Note: You can view this teaching on our YouTube Channel. Synopsis: Why does openness matter? If God is not open to an unknown future, then we have no true freedom as everything has been predetermined. We are stuck on a ride we didn’t choose and can never get off. People use phrases that are based in predestination to explain things, to bring comfort: when people die it’s their appointed time; when people meet and fall in love it was God’s will that they meet then and there; accidents, bad medical diagnoses, etc. are often met with this type of language. It does bring some level of comfort. When we feel out of control, such words can make us feel secure. “God is in control” brings a sigh of relief in the moment. For many, over the long haul of life, the phrase loses its power, and we don’t really live like it’s true with all our dreaming, planning, deciding, etc. Deconstructing this aspect of faith will allow a new component to be appreciated in the reconstruction processes which can result in a more meaningful, purposeful, impactful life. Are you a sun worshipper? Not the kind that refers to trying to get a tan, but in a religious sense, where you worship the sun as God. Why or why not? My guess is that you do not worship the sun as God because you are aware that the sun is a star and not a magical being that flies across the sky each day. This is related to the same reason why you don’t worship the moon. Yet sun worship was not uncommon in antiquity, when they simply watched as a massive orb watchfully visited them each day. More information and experience have freed us from such notions, which is a very good thing. This series on Open and Relational Theology based on Thomas Oord’s book by the same name is meant to introduce you to the life-changing ideas the subtitle suggests. New ideas usually haven’t surfaced because older ideas dominate. An older, conventional idea we will look at now is that of God as a being who does not change, and who also knows the future with great specificity. The two issues are quite related, because only a God who does not change can possibly know a future that is certain. If the future changes, that requires a change on God’s part. If God doesn’t change, neither can the future – it all must be known in advance. Some folks are very comfortable with this, especially when they go through major shifts in their lives like falling in love, having a child, the death of a loved one, etc. These are times when it can really feel like God is in control of every part of creation: all the timing had to work out to meet that someone special; more timing had to be right to get pregnant; and how many times have you heard that when a person dies, it was their time appointed by heaven? There is a certain level of security and comfort with this way of thinking. I wonder though, especially considering our moving into 2022, do you have any goals for the upcoming year? Notice I didn’t say resolutions – nobody imagines keeping those, right? But how about goals? We all do, whether we can articulate them or not. To wake up another day. To survive. To get ahead. To be healthier. To take care of some things we’ve been putting off. To successfully go to the bathroom every day. To wash your dishes and clothes as needed. Eat. Sleep. Binge some Netflix. Goals. Note that if everything is already written – a requirement of a future that God already knows – what’s the point of any of our dreams and plans? Some take this to heart and sort of give up on caring about the larger world around them and even some things close to home because they conclude that “what’s going to happen is going to happen.” This is a resignation to a worldview that sometimes feels accurate, and yet might not be as airtight as is popularly taught. There are verses in the Bible where God appears to be “quoted” as saying that God does not change (such statements coming from the pens of prophets and p

Note: You can view this teaching on our YouTube Channel. Monica was raped. Jimmy struggles with the threat of . Rochelle questions the relevance of prayer. Kyler and his husband, Gary, adopted baby girls and wonder what to teach them about God. Chad lost his wife, Jenny, to COVID-induced complications. I bet you really don’t need many more details about these stories to recognize that they represent very difficult questions about the character and nature of God. Many of the answers coming from conventional theology have left some people wanting and others walking away from faithful pursuits entirely. What questions have you struggled with? How many times have you had to play the mystery card, giving God a pass on tough questions? The reason I want to teach about Open and Relational Theology is because I think it could be extraordinarily helpful for your life. It has for mine. There are very big questions about life and God that conventional Christian theology struggles to answer satisfactorily, leaving many people feeling unsure about themselves and God and life. Our paradigms matter because they help us make sense of the world. How we see the world shapes our vision for everything. In the Church, sometimes certain questions have not been encouraged or even welcome, sometimes they are discouraged because the very question appears to imply doubt. A robust faith does not shy away from challenging questions, it runs toward them, not as enemies to be fought and conquered but as a new vista to behold. We can only play the mystery card for so long before we lose confidence in our faith. Another major reason why I want to teach this is because the way we see God and everything else deeply affects how we think about ourselves and our place in the world. There are some really valuable aspects of conventional theology which obviously resonate with a lot of people, and yet parts of it have also contributed to some of the most horrific acts of humanity ever committed, even with God’s “blessing.” If large-scale atrocities can be mitigated against with some new ways of thinking, this venture is worth it. Yet our individual lives can be deeply impacted as well. We human beings tend to create God in our image, and then return the favor. Parts of conventional theology may work to shape us into jerks more than Jesus. If that’s the case, change is worth looking into. Theology is not fixed. While there are some central themes about the character and nature of God in the Bible, there is no single, complete systematic theology offered in its pages. Theology – the study of God – has always been fluid, shaped by new discoveries, insights, and experiences over time. When popular models of theology are challenged, there is always a mixture of rejoicing and backlash. Jesus certainly experienced this as he offered new ways to think about God and life. When you feel a little anxious as certain tenets of comfortable theological are challenged, remember that such feelings are normal when new ideas are floated. And remember that the author and perfecter of the Christian faith, Jesus, chose to push the envelope, discovering and proclaiming a bigger God so that we could, too. Over the next several weeks we will examine some conventional ways of thinking and consider some new ways. The key components we will examine include the following:· Open. Our lives are not written. God does not know the specifics of the future. Everything may “happen for a reason”, but it’s not necessarily God’s will or something predetermined. The future is open and undetermined. It doesn’t imply a lack of interconnectedness – on the contrary, it respects and is dependent upon it. When we really believe that God is open, we become more empowered, not less. This is different than conventional views.· Relational. God is deeply engaged with all of creation because God is in all parts of creation. The relationship is a two-way

In the final teaching in this series, we ask the critical question related to all we've covered: so what? And a second critical question: now what?

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.Some problems take time to sort out, some issues take a while to resolve. If we are lifelong learners, we can be confident that as we come to grips with new information and as our perspective changes with maturity, we will forever be in process. The process seems to be one where we construct ways of thinking, eventually deconstruct them as necessary given new information and experience, and reconstruct our paradigms based on the process we’ve undergone. We enjoy our newly constructed schema for a while until – uh oh – we are introduced to new information and experiences that start the process all over again. This has been called “the perennial tradition” by Richard Rohr and others, and I think it’s accurate. My understanding of Jesus has gone through several rounds of this process. I am very familiar with the range of perspectives about Jesus – kind of important for a Christian pastor. Earlier in my life I simply accepted the birth narratives as literal fact. In time I heard about scholars who challenged the virgin birth, but I dismissed them because it seemed like they were challenging the authority of scripture as reliable and true, and therefore they were suspect and probably heretics as far as I was concerned. Over time and with more study, however, I began to understand the Bible differently – its own series of the perennial process – and had room to entertain the ideas I had previously rejected. We generally don’t have Eureka moments where we shift from one perspective immediately to another – major shifts take time because that level of change is very complex. Today I want to tell you how I understand Jesus this Christmas, knowing that in time this will change if I am open to new information and experience. Before I begin, I want to assure you of two things that I generally get questioned about: the Bible and Jesus. While I do not believe the Bible to be inerrant or infallible – these more modern concepts were foreign to Jesus and Paul and the entire rabbinical tradition and therefore should be challenged – I absolutely engage the Bible as sacred text. For Christians it remains our primary text to understand first the development of Judaism, and how the first followers of Jesus thought and lived so that we can think and live faithfully today. But because I don’t ascribe to the Fundamental/Evangelical doctrine of the Bible, I sometimes get dismissed as not teaching the Bible. I have been a pastor for over 26 years. I earned my doctorate studying the soteriology based on the Gospel of John. Between Sunday sermons, memorial services, weddings, and other special events, I have offered over 1500 original teachings, each averaging 16-20 hours of research and preparation. I don’t repeat a teaching. With literally only a handful of exceptions when I may have given a talk on another religious tradition, I have taught strictly from the Bible, even when offering a series that dovetails with a book. I am a Bible-teaching pastor. If anybody doubts it, they are welcome to view hundreds of hours of teachings on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel to try to prove me wrong. If you can do so, I will buy you an ice cream cone from McDonalds. As far as Jesus goes, I chose to follow in his footsteps at age 10, had a profound experience of the Holy Spirit at age 15 which amped up my relationship with God exponentially, sensed a call to become a pastor the summer before my Sophomore year of High School, had another dramatic experience of the Holy Spirit in college which further refined my faith and passion, and have remained an ordained pastor since July 23, 1995. My commitment to following the Way of Jesus has never been stronger or deeper. I will go to my grave proclaiming my faith even if that proclamation leads to the grave. I say these things because I do not agree with some classic views of Jesus that developed hundreds of years after his mi

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel. The backdrop of the Christmas story is despair. The few hundred years before Jesus was born was considered to be a time when God was silent. No new words from God spoken through prophets were being announced or published. The state of Israel suggested that God had left the building: foreign oppressors ruled over them in their own land, and their Temple was in ruins until a bit before Jesus was born. Even then, the Jewish tradition was tolerated more than celebrated. The recitation of psalms and prayers and sacrifices seemed to fall flat, words of exasperation falling on deaf ears. And yet it was a time when the desperation of people was rising to fever pitch. Some thought that God would act like God again (think Moses and the Exodus) if the people themselves would just show some faith and follow a leader courageous enough to sound a rallying cry. Many did rise, faith-claiming the role of messiah, the anointed one of God who would be God’s agent to bring about the restoration they hoped for. One by one those wannabe messiahs met their death at the hands of Rome. There was unrest. There was despair. There was crying out to God. There was silence. Where was God? Part of the brilliance of the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth are the inclusion of God showing up in surprising ways. An old, childless couple long past child-bearing years is told that they could expect a bun in the oven very soon, and they were to name the child John. In good male fashion, Zechariah offered solid “mansplaining” to the angel Gabriel, suggesting that this would be impossible due to their old age, and also that the kid would be named Zechariah, Jr.. Gabriel then did to Zechariah what women everywhere across all time have longed to do: he hit the mute button on Zech. Nine months of peace and quiet surely helped Elizabeth enjoy her pregnancy! Everybody wondered if God was up to something with them, and their suspicions were realized when, after the baby was born, Elizabeth named him John (to the shock of all), only to have Zechariah confirm it (at which point the mute button was turned off). God was not distant, inactive, or silent. God showed up. The birth narrative of Jesus is also incredible. Instead of a highly respected elderly couple unexpectedly becoming new parents, the story of Jesus’ beginning starts from the other end of the spectrum. Mary and Joseph are dirt poor. They are engaged – likely a marriage arranged for some time – but aren’t together yet until Joseph can provide for her. That could take a while since Joseph is a carpenter – not a high paying job, not much respect. Their engagement was legally binding even if they weren’t allowed to consummate the marriage. This is where the scandal comes in. Mary is visited by Gabriel and told that she is going to get pregnant via the Holy Spirit – that her coming pregnancy would be anointed by God somehow – and that the child she would bear would be the messiah of God. She visits her relative Elizabeth – now six months pregnant – and Elizabeth confirms that Mary must be telling the truth since baby John did a lot of kicking as soon as Mary showed up. Or was it the spicy tacos she just ate? Of course, getting pregnant out of wedlock – and not from your fiancé – is generally not ideal and caused a lot of problems with Joseph, their families, and their neighbors. Who would believe such a thing? One thing Mary (and eventually Joseph) learned was that God was not distant, but near. God was not silent but speaking. God was not inactive, but deeply involved. The night of Jesus’ birth, another set of undervalued people received a heavenly birth announcement. Sometime later, astrologers from a distant land noticed a star that communicated to them that a new king was born and made the very long journey to pay homage. The graveyard-shift shepherds under the stars that night foun

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.How many Christmases have you lived through? How has the meaning of Christmas changed for you over the course of your life? As we enter into another season of Advent (the waiting and anticipating of the birth of Jesus), what does it mean to you? Sometimes we get locked into a particular way of thinking about things. That’s not a bad thing. We need to know where our firm places are to stand. When we land on what feels like good footing, we feel stable, confident, and able to build. The problem sometimes comes when we don’t allow ourselves to wonder if there are other footings that may help us build in other ways. Building on images of God for our spirituality and theology is wonderfully human and good. This is called the kataphatic tradition. Sometimes we get so limited by the images of God that we come to realize that no image is adequate, and we resort to not welcoming any images since they will be immediately limiting. This is called the apophatic tradition. These two traditions work together, of course, since they are opposites of one another. The question is, how are you employing each tradition this Christmas season? What images add to the richness of this time? What images have you chosen to not employ as much? How has the apophatic side allowed you to embrace more mystery in this season? Before we jump into the full Christmas story, I think it wise to spend some time determining where we’re “at”. I know for fact that we are much less able to learn anything new until we identify what we know. I hope this season will be wonderfully stretchy for you, which is a deeply embedded yet often neglected aspect of our faith tradition. There is more to learn, more to imagine, more to write – this is a key part of the biblical tradition. The biblical narrative which includes the formation of the Jewish people all the way through Jesus and the early days of the church gives witness to the evolution of thought over many centuries. The collective people of faith are still evolving. Are you? Are we? Let the Advent-ure continue...

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.This Thanksgiving, I offer three resources for you that I hope will help you experience a deeper, more reflective, and theologically rich time of gratitude. Reading one or both of the writings below might be a great addition to include during your dinner. And I hope this video featuring scholar and writer Diana Butler Bass will help you rethink what gratitude is really all about for you this season. Or, if you’re coming unglued, maybe this video will help. – Pete A Brief Theology of ThanksgivingThe SALTProject.org Team I. Origins With apologies to the Pilgrims, the origins of the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States are more complicated than most people think. Was the first Thanksgiving meal in present-day Massachusetts, complete with buckled, wide-brimmed hats, in 1621? Or was it an English celebration (different hats!) on the shores of Virginia, in 1619? Or how about a Spanish gathering in what became Texas, in 1598 — or Florida, in 1565? The reasons for those celebrations varied, of course. The English colonists in Virginia, for example, declared the day a commemoration of their arrival, thanking God for safe passage across a forbidding ocean; likewise, the Spanish explorers thanked God for survival. On the other hand, after a 1637 massacre of Native Americans, the governor of Plymouth wrote that Thanksgiving Days would be “in honor of the bloody victory.” In 1789, President George Washington declared a national Day of Thanksgiving to thank God for the birth of a new nation. And the current annual date in late November — which is far too late, after all, for a “harvest festival” in New England! — wasn’t established until Abraham Lincoln’s declaration in 1863, explicitly giving thanks for the Union’s military efforts in the Civil War.II. Thanksgiving Today. So the holiday we inherit is a complex, morally ambivalent amalgam of different kinds of gratitude: for good harvest, for safe passage, for colonial conquest, for military victory. All of which only sharpens the question, How will we celebrate Thanksgiving today?Remembering this history of immigration and cross-cultural connection and conflict, we may give thanks for the dazzling diversity of this land, including and especially Native American communities. Giving thanks in this way, our gratitude can spur us to reach out and work together to create a more just and equitable world. Likewise, remembering the holiday’s links to war, we may give thanks for times of peace: in our hearts, homes, neighborhoods, and between nations. Remembering the holiday’s links to creation, we may give thanks for that nourishing abundance. Here, too, our gratitude can serve as inspiration to redouble our efforts to be genuine peacemakers, serve the hungry in our neighborhoods, and care for God’s good Earth, all creatures great and small.III. The Difference Gratitude Makes But there’s perhaps no better day than Thanksgiving to reflect on the astounding power of gratitude itself — and accordingly, to commit ourselves to cultivating it more intentionally in the coming year. If we think of “gratitude” primarily as a kind of duty to discharge (Now remember to write that thank-you note!), we’re missing the boat entirely, effectively reducing one of life’s wonders to mere good manners. On the contrary, gratitude is vital force in the world, a profoundly dignifying act that builds relationships, communities, and healthy human hearts.The science on this subject is overwhelming: in study after study, gratitude has been shown to lead to stronger relationships, better sleep, lower blood pressure, fewer trips to the doctor, fewer depressive symptoms, more patience, and more perseverance, among other benefits (check out these study summaries here and here). In one particularly intriguing study, gratitude turns out to be a powerful antidote to the “Headwinds/Tailwinds Asymmetry,” our all-too-common

In this session from An Interesting Conference on Sexuality hosted by Jonathon Foster along with Tom Oord, we hear from Elaine Padilla, an author and a professor of Philosophy and Religion, Latinx/Latin American Studies at LaVerne University. She's super interesting and I love what she talks about in her video. I will not soon forget the phrase she uses here, "the immodesty of love." Find some of Elaine's scholarly work at researchgate.net/profile/Elaine-Padilla.

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.When blindness strikes someone after they once had sight, they forget what they once saw. The images once stored leave their memory. Everything fades to black. Physically, the brain forgets how to see as well. If sight is ever regained after being lost for a long time, it takes a very long time – years – for the brain to relearn how to see. Blind Bartimaeus got two miracles that day when he encountered Jesus. His vision was restored – his eyes worked again – and his brain immediately was able to meaningfully process the information it was receiving. Something that should have taken a long time took just a moment. Jesus struggled with blindness. We are not completely certain how long the process of regaining his sight took, but we can imagine that it took years – the long period of time leading up to his public ministry and beyond. We don’t have any reason to believe that his physical eyesight had ever been lost, but I am confident that he was very aware of the cultural blinders that he very naturally acquired as a man born into the context in which he lived. This sort of blindness is very much related to the blindness we struggle with in our own time. It is a coming to awareness that our lenses have been very much affected by influences beyond our control and choice to see the world and everything in it in a particular way. While we sometimes have moments when it feels like the veil has been removed, we later discover that it was just one veil of many that has impacted our ability to see clearly. As we’ve noted before, the crowd in the story likely acted just like crowds do today with those who are blind. They treated the blind as if they were dumb. They communicated in different ways that those who were blind were a burden on society, which shamed them. And they communicated to those who were blind that surely their affliction was an indication of God’s wrath for something they did. Note: similar attitudes and behaviors were held toward people who struggle with other afflictions: leprosy, paralysis, Gentile heritage, being female, being gender binary, being poor, as well as some afflictions of choice such as occupation (prostitutes and tax collectors come to mind). Overall, the culture Jesus was born into viewed all these people as “less than”. To varying degrees, the “less than” attitude served to dehumanize these others, which then allowed the culture to treat them as less than equal human beings. Their cultural lens shaped their vision to perpetually treat the “other” inhumanely. Jesus ventured into non-Jewish territory a little, but mostly he lived his life around the region of the Sea of Galilee, which was not the center of the Jewish or Roman universe. He spent most of his time with Jewish people who thought just like the folks of Jericho. We know that Jesus was able to recognize his cultural blindness because of what he did, what he taught, and the feedback he received. He was considered radical because he treated the “others” as human beings instead of the labels the culture placed on them. He didn’t simply publish books or articles or podcasts or YouTube videos or TED Talks about it – he actually lived according to his new way of seeing, with less and less of the cultural blinders that restricted him. He took a lot of heat at times. He was schooled by a non-Jewish woman asking for help for her daughter – can you imagine Jesus’ blinders being called out by a foreign woman, and he accepted it?! Remarkable! Religious leaders and the general public were stunned by his choosing to be with – up close and personal – all the “others” who had been dehumanized by the majority. He treated them as human beings. There was a first time for all of these gracious moves closer to those who had been ostracized. Especially the first few times, it had to be tough to swim upstream, to go against the crowd, to choose to see

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.In this session from An Interesting Conference on Sexuality hosted by Jonathon Foster along with Tom Oord, we will hear from James Alison, a Catholic theologian, priest and author, and one of the foremost Girardians (Rene Girard) in the world. James shares his thoughts here about how Jesus chose to occupy the place of those who've been cast out. The thought should not have been lost on us that it's the LGTBQ+ crowd who have been cast out by so many over the years. Find out more about James at jamesalison.com