It’s a beautiful picture of what it means to be a child of God, and indeed, the Christian Church – sensitive to the needs of the world but open to the possibility of miracles. Standing in the gap. At this moment in history, as we daily grope our way through the mess and the suffering and the despair of the pandemic, we have a task – a noble calling. We are charged with standing in the gap – noticing and feeling the pain of this fractured and needy world, because we are a part of it. Its agony is our agony, it’s frustrations our frustrations. And yet we are more than that. We are ambassadors of God, mini bridges, channels of reconciliation, crying to God, along with Mary, “Lord, they have no wine.”

As I stand on the banks of American Christianity, and watch the river flow, I think I detect two baptisms, two gospels. The baptism of syrup and the baptism of mud. The gospel of sugar, the gospel of soil. The sanitized gospel, the earthy gospel. The synthetic life in God, the organic life.

The God of justice gets it. The God of suffering understands. He knows what it’s like to be us, and has taken decisive action in the life, death and resurrection of his Son to end the suffering of humankind.

Magnifying God? You can’t make the creator of the universe bigger – not in a literal sense. But I can make God bigger in my life. I can hold up my magnifying glass and make God bigger in my thinking, my words, my interactions. I can magnify God’s reputation and fame. We can hold up our magnifying glasses in our worship – drawing us to focus more intensely on God and allowing the warmth of God’s love to be intensified back to us like the rays of the sun to warm their hearts.

People come out to see John in the desert. He tells them to shape up and live right – and then he sends them back to their old lives. ‘Go home, do what you’ve been doing, but do it better, more ethically, more lovingly. Be a better person while you’re doing it – compassion, integrity, contentment.'

All Aboard! There's a Train Coming! by Rev. Duncan Johnston

We are suffering. We are in pain. We have experienced all kinds of loss. But our suffering is not a sign that evil and death have won. The signs do not reveal God’s powerlessness or our destruction. They do not show us that God’s plans have been thwarted or that goodness has lost. They do not predict that the madness of our world has triumphed. No. These frightening and cataclysmic events are signs that the Kingdom of God is close at hand.

Like most people, Pilate is not interested in theology. He doesn’t care about religious debates. He wants truth. THE Truth. He wants the solution to his own deep hunger, the healing of his sense of alienation, the stilling of his internal troubled waters that tell him that he is missing out on the purpose of his life. He’s searching for the thing he was created for. In that way, I’m Pilate’s brother. Pilate has put into words the question at the heart of the human story - What is Truth?

God the Dome, God the Castle, God the hazmat suit? Well, as thinking, realistic Christians we survey our lives, and we know that our experience of God does not match these images. We get sick. We die. We stagger under the burden of suffering. Christians are still killed for their faith. We are tired of the daily struggle, weary of the weekly routines, heartily sick of the cycle of alienation. At this point of the pandemic, many of us are feeling deskilled, disconnected, kind of lost. We’ve succumbed to financial strains, relationship pains, and emotional drains.

The clunk of the big coins, the ting of the small, and one more sound - how about the crack of our hearts? Because this word hurts. That impoverished woman drops her coins into the chest and a bomb into our chests. I hear her story, and I wonder how much I ever truly give. Because if I don't really notice that it's gone, if I am not feeling a personal loss when I give, then maybe I've not really begun. That widow challenges the custom of naming public buildings after big donors. Maybe we should not name the new wing of a hospital after a wealthy person who gave a million dollars to the appeal, but the senior citizen who gave 200. This word hurts. It rips the mask off the superheroes of giving and reveals them to be not the wealthy philanthropists, but the ordinary men and women who give proportionately more of their income to their churches or charitable causes. Yes, this word hurts.