Jesus, Justice + Mercy: Bold faith, radical love and justice for the church

Depending on your translation, this Hebrew word shows up as "stranger," "sojourner," "alien," "foreigner," or "immigrant," and none of those words are neutral anymore. This week, we dig into ger, the word Torah uses more than any other command in the whole book to describe the person living among you without the built-in rights of a citizen, and then systematically gives that same person nearly every one of those rights anyway. Same Passover, same tithe, same cities of refuge, even a place in Ezekiel's vision of the restored land. We trace it from Deuteronomy all the way to Ephesians 2:19, where Paul tells a Gentile church they're no longer strangers and aliens but fellow citizens, the exact same move, centuries later, now called gospel.

Scriptures referenced:

·       Deuteronomy 31:12

·       Deuteronomy 28

·       Leviticus 19:34

·       Numbers 35:15

·       Ezekiel 47:21–23

·       Ephesians 2:19

Archive callbacks:

·       Season 1, Ep 12 | Embracing the Other: Faith, justice, and immigration in America

·       Season 2, Ep 3 | Jesus Isn't Triggered by Justice, but We Might Be

Theology Unleashed is a summer series of short Greek and Hebrew word studies from Jesus, Justice + Mercy. Justice-rooted, seminary-informed, and considerably less scripted than usual. Dogs present.

See the full series at kristenabrock.com/theology-unleashed

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
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• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

We use "shalom" as a Hebrew hello and goodbye, and mostly leave it there. But this word carries way more weight than a greeting. In Hebrew, shalom describes a state where nothing is missing, broken, or lacking; it shares a root with the word for paying a debt in full. To bring shalom means to restore what's broken back to completeness. You don't just have it. You make it.

This week we trace shalom from the priestly blessing in Numbers 6, through Jeremiah calling out false prophets for declaring "peace, peace" over a wound that was never actually healed, into the Greek word eirene and Isaiah's "Prince of Peace" title, which in Hebrew is Prince of Shalom, not a conqueror, but the one who restores what's missing. And we get honest about how often "keep the peace" language gets used in churches to silence the people naming real harm, around gender, sexuality, and race alike.

Theology Unleashed is a summer series of short Greek and Hebrew word studies from Jesus, Justice + Mercy. Justice-rooted, seminary-informed, and considerably less scripted than usual. Dogs present.

See the full series at kristenabrock.com/theology-unleashed

Related episodes mentioned:

• S2 E24 | The Advent of Justice: Peace that Disarms
• S3 E8 | Starting in the Rubble: Reconciliation That Holds
• S3 E13 | He Knows Your Name: A Resurrection for the Scarred, the Shut Out, and the Still Waiting
• S3 E17 | No Casseroles Required

Scripture Mentioned 

1. Judges 6 — the angel's greeting to Gideon (shalom used as a greeting)
2. Leviticus 25 — sabbath rest for the land
3. Numbers 6 — the priestly blessing ("The Lord bless you and keep you...")
4. Jeremiah 6:14 — "Peace, peace... but there is no peace" 
5. Isaiah 9:6 — "Prince of Peace" title 

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Hesed: Not Kindness. Stubborn Covenant Love.

Your Bible probably says kindness. Or mercy. Or lovingkindness. None of them quite get there.

Hesed is the Hebrew word that shows up roughly 250 times in the Old Testament, and no single English translation has ever fully captured it. It's not a feeling that might produce a kind act. It's covenant loyalty in motion: the love that doesn't quit even when people blow it, the willingness to show up for the weaker party, not because you feel like it but because the covenant holds.

This week, we use the Book of Ruth as our classroom where hesed appears exactly three times, at the beginning, middle, and end, and turns out to be the entire arc of a story most of us were taught to read as a romance or a waiting story. We also trace how hesed crosses into the New Testament through the Greek words agapē and eleos, and why Methodist pastor Lisa Barker's piece "Tired of Being Nice" gets at exactly what's at stake when the church settles for niceness rather than covenant love.

Key texts: Ruth 1:8, 2:20, 3:10. Micah 6:8. Matthew 9:13 / Hosea 6:6.

Related episodes: 

Season 1 Episode 8 | Justice Embodied: Mercy Matters with Luke's Gospel. 

Season 3 Episode 10 | Back Porch Mercy: What Faithful Looks Like on a Tuesday.

Lisa Barker, "Tired of Being Nice"

Theology Unleashed is a summer series of short Greek and Hebrew word studies from Jesus, Justice + Mercy. Justice-rooted, seminary-informed, and considerably less scripted than usual. Dogs present.

See the full series at kristenabrock.com/theology-unleashed

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Mishpat. Your Bible probably calls it judgment, and that translation isn't wrong; it's just incomplete. In Hebrew, mishpat comes from the root shafat, meaning "to judge, to govern, to set right." It appears over 400 times in the Old Testament, and throughout Torah and the Prophets, the verdict it describes lands in favor of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the one with no leverage to make their case heard.

This week, we look at what gets lost when judgment drowns out justice: why even our language for vulnerable people comes loaded with suspicion, how "hate the sin, love the sinner" borrows the form of judgment while skipping everything mishpat actually demands, and what it looks like when the church hands down verdicts on LGBTQ people and women preachers while insisting it isn't judging anyone. That's mishpat running backward, and we can do better.

Key references: Exodus 21:1 - 24:18, Exodus 23:6, Deuteronomy 24:17, Isaiah 1:17, Psalm 82:3, Amos 5:24, Matthew 23:23, Micah 6:8, 

Episodes related to this episode:

• S1 E3: Church, Race, and Justice: 3 Words Nobody Wants in the Same Sentence
• S2 E20: Weapons Down: What God Requires for a Faith at War with Itself
• S3 E8: Starting in the Rubble: Reconciliation That Holds
• S3 E10: Back Porch Mercy: What Faithful Looks Like on a Tuesday

Theology Unleashed is a summer series of short Greek and Hebrew word studies from Jesus, Justice + Mercy. Justice-rooted, seminary-informed, and considerably less scripted than usual. Dogs present.

See the full series at kristenabrock.com/theology-unleashed

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Your Bible has been quietly mistranslating a word that shows up over 150 times, and the gap has shaped centuries of Christian formation. This week: tzedakah. Usually translated as "righteousness." Almost always meant something closer to justice.

We trace it from the Hebrew prophets through to the Greek New Testament, where tzedakah becomes dikaiosynē, the same word your English Bible renders "righteousness" 92 times. Same gap, just one language removed. Along the way: Micah 6:8, Amos 5:24, MLK's "I Have a Dream," and why "blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness" means something different than you were taught.

Theology Unleashed is a summer series of short Greek and Hebrew word studies from Jesus, Justice + Mercy. Justice-rooted, seminary-informed, and considerably less scripted than usual. Dogs present.

See the full series at kristenabrock.com/theology-unleashed

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

I missed last week. Here's why. We lost one of our cats, and grief doesn't keep a production schedule. But there's more. After two years of this work, I find myself worn out, and I've been sitting with that honestly.

So today I'm giving you a word: Shabbat. Not as a self-care buzzword but as a theological practice, commanded, ancient, and countercultural. And its companion, nuakh, the Hebrew word for dwelling, settling, being present. Together, they're my invitation for this season.

I'll be back with Theology Unleashed, a new series of short Greek and Hebrew word studies starting with tzedakah. And despite what the men of the SBC would prefer, I may not be as quiet this summer as I planned. This is not the time for women with voices to go silent.

69 episodes in the archive. Start at Season 1 if you're new. Jesus. Justice. No apologies.

Want to see what's coming this fall? 

Check out www.kristenabrock.com/theology-unleashed

Episode mentioned: Pulpit Fiction: The Women They Renamed, Silenced, and Forgot 

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Pentecost and social justice belong in the same sentence, and this Season 3 finale makes the case that they always have.

This episode goes back to the room before the wind came. The locked room. Full of frightened, grieving, failing people. And that is exactly where Jesus starts.

Two Pentecost accounts belong together. Acts 2 is the outer Pentecost: loud, public, multilingual. But Joel's prophecy is a social inversion, sons and daughters, old and young, servants and free. The crowd in the street is itself a justice statement: colonized people hearing the gospel in their own languages, not Rome's. And the multilingual miracle is the reversal of Babel, not uniformity, but the many held together without erasing each other.

John 20 is the inner Pentecost: intimate, quiet, a locked room. Jesus walks through the locked door, shows his wounds, and breathes on them. The Greek emphysaō appears only once elsewhere, in Genesis 2, when God breathes life into the first human. New creation, in the dark, with people who ran.

Romans 8 tells us the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in us and intercedes with groans when we can't find words. That resurrection power is available now.

Spirit-fueled faith is not a feeling. It is a direction. This is the Season 3 send-off.

Scripture References:

·      John 20:19–23 

·      Acts 2:1–21 

·      Acts 4:32–35 

·      Joel 2:28–29 

·      Genesis 2:7 

·      Genesis 11:1–9 

·      Ezekiel 37:1–5 

·      Romans 8:26–27 

·      Philippians 2:6–8

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Mental health in the church is one of the most underprepared gaps in the Christian community, and for families in crisis, that gap has real consequences.

This episode is personal. Kristen reads a piece of writing kept private for years, a story about her son, suicidal ideation, and a 5150. After reading it aloud, she pauses to name what her body still carries: not just memory, but PTSD. The hypervigilance doesn't turn off when the crisis passes.

From there: a direct theological reckoning with what the church typically offers families in mental health crisis, and why it causes harm even when it means well. The anti-medication strain in evangelical culture has cost people their lives. The brain is an organ. Bipolar disorder is not a faith failure.

The church's silence around suicide compounds the harm, isolating families, layering shame on the unbearable, leaving the bereaved without a community equipped to hold their grief.

Scripture offers more. Psalm 88 closes in darkness without turning toward hope, and that's canon. Jesus was on his way to perform his first resurrection miracle when he stopped for the woman with the issue of blood. Turned. Made her visible. Called her daughter. The resurrection could wait. She could not.

Mental health in the church is also a justice issue; kids from trauma backgrounds, BIPOC families, and lower-income communities bear the highest cost of the church's unpreparedness.

The close lands in Ezekiel 37. God doesn't ask the dry bones to reassemble before entering the valley. God enters first.

Mental Health Awareness Month is not a secular intrusion into sacred space. It is an invitation to recover something the church was always supposed to be.

Content note: This episode discusses suicide and mental health crises. The 988 Lifeline is available by call or text, anytime.

RELATED EPISODES

• Season 1 Episode 14, Beyond the System: A Journey of Love, Loss, Healing and Faith (ACEs and childhood trauma)
• Season 1 Episode 16, Bearing Witness: Navigating Mental Health and Miracles (original telling of this story)
• Season 3 Episode 5, The Cost of Staying Awake: How Long, O Lord? (lament theology and Psalm 88)
• Season 3 Episode 14 Everyday Prophets: You Can't Heal What You Won't Name with Conscious Coore(trauma-informed spiritual care)
• Season 3 Episode 8, Starting in the Rubble: Reconciliation That Holds (repair before reconciliation)

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Women in church leadership is not a new idea; it's a biblical one. The record is full of women leading, prophesying, teaching, and apostling. The church just worked very hard to make you forget them.

In this episode, we go directly into the text: Deborah, judge and military commander. Huldah, the prophet, the king sent his priests to. Junia, the apostle whose name was changed to erase her. Phoebe, the minister, and leader Paul celebrated. Mary, whose Magnificat is not a lullaby, it's a liberation text.

We also address the passages used to silence women, 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, and read them in their full context. We take on the teaching vs. preaching distinction, the complementarianism vs. egalitarianism debate, and the theological architecture of patriarchy from Genesis to Galatians.

And we ask: what has the church lost by silencing women's voices? We spend time with Pauli Murray, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, women who prophesied to the church even when it wouldn't let them in the door.

This is a longer episode. Theologically heavy. Worth every minute.

This episode covers:

• The biblical record of women as leaders, prophets, apostles, and theologians
• 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 in full context
• The teaching vs. preaching distinction, where it came from, and why it doesn't hold
• Patriarchy as a consequence of the fall, not God's design
• The cost of silencing women theologically, pastorally, and prophetically
• Pauli Murray, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Lou Hamer
• What Re-Imagining the church looks like when women lead

Episodes referenced: Ep. 17 (Mary Magdalene), Ep. 10 (Fannie Lou Hamer), Ep. 4 (Black theology), Ep. 6 (White Christian nationalism)

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Grief doesn’t arrive alone. It brings everything you’ve ever lost with it. And the church has rarely known what to do with that.

 In this episode, we sit with the women of Scripture who grieved loudly, honestly, and without apology, and ask what they knew that the church has largely forgotten.

 The Women We Cover:

•  Naomi | who insisted on an honest name for her pain and refused to perform wellness

•  Rachel | whose grief was so vast God responded to it with promise

•  Rizpah | whose months-long vigil over her sons’ bodies forced a king to act

•  Martha, Mary & Mary Magdalene | who brought their grief directly to Jesus and found he entered it rather than bypassed it

•  Hannah | whose desperate, silent prayer was mistaken for drunkenness by the priest in front of her

We also talk about what happens when grief goes underground, why the impulse to fast-forward through pain causes real harm, and how to hold devastating loss alongside a God who is supposed to be good.

This episode isn’t about getting over grief. It’s about what happens when we grieve anyway.

 Scripture References:

Ruth 1 · Jeremiah 31:15-17 · 2 Samuel 21:10-14 · John 11 · 1 Samuel 1:9-18 · Psalm 13 · Psalm 22 · Psalm 77 · Psalm 88 · Psalm 23

 Resources:

Grief support with Dr. Quanny Ard

Mother’s Day reflection | We See You: 

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start? 
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com