Colourful Dreamer

Today’s gospel reading is tough. It lays out what living out the Lord’s prayer looks like. It calls us to be more. In response to the accusation by other clergy that he was an extremist whose civil rights campaign was causing tensions between black and white people in the US, Martin Luther King Jr quoted this reading in his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail. King wrote, “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment.” Jesus said "Love your enemi...

As I was preparing for this week, the podcast I listen to in preparation each week talked about the letter to the Hebrews offered several responses to the question, “what do we think God was up to in Jesus?” As I thought about that, I think we can add, and what does that say about God?   Big questions that are there every week. How we answer them shapes what we think about the life of faith, church, and the mission of God. The people on the podcast suggest that Hebrews offers more than one answer to that first question. With Job, it encourages us to ask the question, and to hold lightly the answers we come to. We are reminded that our understanding of the nature and way of God is in the end limited and flawed. God is God. But they are still questions we need to reflect on. As I have said many times, the gospels address these questions through the story of Jesus; what he said and did, the people he mixed with, and his death, resurrection, and ascension. To put that more simply, ...