A Fresh Perspective

The healing stories in our Gospels are never just about physical healing, they always have spiritual and theological meanings. The woman in our story had been plagued by a crippling spirit for eighteen years. It kept her bent over and unable to stand up. Can you see the fairly obvious symbolical and spiritual implications here? A crippling spirit of this kind can diminish our sense of worth and value. We find ourselves spiritually and emotionally and psychologically unable to stand straight and take our rightful place in the realm of God. Jesus calls the woman he heals in our story a “daughter of Abraham.” A daughter of Abraham who has been bound by Satan eighteen long years. Satan here is a symbol for the crippling spirit, the spirit that has kept her from living life in its fullness in God’s kingdom. But she is still a daughter of Abraham. She is still a daughter of God. She is still God’s chosen. God’s beloved. Jesus sees through and beyond the crippling spirit. Can we? A...

Let’s all come clean and not pretend that we like what Jesus says in this passage. I don’t know of anyone who actually considers poverty a good thing. If God’s blessing is on the poor and God’s woe upon the rich, then most of us would rather have God’s woe than God’s blessing right? We are after all in worship, so let’s a least be honest with God and ourselves. I certainly don’t believe God wants anyone to live in poverty – to be economically deprived and materially impoverished. Do you think that is what God wants for God’s creation, for God’s daughters and sons? Do you think God wants us to be in want – to barely have enough to survive, let alone thrive? I don’t believe that for one minute. So what for heaven’s sake is Jesus saying here? First off, if we take our scriptures with any seriousness at all we have to acknowledge how much God cares for the poor. How does one get to be poor? Well, in ancient Israel a couple of years of really bad harvests could do it. One might ha...

Jesus was affirmed as Son of God at his baptism by John, and now he is affirmed once again on the mount that we call the mount of Transfiguration. Actually, it’s not hard to understand why Jesus might need this second affirmation by God. In the passage just prior to the Transfiguration Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to undergo suffering and death. He warns them that they he will be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and then he will rise, that is, he will be vindicated by God. Jesus didn’t need any special revelation to see this coming. He spoke truth to power. He challenged the domination system by preaching the kingdom of God. He continuously violated the holiness code of the gatekeepers and opposed their systems of worthiness. He knew what that would mean, and he tried to prepare his disciples for the same fate. He tells them that they must be willing to lose their lives to gain their lives, and he challenges them to take up thei...

In 1972 songwriter and singer Johnny Nash, made it to number one on the pop chart singing: I can see clearly now the rain is gone. / I can see all the obstacles in my way. / Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind. / It’s gonna be a bright, bright sun-shiny-day. Rarely though, do we see so clearly. Rarely do we see all the obstacles in our way or all our blind spots that prevent us from seeing. Paul says in his beautiful poem on love in First Corinthians: “For now we see in a mirror dimly.” The Gospel of John equates seeing with believing, and believing, as I have said so often, is about trusting and serving and loving. Believing is about being faithful to the way of Jesus. So seeing is trusting, seeing is loving, seeing is serving. Our capacity to see greatly impacts our capacity to trust God, and love and serve others. Our Gospel text today says that as Jesus went along he “saw” a man blind from birth. What did Jesus see? Jesus sees a man who is very vulnerable and at a grea...

No Christian conversion is exactly alike; each one is unique. This is certainly true of Saul’s conversion depicted by Luke in Acts 9. There are, however, some common elements. Read post at Baptist News Global

  The story goes that General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, was scheduled to deliver a message at a major convention to chart the future of the organization for the next 50 years. As the time approached, he became ill and could not attend in person; but he wired the message he wanted delivered. The people waited on the edge of their seats for the telegram.   When it arrived, the one chosen to deliver the message walked up to the platform, opened the telegram, and a confused, puzzled look came over him. There was just one word on the telegram. It was the word “others.”     In Philippians 2, Paul exhorts the church to focus on others. He says in 2:3–4: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Clearly the focus is on “others.” To commend this way of life—this other–centeredness—Paul draws upon an early C...

As long as faith just remains a belief system as it does for so many Christian people in our society we will just keep creating “in” groups and “out” groups filled with unchanged, unconverted people. Real transformation takes some major surgery, getting the head, heart, and body aligned with the inner working of the Spirit. A terrified Jewish young man was fleeing the Nazi’s who had just overtaken their small village. He fled to the door of the pastor of the village church seeking refuge. The pastor had been warned that any person or family caught hiding a Jew would not only bring the wrath of the Nazi’s upon their house but upon the whole village. So the pastor had the young man step inside, while he went to pray for guidance and read the Scriptures. As the pastor prayed and searched the Scriptures, he came upon the verse that read, “It is better for one man to die, than the whole people perish.” The pastor was certain he had the answer. Though it was hard for him to do, he ...

One of the problems with some self-help plans is that they by-pass the absolutely necessary first step of all spiritual progress and growth, namely, that we are powerless to change ourselves and must surrender to the power of divine grace. Change that comes about through mere willpower and determination is not real spiritual change. The veil around our minds is often disguised as some great moral issue that makes us feel superior and asks nothing of us while asking everything from us. That sounds paradoxical, but it’s true. For those on the theological left, it can mean investing in some great social justice cause at great personal cost and sacrifice, while living one’s actual life in total isolation from any real suffering and without any personal transformation. For those on the theological right, it can mean investing heavily with great effort and sacrifice in some current political correctness or preaching a gospel of evacuation into heaven (it’s amazing how these two...