Day1 Weekly Podcast

The Ten Commandments are strategies for staying emancipated once you get away from Pharaoh. This new strategy, first of all, says you have to honor God - that's the first three commandments - to the exclusion of every idol, every "ism" such as racism, or sexism, or nationalism, or the worship of stuff that is rare or precious or attractive or beautiful or empowering. The new strategy means in the Ten Commandments to take the neighbor with utmost seriousness. So, the last five commandments are all about the neighbor and treating neighbors with legitimacy and dignity and viability and especially disadvantaged neighbors - not to violate the neighbor for the sake of greed.

Of course, Jesus (as he so often does) shattered my self-centered ambitions and expectations with…well, with the words he says in these verses to the crowd after calling Peter, Satan, for rebuking him. He said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Wait! If I want to be a follower of Jesus, a Christian, I have to *deny* myself…lose my life? Does Jesus mean I’ll have to be willing to die? I thought I just had to agree to a few fundamental bullet points, pray this prayer about confessing my sins, repenting, and accepting Jesus into my heart. I thought I was supposed to get baptized (all the way under, you know, the right way), come to church most Sundays, read my Bible, drink sweet tea instead of Bud Light, and stay out of trouble. I thought all I had to do to be a Christian, to get into heaven, was simple, but now – now, Jesus tells me I have to...

I invite you to think of the ways and places that you are tempted – tempted by Satan to ignore God’s love in your heart, God’s call on your life – and to recognize that God stands ready in those places of temptation to be with you. That when we are not strong enough to withstand temptation, God says, “I am here. Turn to me. Cry to me. Pray to me and I will give you the strength, the humility you need to face temptation.” I like to think of wilderness time as fallow time, from the time when our societies were agricultural and we would leave a field after it had been harvested for a year or so to recover and leave it fallow so that it could rest, it could receive the blessing of rain and of God’s nature. And I like to think of us as fields that sometimes need that fallow time, that wilderness time.

Sometimes we take ourselves too seriously, and that’s always to our detriment, failing to see the humorous parts of our own lives. And if we cannot laugh at ourselves from time to time, our lives become shallow and painful. Other times, however, we fail to see the tragic aspects of our lives. I knew a man who was a textbook workaholic. He spent ten hours a day, five days a week, on the job and often went back in on weekends. He rarely spent quality time with his wife or kids, almost never seeing his children’s ballet recitals or little league ball games. The man said to me following his divorce, “I never realized how much time I was absent from them until they decided to be permanently absent from me.” “Oh, would some Power the gift give us to see ourselves as others see us!”

Today Paul invites us to find Jesus again. Paul’s argument for the incarnation is that we too become human, we sympathize with the doubter, we contemplate with the questioner, we listen deeply to the needs of our unhoused brother and we cry and spend time with our single mother sister. We make dramatic and fun plans with the seven-year-old lemonade entrepreneur and help him understand economics and the way of Jesus. We take the time to learn another language and culture. We read the story of someone whose life has been different than our own. We get involved in a life that is not our own. We get lost in the life, the worries, the hopes and the dreams of others, knowing that it is there that together we will all find Jesus again.

What has power over you? Not all power is equal. Power can be negative. It can motivate poorly. It can come from places that are self-serving. We all know of people and things that have power over us, that aren’t beneficial. The power of physical illness, as in the case of this little boy. The power of an unkind word. The power of fear. The power of insecurity. We all know these powers. Power can be adverse. In our gospel text, we read about power that is adverse...

Audre Lorde reminds us that anger does not destroy; hate does. Anger provides energy so we may engage in analysis and protest, survival and justice. In today’s text Jonah marches through the city proclaiming repentance. Could it be that Jonah stands in a long prophetic tradition? That anger, when it is not rage but righteousness, can be a creative harness to declare a vision of what God intends for the world. That God’s call to the most unlikely of places is both for our transformation and the transformation of the world. God often uses those on the margins to speak truth to power. God has sent Jonah right into the midst of the empire to declare a word from the Lord. God has used prophets throughout history to speak God’s words of truth in the midst of

New Testament scholar Gail O’Day observes that there is a connection between the identity of Jesus and how you understand that and the meaning of your discipleship. She writes, “The decision to be a disciple is inseparable from the decision that one makes about Jesus’ identity.” Now, listen to that again. I want you to think about your own life. The decision to be a disciple is inseparable from the decision one makes about Jesus’s identity. In other words, your discipleship will depend in many ways on how you understand Jesus. Who you believe Jesus to be, how you see his role and his function, dramatically impacts your life...

Do we even remember there is a Spirit of God aside from our reciting our creeds? “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.” “I believe in the Holy Ghost…” Do we? Do we even remember the Spirit of God beyond the creed? And if so, I argue we often tend to forget that the Spirit of God is more than a line in our credal statements and more than a line in our end-of-worship benedictions. We tend to forget that the Spirit of God is, to put it bluntly…very disruptive. Incredibly disruptive!

It’s still Christmas, my friends, and we are in a season of singing songs. At this point, I wonder how many times you’ve heard Nat King Cole singing, “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” or maybe a little Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Or perhaps, the one and only always and forever, Amy Grant…”Breath of Heaven, Hold Me Together, Be Forever near Me”…. Perhaps at this point, though, you’re kind of sick of those songs.