Link to the lectionary page for Todays readings

Tomorrow is my citizenship interview. I could have spent today studying.

Actually, I could have spent today overstudying, running Hungarian words and phrases through my head, rehearsing questions that may or may not be asked, checking documents I have already checked, convincing myself that if I could just prepare a little more, I might finally arrive at that mythical place where I feel completely ready. I had my typical two-hour Saturday Hungarian lesson, which I have taken weekly for more than six months, except this time I am actually in Budapest, where I have been for the last seven days, immersed in Hungarian.

My teacher assured me that I am ready while also keeping me humble about my level of comprehension. He knows that I plan to continue our Saturday sessions until fluency. He has become more than just a tutor; he has become a friend, and I look forward to meeting with him and his wife tomorrow, when they join Austin and me for an evening dinner cruise on the Duna.

So today, instead, I went swimming with my son.

The hotel has a spa and, wonderfully, childcare. Austin and I swam together for a while, and then he went off for some kid time while I gave myself permission to stop preparing for tomorrow and simply be here today.

I took a long steam. Then I lowered myself into the cold water of the bath at the Royal Spa and felt my entire body protest. Hot tub. Sauna. More swimming. Heat, cold, water, stillness. Eventually, a sixty-minute deep-tissue massage that seemed to find every place in my body where I had been quietly storing the last several months.

There is something strange about how hard it can be to let ourselves rest when something important is coming.

As though anxiety were evidence that we care. As though worrying were preparation. As though vigilance could guarantee an outcome.

Afterward, Austin and I had an early dinner. And sometime in the late afternoon, in Budapest, I ordered a cappuccino.

Délutáni cappuccino Budapesten.

When it arrived, I barely noticed the coffee. I noticed the cup.

My motto since I started this journey has been, “A lélek tudja az utat.” “The soul knows the way.”

I think that may have been my motto since I started formal discernment. I often share the prayer-song written by Lyndsey Scott:

You don’t have to know the way
the way knows the way
You don’t have to plan the way
Trust the way, feel your way
The way knows
The way knows
The way knows the way1

I held the hot cup in my hand, the texture, the warmth, and I began to think about my day. I remembered the changing temperatures, the cold plunge, and the ways I remembered my body. My body, not broken, not whole, somewhere in between; my soul not broken, not healed, perhaps also somewhere in between. Yet not in process, not in the way we describe process as a verb. The cup represents a Japanese art form known as kintsugi2 the practice of repairing broken pottery with lacquer traditionally dusted with powdered gold. The fracture is not disguised. The repair becomes part of the object’s history and, visually, often its most striking feature.

And there is something especially compelling about encountering that image today, in Budapest.

A city broken so many times, yet as beautiful a place as I have ever seen. My scars are part of me. My life has been haunted by death, trauma, and pain, but also mingled with great joy, love, and beauty. I am in a real sense living kintsugi.

There is a remarkable dichotomy in today’s appointed reading from Jeremiah, one that seems almost made for thinking about kintsugi, brokenness, and what it actually means to be made whole.

Jeremiah begins by remembering the sweetness of his relationship with God: “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart” (Jeremiah 15:16). This is not merely intellectual belief. Jeremiah consumes the word of God. He takes it into himself. It nourishes him. He even grounds his identity in that relationship: “for I am called by your name, O Lord, God of hosts” (Jeremiah 15:16).

And yet, only one verse later, the same Jeremiah says, “under the weight of your hand I sat alone” (Jeremiah 15:17).

There it is: delight and loneliness. Calling and isolation. The hand of God that gives Jeremiah purpose is also experienced as a weight. His relationship with God has given his life meaning, but it has also cost him something. Jeremiah does not attempt to reconcile these experiences into something more comfortable. He allows both of them to be true.

Then comes the verse that stopped me today: “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?” (Jeremiah 15:18).

Jeremiah does not call himself healed. He names the wound. More than that, he names it incurable. And then he does something even more startling: he turns his accusation toward God. “Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail” (Jeremiah 15:18).

This is the same man who, two verses earlier, called God’s words the delight of his heart.

“Your words became to me a joy.” (Jeremiah 15:16)

“You are to me like a deceitful brook.” (Jeremiah 15:18)

Both belong to the same prayer.

Both come from the same person.

Both are permitted to be true.

And perhaps that is already saying something about wholeness. Jeremiah does not have to divide himself into the faithful Jeremiah and the wounded Jeremiah. He does not have to choose between gratitude and anger, love and disappointment, calling and exhaustion. Scripture preserves all of it.

What strikes me even more is that God never responds by telling Jeremiah that the wound isn’t real.

Instead, God says, “If you turn back, I will take you back, and you shall stand before me” (Jeremiah 15:19). And then God makes Jeremiah an extraordinary promise: “I will make you to this people a fortified wall of bronze” (Jeremiah 15:20).

But even here, God does not promise invulnerability.

“They will fight against you.” (Jeremiah 15:20)

That part matters.

The promise isn’t that Jeremiah will never again encounter something capable of hurting him. The promise is what comes next:

“But they shall not prevail over you, for I am with you to save you and deliver you.” (Jeremiah 15:20)

There is an enormous difference between being untouched and being whole.

In the appointed Epistle for today, we are told Saint Paul speaking to the emerging Church in Rome says, “Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.” (Romans 12:11)

Ardent.

I keep returning to that word.

The twelfth chapter of Romans has long been a favorite of mine because it does something extraordinary; it summarizes, in my view, the call to the emerging Church to these new Christians. To be ardent is to burn to be warm, passionate, alive, even aflame. Something about the word feels almost defiant. Paul is not writing about a life protected from suffering. In the very next verse, he says, “Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.” (Romans 12:12)

There it is again, the dichotomy that seems to run through all of today’s appointed readings: ardor and suffering are permitted to inhabit the same life. I can hurt and still burn. I can grieve and still rejoice. I can carry wounds and still be filled with zeal. The presence of one does not invalidate the other.

There is some historical weight behind Paul’s words that feels particularly poignant to me today. Around 49 CE, the Emperor Claudius expelled Jews from Rome, an event referenced in Acts 18:2 and also recorded by the Roman historian Suetonius. After Claudius died in 54 CE, Jews were able to return. By the time Paul writes his letter to the Romans, probably only a few years later, communities of Jesus-followers in Rome included Jews and Gentiles attempting to understand how they belonged to one another after years of disruption, displacement, and change.3

And I am writing these words from the Corinthia Hotel on Erzsébet körút, on the edge of Budapest’s historic Jewish Quarter.

I cannot miss the geography of that.

I am sitting in a European city where, nearly two thousand years after Paul wrote to Rome, another Jewish community would experience exclusion, dispossession, confinement, deportation, and murder. Just blocks from where I sit is the old Budapest ghetto, where tens of thousands of Jews were confined during the final months of the Holocaust.4

I want to be careful not to collapse these histories into one another. Claudius’s expulsion of Jews from Rome was not the Holocaust, and Paul’s first-century Roman communities were not twentieth-century Budapest. They deserve to be remembered in their own particularity. But sitting here, the recurring human questions are difficult for me to ignore:

Who belongs?

Who gets pushed outside?

What happens when those who have been displaced return?

And how do people who carry different histories learn to live together again?

Into something of that first-century world Paul writes:

“Let love be genuine.” (Romans 12:9)

“Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.” (Romans 12:10)

Ardent.

Sitting here on Erzsébet körút, that word feels heavier.

Perhaps Paul is not simply telling people to be enthusiastic about their faith. Perhaps he is telling a community living amid real difference and fracture: Do not become cold.

Do not allow displacement to make you inhospitable.

Do not allow disagreement to make you contemptuous.

Do not allow suffering to make you incapable of recognizing another person’s suffering.

“Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” (Romans 12:15)

Remain permeable to one another.

Remain capable of being moved.

Remain ardent.

And then there is the Gospel.

Jesus tells his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). And then comes one of those great Christian paradoxes: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

Lose your life to find your life.

I wonder if I have spent too much of my life trying to do precisely the opposite.

Trying to preserve things. Trying to hold them together. Trying to make certain that nothing cracks. Trying to anticipate what might happen next so that I can prepare for it, manage it, perhaps even prevent it. There is something deeply human about Peter’s reaction earlier in this Gospel. Jesus tells the disciples that he is going toward Jerusalem, toward suffering and death, and Peter immediately objects: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you” (Matthew 16:22).

This must never happen.

This afternoon, the massage therapist felt the tension in my left shoulder, a constant for a long time now, and she asked me, would you tell me, if I asked, about the trauma? She could sense my body unwilling to tell the stories. She said, "You like to be in control, but sometimes you have to let your body rest." How could she know that? And for once, I stopped trying to understand it.

I relaxed.

I let my shoulder go.

I let my body rest.

And she healed with touch.

Not healed in the sense that everything that shoulder has carried suddenly disappeared. Not healed as though the stories stored there had never happened. She couldn’t undo them, and neither could I.

But for an hour, I allowed myself to stop holding everything together.

Perhaps that was its own kind of healing.

And now, reading the Gospel tonight, I wonder whether I understand Peter a little differently. Jesus tells his disciples what lies ahead: Jerusalem, suffering, death, and Peter immediately responds, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you” (Matthew 16:22).

This must never happen.

Peter wants to control the story.

I understand him.

Because control offers us an extraordinary illusion: if I remain vigilant enough, prepare enough, anticipate enough, hold tightly enough, perhaps I can keep the terrible thing from happening. Perhaps I can preserve the life I have constructed. Perhaps nothing else will break.

And Jesus answers Peter with a paradox: “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

Maybe there are ways of holding on that eventually become their own kind of losing.

And maybe there are moments of letting go that allow us to find something again.

That is what happened on the massage table this afternoon. Nothing dramatic. No great revelation. I simply stopped holding my shoulder so tightly. I let another human being touch the place that hurt. I allowed my body, for sixty minutes, to believe that it did not have to protect me from whatever might happen next.

And afterward, I sat down for a cappuccino.

It came in a black cup traced with gold.

Kintsugi.

Of course it did.

The “coincidence” almost makes me laugh now.

Because perhaps the lesson of that cup is not that broken things can be repaired until they become beautiful again. Maybe even that interpretation assumes too much: that the goal was always to return the vessel to some previous, unbroken state.

The therapist hadn’t erased what my body carried.

The gold hadn’t erased where the ceramic fractured.

Neither needed to.

And tomorrow, when I walk into my citizenship interview, I will not walk in as some perfected version of myself who finally managed to get everything under control.

I will walk in as this me.

This body.

This history.

This imperfect Hungarian.

This father who spent the afternoon swimming with his son.

This man who lay on a massage table and discovered how difficult it can be simply to let his shoulder fall.

This person sitting tonight in Budapest, drinking coffee from a cup whose fractures someone decided were worth tracing in gold.

Maybe that is what today’s Gospel is asking me to lose not myself, but the exhausting project of saving myself from being myself.

Take up the cross.

Follow.

Let go.

Find.

And perhaps, somewhere along the way, discover that the thing I had been so desperately trying to hold together was already whole.

Brokenness is a kind of perspective.

Wholeness may be, too.

And still, beneath all of it:

The soul knows the way.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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“Late have I loved Thee, Thou Beauty ever old and ever new.” 1

Today is the Feast of St. Augustine, and today my son and I stood barefoot at the edge of Lake Balaton.

We stepped with purpose and intentionality. We made our marks side by side.

I came to Hungary searching for footprints.

The footprints of Sándor and Zsuzsanna. The traces of those who lived here before either Austin or I existed. I have searched through records and churches, names and dates, ships and graves. I crossed an ocean carrying the earth of those who left this place more than a century ago, trying somehow to follow the path backward toward home.

And Augustine whispers across sixteen centuries:

Thou wast within and I without, and there I sought Thee.2

Perhaps that is one of the strange graces of pilgrimage. We travel enormous distances looking for something, only to discover that part of what we sought traveled with us.

I came here looking backward.

Backward through generations. Backward through passenger manifests and naturalization papers, baptismal records and marriage registers. Backward through the lives of people. Some of whom I never knew, but without whom there would be no me. I wanted to know where they stood. Where they worshipped. What they saw when they looked across this land. What the earth felt like beneath their feet.

And today, I looked down.

There was my footprint.

And beside it, my son’s.

There is something almost impossibly beautiful about that to me. Sándor and Zsuzsanna left Hungary more than a century ago. They crossed an ocean toward a country they could not possibly have known would become home to generations of their descendants. They could not have imagined me. They certainly could not have imagined Austin.

Could they ever have dreamed that one day their great-great-grandson and great-great-great-grandson would cross that same ocean in the opposite direction? Searching for a glimpse of their spirit, hoping to connect with them through time and space.

That we would come looking for them?

That we would speak their names?

That we would stand barefoot upon Hungarian earth and deliberately press our feet into it?

We came searching for their footprints.

Today, we left ours.

Another spirit calls to me; I found her while climbing Castle Rock in Budapest.

She watches.

High above the city stands the Mother of Budapest, holding her child against her body, her face turned outward toward the city below. From where I stood, she seemed almost impossibly still against the sky. Beneath her, Budapest moved: cars crossing bridges, boats passing along the Duna, people hurrying through streets that have known kings and revolutions, occupations and liberation, departures and returns.

And she simply watched.

There was something about her that held me.

Perhaps because I, too, came here carrying a child.

Mary and the Christ Child stand high above Budapest, watching over the city, their quiet presence calling us toward love, conviction, and hospitality.

Thou wast within and I without, and there I sought Thee.3

Perhaps that is why her image stays with me.

She does not chase after the city.

She remains.

She watches.

She holds.

She loves.

I crossed an ocean searching for a glimpse of Sándor and Zsuzsanna’s spirit, hoping somehow to connect with them across time and space.

Perhaps I had forgotten to look at what they had left within me.

The Mother watches.

The ancestors remain.

The child walks beside me.

And for one brief moment on the shore of Balaton, the generations seemed to stand together.

We came looking for the footprints of those who came before us, and somewhere along the way, we left our own.

Late have I loved Thee, Thou Beauty ever old and ever new.4

Perhaps that is what this country has become for me:

ever old, and ever new.

I discovered that Augustine is not entirely a stranger to Hungary either. He never walked this land, but his words did. Centuries after his death, communities shaped by his Rule took root throughout the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. Even the Pauline Order-the Pálosok, born here on Hungarian soil made Augustine’s Rule part of its life.

Perhaps words have ancestors and descendants too.

Augustine’s restless heart traveled farther than he ever could.

And sixteen centuries after his death, on his feast day, I find myself standing barefoot with my son beside Lake Balaton, hearing his ancient words anew:

Thou wast within and I without, and there I sought Thee.5

I came to Hungary seeking outwardly ancestors, villages, churches, records, graves, some trace that might tell me who I am and where I came from.

Augustine seems to ask whether perhaps some of what I crossed an ocean searching for had already crossed the ocean long ago and was living within me.

Perhaps I did not cross an ocean to become Hungarian. Perhaps I crossed an ocean to encounter something that had been quietly traveling within me all along.

Today, on Augustine’s feast day, Mary and the Christ Child keep their quiet watch over Budapest. The Duna continues its ancient journey through the city. Lake Balaton moves against its shores. Somewhere beneath its waters, the grey mineral mud is already softening the edges of two footprints a father’s and a son’s.

Soon they will disappear.

That is all right.

Sándor and Zsuzsanna’s footprints disappeared long ago, too.

And yet I am here.

Austin is here.

We remember them.

We speak their names.

We carry them.

And today, we left something of ourselves behind.

Late have I loved Thee, Thou Beauty ever old and ever new.6

Maybe that is Hungary for me now, ever old and ever new, a place I am discovering for the first time and somehow remembering. A home I have traveled thousands of miles to find, only to discover that some part of it has always been traveling with me.

The restless heart does not always find its ease by finally arriving somewhere.

Sometimes it finds its ease by realizing:

I have been coming home all along.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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Today would have been my thirteenth wedding anniversary.

Nineteen years together.

There is something strange about writing those words while sitting here in Siófok, Hungary, a glass of Hungarian red wine beside me, some cured meat and cheese on the table, Patty Griffin playing, and the air coming off Lake Balaton moving across my skin.

There is grief here.

But there is healing here, too.

The appropriate amount of grief and, perhaps, the appropriate amount of healing.

Nine years ago, I also spent our anniversary alone. I was in Sint Maarten then, thousands of miles from home, surrounded by another beautiful body of water.

I have been thinking about that tonight.

Two anniversaries.

Two countries.

Two bodies of water.

Two versions of me.

And yet they feel very different.

9 years ago, I couldn't imagine I would be sitting in Hungary, both a therapist and a seminarian. Nine years ago, I was working in the New Jersey Department of Children and Families, in the Division of Child Protection and Permanency. Nine years ago, I became a father, also not something expected at the time, and also by choice.

Rain by Patty Griffin has been a friend of mine for a long time.

I don’t remember exactly when it stopped being simply a song I loved and became something more like a companion. I only know that somewhere along this journey, I began returning to it when I didn’t have language for what I was feeling.

Some songs we listen to, and others seem to know us.

Rain has known me. I often refer to songs like this one as “Friends,” because they feel more like companions to me.

Rain itself has always seemed complicated to me.

Rain can be sadness.

We speak of storm clouds gathering when life becomes difficult. We describe seasons of grief as dark and gray. Rain falls down windows like tears. We run from it, seek shelter, and wait impatiently for it to pass.

But rain can also be joy.

There is the smell of the earth after a summer rain. The sound of it against a roof when you’re safe inside. Children jumping into puddles. Gardens opening themselves to receive it. Fields that have been dry drinking deeply from something falling out of the sky.

The farmer praying for rain and the bride praying against it are looking at exactly the same clouds.

Maybe so much of life is like that.

The rain itself doesn’t always tell us what it means.

Sometimes meaning depends upon where I am standing when it begins to fall.

As a teacher and practitioner of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), I often teach and practice mindfulness in the moment; I place perspective in the gentle hands of psychological flexibility rather than the rigid arms of all-or-nothing thinking.

There have been times during these nineteen years when the rain felt like sadness. There were storms I desperately wanted to escape, seasons when I could barely see beyond what was happening immediately in front of me. There were moments when the hurt felt deep enough to drown in.

But when I look backward now, I can also see that some things grew there.

Not because everything that happened was necessary.

Not because suffering automatically becomes sacred simply because we survive it.

And certainly not because I believe God sends every storm to teach us a lesson.

But because human beings sometimes discover that even after the rain we never wanted, the ground beneath us is still capable of growing something.

That distinction matters to me.

I don’t have to call the storm good in order to recognize the fruit that eventually grew in its aftermath.

Maybe that is why Rain has remained my friend for so long.

At different moments in my life, I have heard a different song inside the same song.

Sometimes I heard sorrow.

Sometimes desperation.

Sometimes exhaustion.

Sometimes hope.

And tonight, sitting beside Lake Balaton on what would have been my thirteenth wedding anniversary, I hear something I don’t think I was capable of hearing nine years ago:

life.

Nine years ago, I sat beside another body of water in Sint Maarten on our anniversary.

Tonight, I sit beside Balaton.

Two shores.

Nine years.

The same song.

A different man listening.

And perhaps that is what rain has been teaching me all along.

Rain can fall upon a grave.

Rain can fall upon a garden.

Sometimes it is falling on both at exactly the same time.

Something is ending.

Something else is growing.

And maybe I don’t have to decide tonight whether the rain is sadness or joy.

Maybe it can be both.

Maybe grief and healing aren’t opposites.

Maybe they are standing together beneath the same clouds, receiving the same rain differently.

Tonight there is an appropriate amount of grief.

And there is an appropriate amount of healing.

I can mourn what is ending without mourning the fact that I am still alive.

I can remember the nineteen years without asking for them back.

I can love what was beautiful without returning to what hurt.

I can allow the rain to fall without believing that I am drowning anymore.

Because rain does something else.

It grows things.

And tonight I find myself wondering what has been growing in me during these nine years between those two shores.

My discernment process has been more than deep prayer about Holy Orders and ordination; it's also, if not primarily, been about the unfolding truth that Gd has dreamed for me, and about sitting still long enough for that dream to take shape.

I have been thinking a lot about the number nine today. Then it began to grow in me, the nine fruits of the Spirit.

Paul writes of nine fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22–23.)

I don’t believe the nine years between Sint Maarten and Siófok are some divine numerological code. But I do believe there is something sacred in looking backward and asking:

What fruit has grown in me during these nine years?

What has all this rain watered?

Perhaps love has changed.

Perhaps patience has matured.

Perhaps peace has become less dependent upon another person’s choices.

Perhaps kindness has finally learned to include kindness toward myself.

Perhaps faithfulness no longer means remaining indefinitely in something simply because I once promised I would.

Perhaps gentleness means I don’t have to turn the person I loved into a monster in order to let him go.

And perhaps joy is this:

Sitting beside Lake Balaton with a glass of Hungarian red wine, some cured meat and cheese, Patty Griffin playing, feeling the air coming off the water and realizing that I am still here.

Still capable of tasting.

Still capable of listening.

Still capable of grieving.

Still capable of loving.

Still capable of becoming.

Still alive beneath the rain.

And God knows, there has been rain.

As I lift this glass and sip the sweet Hungarian red wine, grown in the same county my family came from, another familiar set of words comes to me.

This is my blood of the new covenant.

Do this in remembrance of me.

Words I have heard at the altar more times than I could ever count.

Tonight I hear them differently.

Not because this glass of wine is the Eucharist. It isn’t. And not because I would dare replace Christ at the center of those words with myself.

But because I am struck by what the Eucharist asks us to embody every time we receive it:

newness.

A new covenant.

A new promise.

A life received again.

And remembrance.

Christian remembrance is not simply nostalgia. It does not ask me to travel backward and live inside what was. It brings what has been into the present and asks me to encounter it here, now.

Perhaps that is what I am doing tonight.

I remember.

I remember nineteen years.

I remember thirteen anniversaries.

I remember Sint Maarten nine years ago.

I remember the person I loved.

I remember the man I was.

I remember what was beautiful.

I remember what hurt.

But remembrance does not require return.

I can remember without going backward.

I can honor without holding on.

I can grieve without surrendering the life that remains.

This is what I have been telling my patients lately. I call it the “really real.”

The really real is right now.

Not the marriage I thought I would have.

Not the conversation I wish had gone differently.

Not the person I hoped someone might become.

Not the future I once imagined.

Not even the nineteen years that came before this moment.

Those things are real. They happened. They belong to me.

But they are not the really real.

The really real is this moment.

This breath.

This glass.

This wine.

This air coming off Balaton.

This grief.

This healing.

This body that carried me through nineteen years and brought me all the way to Hungary.

This life that is still happening.

Now.

Perhaps that is another thing the table has been trying to teach me all these years.

Take.

Eat.

Drink.

Remember.

And then get up from the table and live.

The sacrament doesn’t ask us to remain kneeling at the altar forever.

We receive something there and carry it back into the world.

Tonight, beside Lake Balaton, I think I understand that in a different way.

I can receive my past without remaining there.

I can remember my marriage without continuing to inhabit it.

I can bless what was good.

I can mourn what was lost.

And then I can stand up and walk into whatever comes next.

So I lift this glass.

Not as sacrament, but as remembrance.

Not to the death of something, but to the life that remains.

To my ancestors who left this soil.

To the strange grace of returning to it generations later.

To nineteen years that shaped me.

To the person I loved.

To the man I am becoming.

To the rain.

To the fruit.

To the newness.

And to the really real

this moment,

this breath,

this life,

right now.

And I whisper into the lake-blown air:

Peace.

Salaam.

Shalom.

Not the peace that comes because everything has been repaired.

Not the peace that requires me to forget.

Not the peace of pretending there was no hurt.

Shalom.

Wholeness.

The kind of peace that allows what is finished to be finished.

The kind that lets nineteen years belong to nineteen years without demanding the twentieth.

And then another set of words rises in me—words I have heard at the end of the Eucharist so many times:

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

Go.

Maybe that is the word I needed all along.

The liturgy does not end at the table.

We gather.

We remember.

We confess.

We forgive.

We break.

We receive.

And then

we go.

We are not supposed to remain kneeling at the altar clutching what we have received.

We are sent back into the world.

Back into the really real.

Back into now.

So perhaps tonight is not simply an ending.

Perhaps it is a dismissal.

I have remembered.

I have grieved.

I have given thanks.

I have received what these nineteen years have given me and acknowledged what they could not.

And now I can go.

I take another sip of wine.

Patty Griffin is still singing.

Balaton is before me.

The air moves across my face.

And somewhere between Rain and Let Him Fly, between Sint Maarten and Siófok, between the marriage I remember and the life that is actually happening, I realize:

I am still alive beneath the rain.

There has been fruit.

There is wine.

There is breath.

There is life.

There is now.

The really real.

And so, on what would have been my thirteenth wedding anniversary, after nineteen years together, I do not whisper goodbye into the Hungarian night.

I whisper something gentler.

Something older.

Something that does not curse what was but releases it from what must be.

Peace.

Salaam.

Shalom.

Go in peace.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

All is peace, all is love, and all is within the love of God.

So, let go, let fly, let God write the story.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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Ever since I began learning about Hungary's history, I have felt a mix of fascination and awe at the many wars, revolutions, skirmishes, and its tendency toward authoritarianism.

I spent the entire day yesterday exploring Castle Rock, Szent Matthias Church, the Halászbástya (or Fisherman’s Bastion), and, of course, Buda Castle. With each of these incredible spaces and architecture, none of it at least for me, compared to the view of the Danu and of the Széchenyi lánchíd (or Széchenyi Chain Bridge)

I was drawn to the bridge connecting Buda and Pest, once separate cities. When I think about it this morning, there is something of a metaphor there for me. This ancient country, over 1100 years old, has seen its share of war, yet this bridge remains a fixture of unity.

The great walls of the Bastion and Castle Rock draw out the Game of Thrones fanboy in me, but that Bridge is remarkable.

I walked across it with my son and spent some time in Buda after our full day at Castle Rock, then explored the markets before walking back over the bridge to our apartment in Pest.

I was taken in by the many languages and people walking alongside me. I would say the most common language I have heard spoken here in Hungary besides Hungarian is Spanish, followed by English and French. Some Russian, though I tend to think Russian speakers might speak more quietly these days.

Muslims, Jews, and Christians were all having a nice day, crossing this bridge, shopping, and exploring the culture, and it struck me why I am so taken with the Széchenyi lánchíd; bridges are, by their nature, connections.

I don’t want to idealize the real struggles Hungary faces with diversity and inclusion, but I sensed a multicultural city thriving. Later that evening, I showed my son Austin a picture of the bridge after its destruction in WWII at the hands of the Nazis. Yet, this time, when discussing war, I was able to explain that humans seem to always find a way forward, a way to rebuild, and a way to connect with each other, even when the most evil among us try to separate us.

Someday this experience will mean more to him. Yesterday, I could feel his eyes rolling as he discovered we were going to walk back over the bridge. You see, yesterday I never even used the rental car; we walked the city. In fact, there really is no good reason to have a car in the city I am learning.

In the appointed Psalm for today, it is written,

I love you, O Lord my strength,
O Lord my stronghold, my crag, and my haven.
My God, my rock in whom I put my trust,
my shield, the horn of my salvation, and my refuge;
you are worthy of praise. (Psalm 18:1-2)

Crag is one of those words that is easy to pass by and think, what the heck does that mean…?

The KJV of these verses reads:

“The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer;
my God, my strength, in whom I will trust;
my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.”
—Psalm 18:2, KJV

In Hebrew, the verse piles one image of safety upon another: סַלְעִי (sal‘i), “my crag”; מְצוּדָתִי (metzudati), “my fortress”; מְפַלְטִי (mefalti), “my deliverer.” It isn’t merely saying God helps me. It pictures God as the place you can actually stand when everything around you is unstable.

And “my crag” is especially striking. A crag is not a soft refuge. It is ancient, immovable stone something that was there before you arrived and will remain after the storm passes.

I think that is an especially beautiful image for Hungary in its 1100 years of existence. Having spent the day yesterday in what was literally a fortress, and seeing the many rocks, some stones lost, others patched back in, and the ongoing restoration of the walls, I find that to be a comforting prayer for today.

Adonai, sal‘i, metzudati u-mefalti
O LORD, my crag, my fortress, and my deliverer.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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It’s 10:00 am in Budapest this morning. It’s a beautiful morning; yesterday it was cloudy all day, but today feels different. Our third day in Hungary. My son Austin is having a hard time adjusting to the 6-hour time change. He woke me up in the middle of the night (here) around 3 am to tell me he couldn't sleep. It was about 9 pm back home, his actual bedtime. So, though I had been asleep for hours now, I woke up, cut some watermelon, gave him some OJ, and said, " Let's watch 'Stranger Things,' his new show obsession for his bedtime routine. I sensed his body needed the ritual he was used to to fall asleep. He was still hungry even though we had dinner at 8:30 pm Hungarian time, so I made him the leftover csirkepaprikas and joined him for a 3 am dinner date.

Yesterday we walked along the Danu and when we arrived at the memorial “Shoes on the Danube,” I made intentional space and time to sit there, be present, and then answer his questions. My mind was flooded with worry: what in the world do I tell a 10-year-old boy on the spectrum about the Holocaust?

What I realized is that I am not even sure I know how to answer the “Why” questions about the Holocaust to a neurotypical adult, let alone a young boy.

So I said, let’s touch them together and say a prayer, which we did. “God, we thank you for leaving this example, that we may learn from our many evils as humans, teach us to forsake what is of this world for you, and to love in the ways in which you have commanded us, save us from ourselves, and stop this from happening over and over again.”

Then came the questions: “Daddy, why do people put rocks in the shoes?”

The act of placing visitation stones is significant in Jewish bereavement practices. Small stones are placed by people who visit Jewish graves in an act of remembrance or respect for the deceased. The practice is a way of participating in the mitzvah (commandment) of burial. It is customary to place the stone with the left hand.1

In this morning’s appointed Gospel lesson (John 7:1-13), we are confronted with several questions, and with the word often used in John’s Gospel, “The Jews.”

When today we hear John say “the Jews,” we must listen carefully. Jesus was a Jew. His mother was a Jew. His disciples were Jews. The people debating who Jesus was were Jews. This is a family argument within the Jewish world of the first century, not permission for Christians to turn the Jewish people into the enemy.

And perhaps that matters especially beside these empty shoes.

Scripture itself reminds us how dangerous a stone can become in the human hand. A stone can be lifted against the woman accused. Stones can be hurled against Stephen. And words, too, can become stones when we use them to turn a people into “them.”

So when John says “the Jews,” we will not allow those words to become another stone in our hands.

We will lay our stone down.

Not a stone cast in accusation.
Not a stone thrown in condemnation.
But a stone placed gently inside an empty shoe.

In Today’s Gospel, Jesus does not show up at the festival, and they ask, “Where is He?”

The same question my son asked of the bodies that fell into the Danu after being shot by the Arrow Cross. Where did they go?

Where are they?

Where is the child who wore those little shoes?
Where is the mother who fastened them?
Where is the father who walked beside them?
Where are the families, the prayers, the meals, the arguments, the laughter, the ordinary lives that once walked these streets?

One generation teaching the next not to forget.

That is zachor — זָכוֹר — remember.

Emlékezünk. — We remember.

I explained to my son that this is why the shoes are here, memorialized on the river. So that we might remember. I said, the people who died were loved and known; they had families, friends, and neighbors who loved them and remember them, and now, even though we do not know them, we are here, and we remember.

לזכר קרבנות שנורו אל תוך הדנובה
בידי אנשי צלב החץ בשנים
1944–1945
טרונם לברכה
הוקם טבת תשס״ה

“In memory of the victims who were shot into the Danube by the Arrow Cross men in the years 1944–1945.” זכרונם לברכה — Zikhronam livrakhah
“May their memory be for a blessing.”

Today’s appointed psalm 63:1 reads, “O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.”

I don’t know how to tell my son about what happened here, but today's psalm opens with embodiment; Psalm 63 doesn't rush to fill absence. It allows thirst, bodily longing, absence, and searching to remain present before God.

So, I took his hand and my own hand, and we touch one of the shoes together.

We placed a stone in it, and then my son said, “How can anyone hurt other people like this?”

To which I said, I don’t know…. People can convince themselves of all sorts of evil in the name of God, and none of that is from God; it is a lie. Love twisted into hatred.

Austin says, Jesus said to love everyone. Yes, he did, and it was that message, and more, that led the people to be convinced they alone had power over life and death to crucify him.

Austin said, yes, but he rose from the dead, and I said to him, and so will these, every single one of them, Austin, on the last day, they will be with God.

“Even the bad people?” he asks, to which I reply, that's not up to us; that's up to God, and I don’t know the answer to that question either, but I suspect God's love is more powerful and stronger than even we can imagine.

A prayer:

Let this not be a stone cast in judgment,
as stones have so often been cast against the condemned.
Let it be a stone placed gently in an empty shoe.

Not a stone that wounds,
but a stone that remembers.
Not a stone thrown to erase a life,
but a stone laid down to say:
this life will not be erased.

Once, human hands took up stones against their neighbors.
Today, our hands lay one down.

The shoe asks, “Where are they?”
The stone answers, “They were here.”

They mattered.
They were beloved.
We remember.

זָכוֹר — Zachor.
Emlékezünk.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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To read the appointed scripture click here: John 3:1-21

^“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)

As I sat with those words, my mind wandered to another familiar story, that of Job. For chapters, Job demands an explanation for his suffering. He asks "Why?" over and over again. When God finally speaks from the whirlwind, God never answers Job's question directly. Instead, God asks a series of questions that reveal the vastness of creation and the limits of human understanding.

"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (Job 38:4), God asks. The point is not to humiliate Job but to remind him that the One who governs the universe sees far beyond what any human being can perceive.

Jesus offers Nicodemus a similar invitation. Nicodemus wants an explanation. How can someone be born again? (John 3:4) How does this work? Jesus does not provide a formula.

Jesus employs a deliberate paronomasia on the term pneuma, reflecting the Hebrew and Aramaic semantic range of ruach (wind, breath, Spirit). His teaching evokes Israel's Scriptures, especially Genesis 1–2 and Ezekiel 36–37, in a manner consistent with Second Temple Jewish interpretive traditions.1

Nicodemus was not an ordinary listener.

The Gospel of John introduces Nicodemus with three descriptions:

• A Pharisee (John 3:1)

• A ruler of the Jews (a member of the Sanhedrin) (John 3:1)

• “The teacher of Israel” (John 3:10)

That last description is especially important. Jesus does not call him a teacher but "the teacher of Israel" (ὁ διδάσκαλος τοῦ Ἰσραήλ). Whether this is an honorific or rhetorical emphasis, John portrays Nicodemus as someone who should be deeply formed by Israel's Scriptures and interpretive traditions.2

Nicodemus is not simply a curious seeker. He represents the very best of Israel’s religious tradition. He is a Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin, and, as Jesus says, “the teacher of Israel” (John 3:10). In other words, if anyone should recognize what Jesus is talking about, it is Nicodemus.

That is precisely why Jesus speaks as He does.

Jesus does not begin with a systematic explanation. He begins with language that invites contemplation. He uses layered language, biblical allusions, and a deliberate play on the word ruach/pneuma because He expects Nicodemus to hear more than a single definition. A rabbi trained in Israel’s Scriptures would immediately recognize that the same word can mean wind, breath, and Spirit, and that this single word ties together some of the most foundational moments in Israel’s story.

The Spirit (ruach) hovers over the waters of creation (Genesis 1:2). God breathes life into humanity (Genesis 2:7). Through Ezekiel, God promises to sprinkle clean water upon His people and give them a new heart and a new Spirit (Ezekiel 36:25–27). Moments later, that same ruach breathes life into dry bones (Ezekiel 37:1–14). Even Israel’s wisdom tradition reflects on the mystery of God’s life-giving breath (Ecclesiastes 11:5). These are not isolated texts but part of the theological imagination that shaped Israel’s understanding of God’s work in the world.

Jesus expects Nicodemus to hear all of these echoes.

Instead, we have been taught traditionally that Nicodemus hears only the literal. He hears “born again” and thinks of physical birth. He hears “wind” and thinks of weather. Jesus is speaking on the level of Scripture’s deepest patterns, but there is another possibility. Perhaps Nicodemus is engaging Jesus rhetorically, maybe even with irony or playful exaggeration.

Nicodemus’ question may be intentionally absurd:

“Surely you don’t mean crawling back into your mother’s womb?”

In Greek rhetoric, questions like this often function as reductio ad absurdum, pushing a statement to its logical extreme in order to invite clarification.

In other words, Nicodemus may be saying,

“Rabbi, your language cannot possibly be literal. Explain what you mean.”

The writer of the Gospel of John frequently writes conversations with multiple layers. A speaker says something with one meaning. Another responds on another level. Sometimes that response reflects misunderstanding. Sometimes it functions as a narrative device to draw out Jesus’ teaching. The Gospel never explicitly tells us which is happening here.

A number of scholars have argued that Nicodemus should not be viewed merely as an opponent or curious outsider, but as someone who becomes, at least in some sense, a disciple in process. The text itself does not explicitly call him a disciple, but John's Gospel portrays a trajectory that is difficult to ignore.

Gail R. O'Day's reading of Nicodemus is, in my opinion, one of the most insightful because she pays close attention to how John tells the story, not merely what Jesus teaches. She reads John as a carefully crafted narrative in which Nicodemus functions as a representative character for the reader.

John’s Gospel is saturated with contrasts: light and darkness, above and below, belief and unbelief, life and death. Nicodemus enters the story within precisely this symbolic world. John tells us that “he came to Jesus by night” (John 3:2). The detail may certainly describe the literal time of the encounter, but within the symbolic vocabulary of the Fourth Gospel, night carries theological weight as well. Nicodemus approaches Jesus from a place where understanding is still incomplete, where he can recognize that Jesus has come from God and yet cannot fully comprehend what Jesus is revealing to him.

What makes Nicodemus especially compelling, however, is that John does not leave him frozen in that first nighttime encounter. He appears again in John 7:50–52, where he cautiously challenges his colleagues’ willingness to condemn Jesus without first hearing him. Then, in John 19:39, Nicodemus appears once more, this time openly assisting Joseph of Arimathea in the burial of Jesus and bringing an extravagant quantity of myrrh and aloes. John never gives us a dramatic conversion scene for Nicodemus. Instead, he allows us to watch a life unfold. The man who first approached Jesus under the cover of night gradually acts with increasing openness and courage.

This makes Nicodemus an especially fitting character within a Gospel preoccupied with the movement from darkness into light. His discipleship, if that is what we are witnessing, is not instantaneous. It develops. He questions, wrestles, returns, speaks, and eventually acts.

Gail R. O’Day’s narrative reading of John is helpful here because she cautions against reducing John 3 to a collection of theological propositions detached from the encounter itself. The dialogue matters. Nicodemus’s questions matter. Jesus’ repeated images matter. The reader is meant to move through the conversation alongside Nicodemus and, in doing so, to be changed by it.

O’Day writes that the interpreter must attend to the way John moves the reader through the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, allowing the reader to perceive what Nicodemus does not yet fully perceive. She insists that “the interpreter must allow the narrative dynamics of John 3:1–21 to shape an interpretation of the text.” Nicodemus therefore becomes more than merely the man who misunderstood Jesus. He becomes a character through whom John allows us to experience what coming toward the light can look like: not necessarily one sudden moment of certainty, but a gradual reorientation of the person toward Jesus.3

Why does this matter?

For many Christians, particularly within evangelical and fundamentalist traditions, John 3 is read primarily as the chapter that teaches the necessity of being “born again.” The emphasis often falls on the individual’s moment of conversion: a conscious decision to accept Christ as Savior, without which one remains outside salvation. There is certainly biblical warrant for affirming that Jesus speaks of the necessity of new birth. He plainly says, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (John 3:3), and He later speaks of the gift of eternal life through belief in the Son (John 3:16).

Yet the conversation with Nicodemus suggests that Jesus is speaking of something both deeper and older than a single conversion experience. He does not invent a new doctrine detached from Israel’s story. Instead, He speaks in the language of Israel’s Scriptures. His imagery evokes creation, where the Spirit of God hovers over the waters (Genesis 1:2); the creation of humanity, where God breathes life into Adam (Genesis 2:7); Ezekiel’s promise of a new heart and a new Spirit (Ezekiel 36:25–27); the valley of dry bones animated by God’s breath (Ezekiel 37:1–14); and the wisdom tradition that reflects upon the mystery of God’s life-giving breath (Ecclesiastes 11:5). Jesus is not introducing Nicodemus to an entirely new religious experience. He is revealing the fulfillment of a story that began at creation itself.

This is significant because it broadens our understanding of what Jesus means by being “born from above.” New birth is not merely a change of religious affiliation, an emotional experience, or even a single moment of decision. It is participation in God’s ongoing work of new creation. The same Spirit who brought order out of chaos, breathed life into humanity, inspired the prophets, and promised Israel’s restoration is now bringing forth a renewed humanity in Christ.

Seen this way, Jesus’ words are no less demanding than many evangelical interpretations; they may, in fact, be more demanding. He is not asking for intellectual agreement alone. He is announcing that entrance into the kingdom requires nothing less than the creative work of God within the human person. This new birth cannot be manufactured through religious achievement, inherited through ancestry, or secured by one’s status as “the teacher of Israel.” It is the gracious work of the Spirit, whose movement is as free and mysterious as the wind.

Thus, the question posed by John 3 is not simply, “Have you had a born-again experience?” The deeper question is, “Has the Spirit of God begun the work of making you a new creation?” That work may begin in a moment, but throughout John’s Gospel it unfolds over a lifetime. Nicodemus himself becomes the example. He comes by night, struggles to understand, cautiously defends Jesus, and finally steps into the light through a costly act of public devotion. His story reminds us that being born from above is not merely a point in time; it is the beginning of a life continually transformed by the Spirit of God.

Perhaps this is why John 3:16 has become one of the most beloved verses in all of Scripture. It captures the very heart of the Gospel:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

For generations, Christians have memorized these words, quoted them, and proclaimed them as the summary of the Christian faith. Yet, too often, we stop reading one verse too soon.

Jesus continues:

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17)

The order matters.

Love comes before judgment.

Grace comes before response.

Salvation is God’s initiative before it is humanity’s decision.

This does not diminish the necessity of faith or the reality of responding to Christ. Rather, it reminds us that the very purpose of Christ’s coming was not condemnation but reconciliation. Jesus did not enter the world looking for reasons to exclude humanity from God’s kingdom. He entered the world because the Father loved the world too deeply to leave it as it was.

That has been the thread running through Jesus’ entire conversation with Nicodemus. The language of being born from above is not a threat; it is an invitation. The imagery of the wind is not meant to confuse; it is meant to awaken wonder. The call to new birth is not about earning God’s favor but about receiving the new life that only God’s Spirit can give.

Perhaps this is where we have sometimes misunderstood the Gospel. We have treated “born again” as a line that separates the saved from the condemned, when Jesus presents it as the gracious work of God’s Spirit recreating humanity. The emphasis is not on drawing tighter boundaries around who is in and who is out. The emphasis is on the astonishing truth that God is making all things new.

John’s Gospel begins with creation:

“In the beginning...”

It continues with new creation:

“You must be born from above.”

And it culminates in God’s purpose:

“God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The movement of the Gospel is always toward life.

Toward restoration.

Toward light.

Toward love.

Like Nicodemus, we may come to Jesus in the darkness, carrying our questions, our certainties, and our misunderstandings. The good news is that Jesus does not meet us there with condemnation. He meets us with an invitation to step into the light, to be born from above, and to entrust ourselves to the mysterious, life-giving Spirit who still blows where He wills.

Perhaps that is the greatest irony of this passage. The most famous verse in the Bible is not ultimately about escaping hell; it is about the immeasurable love of God. And the verse that follows reminds us why that love took flesh in Jesus Christ: not to condemn the world, but to save it. Every conversation Jesus has in John 3 from new birth, to the wind, to the cross, to eternal life must be read through that lens. The Gospel does not begin with condemnation. It begins, and ends, with the astonishing declaration that God so loved the world.

Jesus concludes His conversation with Nicodemus not with a command, but with an invitation:

“For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” (John 3:20–21)

Too often these verses are read as though Jesus is dividing humanity into the “good” and the “bad.” Yet that is not what He says. He does not say that those who are perfect come into the light. He says that those who do what is true come into the light. Truth, in John’s Gospel, is not merely something to believe; it is something to live. It is the courage to stop hiding. It is the willingness to allow ourselves to be fully seen by God.

This is where John 3:17 becomes indispensable. Jesus has already told Nicodemus that the Son was not sent into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. The light, therefore, is not the harsh beam of condemnation searching for flaws. It is the healing light of God’s presence. We do not come into the light because we have finally become worthy of it. We come into the light because it is there that God does the deepest work.

Perhaps that is why Nicodemus’ story is left unfinished. John never records the exact moment when Nicodemus is “born from above.” Instead, he simply allows us to watch his life unfold. The man who first comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness gradually steps into the light first by seeking, then by questioning, then by defending, and finally by publicly honoring the crucified Christ. His journey reminds us that faith is often less a single dramatic moment than a lifelong movement toward the light.

Maybe that is John’s invitation to each of us. We all come to Christ carrying questions, fears, assumptions, and hidden places we would rather keep concealed. Yet the Gospel assures us that Christ does not meet us with condemnation. He meets us with love. He does not expose us to shame us; He brings us into the light to heal us. The Spirit still blows where it wills, still breathes life where there was death, still creates where there was chaos, and still calls every one of us from whatever darkness we inhabit to step into the marvelous light of God.

The conversation that began in the darkness of night ends with an invitation into the light. It is, perhaps, the invitation of the entire Gospel of John: not simply to know more about Jesus, but to encounter Him, to be remade by His Spirit, and to discover that the God who so loved the world has never ceased calling His children out of darkness and into life.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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Matthew 14:22-33

Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Imagine it, you are in a small boat, the waves are crashing as a storm rolls in across the sea. I can say I would be terrified. I have both a reverence and fear of the sea. The disciples are exactly where Jesus told them to be, and yet the storm surrounds them, and in it, or through it, or of it, a figure appears to be walking toward them. This sounds like the plot of a scary movie; you can almost see the old seaman in the yellow raincoat with a hook for a hand, and yet, this was happening. “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid,” Jesus says to his frightened friends. Again, if I am being honest, that would not have settled the fear in me; I would be caught up between jumping overboard or waiting for this talking, walking-through-a-storm-over-or-on-the-water guy to come and get me. Choices, this one is sort of like choosing between getting bit by a snake or a scorpion; neither choice sounds inviting.

I think all of us can name at least one time, some of us many times, perhaps some of us still a daily normal of being caught up between fear and fright. Times when faith feels flat, life seems to be offering nothing but silence. Not the silence of stillness and peace, but the silence, like that brief second before you realize you are about to crash your car. That slow-motion kind of “Oh shit” feeling that lasts for a split second between “I can't believe this is happening, and the resignation that this is absolutely happening.

In that almost timeless space, the storm is raging, and all of our choices seem worse than the next; here he comes…Walking through, in and of the storm, on, or above the water, saying, “egō eimi—”I am.”

And, in that moment, your memory time travels back to Moses and the burning bush, and back again, in that split second that seems to last longer than any minute you have ever lived through… “I am?”

The saints have always known, or so we are taught, that dark nights are not evidence of God’s abandonment. Yet, most of them, or the stories we hear of them, suffered doubt, fear, where are you? How could you? Why me?

“egō eimi—”I am.”

Storms eventually pass, but they leave a sort of promise behind: “This will not be the last you will be seeing of me, I’ll be back…”

We often hear folks speak about the calmness that comes right before, right in the middle, and right after the storms, as if in each tempest there is a kind of peace…

Not the kind that leaves you feeling like everything is just fine, but the kind that arrives unexpectedly, like when you never thought you could survive, but here you are one more day, one more storm….

Before Jesus joins his friends in the boat being tossed about, the story has a bit of a prelude…He leaves the crowds, and we are told he goes up the mountain by himself to pray.

What does it mean for God to pray?

What happened in that time? Did it occur at the crossroads where physics and gravity no longer set the rules, or inside, or outside, or in some way unknowable to us?

What is it like for God to pray, and then descend a mountain and walk through a storm of his own command, on the water…

Why not just command the storm to be still as we are told he did in another Gospel account of this story?

What happens between “Be still… and take heart?”

The first miracle says:

“I have authority over the storm.”

The second says:

“I am with you in the storm.”

Yet, for those of us who have known the darkest and stormiest nights, we might ask, why the storm at all? What is the purpose of causing such fear and then exclaiming, fear not.

We are told that the faithful have asked this question for centuries, but I have never really appreciated that answer. Who are these so faithful that no matter the storm, they seem to be okay with a sinking ship or a ghostly boo from within the worst night of your life….

Who can watch the boat filling with water and calmly say, “There must be a reason for this”?

I cannot. Not when the ship feels as though it is sinking.

Yet, Peter, boastful, prideful, some might say arrogant Peter, the so-called Rock, steps onto the water, into the storm, and begins to sink like the rock he is….

Some preachers have said it is because he took his eyes off Jesus; perhaps I can see that…

But, what kind of a friend, or teacher, lets their student jump into the dangerous water anyway?

I mean, I honestly do get that. Fear narrows our vision. Panic makes the waves seem larger than anything else. There is something true in the image of losing sight of the One who called us forward.

Jesus could have said “no.”

He could have told Peter to stay where it was safer.

He could have reached the boat first.

Instead, Peter says, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”

And Jesus says only:

“Come.”

The command is almost impossible.

We like the image of Peter walking on water because it sounds courageous.

We speak less often about the fact that he sank.

And perhaps even less about the unsettling reality that Jesus knew he might.

What kind of teacher allows that?

Perhaps one who does not promise that following Him will keep us from discovering the limits of our own strength. Perhaps Peter needed to learn something he could never have learned from inside the boat: not that he was capable of walking on water, but that when he could no longer walk, Christ would reach for him.

I am not entirely satisfied with that answer either.

I do not want suffering reduced to a lesson plan.

I do not believe every terrifying thing that happens to us was arranged by God so that we might grow from it.

Sometimes the water is simply dangerous.

Sometimes people hurt us.

Sometimes bodies fail.

Sometimes relationships end.

Sometimes storms arrive without offering us a theological explanation.

Peter is the one who asks to leave the boat. Jesus does not push him overboard. And when Peter discovers that courage and fear can occupy the same body, Jesus does not stand at a distance and tell him to have better faith.

He reaches out His hand.

Immediately.

Maybe that is where I find Jesus most believable. Not in the idea that faithful people never sink. But in the possibility that sinking is not the end of the story.

And then Jesus says something that, if it came from someone you deeply loved a teacher, a mentor, a trusted friend might make your soul sink even faster than your body.

“You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

If I am honest, those words have always been difficult for me.

If I were Peter (and I have been like Peter many times), soaked, terrified, and gasping for breath, the first words I hear would sound almost like a rebuke.

Really?

Now?

This is the moment to question my faith?

I know many sermons rush to explain it.

Peter took his eyes off Jesus.

Peter lacked faith.

Peter doubted.

Perhaps.

But I am not convinced those explanations are sufficient.

Because Peter is also the only disciple who climbed over the side of the boat.

The only one who risked looking foolish. The only one who believed enough to ask, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come.” If this is “little faith,” I wonder what Jesus would call the eleven who never moved.

Perhaps the problem is not Peter’s fear.

Fear seems inevitable when human feet meet open water.

Perhaps the problem is not even that he sank.

Anyone would.

No, what unsettles me is that Jesus asks the question at all.

And I am not yet ready to resolve it.

Some questions in Scripture are meant to be answered.

Others seem to follow us for a lifetime.

Maybe this is one of them.

Yet, I will take heart in this, even when I am so afraid that I join my 10 best friends and hide in fear, or whether I am foolish enough to try something that has never been done before, Jesus is there, “egō eimi—”I am.”

For me, the truth of this passage is less about the sinking, less about the walking on water, and more about the presence.

Life will always have storms, sinking boats, fear and foolishness, risks we take and ones we should but do not because of fear. Life will be full of the right path and the wrong path, there will be days when we are depressed, anxious, overjoyed, filled with the spirit, and there will be dark nights that feel like a boat adrift in a sea storm, resigned to the fate of the night, and even in all of it, Jesus is there, “egō eimi—”I am.”

It may not always feel like it, and sometimes it feels like we are in this alone, but the one who walked through or in the storm, on or above the water, the one who could command the storm still, beckon it to come or to go; simply went up the mountain to pray, walked to join his friends, and prepared them for what was to come, worse still and yet more glorious than they could ever imagine.

Death & resurrection, and everything in between and beyond.

Maybe I will spend the rest of my life wondering why Jesus did not simply command this storm to be still.

Maybe I will never understand why Peter had to sink before he was lifted.

Maybe I will always wince when I hear,

“You of little faith...”

I don’t know.

But I know this.

Every storm I have survived has left me asking different questions than the ones I asked before it.

Less often,

“Why this storm?”

More often,

“Who met me there?”

And every time, however late I recognized Him, however frightened I was, however convinced I had been abandoned, I eventually heard the same words echoing through the wind.

Take heart.

egō eimi.

I am.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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A reading from the Letter to the Romans 10:1-13

¹Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. ²I can testify that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. ³For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they have not submitted to God’s righteousness. ⁴For Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. ⁵Moses writes concerning the righteousness that comes from the law, that “the person who does these things will live by them.” ⁶But the righteousness that comes from faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) ⁷“or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). ⁸But what does it say? “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); ⁹because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. ¹¹The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.”

¹²For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. ¹³For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

What does it mean, "You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ's own forever?"1

Before considering what Paul is saying in today’s appointed lesson, it is helpful to remember who Paul was. Born Saul of Tarsus, he was not a casual observer of Judaism but one of its most devoted sons. Educated under the respected Pharisee Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), Saul possessed an extraordinary knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures and was zealous for the traditions of his ancestors. His zeal was so intense that he became an active persecutor of the earliest followers of Jesus, convinced that this new movement threatened Israel’s covenantal faithfulness. Then, on the road to Damascus, everything changed. Saul encountered the risen Christ not as an abandonment of the God of Israel, but as a revelation that the crucified Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. That encounter transformed not only his understanding of Jesus but also his reading of Israel’s Scriptures, his understanding of righteousness, and his vocation. The persecutor became the apostle, and Saul came to be known by his Roman name, Paul, carrying the Gospel throughout the Gentile world.

This history matters because Romans is not the work of someone rejecting Judaism from the outside. It is the deeply personal reflection of a Jewish apostle wrestling with one of the most painful questions of his life: If God has acted decisively in Jesus Christ, what does this mean for my own people? Paul’s anguish is evident throughout Romans 9–11. “My heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved” (Rom. 10:1). These are not the words of an enemy but of a brother who loves his people and trusts in God’s faithfulness to Israel.

As contemporary readers, we must approach this passage with humility. Christians have too often read Romans as though it justified contempt for Judaism or implied that God had rejected the Jewish people. Paul says the opposite precisely. Later in this very letter, he insists, “Has God rejected his people? By no means!” (Rom. 11:1). He goes on to affirm that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29). Whatever Paul means by salvation, it cannot be understood apart from God’s enduring faithfulness to the covenant made with Israel.

This raises an important question for Christians today: What does salvation look like? If we reduce salvation merely to crossing a line between heaven and hell, we risk missing Paul’s broader vision. Throughout Romans, salvation is also about reconciliation with God, liberation from the power of sin and death, participation in the life of Christ, and the restoration of humanity into the people God intends us to become. Salvation is not only about our destiny after death; it is about the transformation of our lives here and now through the grace of God.

For Jewish readers, this passage continues to invite reflection on God’s righteousness, covenantal faithfulness, and the hope of redemption that has animated Israel for generations. For Christians, it calls us to recognize in Jesus the fulfillment of God’s saving purposes as we understand them, while remaining grateful for the Jewish faith from which our own faith emerged and through which the Scriptures, the prophets, and ultimately Jesus himself were given to the world. Paul himself refuses triumphalism. Instead, he urges humility, reminding Gentile believers that they have been grafted into Israel’s story rather than replacing it (Rom. 11:17–24).

Reading Romans in the twenty-first century also invites us to broaden our horizon beyond the immediate concerns of Paul’s own day. Today, Christians, Jews, and Muslims all look to Abraham as a father in faith. While our theological convictions differ in significant ways, each tradition seeks to worship the one Creator, to pursue justice, to practice mercy, and to live in faithful obedience to God. As Christians, we confess Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God and the definitive revelation of God’s saving love. Yet that confession need not lead to contempt for those who worship differently. Rather, it calls us to approach our Jewish and Muslim neighbors with humility, recognizing both our profound differences and our shared inheritance in the story of Abraham.2

Perhaps this is one of the enduring lessons of Romans 10. Paul reminds us that zeal for God, by itself, is not enough; what ultimately matters is openness to God’s gracious initiative. The passage therefore becomes an invitation to every reader, not only Christians, but all who sincerely seek God, to examine whether our faith has become rooted in our own striving, certainty, or self-righteousness, or whether we remain open to the transforming work of God’s grace. Christians will answer that question through the person of Jesus Christ; Jews and Muslims will answer it according to the faith they have received. Yet for all of us, the challenge remains the same: to seek God with humility, to resist the temptation of spiritual pride, and to trust that the God of Abraham is infinitely more faithful and merciful than our own understanding.

Perhaps, then, the question this passage poses to us today is not simply "Who is saved?" but upon what are we building our identity? Are we attempting to establish our own righteousness through achievement, moral performance, certainty, reputation, or religious success? Or are we willing to receive the righteousness that God freely offers as a gift of grace?

From here, Paul’s words turn us back toward the Christian reader. For the modern Christian, this passage remains a summons to trust that our deepest identity is not something we earn but something we receive in Christ. We are not made righteous by moral perfection, religious achievement, theological certainty, or the strength of our own devotion. We are made right with God by grace, and our lives become faithful responses to a gift already given.

That distinction matters because Christians are no less vulnerable than anyone else to the temptation Paul names. We, too, can possess zeal without humility. We, too, can confuse religious performance with faithfulness. We can begin to imagine that correct belief, church attendance, sacramental participation, moral discipline, or public piety establishes our worth before God.

History bears sobering witness to this reality. At times, the Church has reflected the self-giving love of Christ with extraordinary beauty. At other times, Christians have exchanged the way of the cross for the pursuit of power. Whenever the Church has become entangled with empire, political domination, ethnic superiority, or national identity, it has risked proclaiming a gospel that looks far more like the kingdoms of this world than the Kingdom of God.3 Christian nationalism, in all its forms, is not merely a political distortion; it is a theological one. It tempts us to place our ultimate allegiance in nation, ideology, culture, or tribe rather than in the crucified and risen Christ. In doing so, it enflames idolatry, asking us to sanctify human power instead of submitting ourselves to the reign of God.

Paul’s warning in Romans speaks directly into every generation because the temptation has never disappeared. The impulse to “establish our own righteousness” (Romans 10:3) is not limited to individuals; communities, churches, and even nations can convince themselves that they possess a unique moral standing before God. Whenever Christians begin to identify the Kingdom of God with the success of a political movement, the preservation of a particular culture, or the supremacy of a nation, we have drifted from the Gospel’s center. The One who declared, “My kingdom is not from this world” (John 18:36), consistently resisted every attempt to wield worldly power as the means of accomplishing God’s purposes.

Yet Paul insists that righteousness cannot be constructed by the self—whether individually or collectively. It is not achieved through moral accomplishment, ecclesial prestige, cultural dominance, or national greatness. It can only be received as God’s gracious gift in Christ. The Church is most faithful not when it seeks to rule the world, but when it bears witness to the crucified Lord through humility, repentance, sacrificial love, and lives transformed by grace.

The question, then, is not whether we have done enough to make ourselves acceptable to God, but whether we are willing to live from the acceptance God has already extended to us in Christ. The Christian life is not an anxious effort to secure belonging. It is the lifelong practice of inhabiting a belonging already bestowed.

This is where Paul’s words begin to illuminate the Church’s baptismal proclamation. At the font, the newly baptized is not congratulated for having achieved spiritual worthiness. Instead, the Church declares what God has done: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”¹ The language is passive because the initiative belongs to God. The baptized does not create this identity, earn it, or sustain it by personal strength. It is given.

To be marked as Christ’s own forever is therefore to receive an identity more fundamental than success or failure, virtue or weakness, certainty or doubt. It means that before we are defined by our wounds, our accomplishments, our fears, our social roles, or even our sins, we are defined by belonging to Christ. The Christian life that follows is not the attempt to become worthy of that mark, but the gradual transformation of learning to live from it.

Paul brings the passage to its climax with words that have echoed through the Church for centuries: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

To confess that Jesus is Lord is not merely to repeat a doctrinal formula. In Paul’s world, the word Lord carried political as well as religious meaning. Caesar claimed lordship. Empire demanded allegiance. Power presented itself as ultimate. To confess Jesus as Lord was therefore to declare that no emperor, nation, ideology, political party, or human institution could claim the final loyalty of the Christian. The one crucified by empire and raised by God is Lord.

This confession remains just as demanding now as it was then. To say that Jesus is Lord is to reject every competing claim to ultimacy. It means that nationalism cannot be lord. Wealth cannot be lord. Race, class, political identity, religious prestige, and cultural power cannot be lord. The Church itself cannot become an object of worship. All are placed beneath the judgment of the crucified and risen Christ.

Paul joins this outward confession to inward trust: “believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.” The heart, in the biblical imagination, is not merely the seat of emotion. It is the center of the person, the place of will, desire, memory, allegiance, and hope. To believe in the resurrection with the heart is to entrust one’s whole life to the conviction that death, violence, shame, and empire do not have the final word. God does.

The resurrection is therefore not an abstract proposition to which Christians give intellectual assent. It is the pattern by which we learn to live. If Christ is raised, then despair is not ultimate. If Christ is raised, then the wounds of the world are not beyond redemption. If Christ is raised, then the Church is not called to preserve its own power but to embody resurrection through reconciliation, justice, mercy, forgiveness, and courageous love.

Paul then declares, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” This does not mean that Christians will never experience failure, humiliation, exclusion, or suffering. Paul himself knew all of these. Rather, it means that the one who entrusts life to God will not finally discover that such trust was misplaced. Human institutions may shame. Religious communities may fail. Nations may betray their highest ideals. Even the Church may wound those entrusted to its care. But God’s faithfulness remains deeper than human failure.

Then Paul opens the circle as widely as possible: “There is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.” This is not the erasure of difference. Paul does not say that Jew and Greek cease to possess distinct histories, identities, or traditions. He says that difference cannot be used to determine access to divine mercy. No people can claim exclusive possession of God. No nation can declare itself uniquely righteous. No church can turn grace into private property.

“The same Lord is Lord of all.”

That sentence dismantles every theology of superiority. It exposes racial supremacy, religious arrogance, imperial Christianity, and Christian nationalism as denials of the Gospel they claim to defend.4 If Christ is Lord of all, then Christ cannot be made the mascot of one nation, one race, one party, or one civilization. The generosity of God exceeds every boundary human beings construct.

Paul concludes by quoting the prophet Joel: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Everyone. The word is intentionally expansive. It places salvation within the mercy of God rather than within the control of religious gatekeepers. It does not permit the Church to decide who is beyond grace. It calls the Church to proclaim Christ, practice humility, and trust the wideness of divine mercy.

And so we return to the opening question: What does it mean to be “sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever”?

It means that the confession “Jesus is Lord” has been placed upon our bodies before it is fully formed upon our lips. The cross traced in holy oil upon the forehead is a visible declaration that our ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ. It is not a mark of superiority, entitlement, or exemption from failure. It is a mark of belonging and vocation.

To be marked as Christ’s own is to be claimed by the One whose lordship is revealed not through domination but through self-emptying love; not through conquest but through the cross; not through exclusion but through mercy; not through death-dealing power but through resurrection.

The baptismal seal does not proclaim that we have achieved righteousness. It proclaims that grace has found us. It does not certify that we will never fail. It declares that even our failure does not possess the authority to name us finally. It does not separate us from the world as a spiritually privileged class. It sends us into the world as witnesses to the generosity of the Lord who is Lord of all.

“You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”¹

Forever means that before every achievement and beneath every failure, this identity remains: we belong to Christ. We belong to the crucified One who refused the seduction of empire. We belong to the risen One who overcame the powers of sin and death. We belong to the Lord whose mercy cannot be contained by nation, ethnicity, status, or human judgment.

The question is therefore not whether we can earn this belonging. We cannot. The question is whether our lives, our churches, and our public witness will bear any resemblance to the One whose mark we carry.

If Jesus is Lord, then love must become more than sentiment. Mercy must become more than abstraction. Justice must become more than rhetoric. And the Church must learn again that its authority comes not from proximity to power, but from conformity to Christ.

The word is near us on our lips, in our hearts, and, in Baptism, marked upon our very bodies.

May we become what the sacrament has declared us to be: Christ’s own, not for ourselves alone, but for the life of the world.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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A reading from the Gospel according to Matthew 24:1-14

¹As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. ²Then he asked them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” ³When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

⁴Jesus answered them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. ⁵For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will lead many astray. ⁶And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. ⁷For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: ⁸all this is but the beginning of the birthpangs. ⁹“Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. ¹⁰Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. ¹¹And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. ¹²And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. ¹³But the one who endures to the end will be saved. ¹⁴And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come.

What does it mean to keep your heart warm in a world that rewards coldness?

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus warns his disciples about deception, violence, betrayal, suffering, and the temptation to lose heart. He tells them that wars and rumors of wars will come, that false prophets will arise, and that fear and lawlessness will test the faith of many.

But his warning is not given so that they might become obsessed with predicting the future. It is given so that they might remain faithful within it.

Jesus does not call his disciples to panic. He calls them to endurance.

He does not ask them to escape history. He asks them to bear witness in the midst of it. And perhaps most importantly, he warns them that when lawlessness increases, “the love of many will grow cold.”

This may be the deepest danger of all.

Not merely that the world becomes violent, but that we begin to resemble its violence. Not merely that deception spreads, but that we surrender our commitment to truth. Not merely that fear surrounds us, but that fear closes our hearts.

The Christian vocation has never been merely to survive history.

It is to refuse to become like the chaos around us.

To tell the truth when deception is more convenient.

To practice mercy when vengeance feels justified.

To choose hope when cynicism masquerades as wisdom.

To remain open to love when fear bids us withdraw.

The call of Christ has never been to know the future, but to remain faithful regardless of it.

This is the deepest yes. To keep loving. To keep hoping. To keep bearing witness. To refuse to let the world determine the temperature of our hearts.

This Gospel lesson has often been used to point toward the so-called end times, as though Jesus were offering a coded timetable for some distant catastrophe.

Yet I say here that the end is near.

Indeed, it always has been.

At the intersection of incarnation, death, and resurrection, the end did come.

In Christ, the old order was judged. In Christ, death was defeated. In Christ, the powers of violence, empire, sin, and despair were exposed for what they are. And in the resurrection, the future of God broke into the present.

Christ did return not as a prediction fulfilled at the edge of history, but as the beginning of a new creation breaking into history itself.

The end is not merely an event toward which we are moving. It is a reality that has already entered the world. The Kingdom has drawn near. Eternity has interrupted time. The future of God has taken flesh among us.

And still, we wait.

We live in the tension between what has already been accomplished and what has not yet been fully revealed. The old world continues to wound, deceive, divide, and destroy, even as the new creation quietly emerges within it.

This is why the Christian life is not passive waiting.

It is participation. It is the daily decision to live as though resurrection is true. To forgive because death does not have the final word. To love because hatred belongs to an order already passing away. To hope because the future has already appeared in the risen Christ.

The end is near because Christ is near.

The end has come because Christ has come.

And Christ continues to return wherever love refuses to grow cold, wherever mercy interrupts vengeance, wherever truth is spoken, wherever the broken are restored, and wherever the Kingdom of God becomes visible among us.

Psalm 139 tells us:

“I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Jesus tells us:

“Because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold.”

One describes who we are. The other warns us what we can become.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made not merely because of our biology or intellect, but because we possess an extraordinary capacity for love, imagination, freedom, creativity, forgiveness, and communion with God. We are meaning-makers. Story-weavers. Bearers of the divine image.

But that same freedom means our hearts are capable of becoming hardened.

The tragedy of Matthew 24 is not simply that wars will come or nations will rise against one another. Humanity has always known violence. Jesus’ deepest concern is that, amid the chaos, we begin to lose the very thing that makes us most human.

Our love.

Lawlessness does not merely produce disorder in society. It produces disorder in the soul. It tempts us toward suspicion instead of trust. Fear instead of hospitality. Cynicism instead of hope. Control instead of surrender. Revenge instead of mercy.

Psalm 139 tells us who God created us to be, Matthew 24 warns us what fear can slowly erode.

The Christian life, then, is not about escaping the world before it falls apart. It is about refusing to allow the world to deform the image of God within us.

Every act of forgiveness is a declaration that love has not grown cold. Every act of mercy is resistance against the powers of fear. Every truthful word spoken in an age of deception is a witness to the Kingdom.

To be “fearfully and wonderfully made” is to possess the capacity to become more fully ourselves in Christ—or to become less ourselves by surrendering to fear.

Perhaps that is why Jesus says, “The one who endures to the end will be saved.”

Endurance is not merely surviving. It is remaining fully human. It is refusing to let hatred define us. It is refusing to let fear dictate our loves. It is refusing to let the world’s chaos extinguish the divine image that was breathed into us from the beginning.

The deepest Christian question, then, is not:

When will the end come?

It is:

Who am I becoming while I wait?

Am I becoming more fearful or more faithful?

More cynical or more compassionate?

More defensive or more generous?

Is my heart growing colder...

or warmer?

Every day the world offers us reasons to retreat into suspicion, outrage, and despair.

Every day Christ offers another invitation.

Keep your heart warm.

Keep telling the truth.

Keep practicing mercy.

Keep loving.

For perhaps the greatest sign that the Kingdom has drawn near is not found in wars or earthquakes or headlines. It is found wherever a human being, wonderfully and fearfully made, refuses to let love grow cold.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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The Scriptures Referenced Link

This week, someone asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks.

Intellectually, I love when this happens. There are certain questions that don’t simply invite an answer; they interrupt you. They throw you off course. They make you stumble, not because they are difficult, but because their very existence reveals that you’ve been walking through life without ever thinking to ask them.

The question was this:

If you were to forget who you were, what book would you want to read to remind yourself?

My first instinct was to dismiss it as impossible. It belongs in the same family as questions like, “What’s your favorite book?” or “What’s your favorite song?” I have never been able to answer those questions with much confidence. How could I? A human life is far too expansive to be contained within a single novel, a single melody, or a single work of art.

There are books that have shaped me. Songs that have found me in seasons when I lacked words of my own. Paintings, poems, films, and places that have served as mirrors in which I have briefly caught sight of myself with unusual clarity. But I am not the same person at forty-eight that I was at thirty, or twenty, or even six months ago. As I change, so do the mirrors that reveal me. No single work can capture an entire human life, because no human life remains still long enough to be captured.

Yet the question lingered.

If everything else were stripped away, if memory failed, if I no longer remembered my vocation, my history, my successes or failures, if I had somehow forgotten who I believed myself to be, what book would I place into my own hands?

To my surprise, the first title that came to mind was not Scripture.

It was Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard.1

The answer startled me as much as the question had. Of all the books that have occupied my shelves over the years, why this one? Why this strange meditation on Abraham and Isaac? Why a book whose author spends nearly two hundred pages trying to describe a faith he repeatedly admits he does not fully understand?

Perhaps the answer is that Fear and Trembling is not ultimately a book about Abraham.

It is a book about the moment language reaches its limit, about what remains when every explanation has been exhausted, and about the only thing left: whether we will continue walking with God.

Then, as so often seems to happen when a question has genuinely taken hold of me, something unexpected occurred.

This morning, the appointed Hebrew Scripture reading was Genesis 22—the story traditionally known in Judaism as the Akedah, “The Binding” of Isaac.

I had not planned it. I had not gone searching for it. Yet there it was, the very story at the heart of Fear and Trembling.

I have long believed that God has a peculiar way of allowing certain conversations to echo through our lives. A question asked by a friend one day finds an unexpected companion in Scripture the next. Whether we call it providence, coincidence, or what Carl Jung famously described as synchronicity2, these moments have a way of slowing us down. They invite us to pay attention rather than rush toward an answer.

This morning at church, I listened to the reading of Abraham’s ascent up Mount Moriah. I felt that familiar squirming in my spirit that always seems to arrive whenever I encounter the Akedah. If anything, that discomfort has only deepened since becoming a father.

This is not an easy story. It should not be made easy.

I have heard Genesis 22 used by preachers and teachers to justify all manner of troubling, unethical, and sometimes plainly dangerous ideas about obedience, sacrifice, and duty to God. So as the lesson was being read, I found myself wondering, almost whispering inwardly, What will Fr. Todd do with this story?3 Sermon, Proper 8, Saint Lukes

When his sermon turned toward the Akedah, I thought, Well, good luck, Fr. Todd, better you than me.

But almost immediately, he disarmed the room with honesty, naming “the truly horrifying terror that Scripture can be.” From there, he did not flatten the story or try to rescue it with easy answers. Instead, he gently drew out a deeper connection to the appointed Gospel, weaving together God's welcome, the sacred place of hospitality, and the room God has made for us.

On my drive home from church, I found myself still thinking about the lesson, the sermon, and the strange mercy of belonging to a congregation where the whole range of human life is held together in one room.

I thought about how grateful I am for such a welcoming community, a place where little children can walk forward for a blessing on their kindergarten graduation, and beside them, a widow, herself a priest, can ask her colleague for a blessing as she remembers her beloved husband, who died on this day several years ago.

There it was: the range of God’s mercies, a perfect illustration for that space Fr. Todd was just teaching us about in his sermon.

A grieving widow can give thanks for the life of the husband she still loves. Little children can celebrate the small but sacred milestone of graduating from kindergarten. Sorrow and joy do not cancel each other out. In the life of the Church, they stand side by side, both gathered into God's hospitality.

Then my mind wandered back to Fear and Trembling.

Why had that book emerged from the nearly one thousand volumes that line the shelves of my study when I was asked what I would read if I had forgotten who I was? Why that book? Why not Scripture? Why not Tolkien, Dostoevsky, Lewis, or one of the countless other companions that have shaped my life? What, if anything, might God have been preparing me to notice?

The more I sat with the question, the more it seemed that Fear and Trembling occupies a unique intersection in my own life. It is one of those rare works that touches each of my vocations at once.

As a trauma therapist, I spend my days accompanying people through uncertainty, suffering, and the reconstruction of meaning. As a student of existential psychology, I have long been captivated by the questions that preoccupied thinkers like Kierkegaard, Sartre, Tillich, and Frankl, not simply What is true? But how does one live? As a student of Carl Jung, I have become increasingly attentive to those moments of synchronicity, symbol, and encounter that seem to arrive with a significance beyond mere coincidence.

As a seminarian, I find myself continually drawn back to the biblical witness, where faith is less often a matter of certainty than of faithful presence.

And then there is the simplest vocation of all: being human.

Like everyone else, I am still trying to learn what it means to trust God when the road ahead cannot be seen. Perhaps that is why Fear and Trembling came so quickly to mind. It is not because I have mastered its questions, but because, after all these years, it still refuses to let me escape them.

One of Kierkegaard’s central observations in Fear and Trembling is that Abraham stands in a kind of terrible silence.

Not because he refuses to speak. Scripture tells us that he does. Isaac asks the heartbreaking question every parent dreads: “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb?” Abraham answers, “God himself will provide the lamb.”

The silence Kierkegaard describes is something much deeper.

Abraham cannot explain himself.

If he were to tell Sarah what God had commanded, she would rightly believe him to be mad. If he were to tell Isaac the whole truth, no explanation could possibly make sense of it. To everyone looking in from the outside, Abraham appears either insane or murderous. The deepest truth of what he is carrying cannot be translated into ordinary language.

As I continued driving, my mind began to wander beyond Abraham.

Where else in Scripture have I seen language reach its limit?

Almost immediately, Job came to mind.

After demanding answers from God through chapter after chapter of anguish, Job finally encounters the living God. Remarkably, God never explains Job’s suffering. Instead, God reveals Himself. Job’s response is not a triumphant declaration of understanding but a surrender of speech:

“I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but I will proceed no further.” (Job 40:5)

It is as though words themselves have reached the end of their usefulness.

Then another scene surfaced.

Isaiah, standing before the throne of God, does not begin with a sermon. He does not offer a theological treatise. He cries out,

“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips.” (Isaiah 6:5)

Only after the burning coal touches his lips, only after grace precedes speech, does he become capable of answering God’s call:

“Here am I. Send me.” (Isaiah 6:8)

The more I considered these stories together, the more I wondered whether there is a pattern hidden in plain sight.

Perhaps the deepest encounters with God do not first produce certainty. They produce humility.

Perhaps the first response to the holy is not explanation but silence.

Not the silence of absence.

The silence of a reality too large to fit inside our words.

It is only afterward that speech returns changed, purified, and somehow more truthful than before.

As these passages continued to echo in my mind, another memory surfaced.

Last autumn, during our first preaching intensive in seminary, I drove to Alexandria, Virginia, where our class was being held at Virginia Theological Seminary. Though I am a student at General Theological Seminary in New York City, we had gathered there for an immersive week devoted entirely to preaching.

I remember that drive well.

It was bittersweet. My dear friend, Padre José, had died only days before. Leaving Austin for a week is never easy; he depends on me in ways that make every departure carry its own quiet ache. And waiting for me on the other end was the knowledge that I had been assigned to preach the very first sermon of the week. No pressure.

The sermon I preached was titled The Messy, Fleshy In-Between.

It was an exploration of the spaces between the Psalms, the places where the text falls silent, but where human life continues. Between one psalm and the next, people are born and buried. Hearts are broken and healed. Faith falters and is found again. The Bible often gives us the mountaintops, but we live most of our lives in the valleys between them.

I found myself thinking about that sermon again today.

Perhaps what has always unsettled me about the Akedah is not simply Abraham’s obedience, but the terrible silence that surrounds it. Scripture tells us remarkably little about what was happening within him. We are not given access to his prayers, his tears, his questions, or the weight that must have settled into his chest during those three days toward Moriah.

And yet, surely there was something.

Surely there was fear.

Surely there was trembling.

Perhaps this is where Kierkegaard was looking all along, not at the external events of Genesis 22, but at that mysterious, hidden space between God’s command and Abraham’s response. The space where no one else could follow. The place where language itself begins to fail, and where faith, grief, terror, and love become almost impossible to distinguish.

It is that messy, fleshy in-between that continues to draw me back to this story.

What Abraham, Job, and Isaiah reveal together is that a genuine encounter with God often brings human speech to its limit.

Abraham cannot explain what he is carrying.

Job cannot continue arguing once he has encountered the living God.

Isaiah cannot speak truthfully until his lips have first been touched by grace.

In each story, silence is not emptiness. It is the threshold where human certainty gives way to holy presence. The silence is not the absence of faith, but the place where faith is being remade.

And only after that silence does speech return.

Abraham says, “The Lord will provide.”

Job says, in effect, “I had heard of you, but now my eye sees you.”

Isaiah says, “Here am I. Send me.”

These are not the words of people who have mastered God, though we human beings are often tempted to try. They are the words that remain after the encounter with the truest language available to those who have passed through the messy, fleshy in-between, where fear, silence, mercy, and faith are all held together before God.

Kierkegaard calls it Fear and Trembling, and I have come to think that he chose those words wisely.

How else could one respond to such an outrageous inner dialogue? To stand in that terrible space where everything you know about God, about yourself, about love, and about the world seems to collide? What language could possibly contain it?

Perhaps fear and trembling are not signs that faith has failed. Perhaps they are what faith feels like when it is stretched beyond the limits of certainty.

Abraham does not ascend Mount Moriah as a man untouched by anguish. Job does not cover his mouth because his questions were foolish. Isaiah does not cry, “Woe is me,” because he has suddenly become less faithful than everyone else. Each of them has come so near to the holy that ordinary language, ordinary certainty, even ordinary categories of understanding begin to give way.

The fear is real.

The trembling is real.

And perhaps that is precisely where God so often meets us, not beyond our humanity, but within it.

Which brings me back to today’s Gospel.

After all of the grandeur, mystery, and holy terror that surrounds Abraham, Job, and Isaiah, Jesus says something almost painfully ordinary.

“Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones... will certainly not lose their reward.”

A cup of cold water.

Not a theological treatise.

Not certainty.

Not the ability to explain every mystery of God.

Just a simple act of welcome.

Perhaps this is where the Scriptures have been leading all along.

There are moments in the spiritual life when words become too small. When our prayers are reduced to silence. When grief cannot be explained. When faith feels less like confidence and more like fear and trembling.

But the Gospel reminds us that even when language reaches its limit, love does not.

Love still knows how to welcome.

Love still knows how to bless.

Love still knows how to offer a cup of cold water to another human being.

Perhaps that is what Abraham could still do for Isaac as they walked together toward Moriah. Perhaps it is what Job discovered after laying his hand over his mouth. Perhaps it is what Isaiah learned after the burning coal touched his lips.

And perhaps it is what we are called to remember as well.

We will not always have the right words.

We will not always understand what God is doing.

There will be seasons of fear and trembling, and there will be long stretches of that messy, fleshy in-between where explanations fail us.

Yet even there, the Kingdom of God remains astonishingly near.

It is found whenever we make room for another.

Whenever we welcome the stranger.

Whenever we bless a child.

Whenever we stand beside the grieving.

Whenever we offer, in the name of Christ, even something as small as a cup of cold water.

Perhaps faith is not finally measured by how completely we can explain God, but by how faithfully we embody God’s welcome.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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In my own life, I have known both the darkest night of the soul and the joy of standing on the mountaintop. I have experienced seasons of grief, uncertainty, loss, and despair, as well as seasons of gratitude, belonging, and profound spiritual clarity. Few hymns capture that full range of human experience as perfectly as It Is Well with My Soul.

The hymn’s power becomes even more remarkable when one understands the circumstances under which it was written. Its author, Horatio Gates Spafford, was no stranger to suffering. A successful attorney and devout Christian, Spafford experienced a series of devastating losses. Perhaps it would not be a stretch to recognize the story of Job unfolding in this 19th century family. He endured significant financial hardship following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed much of his real estate holdings. Yet an even greater tragedy awaited him. In 1873, while his family was traveling to Europe, the steamship Ville du Havre collided with another vessel and sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Spafford’s wife, Anna, survived, but all four of their daughters—Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta—were lost at sea.

After reaching safety, Anna sent her husband a brief telegram containing two heartbreaking words: “Saved alone.”

Few messages in human history have carried so much grief in so few words.

Saved alone.

In those two words was the loss of four daughters. In those two words was a mother’s unimaginable sorrow. In those two words was the collapse of an entire future that she and Horatio had envisioned for their family.

Saved alone.

The phrase forces us to confront one of the deepest fears of the human heart: separation. Not simply death, but separation from those we love most. It is the cry of every parent who has buried a child, every spouse who has stood beside a grave, every family fractured by loss, distance, or tragedy.

What makes It Is Well with My Soul so remarkable is that it was born not from a place of victory but from this place of separation.

The hymn begins not with answers but with sorrow. The sea that carried Spafford toward Europe was the same sea that had taken his daughters. The waters beneath the ship marked the place where his family had been torn apart. Yet somewhere between the words “Saved alone” and the writing of the hymn, faith transformed grief without denying it.

Spafford did not write, “I understand.”

He did not write, “This does not hurt.”

He did not write, “Everything happens for a reason.”

Instead, he wrote words that Christians have repeated for more than a century:

“When sorrows like sea billows roll... it is well with my soul.”

I am drawn to this hymn because its story intersects with so many stories that have shaped my own life.

I think of my great-grandparents, Sándor and Zsuzsánna, crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Hungary in 1914. Zsuzsánna was pregnant. They traveled in steerage, enduring the long, crowded, and uncertain voyage that carried millions of immigrants away from everything they had ever known. They left family, language, homeland, and familiarity behind in pursuit of a future they could not yet see.

I think of another story I uncovered only recently. My grandfather’s brother, Oliver Cottrell, died in 1932 at just four years old after drowning in a nearby canal feeder. For decades, he existed in the family record as little more than a name. Now, nearly a century later, his story has re-emerged. He was a child who was loved, mourned, and buried by a grieving family whose lives were forever changed by his loss.

I think of my godmother, whose infant son died from a disease so rare that only a handful of children in the world had ever been diagnosed with it. I think of my grandmother, who endured the heartbreak of multiple stillbirths and the death of a child from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. These are losses that never fully disappear. They become part of a family’s story, carried quietly from one generation to the next.

I think, too, of the deepest wounds in my own life. The moments of grief, uncertainty, trauma, and despair that felt overwhelming at the time. And I think of the sacred privilege I have as a therapist to sit with people in the midst of their own suffering. Every day, individuals entrust me with their fears, losses, disappointments, traumas, and heartbreak. They invite me into some of the most vulnerable spaces of their lives.

When I consider all of these stories together, I am struck by a common thread. Human beings are capable of enduring extraordinary suffering. We lose children. We lose parents. We lose dreams. We lose certainty. We lose pieces of ourselves. Yet somehow, again and again, people find a way to continue.

I believe there is something in the human spirit that, when ignited by faith and anchored in trust in Jesus Christ, can withstand even the deepest grief. Not because faith removes pain. It does not. Not because Christians are spared tragedy. We are not. Rather, faith offers the assurance that suffering is not the end of the story.

That is why Horatio Spafford’s words continue to resonate across generations. They are not the words of a man untouched by loss. They are the words of a man who stood in the shadow of unimaginable grief and still found the courage to trust God.

The same hope echoes through the stories of my ancestors, through the lives of those I serve as a clinician, and through my own journey. Loss is real. Separation is real. Grief is real. Yet the Christian story insists that none of these realities are ultimate.

There remains the possibility of restoration.

There remains the possibility of healing.

There remains the possibility of hope.

And because of Christ, there remains the possibility that even after the darkest night of the soul, it can still be well with us.

The version of It Is Well with My Soul that speaks most deeply to me concludes with the refrain, “Because He lives.” Those words always bring me back to one particular day.

I remember driving to my grandmother’s house after learning that she had died. Even now, I can recall the feeling of disbelief. She had been one of the fixed points in my life, one of those people whose presence seemed so foundational that I could scarcely imagine the world without her. Yet suddenly I was being forced to do exactly that.

As I drove, a song came on the radio: I Know My Redeemer Lives.

The timing felt almost cruel. I was overwhelmed by grief, confronted with the reality that someone I loved deeply was gone. Yet there, in the midst of that sorrow, were the words: I know my Redeemer lives.

I remember feeling the tension between those two realities. Death was real. Loss was real. My grandmother was gone. Yet so was the proclamation of the Gospel: Christ is risen. Christ lives.

For many people, that juxtaposition makes little sense. The Apostle Paul wrote that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who cannot accept it. From a purely worldly perspective, it is difficult to understand. How can Christians speak of hope in the face of death? How can faith endure when confronted with tragedy? How can someone stand beside a grave and still proclaim resurrection?

And yet I have found that this apparent foolishness is the only thing that has ever truly made sense of suffering.

The Christian faith does not deny death. It stares directly into it. It does not minimize grief. It sanctifies it. The cross itself is the ultimate symbol of apparent defeat transformed into victory, suffering transformed into redemption, and death transformed into life.

When I walked into my grandmother’s house after she died, I collapsed onto her still, lifeless body. Cancer had ravaged her, but Jesus had freed her.

In that moment, it felt as though the anchor of our family had been taken from us. She was the one who held so many things together: the relationships, the traditions, the faith, the meals, the holidays, the expectations, the stubborn insistence that family still mattered even when it was complicated.

But as I have grown older, I have come to understand that she did not leave us unprepared.

She had already shown us the way.

We need only look at how she lived. She held her family together with a steady, stubborn, and at times relentless love. She did this even when it cost her personally. She carried burdens quietly. She endured losses that could have broken her. She lost her mother and her husband within three months of each other, yet somehow she continued. She kept believing. She kept gathering. She kept loving.

Her faith was not ornamental. It was the structure beneath her life.

My grandmother once told me that her favorite hymn was When Morning Gilds the Skies. In the Episcopal Church, the hymn returns again and again to the line:

May Jesus Christ be praised.

That refrain feels like the key to understanding her.

In the morning and in grief, may Jesus Christ be praised.

In the breaking and in the rebuilding, may Jesus Christ be praised.

In cancer and in freedom, may Jesus Christ be praised.

In life and in death, may Jesus Christ be praised.

When I think of It Is Well with My Soul, I think of that same faith. Not a faith that avoided suffering, but a faith that endured it. Not a faith that explained everything, but a faith that held her when nothing else could.

And perhaps that is what she left us: not simply memories, not simply traditions, not even simply a family held together by her strength. She left us a way of seeing suffering through the light of Christ.

She left us the truth that even when the anchor is gone, the foundation remains.

Because He lives.

Because He lives, cancer did not have the final word.

Because He lives, death did not have the final word.

Because He lives, grief did not have the final word.

And because He lives, it can still be well with my soul.

If It Is Well with My Soul is the hymn that carries me through suffering, then How Great Thou Art is the hymn that lifts my eyes beyond it.

In many ways, the two hymns feel like perfect bookends. One begins in sorrow and ends in trust. The other begins in wonder and ends in worship. Together they tell the story of the Christian life: faithfulness in the valley and praise on the mountaintop.

When I was younger, I knew a woman named Eleanor Huson. She was one of the most wonderful, quirky, and brilliant people I have ever met. She was something of a local legend. I worked in a restaurant where she came in at least once a week. She had her own table, her own chair, and even her picture hanging on the wall. Everyone knew her. Everyone loved her.

Mrs. Huson was 107 years old when she died.

What made her remarkable was not simply her age, but the way she lived. She remained engaged with life almost until the very end. She possessed a sharp wit, a strong personality, and a perspective that can only come from having witnessed more than a century of history.

One day I asked her the secret to living such a long life.

Without hesitation she answered: one glass of sherry every day.

Then, after a pause and a smile, she added something far more important.

Every morning she would stand at the window of her apartment overlooking the ocean and sing How Great Thou Art.

I have never forgotten that image.

A woman who had lived through wars, depressions, social upheavals, personal losses, and the countless changes that accompany more than a century of life, beginning each day not with anxiety or complaint, but with worship.

“O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds Thy hands have made...”

There is something profoundly beautiful about that.

The older I become, the more I appreciate the wisdom hidden within her simple practice. Before facing the demands of the day, she oriented herself toward gratitude. Before considering her problems, she considered God. Before focusing on her limitations, she reflected on divine greatness.

If It Is Well with My Soul teaches me how to endure suffering, How Great Thou Art reminds me why endurance is possible in the first place.

One hymn proclaims that God is present in the storm.

The other proclaims that God is greater than the storm.

One begins with sea billows rolling.

The other begins with awesome wonder.

One teaches trust.

The other inspires praise.

Together they form a complete testimony.

When sorrow comes, it can still be well with my soul.

When I look upon creation, memory, family, and grace, then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee: How great Thou art.

Perhaps that is the journey of faith itself moving between lament and praise, grief and gratitude, suffering and wonder, until both become part of the same song.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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(This is a sermon for Sunday, June 14, 2026, Proper 6. Year A. The readings are Track 1, see this link for reference: Appointed Scripture)

Have you ever had one of those days where you laugh, not because anything is funny, but because you are suddenly confronted with the absurdity of one more thing piling on top of everything else?

You wake up late. The coffee spills. Traffic is worse than usual. The phone won’t stop ringing. The thing you thought would take five minutes takes an hour. Every plan seems to unravel the moment you make it.

I remember a morning like that. I was already running behind schedule, dressed for work, rushing out the door, convinced I was barely going to make it on time. As I stepped outside and headed toward my car, the sky simply opened up. Not a drizzle. Not a passing shower. It was as if someone had overturned an ocean directly above me.

And I laughed.

Not because I was happy.

Not because it was funny.

I laughed because I had reached the point where crying seemed like too much work. You know that kind of laughter.

The laughter that says, “Of course.”

The laughter that comes when life feels determined to add one more burden to a pile that is already too heavy.

I imagine Sarah’s laughter sounding something like that.

For years she had carried the weight of an unfulfilled promise. For years she had watched time pass. For years she had learned to protect herself from disappointment by expecting nothing.

And then God shows up and says, “Next year, you will have a son.” Sarah doesn’t laugh because she believes. She laughs because the promise sounds absurd. She laughs because hope itself has become difficult.

She laughs because disappointment has been her companion for so long that joy feels impossible. Yet what Sarah cannot see is that God has been at work long before this conversation began.

The promise did not begin when God spoke it. The harvest did not begin when it became visible. God had already been preparing what Sarah thought was impossible.

I love the Psalms.

In fact, if I had to choose a favorite book of Scripture, the Psalms—the heart songs of God’s people—might be it. At least in my top three.

The Psalms are honest. They don’t clean up human experience. They don’t pretend faith means having everything figured out. They contain joy and rage, gratitude and despair, confidence and confusion, sometimes all within the same prayer.

Today’s Psalm opens beautifully: (Psalm 116:1)

“I love the Lord, because he has heard the voice of my supplication, because he has inclined his ear to me whenever I called upon him.”

I have had days when those words come easily. Days when everything seems to be falling into place. Days when the pieces fit together. Days when life feels blessed.

But whose plan is unfolding on those days?

Does it feel good because things are going my way, or because they are going God’s way?

And if we’re honest, isn’t it easier to proclaim, “I love the Lord because he has inclined his ear to me,” when the answer appears to be yes?

But that is not what the Psalmist is saying.

The Psalmist is not claiming that whenever he called upon God, God granted every request.

God is not a cosmic vending machine. God is not a wizard granting wishes to some while arbitrarily handing suffering to others.

That is not faith. That is superstition.

The Psalmist is saying something much deeper. He is saying that God heard him. That God was present. That God was listening. That even when life was difficult, he was not abandoned.

And so he asks:

“How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me?”

And he answers:

“I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the Name of the Lord. I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.”

Beautiful. Gratitude. Worship. Thanksgiving.

We are nodding along. And then the Psalm takes a turn.

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his servants.”

Wait.

What?

Say that again.

Precious?

The death of his servants?

That is not the verse we embroider onto pillows. That is not the verse we frame above the fireplace. What could the Psalmist possibly mean?

Surely he is not saying that God delights in death. The God who creates life does not celebrate death. The God who raises Jesus from the grave does not rejoice in graves. No. The Psalmist is saying something more profound.

He is saying that the lives of God’s people matter so deeply to God that not even their deaths pass unnoticed. The world forgets. History forgets. But God does not.

The life that seemed ordinary. The prayers whispered in private. The sacrifices no one saw. The tears shed when no one was watching. The faithfulness hidden beneath the surface.

None of it is lost. None of it is wasted. None of it escapes God’s attention. Even death itself cannot separate a beloved servant from the gaze of God.

And perhaps that is exactly what connects this Psalm to today’s Gospel. Because Jesus looks at the crowds and says, “The harvest is plentiful.”

A harvest is not the beginning of the agricultural cycle. It is the end of one.

Jesus is essentially telling the disciples, “Look around. God has been at work long before you arrived.”

The Psalmist has discovered the same truth.

Looking back over his life, he can finally say, “I love the Lord, because he has heard the voice of my supplication.” Not because every answer was easy. Not because every prayer received the answer he wanted. But because, somehow, through it all, God was listening.

And Sarah—beloved Sarah—with her honest, weary, sarcastic laugh, is about to discover it too.

What sounds impossible to her has already begun in the heart of God. What seems barren to her is not barren to God. What feels too late to her is not too late for God.

The harvest is not always visible when God begins the work. Sometimes all we have is a promise, a prayer, a laugh that keeps us from crying, and the strange, holy possibility that God is doing more than we can see. Because what seems impossible for us is not impossible for God.

In his letter to the Romans, Saint Paul exhorts the ancient Church.

And yet, even though this letter was written to Christians in Rome nearly two thousand years ago, we discover something remarkable whenever we open the Scriptures. The words were written to a particular people, in a particular place, at a particular moment in history, and yet the living Word continues to echo through time.

Because human beings have not changed nearly as much as we imagine.

We still hope.

We still fear.

We still wait.

We still struggle to trust God when the outcome remains uncertain.

And so Paul speaks not only to Rome, but to us. Listen carefully to what he says:

“We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” (Romans 5:1-8)

That is a difficult passage. Most of us would gladly skip directly to hope. We would like hope without suffering. Character without endurance. Harvest without planting.

But that is not how life works. And it is not how God usually works.

Paul is describing a process.

A seed does not become fruit overnight. The farmer does not scatter seed in the morning and gather a harvest in the evening. There is a season of hidden growth. A season when nothing appears to be happening. A season when the field can look empty even while life is emerging beneath the surface.

Paul is telling us that the spiritual life often unfolds the same way.

Suffering produces endurance.

Endurance produces character.

Character produces hope.

Notice that hope comes at the end. Hope is not naïve optimism. Hope is not pretending everything is fine. Hope is what emerges after we have walked through suffering and discovered that God has not abandoned us there.

• The Psalmist learned this.

• Sarah is learning this.

• And Paul is teaching this.

God is often doing the deepest work beneath the surface, long before the harvest becomes visible.

That is why Paul can say, “Hope does not disappoint us.”

Not because life never disappoints us. It certainly does. Not because suffering is pleasant. It is not.

But because God’s love is at work even there, in places where we cannot yet see what he is growing.

The harvest is not the beginning of the agricultural cycle. It is the end of one. And sometimes what we call suffering is simply the season before the harvest.

After all the questions, all the prayers, all the cries for help, all the reflections on God’s faithfulness, the Psalmist arrives at a simple conclusion:

“I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people,

In the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of you, O Jerusalem.
Hallelujah!” Notice where he ends. Not alone. Not in isolation.

Not with a private spirituality disconnected from everyone else.

He ends among God’s people.

In worship.

In community.

In thanksgiving.

The Psalm begins with, “I love the Lord, because he has heard the voice of my supplication.” It ends with, “Hallelujah.”

It begins with a personal prayer. It ends with communal praise.

And perhaps that is the journey of faith.

We come to God carrying our fears, our disappointments, our questions, our laughter that keeps us from crying.

We come like Sarah, wondering whether hope is still possible.

We come like the disciples, uncertain of what lies ahead.

We come like the Christians in Rome, trying to make sense of suffering.

And somewhere along the way we discover that God has been at work long before we arrived.

Which is precisely why the Church, in her wisdom and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, never envisions the Christian life as a solitary endeavor.

When we renew our Baptismal Covenant, we are asked:

“Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers?”

And we respond:

“I will, with God’s help.”

Notice that we do not answer, “I will, by myself.”

We do not answer, “I will, relying solely on my own understanding.”

We answer, “I will, with God’s help.”

And one of the primary ways God helps us is through one another.

Through the apostles’ teaching. Through fellowship. Through the breaking of bread. Through prayer.

The Church understands something that modern people often forget: we need one another.

• We discern together.

• We learn together.

• We pray together.

• We bear one another’s burdens.

• We remind one another of God’s faithfulness when our own memory grows weak.

Because there are seasons when I cannot see the harvest.

There are seasons when you cannot see the harvest.

There are seasons when Sarah can only laugh at the absurdity of hope.

There are seasons when suffering obscures the character and hope that Saint Paul promises are being formed.

There are seasons when all we can manage is a prayer whispered through clenched teeth.

And in those moments, the Church gathers around us and says, “Keep going. God is not finished yet.”

The apostles’ teaching reminds us where we have come from.

The fellowship reminds us that we do not walk alone.

The breaking of the bread reminds us whose we are.

The prayers remind us that God is still listening.

This is how we steward our lives.

This is how we shape our faith.

This is how we learn to recognize that God has been at work long before we arrived.

And when we begin to see it, even dimly, we find ourselves standing with the Psalmist, in the midst of God’s people, saying the only word that finally seems adequate:

“Hallelujah.”

The harvest was already growing.

The promise was already unfolding.

The grace was already being poured out.

And so, in the end, the appropriate response is not mastery. It is not certain. It is not having all the answers.

• It is worship.

• It is gratitude.

• It is standing in the midst of God’s people and saying, “Hallelujah.”

Because a harvest is not the beginning of the agricultural cycle. It is the end of one. And when we finally see what God has been doing all along, praise becomes the most natural thing in the world.

Come, Labor on, my friends. We have work to do, let’s get busy….

Amen.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

((This is a Sermon Prepared and Preached at Saint Lukes Episcopal Church, Metuchen NJ. —→ Here is the link to the Scripture lessons for the appointed Sunday. Scripture Lessons))

I took a long walk to write this sermon.

I live on the shore of Raritan Bay and grew up there, and I love walking along the Henry Hudson Trail that runs through my town. When I was a young boy, before the Monmouth County Park System turned the trail into a paved walking path, it was still largely the broken skeleton of old train tracks and trestles.

Late at night, I could hear the distant sound of the train horn in Hazlet. Now, of course, my adult mind understands that sound travels in the quiet of the night. But my childlike mind did not know that. I only knew that darkness was mysterious, and that I could still see the remnants of the old tracks. So naturally, my imagination gave the sound a body: a ghost train moving through the abandoned rails of my own town.

This week, as I walked the trail and contemplated the lessons appointed for Trinity Sunday, I found myself humming a familiar melody. An old Hungarian folk song. Some would say an ancient one.

Szól a kakas már.

Szól a kakas már,
Majd megvirrad már,
Zöld erdőben, sík mezőben
Sétál egy madár.

“The rooster calls now.

Soon the dawn will break.

In the green forest and open field,

a bird walks.”

What fascinates me about the song is that no one knows exactly where it came from.

According to Hasidic tradition, Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Taub of Nagykálló, Hungary, overheard a shepherd singing the melody more than two hundred years ago. Nagykálló lies only about thirty kilometers from the village my own family came from, so when I first learned this story, the song stopped feeling distant. It belonged to the same soil, the same fields, the same northeastern Hungarian landscape where part of my own story began.

The Rabbi believed he had discovered something ancient hidden within an ordinary folk melody. He taught that it was not merely a folk song at all, but a fragment of a sacred song once sung in the Temple in Jerusalem and scattered among the nations in exile.

Yet the story holds an even deeper mystery still.

Tradition tells us that when the Rabbi asked the shepherd to sing the melody a second time, the shepherd could no longer remember it. The song had vanished from his memory the moment it was given away, as though it had been wandering through the world waiting for someone to recognize it.

The song itself speaks of a mysterious bird moving through a green forest and open field, longing for home. For some, the bird became a symbol of Israel in exile. For others, it became a symbol of the human soul. The song never fully explains itself. It remains suspended between longing and fulfillment, exile and homecoming, darkness and dawn.

Perhaps that is why I found myself thinking about this song as I prepared for Trinity Sunday.

Because some mysteries are not meant to be solved. They are meant to be embodied.

The Church has never fully contained the mystery of the Trinity. We have written books about it, argued over it, defended it, and proclaimed it. Yet generation after generation has discovered that the mystery of God is known less through explanation than through participation. We do not stand outside the Trinity and analyze it. We live within its reality. We pray it. We worship it. We are baptized into it. We encounter it in bread broken and wine poured, in love given and received, in the breath of God moving through creation and through one another.

The rooster calls.
The darkness is passing.
The dawn is near.

And as I continued walking the trail, my mind returned to another place.

The trail passes directly by the home where I grew up.

The place where my own story first began.

My own Genesis.

My backyard was a place of refuge, the place where I learned the medicine, if you will, of the willow, the dandelion, and the wild daylily,

My yard was not extraordinary by adult standards, but because children know how to see differently, it was a land of wonder. A child can turn ordinary ground into holy ground. A child’s imagination can baptize a landscape with wonder.

I remembered the dandelions...

Bright bursts of gold pushing stubbornly through cracked earth and patchy grass, resilient little suns growing where no one planted them. Adults call them weeds. Children call them wishes. I would pick them, hold them carefully in my hands, and later watch them transform into those white globes of fragile seeds, waiting for the breath of someone willing to send them into the world.

My son Austin still never misses the opportunity to stop for a dandelion. He picks one instinctively, almost reverently, as though every child somehow understands what adults forget. He closes his eyes, makes a wish—a prayer, really—and blows. And suddenly what seemed rooted becomes windborne. What was held in the earth becomes movement in the air.

And it strikes me now that perhaps the dandelion has always been quietly teaching theology. Rooted deeply in the soil, it rises first in the spring as nourishment for bees and waking life. Golden and radiant, almost sun-like in its flowering, it offers itself outwardly and abundantly. Then, finally, it becomes breath and sends its seeds lifted and scattered by the wind into places unseen.

Earth. Flower. Breath. Creation. Incarnation. Spirit. Distinct, yet inseparable within one living movement.

Genesis feels more like poetry spoken beside a fire. The text is alive with movement, breath, relationship, and becoming. The Hebrew itself carries a depth that is difficult to fully preserve in English: Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz. Usually translated, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. But the Hebrew has an unfinished, unfolding quality. Creation is not presented as static machinery snapping into existence. It feels living, ongoing, dynamic—as though the universe itself is still responding to the voice that first called it forth.

And then the text grows more mysterious and beautiful: Veha’aretz hayetah tohu va’vohu… “The earth was wild and waste”. And then comes one of the most beautiful images in all of Scripture: Veruach Elohim merachefet al-penei hamayim. “And the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters”.

The word ruach means Spirit, breath, and wind (((all at once))). Hebrew refuses to separate them. Modern Western thought often wants categories, definitions, separations. But Hebrew thought is more embodied than that, more relational, more alive.

You cannot see wind, only its movement. You cannot hold breath in your hands, only receive it. You cannot contain Spirit, only experience its presence. (((They belong to one another.)))

Thousands of tiny seeds rise into the air, carried by something unseen yet undeniably real. You cannot see the breath itself, but you can see what the breath does. That is ruach.

And then comes the first recorded divine utterance in Scripture: Yehi or. (((Yehi or.))) “Let there be light”. God does not have to defeat the darkness before light can appear. God speaks, and light enters the deep. And as First John says, “God is light, and in God there is no darkness at all.” This does not mean God is afraid of darkness. It means darkness cannot finally overcome the life and love of God.

God is illumination, the abode and action of light. The beginning of visibility, the first possibility of seeing, the first gift by which creation may be known.

In that sense, creation is still receiving light. Still being illuminated. Because light is not absent from a person who lacks sight. Light can still be felt. It can still be perceived. It can still warm the skin, mark the morning, and announce that darkness is not the final word.

And yet, not all illumination begins above ground.

Before we ever see the dandelion emerge in the spring, its life is already at work beneath the surface. Long before the gold appears, the roots are deep in the earth, hidden in darkness. And scientifically, the plant is not merely surviving there; it is participating in restoration. Dandelions help aerate the soil. What many call a weed is quietly healing exhausted ground. Which feels strangely theological to me. Because so much of life with God happens beneath visibility.

And perhaps this is where the Gospel meets us not as an abstract doctrine to solve, but as an invitation into the life of God itself.

The air moving through our lungs today is not different from the breath moving over the waters in Genesis. The water flowing through rivers, rain, and oceans today is not separate from the waters over which the Spirit hovered in the beginning. Creation is not disconnected from its origins. It remains continuous with them.

The same atmosphere cycles endlessly through the world. The breath we inhale contains molecules once breathed by forests, oceans, animals, and ancestors. The water we drink may once have moved through the bodies of saints and strangers, through ancient cedars and forgotten civilizations. The world is older, more connected, and more alive than we usually allow ourselves to imagine. Which means Genesis is not merely describing a past event. It is describing a reality we are still inside of.

The Spirit did not hover over the waters once and withdraw into distance. The breath of God still moves through creation, and the waters still carry that first blessing. Perhaps this is why baptism matters so deeply.

Because Christianity does not invent holy water. It recognizes that creation was already holy before we arrived. In baptism, ordinary water becomes a sign of extraordinary grace, not because God suddenly enters creation for the first time, but because God has always been moving through creation from the beginning.

The waters remember. The air remembers. The earth remembers.

And maybe that is why moments of awe can feel so ancient and yet so immediate at the same time: sunlight through trees, wind across the bay, the smell of rain approaching, the whisper of butterfly wings, a child blowing dandelion seeds into the evening air, fireflies illuminating the darkness for only a moment, moving through the night like tiny living stars.

Creation still carries memory of the breath that first moved across the deep.

The Spirit that hovered over the waters in Genesis still moves through creation now: through human hands, through communities, through acts of mercy, through forgiveness, through baptismal waters, through bread broken and wine poured, through the strange and holy persistence of love in a wounded world. Through this congregation assembled right here and right now.

Genesis is not behind us. We are still living inside its story. The breath still moves. The waters still flow. The light still shines. Creation is still unfolding.

The story of creation does not end with the first light breaking over the waters. It continues wherever the Spirit is still moving, still breathing, still calling life into being.

And in Matthew’s Gospel, that movement continues on a mountain.

The risen Christ stands before the disciples, and Matthew tells us something astonishingly honest: “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted”. ( But some doubted)

Matthew does not erase the doubt. And maybe that matters because doubt, in this context, is not something we need to fear. Doubt is not always rebellion. Sometimes doubt is the soul waiting for connection. Sometimes we doubt because we have not yet experienced enough presence to trust what is being revealed.

The disciples are standing before the risen Christ, and still some part of them trembles. That feels deeply human to me. Faith is not the absence of trembling. Faith is staying open long enough for an encounter.

So perhaps the invitation is not to shame the doubting parts of ourselves, but to let them come along. Doubt and faith are not always opposing forces. Sometimes they belong to the same trembling reach toward God. Sometimes mystery is more honest than certainty, and wonder brings us closer than explanation ever could.

Let the doubting parts stand on the mountain too. Let them breathe. Let them listen. Let them be slowly warmed by the light they cannot yet fully understand.Jesus then says: “Go therefore…”. Move outward. Become part of the sending.

In this moment, Christ breathes the ancient ruach over His followers, and the disciples become the seeds. Just as a child exhales and sends thousands of tiny seeds rising into the air, Jesus sends His followers outward into places unseen.

“Baptizing them in the (name) of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. Notice: not (names— name.) Singular. One divine life spoken relationally. One communion of love overflowing outward into creation.

And perhaps this is why the dandelion belongs here after all.

The dandelion does not cling forever to its own flowering. Eventually, it opens itself to the wind.

Root. Flower. Breath. Source. Expression. Sending.

Not separate things, but one living movement.

Children become our teachers. Children do not need to explain the mystery. They instinctively participate in it.

They see the dandelion. They pick it up. They close their eyes. They breathe. They trust that something unseen can carry life farther than they can imagine.

So let yourself become like the children. See the magic and wonder of creation again. Let the ancient mystery fill you. Let the wind move. Let the light warm. Let the waters remember. Let the breath of God carry you into places not yet seen.

The rooster still calls.

The dawn is still breaking.

And the Spirit is still moving over the face of the deep.

God is. And because God is, we are. So to the One who sits upon the throne, and to Christ the Lamb, be worship and dominion, honor and praise, now and forever.

Amen.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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If you would like to read the Scripture appointed for today, the 7th Sunday of Easter, that is referenced in this sermon, you can click on the link here: Scripture Readings

“Sing to God, O kingdoms of the earth; sing praises to the Lord.” Psalm 68:33

In today’s appointed epistle, Peter is addressing the followers of “The Way,” likely around this time being called Christianos in Greek, a term given to them by outsiders. A tension was growing between synagogue communities, Jewish followers of Jesus, Gentile converts, and Roman authorities. The Roman historian Tacitus later refers to Christians as followers of “Christus,” who suffered under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Later in this same letter, Peter writes

“If you suffer as a Christian…” (Peter 4:16)

The wording strongly implies the label had become publicly recognizable and potentially dangerous. Christian was not yet a triumphant institutional identity. At first, it likely sounded more like:

“those people,”
“that sect,”
“the Christus faction.”

Peter is writing to a church in danger, not necessarily yet under empire-wide execution, but under mounting suspicion, social hostility, and pressure because of its beliefs and way of life.

These communities refused to participate fully in the religious and political expectations of the Roman world. They would not worship Caesar. They crossed boundaries between Jew and Gentile, enslaved and free, male and female. They gathered around a crucified Messiah and proclaimed that Jesus, not the emperor, was Lord.

So when Peter writes:

“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you…”

He is not speaking abstractly. He is speaking to people whose lives had become unstable because of their fidelity to Christ.

The phrase “fiery ordeal” evokes both purification and threat. The church is being tested publicly. They are being reviled, mocked, isolated, perhaps economically harmed, perhaps denounced by neighbors or estranged from family and synagogue communities. To bear the name Christianos increasingly meant to carry risk. In a Roman world where imperial violence often appeared absolute, Peter reminds the church that beneath the visible powers of accusation, fear, and domination is a deeper spiritual struggle. The church is called neither to panic nor triumphalism, but endurance.

“Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.”

This is not sentimental comfort. This is pastoral language spoken to frightened people living under uncertainty. The early church was anxious because they had reason to be anxious. Their identity had become dangerous. Their future was unclear. Some were likely exhausted from vigilance and fear.

The contrast between the church addressed in First Epistle of Peter and much of modern Christianity can feel almost unbearable.

The early church Peter writes to possessed:

• no armies,

• no political dominance,

• no institutional protection,

• no cultural power,

• no legal privilege.

They were a vulnerable minority living under suspicion. To be associated with the name of Jesus could cost them social standing, family relationships, economic stability, even their lives. The name Christianos was not yet prestige. It was risk.

And yet today, in many parts of the world — especially in the modern West — the church has often become intertwined with:

• nationalism,

• empire,

• partisan identity,

• military power,

• cultural dominance,

• and ideological warfare.

The cross, once an instrument of imperial execution, is at times draped in the banners of empire itself.

The early Christians were accused of refusing allegiance to Caesar because they confessed:

“Jesus is Lord.”

But now, far too often, the name of Jesus is invoked not as a challenge to domination, but as a justification for it.

Peter’s church knew what it meant to suffer under empire. The modern church sometimes struggles to recognize when it has become too comfortable beside it.

There is a tragic irony here.

The same movement whose founder told Peter:

“Put your sword back into its place…”

became, across centuries, linked to:

• crusades,

• conquest,

• colonialism,

• state violence,

• national exceptionalism,

• and religious triumphalism.

Even today, we speak of the military as defending our freedom, but at what cost? Whose freedom? To whom do we belong? Jesus or Caesar?

The name of Jesus, who washed feet and forgave executioners, is now sometimes spoken like a weapon.

Not always.
Not everywhere.
But far too often.

In Peter’s epistle, suffering is not portrayed as proof of weakness, but as participation in Christ. The church’s power was not coercive. It was cruciform.

Today’s Gospel, sometimes referred to as “The High Priestly Prayer,” reveals what kind of “power” Jesus is actually praying into the world.

Jesus is standing at the threshold of crucifixion. This is not a triumphant political speech. This is the prayer spoken the night before the empire kills him.

And yet listen carefully to the language:

“Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you…”

In John’s Gospel, “glory” does not mean domination.
It does not mean conquest.
It does not mean military victory or cultural control.

The glory of Christ in John is revealed through self-emptying love.

The hour of glory is the cross.

That changes everything.

Jesus says:

“And this is eternal life, that they may know you…”

Not conquer in your name.
Not rule in your name.
Not dominate in your name.

Know you.

The Greek here carries intimacy, communion, relationship. Eternal life in John is not merely survival after death. It is participation in the life of God now. A life shaped by communion instead of domination.

And then Jesus says something extraordinary:

“I have made your name known…”

Not weaponized your name.
Not branded armies with your name.
Not fused your name to empire.

And he did not make the name of God known merely through proclamation, but through embodiment.

In Scripture, the “name” of God is not simply a title or religious designation. The name signifies presence, character, essence, the very life of God revealed in the world. In the ancient imagination, to know the name of God was to encounter the nature of God.

And Jesus embodied that name.

He revealed the Father not through domination, but through presence. Not through spectacle, but through love enacted in flesh and history.

He washed the feet of his disciples, kneeling with the posture of a servant in a world obsessed with hierarchy and honor. He touched the wounded and the unclean, crossing the boundaries purity systems demanded remain fixed. He fed the hungry not only with bread, but with dignity, seeing those the world had learned not to see. He forgave enemies while violence was still being done to him. He crossed boundaries between Jew and Samaritan, men and women, rich and poor, righteous and sinner. He refused to answer empire with empire’s own logic. And even as he endured the machinery of political and religious violence, he did not become violent in return.

This is how Jesus made the name of God known.

Not by seizing power, but by revealing a love that could not be conquered by it.

The cross in John’s Gospel is not the abandonment of glory, but its unveiling. The glory of God is revealed in self-giving love that remains faithful even when the world responds with fear, humiliation, and death.

And this becomes the crisis for the church in every generation: whether we will merely speak the name of Jesus, or embody the life he revealed.

Because the world has heard Christians speak the name of Jesus while refusing mercy. It has heard the name spoken alongside exclusion, cruelty, nationalism, and violence. But Jesus says:

“I have made your name known…”

Meaning: I showed them who You are through love that remained open even to the point of suffering.

On the night before his arrest, Jesus does not gather an army. He does not sharpen a sword. He does not pray for his followers to conquer the world or defeat their enemies by force.

He lifts his eyes to heaven and prays.

He prays for the ones who will remain in the world after him. The frightened ones. The confused ones. The ones who will carry his name into places where that name may cost them something. He prays for the church before the church knows what it will become. He prays for you individually, and for me, he prays for us all.

And what does he ask?

That they all may be one.

Not that they all may be the same.

Jesus is not praying for a church without difference, without particularity, without culture, story, language, grief, memory, or wound. He is not praying for sameness. He is praying for communion.

That they all may be one as the Father and the Son are one: distinct, yet united in love; different, yet held in mutual belonging; not collapsed into each other, but moving together in the life of God.

That is the unity Christ prays for.

Not the unity of empire, which demands conformity.

Not the unity of nationalism, which decides who belongs by borders, blood, and power.

Not the unity of fear, which gathers people by giving them a common enemy.

But the unity of communion.

The unity of mercy.

The unity of people who have learned that bearing the name of Jesus means embodying the life of Jesus.

And perhaps this is the prayer the church must hear again: that we would become one by being drawn more deeply into the love of God.

One in truth.

One in mercy.

One in humility.

One in the wounded and risen Christ.

It is fitting that we close the Easter season here, with Jesus praying before the cross.

Easter does not move us away from this moment; it teaches us how to see it. The resurrection does not erase the crucifixion. It reveals that the life poured out there was never lost to God.

So as the season turns, we return to the prayer of Jesus: the prayer he offered before suffering, before separation, before his friends understood what was coming.

And in that prayer, he gathers them — and us — into the heart of God:

“That they all may be one.”

Amen. +

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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To access the readings referred to in this sermon, please click here: Lectionary

“O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

There is something deeply honest about this prayer because it begins by admitting that we do not fully understand what we are asking for.

We ask for love, but love is rarely simple. We ask for God’s promises, but often discover those promises do not arrive in the forms we expected. We ask for goodness, meaning, closeness, and healing, and yet life remains marked by complexity, grief, longing, and human limitation.

And perhaps that is why this prayer feels especially important today.

Because Mother’s Day is a complicated day.

For some, it is a joyful celebration filled with gratitude, tenderness, and memory. For others, it is a painful reminder of a relationship that was disrupted: love tangled in absence, addiction, estrangement, silence, grief, or wounds that never fully healed. And for many people, it is both at once: love and ache existing together in the same story.

It is worth naming that honestly.

The relationship between a caregiver and a child is one of the deepest bonds human beings can experience. It shapes how we first encounter comfort, safety, belonging, and love itself. In the earliest parts of life, that bond is so close, so intertwined, that it can feel almost impossible to tell where one life ends and another begins.

Because that bond is so profound, its beauty can sustain us for years, and its wounds can echo for years as well.

Some of us were loved well and still carry that love like warmth within us. Some were loved imperfectly by people who themselves were wounded and overwhelmed. Some are grieving mothers whom they miss deeply. Some are grieving relationships they never truly had. Some are mothers carrying invisible sacrifice, exhaustion, fear, or guilt. And some are still trying to understand what love actually requires after growing up in homes where love and pain became intertwined.

Mother’s Day, then, is the undercurrent, unconnected to the liturgical day, yet unavoidable in its complexity and meaning for those of us gathered here today.

And scripture, interestingly, does not ask us to pretend otherwise. Instead, the readings move directly into the tension of what it means to love in a world where suffering still exists.

In the First Epistle of Peter, we hear:

“Even if you suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed.”

And in the Gospel, Jesus says:

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

Not as pressure. Not as performance. But as alignment.

Because love, in the way Christ speaks of it, is not merely emotion or sentiment. It is the ground of our being, the substance of our faith. Love is what we hold onto. Love is what begins to shape the center of our lives. Love is what remains when life becomes difficult, when relationships are imperfect, and when goodness costs us something.

In The Acts of the Apostles, Paul gives a speech he says,

“For we too are his offspring.”

That is the truth beneath everything.

Before we are labeled, judged, rejected, misunderstood, or reduced by anyone else, we are God’s offspring.

We belong to God.

And because we are God’s offspring, we must be careful not to make God into something smaller than God is, not gold, not silver, not stone, not an image shaped by human imagination.

And I would add: not an image shaped by fear or nationalism.
Not an image shaped by prejudice.
Not an image shaped by the sharpness of our wounds.

Because when we make God small, we usually make each other small too.

The writer of Acts says, “God now calls all people everywhere to repent.”

And repentance is not merely feeling bad.

It is turning.

It is the willingness to let God change the direction of our hearts.

To repent is to stop worshipping the small gods of fear, control, hatred, and certainty and to turn again toward the living God, the One in whom we live and move and have our being. So when Peter says, “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts,” and Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” they are not separate messages.

They are one movement:

Remember whose you are.
Turn from what diminishes life.
Let Christ become the center.
And live from love.

Yesterday, I experienced something ugly. It was hurtful not only because of what was said, but also because of the display of human failure to love. A neighbor who has never spoken a single word to me in the three years I have lived in my home instructed some masons not to accept work from me. And in speaking about us, he referred to us as “the two faggots,” and said we were not good people.

Now I want to be honest about something. My first instinct was not holiness. My first instincts were anger, defensiveness, humiliation, and a deep human desire to strike back after being diminished.

Because words like that do not simply insult a person. They attempt to reduce a person.

But the truth is, I am not reducible to someone else’s fear, disgust, or projection.

I, like most of you, was baptized into Christ and marked as his own forever. The only name I carry is beloved.

During my first semester at seminary, I took a course on forgiveness taught in part by Mpho Tutu van Furth, the daughter of Desmond Tutu, a scholar and Episcopal priest in her own right. She shared an image that has never left me.

She said that when a person strikes you in the face, what they are saying is:

“You are worthy of being struck.”

That is what violence does.
That is what hatred does.
That is what humiliation tries to do.

It attempts to define your worth through harm.

But then she said something powerful. Her response was:

“I am a child of God. I am worthy of God’s love.”

Not because the harm was acceptable.
Not because the wound was unreal.
Not because forgiveness means pretending evil is good.

But because another person’s hatred does not have the authority to define who you are.

And I think that is part of what Peter means when he says:

“Do not fear what they fear… but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.”

Set Christ, not hatred, not shame, not fear, at the center of your identity.

Because if fear becomes Lord, then hatred begins to shape us. But if Christ is Lord, then even in moments of rejection, we remember something deeper is true: we belong to God before we belong to the opinions of others. Our worth is not granted by the crowd. Love remains sacred, even in a world that often forgets how to practice it.

I have a mother. I am someone’s son. Someone’s father. Someone’s brother, cousin, nephew, and friend.

As Walt Whitman once wrote, “I contain multitudes.”

And so do you.

Every person sitting here does.

I have heard this Gospel verse misused in ways that deeply wound people.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

I have heard it turned into performative religion. I have heard it used as moral pressure. I have literally been told in my life that being gay is proof I cannot love Jesus, and this verse was at the head of that twisted theology.

I have heard people imply that if you fail some narrow human definition of righteousness, then somehow you become less worthy of love, less human, less welcome before God.

But Jesus does not summarize the commandments with exclusion.

He summarizes them with love.

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

And that changes everything.

The Greek word Jesus uses for “keep” is τηρέω — tēreō — which means not merely to obey mechanically, but to hold onto, to guard, to preserve within yourself.

So when Jesus says:

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,”

He is not saying: “Perform correctly so you can earn love.”

He is saying:

“If love has truly taken root in you, then love is what you will hold onto, even when hatred invites you to become something else.”

And yesterday, standing in that moment, I remembered something from the Book of Genesis. Joseph is speaking to his brothers.

You remember the story.

The brothers who betrayed him. Sold him into slavery. Allowed his father to believe he was dead.

And after all of it, after the betrayal, the humiliation, and the suffering, Joseph says:

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good…”

Not because what they did was good.

It was not.

But because hatred does not get the final authority over what a human life becomes. And I think this matters not only personally, but communally.

Because we as a church community have also walked through a season of fear, pressure, and uncertainty.

We have lived under the threat of losing this building and these grounds through the actions of local government. We know what it feels like to watch something sacred become vulnerable. We know what it feels like to wonder whether the place we have prayed, grieved, worshipped, celebrated, baptized, buried, and gathered might be taken away.

And yet, even in all of that stress, one thing became abundantly clear:

The Church is not this beautiful building.

The Church is us.

Somos una iglesia.

We are one Church.

And what revealed itself during this season was extraordinary.

Neighbors came to our aid. Neighbors of many faiths and neighbors of none.

The wider Episcopal Church and our diocese surrounded us with love, support, advocacy, prayer, and presence. And in the end, what was intended for harm became, somehow, a source of transformation.

Not because the conflict itself was good.

It was not.

But because suffering has a way of revealing what was true all along: love is stronger than fear, community is stronger than isolation, and the Church is not held together by property, but by people willing to remain aligned with Christ in how they love one another.

Joseph says to his brothers:

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.”

And perhaps we can say something similar.

What was meant to fracture us instead revealed us to ourselves.

We are not merely a collection of individuals occupying a building. We are a people bound together through love, sacrifice, memory, grief, hope, and shared belonging.

We are a transformed community now. That is not performance. That is formation. That is the work of a sanctified heart.

The world often teaches us that suffering should harden us. That humiliation should diminish us. That fear should define us. That if we are wounded enough, we have every right to become smaller, colder, sharper versions of ourselves.

But Jesus says something different.

“Because I live, you also will live.”

Not only someday.

Now.

Because Christ lives, love can still live in us. Hope can still live in us. Tenderness can still live in us. Truth can still live in us. God can still live in us.

That does not mean we will never suffer. It does not mean we will never be misunderstood, rejected, wounded, or afraid. It means suffering does not get to decide what remains alive within us.

A sanctified heart is not a perfect heart. It is a heart that has made room for Christ at the center. A heart that continues to live from love when fear is loud. A heart that refuses to let hatred become its teacher.

So when harm speaks, when fear rises, when rejection comes, when the world tries to tell us who we are, we answer from that sanctified center:

I am a child of God.

I am worthy of God’s love.

And I will not let hatred decide what I become.

“Bless our God, you peoples;
make the voice of his praise to be heard;

Who holds our souls in life,
and will not allow our feet to slip.”

Amen.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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Until the Wind Remembers Your Name

Gabriel, I remember the day we met, I was lost in your deep green eyes,
oceans of love.

Even at the end, as I lay beside you on the floor, rubbing you in all the ways you loved, your deep eyes looked at me with knowing.

“Yes, sweet boy. I am here. I will not leave you.”

I wrapped you in a warm white towel and held you like a human baby,
swaddled against my heartbeat.

I could feel your love and pain. I wondered if you knew what was happening.

I remembered you as a kitten, playful, bright, alive with wanting.

I remembered how each night, around eight o’clock, you would howl and chase me until I gave you your favorite food.

You were relentless, I was often annoyed by it, and now I will miss it.

I named you because like the angel Gabriel your voice called out you purred,
you howled, and pursued me through the house as if love were something
that must be answered.

It was not supposed to be so soon, I thought we had many more years, but time is like a flower, it blooms and releases its life for but a season.

You were one of my best friends, and we shared the best naps and snuggles.

You held me through difficult times, taking my anxiety like alchemy and transforming it into peace.

You softened my heart and pierced it alike. Such is the price of love.

I stayed with you, in the dark of the night, and whispered your name to you like the magic of a love never spoken in words.

I did not expect a miracle; I knew your life was that. I made you promise to never leave me in your spirit, your eyes told me the truth, and in our own language spoken through the soul, I know you are with me.

Early this morning, when you exhaled for the last time, your breath was borne upon the wind.

Now it wisps like butterfly wings.

I promised you I would still speak your name into the wild of the night as you play with the fairies and chase the wind.

I missed you today. My heart is aching.

So I walked about the spring-bursting yard and the angel white lilacs
stopped me in my tracks.

I think now their fragrance will always remind me of you.

The wisteria wrapped around the pergola like you would twist through my legs, following me wherever I went.

The honeysuckle climbed the trellis like you, brave boy, leaping through the air from height to height.

The birdhouses reminded me how you would sit at the window,
watching the birds, your whole body still, eyes alive, and I could feel the wild in you, that quiet, electric longing to pounce, to become wind and motion and instinct.

Everywhere I turned, you were still here not as you were, but as something
the world is now holding for me.

And I will keep speaking your name, until even the wind remembers it I will think of you pouncing on the wind, wild and free.

The love between a cat and a human is one that is so strong it never needs words, now you as you were in life you are in death, the purest form of love, wild and free.

The Scripture passages are embedded as hyperlinks, allowing the reader or listener to click to access the full text for reference—Matthew 4:12–17, Colossians 2:8–23, and Psalm 105—Today’s appointed readings draw us into a single movement. Christ steps into the darkness and announces that the Kingdom has come near. Paul warns against a faith that remains external, unrooted in Christ. The Psalm calls us to make known God's deeds among the peoples. Together, they press one question: will this remain something we observe, or something we embody?

Psalm 105 begins with a command:

“Give thanks… call upon God’s Name… make known his deeds among the peoples” (Psalm 105:1).

The question is not whether to make God known. The question is how. Not through performance. Not through self-display disguised as righteousness. Not even through words alone. Because words without embodiment become exactly what Paul warns about: clanging noise (1 Corinthians 13:1).

When proclamation is severed from love, it ceases to be witness and becomes spectacle. When Scripture is spoken but not lived, it does not reveal God; it obscures the fullness of God.

In today’s appointed lesson from Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, Paul sharpens the edge of the matter. He warns the church, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit,” through ways of thinking rooted merely in human tradition and not according to Christ (Colossians 2:8).

That captivity is not only a false belief. It is a belief that remains outside the body. It is the truth that is spoken but never enfleshed. It is Scripture read, quoted, defended, and even proclaimed, but never allowed to become mercy, humility, forgiveness, justice, or love.

Paul does not leave Christ in the realm of ideas. He grounds everything in the body: “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him” (Colossians 2:9–10).

Not abstractly.
Not intellectually.
Bodily.

The fullness of God is revealed in the flesh. And if Christ dwells in us, then the Word is not meant only to be read. It is meant to live in us, and life requires action.

The problem is not that America reads the Bible. The problem is reading without indwelling. The problem is that Scripture is handled as a possession rather than as a surrender. Scripture becomes something to quote, defend, post, weaponize, memorize, or display, while the heart remains unchanged. But the Word was never given so that we could master it. The Word was given so that it could master us.

The Word is not an object we stand over.

It is a living presence that enters us, searches us, wounds what is false, heals what is broken, and teaches the body how to become love.

Jesus asks, “What will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” (Matthew 16:26). That question cuts through every religious performance. What does it profit a person to gain moral certainty, public approval, theological correctness, institutional power, political victory, and the praise of others, if in the process they lose the tenderness of their soul?

What does it profit us to read the Bible and become less merciful?

What does it profit us to proclaim Christ and become less like Christ?

What does it profit us to defend the Word while refusing to let the Word become flesh in us?

Because the danger is not only unbelief. Sometimes the danger is belief without incarnation. Belief without love. Belief without humility. Belief without repentance. Belief that can recite the commandments but cannot recognize the wounded person on the road.

That is reading without indwelling.

To indwell the Word means Scripture does not remain on the page. It descends into the heart. It enters the nervous system. It changes how we speak when we are angry, how we respond when we are afraid, how we treat the person who cannot benefit us, how we forgive without pretending harm did not happen, how we tell the truth without cruelty, and how we love without needing applause.

Because if the Spirit dwells within, then the Word is no longer something we merely quote.

It is something we become.

The Word becomes mercy in our hands.

The Word becomes restraint in our mouth.

The Word becomes courage in our body.

The Word becomes light in rooms where people have only known darkness.

This is the difference between performance and witness. Performance says, “Look at my righteousness.” Witness says, “Come and see what love has done.”

The Word is not given to make us impressive. It is given to make us whole.

In today’s appointed Gospel, John the Baptist, the forerunner, the voice in the wilderness, the cousin of Jesus, has been arrested. The voice that cried out has been silenced by power. And it is precisely there, in that moment of interruption and uncertainty, that Jesus begins his public ministry.

He does not begin with an argument.
He does not begin with defense.
He begins with fulfillment.

Quoting the prophet Isaiah, he declares:

“The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned” (Matthew 4:16; Isaiah 9:2).

This is where the Gospel movement completes itself.

Light is not argued into existence. It is not proven. It is not forced. Light is seen. And how is it seen?

Not through volume. Not through certainty. Not through domination or control. But through lives that carry a different quality of presence: mercy without transaction, love without merit, forgiveness without control. This is how the light dawns, not as an idea, but as a reality that can be encountered.

So how do we “make known His deeds among the peoples” (Psalm 105:1)?

Not by announcing what God has done for us but by becoming a place where others experience what God is like. Because the world does not need louder proclamations if those proclamations are empty of love. The world needs witnesses, people in whom the Word has taken flesh again.

We have been reading Exodus all week, set free from bondage, carried through the sea, led by fire, fed from heaven, and still, the people return to fear, doubt, and complaint.

Not because they are uniquely flawed but because this is the human condition. We struggle to remain present to what has already been given.
We forget what we have seen. We lose trust even after deliverance.

And yet God does not withdraw.

God continues to lead. God continues to dwell. God continues to make Godself known not only in acts of power but also in a patient, enduring presence.

So the call is not a louder proclamation. It is a deeper embodiment. Because without love, even truth becomes noise. But with love, even silence can reveal God.

You can read all sixty-six books of the Bible. You can memorize it, preach it, quote it, defend it, and still never taste the glory of God.

You can carry the text in your mind and remain untouched in your heart.

Because knowing the Bible is not the same as knowing Christ.

And Scripture itself bears witness to this: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:39–40).

Knowing the Bible, on its own, can become another form of distance, another way to speak about God without ever encountering the living God.

But knowing Jesus is different. Knowing Jesus is not informational. It is relational. It is participatory. It draws you in.

And when Christ is truly known, something happens: the inner life begins to shift, the heart softens, the need to perform loosens, the impulse to control gives way, and love begins to take root where fear once lived.

This is transformation.

This is transfiguration.

Not a change of appearance for the sake of others, but a change of being from the inside out. Where the Word once sat on the page, it now breathes in you.

Where truth was once something you carried, it becomes something that carries you.

And slowly, sometimes imperceptibly at first, your life begins to reflect a different light, not your own, but God’s.

The light that has dawned.

The light that cannot be manufactured.
The light that is only ever received… and then revealed.

Jesus stands in the Temple and says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). Not someday. Not after understanding. Not after perfection. Today.

And yet, this same Jesus also tells his disciples, “I go to prepare a place for you,” and promises that God will send the Holy Spirit to dwell with them and be in them (John 14:2–3, 16–17). This is not a contradiction. It is a revelation unfolding. The fulfillment is already breaking in, and it is still coming. The Kingdom is present and arriving. The Word is fulfilled, and it is still being written into human lives.

This is not something to pass over quickly. This is the reordering of everything. It is the reordering of worship, no longer confined to mountain or temple, but opened in spirit and in truth (John 4:23). It is the reordering of power, no longer held by empire, priesthood, or institution, but revealed in surrender, love, and the cross. It is the reordering of sacred space, in which God is no longer encountered only behind a veil but within the human person.

The temple is not simply destroyed. It is transfigured. It is relocated. When Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” John tells us that he was speaking of the temple of his body (John 2:19, 21). And through the Spirit, that life extends outward into us. Paul says it plainly: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16).

If Jesus says the kingdom of God is within you, then what are we? Not spectators. Not mere believers. Not carriers of religious ideas. We are the living, breathing temple of God. We are the place where heaven and earth meet. We are the place where the Word becomes flesh again. We are the place where light dawns, again and again, into the darkness.

So the invitation is not only to read the Word, or proclaim the Word, or defend the Word. The invitation is to become a dwelling place for it. Because if Christ is in us, then wherever we go, the temple goes. And wherever the temple goes, God is made known.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

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Do Not Fear What They Fear (III): Courage That Does Not Collapse

There is a moment when everything that has been forming within a person is tested, not in theory, not in prayer alone, not in the privacy of thought, but in the world as it actually is. I know that moment well. I am afraid of the state of the world. I do not mean that in an abstract or performative way. I mean it in the body. I mean it in the quiet dread that meets me in the morning before the day has fully begun.

Each morning, when I open the New York Times, there is a brief pause before the page loads, and in that small suspended space I find myself whispering something that has become its own kind of liturgy: Please God, don’t let it be too bad. It is my modern Lord, have mercy. That prayer rises from anticipation as much as from fact. It rises from the sense that things can turn quickly, and not always toward life. As Aristotle put it, “fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil” (often attributed to Aristotle; compare Rhetoric 2.5). That feels right to me. Much of what I fear is not only what has happened, but what may happen next. Fear reaches forward. It asks the soul to inhabit a future that has not yet arrived and then to live as though that future were already final.

That is why the Israelites feel so familiar to me. When they ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?” (Exod. 17:7), they are not speaking from a safe distance. They are thirsty. They are destabilized. They are frightened. Their question is not the question of shallow people. It is the question of human beings under pressure. It is the question asked whenever the world no longer feels interpretable through trust. Where is God when things are unraveling? Where is God when systems wound? Where is God when power feels cruel, when families are torn apart, when whole peoples live beneath threat, when the future feels unstable enough to shake the body before a word is spoken? The trauma is real. The fear is real. The cry itself is human.

What Scripture shows with painful honesty is not only that fear exists, but what fear does. Fear narrows the field of vision. It collapses memory. It makes the present moment feel total. The Israelites had seen deliverance. They had history with God. But under the pressure of thirst, their perception reorganized around what was missing. That is what trauma does. It does not simply hurt. It rewrites meaning. It persuades us that absence is the deepest truth. It trains the soul to interpret the whole of reality through the wound of the moment.

Jesus does not meet that condition with denial. He does not pretend the world is gentle. “In the world you face persecution,” he says, “But take courage; I have conquered the world” (John 16:33). He names the pressure without softening it. He does not promise safety. He does not imply that faith will remove fear. He does not ask anyone to become inhuman. That line can be badly misunderstood if we hear it as a command not to feel afraid. It is not that. It is not a rebuke against trembling. It is not spiritual pressure to become serene on demand. It is something far more human, and for that reason, far more demanding.

I understand this best because of my son. He is ten years old and afraid of needles, and what child is not? Whenever he knows one is coming, I give him a day to let it settle in. I let him feel it before he has to face it. The tears come. The fear becomes visible. His body tells the truth before his words can do much with it. One time, through tears, he said something that stopped me: “I’m not brave, because I’m scared.” I told him what I believe is true for him and for all of us. I said, “Daddy doesn’t like needles either. They are scary. But being brave doesn’t mean we are not afraid. It means even when we are afraid, we still do it. It’s okay to be afraid.”

That, I think, is what Jesus means. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is movement that is not determined by fear. The fear may remain. The body may tremble. The tears may still come. But fear does not get to decide the action. Fear does not become lord.

This matters because fear always wants more than to be felt. It wants to organize. It wants to calculate outcomes and make them sovereign before anything has begun. Kierkegaard puts it well: “If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin” (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling). Fear projects, anticipates, calculates, and then paralyzes. If I must know how this will be resolved before I act, I will not begin. If I must secure the outcome before I move, I will remain still. If I must guarantee that faithfulness will succeed in visible terms, I will wait forever. But Jesus does not say, act once you can control the ending. He says, “take courage” (John 16:33). In other words, move without possessing the outcome.

The point of “take courage” is not that Christians should not be afraid. The point is that fear does not get to take center stage. The danger is not simply that the world is frightening. The danger is that fear begins to reorganize the soul around itself. The world teaches that pattern relentlessly. It teaches us to harden, to protect, to control, to become smaller in order to feel safe. It trains us to confuse self-protection with wisdom and numbness with strength. But that is not freedom. That is formation under fear.

Peter writes with a grim clarity about the world. He does not soften it. He speaks of ordeal, pressure, and judgment. “The end of all things is near,” he writes, and then calls the church to seriousness, disciplined prayer, constant love, hospitality without complaint, and service grounded in the strength God supplies (1 Pet. 4:7–11). He warns them not to be surprised by “the fiery ordeal” taking place among them, but to entrust themselves to “a faithful Creator, while continuing to do good” (1 Pet. 4:12, 19).

He writes to people learning how to live under conditions they did not choose. But even there, his deepest concern is not only what happens to them. It is what happens within them. Will the world deform them into its own image? Will fear become inward law? Will suffering make them cruel? Will pressure make them false? Peter’s warning is severe because the stakes are severe. The real battle is not only whether the faithful will suffer. It is whether they will remain themselves before God while they do.

Peter does not write as a detached moralist. He writes as someone who has already been undone by fear and then remade through mercy. This is the same Peter who said, “Not me, Lord” (Luke 22:33), the one who could not imagine himself failing, the one who, within hours, would deny Jesus three times (Luke 22:54–62). He knows what fear does when it takes the center. He knows how quickly courage collapses when the body feels threatened, when the cost becomes real, when the distance between conviction and survival closes. His warning is not theoretical. It is autobiographical. He has already lived the moment where fear became inward law, where pressure made him false, where love was overridden by self preservation.

And yet he also knows redemption from the inside. The same Peter who denied… is the one who was restored, three times asked, “Do you love me?” and three times entrusted again with care (John 21:15–17). That matters because it means Peter is not writing to people from a place of untouched strength. He is writing as someone who has faced what fear can do to a person and has seen what Christ can do in return. He knows that fear can deform the soul, but he also knows it does not have the final word. So when he urges the church to remain steady, to continue in love, to endure without becoming cruel or false, he is not asking them to do what he has not done. He is asking them to live from the place he himself had to learn the hard way: that the real battle is not only what happens to you, but whether you will remain yourself before God when it does.

That is why Christ’s conquest must be understood rightly. “I have conquered the world” (John 16:33) does not mean the world has become safe. It does not mean violence has vanished or that headlines will cease to wound or that empire has finally become kind. It means something deeper. It means the world does not get to define what is ultimate. Not fear. Not power. Not instability. Not even suffering.

Christ conquers not by domination, but by refusing to be defined by what seeks to undo him. He remains faithful within what wounds. He does not become what harms him. That is victory of a very different order.

And that brings the question back to me, and perhaps to anyone willing to ask it honestly. Not simply, where is God? But what is taking the center in me right now? Fear? Control? Despair? The demand for certainty? Or Christ? That is the real question. The shift is not from fear to no fear. The shift is from fear at the center to Christ at the center.

That kind of courage is rarely loud. It is not triumphal. It does not always feel resolved. More often it is quiet.

It is the parent who walks a frightened child into the room while both of them are afraid. It is the person who opens the morning news and still whispers, Lord, have mercy. It is the soul that keeps turning toward God even when steadiness feels thin. It is not the absence of trembling. It is the refusal to let trembling decide who you become.

So when Jesus says, “Take courage” (John 16:33), he is not asking us to become fearless. He is inviting us to become anchored. And he speaks that as one who has already entered fear himself. This is the same Jesus in the garden who says, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me” (Matt. 26:39). He does not deny the cost. He does not pretend the suffering is easy. He names the desire to avoid it. He lets the human instinct for preservation speak. Which means Jesus does not stand above fear as though untouched by it. He stands within it.

But he does not remain there.

He continues: “Yet not my will but yours be done” (Matt. 26:39). That is courage. Not the absence of fear, but the refusal to let fear determine obedience. The anchoring of the will in something deeper than the instinct to escape. Jesus shows us that courage is not emotional control, not the elimination of dread, not the silencing of the body. It is the steady offering of the self to God even when the cost is known, even when the fear is present, even when everything in us would rather turn away.

He is inviting us to live from a center not determined by what we see. He is inviting us to trust that the presence of fear is not the absence of God. The world is unstable. The trauma is real. The suffering is real. But even here, we are not abandoned, and we are not without a center.

We might even say that Jesus’ whole life unfolds within this tension. His incarnation begins with “Do not be afraid” (Luke 1:30; 2:10), and from that moment forward he teaches from within that reality. He does not deny fear. He confronts it, names it, and reorients it. When the disciples panic on the water, he asks, “Why are you afraid?” (Matt. 14:31). When grief overwhelms, he does not stand at a distance Jesus wept (John 11:35) and yet he also speaks into that grief, “Do not weep” (Luke 7:13), “the child is not dead but sleeping” (Mark 5:39). He holds both truths at once. He enters the human experience fully, but he refuses to let fear or death define its meaning.

And he does this not only at the level of the individual, but at the level of systems. Jesus consistently confronts the structures that generate fear and maintain control. He turns questions back on those who wield power. He refuses their categories. He exposes their illusions. Again and again, he reorients the scene, showing where authority actually rests. So that when he stands before power at its most violent, he can say, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11). That is not defiance for its own sake. That is clarity. It is the steady recognition that even under threat, even under judgment, even under the machinery of death itself, fear does not get to define what is ultimate.

On the night before he died, Jesus gathered his friends. He washed their feet (John 13:4–5). He shared a meal (Luke 22:14–20). He asked them to remain with him, “Stay here and keep watch with me” (Matt. 26:38). When fear came, he did not turn away from relationship. He drew closer to it. And after everything fell apart, after they scattered, they found their way back to one another and gathered again in the upper room (John 20:19). Fear revealed the necessity of community.

But that is not the whole pattern.

Again and again, the Gospels tell us that Jesus withdrew (Luke 5:16). He stepped away from the crowds, from the demands, even from the people he loved, and he went to pray. He sought the quiet place. He returned to the Father. This was not avoidance. It was fortitude. It was the refusal to let the noise of the world determine the center of his life. “Seek first the kingdom of God” (Matt. 6:33) is not an abstract command. It is a lived rhythm.

We see it most starkly in the wilderness. Jesus is alone. Hungry. Pressed. Tempted. There is no crowd. No disciples. No external reinforcement. And it is there that he remains steady, not by force of will alone, but by the Word of God alive within him. “It is written…” (Matt. 4:4, 7, 10). He does not grasp for control. He does not negotiate with temptation. He stands within the truth that already holds him. He is not simply quoting the Word. He is, in his very being, the Word (John 1:1, 14).

So the pattern holds together.

When fear comes, we turn toward one another.
We gather.
We remain.
We refuse isolation as abandonment.

And when fear comes, we also withdraw.
We pray.
We return to the Father.
We refuse to let the world set the terms of our interior life.

Community and solitude.
Presence and prayer.
Shared strength and inward grounding.

This is courage.

Not independence.
Not self-sufficiency.
But a life rooted deeply enough in God
that it can both stand alone
and remain together.

So when Jesus says, “Take courage” (John 16:33), he is not calling us into one posture alone.

He is calling us into a way of being.

A way that gathers when it is afraid.
A way that withdraws when it must be re-centered.
A way that remains steady, not because fear is gone,
but because the center has already been claimed.

Do not fear what they fear (1 Pet. 3:14).

Not because fear is not real.
But because it is not your authority.

Sanctify Christ in your heart. (1 Peter 3:15)

When you are afraid.

Return to Christ.
Return to your center.
Return to one another.
Return to prayer.

He is the way, the truth, and the life. (John 14:6)

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

(Press play to listen to “Abide in me,” by Chris August)

Between suffering and witness, between what is seen and what must be borne within, the Scriptures hold a unified call: to sanctify Christ as Lord in the heart, to keep a clear conscience amid pressure, and to be guided into truth by the Spirit who remains. To read the full passages cited for this essay, click on the links that follow: (1 Pet. 3:13–4:6; John 16:1–15).

Do not fear what they fear… but in your hearts sanctify Jesus Christ as Lord.

A human being is not simple. A human being is not a finished whole, not a settled interior harmony, not a life free of contradiction. A human being is tension, relation, paradox, a synthesis stretched between the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and necessity (Kierkegaard, 1843/1983). These are not abstractions reserved for philosophy. They are the felt conditions of being alive. We are bound by time and circumstance, and yet we reach beyond them. We are shaped by what has been given, and yet we are called to become. We are wounded by history, governed by bodies, constrained by necessity, and yet still addressed by freedom, meaning, and desire for what is more than survival. Possessing these dimensions does not yet make a self. The deeper question is what holds them together. The relation does not govern itself. Whatever takes the center begins to order the whole.

Peter writes into that exact human condition, and he writes without illusion. “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord” (1 Pet. 3:14–15, NRSV). Fear, in his account, is not simply a passing feeling. Fear is a force of formation. It teaches the body what to protect, the mind what to justify, and the soul what to surrender. It enters the life not only as alarm but as instruction. Under pressure, fear begins reorganizing the inner world. It narrows the field of vision. It makes survival appear as the highest good. It tempts the self to become smaller than it is, more reactive, more guarded, more willing to betray truth for the sake of safety. The person governed by fear does not merely feel afraid. That person gradually becomes shaped by what fear requires.

Yesterday I said that not everything biblical is faithful, and I leaned into the tenderness of Jesus calling us friends. This reflection extends that claim. Scripture itself bears witness to the difference between what is merely invoked in God’s name and what is actually conformed to the life of Christ. Not every religious act is faithful. Not every appeal to God reveals God. And that is precisely why the inward sanctification of Christ becomes so decisive. Friendship with Christ is not sentimentality. It is a way of being formed closely enough by him that we learn to discern the difference between sacred language and sacred truth.

Peter refuses to leave the soul under fear’s dominion. He does not say that fear will never come. He does not pretend that suffering can be avoided by piety. He does not offer safety as the reward of faithfulness. He names another possibility: not the absence of fear, but its displacement from the center. To sanctify Christ as Lord in the heart is to establish an inward authority that fear cannot overthrow (1 Pet. 3:15). That does not mean the sanctified heart is untouched by anxiety, grief, dread, or trembling. It means fear is no longer sovereign. It may rise, press in, even wound, but it does not become lord. It does not take the throne of conscience. It does not dictate the final shape of obedience. Something deeper has claimed the center.

The heart, in this register, is not sentiment. It is the governing interior place where allegiance is decided, where conscience is formed, where the self is either gathered into coherence or scattered by competing demands. To sanctify Christ there is to refuse the rule of panic, the seduction of social approval, the violence of coercion, and the inward drift toward self protection at any cost. Peter’s language is exact because the danger is exact. When pressure comes, the soul does not remain neutral. It becomes ordered by whatever it trusts most. If the center is unstable, the synthesis collapses. The infinite detaches into fantasy. The finite suffocates into mere survival. Freedom dissolves into drift. Necessity hardens into despair. When Christ is sanctified inwardly, the tension is held rather than denied. The eternal is no longer distant. It takes its place within the temporal without erasing it.

That is why George Fox’s testimony remains so arresting: “Christ has come to teach his people himself.” The force of that sentence is not merely ecclesial or devotional. It is ontological and existential. It means the center is not empty. It means the soul is not left to hold itself together alone. It means truth is not only external instruction, mediated through institution, custom, or inherited formulations, but living presence, inwardly active, directly formative, capable of addressing the conscience from within. Fox does not eliminate the need for community, tradition, or discernment. He refuses, instead, the idea that God must remain at a distance from the actual interior life of the believer. If Christ teaches his people himself, then the self is not suspended over an abyss of uncertainty with only its own powers to sustain it. The relation is upheld from beyond itself and within itself at once.

And when that inward light feels obscured, when the soul does not experience guidance as clarity, when the tension strains toward darkness rather than peace, James Nayler speaks with a kind of severe tenderness: “Art thou in darkness? Mind it not, for if thou do it will fill thee more; but stand still, and act not, and wait in patience till light arise out of darkness to lead thee.” The wisdom here is not quietism but spiritual discipline. It resists the compulsion to force certainty, to seize control, to baptize panic as decisiveness. It knows that a soul in darkness often deepens its own darkness by frantic motion. Nayler does not say the darkness is unreal. He says do not enthrone it. Do not let it occupy all attention. Do not let urgency masquerade as revelation. Wait in patience until light arises to lead. Such waiting is not emptiness. It is trust that the One who orders the soul does not cease to be present when the soul cannot yet see.

That interior posture stands close to the Gospel appointed here. “It is to your advantage that I go away,” Jesus tells the disciples, “for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come” (John 16:7, NRSV). The line sounds almost unbearable because grief hears only loss. Yet Jesus is naming transformation, not diminishment. What was once beside them will become within them. What was once encountered in visible, localized form will become inwardly sustaining, no longer confined to proximity or place. The departure of Christ is not divine retreat. It is a change in mode. The Advocate comes not as replacement, but as the living continuation of Christ’s presence in a form the world cannot confiscate.

That movement matters because an externalized faith remains fragile in ways an inwardly inhabited faith does not. What is only beside us can be taken from sight. What is only occasional can be missed. What depends entirely on visible reassurance falters when night falls. What is given inwardly can accompany. What is internalized can remain. The Spirit of truth guides not from a distance, but from within the life of the believer, “for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears” (John 16:13, NRSV). Guidance is no longer limited to direct physical presence. Truth is not merely delivered from outside as information. It is declared, unfolded, borne, and lived in time.

Jesus adds the line that reveals the tenderness of this whole structure: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12, NRSV). Revelation, then, is not only about truth. It is about mercy. It is about capacity. It is about the difference between what is real and what can actually be received without breaking the person who receives it. Not all truth can be carried at once. Not all disclosure heals by immediacy. Some realities must unfold because the soul is still being made able to bear them. The Spirit’s guidance honors creaturely limits. There is no violence in that guidance, no crushing imposition of total knowledge, no demand that sorrowed hearts instantly become spacious enough to contain what they cannot yet hold. Truth comes in time. It arrives with moral weight, spiritual depth, and existential consequence, but it is still given according to what can be borne.

Within that unfolding, doubt need not be treated as failure. It need not signify betrayal, abandonment, or the collapse of faith. It can become one of the places where discernment deepens, where the soul remains open instead of closing around false certainty. Tillich is useful here not because he makes doubt romantic, but because he refuses to define faith as possession of total assurance. Faith is not mastery. Faith is not the elimination of all inward unsettlement. Faith is participation in a living relation that remains larger than the one who trusts. In that sense, doubt can belong to faith’s interior life when it is endured honestly, without cynicism, without self deception, and without surrender to despair (Tillich, 1957). The one who doubts and waits may be closer to truth than the one who grasps certainty too quickly. The Spirit’s work does not bypass ambiguity simply because ambiguity is uncomfortable.

John’s Gospel creates space for exactly that kind of faithful incompletion. The disciples do not understand what Jesus is saying. “Sorrow has filled your hearts” (John 16:6, NRSV). They are limited, confused, grieving, not yet able to receive the full meaning of what is happening. They are not rejected for this. They are accompanied within it. What they cannot yet carry will still be given, but not all at once, and not apart from the Spirit who guides them. Doubt, then, can become a space of humility, a place where one learns not to enthrone either panic or premature clarity. It can become one of the disciplines of not pretending to possess what has not yet been fully given.

And yet faith cannot remain only inward without becoming distorted in a different direction. Once conviction is severed from love, religion begins to decay. Once truth is detached from charity, conscience can remain technically clear while the soul becomes hard. Peter guards against this with one of the most important qualifications in the passage: “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence” (1 Pet. 3:15–16, NRSV). The defense of hope is not abandoned. Peter does not tell the believer to become vague, apologetic, or spiritually mute. But neither may truth be defended in a way that betrays its own content. Gentleness and reverence are not stylistic niceties. They are signs that truth and love remain joined.

Tillich’s warning about the deterioration of religion when faith and love are separated belongs here with force. Faith without love does not become stronger. It becomes dangerous. It becomes capable of preserving conviction while abandoning communion. It begins to resemble certainty more than trust, control more than surrender, aggression more than witness (Tillich, 1957). That distortion is one of the central dangers in both Peter and John. A conscience may imagine itself clean while becoming cruel. A defense of truth may sound forceful while being inwardly disordered. Peter refuses that split. The life of faith must remain animate with love, or else its truthfulness is already compromised.

The world imagined in these passages is not neutral ground on which harmless disagreements unfold. It is a world in which violence can wear sacred clothing. Jesus says, “An hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God” (John 16:2, NRSV). Few lines are more devastating in their clarity. Violence is not always recognized as violence by those who commit it. It is often justified, sanctified, carried out under the sign of devotion, righteousness, necessity, or divine mandate. The most dangerous falsehood is not always the one that rejects God openly. It is often the one that invokes God while betraying God’s character.

History has offered more than enough evidence. Political and religious powers have cited God as warrant for conquest, domination, crusade, exclusion, empire, and war. The language of holiness has been made to serve the machinery of coercion. Appeals to divine will have silenced dissent, legitimized bloodshed, and baptized systems of harm. What is named as sacred becomes the instrument of violence. The invocation of God does not automatically restrain power. It can intensify it when devotion becomes detached from love, when certainty replaces relationship, when piety is harnessed to control.

Jesus locates the distortion at its root: “They will do this because they have not known the Father or me” (John 16:3, NRSV). The problem is not simply moral inconsistency. It is theological misrecognition. God is spoken of, invoked, defended, and weaponized without being known. The name remains while the reality is lost. Certainty replaces communion. Power replaces truth. Devotion is severed from love. Once that severance occurs, violence can feel righteous to the one inflicting it. The greater danger is not only that harm is done in God’s name, but that it begins to feel justified, necessary, even holy.

A life inwardly ordered around Christ resists that distortion not by withdrawing from the world, but by refusing its false sanctifications. When Christ is truly sanctified as Lord in the heart, coercion cannot so easily masquerade as faithfulness. Domination cannot be confused with righteousness. Force cannot be mistaken for worship. Every claim to God must be measured not by its confidence, intensity, or political usefulness, but by its conformity to the life, spirit, and love of Christ. The question is no longer simply what is being said in God’s name. The question is whether the one whose name is spoken is actually being reflected. A life shaped by the inward lordship of Christ will not defend God by betraying God’s character.

Peter knows this world well. He writes of those who “are surprised that you no longer join them in the same excesses of dissipation, and so they blaspheme” (1 Pet. 4:4, NRSV). Social consensus does not automatically reveal truth. The universal can become corrupt. Public approval can form a moral fog in which disorder appears normal and holiness appears threatening. Under such conditions, the single person standing before God cannot finally let the crowd determine what is faithful. That does not make faith private in the shallow modern sense. It makes faith accountable at its deepest point to God rather than to consensus. The inward relation to God becomes decisive precisely when the surrounding order has grown spiritually confused (Kierkegaard, 1843/1983).

Such a life cannot be sustained by what costs nothing. Grace that demands nothing forms nothing. Grace that asks for no obedience, no relinquishment, no cross, leaves the conscience unprepared when suffering arrives. Bonhoeffer’s warning remains exact here. Cheap grace cannot sustain a person under pressure because it has never required that person to become inwardly ordered. A clear conscience under accusation, gentleness under slander, suffering for doing good rather than evil, none of this is produced by vague reassurance (1 Pet. 3:16–17). It is formed through costly obedience, through grace that does not remove the cross from discipleship, but makes the disciple capable of bearing it (Bonhoeffer, 1937/1995).

What emerges, then, is not a cluster of disconnected religious themes, but a single movement of formation. The self does not hold itself together. It requires a center beyond itself (Kierkegaard, 1843/1983). That center is not fear, not the crowd, not certainty, not public approval, not coercive power. It is Christ sanctified inwardly as Lord (1 Pet. 3:15). What sustains that inward center is not human effort alone, but the Spirit’s ongoing guidance into what can be borne, known, and lived (John 16:7–15). What keeps that guidance from hardening into violence is love, without which religion deteriorates (Tillich, 1957). What keeps grace from becoming decorative is cost, without which discipleship does not become real (Bonhoeffer, 1937/1995). What keeps the soul from collapsing when clarity has not yet come is the patience to wait in darkness without enthroning darkness itself.

The tension does not disappear. The human being remains finite and yet drawn toward the infinite, temporal and yet summoned by the eternal. But the synthesis is no longer left to itself. It is held. Not by certainty alone. Not by feeling alone. Not by public consensus alone. It is held by Christ inwardly sanctified, by the Spirit inwardly guiding, by faith honest enough to endure doubt, by love that keeps truth from turning cruel, and by grace costly enough to make witness possible.

That is why the life Peter describes is not passive endurance. It is disciplined inner freedom. It is the refusal to become what one suffers. It is the refusal to let fear become lord, violence become worship, certainty become cruelty, or religion become a mask for domination. It is the self becoming itself before God.

And that is why this life is not weakness.

It is witness.

Go into the world not fearing what they fear,
but with Christ sanctified as Lord within your heart (1 Pet. 3:14–15).
When fear rises, let it not take the center.
When truth is costly, let your conscience remain clear before God.

Go with the patience to bear what is not yet revealed,
trusting the Spirit who guides you into all truth in time (John 16:12–13).
Do not rush to certainty where God is still forming you.
Do not abandon hope where light has not yet fully come.

Go with a faith that does not sever truth from love,
nor conviction from gentleness.
Let your life speak with reverence, even when misunderstood,
and let no distortion of God’s name turn your heart toward hardness.

And in all things, remain inwardly free,
held in the presence that cannot be taken,
guided by the truth that cannot be silenced,
and sustained by the love that does not fail.

References

Bonhoeffer, D. (1995). The cost of discipleship (R. H. Fuller, Trans.). Touchstone. (Original work published 1937)

Kierkegaard, S. (1983). Fear and trembling/Repetition (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1843)

Tillich, P. (1957). Dynamics of faith. Harper & Row.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.

(Click on the Scipture Links to Read the Passages)

Tonight the Church holds three voices in tension: the psalmist crying out from the waters (Psalm 18:1–20), Jesus naming his disciples as friends and commanding love (John 15:12–27), and Peter speaking to a vulnerable people learning how to live under pressure without losing their souls (1 Peter 2:11–25).

We are not given these texts to flatten them, but to wrestle with them, to listen for the voice of God within them.

A long time ago, when I was struggling with the so-called clobber verses related to human sexuality and trying to remain orthodox in my relationship to the canon of Scripture, I sought out an Episcopal priest I believed I could trust. I needed someone who would be faithful in interpretation, but who would also speak what he believed was true, regardless of how it might make me feel. Not in a fire and brimstone way, but in the way a father loves you enough to tell you the truth.

At that time, I was struggling deeply with identity. I was struggling with verses that felt like swords in my heart. I was struggling with the question of my salvation itself. I lived with the tension between being fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14) and working out my salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). I wanted an answer honest enough to bear the weight of my fear.

And this priest, very wisely, responded to my existential questions with a sentence I have never forgotten: “Everything necessary for your salvation is found in Scripture.”

I remember thinking, Well, great. I’m doomed.

But then he added, “Not everything in Scripture is necessary for your salvation.”

How very Episcopalian of him. The via media at its best.

So when I say that not everything biblical is faithful, I am not being coy with the sacred text, and I am certainly not saying the Bible does not matter. I am not interested in a shallow relativism that empties Scripture of authority, nor in a brittle certainty that mistakes literalism for faithfulness. My inclusive orthodoxy refuses to relegate Scripture to irrelevance. But my faith also demands seriousness, maturity, and discernment. It asks more of me than proof-texting. It asks me to wrestle, to pray, to listen, and above all to read through the light of Christ.

Not everything biblical is faithful is not a rejection of Scripture. It is a confession about how Scripture must be read. The Bible contains law and liberation, memory and trauma, poetry and protest, survival and hope. It also contains texts that have been used to bless domination, excuse cruelty, and keep people in their place. The question, then, is not only whether something is biblical. The deeper question is whether it is Christlike. Many things can be defended by quoting a verse. Only one life reveals the full heart of God. Only one is Christlike.

That is where I need to begin tonight, because the Letter of Peter does not let us remain shallow. It presses directly into the tension. Peter addresses people living under the empire, people without social power, people under suspicion, people whose faith has made them strange in the eyes of the world around them. When he calls them aliens and exiles, he is not reaching for a pretty metaphor. He is describing their condition (1 Peter 2:11). They live in a world not arranged for their flourishing. They live under pressure. They live under domination. They live where a wrong move can cost them dearly.

So when Peter says to accept human authority, to honor the emperor, and then addresses enslaved persons directly, we cannot read those words from the comfort of abstraction (1 Peter 2:13–18). We have to hear them from inside the violence of the Roman world. And we must also allow the Gospel itself to question us as we read, because as Óscar Romero preached on this very day, April 16, 1978, “A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a Gospel that does not unsettle, a word of God that does not get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that does not touch the real sin of society in which it is being proclaimed what gospel is that?” If our reading of Peter leaves systems of domination untouched, if it asks nothing of power and only demands endurance from the vulnerable, then we have not yet heard the Gospel clearly. It is not a letter written from a place of safety. It is written from within a system in which refusal could bring punishment, public humiliation, imprisonment, or death.

Peter is offering a strategy for survival under domination. He is not endorsing the system. He is not declaring the empire just. He is not saying slavery is good. He is speaking to people who do not have the power to dismantle the structures over them in that moment, and he is trying to tell them how to live without losing their souls.

That distinction matters because this text has been used terribly. Slaveholders quoted it. Empires leaned on it. Churches weaponized it against the vulnerable. Submit became a holy word in the mouths of abusive people. Endure became a burden laid on those already crushed. That is not a small interpretive mistake. That is moral failure. And it is exactly why we must say again that not everything biblical is faithful. If a reading of Scripture produces less dignity, less truth, less freedom, less likeness to Jesus, then something has gone wrong.

This is why the Gospel appointed for tonight punctures this domination with one powerful word, “Friend.” The word Jesus uses is phílos (John 15:15), and it is not casual. It is relational, mutual, knowing. In a world structured by hierarchy, master and servant, ruler and subject, Jesus deliberately shifts the axis. “I do not call you servants any longer… I have called you friends” (John 15:15). A servant obeys without insight; a friend is brought close, entrusted, made to know the heart of what is unfolding. This is not the removal of authority, but the transformation of the relationship. It is the collapse of distance. It is the refusal to let power be the defining category between God and humanity. Jesus does not merely command; he discloses. He does not merely send; he shares. And in doing so, he restores dignity at the level of identity itself.

And once that word is spoken, it becomes the measure by which everything else must be read. If Jesus names his disciples phíloi, then no system, religious or political, gets to reduce them back to something less. Not a servant as identity. Not object. Not expendable. Friend. Which means that when we return to texts like Peter, we cannot read them in a way that erases what Christ has already established. Whatever Peter is doing, and he is doing something real within the constraints of empire, it cannot overturn the truth that precedes it. You are not defined by domination. You are not named by the system you are surviving. You are named by Christ. And the name he gives you is not servant, but friend.

I think that is one of the reasons I have always loved the Quaker practice of calling one another Friend. They are not being quaint. They are making a theological claim. They are taking Jesus seriously. To call another person a friend is to say you are not reducible to your status, not defined by domination, not here to be controlled. It is to say we meet one another under the gaze of God with dignity, listening, and mutual regard. That word carries more Gospel in it than many sermons. Friend. It reminds us that before the church became preoccupied with control, it was first called into communion.

So when Jesus says, I have called you friends, he is not simply offering comfort. He is establishing identity before suffering has its say. Before rejection. Before hatred. Before persecution. Before Peter ever tells the church how to endure. Jesus says, " You are my friends. And even deeper than that, he says, you did not choose me, but I chose you (John 15:16). That is where the soul steadies. Not in public approval. Not in institutional belonging. Not in safety. In chosenness. In being known. In being loved first.

Then Jesus says the hard thing. Love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:12–13).

This is where friendship stops sounding soft and becomes costly. The friendship of Jesus is not casual affection. It is a shared life shaped by self-giving love. It is truth without domination. It is fidelity without violence. It is a way of being in the world that refuses to make power the center. That is why the passage turns so quickly from friendship to hatred.

If the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you (John 15:18). Love like this unsettles systems built on fear. Truth like this exposes structures built on lies. A life shaped by Christ will not always be welcomed by the world that crucified him.

Now Peter comes back into focus. If Jesus has already said, You are my friends, then Peter cannot be telling the church that submission is its identity. It cannot mean to become less human. It cannot mean accept abuse because abuse is holy. It cannot mean, Stay silent because power is always right. No. Peter is speaking to people who already belong to Jesus, people who have already been named as friends, and he is asking how such people live in a world that does not recognize their dignity. How do you remain inwardly free while outwardly constrained? How do you endure without becoming what harmed you? How do you survive an empire without letting an empire colonize your soul?

Those are not ancient questions alone. They are the questions of every age in which power overreaches, truth is manipulated, cruelty is normalized, and human beings are trained to confuse domination with order. Followers of Christ ought to recognize the signs. We ought to recognize what happens when fear becomes political currency, when neighbors are taught to mistrust one another, when the vulnerable are blamed for their own suffering, when force is praised as strength, and when efficiency matters more than mercy.

We ought to recognize how quickly the soul begins to absorb the habits of the world around it: numbness, contempt, despair, defensiveness, and the slow temptation to become as hard as the systems we oppose.

And that is precisely where the call of Christ becomes urgent. As Thomas Merton reminds us, “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.” It asks more of us than outrage. It asks for fidelity to truth, purity of conscience, and the kind of inward steadiness that refuses both violence and illusion.

To follow Christ in such a world is not to become passive, but to become unyieldingly truthful without surrendering the soul to the very hardness we are called to resist.

The Christian task is not only to denounce what is wrong in the world, but to refuse its formation within ourselves.

We are called to see clearly, to tell the truth, to protect the vulnerable, to resist what degrades human dignity, and yet to do so without surrendering our hearts to hatred.

Followers of Christ ought to recognize that the deepest victory of empire is not merely outward control, but inward imitation. The danger is not only that unjust powers rule the world, but that their logic begins to rule us. So the work of discipleship is deeper than reaction. It is the long obedience of becoming uncolonized within, so that even in a violent age we remain truthful without cruelty, courageous without domination, and loving without illusion.

That, I think, is the heart of it. Peter is not glorifying suffering. He is not baptizing oppression. He is trying to teach the church how to remain morally unbroken in a world that wounds. Conduct yourselves honorably, he says, so that even when they malign you, your life will tell the truth (1 Peter 2:12). Live as free people, he says, but do not use freedom as a pretext for evil (1 Peter 2:16). In other words, do not let oppression deform you into its mirror image. Do not let domination teach you domination. Do not let violence teach you violence. Do not let the hatred around you become the logic within you.

That is why Peter turns to Christ. When he was abused, he did not return abuse. When he suffered, he did not threaten. He entrusted himself to the one who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23). This is not passivity. This is not cowardice. This is spiritual clarity of the highest order. Jesus does not call evil good. He does not deny the wound. He does not romanticize pain. He refuses to let violence dictate the terms of his own soul. He remains himself. He remains rooted in truth. He remains rooted in love. He does not become what harms him. That is Christlike.

And that is the line that matters tonight. Not everything biblical is faithful. But only one is Christlike. Not every sentence in Scripture carries the same moral center. Not every text reveals God in the same way. Some texts preserve struggle. Some preserve survival. Some preserve the limits of human understanding under pressure.

But Christ reveals the fullness. Christ is the measure. Christ is the lens. Christ is the face we are allowed to trust. So when we come to texts that have been used to justify domination, we do not flatten them into eternal commands. We read them through Jesus. We ask whether this interpretation looks like the one who called his disciples friends, touched the outcast, confronted the proud, renounced coercion, and loved to the end.

And then, after all of that, after empire and slavery, after friendship and persecution, after Peter and John have both had their say, the church gives us Psalm 18 tonight. And that feels exactly right to me, because there comes a point when argument is no longer enough. There comes a point when only prayer can carry what truth has uncovered.

Psalm 18 does not begin in triumph. It begins in love, yes, but love spoken by someone who has known terror. I love you, O Lord my strength, my stronghold, my crag, and my haven (Psalm 18:1–2). Those are not ornamental titles. Those are names uttered by someone in need of shelter. The breakers of death rolled over me. The torrents of oblivion made me afraid. The cords of hell entangled me. The snares of death were set for me (Psalm 18:4–5). That is not pious exaggeration. That is what it feels like when the waters are too high, when the forces around you are too great, when the day of disaster finds you, and you do not know how you will stand.

And there it is again, the shared truth beneath all three readings. John tells us that love will cost something. Peter tells us that the church must learn to endure without surrendering its soul. The psalm tells the truth about what that endurance feels like from the inside. They confronted me in the day of my disaster, the psalmist says, for they were too mighty for me (Psalm 18:18). That line matters because it is honest. It does not pretend that the danger was manageable. It does not glorify resilience. It simply says the truth. They were too mighty for me.

But the Lord was my support (Psalm 18:18).

That is the turn. Not self-rescue. Not denial. Not spiritual performance. I called upon the Lord in my distress (Psalm 18:6). In my distress. Not afterward, when everything made sense. Not once had the waters receded. In the distress.

And the God of the psalm is not remote. He hears. He moves. He comes down. He reaches. He draws. He rescues. He reached down from on high and grasped me. He drew me out of great waters (Psalm 18:16). That is what the Christlike life finally trusts. Not that empire will save. Not that domination will relent. Not that suffering is somehow good. But that God does not leave us in the flood.

And then the line that holds everything together. He brought me out into an open place. He rescued me because he delighted in me (Psalm 18:19–20).

Because he delighted in me.

Not because I argued perfectly. Not because I submitted correctly. Not because I managed suffering with enough grace to deserve deliverance. Because he delighted in me.

That is where the whole thing comes to rest. Jesus calls us friends. Peter tells the church how not to lose its soul in a world of domination. The psalm reveals the God who does not abandon the beloved in the waters. The end is not subjugation. The end is open space. The end is rescue. The end is delight.

So this is the word I would leave us with tonight. You may live in systems that do not name you rightly. You may be treated as less than what you are. Scripture itself may contain passages that have been used to wound rather than heal. But the final measure is Christ. And the Christ we follow does not call you property. He does not call you tool. He does not call you disposable. He calls you friend. He meets you in the deep. He teaches you how not to become what harms you. And he does not stop until he has drawn you out into an open place.

That is faithful. That is the Gospel. That is Christlike.

Go into the world as those who have been named friend, not by the powers that surround you, but by Christ who has chosen you.

Do not give your soul to what is hard, even when the world demands it.
Do not mirror what wounds, even when you are wounded.
Hold fast to what is true, what is just, what is merciful, and what is Christlike.

And when the waters rise, as they will, remember this:
You are not abandoned there.
The One who calls you friend reaches into the deep, draws you out, and brings you into an open place.

Go in peace, to love and to serve the Lord.

Harvey Cottrell ( Harvi Kotrél ) is a licensed therapist, trauma specialist, and seminarian writing at the intersection of faith, grief, justice, and the human nervous system. His work explores forgiveness, moral injury, and what it means to stay tender in a violent world. Through The Deepest Yes and The Inner Room, Harvey offers reflections for those carrying more than they show, where theology meets lived experience, and truth is held with compassion.