A Fresh Perspective

Dr. Diana Butler Bass is a church historian and a keen analyst of present day Christianity and culture. She has written a number of books, several of which I have found quite helpful. She recently wrote a piece that appeared on the CNN opinion page, part in response to recent events and part as an analysis of where Christianity is today in our country. The piece was titled, “The of God of Love had a really bad week.” She began the piece by noting the crowd chant, “Send them back,” at a recent political rally. She discusses how the deep divisions that are tearing our country apart right now are being felt and played out in churches all across the country. She talks about this in the context of her own family and shares that she has not spoken to her brother since the incident at Charlottesville where a white nationalist ran his car through the crowd killing one and injuring 19 others. After that incident she and her brother had argued about white nationalism and racism, and haven’t t...

This teaching of Jesus on love gets to the heart and soul of God’s will for humanity. I get to preach on this text yearly, because all three Synoptic Gospels has a version of this passage, and the Revised Common Lectionary includes this text yearly as part of its readings. Each version is different, and Luke’s version deviates significantly from Mark and Matthew’s version. Only Luke includes the story of what we have come to call the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which is why I love preaching Luke’s version of the story. All three versions make it clear that these two commandments – to love God with the totality of our being and to love our neighbor as ourselves – constitute the goal and fulfillment of healthy religion and what God longs to see in human relationships and society. Luke, however, clearly puts the emphasis on the command to love one’s neighbor. For Luke, loving one’s neighbor is how one loves God. Actually, these are not two separate commands, but one command. When...

Jesus says that the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest. There is much work to do and few workers to do it. But even as we ask the Lord to send out workers, maybe we should give some thought to the work that needs to be done. Answers will differ. Perhaps there was a time in our lives when we could assume that all Christians of a particular stripe would agree on the work to be done. If there was such a time, those days are gone. One of the interesting things modern biblical scholarship has exposed is how much diversity there was even in the early days of the Jesus movement. What does Jesus sent out the the seventy to do? For one thing, he sends them out to heal the sick. One of the primary works of Jesus that the living Christ calls us to do are works of healing. Heal the sick, says Jesus. The word that we often translate as “heal” or “make whole” in the Gospels is the same word we translate as “sa...

You have heard me say a number of times, “Religion can be the best thing in the world, and it can be the worst thing in the world.” And that’s as much true of our own religion, Christianity, as any other religion. Our Christian worship, scriptures, rituals, and practices can be liberating or suffocating. Paul, it seems, wants to get that message across to the Galatian Christians, some of whom, want to shackle themselves with the lesser and unnecessary aspects of the Mosaic law. Paul reminds them that he brought to them the way of true freedom in Christ, but now they want to settle for a yoke of slavery. In our text Paul contrasts two ways of life. One way leads to life and true freedom; the other way leads to death and bondage. I am speaking of life and death metaphorically. One way is a healthy, redemptive, healing, transformative, and liberating way of life. The other is an unhealthy, non-redemptive, destructive and enslaving way of life. Paul identifies the two different ways ...