This week we’re continuing our summer series on “Disputing with God” with the story of Jesus’s encounter with a Syro-Phoenician woman as told in Matthew 15:21-28. This story makes us comfortable in a lot of ways, as Jesus appears to ignore the pleas of a foreign woman, who Matthew refers to as a Canaanite, whose daughter is possessed by a demon. Jesus refuses to help, first saying that his mission is only for the lost sheep of Israel and then saying that it is not fair to give the children’s bread to the dogs. When she reminds Jesus that even the dogs eat the children’s crumbs, Jesus commends her great faith and heals her daughter. We struggle with the demeaning language in this text, both Jesus’ reference to her as a dog and her apparent acceptance of that designation even while we admire her persistence as a parent to do whatever it takes to achieve healing for her daughter. We wonder, does this woman change Jesus’ understanding of his own mission, and if so, what cost did she pay to do it?

This week we continue with our summer series “Disputing with God” with Psalm 88, the Bible’s most unrelenting lament psalm. The speaker cries out to God from the depths of the pit, lamenting about the pain, suffering, and isolation that makes their life seem like a walking death, even accusing God of being the one who has caused them to suffer. And yet in this dispute, there is no response from God. Night and day the speaker cries out, from morning until night, every day since their youth—and God simply does not engage. We think of all the ways this psalm can speak to the pain of our own lives, giving voice to that which we might fear to voice before God. And we wrestle with what it means to dispute with a silent God, who is simply nowhere to be found.

This week we continue with our summer series “Disputing with God” with the story of the prophet Jonah in Nineveh as told in Jonah 3:1–4:11. While we have often read Jonah as a comedic parody of Israelite prophecy, this time we explore what happens if we take Jonah’s concerns about God’s mercy seriously. The Ninevites are, after all, the very people who will destroy the northern kingdom of Israel some 30 years after Jonah’s prophecy, so God’s compassion for them ultimately has disastrous consequences for Jonah and his people. This leads us to the question of the cost of compassion. What do we do when God has mercy on enemies who mean us harm? And how should we respond when God calls us to do the same? Like the book of Jonah itself, our conversation ends with an unresolved question. But what an urgent question it is.

This week we are reading one of the Bible’s most famous disputes with God – Abraham's insistence that God should have mercy on Sodom for the sake of its righteous, found in Genesis 18:16-33. Now, we love mercy as much as the next guy, but this time around we wrestled with the profound entanglement of the righteous and the wicked in this story. There is no discussion here about simply stopping the wickedness in one way or another, or even just eliminating the people perpetrating wickedness while leaving the righteous alone – they are all in it together. But if mercy in this case basically means ignoring the land’s outcry and letting the wickedness stand ... what does THAT mean for the innocent who continue to live there? In a modern society that so values individual autonomy, how do we think about the ways in which our fates are inextricably tied?  

This week we continue with our summer series “Disputing with God,” picking up where we left off last time with the story of the repair of the relationship between God and Israel after the incident of the Golden Calf, as told in Exodus 33:1–23 and 34:1–9. God is at first so angry about the Golden Calf that God seems to be finished with Israel, sending the messenger with them to the Promised Land but the divine presence remaining on Sinai lest God’s anger consume them. By the end, though, through the mediation Moses, God and Israel seem to accept one another as they are. The people confess they are stiff-necked, but God commits to being with them in spite of their shortcomings. Likewise, God reveals a divine Self that is anger as well as compassion, but nonetheless the people would rather stay in the wilderness with God than to enter the Promised Land alone. This relationship is messier than we might like, but God and the people remain together in the messiness, committed to a future together.

This week we’re reading the texts for Pentecost with Acts 2:1-21 and Philippians 4:4-7. We ponder the connections between Christian Pentecost and Jewish Shavuot, both commemorating the establishment of a new relationship with God following an act of dramatic liberation. We notice the democratization of the Holy Spirit in this text, which pours out on all people, so that everyone—young and old, male and female, rich and poor, of all languages and cultures—become prophets and visionaries of the kingdom of God. And we linger over the idea that the Spirit brings not only cataclysmic change to the world but also a deep peace that passes understanding, inviting us to engage the world with gentleness even as God’s kingdom is breaking into the world.

This week we are reading Philippians 2:1-13, which contain within them the beautiful Christ Hymn, and this passage made us think a lot about the role of community in any given person’s ability to live the kind of life Jesus is asking people to live. What does it really mean to be of one mind, in the way that Paul might mean it here? How can we really, actually, realistically fill our minds with concern for another, instead of attending to our own fear and pain and ego? Is it even possible to live the life Paul is talking about without a community of others trying to do the same?  Possible, maybe, but a lot harder.

This week we’re reading Philippians 1:1–18, in which the apostle Paul gives thanks to the church in Philippi for their friendship and ongoing support of his ministry. Paul writes this letter from prison where, predictably, Paul is not wallowing in self-pity but continues his mission, even converting the Praetorian Guard. We wrestle with Paul’s insistence that any proclamation of the Gospel is valuable, even if done for the wrong reasons. Has he really thought through the long-term implications of people preaching for selfish gain? Yet we find beauty in Paul’s instruction to live a life in which love and compassion lead to greater knowledge and understanding, producing righteousness on behalf of others. What a world that would be! Jesus won’t take the wheel. But maybe he could be our backseat driver?

This week we are reading Acts 17:16-34, a story of Paul biding his time in Athens and engaging with the beliefs and culture of the local people there. Though he’s upset by their use of idols, this distress doesn't lead our notoriously hotheaded Paul to smash any idols or overturn any tables – he goes instead to conversation with a wide range of people.  Is he being earnest or savvy in his way of speaking to the Athenians? What can this text teach us about interfaith dialogue – and when does it cross over from mutual curiosity and exchange to a careful kind of evangelism? Wherever you might draw that line, this is a master class in finding common ground and leaning into every shared foundation before naming the points of real difference and attempting to effect change in the other.