family of God

John 3:1-17-"Clearing the Way for Christ: Seeing Others with Fresh Eyes"

Synopsis:

Jesus is visited at night by the respected rabbi Nicodemus. He visited at night because Nicodemus doesn’t want anyone to see him. In a world before streetlights and lampposts, night time was a dangerous place, but the danger of socializing with a radical rabbi like Jesus was a greater threat to popular Nicodemus. Jesus invitation to Nicodemus flips his world upside down when Jesus tells him that he has come because “God so loved the world,” not just the chosen, biological of Abraham descendants. The wind of Spirit, “blows where it chooses,” and those born again of the Spirit cannot be contained by restrictive, exclusionary religious systems. The Holy Spirit came down on Pentecost to not only set fire to our hearts but to open our eyes to see each other–of every race, place, and faith–as our God-given siblings. While we want to build walls between who is in an who is out, the Spirit keeps circling our hearts until the walls come tumbling down so we can look into our neighbor’s face with fresh eyes and see a fellow child of God.

2 Timothy 1:1-14 - "World Communion: A Faith That Lived First"

Synopsis: Paul writes to Timothy encouraging him to keep the faith which was first passed on to him by his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. The faith which grants us a spirit not of cowardice but of power, love, and self-discipline, is the same faith passed down from Jesus to the Apostles, to Timothy’s grandmother, all the way to all 2 billion Christians around the world today. In this faith, we are all the family of God gathered around one global table of fellowship and community. The faith which strengthens us is a gift that lived first in the countless faithful people who have loved and lived for good and for God since Christ rose from the dead.

Keywords: Jesus, unity, Kingdom of God, communion, global church, family of God, inclusion, peace, community

Galatians 3:23-29 - "Brother Paul and the Kin-dom of God"

In a biographical look at the life of Saul-turned-Paul, we see a life of violence, hate, and bigotry transformed on the road to Damascus in an encounter with the Living, Risen Christ. After this, Paul’s hatred of the Jesus-follower’s inclusion of Gentiles into their community becomes his life calling. In a world where we label, divide, and polarize, Brother Paul is still preaching today that we are all not just citizens in the Kingdom of God, but kinfolk and siblings in the family of God.

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 and John 16:12-15 - "Trinity Sunday: All in the Family"

Synopsis: On Trinity Sunday, we hear two distinct images from Proverbs and John bubbling up from the scriptures to spark our imaginations about the invisible, ineffable, eternal Trinitarian family. The image of the woman as the feminine “sophia” wisdom incarnate, begotten before Creation, and eternally dancing in communion with the Creator, sounds mysteriously like the masculine “logos” word in the Gospel of John. The biblical vocabulary describing the eternally mysterious Trinity is illuminated by these images of feminine wisdom and masculine word, to remind us that God is neither male nor female, but gender identity finds it’s genesis in God, who exists eternally in loving, familial-like relationships. The traditional Trinitarian formula of Father - Son - Holy Spirit is not about the gender of God (God is not male, and men are not more like God), but to the nature of the relationships which exist within the Trinity. We use the language of family to describe the Trinity because there is no more intimate, complex, and enmeshed relationship than the connect of the family system (for good or ill). As members of the “household of faith,” we are called to participant in the great family circle of the Holy Trinity by being church family to one another. The metaphors are not meant to hinder, but help us reframe family membership in God’s New Family where everyone is welcome regardless of status, identity, or lineage. This is why the biblical mandate is repeated so often to protect orphans (those without parents), widows (those without spouses or children), the poor (those without a support system), and immigrants (those without a homeland). We are call to be the new human family God is creating through Trinitarian love and Resurrection life.