Woolman Redux

June 28, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

“There is a reciprocal nature to how you treat other people,” writes New Testament scholar Cleophus J. LaRue. “What you do for others you will see it again in your own life.” 

We call it Karma. 

A high school football quarterback swaggers with the confidence that he is a superstar on campus. In just a few years, he's getting a bit of as gut, his lowly job bores him to tears, his marriage is falling apart, and former classmates have forgotten him.

Karma.

A high school prom queen exults in her beauty and tends to be a mean girl to her friends. Years later her beauty has faded, her belly has sagged, and the plain girls she used to torment hide their smiles when they see her at class reunions.

Karma. 

“This admonition also applies to those who are involved in the work of the Lord, LaRue continues. “One finds this observance in both the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament it is ‘Do not touch my anointed ones; do my prophets no harm’ (Psalm 105:15). In the New Testament it is found in Galatians 6:7: ‘Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.’”

In the three brief verses in Matthew 10:40-42, Jesus endows the disciples with remarkable and often frightening authority: the power to forgive sins, execute miracles, and speak on behalf of the Creator of the Universe.

“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” (Matthew 40:40)

“The language here is ambassadorial,” notes Professor LaRue. “To receive the ambassador or apostle is to receive the potentate that sent him; to reject the ambassador is to reject the one that sent him. The word ‘welcome’ refers practically to the willingness to offer support and shelter to those who represent Jesus.”

It’s an awesome thing to be Christ’s ambassador, especially in parts of the world where religion is waning or used to gird political power. Not everyone wants to hear Jesus’s commandments to love one another, to proclaim comfort and release to captives, to free the oppressed, to forgive debts, to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with God (Luke 4, Micah 6). Many will not recognize these ambassadors as Jesus’ envoys and will accuse them of being “snowflakes,” weak, left leaning, and politically ambitious.

It takes a very special person to be an ambassador for Christ. 

“These verses in Matthew capture the heart of discipleship,” writes Professor Danny Zacharias of Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia: “responding to the needs of the people, relying on God’s provision, and carrying forth the work of healing and restoration. To do this, Jesus’s disciples need to imitate their Lord. This passage challenges us to see discipleship not as passive belief but as active participation in the work of restoration.”

If we accept the challenge, our first duty is to imitate Jesus, to minister among the “harassed and helpless” with loving compassion.

As we prepare ourselves for this ambassadorial role, it might be good to meditate on the lives of many who took up this mantle of discipleship.

We might think of Mother Teresa who ministered among the poor and dying of Kolkata, India. 

We might think of Albert Schweitzer, musician, organist, physician, and Lutheran minister, who founded a hospital in Gabon, Africa.

We might think of Father Damien, also known as Damien the Leper, who devoted his life to serving lepers on a remote compound on Molokai island.

We might think of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who gave their lives to speak God’s truth to self-aggrandizing power.

I’d like to offer another paradigm of discipleship who has inspired me since college.

John Woolman was an itinerate Quaker mystic who spread his peaceful witness throughout Colonial New Jersey in the mid 18th century. He was born 306 years ago this October.

Woolman became one of my heroes when I was a student at Eastern Baptist College (now Eastern University), in the late sixties. I began classes as a recently discharged veteran of the Air Force but soon began to feel the Vietnam War was a hideous mistake by America’s best and brightest politicians, and an immoral travesty by the presidents who refused to stop it.

I became active in the peace movement and spent hours exploring pacifist ideas with Professor John L. Ruth, a Mennonite minister. One afternoon, John handed me his 18th century copy of John Woolman’s Journal. It was a loan, he said. “I know you’ll treat it gently.”

It was not easy reading because the pages were yellowed, the letter s was stylized f, and I had to train my brain not to read, “purfuit of happineff.” The ancient binding made crinkling sounds when I opened the book. I turned each page with gentleness and read the journal in one night.

No book I read in college had a greater impact on me. Woolman, committed to Christ’s command to love God and neighbor, swore he would never do harm to any living creature. He begged carriage drivers to treat both their African coachmen and their horses with kindness. He walked in friendship with indigenous peoples in New Jersey. And he was an early abolitionist.

Woolman was eccentric in the extreme. He discovered that the harsh chemicals used to blacken men’s coats were blinding the slaves forced to do the dyeing. He couldn’t convince his fellow Quakers to stop dyeing their clothes black but he refused to do it himself. He wore a white muslin jacket that became increasingly soiled as traveled around Colonial New Jersey, snow time or mud time.

That is the image of Woolman I have carried in my head since I returned his journal safely to John Ruth’s keeping. He must have cut a comical figure when he arrived in meeting houses and pubs, wrinkled, yellowed, and stained with mud and sweat.

Woolman was a notary public. He steadfastly refused to notarize wills if they included slaves as property. An excerpt from his journal:

A person at some distance lying sick, his brother came to me to write his will. I knew he had slaves, and, asking his brother, was told he intended to leave them as slaves to his children. As writing is a profitable employ, and as offending sober people was disagreeable to my inclination, I was straitened in my mind; but as I looked to the Lord, he inclined my heart to His testimony. I told the man that I believed the practice of continuing slavery to this people was not right, and that I had a scruple in my mind against doing writings of that kind; that though many in our Society kept them as slaves, still I was not easy to be concerned in it, and desired to be excused from going to write the will. I spake to him in the fear of the Lord, and he made no reply to what I said, but went away; he also had some concerns in the practice, and I thought he was displeased with me. In this case I had fresh confirmation that acting contrary to present outward interest, from a motive of divine love and in regard to truth and righteousness, and thereby incurring the resentments of people, opens the way to a treasure better than silver, and to a friendship exceeding the friendship of men.

I don’t know what it was about Woolman that people found so persuasive. I was used to the contentious debates of the sixties when we tended to shout at persons who disagreed with us, never expecting to convince them. But Woolman spoke with gentle persuasion and people generally saw he was right.

Woolman could walk into raucous New Jersey pubs, preach about the evils of rum, and convince both the pub crowd and the pub owner that he was right. “When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink,” he wrote in his journal, “and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings, neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society, and cast off all regard to religion, their case is much to be pitied.” It’s a mystery – and perhaps a miracle – that Woolman was not simply thrown out of the pub on his head.

But most people quickly figured out that John Woolman was a prophet in their midst. He’s one of the unsung heroes of U.S. history and I wish more people would sing about him.

There are, of course, limitations to Woolman’s style of servant discipleship. Today it would be nearly impossible to avoid products or practices that hurt others. One might boycott a particular company that is harming the environment only to discover there are companies in the same conglomerate that distribute food to hungry children.

Woolman’s style or gentle persuasion might also be a non-starter today. When Gandhi suggested passive resistance was the morally acceptable way of confronting the Third Reich, Churchill said, “Hitler would smash him like a bug.”

When Woolman advocated abolition of slavery or abstinence from liquor he convinced many of his contemporaries he was right. This kind of “woke” activism would have its critics today.

“Depending on our church traditions and the nations we reside in,” Professor Zacharias writes, “gospel work that focuses on healing and justice can be suspect, seen as ‘social justice’ disconnected from the proclamation of the good news. 

“Similarly, some ministries focus their work entirely on the teaching and proclamation of the gospel with very little thought toward justice and healing. Jesus shows us that the work of the compassionate shepherd is holistic and integral; the preaching of the gospel is never separated from the embodied work of the gospel to bring healing and wholeness.”

John Woolman’s approach to discipleship may seem dated now. 

But three centuries after he passed from the American scene, may God raise up heirs to his loving, peaceful spirit, eccentric, yellowing jacket and all, to speak wisdom and God’s love to our bitterly divided land. 

Fear Itself

June 21, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

When was the last time you were scared out of your wits?

And how helpful would it have been if some well-meaning person had told you, “Fear not?”

The problem with fear is that it’s a very subjective emotion and not everyone is afraid of the same thing. Some people are afraid of flying but others say the bumpier the air the more they like it. Some people are afraid of thunderstorms while others stand in awe of these spectacular spectacles of nature. Some are afraid of heights. Others climb mountains.

And if you happen to be afraid, even if your fear is illogical or silly, it won’t help if someone tells you to chill. To fear not.

Years ago our family went on the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios in Orlando. 

We were seated side-by-side and when the lights went out the seats began to shudder and tilt. As we began to pick up speed we could feel the wind in our faces, and we descended into what appeared to be a dark pit. Prehistoric creatures appeared menacingly on the edge of the precipice, and to my horror I realized we were falling into the gaping mouth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Behind me I could hear Katie shouting, “I don’t want to be eaten by a dinosaur” and I couldn’t have agreed more. At the last minute we diverted from the monster’s jaws but we continued our horrifying ride through the vestiges of time. When we finally stopped, the chairs stopped swaying, the wind stopped blowing, and the lights came on.

Rarely have I been so scared. As we got up to leave I angrily reminded everyone how much I hate roller coasters. 

Martha smiled and said, “This wasn’t a roller coaster.”

She added, “The seats were just vibrating, not moving forward. Didn’t you notice the Exit sign beside you never moved?”

Well, I did not notice, and neither did Katie. Both of us were completely convinced by the mediated illusion of flight. It was a psychological deception in our heads, and Katie and I were seized with great fear.

Fear can be incapacitating, and not just in the artificial thrills of amusement parks. 

We all face it: the fear of a looming big decision, the fear of financial ruin, the fear of a serious illness, fear for the safety of our children and loved ones, even – for many – the fear of making a speech. Fear is a basic human response that has been evolving in our collective psyches since our ancestors lived in caves. Fear is a survival mechanism, a universal impulse that keeps us safe from danger. Fear is a human trait that we should respect, and we should never taunt or yell “cowardly custard” at anyone who is afraid.

All of us know what it is to be afraid.

Remember in the days immediately following nine-eleven, we stopped what we were doing watched fearfully every time an airplane passed overhead?

That was a very fearful time for all of us, and it opened our mediated imaginations to terrible fears. Remember the rumor that “thousands of Muslims cheered in New Jersey” when the towers went down? It was not true, and a week after the terror attacks President George W. Bush condemned the rise of Islamophobia among certain groups:

“When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world,” the President said. “Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace.  And that’s made brothers and sisters out of every race—out of every race …Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow (Muslim) citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.”

That was a good use of the Bully Pulpit, and I sometimes wish we could hear those truths more often from our leaders in the corridors of power.

God’s love is sufficient to overcome anything we fear. 

As a Christian who, as Luther put it, is simultaneously a sinner and saint, I am aware that my fear may make me indifferent to God’s love. It is my fear that forces my silence when a paranoid fear of the “other” compels the building of walls to prevent immigrants from crossing our national border, or detaining thousands of asylum seekers in detention camps, often separating parents from their children, because we are afraid to let people who are not like us mingle safely among us. 

Throughout our land today, thousands of people have been afraid to leave their homes, to get into their cars, to go to work, to go to the store, to go to church. To those who cheer the calls for “Mass Deportation,” the targeted people are the “others” who don’t fit in with the rest of us. And not just persons of color. My therapist is an empathic middle-aged white lady born in Ireland and she fears she may be arrested every time she visits Immigrations to complete her application for U.S. citizenship.

But for those of us who have experienced God’s infinite love, we know that these frightened people who worry about their future are our neighbors we are commanded to love. Even if our love for these neighbors will get us into trouble with the civil authorities.

Professor Danny Zacharias, a biblical scholar in Canada, in today’s reading , “Jesus repeatedly tells his disciples not to be afraid. Though they will face threats, they should not fear those who can harm the body but cannot touch the soul. Instead, they are to trust in God’s care, knowing that even the hairs on their heads are counted.”

Reading this as an Indigenous man, Zacharias continues, “I cannot help but also think of Indigenous communities throughout much of the world, but especially here on Turtle Island (North America). The church has perpetuated much harm among my people, the First Nations of Canada. Christian theology demonized our culture. Christian teachings like the Doctrine of Discovery bolstered colonial conquest and dehumanization. Christian churches helped to run Indian Residential and Boarding schools, which sought to kill the Indian in the child. It should not be hard for people to understand why there is sometimes such outright hatred toward the Christian church within Indigenous communities.”

In Canada as elsewhere in the world, seeking justice for marginalized people is often unpopular – and dangerous. In our country we have a long list of human rights leaders who overcame their fear and paid the ultimate price. Medgar Evers. Martin Luther King, Jr. And in another context, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran scholar who gave his life speaking truth to the Third Reich. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘The cross is laid on every Christian.’ Said differently, the cross cannot be bypassed on the road to discipleship, and we can’t serve Jesus if we succumb to fear.

The New Testament offers many examples of Christians who faced the consequences of discipleship.

One of my favorites was Deacon Stephen, a convert who was so zealous to win people to Jesus that he wouldn’t stop pressing his message even when it began to enrage his listeners. (Acts 6)

Sticking to one’s message takes courage.

Years ago, when I was a young magazine editor, I began receiving scores of angry letters from readers who thought the magazine was devoting too much space to social issues and too little to spiritual issues. I mentioned this to George Cornell, religion editor of the Associated Press, and asked him how he handled angry letters. George stroked his chin and said, in his Oklahoma drawl, “I tell ’em, ‘You may be right.’”

Perhaps it would have been safer for Stephen and for Dietrich Bonhoeffer to take this approach with their critics. But instead they angered them even more with arguments so smart that they knew they could not refute them. 

For most of us, and for many pastors in many traditions, the cost may not be so high.

But here’s the thing: if there is no cost at all, it is not serving Jesus.

Throughout my forty years as a reporter, editor, layperson, and guilty bystander in church circles, I’ve observed many disciples who paid large and small prices for their discipleship.

I've known more than one pastor fired from his or her congregation for taking pastoral or diaconal stands they believed to be right:

For preaching against what they believed to be this nation’s immoral war in Vietnam;

For removing the U.S. flag from the church sanctuary on the grounds that God is the God of all nations and all peoples;

For participating in Civil Rights marches;

For presiding over the marriage vows of same-sex couples;

For preaching against the ownership of powerful assault rifles.

For accompanying their undocumented neighbors to immigration hearings.

I’ve known married women pastors who have been dismissed from their congregations for getting pregnant, or for requesting a one-month leave to recuperate from a mastectomy. 

Today, in our hypertense environment, the moral questions we face cause many of us to ask whether we dare risk the cost of discipleship. Do we dare declare unequivocally:

That war and violence are always sin;

That Black Lives Matter; 

That Islam is a religion of peace;

That no person is illegal;

That no religious views should be forced upon anyone;

That everyone is entitled to express their sexuality in their own way without social prejudice or government imposition. 

That God is love;

And the greatest commandment is always to love one another as we love ourselves.

 “Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me,” Jesus reminds us

“This is a tough pill to swallow, especially in the modern day when comfort, convenience, and safety are so highly prized. And the final verse offers a paradox: ‘Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it,’” Zacharias concludes.

“This teaching calls believers to release their grip on self-preservation and embrace the deeper life found in Christ. We will find abundance in life if we take up the life of Christ. True life is found not in accumulation or personal achievement but in living in right relationship with Creator, with community, and with creation. Jesus’s words invite his followers into this reality—where life is defined not by status or security but by faithfulness to God’s call.”

The Great Muslin Hope

June 14, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y. 

Jesus is the very model of a modern mindful minister. 

“(He) went about all the cities and villages,” Matthew reports, “teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness.” (Mt 9:35)

He is a teacher. He is a healer. Compassionate. Empathetic. Selfless.

“When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Mt 9:36)

This is the point at which Jesus enlists his disciples to be participants in the harvest of souls.

“Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.” (Mt 10:1)

“These verses capture the heart of discipleship,” writes Professor Danny Zacharias of Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia: “responding to the needs of the people, relying on God’s provision, and carrying forth the work of healing and restoration. To do this, Jesus’s disciples need to imitate their Lord. This passage challenges us to see discipleship not as passive belief but as active participation in the work of restoration.”

As an Indigenous reader of this text, Zacharias points out “the confluence of understanding around what it means to be a leader. In many Indigenous cultures, leadership is not about hierarchy (Who am I in charge of?) but about service (Who can I help?). A true leader is one who cares for the people, ensuring their well-being. Much like a Wisdom Keeper or Medicine Man, Jesus responds to the needs of the people, embodying a leadership that is deeply relational and motivated by compassion.”

If we accept the challenge, our first duty is to imitate Jesus, to minister among the “harassed and helpless” with loving compassion.

We might also reflect on more recent exemplars of participatory discipleship.

We might think of Mother Teresa who ministered among the poor and dying of Kolkata, India. 

We might think of Albert Schweitzer, musician, organist, physician, and Lutheran minister, who founded a hospital in Gabon, Africa.

We might think of Father Damien, also known as Damien the Leper, who devoted his life to serving a remote leprosy compound on Molokai island.

I’d like to offer another paradigm of discipleship who has inspired me since college.

John Woolman was an itinerate Quaker mystic who spread his peaceful witness throughout Colonial New Jersey in the mid 18th century. He was born 306 years ago this October.

Woolman became one of my heroes when I was a student at Eastern Baptist College (now Eastern University), in the late sixties. I began classes as a recently discharged veteran of the Air Force but soon began to feel the Vietnam War was a hideous mistake by America’s best and brightest politicians, and an immoral travesty by the presidents who refused to stop it.

I became active in the peace movement and spent hours exploring pacifist ideas with Professor John L. Ruth, a Mennonite minister. One afternoon, John handed me his 18th century copy of John Woolman’s Journal. It was a loan, he said. “I know you’ll treat it gently.”

It was not easy reading because the pages were yellowed, the letter s was stylized f, and I had to train my brain not to read, “purfuit of happineff.” The ancient binding made crinkling sounds when I opened the book. I turned each page with  gentleness and read the journal in one night.

No book I read in college had a greater impact on me. Woolman, committed to Christ’s command to love God and neighbor, swore he would never do harm to any living creature. He begged carriage drivers to treat both their African coachmen and their horses with kindness. He walked in friendship with indigenous peoples in New Jersey. And he was an early abolitionist.

Woolman was eccentric in the extreme. He discovered that the harsh chemicals used to blacken men’s coats were blinding the slaves forced to do the dyeing. He couldn’t convince his fellow Quakers to stop dyeing their clothes a traditional black but he refused to do it himself. He wore a white muslin jacket that became increasingly soiled as traveled around Colonial New Jersey, snow time or mud time.

That is the image of Woolman I have carried in my head since I returned his journal safely to John Ruth’s keeping. He must have cut a comical figure when he arrived in meeting houses and pubs, wrinkled, yellowed, and stained with mud and sweat.

Woolman was a notary public. He steadfastly refused to notarize wills if they included slaves as property. An excerpt from his journal:

A person at some distance lying sick, his brother came to me to write his will. I knew he had slaves, and, asking his brother, was told he intended to leave them as slaves to his children. As writing is a profitable employ, and as offending sober people was disagreeable to my inclination, I was straitened in my mind; but as I looked to the Lord, he inclined my heart to His testimony. I told the man that I believed the practice of continuing slavery to this people was not right, and that I had a scruple in my mind against doing writings of that kind; that though many in our Society kept them as slaves, still I was not easy to be concerned in it, and desired to be excused from going to write the will. I spake to him in the fear of the Lord, and he made no reply to what I said, but went away; he also had some concerns in the practice, and I thought he was displeased with me. In this case I had fresh confirmation that acting contrary to present outward interest, from a motive of divine love and in regard to truth and righteousness, and thereby incurring the resentments of people, opens the way to a treasure better than silver, and to a friendship exceeding the friendship of men.

I will always wonder what it was about Woolman that people found so persuasive. I was used to the contentious debates of the sixties when we tended to shout at persons who disagreed with us, never expecting to convince them. But Woolman spoke with gentle persuasion and people generally saw he was right.

Incredibly, he could walk into a raucous New Jersey pub, preach about the evils of rum, and convince both the pub crowd and the pub owner that he was right. “When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink,” he wrote in his journal, “and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings, neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society, and cast off all regard to religion, their case is much to be pitied.” It’s a mystery – and perhaps a miracle – that Woolman was not simply thrown out of the pub on his head.

But it seems unlikely anyone laughed because most people quickly figured out that John Woolman was a prophet in their midst. He’s one of the unsung heroes of U.S. history and I wish more people would sing about him.

There are, of course, limitations to Woolman’s style of servant discipleship. Today it would be nearly impossible to avoid products or practices that hurt others. One might boycott a particular company that is harming the environment only to discover there are companies in the same conglomerate that distribute food to hungry children.

Woolman’s style or gentle persuasion might also be a non-starter today. When Gandhi suggested passive resistance was the morally acceptable way of confronting the Third Reich, Churchill said, “Hitler would smash him like a bug.”

When Woolman advocated abolition of slavery or abstinence from liquor he was able to convince many of his contemporaries he was right. This kind of woke activism would have its critics today.

“Depending on our church traditions and the nations we reside in,” Professor Zacharias writes, “gospel work that focuses on healing and justice can be suspect, seen as ‘social justice’ disconnected from the proclamation of the good news. 

“Similarly, some ministries focus their work entirely on the teaching and proclamation of the gospel with very little thought toward justice and healing. Jesus shows us that the work of the compassionate shepherd is holistic and integral; the preaching of the gospel is never separated from the embodied work of the gospel to bring healing and wholeness.”

John Woolman’s approach to discipleship may seem dated now. But three centuries after he passed from the American scene, I’d love to see his loving, peaceful spirit, rumpled yellowing jacket and all, returning to speak wisdom and true discipleship to our bitterly divided country.

Frauds

 

June 7, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

The second Sunday after Pentecost leads us into the very heart of Jesus’s ministry.

The ninth chapter of Matthew has two main themes: the calling of the unlikely, and the power of healing. 

Jesus’ healing miracles in Matthew are among the most moving and dramatic of the gospels. A leader of the Synagogue kneels before him begging him to save his young daughter. A woman with a chronic hemorrhage reaches out to Jesus in faith that she will be cured. Blind men are given sight. Demoniacs are freed from their bondage.

“Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness.” (MT 9:35)

At the same time, Jesus reached out to unsavory and dubious people who were shunned by society and invited them to his ministry.

“These passages show us a Christ who moves toward those in need, who upends social expectations, and who embodies mercy in ways that challenge religious structures,” writes Danny Zacharias, a New Testament scholar from Wolfville, Nova Scotia. “The stories of Matthew’s call and Jesus’s healing acts emphasize restorative mercy. This mercy is not simply words, not just words of forgiveness or absolution, but tangible acts of restoration that show what the kingdom of God ought to be like.”e

This is good news for those of us who doubt our worthiness to serve Jesus. Jesus calls us whether we are worthy or not.

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.

And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (MT 9:9-13)

This statement is a direct challenge to the religious order. The Pharisees emphasize purity and sacrifice, but Jesus reorients the discussion toward mercy, toward healing, and toward relationship. 

But who can blame the Pharisees? Thieving tax collectors? Prostitutes and unabashed sinners? Are these the kind of people who should be hanging with the Lord of Life? 

We don’t think so.

And probably the persons Jesus called didn’t think so either. Matthew would have been keenly aware that people hated him. As a tax collector he was seen as an opportunistic collaborator with the hated Roman government. No doubt Matthew, like most of his devious associates, enriched himself by skimming shekels off the top of his ill-gotten gains. He was, plainly, a parasite and a rat. And he knew it.

So Matthew must have been incredulous when Jesus looked him in the eye and said, “Follow me.” Jesus knew exactly who Matthew was and didn’t hold it against him. Stunned and uncertain, Matthew abandoned his cash box and followed Jesus.

How did Matthew feel about his sudden elevation from louse to disciple? Did he feel out of place? Did he feel unworthy? Did he doubt he could fill the role to which Jesus had called him?

Probably. Over the last two millennia, millions accepted Jesus’ call. And millions doubted they were up to it.

One does not have to be paranoid to feel like an imposter. It happens to the best of us. “I secretly know that I am not good enough an actor to be as successful as I am,” confessed the late David Niven. “All my life I’ve been waiting for someone else to find that out. Someday, someone will tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘I’m sorry, old boy, but you’ve been found out. You must come with us now.’”

This anxiety is not uncommon within the mainstream of the human race. When Paul said all are sinners, he meant all of us are frauds and all of us will eventually be found out. And Paul could not escape the anguish himself. “I know that nothing good dwells within me,” he confessed to the church in Rome (Romans 7:18ff). “I not the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”

I know the feeling. I was the least athletic member of my family and after I grew up I tried to cover up that fact by compulsively jogging. Granted, jogging is a rather talentless process of picking ‘em up and putting ‘em down, but I hoped the grunting and sweating would obscure the fact that I am athletically inept.

Years ago I liked to jog on the track at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field. One morning I was overtaken by the entire University of Pennsylvania Women’s Cross Country Team. Attempting to impress them, I ran on my toes and strained breathlessly to hold my stomach in. I lost my bearings and collided with a tackling dummy. As I lay on the grass examining my attacker it appeared to be a worn, grass-stained piece of second-hand athletic equipment. But I knew better. It was my own personal stalker saying, “I’m sorry, old boy, but you’ve been found out.”

In literary and musical terms, that allegorical stalker who knows we are frauds is Javert, the ruthless pursuer of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. Javert knows there is an open warrant for Valjean, a former prisoner, and he searches for him obsessively. Valjean, who has shed prison rags and has become a wealthy mayor and businessman, knows he’s a fraud. But he knows if Javert sends him back to jail he will not be around to protect his employees or his beloved foster daughter from lives of poverty.

Les Misérables is a musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg with an English libretto by Herbert Kretzmer. Each production has been distinguished by different musicians, performers, and stage design but they all have two things in common: performances are invariably tear-inducing and they are always sermon inspiring. My eyes overflow each time the chorus sings the words originally penned by Victor Hugo himself: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

Did Javert ever catch up with Valjean Was Valjean thrown back into a drizzly Parisian prison? You know what happened, of course, and if you don’t, Victor Hugo’s thick volume awaits you at your local library. 

Javert is a haunting figure because he reminds us what our lives would be like if God had not intervened. Without the Cross, all of us would be relentlessly pursued by the truth of our sins, and all of us would be condemned.

Happily, there are no Javerts on our tail. God has sent Jesus to seek us out: a tireless pursuer who knows we are frauds and loves us anyway. 

With Javert there is only punishment. With Jesus, there is the promise that our fraudulence will one day be transformed for the sake of the world.

Jesus dines with tax collectors and sinners. His acceptance of those the world considers frauds is a sign of his radical nature. 

“As an Indigenous Christian,” writes Danny Zacharias, “I see resonance with Indigenous spirituality. Indigenous practice often prioritizes relational healing over ritual correctness. Indigenous ceremony is central in Indigenous spirituality, and many ceremonies are open and welcoming to others. While there are protocols around ceremony, they are often not so rigid that relationship is sacrificed. Laughter brings us together and connects us in these moments. Just as Jesus calls Matthew into a new life, Indigenous traditions recognize that love and restoration happen through inclusion, not exclusion. A person is not cast out for past failures but invited to walk a new path.”

No matter who we are or what we have done or how many weaknesses and sins we have accumulated, Jesus will not cast us out.

Instead, as we sit by the road minding our business, the Son of Man comes to us and says, “Follow me.”

Our prayer is that we, like the nasty tax collector, will shake off our surprise.  And follow. May the Triune God give us faith to follow Jesus wherever he leads.

Selah.

Fearsome Threesome

May 31, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

When we baptize a baby or adult, we cite the triune God: “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

These words are from Matthew 28:19: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

This is why use this triune formula whenever we baptize or pray. Jesus etched the phrase permanently in our ecclesial lexicon. 

We might conclude that the concept of God in three persons was understood and proclaimed by Christians in the earliest days of the church. We might also conclude that the first Christians were routinely using the formulation every time they baptized someone.

But New Testament scholars who get paid to notice such things point out that the Father-Son-Holy Spirit phrase appears nowhere else in the New Testament.

“It’s a reminder that it took time for the church to learn to speak and confess in a trinitarian way, and even longer for a formal declaration of ‘the Trinity’ to emerge,” writes Matt Skinner, professor of New Testament of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, but noting the gradual process cautions us against trying to find too much precision in the New Testament’s ways of relating (or uniting) Jesus to God and to the church’s experience of Holy Spirit power.”

So the early church had to take some time to develop the model of the Trinity to describe God. If we modern Christians have difficulty grasping the Trinity, it’s good to know the early Christians were slow to perfect the idea. It took some figuring out.

When was the last time you had to explain the Trinity to someone?

We’ve heard the sermons. The Trinity is the way we describe the three basic components of our relationship to God: creator, God the redeemer, God the advocate.

For 17 centuries, preachers have been devising ways to explain the Trinity to simple-minded heathens. St. Patrick, with no snakes to drive out of Ireland in the fifth century, is said to have used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the Trinity to locals. If so, he didn’t write about it, nor did anyone else until about 1726, so the legend appears to be as false as the analogy is weak.

If shamrocks don’t work, there is the classic cliché about the various roles we play in life. For example, I am a father, I am a son, I am a spouse – three different roles that call for three distinct presentations. Yet these roles do not require a trifurcation into three distinct Persons. The analogy doesn’t really help us understand the nature of the Holy Trinity.  God in three persons? Why not one God with three personalities? That might work if all three personalities were spirit, but one is flesh. One is tempted to ask the question in the form of a haiku (which, I admit, are more fun to write than to read):

Can corporeal
blend incorporeally
as one in the same?

That’s where the concept becomes a conundrum, and because there are no instruments with which to take God’s true measure, the enigma deepens.

The Trinitarian paradigm was formalized in the year 325 of the common era when the newly Christianized Emperor Constantine called the bishops of the church to Nicaea to hash out some common understanding of what all Christians should believe.

I often wonder what it must have been like for the bishops to work under the watchful but not always comprehending eyes of the most powerful autocrat in the world, a military man with no background in theology. We’ve seen throughout history that theological naïfs like Constantine can be dangerous if they think God has called them to special purposes. Did Constantine aver that as soon as the bible was canonized, “It will be my favorite book”? Did the bishops press Constantine to testify about his faith? And did the Emperor respond, “It’s personal, I really don’t want to get into that.”

Be that as it may, when Matthew wrote about the gathering of Jesus and the disciples on the mountain, Constantine was still about 220 years in the future. 

The scene in Matthew 28 is Jesus’ farewell address traditionally called the “Great Commission” because he gave them their marching orders.

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations … and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Mt 28:18-19)

The word “obey” seems arbitrary and even a bit harsh, and history has shown that some Christian missionaries overdid it when they set out to make disciples. In many cases the missionaries who demanded obedience not to Jesus but to themselves. Columbus converted indigenous peoples of the Americas and demanded their submission as slaves. Missionaries were appalled by the innocent nakedness of Pacific islanders and demanded they cover themselves with itchy European clothing, thus bestowing upon them with the “gift of shame.” Baptist missionaries to Native Americans in North America also demanded their charges dress like whites but also required them to stop speaking their own languages and to give up artifacts of their culture that the missionaries regarded as satanic, including drums.

“If the authority that Matthew 28 talks about is interpreted as an authority to dominate, to reign, to subjugate, then the goal of Christian discipleship is to conquer the world for Christ,” writes New Testament Professor Osvaldo Vena. “This way of understanding the mission of the church reflects a patriarchal and imperialist model that characterized the conquest of America as well as the missionary enterprise of the 19th and 20th centuries.

On the contrary, when Jesus calls upon his disciples to “obey,” he says it in a context that turns obedience from a duty into a sacred opportunity. We are called to obey “everything I have commanded you.”

“Baptizing (disciples) with the Trinitarian formula implies their incorporation into a community that acknowledges and confesses a relational Godhead,” writes Professor Vena. 

What has Jesus commanded us?

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.” (John 13:34)

Matthew, in his rendition of the Sermon on the Mount, specifies the ones who have Jesus’ special attention. (Mt 5:3-13)

The poor in spirit.

Those who mourn.

The meek.

The seekers of righteousness.

The merciful.

The poor in heart.

The peacemakers.

The persecuted.

The reviled.

Jesus reached out to all persons during his earthly ministry. He cured the sick. He sought justice for the poor. He welcomed foreigners, thieving tax collectors, prostitutes, Roman officers, even Pharisees, even Judas, into his life. And he loved them all.

The resurrected Jesus, given all authority over heaven and earth by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, calls upon us to make disciples and teach them to obey his teaching:

To love ourselves. To love all people, regardless of their rank or nationality. To seek justice for the persecuted, regardless of their immigration status, sexual orientation, religion, or race. To feed the hungry poor. To rule justly. To make peace. To love your enemy. To nourish and protect children.

In our frightening, chaotic, divided society, it’s hard to imagine that such commands could get any traction. There’s no evidence in media or anywhere online that anyone is really interested in obeying everything Jesus commanded us.

That is certainly an indictment on ourselves and on our church because the commands are coming from the highest authority in the universe: the Triune God.

On Trinity Sunday we remind ourselves that we cannot live without that authority or the love that authority commands.

A poet who calls herself Sharon offers this prayer:

Holy Spirit, Father, Son,
How can I declare your name?
Ever-living three-in-one?

God, besides whom, there is none.
Rock of Waters, fount of flame,
Holy Spirit, Father, Son.

Guarantee of all to come,
Kinsman in our temporal frame,
Ever-living three-on-one.

Advocate, whose love has won,
King, whose crown you rightly claim,
Holy Spirit, Father, Son.

Good and true in all you’ve done,
Age to age you are the same,
Ever-living three-on-one.

Western shores to rising sun,
All will celebrate your fame,
Holy Spirit, Father, Son,
Ever-living three-on-one.

Selah.

How Long is Too Long?

May 17, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y. 

Every Sunday we say it together and every day we say it alone: the Lord’s prayer. 

Most of us are able to memorize this austere prayer at a very young age and for some the words are still there when other memories fade.

By contrast, Jesus’ prayer in John 17 is anything but simple. Dr. Cody J. Sanders of Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, this prayer is thick with theological symbols, recapitulating many themes encountered throughout the Fourth Gospel.”  Theologically, many scholars regard this chapter as essential reading. 

Eternal life is a crucial refrain in the chapter. 

“But our contemporary theological notions of what eternal life means,” writes Professor Sanders, “can become unhelpful when overlaid on John’s much richer understanding of the term.”

“Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

An Air Force chaplain I worked for a long time ago made these words his credo.

“I feel thrilled every time I read them,” Chaplain Harland Getts often said at Wednesday night bible studies in the chapel at RAF Woodbridge in England.

But the chaplain never attempted to define what Peter was thinking about when he said “eternal life.”

“People come to me,” Billy Graham said in many sermons, “and say, ‘Billy, I don’t want to live forever.’ I tell them, ‘You have no choice. But you do have a choice where you spend forever.’”

Where? And what is eternal life?

Hieronymus Bosch, the 15th century Dutch artist who spent much of his life imagining the afterlife, depicted an upwardly spiraling light as a pathway to heaven for the redeemed.

Bosch’s “Ascent of the Blessed,” painted in 1490, looks a lot like the shaft of light persons describe after near-death experiences. The painting is one of four panels of a larger work entitled Visions of the Hereafter. Other visions are “Terrestrial Paradise,” “Fall of the Damned,” and “Hell.”

None of the visions portray an afterlife you’d want to visit for very long.

Then again, most of our images of heaven and hell are metaphorical.

Perhaps most of us think of eternal life as a permanent extension of the life we have now, but free of pain and the infirmities of age.

But even if we are convinced that our lives are good, could we actually endure them forever?

In Thornton Wilder’s three act play, “Our Town,” we get a chilling glimpse at the quality of our lives in Act III.

As the act begins, we see the village cemetery of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, where the drama has been unfolding. The graves are represented by folding chairs arranged in neat rows. Actors representing the dead sit silently on the chairs.

Emily Webb, the main character of the play, has died in childbirth. A subdued funeral procession escorts her to her chair where she takes her place. There, she is welcomed by her late mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbs, who tells her it is best to sit quietly and forget about her earthly life.

But Emily is determined to go back, to re-live at least one day of her short, happy life. Ignoring warnings by Mrs. Gibbs and others in the cemetery, Emily chooses one of her happiest days, the day she turned 12.

But the experience is devastating. Emily is at first thrilled to be reunited with her loved ones, but she quickly realizes that the people around her – her mother, her father, her younger brother, the boy next door – are so preoccupied with minutia that they barely notice one another.

Desperately, Emily tries to get her mother to look at her, but her mother is absorbed with other insignificant things.

This is not living, Emily concludes, and she can no longer stand the pain.  Life, she realizes, should be lived intensely “every, every minute.” But the loved ones she re-encounters on her twelfth birthday are scarcely alive. On her way back to the cemetery, Emily asks the Stage Manager if any one is ever able to live life to the fullest.

“No,” the Stage Manager replies. “The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”

Emily returns to her chair. Her husband, George, kneels in front of the grave and weeps inconsolably, but Emily watches him vacantly, without emotion.

Thornton Wilder forces his audience to face a daunting question: if we don’t live life to the fullest now, why would we want to live it eternally?

The late Tony Campolo, who I knew before he was Tony Campolo – when he was my sociology professor at Eastern University – used to try to define eternal life to pre-lobed evangelical kids who flocked to his classes.

He described it as existential, a word guaranteed to fog the eyes of most freshmen. When one is born again, Tony explained, one experiences God’s presence with an existential energy that never fades. Those special moments accumulate and intensify until they form a chain of ecstatic existence, and in the last microseconds of our physical lives we dwell rapturously and forever in our own existential memories.

As a Central New Yorker with Minnesota roots, I’m not sure I’m wired for the existential ecstasy required for the experience. It’s not that we un-emotive white folks aren’t pleased by the words of eternal life; it’s just that we respond to them differently.

“Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”

Shrug. “Ayuh.”

As Thornton Wilder, who grew up in Maple Bluff, Wis., understood, it takes a lot of concentration to live each moment with an intensity that justifies being alive. We don’t spend a lot of time in each moment. There is always the preceding moment and the following moment to worry about. Now is not around long enough for us to get emotionally involved with it.

The John F. Kennedy library has posted online hundreds of high definition photographs, many of them in living color, of the 35th President. They appear in slow succession as a screen saver on my laptop.

There in uncanny digital detail is a young man at the top of his form and near the end of his life. My favorite is a picture of JFK seated in straight-back chair against the wall of the Oval Office, his arm around a little girl wearing a red dress and leg braces. The President’s bad back would not enable him to pick the child up, so he sat down to greet her. It’s a photo-op of the highest order, but the President is not looking at the camera; he’s looking into the child’s eyes, reflecting her shy smile.

It’s a high quality, perhaps even existential moment, frozen in time. I don’t know what else was on the President’s agenda that day, but this moment strikes me as having a special quality. It could be one of those rare, fleeting moments when the lives of two persons had the intensity Emily Webb missed so much when she re-lived her twelfth birthday.

I like to think it’s a quality moment that both the little girl and the young president would define as an example of life at its best – a reason to look forward to eternal life. But the moment was gone soon enough. The moment may a dimming memory for the girl who, if she lives, would be in her fifties today. I doubt the laconic president ever commented on it.

Theologian Mary Coloe writes that in his prayer, Jesus “reveals God’s love for the world and God’s desire to draw all into God’s own eternity life, which is to participate in the very being of God.” Or, in the words of David Ford, “I have read the whole Gospel as an invitation to enter into a relationship of trusting Jesus, with continuing ‘life in his name’ involving an ongoing drama of desiring, learning, praying, and loving in community, for the sake of God’s love for the world.”

Our lives are full of passing moments that bring pleasure and pain. All of us have memories too unbearable to recall, and we all have had moments of bliss we wanted to preserve forever.

When Peter talked about Jesus’ words of eternal life, he was certainly thinking about the good times.

Peter did, after all, understand the nature and authority of the one who was making eternal life possible. “Lord, to whom can we go?” Peter asked. “You have the words of eternal life.” Then Peter added an important postscript: 

“We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

No one knows the details of all the moments Peter and the other disciples spent with Jesus. No doubt they were not all moments of existential quality. There were moments of pain, moments when they were rained on, moments when the sun blistered their feet, moments when they argued among themselves, even moments when they were frustrated and angry at Jesus. Jesus could, at times, leave them confused and perplexed, so that the disciples complained among themselves, “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?”

All of which suggests that eternal life is not based on existentially intense experiences in the presence of Jesus.

As most Christians have discovered, every day with Jesus is not necessarily sweeter than the day before.

Nor, as Thornton Wilder suggested, is eternal life dependent on the quality of the moments of our lives, requiring is to live “every, every minute” with an intensity that reminds us of life’s value. Those who live that intensely are candles in the wind, flames that flare brightly and all too briefly.

But Peter sensed that Jesus, “the holy one of God,” was not sent to make eternal life difficult to attain, nor was the eternal life of which he spoke a mere extension of the often mundane lives we live on earth.

At the heart of Jesus’ message is God’s love for all God’s creatures, and Jesus made it clear that whatever eternal life held for believers, it was good.

“Do not be afraid, little flock,” Jesus told his fretful followers, “for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32).

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus said. “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (John 14:1-2).

Both of these heavenly images are as far-fetched as Pearly Gates, and Jesus knew it.  Like artists and poets and scholars across the centuries, Jesus was trying to build an emotional impression about a state of being no living person can comprehend: not a mere place one goes to sit around forever, but a perfect reunion with the God of love – the God who was, is, and evermore shall be – the God who is the Great I Am and indescribable through the paltry grammatical devices we use to measure the passage of time.

What does all that mean exactly?

Beats me.

Nor will any of us know until it’s our turn to experience what Peter simplistically termed “eternal life.”

But we can be sure of this: eternal life will be measured by its quality, not its quantity.

And Jesus assures us: whatever it looks and feels like, it will be good. Very good.

Love, Sweet Love

[May 10, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.]

As I was reading Jesus’ farewell discourse in John 14, a lilting melody was swirling through my head. 

Lord, we don't need another meadow
There are corn fields and wheat fields enough to grow
There are sunbeams and moonbeams enough to shine
Oh listen Lord, if You want to know

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No, not just for some, oh, but just for every, every everyone

Love, sweet love.

This is what Jesus is promising his disciples as the time comes to leave them.

Love. 

Not merely the love of country or the love of family.

Not merely the love of a mother for a child. 

Not merely the romantic love between two people.

Jesus is talking about the very love that brings the universe into existence. The love we know as truth. The love we know as God.

Agape love. The highest form of Christian love, defined as unconditional, sacrificial, and volitional love aimed at the highest good of others. It is God’s selfless love for humanity and the core of Christian theology, guiding believers to love God and neighbors, even enemies.

“In John’s Gospel, love originates in God, who demonstrated ultimate love by sending his Son to save the world,” writes Professor Yung Suk Kim of Virginia Union University. 

“This love transcends self-interest, prejudice, and parochialism; it embraces all people and creation. For Jesus, true religion is practical and tangible, expressed through acts of love that mirror God’s own. His commandments, therefore, are not arbitrary rules, but invitations to participate in God’s loving mission.”

I like to reflect that the power behind the Big Bang, the power who formed the stars and planets, the power who set into motion the laws of physics, the power who so meticulously produced the right conditions to beget life, the power who is the ground of all being, the fundamental, creative, and sustaining source of reality: that power is love.

As we sing the beautiful Psalm 66 this morning, we can share in this ancient understanding of the God of Love.

“But truly God has listened; he has heard the words of my prayer. Blessed be God who has not rejected my prayer or removed from me his steadfast love.” (19-20)

God so loved the world that we gave his son to testify to the truth of God’s love. 

 “And I will ask the Father,” Jesus said, “and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.” (John 14:15-16)

The writer of First Peter declares that “Christ also suffered for the sins of all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.” (I Peter 3:18)

In John’s gospel, “God is truth—the ultimate reality and source of all that exists,” writes Professor Kim. “Jesus, as the incarnate Word, entered the world to bear witness to this truth, revealing God’s character and purpose through his teachings and actions (18:37). 

“He embodied truth in his very being, demonstrating its transformative power in his interactions with others. The Advocate, upon arrival, assumes the critical role of empowering the believing community to faithfully continue this mission of bearing witness to God’s truth, now definitively and fully revealed through Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God.”

Be that as it may, as Jesus gathers his disciples to say good-bye, these lofty truths are not foremost in their hearts.

Instead, the disciples are facing the reality that Jesus is about to leave them. They have to wonder: Is he going to abandon them?

It is said that in the hierarchy of things people are afraid of, death is number one. Public speaking is number two. Incapacitating illness is high on the list.

But abandonment is also a common fear. If you are suddenly abandoned by a parent or lover, you may never trust in a relationship again. Young children may begin to panic when Mommy steps outside the house despite reassurances that “I’ll be right back.”

Even pets fear desertion. It is said that if you leave the house, a dog instinctively assumes he’ll never see you again. This may be true. When we close the door behind us our puppers complain with howls of despair.

Jesus is quick to reassure the disciples, “I will not leave you orphaned.” (John 14:18)

“In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.” (John 14:19)

"This is a compelling vision of the Christian life, one characterized by living in love, obedience, and constant reliance on the Advocate’s empowering presence,” writes Dr Kim. 

The passage highlights that true love for Jesus is shown by following his commandments, which reflect God's inclusive love for everyone. The Spirit of truth supports and guides believers, enabling them to share this love with the world.

Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, is no longer limited by physical embodiment and can be present everywhere. The Holy Spirit, sent as an advocate, enables Jesus to walk alongside us without physical constraints, making his presence accessible at all times.

Throughout church history, when the Spirit has been prioritized, barriers of sexism, classism, and prejudice have fallen. The spirit of truth helps us recognize justice, mercy, and peace, guiding us beyond limitations of ethnicity, gender, class, or personal experience.

“Jesus, is ever present with each and every human being as we walk through this journey of life with the unrestrained guidance and wisdom of the Holy Spirit,” writes Professor Samuel Cruz of Union Theological Seminary in New York.  

“This same spirit would not allow for the exclusion of a woman who was a Samaritan from the blessings of the Kingdom, as the Spirit will not allow for the exclusion of any among us today.”

One might even suggest that those who would restrict the spirit’s power to the male gender are blasphemous.

The Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Churches do not ordain women to the priesthood. Pope John Paul II affirmed in an apostolic letter that the church has no authority to ordain women. A recent book by a Greek Orthodox priest and an Orthodox woman professor discussed the subject carefully and concluded there were no biblical or theological reasons that women should not be ordained, but it won’t happen. Southern Baptists won’t ordain women because they embrace a Chrisitan nationalist preference for Good Ole Boys.

The historic torpor of these churches throws up heretical roadblocks to the holy spirit because tens of thousands of women attest to their profound calling to be pastors, priests, or bishops. The recent investiture of Dame Sarah Mullally at the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury has raised hopes that it may be time to reopen the discussion of women’s ordination. But when asked about it, Pope Leo XIV simply responded, “It’s church law.” He did, however, look very collegial when he welcomed Her Grace to the Vatican last week.

I would love to hear an interpretation by a pope or patriarch as to why this exclusion could be consistent with the Holy Spirit who excludes no one.

And who resides in each human heart as the closest we will ever be to God’s universal and unconditional love.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No, not just for some, oh, but just for every, every everyone
Love, sweet love.

Selah.