The authoritative voice one may learn to discern in Scripture is often drowned out by the sheer abundance and volume of other voices. But it hasn’t gone silent. Jesus’ voice always does the same thing: clears some things up; unsettles others. If you pay attention, Jesus’ voice, interpreting Scripture, wakes you up.

God, viewed cross-wise, reveals God’s self not as relating to the world in dominating power, but rather as a God become present to the world in weakness, in vulnerability, in sharing the all-too-familiar status of victim.

Praying the Great Thanksgiving at Communion led me, over time, to reflect more deeply about eschatology, about which seminarians learn a little and then try to forget lest they be mistaken for fanatics!

“In scripture’s images of a heavenly banquet, we are led to a big-picture redemption, a cosmic resurrection, a transfiguration of heaven and earth, where God’s expansive generosity will be realized in the reign of Christ, whose embrace reaches to me and mine, but not only to me and mine!”

Adam and Eve did what’s so easy to do: They followed their impulses, naively abandoned their trust as though trust were just a trick meant to deceive them. So, they reached out for that one off-limits thing that would prove to be, sooner or later, a terrible blend of heaven and hell.

“It does not take much exposure to religious extremism to find oneself sufficiently repelled as to want to distance ourselves, to shake the dust off our feet, to stalk off and leave it all to those Christians who seem to have kidnapped the God we thought we knew.”   

“I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” says Jesus. 
 
The Holy Spirit speaks to the church; and we find ourselves rejecting some ideas that seemed like sure-enough certainties for centuries. The divine right of kings, trashed. Slavery, discarded; race-based privilege no longer credible. Male domination, rejected. Caste systems, overruled. Disdain for those who don’t fit prevailing patterns of masculinity or femininity, getting over it.

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Rom 7:15b, 19)

“Growing up is, very often at least, a series of disenchantments.” As childhood gives way to adolescence, and adolescence to young adulthood, we’ve got to figure out what to do with that early naiveté. 

It’s easy to critique other tribes, other nations; but the prophets did what wasn’t expected and isn’t easy.