A friend indeed

In this week’s Gospel reading from John 15, Jesus is spending one last night—just prior to his arrest, torture, and crucifixion—with a few of his closest friends. He’s encouraging and equipping them for the next chapter of their lives and mission without him physically present.

 In this farewell discourse, Jesus uses a word to describe a radical change in his relationship with them that, largely with the “help” of social media, has become familiar to us to the point of losing its punch, but is utterly profound in its usage here: he calls them—and by extension, us—friends.

This ought to stop us in our tracks because here is the eternal, omnipotent, God of the universe calling us his friends with all the weight that word carries.

 What is it about the core of his mission—his death on the cross—that is so strong it can turn servants, strangers, and even enemies into friends? Because that’s what he says here.

 And why is this so important?

The Fifth Sunday of Easter—The Promise of the Holy Spirit

As we approach Ascension and ten days later, Pentecost, this week’s Gospel reading draws our gaze to Jesus’s promise of the coming of the Holy Spirit.

Just as Jesus himself physically demonstrated—was literally the exact representation (Colossians 1:15)—of the personality and character of God, so after his departure the Holy Spirit would make the living Christ real to his followers. The Spirit teaches. He instructs from within and recalls to memory what Jesus taught. His role is to impress the commandments of Jesus on the minds and hearts of his disciples and thus prompt them to obedience.

Skin in the game

“Skin in the game” is an aphorism popularized by Warren Buffet referring to the benefit of executives using their own money to buy stock in the company they’re running. It’s to have a personal risk, or stake, in the outcome. It’s a simple fact of human nature that we take something more seriously when we have an ownership stake.

This is the very point Jesus makes when he describes himself as “the good shepherd” in this week's Gospel reading from John 10, echoing Psalm 23. His people are the sheep he both loves and owns. The incarnation and the cross mean God has skin in the game.

Gather and believe with burning hearts

Bishop Julian will Consecrate and Bless our new home in our worship service this Sunday. Consecration is a momentous formational event in the life of an Anglican community

Dichotomy, or Paradox and Complexity?

The Gospel reading appointed for this Sunday includes “John’s” (the Johannine) Great Commission in John 20:20, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”

Which begs the question…“Where’s he sending them, and by extension, us?” Jesus doesn’t clarify here, but we know the answer to that from the Great Commission found in Matthew 28: into “the world” to make disciples.

And that being the case, it behooves us to know—in the proper and biblical sense—as much about how we ought to see and interpret “the world” as we possibly can. Is it a world of dichotomy (good/bad, sacred/secular), or is it a world full of paradox and complexity? Knowing the answer to this question will radically shape how we embody our Mission (“to make disciples”) and our Shared Vision (I’m hoping you know what that is by now).

One of the signs

This Sunday is the Fourth Sunday in Advent and this week’s Gospel reading tells us much about the character of the Son of God. On the one hand, he is forthright in carrying out his ministry to preach the Gospel, heal the sick, and feed the hungry. “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…” (see Isaiah 61:1-5). Here is the mission of the Servant of God to Israel, and it compels Jesus to carry it out in feeding a multitude, the fourth of the seven signs in John pointing to Jesus as the perfect fulfillment of all the law and the prophets.

Something Deeper?

The church where I grew up regularly hosted traveling music groups. They’d always have their LPs (yes, LPs) and other stuff—their “merch”—to sell, but at our church they weren’t allowed to do this. At least not in the sanctuary or the foyer where most people entered. The rationale came, at least in part, from this week’s Gospel reading. Jesus clearly didn’t like it when folks hawked their wares around the Temple, and therefore we shouldn’t sell stuff around the sanctuary.

To be sure, the place of worship in first-century Israel and the auditorium of a small independent church in Southern California don’t correspond exactly, but true to Jesus’s words, my church didn’t want the place of worship to be co-opted as a place of commerce. And that much is right.

But is merch in church really the heart of the issue…or is it something deeper, something much more invisible and insidious?

Cardinal Point

We’re all familiar with cardinal numbers, cardinal points on the compass, cardinal virtues, and Cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church. None of these have anything to do with either the bird or the color red.

Cardinal comes from the Latin word for hinge, like a door or a gate turns on.

This week’s Gospel describes a cardinal point (cardinalis punctum) in the ministry of Jesus. From Peter’s limited perspective, in one brief moment the whole thing takes a turn. And not for the better.