4 September 2026 - while the bridegroom is with them

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

“The disciples of John the Baptist fast often and offer prayers,
and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same;
but yours eat and drink.”

The disciples of Jesus didn't fit the mold of people who took religion seriously in his own day. They didn't do what others did, even though it was considered table stakes. They did what others did not, even though it was superficially somewhat scandalous. So too today, if Christians don't appear to others as they would expect, that is to be expected. Christians follow an internal logic that cannot be discerned merely from the order of the universe, human nature, or previous divine revelations. They live based on their relationship with the bridegroom.

Jesus answered them, “Can you make the wedding guests fast
while the bridegroom is with them?
But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
then they will fast in those days.”

When the world mourns Christians may well manifest an annoying aloof sense of joy. Those in the world see this as irresponsible, as though attending to one's duties in the world means treating it as an absolute good, which must be grieved whenever its inherent imperfections manifest. In the face of war, suffering, sickness, and death, Christians maintain an invincible hope and confidence in the Lord. This joy does not make them useless or incompetent to respond to those in material need. Rather, it allows them to be clearheaded enough to do so. But Christians often mourn the things the world celebrates, such as power, violence, sensuality, and celebrity. They are saddened by anything which might compromise the immortal soul for the sake of temporary benefits. This reversal, in which mortal sin is a cause for sadness, but even death, in the final analysis, calls for celebration, is paradoxical to those who do not yet know the bridegroom who stands at the center of it all.

Thus should one regard us: as servants of Christ
and stewards of the mysteries of God. 

Even Christians can make the mistake of trying to use old wineskins for new wine, or of trying to patch an old cloak with a piece of new cloth. The Corinthians did so when they imported worldly concepts of  celebrity into their relationships with those doing apostolic work, such as Paul, Peter, and Apollos. They chose champions from among them as though these figures were in a popularity contest. In choosing one over another they seemed to assume that they themselves were made better by the strengths of the preferred preacher, as though it implied something about their own value. Paul attempted to put things in their proper context, explaining that he and the others were not celebrities to be celebrated, but servants and stewards working together for the good of all. If there were truly some kind of moral corruption, if any were not "found trustworthy" that would be a separate and potentially serious issue. But the human tribunal which motivated the divisions in Corinth was not competent to judge such matters. It was motivated only by self-interest. In this sense Paul did not even pass judgment on himself, whether he was superior or inferior to others. But he did take morality and having a clean conscience seriously, which is why he was able to say, "I am not conscious of anything against me".

Therefore, do not make any judgment before the appointed time,
until the Lord comes,
for he will bring to light what is hidden in darkness
and will manifest the motives of our hearts,
and then everyone will receive praise from God.

Rather than the praise of men, leading to competition, divisions, and even schisms, what matters is praise from God. Not only in the time of Paul but even in our day we can get caught up in concern for what others think when the only thing the really matters is what God thinks. Let's resolve to keep the new wine of the Gospel in new wineskins of renewed hearts and minds, and to keep the new cloak given to us in baptism whole and unstained until his coming.

Elevation Worship Featuring Brandon Lake - There Is A King

 

3 September 2026 - catching on

Today's Readings
(Audio)

 Simon said in reply,
"Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing,
but at your command I will lower the nets."

Life apart from Jesus is shallow, frustrating, and unsatisfying. In spite of the hard work we invest we can labor without rest with little or nothing to show for it. When we do manage to catch a few fish it is only a temporary reprieve. It is never such an abundance that we feel as though we can ever take a rest from the endless cycle of working to sustain ourselves in this world. We always have a vague lingering sense that there should be something more, an end toward which we are working, a fullness and a finality that can actually be attained. But at the same time we recognize that this could never be a matter of mere quantity. We are looking for something qualitatively different. Thus, it isn't so much about the miraculous draft of fish as it is about the one who gives us the directions that lead to that abundant catch.

When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at the knees of Jesus and said,
"Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man."

Peter saw Jesus as more than a highly accurate instrument for locating fish, as though it was his spiritual sonar that was valuable. Jesus had shown that he was able to find fulfillment in places where Peter had assumed there was none to be found. But what mattered was not so much the individual instances of miraculous fulfillment as knowing Jesus himself. If Peter had seen Jesus as a tool for increasing the profitability of his fishing business he would not have said "Depart from me, Lord". But he recognized something deeper in Jesus, an individual that stood outside of the cycle of endless work and partial fulfillment. The true abundance was not in the vicinity of Jesus waiting to be identified by him. Jesus himself was the true abundance. Possessing him one possessed all else besides.

So let no one boast about human beings, for everything belongs to you,
Paul or Apollos or Cephas,
or the world or life or death,
or the present or the future:
all belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.

When we recognize the abundance that is found in Jesus we see our own insufficiency in stark relief. We come to more deeply recognize our own inadequacy, our deeply rooted tendencies that are not merely inefficient, but even selfish and sinful. Yet this does not disqualify us from possessing all things in Christ. Precisely because of his abundance, because he needs nothing from his creatures, he is the one person who can offer us everything. Knowing this we are free to leave our large expensive fishing nets, whatever those represent for us, in order to follow Jesus himself.

He shall receive a blessing from the LORD,
a reward from God his savior.
Such is the race that seeks for him,
that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.

Elevation Worship - Fullness

 

2 September 2026 - for this purpose

Today's Readings

(Audio)

 

Unlike in the Nazareth, where Jesus was unable to do many miracles because of their lack of faith, in Galilee he seemed to heal one person after another. The two individuals that started the cascade were the demon possessed man in the synagogue and the mother-in-law of Simon Peter. The first was apparently Jesus's own initiative, a way to concretely announce his jubilee liberation program and Gospel message. The second, Simon's mother-in-law's healing, was the result of the fact that concerned individuals "interceded with" Jesus "about her." Jesus does sometimes take the initiative in order to make the coming of his Kingdom known to those who would otherwise have been ignorant of it. But sometimes, particularly once he is known in a region, he allows others to take the initiative. He waits for them to use their faith to unlock and unleash his healing power. Far from putting people off of Jesus, this second mode actually draws people to Jesus in increasing numbers. This is not surprising, since they are active and involved and not merely passive as in the cases when Jesus takes the initiative himself. The fact that there is incentive to being involved draws more and more people into the orbit of Jesus. Being merely passive observers and recipients does not energize people to follow Jesus in the same way as does their active conscious participation.

At sunset, all who had people sick with various diseases
brought them to him.
He laid his hands on each of them and cured them.

As he cast out demons they tried to shout out something that was apparently true about his identity, "You are the Son of God." But they were not doing this to help his cause. It was not spoken with the same sincerity with which Simon Peter would later confess it. The demons were trying to sabotage Jesus by attempting to reveal something true, but in a way that was skewed and unhelpful. Most others, if they were in Jesus's place, would probably have responded, "Yes. Yes I am". But Jesus was not interested in popularity or feeling validated. It didn't help for people to hear it if they didn't realize what it meant in a deeply interior way. Jesus wanted people to receive this truth as a revelation, not as a slogan. Further, had it been too widely broadcast or re-shared with insufficient comprehension, it would only have served to shorten the time before the conflict leading to the cross was initiated. When demons tell us anything about Jesus they always do so to suggest that he is a threat to our autonomy and our ability to freely enjoy ourselves. They want us to see him as dangerous, and they are willing to twist things that are true to make us believe it. We should be aware of the motivations behind statements about Jesus, since even those with good intentions are never entirely neutral. This will help us to guard against deception.

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

(see James 1:16-17)

Had Jesus been subject to a desire for popular approval his mission never would have gotten off the ground. He would have stayed in one region fulfilling one need after another in order to keep the crowds perpetually happy. But he had a higher purpose in coming than healing and exorcism, the results of which still did not address the deepest issues that afflicted humanity: sin and death. It was more important that more people hear his message than it was for him to experience sustained popularity in one area, even if it was the result of an endless list of miraculous deeds. But we should not take for granted that this was not a typical human response to success and adulation. He left those who at least superficially adored him and went on to others who did not yet even know him, some of whom were almost certain to reject him. He did this, and was able to do it, because he knew his true purpose. This speaks to the importance of knowing ones purpose generally, and the power it gives us to live as we are meant to live, to choose rightly even when the right choice is not the easiest one.

Our soul waits for the LORD,
who is our help and our shield,
For in him our hearts rejoice;
in his holy name we trust.

 

 

Randy Rothwell - For This Purpose

 

1 September 2026 - it hits different

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

 

He taught them on the sabbath,
and they were astonished at his teaching
because he spoke with authority.

They were not used to the way in which Jesus spoke. Other teachers would have peppered their doctrine with references to previous interpretive traditions in order to substantiate their own points of view. Jesus did reference the Scriptures in what he taught. For instance, he later asked the Pharisees, "Have you not heard what David did ... ?" (see Matthew 12:3). But although these quotations did help to establish and validate his own claim, their usage was new and unexpected. They were not rooted in any tradition of authority, and made sense only if he himself was an authoritative interpreter of God's word. Similarly, his moral teachings referred to core truths that did exist in the Scriptures. But when he presented these teachings in the Sermon on the Mount they took shapes that no one would have previously guessed. It was necessary for him to go beyond what Moses had said to fully bring God's moral law to light. He demonstrated an authority that transcended even that of Moses, who was the greatest of the Lord's prophets, and of the law itself, the most concrete and comprehensive revelation of God's will for mankind. He did not use his authority to upend or abolish the law, but rather to bring it to its true fulfillment (see Matthew 5:17). 

The reason Jesus was able to speak with such authoritative clarity about God's Word and his will for mankind was because the Spirit of God "knows what pertains to God", and Jesus was filled beyond measure with that Spirit (see John 3:34). He did not need to defer to merely human interpretations which were always somewhat tainted by the merely "human wisdom" of the "natural man" who "does not accept what pertains to the Spirit" since "to him it is foolishness, and he cannot understand it". The natural man responds to spiritual things like the unclean demon responds to Jesus in today's Gospel, assuming that God is out to get us, that his will means that the party is over. 

Unlike all other teachers Jesus was so spiritual that he could "judge everything" and was "not subject to judgment by anyone". He didn't have to prove anything or impress anyone. His confidence was rooted in his Father, not the unstable opinions of the crowds. One who was merely excessively certain of himself would quickly be revealed as a fool. One who tried to appeal to others for popularity would find popularity to be a fickle master. But one who was truly rooted in God was unshakable in a way that the crowds to whom Jesus spoke were able to recognize.

For “who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to counsel him?”
But we have the mind of Christ.

Surprisingly, the spirituality of Jesus that gave him the authority he possessed was not to be reserved to him alone. Since we share the Spirit which motivated his life we too come to possess the same "mind of Christ" that was proper to Jesus himself. Clearly, none of us possess this mind to the constant and perfect degree that Jesus did. But we are meant to do so more and more through the renewal of our minds that Paul enjoined on the Romans (see Romans 12:2). The more we experience this transformation the less we will be bothered by the judgments of those whose minds are still limited to the merely natural and human. We  can say, as Paul later will to the Corinthians, that "with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself" (see First Corinthians 4:3).

The mind of Christ isn't just something that is a nice way to enhance our subjective experience of life. It is necessary if we are to do our own part in the struggle against the dark powers that hold sway in our world. When our words our shaped by his mind they become powerful, and the world is changed as a consequence.

“What is there about his word?
For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits,
and they come out.”

 

Elevation Worship - Here As In Heaven

 

31 August 2026 - fulfilled in your hearing

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

 

In the synagogue at Nazareth Jesus proclaimed that the definitive year of jubilee had at last arrived. Jesus inaugurated it by proclaiming the Gospel to the poor, both materially and spiritually. He ushered it in by freeing those bound by sin, making God's forgiveness available to them. He helped those who recognized their own blindness be healed and recover their sight, with the result being not only that they acquired eyes that could see their surroundings, but also spiritual vision that was able to more see more deeply the identity of Jesus himself. He freed people bound by addiction and demonic affliction, letting the oppressed go free. This, finally, was what God had wanted all along, a year that that was acceptable to him at last.

“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Simply in virtue of the power of the proclamation of the Gospel the word of Scripture was fulfilled in their midst. But whether or not it had a transformative effect on those who listened would depend on how they heard. Like them, we have a choice about how to respond when we hear the Scripture proclaimed. We may be initially impressed by the gracious words it contains. But our initial impressions only go so far. We can follow our initial positive feelings with a response faith, in which case it's power is unleashed in our own lives and it becomes a reality for us. Or we can respond with skepticism, as did the congregation at Nazareth.

And all spoke highly of him
and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.
They also asked, “Is this not the son of Joseph?”

We can think, like those in Nazareth, that the words of Scripture, though impressive, are too good to be true. Or if they are true to any degree, that must at least be exaggerated. We think this based on the fact of our prolonged proximity to Jesus in our midst, assuming that if he were all that he claimed to be we would see more of the results on a daily basis. He wouldn't leave for other regions, perform miracles there, and then come back to us with only a sermon. Or would he? The problem is never with what Jesus provides, it is always with our response, which often lacks the intensity of faith to unleash all that he wishes to do in our midst. Miracles are not meant to be a way we test Jesus and defang his potentially life-altering call to repentence. Rather, our faith unlocks the power of Jesus to do miracles in our midst. If we approach Scriptures with an attitude that we've heard it all before we risk missing out on what Jesus desires to do among us.

Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.

Jesus did not write off the people at Nazareth. Since they were too familiar with him, or at least who they believed him to be, Jesus would help them to see him from a new and different perspective. It was, to be sure, a challenge to their assumptions. But it represented a real opportunity to choose to see him from the perspective of an outsider, with fresh eyes. But in order to avail themselves of the potential of this perspective they had to square it with the fact that recipients of God's favor in his examples were Gentiles. If they could overcome their prejudice and animosity against those groups and see what God had done in those cases they would be able to recognize how Jesus himself was at work among there in that synagogue. It was already clear from history that God did not always play favorites in the world in the way they assumed he would. It ought to have helped them overcome the sense of entitlement which led them to insist that Jesus go above and beyond to prove himself when they had already seen and heard enough to believe. 

Jesus wants us to come to a deeper faith as well. He may invite us to do so in ways that challenge our expectations, in order to help us see things in a new way. But we want to become able to see things in this way. We are among the blind who need new spiritual eyes to see him. We look around and do not see a year acceptable to the Lord. But Jesus can help us to have the faith to realize that in him the great jubilee is truly here. When we realize it we can leave the benches from which skeptics spout their unhelpful critiques.  We can then take our place sharing that good news with those others who do not yet know it, so that they too may be transformed.

Kutless - Word Of God Speak

 

30 August 2026 - get your mind right

Today's Readings
(Audio) 

 

Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him,
"God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you." 

Peter had a very human response to the idea that his friend and teacher should need to suffer and die. The compassion that motivated it was a strength, not a weakness. But the human way he expressed it was limited and insufficient. If Jesus really was what Peter had said of him it implied that he, and not Peter, would dictate the plan. The Christ and the Son of God would not benefit from the suggestion of an alternate path or from second opinion in regard to his next steps. Yet Peter could not wrap his head around the fact that Jesus should have to suffer in this way. When he arrived at this apparent contradiction he had the choice to trust his own wisdom or to assume that Jesus had a reason for what he said. But what Jesus said seemed so wildly unlikely that Peter reverted to treating Jesus like any other friend. He acted as though he were talking someone who was saying crazy things back from a ledge. No doubt such dark words would have been difficult to accept. Doing so would have been in the same ballpark as Abraham agreeing to offering his beloved Isaac in obedience to God even though the promise made to him by God could only be fulfilled through him.

"Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. 
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do."

Human thinking might reason rightly about merely human realities. But it was insufficient to assess the strategy of God for establishing his Kingdom on earth. If we were interacting with a purely natural world, that had no interpenetration with spiritual realities, we might have been able to content ourselves with the type of thinking that comes naturally to us. But as things stand, the spiritual has always been present and working to shape our reality, sometimes in hidden ways, sometimes through the parts of the story the prophets like Jeremiah were able to illuminate, but now made explicit in the coming of Jesus himself. If we are to align our lives with God's design for the world we can't really on merely human modes of thinking. Instead, we need to do what Paul suggests in our second reading.

Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may discern what is the will of God,
what is good and pleasing and perfect.

Only when our minds are renewed do we understand the logic of sacrificial love that made Jesus go to the cross for us. It is the revolution in our thinking that allows us to make the transition from the initial appeal of our callings and vocations to persistence even during the hard times and difficult aspects those things entail. We may feel for a moment as though we were duped by the Lord. But our transformed minds will help us end by choosing obedience.

Jeremiah's human mind did have something to say:

I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.

But ultimately he chose to remember the spiritual truth of which his renewed mind was certain:

But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.

Jeremiah didn't want to cry out violence and outrage as his message. Humanly speaking, he would have preferred to stay positive. He wanted people to feel affirmed and to remain in their good graces himself. But to do so in that time and place and circumstance would not have been truly loving. He had to believe God's word, which told him that there were higher goods that mattered more. In ruminating on that word he received the fiery motivation necessary to persevere even amidst great difficulty. 

 

Jeremiah could, no doubt, have made a more concerted effort to forget his calling, to distract himself whenever something reminded him of what had been spoken to him by God. Little by little he might have deadened the fire within him. But he chose not to be conformed to his age. Thus, not only was he transformed as an isolated individual, but God's will was accomplished through him. In truth he became an example of the sort of "living sacrifice" about which Paul wrote, whose very life availed for the well-being of his people. It did not do so in the way he might have hoped, by avoiding the Babylonian exile, or even mitigating the horror of that exile appreciably. But nevertheless, at the end of the book of Jeremiah, in the beginning of the exile, we do see immediate signs of hope. Not only that, but future generations who read his words would come to understand more deeply the importance of wholehearted obedience to the Lord. Moreover, his word contained promises that helped prepare for the coming of the Lord Jesus himself:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
 

(See Jeremiah 31:31-34)

Jeremiah's own life as a living sacrifice had sufficient parallels with the life and career of Jesus that his  life, and not only his message, served to prepare people for the coming messiah. When our own minds are renewed and our lives correspond to that fresh spiritual way of thinking we help make Jesus intelligible to others, to whom the cross often seems as strange as it did to Peter. 

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

It isn't so much that we are called to seek out misery and suffering, as though they were good in themselves. But we are called to be able to put God's Kingdom first and ourselves second. We must not be so fixated on self that we are unwilling to hear where God is calling us. We need to be willing to speak when and what we are called to speak, even if there are consequences. We must be willing to demonstrate our love for both God and neighbor, when it is difficult, and not only when it is easy. We must be faithful to the Gospel and "be ready in season and out of season" (see Second Timothy 4:2), as Paul told Timothy. It is important for us to overcome the patterns of human thinking that tell us to prioritize our selves and our lives in this world as though they were the highest goods. Let us replace a mindset that asks "What about me?" with one that meditates trustingly on God's word, seeking his will and then carrying it out by his grace. 

Todd Agnew - Romans 12:1

 

29 August 2026 - the heat of the moment

 

Today's Readings

(Audio)

 

Herodias harbored a grudge against him
and wanted to kill him but was unable to do so.
Herod feared John, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man,
and kept him in custody.

The place of Herodias in the life of Herod was tenuous. Herod might have been convinced at any moment by the words of his prisoner John the Baptist, to whom "he liked to listen". We can imagine why the words of the one who called their union "not lawful" would be threatening to Herodias. There was always the possibility that the idle curiosity of Herod about the John would turn into something more serious. If it did, there was no guarantee that she would be able to retain her relationship the royal position it entailed.

She had an opportunity one day when Herod, on his birthday,
gave a banquet for his courtiers,
his military officers, and the leading men of Galilee.
Herodias’ own daughter came in
and performed a dance that delighted Herod and his guests.

Herodias preyed upon the same weakness that John condemned in Herod. Presumably it was to some degree sensuality that caused him to take Herodias as a wife in spite of the prohibition against such a marriage. And it was sensuality, drinking, a party, and a dance that again managed to captivate him and sufficiently mute the voice of his conscience in order permanently remove the danger represented to his hedonistic ego by John. The volume of the temptation was turned up to eleven, while the voice of reason was never more for him than a passing interest. It was not enough to provide proof against the temptation. In his desire to honor the pleasure he had received he surrendered his self-control and even his rationality. On some level he responded to the dance as though it were an idol to be rewarded, as though making promises would help to continue and increase the delight he had received. Thus, as is always the case with sin, he gave of himself but received nothing real in return. And indeed, what he gave of himself he was not able to claw back.

“Ask of me whatever you wish and I will grant it to you.”
He even swore many things to her,
“I will grant you whatever you ask of me,
even to half of my kingdom.”

The fact that Herod agreed to put John to death was not the end of the story for his afflicted conscience. We know that even after the death of John his memory continued to haunt the corrupt king. Thus, when he heard about Jesus, who was the fulfillment of everything represented by John, he said, "This is John the Baptist. He has been raised from the dead; that is why these miraculous powers are at work in him" (see Matthew 14:2).  The consequences of sin listed by Paul are clearly seen in Herod's own life choices: "they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened" (see Romans 1:21). Yet we also see that it is impossible to deaden the voice of conscience entirely. The form conscience takes when it is suppressed is increasingly experienced as antagonistic and thus perhaps even less easy to accept, at least without some kind of rock bottom experience leading to desperation for change. But we can see that the words of John the Baptist were not entirely wasted and even Herod was not left entirely without hope. 

 

We see in John, who never appeared very impressive in terms of worldly status or wealth, precisely how "God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong". Exactly when John seemed more than ever to "count for nothing" he reduced to nothing one who appeared to be something. The reversal was among the greatest imaginable. Herod appeared victorious when he had John killed, yet was in the act defeated. John seemed to lose everything when he was slain, yet it was in fact then that he truly gained all things.

Our soul waits for the LORD,
who is our help and our shield,
For in him our hearts rejoice;
in his holy name we trust.

 

 

Newsboys - Step Up To The Microphone