived in a world increasingly shaped by commerce and status.

His own family belonged to the merchant class.

Francis eventually walked away from that economy of identity.

He discovered another way of measuring life.

Not:

What do you own?

But:

Whom do you love?

Not:

How important are you?

But:

Whom do you serve?

Not:

What is your social rank?

But:

Can you recognize kinship?

Brother Sun.

Sister Moon.

Sister Water.

Brother Fire.

Grace rearranged Francis’ economy.

Suddenly everything became gift.

XII. Clare Refused to Let Poverty Become a Transaction

Clare of Assisi likewise fought fiercely for the privilege of living without property.

That sounds bizarre in a culture obsessed with accumulation.

But Clare understood something profound.

Possessions can create the illusion of self-sufficiency.

Grace reveals dependence.

We need one another.

We need Earth.

We need food we did not create alone.

Air we did not manufacture.

Water we did not invent.

Bodies we did not design.

Life begins as gift.

Before you accomplished anything—

you breathed.

Before you believed anything—

you belonged to creation.

XIII. Religious Pluralism and the Economy of Grace

Transactional religion asks:

Who has the correct religion?

Then it divides humanity into spiritual winners and losers.

Grace asks another question:

Where is love happening?

Perhaps grace appears in a Muslim feeding neighbors.

A Buddhist practicing compassion.

A Jewish community pursuing tikkun olam.

A Hindu serving strangers.

A Pagan caring for Earth.

An Indigenous community protecting land.

A Christian opening the table.

An atheist defending human dignity.

These traditions are not interchangeable.

Their differences matter.

But grace does not need our permission to cross theological borders.

Jesus said:

“The wind blows where it chooses.”

Grace apparently has poor respect for denominational property lines.

XIV. The Christian Atheist and Grace

Can an atheist experience grace?

Of course.

They may simply use another word.

The unexpected second chance.

The friend who stays.

The stranger who helps.

The beauty that arrives during grief.

The realization that failure has not destroyed the future.

The moment someone discovers:

I don’t have to earn the right to exist.

Call it grace.

Call it human solidarity.

Call it chance.

Call it love.

Call it Tuesday.

The name matters less than what happens next.

Something was given.

You did not earn it.

And life opened.

XV. Grace Destroys Religious Superiority

If everything is grace, boasting becomes ridiculous.

Paul asks:

“What do you have that you did not receive?”

Your intelligence?

You inherited capacities you did not design.

Your opportunities?

Someone opened doors.

Your education?

Someone taught you.

Your faith?

You inherited languages and traditions.

Your body?

Gift.

Your breath?

Gift.

Your planet?

Gift.

Your next heartbeat?

Not guaranteed.

Grace destroys superiority because nobody is self-created.

We are all receivers before we are achievers.

XVI. Grace Changes Justice

Grace does not oppose justice.

It deepens it.

Punitive justice asks:

What punishment does this person deserve?

Restorative justice asks:

What was harmed, what needs repair, and how can we prevent further harm?

Grace does not eliminate consequences.

It refuses to make destruction the final goal.

This is why the Gospel can take accountability seriously without becoming obsessed with vengeance.

The goal is not humiliation.

The goal is transformation.

A fuller life for everyone must include protection for victims, accountability for harm, and possibilities for change.

XVII. Stop Keeping Score

Some relationships die because everybody becomes an accountant.

I did this for you.

You only did that for me.

I apologized first.

You owe me.

I called last time.

You forgot my birthday.

Scorekeeping can become emotional capitalism.

Sometimes boundaries require remembering patterns.

Wisdom matters.

But love cannot survive if every act becomes an invoice.

Grace occasionally tears up the receipt.

Not because nothing matters.

Because relationship matters more than keeping perfect accounts.

XVIII. Eucharist Is a Table of Grace

The Christian table should embody this.

Bread.

Cup.

Ordinary things.

Shared.

Nobody manufactures their own Eucharist in isolation.

We receive.

Then we pass.

Imagine churches practicing Eucharist as radical grace.

No VIP section.

No theological entrance examination.

No ranking of worthiness.

Hungry?

Come.

Thirsty?

Come.

Believer?

Come.

Doubter?

Come.

Wounded?

Come.

Still figuring everything out?

Welcome to the club.

The table says:

There is enough.

That is grace made edible.

Conclusion: You Cannot Earn What Was Never for Sale

Maybe you have spent your life trying to earn something that cannot be earned.

Love.

Worth.

Belonging.

Forgiveness.

God.

Maybe religion handed you an invoice.

You believed you owed perfection.

You tried.

You failed.

You tried harder.

You failed differently.

Welcome to being human.

But Isaiah still stands in the marketplace shouting:

“Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

The workers still receive their wages.

The prodigal still receives the ring.

The feast still begins.

The older brother is still invited inside.

Grace is scandalous because it refuses our arithmetic.

It does not say injustice does not matter.

It says worth cannot be calculated.

It does not say actions have no consequences.

It says consequences need not become eternal identity.

It does not say transformation is unnecessary.

Grace makes transformation possible because we no longer have to transform in order to become worthy of love.

We transform because love has already called us toward fuller life.

So stop negotiating with God.

Stop trying to purchase your existence.

Stop turning spirituality into a résumé.

Breathe.

Receive.

You are alive.

Gift.

Someone loves you.

Gift.

Another morning arrives.

Gift.

Someone needs your compassion.

Invitation.

Justice calls.

Invitation.

The stranger knocks.

Invitation.

Creation asks for care.

Invitation.

God insists.

Invitation.

And now the gift wants to move through you.

Because grace received becomes generosity.

Grace experienced becomes hospitality.

Grace remembered becomes mercy.

So give somebody what they cannot earn.

A chair.

A meal.

A second chance where it is safe.

A listening ear.

Dignity.

Welcome.

Mercy.

Love.

Not because they deserve it.

Not because they don’t deserve it.

Because grace has moved beyond deserving.

The Kingdom is not a marketplace.

The Gospel is not an invoice.

God is not an accountant.

Love is not for sale.

And the table has room.

Come without money.

Come without price.

Come exactly as unfinished as you are.

Then rise from the table and help build a world where others can discover the same astonishing truth:

Life is gift.

Love is gift.

Grace is gift.

And a fuller life for everyone begins when we stop asking who deserves a place at the table—

and start making the table bigger.

Amen.

Primary Scripture: Luke 4:16–21
Supporting Scriptures: Exodus 3:7–10; Isaiah 58:6–12; Luke 19:1–10; John 10:10; Romans 8:18–23; Revelation 21:1–5

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” — John 10:10

Introduction: Christianity Asked the Wrong Question

For many of us, Christianity was presented through one enormous question:

If you died tonight, where would you go?

Heaven?

Or hell?

Suddenly the entire Christian story became a cosmic evacuation plan.

Jesus came to rescue souls from Earth.

Salvation meant obtaining the correct destination after death.

Church became the place where tickets were distributed.

Believe the right things.

Pray the right prayer.

Get your ticket punched.

Try not to lose it.

And eventually you leave this broken world behind.

There is just one rather serious problem.

That is not how Jesus normally talks about salvation.

Jesus announces:

Good news to poor people.

Freedom for captives.

Sight for people who cannot see.

Release for the oppressed.

Forgiveness.

Healing.

Reconciliation.

Tables where outsiders become family.

Jesus announces something called the Kingdom of God.

And it keeps happening right in the middle of this world.

So perhaps Christianity has spent too much time asking:

How do we get people into heaven?

Maybe Jesus was asking:

How do we get heaven into people, communities, economies, relationships and the wounded Earth?

Perhaps salvation is not primarily about escaping somewhere else.

Perhaps salvation means participating in fuller life here and now.

I. Exodus: Salvation Begins as Liberation

Before Christianity developed theories about individual salvation, Israel told a story.

Slaves cried out in Egypt.

Exodus says:

“The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out.”

Then comes one of the most important statements about God in Scripture:

“I have observed the misery of my people… I have heard their cry.”

God hears.

That matters.

The biblical story of salvation begins not with people being rescued from hell after death.

It begins with people being rescued from Pharaoh.

Salvation is political.

Economic.

Bodily.

Historical.

People are suffering.

Their suffering cries out.

Something insists:

This cannot continue.

In Caputo’s language, we might say that the name of God happens here as the insistence of liberation.

The slaves cry.

The call emerges.

Moses hears:

Go.

And liberation requires human participation.

II. Jesus Announces Liberation

Centuries later, Luke places Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth.

Jesus reads Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”

Why?

“He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”

Then:

“Release to the captives.”

Then:

“To let the oppressed go free.”

And Jesus says:

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

That is Jesus’ inaugural sermon in Luke.

Imagine if churches treated it as seriously as they treat John 3:16.

Jesus does not announce:

I have come to establish a new religion so everyone can agree about my metaphysical nature.

He announces liberation.

Good news.

Freedom.

Healing.

Release.

Something is changing.

The Kingdom is arriving.

III. The Kingdom of God Was Not Primarily Heaven

Historical-critical scholarship helps us enormously here.

When the historical Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God, he was speaking within Jewish hopes about God’s reign transforming human life.

The phrase did not simply mean:

Where good people go when they die.

It represented an alternative to domination.

Caesar’s world said:

Rome rules.

Jesus announced:

God’s reign is near.

Empire says:

Power comes through domination.

Jesus says:

Blessed are the meek.

Empire says:

Enemies must be destroyed.

Jesus says:

Love your enemies.

Empire builds hierarchical tables.

Jesus eats with outsiders.

Empire says:

Caesar is lord.

The early Christians say:

Jesus is Lord.

The Kingdom is not primarily geography.

It is another way of organizing life.

IV. Salvation Means Healing

The Greek verb sōzō, often translated “save,” can also carry meanings connected with rescue and healing.

That should change the way we hear many Gospel stories.

Jesus says to suffering people:

Your faith has saved you.

We often hear:

“You now have permission to enter heaven after death.”

But the stories themselves concern people being restored.

Bodies.

Communities.

Relationships.

Dignity.

Belonging.

Salvation happens when someone who was excluded returns to community.

When someone bent over stands upright.

When someone silenced speaks.

When someone considered untouchable becomes touchable again.

Salvation looks remarkably like becoming whole.

V. Tillich: Salvation From Estrangement

Paul Tillich described the human predicament in terms of estrangement.

We become separated.

From ourselves.

From other people.

From the ground of our being.

From meaning.

From community.

From creation.

That gives us a powerful way of reimagining salvation.

If sin is estrangement, salvation is reconciliation.

Connection restored.

The divided self becomes integrated.

Enemies become neighbors.

The excluded become family.

Human beings rediscover their relationship with Earth.

Salvation becomes the healing of separation.

VI. Zacchaeus Gets Saved—and His Money Moves

Luke tells the story of Zacchaeus.

Jesus enters his house.

Something happens.

Zacchaeus announces:

“Half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor.”

And if he has defrauded anyone:

“I will pay back four times as much.”

Jesus responds:

“Today salvation has come to this house.”

Notice something.

Salvation has economic consequences.

Money moves.

Relationships change.

Exploitation ends.

Restitution begins.

Imagine Zacchaeus saying:

“Jesus, I have accepted you as my personal Lord and Savior, but I’m keeping the stolen money.”

Jesus might have had follow-up questions.

Salvation that changes nothing may not be much salvation at all.

VII. Gutiérrez: Salvation Must Touch History

Gustavo Gutiérrez helped modern Christianity recover something the biblical prophets never forgot:

God cares about material liberation.

Food.

Housing.

Justice.

Oppression.

Economic dignity.

Human bodies.

Liberation theology refuses to separate salvation into two unrelated categories:

Spiritual salvation someday.

Material suffering today.

If somebody is starving, telling them about heavenly bread while refusing earthly bread is not good news.

Jesus fed people.

Salvation has calories.

VIII. James Cone: Salvation Must Liberate the Oppressed

James H. Cone insisted that theology must be judged by whether it participates in liberation from oppression.

Christianity that speaks endlessly about salvation while accommodating racism has misunderstood salvation.

A Gospel incapable of confronting lynching, segregation, white supremacy and racial domination is not merely politically incomplete.

It is theologically defective.

Salvation cannot mean preserving oppressive arrangements while promising victims a better afterlife.

The Exodus God hears slaves.

The prophetic God hears victims.

The Jesus of the Gospels stands among marginalized people.

Whatever salvation means, it must include liberation.

IX. Caputo: Salvation Is an Event

Now John D. Caputo takes us somewhere fascinating.

Suppose God is not primarily the supernatural manager of an eternal reward system.

Suppose God is event.

Call.

Insistence.

Promise.

Then salvation is not merely something God possesses and distributes.

Salvation happens.

Whenever reconciliation interrupts hostility—

salvation happens.

Whenever justice interrupts oppression—

salvation happens.

Whenever hospitality interrupts exclusion—

salvation happens.

Whenever forgiveness breaks a cycle of vengeance—

salvation happens.

Whenever someone discovers that their life has dignity—

salvation happens.

God does not force these events.

God insists.

The promise calls:

Become whole.

Become free.

Become reconciled.

Become alive.

X. Salvation Without a Supernatural Rescue

This becomes especially important for post-theistic Christianity.

What happens when we no longer imagine God as a cosmic rescuer who periodically reaches into history to fix things?

Some people fear that salvation disappears.

Perhaps responsibility appears.

We pray:

God, feed the hungry.

The hungry remain hungry.

Then the divine insistence returns:

You have bread.

We pray:

God, welcome the refugee.

The refugee waits.

The call returns:

You have a door.

We pray:

God, stop injustice.

The call returns:

You have a voice.

Perhaps prayer does not persuade God to become compassionate.

Perhaps prayer makes us available to compassion.

XI. Derrida: Salvation Is Always “To Come”

Jacques Derrida frequently wrote about justice as something to come.

No society achieves perfect justice.

No institution becomes finally righteous.

No revolution eliminates every form of domination.

There is always someone still excluded.

Something unfinished.

Another voice calling.

This means salvation cannot become something we possess.

I am saved.

Finished.

Done.

Ticket secured.

Perhaps salvation is better understood as an ongoing becoming.

We are being saved from smaller ways of living.

From cruelty.

From domination.

From prejudice.

From isolation.

From fear.

From greed.

And the work remains unfinished.

XII. Francis: Salvation From Possession

Francis of Assisi discovered salvation by walking away from a life organized around wealth and status.

He found freedom through simplicity.

But Francis did not merely reject possessions.

He discovered relationship.

Brother Sun.

Sister Moon.

Sister Water.

Brother Fire.

The poor became kin.

Creation became family.

Perhaps Francis was being saved from the illusion that anything exists alone.

Salvation meant discovering:

We belong to one another.

That remains a desperately needed Gospel.

XIII. Clare: Salvation From the Life Others Chose for Her

Clare of Assisi refused the future her social world had prepared for her.

She stepped outside expectations surrounding class, wealth and gender.

She created another form of community.

There is salvation in that too.

Sometimes salvation means being rescued from somebody else’s definition of who you are supposed to become.

The queer person who stops hating themselves.

The woman who discovers her voice.

The person leaving religious fundamentalism.

The marginalized person who finally says:

My life belongs to me.

Something has been saved.

XIV. Religious Pluralism: Salvation Has Many Languages

Christianity should approach salvation with humility because other traditions possess profound languages of liberation and transformation.

Buddhism speaks of liberation from craving and suffering.

Hindu traditions speak of moksha.

Judaism emphasizes liberation, covenant, justice and teshuvah—return.

Islam speaks of surrender, mercy and living rightly before God.

Indigenous traditions often emphasize restored relationship among people, land, ancestors and community.

Secular humanism seeks human flourishing without requiring supernatural belief.

These traditions are not identical.

We should respect their differences.

But perhaps Christians should stop asking:

How can we save them?

And occasionally ask:

What wisdom about becoming whole might they teach us?

XV. Christian Atheism: Saved From God?

Here is the mischievous part.

Sometimes we need salvation from our idea of God.

The God who terrorizes children with hell.

The God who supposedly hates queer people.

The God who blesses empire.

The God who commands women to remain silent.

The God who chooses one religion and despises everyone else.

The God used to excuse abuse.

The God who becomes cosmic surveillance.

Perhaps losing that God can feel frightening.

But Meister Eckhart prayed:

“I pray God to rid me of God.”

Sometimes the idol must die so Mystery can breathe again.

XVI. Žižek: Stop Waiting for the Big Other

Slavoj Žižek gives Christianity another uncomfortable challenge.

What if the cross destroys our fantasy that someone above history guarantees everything will work out?

Jesus cries:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The divine rescue does not arrive.

Then comes community.

Spirit.

The body of Christ.

Us.

Perhaps Christianity’s message is not:

Don’t worry. God will fix everything.

Perhaps it is:

The responsibility has been placed in our hands.

That is terrifying.

And liberating.

XVII. Process Theology: Salvation Is Becoming

Process theology imagines reality as genuinely unfinished.

Creation is becoming.

The future remains open.

God does not control every event.

Instead, God offers possibilities toward greater beauty, relationship, justice and life.

Salvation therefore becomes creative transformation.

Every moment asks:

What can happen now?

What is the most loving possibility available?

What can be repaired?

What relationship can deepen?

What suffering can be reduced?

What beauty can be created?

The divine lure whispers:

This way leads toward fuller life.

And we decide whether to follow.

XVIII. What About Heaven?

None of this requires us to mock hope beyond death.

Death remains mysterious.

Perhaps consciousness continues.

Perhaps resurrection means more than we understand.

Perhaps we return to some depth of reality we call God.

Perhaps something awaits us beyond our present categories.

I do not know.

And neither does anyone else with the certainty religion sometimes pretends to possess.

Hope is allowed.

Mystery is allowed.

But Christianity should not sacrifice this world while speculating about another.

Jesus says:

“I came that they may have life.”

Not someday.

Life.

XIX. Revelation Does Not End With Us Escaping Earth

The final biblical vision is often misunderstood.

Revelation does not end with human beings abandoning Earth and flying permanently into heaven.

John sees:

“A new heaven and a new earth.”

Then:

“The holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven.”

The movement is downward.

Toward Earth.

And the voice says:

“See, the home of God is among mortals.”

Whatever we make historically and symbolically of Revelation’s apocalyptic imagery, its ending is striking.

God comes to dwell here.

Creation is renewed.

Not discarded.

Conclusion: Saved for a Fuller Life

So let us ask a different question.

Not:

If you died tonight, where would you go?

Ask:

If you wake tomorrow morning, how will you live?

Will somebody be more free because you existed?

Will somebody eat?

Will someone lonely know they matter?

Will an excluded person find a chair?

Will an enemy become slightly less strange?

Will creation be treated more gently?

Will injustice encounter resistance?

Will mercy interrupt vengeance?

Will you become more fully yourself?

That sounds like salvation to me.

Salvation is not merely being saved from something.

We are saved for something.

For relationship.

For freedom.

For justice.

For beauty.

For community.

For wonder.

For love.

For the difficult, unfinished work of becoming human together.

God does not stand above history holding heavenly admission tickets.

God insists within history:

Live.

The oppressed cry:

Freedom.

The stranger asks:

Room.

The wounded Earth whispers:

Remember me.

The lonely person asks:

Stay.

The future says:

Become.

And Jesus says:

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

There it is.

The Gospel.

Not escape from life.

More life.

Deeper life.

Shared life.

Liberated life.

Reconciled life.

A fuller life for everyone.

So stop waiting to be rescued from the world.

Love the world.

Repair it.

Protect it.

Challenge what diminishes it.

Feed somebody.

Plant something.

Forgive where possible.

Resist where necessary.

Open the table.

Make room.

Live simply.

Love boldly.

And wherever life becomes fuller,

wherever dignity is restored,

wherever relationship is healed,

wherever liberation begins,

wherever someone who thought they were lost discovers they belong—

perhaps we can dare to say:

Salvation has happened here today.

And perhaps that is where God happens too.

Amen.

Primary Scripture: Mark 9:14–24
Supporting Scriptures: Ecclesiastes 3:9–14; Micah 6:6–8; Matthew 7:21; Matthew 25:31–40; John 20:24–29; Acts 17:22–28

“I believe; help my unbelief!” — Mark 9:24

Introduction: What If Belief Is Not the Point?

There may be no more honest prayer in the Bible than this:

“I believe; help my unbelief!”

Not:

I have conquered doubt.

Not:

I understand God perfectly.

Not:

I have signed the correct doctrinal statement.

Instead:

I believe.

I don’t believe.

Help me.

Both live inside the same human heart.

Christianity has often treated belief as the entrance examination for salvation.

Do you believe God exists?

Do you believe Jesus is divine?

Do you believe the Bible is inspired?

Do you believe the correct things about heaven, hell, resurrection, miracles, atonement, Trinity and salvation?

Pass the theological examination and you are in.

Fail it and eternity becomes considerably less pleasant.

But what if Christianity was never primarily supposed to be about believing propositions about God?

What if Christianity is about answering a call?

What if someone can doubt God’s existence while living faithfully toward what the name God calls for?

And what if someone can believe every doctrine in the creed while completely missing God?

Today I want to commit a little theological mischief.

I want to invite the atheist to the altar.

And I suspect Jesus might already be standing there waiting.

I. The Bible Contains Doubters

We sometimes talk about the Bible as though it were written by people possessing absolute certainty.

It wasn’t.

The Bible is filled with questions.

Job questions God.

Ecclesiastes questions whether life makes sense.

The psalmists ask:

“How long, O Lord?”

Jesus cries:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Thomas doubts resurrection.

And Mark gives us the father who says:

“I believe; help my unbelief!”

Scripture does not erase doubt.

It preserves it.

Canonizes it.

Makes it sacred literature.

Maybe faith was never certainty.

II. Tillich: Doubt Belongs Inside Faith

Paul Tillich argued that doubt is not simply faith’s enemy.

Doubt can exist inside faith.

That matters because certainty and faith are different things.

Certainty says:

I know.

Faith says:

I entrust myself even though I do not completely know.

If I know something with absolute certainty, faith is unnecessary.

Nobody says:

“I have faith that two plus two equals four.”

You calculate it.

Faith begins where certainty ends.

Perhaps doubt does not destroy mature faith.

Perhaps doubt destroys immature certainty so something deeper can emerge.

III. Nietzsche’s Funeral for God

Then along comes Friedrich Nietzsche with one of philosophy’s most famous announcements:

“God is dead.”

Christians sometimes hear that sentence as an atheist celebrating God’s funeral.

Nietzsche’s point was more complicated.

The old metaphysical and moral world of European Christianity was collapsing.

Modernity had undermined the cultural structures that once made traditional belief almost automatic.

The strange thing is that many churches responded by trying to resurrect certainty.

More apologetics.

More rules.

More dogmatism.

More insistence that everyone believe harder.

But perhaps Christianity should have asked another question:

Which God died?

Maybe the God who died was the cosmic policeman.

The divine dictator.

The supernatural surveillance system.

The God used to justify hierarchy.

The God who supposedly micromanages earthquakes while somehow allowing genocide.

Perhaps losing that God is not necessarily the end of Christianity.

Maybe it creates room for something else.

IV. Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity

From prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wondered what Christianity might look like in a world that had “come of age.”

He explored the possibility of a religionless Christianity.

Bonhoeffer resisted using God merely as an explanation for whatever human beings could not yet understand.

God should not become the filler stuffed into gaps in science or knowledge.

Because eventually the gaps close.

Then where does God go?

Perhaps Christianity must learn to speak about God without making God a competing explanation inside the universe.

That possibility remains unfinished.

But radical theology has continued walking down that road.

V. Caputo: God Does Not Exist; God Insists

Here comes John D. Caputo with his wonderfully provocative sentence:

“God does not exist; God insists.”

Caputo is deliberately disrupting the ordinary question:

Does God exist?

Because perhaps that question already imagines God incorrectly.

It treats God as an object.

Do chairs exist?

Do planets exist?

Do electrons exist?

Does God exist?

Caputo asks us to imagine the name God differently.

Not primarily as a being.

As an event.

A call.

An insistence.

A promise.

Something trying to happen.

Justice insists.

Mercy insists.

Hospitality insists.

Forgiveness insists.

Peace insists.

The impossible possibility of another world insists.

God does not force these things into existence.

God calls.

And we answer.

Or we don’t.

VI. The Atheist Who Answers the Call

Now imagine two people.

The first says:

“I absolutely believe in God.”

They attend church.

Know Scripture.

Defend Christianity.

But they exploit workers.

Despise immigrants.

Reject queer people.

Ignore hungry neighbors.

Treat the Earth as disposable.

They believe in God.

Now consider someone else.

They say:

“I don’t believe God exists.”

But they feed hungry people.

Welcome refugees.

Defend marginalized neighbors.

Care for the dying.

Protect creation.

Forgive enemies.

Fight injustice.

Which person is closer to the Kingdom?

Jesus gives us a rather uncomfortable clue:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Apparently saying Lord correctly is insufficient.

Jesus keeps looking for fruit.

VII. Matthew 25 Doesn’t Give a Theology Exam

In Matthew 25, Jesus describes judgment.

Hungry people.

Thirsty people.

Strangers.

Naked people.

Sick people.

Prisoners.

Jesus says:

“I was hungry and you gave me food.”

The people respond:

When did we see you?

That question is extraordinary.

They did not even know they were serving Christ.

Their theology was incomplete.

Their compassion was not.

Jesus does not say:

“You failed to recognize my metaphysical identity, therefore your kindness doesn’t count.”

Instead:

“As you did it to one of the least of these… you did it to me.”

Maybe some people encounter Christ anonymously.

Maybe they answer God without believing in God.

VIII. Derrida: Justice Without Final Certainty

Jacques Derrida helps us here.

Justice always exceeds our systems.

No doctrine captures it completely.

No institution owns it.

No political order finishes it.

Justice remains to come.

That means faithfulness requires humility.

We act without possessing absolute certainty.

We decide.

We risk.

We remain open to correction.

This is remarkably close to a post-theistic faith.

We may not know exactly what God is.

We may not know whether traditional metaphysical descriptions of God are true.

We may not know what happens after death.

We may not know how miracles work.

We may not know exactly what resurrection means.

And still:

Justice calls.

The stranger waits.

The hungry need food.

The Earth needs protection.

Love needs embodiment.

We know enough to begin.

IX. Žižek: Christianity Contains Its Own Atheism

Slavoj Žižek has provocatively argued that Christianity contains an atheistic moment within itself.

Where?

The cross.

Jesus cries:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

God experiences abandonment by God.

The divine guarantee disappears.

Then Christianity does something extraordinary.

It does not simply replace Jesus with another divine ruler.

Pentecost creates a community.

The Spirit becomes distributed.

The body of Christ becomes us.

The responsibility once projected upward returns to humanity.

Stop waiting for God to fix the world.

Become the community through which love enters it.

That sounds surprisingly close to Christian atheism.

X. Francis Didn’t Need a Metaphysics Degree

Francis of Assisi did not become Francis because he solved the metaphysics of divine existence.

He heard a call:

Repair my church.

And he picked up stones.

He encountered people with leprosy.

And embraced those he once avoided.

He saw creation.

And called it family.

Brother Sun.

Sister Moon.

Sister Water.

Francis answered something.

We may debate precisely what spoke.

Francis called it God.

An atheist might call it conscience.

A psychologist might call it transformation.

A philosopher might call it ethical responsibility.

Caputo might call it an event.

Fine.

But Francis picked up the stone.

Sometimes theology needs to stop arguing about who spoke long enough to answer the call.

XI. Clare’s Theology Was Embodied

Clare of Assisi likewise embodied her theology.

She rejected wealth, hierarchy and expectations surrounding her social position.

She created another kind of community.

Her theology became life.

That matters.

Because Christianity becomes dangerous when doctrine becomes detached from practice.

You can believe in poverty while accumulating wealth.

Believe in peace while supporting domination.

Believe in love while excluding people.

Believe in Jesus while refusing his way.

Clare reminds us:

Faith becomes credible when it becomes flesh.

XII. Mysticism Has Always Known God Exceeds God

Christian mystics often sound suspiciously close to atheists.

Meister Eckhart famously prayed:

“I pray God to rid me of God.”

What could that possibly mean?

Perhaps:

Rid me of my concepts.

My projections.

My religious idols.

My mental pictures.

My certainty that I know what the word God means.

Apophatic theology has long insisted that God exceeds every human description.

God is not this.

Not that.

Not another object.

Not captured by language.

At some point the mystic and the atheist may stand surprisingly close together.

The atheist says:

The God you described does not exist.

The mystic replies:

I agree.

And then both stare silently into the Mystery.

XIII. Religious Pluralism Changes the Question

Religious pluralism also challenges Christianity’s obsession with correct belief.

Human beings have encountered mystery through countless traditions.

Jewish.

Christian.

Muslim.

Hindu.

Buddhist.

Sikh.

Pagan.

Indigenous.

Humanist.

And others.

These traditions are not identical.

We should not flatten them into one religion.

But perhaps the important question is not:

Which tribe possesses God?

Perhaps it is:

What kind of life is emerging here?

Compassion?

Justice?

Humility?

Hospitality?

Liberation?

Peace?

A fuller life?

Jesus says:

“You will know them by their fruits.”

Maybe we should believe him.

XIV. Process Theology: Reality Is Still Becoming

Process thought gives us another way forward.

Reality is unfinished.

The future is genuinely open.

God does not control every event.

Instead, the divine lure offers possibilities toward greater beauty, relationship, justice and life.

This means faith is not trusting that an omnipotent being has already scripted everything.

Faith becomes participation in an unfinished universe.

God offers:

What about this possibility?

We respond.

Creation continues.

Perhaps atheism and theism become less important than whether we participate in becoming.

Are we creating fuller life?

Or diminishing it?

XV. Faith as Fidelity

The English word faith often means intellectual belief.

But biblical faith carries dimensions of trust, faithfulness and fidelity.

This opens another possibility.

Maybe faith is not primarily:

I believe God exists.

Maybe faith is:

I will remain faithful to love.

Even when love fails.

I will remain faithful to justice.

Even when justice loses.

I will remain faithful to mercy.

Even when cruelty is easier.

I will remain faithful to hospitality.

Even when fear tells me to close the door.

That is faith.

Not certainty.

Fidelity.

XVI. The Altar Is Bigger Than the Church

So imagine the altar differently.

Not merely furniture inside a sanctuary.

The altar is wherever we offer ourselves to the possibility of fuller life.

A soup kitchen can become an altar.

A protest line can become an altar.

A hospital bedside can become an altar.

A forest being protected can become an altar.

A kitchen table where enemies begin talking can become an altar.

A shelter can become an altar.

A classroom can become an altar.

A street corner can become an altar.

And yes—

an atheist may already be standing there.

Conclusion: Come to the Altar, Even If You Don’t Believe

So today I offer an unusual altar call.

Not:

Come forward if you believe every doctrine.

Not:

Come if you can prove God exists.

Not:

Come if you have conquered doubt.

Instead:

Come if you hear the call.

Come if justice still troubles you.

Come if cruelty still breaks your heart.

Come if beauty still surprises you.

Come if suffering still interrupts your plans.

Come if strangers still matter.

Come if Earth still feels sacred.

Come if somewhere inside you something whispers:

Another world is possible.

You may call that whisper God.

You may call it conscience.

Spirit.

Humanity.

Love.

The Kingdom.

The event.

The impossible.

You may not know what to call it.

That’s okay.

The call does not require a name before it can be answered.

Perhaps God is less interested in being believed in than in being done.

Justice done.

Mercy done.

Hospitality done.

Peace done.

Love done.

The prophet Micah asks:

“What does the Lord require of you?”

The answer is remarkably practical:

“To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly.”

Especially that last part.

Walk humbly.

The believer walks humbly because they might be wrong about God.

The atheist walks humbly because reality may contain depths their categories do not capture.

The Christian walks humbly because Christianity does not own truth.

The mystic walks humbly because Mystery exceeds every word.

And perhaps somewhere along the road these pilgrims discover they have been walking together.

So bring your belief.

Bring your unbelief.

Bring your theology.

Bring your doubt.

Bring your questions.

Bring your wounds.

Bring your atheist heart if that is what you have.

There is room at the altar.

Because the altar was never ultimately about passing a theology examination.

It was about becoming available.

Available to justice.

Available to mercy.

Available to the stranger.

Available to possibility.

Available to love.

God insists.

The future calls.

And faith—whatever else faith may mean—is our trembling answer:

Here I am.

I don’t know everything.

I cannot prove everything.

But I am willing to love.

Perhaps that is enough to begin.

Amen.

Primary Scripture: Acts 2:1–18
Supporting Scriptures: Genesis 2:7; Ezekiel 37:1–14; John 3:5–8; John 20:19–22; Romans 8:22–27; 1 Corinthians 12:4–7

“The wind blows where it chooses.” — John 3:8

Introduction: What If the Spirit Is Stranger Than We Were Taught?

When I was taught about the Holy Spirit, the Spirit often sounded like the mysterious third member of a supernatural organization.

Father.

Son.

Holy Ghost.

Three persons.

One God.

Memorize the formula.

Don’t ask too many questions.

But what if the Spirit is not primarily a doctrine to explain?

What if Spirit is something to experience?

Breath.

Wind.

Movement.

Relationship.

Possibility.

The ancient biblical languages themselves point us there.

The Hebrew word ruach can mean spirit, wind, or breath.

The Greek word pneuma carries a similar range.

So perhaps when we say Spirit, we are speaking about something far more dynamic than a supernatural person floating invisibly through the universe.

Maybe Spirit is the name Scripture gives to the movement of life.

The breath within us.

The wind between us.

The possibility opening before us.

The sacred disturbance that whispers:

Things do not have to remain as they are.

---

I. Before God Speaks, the Spirit Moves

Genesis begins:

“In the beginning…”

Darkness.

Deep waters.

Chaos.

And the ruach of God moves over the waters.

Before doctrine—

movement.

Before commandments—

breath.

Before temples—

wind.

Before Christianity—

Spirit.

This should immediately humble Christian theology.

The Spirit does not begin at Pentecost.

The Spirit does not begin with the Church.

The Spirit does not begin when somebody becomes Christian.

Spirit is already moving through creation.

That means Christianity does not own the sacred.

We encounter it.

We participate in it.

But we do not possess it.

---

II. God Breathes Into Dirt

Genesis 2 tells another creation story.

God forms the human from the soil.

Then God breathes into the human.

The earth-creature becomes alive.

Whatever we think historically about this ancient creation story, its poetry is magnificent.

We are earth plus breath.

Dust breathing.

Matter becoming conscious.

Earth learning to look at itself.

This is profoundly Franciscan.

Francis of Assisi understood that we are not visitors to creation.

We are relatives.

Brother Sun.

Sister Moon.

Sister Water.

Brother Fire.

And we might add:

Sister Breath.

The air inside your lungs was outside your body moments ago.

You breathe out.

Someone else breathes in.

Trees breathe.

Animals breathe.

Human beings breathe.

Life circulates.

Where exactly do “you” end and the world begin?

Perhaps Spirit has been teaching us interdependence with every breath.

---

III. Ezekiel Preaches to Bones

Then Ezekiel stands before a valley filled with dry bones.

This vision emerged from the trauma of exile.

Israel had experienced national catastrophe.

Jerusalem had fallen.

The temple had been destroyed.

People had been displaced.

The bones represent a community saying:

“Our hope is lost.”

God asks Ezekiel:

“Mortal, can these bones live?”

Ezekiel wisely answers:

“O Lord God, you know.”

In other words:

Don’t ask me.

Look at them.

They’re bones.

But Ezekiel is told to prophesy.

Then comes the ruach.

Breath.

Wind.

Spirit.

The bones begin to live.

Historically, this passage is about the restoration of Israel rather than primarily a prediction of individual bodily resurrection.

But its metaphor reaches beyond its original setting.

Spirit is what happens when hopelessness encounters possibility.

The bones say:

Finished.

Spirit says:

Maybe not.

---

IV. Spirit Is Not Magic

We need to be careful.

Calling something Spirit does not mean denying science.

Wind has meteorological explanations.

Breathing has biological explanations.

Human psychology has neurological dimensions.

Social movements have historical causes.

We do not need to insert supernatural explanations wherever knowledge runs out.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned Christianity against turning God into a solution for gaps in human understanding.

As knowledge grows, a “God of the gaps” continually shrinks.

But perhaps Spirit does not compete with explanation.

Perhaps Spirit names the depth within ordinary processes.

A song can be explained acoustically.

That does not mean music disappears.

Love has neurological correlates.

That does not make love unreal.

A sunset has an astronomical explanation.

That does not prevent beauty from happening.

Likewise, Spirit need not mean violating nature.

Spirit may name something happening through nature.

---

V. Pentecost Is About Difference Without Domination

Acts 2 tells the Pentecost story.

People gather.

Wind fills the house.

Fire appears.

Different languages erupt.

And suddenly people from many nations hear one another.

Notice what does not happen.

Everyone does not begin speaking one sacred language.

Difference remains.

Pentecost is not uniformity.

It is understanding across difference.

That makes Pentecost profoundly relevant to religious pluralism.

The miracle is not:

Everybody becomes the same.

The miracle is:

We become capable of hearing one another without becoming identical.

Imagine if churches understood Spirit that way.

Imagine politics.

Imagine interfaith dialogue.

Imagine families.

Imagine the world.

Not agreement without difference.

Communion through difference.

---

VI. Babel and Pentecost

Pentecost is often contrasted with the Tower of Babel.

At Babel, humanity tries to create greatness:

“Let us make a name for ourselves.”

One city.

One language.

One monumental project.

Uniformity becomes power.

Then language fractures.

Pentecost does not reverse Babel by restoring one language.

That would recreate the original problem.

Instead, Pentecost sanctifies multiplicity.

Many languages.

Many cultures.

Yet communication becomes possible.

Perhaps God’s answer to division is not sameness.

It is relationship.

This is enormously important.

Unity is not uniformity.

We are one does not mean we are identical.

We are one precisely while remaining beautifully different.

---

VII. Caputo: Spirit as Event

Here John D. Caputo becomes useful.

If God is event, call, insistence, promise—rather than primarily a supernatural ruler—then perhaps Spirit is the movement of that insistence among us.

Justice begins stirring.

Spirit.

Mercy interrupts vengeance.

Spirit.

A stranger becomes neighbor.

Spirit.

Someone finally says:

This injustice cannot continue.

Spirit.

A church opens a door previously closed.

Spirit.

An enemy becomes human in our imagination again.

Spirit.

Someone who has been told they are worthless suddenly discovers dignity.

Spirit.

Not necessarily supernatural intervention.

Something happens.

An event.

A possibility becomes real.

The impossible begins insisting upon the possible.

---

VIII. Derrida: The Spirit Is Always “To Come”

Jacques Derrida often spoke about what is to come.

Justice is never finished.

Democracy is never finished.

Hospitality is never finished.

There is always more.

Another excluded person.

Another unheard voice.

Another possibility.

Spirit can be imagined similarly.

Jesus says:

“The wind blows where it chooses.”

You cannot control it.

You cannot institutionalize wind.

You cannot build a fence around breath.

Spirit always exceeds our systems.

Every church should remember this.

The moment we say:

God can only work here,

the wind blows somewhere else.

---

IX. The Spirit Outside Christianity

If Spirit existed before Christianity, then Christians should expect to encounter Spirit beyond Christianity.

Perhaps Spirit moves wherever fuller life emerges.

When a Buddhist practices compassion—

perhaps Spirit moves.

When a Muslim feeds hungry neighbors during Ramadan—

perhaps Spirit moves.

When Jewish communities practice tikkun olam, repairing the world—

perhaps Spirit moves.

When Indigenous communities defend sacred land—

perhaps Spirit moves.

When Pagans honor the living Earth—

perhaps Spirit moves.

When Hindu neighbors recognize sacred depth throughout life—

perhaps Spirit moves.

And when an atheist stands between a vulnerable person and injustice—

perhaps Spirit moves without requiring the atheist to call it Spirit.

Christianity need not erase these traditions by secretly labeling everybody Christian.

Respect their differences.

Let them name their experiences.

But Christians can still confess:

The wind blows where it chooses.

---

X. The Christian Atheist and the Spirit

Can a Christian atheist speak meaningfully about Holy Spirit?

Absolutely.

One need not imagine a supernatural invisible person entering bodies.

Spirit can name the event of transformation.

The courage that appears between people.

The collective energy of liberation.

The movement toward reconciliation.

The depth of human solidarity.

The interruption of despair.

The possibility that emerges when people gather and suddenly become capable of something none could accomplish alone.

Maybe Spirit is not a thing.

Maybe Spirit is a happening.

Not a supernatural object.

An event.

---

XI. Tillich: The Depth Dimension

Paul Tillich helps us again.

Tillich resisted imagining God as merely the highest being somewhere above the universe.

God is the ground and depth of being.

In that framework, Spirit might be understood as life awakening to its own sacred depth.

There are moments when ordinary existence suddenly becomes transparent to something more.

Holding someone’s hand.

Standing beside a river.

Hearing music.

Breaking bread.

Marching for justice.

Sitting silently with grief.

Looking into another person’s face.

Nothing supernatural needs to occur.

Yet somehow the moment becomes more than merely ordinary.

The ordinary opens.

Depth appears.

Perhaps that opening is Spirit.

---

XII. Process Theology: God Offers Possibility

Process thought gives us another way of understanding Spirit.

Reality is unfinished.

Every moment contains possibilities.

God does not determine which possibility must occur.

God lures creation toward richer possibilities of beauty, relationship, justice, and life.

The divine power is persuasive rather than coercive.

Spirit therefore does not shove us.

Spirit beckons.

Come this way.

Forgive.

Create.

Risk.

Speak.

Rest.

Resist.

Welcome.

Become.

We can refuse.

That is why terrible things happen.

The divine lure does not override freedom.

But possibility remains.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Grace may simply be the universe never completely running out of invitations to become otherwise.

---

XIII. Clare and the Spirit of Resistance

Clare of Assisi understood that sacred movement can look like refusal.

She refused the life expected of a woman of her social class.

She refused wealth as the measure of worth.

She refused a spirituality built upon domination.

Her poverty was not passive.

It was resistance.

Sometimes Spirit says:

Go.

Sometimes Spirit says:

Speak.

And sometimes Spirit says:

No.

No to empire.

No to exploitation.

No to dehumanization.

No to religious domination.

No to systems that require somebody else to become small so that we can feel powerful.

A holy “no” can create space for a sacred “yes.”

---

XIV. Žižek and the Community After God

Slavoj Žižek offers a provocative interpretation of Christianity.

At the cross, Jesus cries:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The divine guarantee appears absent.

Then what comes next?

Community.

Spirit.

Pentecost.

The responsibility once projected upward becomes distributed among people.

The body of Christ becomes collective.

This gives Pentecost an almost radical democratic meaning.

No single person possesses Spirit.

Acts says:

“I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”

Sons.

Daughters.

Young.

Old.

Servants.

Everyone.

The sacred becomes radically democratized.

---

XV. The Spirit Does Not Respect Our Hierarchies

This is dangerous theology.

Because institutions prefer predictable Spirit.

A Spirit who always agrees with leadership.

A Spirit who respects denominational boundaries.

A Spirit who knows who has the correct credentials.

But Pentecost is chaos.

People speak unexpectedly.

Ordinary people become prophets.

Women speak.

Young people speak.

Marginalized people speak.

The Spirit spills.

Peter quotes Joel:

“I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”

All flesh.

Not clergy flesh.

Not Christian flesh.

Not respectable flesh.

Not heterosexual flesh.

Not male flesh.

Not wealthy flesh.

All flesh.

If Spirit is poured upon all flesh, religious hierarchy should become very nervous about deciding whose voice cannot possibly carry revelation.

---

XVI. Romans 8: The Spirit Groans

Paul writes:

“The Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

What a beautiful image.

Sometimes Spirit is not speaking in tongues.

Sometimes Spirit is groaning.

There are moments when no theological explanation works.

Someone dies.

A relationship ends.

A community suffers.

War continues.

The planet burns.

Words fail.

And Paul says:

The groan counts.

You do not need sophisticated prayer.

Sometimes:

Oh God…

is enough.

Sometimes silence is enough.

Sometimes tears are theology.

The Spirit groans with creation.

---

XVII. Breath Is Political

Remember that Spirit means breath.

That makes breathing sacred.

Whenever human beings are denied the ability to breathe freely—literally or metaphorically—something spiritual is at stake.

People need air.

But they also need room.

Room to exist.

Room to speak.

Room to love.

Room to question.

Room to worship.

Room not to worship.

Room to become.

A community filled with Spirit should therefore become a place where people can breathe.

Not another place where they must shrink themselves to survive.

Ask of every church:

Can people breathe here?

Can queer people breathe?

Can doubters breathe?

Can children ask questions?

Can women lead?

Can atheists visit without becoming projects?

Can people from other religions remain themselves?

Can wounded people tell the truth?

If not, perhaps we need another Pentecost.

---

Conclusion: Take a Breath

Before finishing this sermon, do something profoundly theological.

Breathe.

In.

Out.

You did not manufacture that air.

It came from beyond you.

And you cannot keep it.

Try holding your breath forever.

Life requires receiving.

And releasing.

Receiving.

Releasing.

Perhaps spirituality works similarly.

We receive traditions.

Then sometimes we must release interpretations that no longer give life.

We receive wisdom.

We release certainty.

We receive love.

We give love away.

We receive breath.

We return breath to the world.

Nothing living survives by holding everything.

Maybe that is Spirit.

The circulation of life.

The movement between us.

The sacred between.

God not as dictator above us.

God as insistence among us.

God as possibility ahead of us.

God as depth beneath us.

Spirit as breath within and between us.

And the wind keeps blowing.

Through churches.

Beyond churches.

Through Christians.

Beyond Christianity.

Through believers.

Through doubters.

Perhaps even through atheists who would laugh at the word Spirit while spending their lives answering its call.

The wind does not ask permission.

So do not imprison Spirit inside doctrine.

Do not trap Spirit inside institutions.

Do not confuse Spirit with emotional spectacle.

Listen.

Where is life trying to emerge?

Where is justice stirring?

Where is someone finding courage?

Where are enemies learning to speak?

Where is creation being restored?

Where is an excluded person finding room?

Where is compassion interrupting cruelty?

Where is somebody saying:

Another world is possible?

There.

Maybe there.

The wind is moving.

The bones are rattling.

The languages are multiplying.

The walls are opening.

Something is trying to happen.

God insists.

Spirit moves.

And creation takes another breath.

So breathe deeply.

Listen carefully.

Live simply.

Love boldly.

Resist whatever suffocates life.

Make room for difference.

Protect the vulnerable.

Welcome the stranger.

And help create communities where every person can breathe.

Because perhaps the Holy Spirit was never primarily something we were supposed to explain.

Perhaps Spirit is something we are invited to become part of.

The wind blows where it chooses.

May it blow through us.

Amen.