True knowledge of God is always proportional to our willingness to live faithfully as witnesses of God’s faithfulness to us.

True belief is never an end in itself. We concern ourselves with believing the right things not so we can have the satisfaction of being right but so that our actions will be rightly directed.

Actually living what we know and what we say we believe is the real point.

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God comes to us and says, 'There are some folks who need my love and compassion. I want you to go to them. I want you to love them for me.'

'Which folks?'

'All my children. You know who I’m talking about, the ones no respectable church wants. The ones who’ve been systematically told they’re not welcome. The ones who don’t have anybody to speak up for them. Don’t talk right. Don’t dress right. Don’t have the right kind of money. Don’t live in the right part of town. Don’t love the right person. Don’t have the right skin color. I want you to go to them.'

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So, when Jesus arrived on the scene, Palestine was desperate for another messiah, a hero, someone to rally the oppressed locals to finally kick the Roman interlopers out of Palestine. They needed, in short, a messiah acquainted with the business end of a sword.

I suspect you can imagine that when Jesus starts talking about humiliation and death as his vision of messiahship, how it is that so many people completely fail to hear him. They didn’t quite get it.

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Jesus says, “Here’s what my glory looks like: Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever wants to catch on with my band of merry souls can look forward to the same kind of ‘glory’ with which I’m about to be ‘glorified.’”

And you can hear the wheels spinning in the Greeks’ minds: “What kind of glory is he talking about? Seeds falling to earth and dying? What does that mean? We know what glory looks like, and frankly, it doesn’t look like dead seeds. So, what’s he talking about?”

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Have you noticed how many people think the table is too big—that we’ve got no business telling everybody they’re welcome?

They say, “Well, of course, everyone’s welcome ... just as soon as they get their beliefs straightened out”—which, translated, generally means: “just as soon as they promise to believe all the things we believe, to hate all the things we hate, and to exclude all the people we exclude.”

I’m not quite sure how to put this, but no matter how systematic your theology is, that’s not Jesus. And this is what I think Jesus is getting at when he starts talking about those who hate the light, who love darkness because their deeds are evil.

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Many people believe that God is to be found at the “temple.” So, they spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how to help people find their way through the doors that they’ve been told for so long is the place where they can meet God.

But since so many people don’t believe religion has much impact on their lives, it’s hard to justify taking prime time out of a weekend to go to church. For people struggling to live faithfully, perhaps the focus should be on where God is moving outside the church's walls, away from the giant stable system that seems so comfortable and inevitable.

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Wayward children. Problem spouses. Overbearing parents. Demanding bosses. Arthritis. The heartbreak of Psoriasis. Male-pattern baldness. All of these and more serious things that bring suffering are commonly referred to as “crosses to bear.”

But that’s not right, is it? Jesus isn’t talking about the cross-as-symbol-of-just-any-garden-variety suffering. He’s talking about the death-dealing power of the state to impose its will on anyone with enough courage or enough gullibility to question it.

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With the uncertainty Jesus has just laid out for them about picking up their crosses and dying as enemies of the state, Peter sees the ancient Near Eastern version of the Justice League all wearing their technicolor dream coats, and he says, “You know, all things considered, this seems like a swell place to be. Why don’t we pitch a few tents and stay right here?

I totally get why the disciples would rather just watch Jeopardy than head down that mountain into an untenable political environment that would soon cost Jesus everything.

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But if Jesus’ mission is about healing, about re-establishing the dignity and purpose of others, of helping them to find a place that’s safe and affirming—then, perhaps, we who are his followers ought to follow suit.

Perhaps we should be less concerned with doing what everyone else thinks churches ought to do and worry more about doing what Jesus calls us to do—to make a place in the world for those who have no place.

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Why? Because Jesus speaks as one with authority—a new kind of authority; he speaks the truth … always.

Jesus is, according to this definition, a faithful jihadist who squares off against the powers that preserve injustice by privileging certain classes of "worthy" people, giving them access—while excluding the powerless and the disadvantaged.

And we who are trying to follow him don't get to excuse ourselves from the messiness. We don't get to stand by silently while some folks get kicked to the back of the bus, or dragged kicking and screaming back across the border, or singled out for the bathrooms they use. We have our own tyrants before whom we need to speak.