On the backs of dinosaurs

Two Fridays ago, Kay and I ended our six-mile hike in the Red Rocks Park at the Geologic Overlook, which sits at the pinnacle of the park at about 6,700 feet above sea level. Situated ten miles southwest of Denver, Red Rocks not only offers over 200 musical and other entertainment events per year, but also provides an 868 acre sanctuary a mere thirty minutes from the bustling city. Taking a breather at the Geologic Overlook, while leisurely reading about the area on the park’s placards, we were in for an unexpected surprise: We had been walking across the backs of ancient dinosaurs.

Apparently, we were not the first to be surprised. In 1937 on the east side of the park, when excavators were building the Alameda Parkway, the road Kay and I took to the park, they exposed hundreds of fossilized dinosaur footprints. The fossils included those of the bipedal duck-billed Ornithopod dinosaurs, which ranged from 2 to 54 feet long; Theropods, which were smaller bipedal carnivores, averaging about 35 feet in length; and the flying, feathered raptor dinosaurs, known as Dromaeosauridae, measuring over twenty feet long. (Imagine one of them swooping down on your head!) This trio thrived 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. This was a unique geologic time for our part of Colorado, as an immense Western Interior Seaway was beginning to flood into North America. Red Rocks sat precisely on the western coastline of the sea and provided what many consider a “Dinosaur Freeway” between the watery expanse separating Rockies and the Appalachian Mountains. The Seaway extended 2,000 miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, cutting a broad 3,000 foot deep briny swath through the interiors of what is now Canada and the United States.

Not to be overshadowed, the west side of Red Rocks Park harbors even older fossils extending from the Late Jurassic Period, 150 million years ago. As early as 1876, the fossilized remains of the five-ton, thirty-foot long Stegosaurus were found in the park. The Stegosaurus is unique amongst the dinosaurs with its column of two-foot high back plates and three-foot long tail spikes. Remains of the massive herbivore Apatosaurus, weighing as much as thirty-tons, standing eighteen feet high, and extending seventy feet in length was found in the area one year later in 1877. Also in 1877, scattered fossilized bones of the fierce, meat-eating Allosaurus were found near the park. With his massive head containing eighty saw-like teeth, this twenty-eight foot predator, could run over twenty-one miles per hour and would have been the terror of the shoreline along the Western Interior Seaway.

Alas, Allosaurus’s salad days, or should I say steak tartare days, would unexpectedly come to an end when a nine-mile wide asteroid fell from the heavens and crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, some 1,600 mile south of Red Rocks. The great dinosaurs that survived the supersonic shockwaves that flattened forests for thousands of miles could not hold out amidst the firestorms and the two-year long solar blackout the asteroidal collision caused.

Lest you wonder, many rats, mice, snakes, and lizards survived the asteroidal blast and aftermath and became the evolutionary foundation of the ten-million year Paleocene Epoch. And yes, the common roach, which predates the dinosaurs by seventy-five million years, scuttled right along through the jungles and into our homes today. At 320 million years old, roaches, in one form or another, are the ancient fixtures of the earth’s ever-evolving ecosystem.

And along came humans

Suffice it to say, humans took our time showing up in Colorado. About 66 million years elapsed between the death of the last dinosaur in our state to the arrival of human beings. Archeological evidence shows that around 12,000 BC, nomadic Paleo-Indians, the ancestors of the Arapahos, Apaches, Cheyenne, Shoshone, and Utes lived and hunted around the Rocky Mountain National Park, ninety-two miles north and a bit east of Red Rocks. One historian reflected, “If earth’s history were a 24-hour day, dinosaurs vanished a little before 11:40 PM—and modern humans wouldn’t appear until the last few seconds before midnight.”

The poet psalmist attests that God made humans ‘a little lower than the angels, has crowned them with glory and honor, and given them dominion over the works of God’s hands’ (Psalm 8:5-6). If that is so, God was in no hurry to put His caretakers in place. For that matter, God did not seem overly eager to fashion the earth either. God breathed the cosmos into being 14 billion years ago, but waited 9.5 billion additional years to create our planet home 93 million miles from the sun. In human terms, the cosmos was a sixty year-old man when our planet was birthed, making the cosmos our somewhat elderly parent.

Alan Lightman, a distinguished physicist at MIT and bestselling author of the philosophical novel Einstein’s Dreams, notes that our planet home is infinitesimally small even in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. While we inhabitants consider Earth’s 24,000 mile circumference an immense piece of real estate, we are a speck in our galaxy. Consider that “it would take a light ray traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per hour, 100,000 years to cross from one side of our galaxy to the other.” It would take that same light ray only 0.1337 seconds or 134 milliseconds to completely circle the earth. If those dimensions do not make us feel small, try to fathom that at the very least there are 200 billion additional galaxies in the observable universe of which the Milky Way is on the average to above-average size. Lightman comments, “The mind reels from trying to imagine such expanse. Think of an ant in New York City contemplating a trip to San Francisco. Our houses, our roads and bridges, our cities are a speck in the cosmos, a dust mote, one grain of sand on a vast beach.”

A first edition in the universe

Even given those incalculable cosmological details, the physiology of individual humans is equally immeasurable. The divine encoding of each of us is imprinted on our DNA molecules and not one of the codes is identical amongst the 8 billion humans alive today, nor amongst the 110 billion humans who have walked the earth since the emergence of Colorado’s Paleo-Indians in 12,000 BC. (I should note that identical twins share the same egg and sperm and start with nearly the same DNA; however, the genetic codes differ slightly over a lifetime.) Lightman adds, “Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe—each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.”

To press our one-of-a-kind biology home, Lightman observes that the conception of a new human being happens when a single male sperm unites with a single female egg. That being said, a female will produce some 300,000 eggs during her lifetime. A male, on the other hand, will produce 300 million sperm. Doing the math, Lightman concludes that a hundred thousand million different human renditions could result from each procreation event. Attempting to break that down for us laymen, the professor muses, “If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the (recently demoted) planet Pluto (4 billion miles), one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.”

Now that we’ve won the lottery

In King Lear, without argument one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, the Duke of Gloucester, after losing his status, his title, and his sight wants to end his life. His devoted son Edgar contrives his dad’s fake suicidal fall on flat ground to jolt him out of his malaise and restore his desire to live. When Gloucester awakes from his shock-induced sleep after his feigned fall, Edgar announces, “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again” (Lear, Act 4, Scene 6). Gloucester becomes Shakespeare’s universal cheerleader for all humanity: The mere fact that we are living, breathing, creative sentient beings capable of acts of great love, courage, and generosity is enough to awaken us from our sleep. Far more forces vied against our existence than for it. To get downright mathematical about it, Harvard theorist, physician, and multilingual polymath, Dr. Ali Binazir, estimates that the odds of a specific sperm meeting a specific egg to form you or me equate to about 1 in 400 trillion. A Los Vegas bookie would never take that bet.

Miracles afoot

No star rose in the East at our births, but the fact that we are here at all is a miracle commensurate with the creation of the universe. True, yours and my lifetimes will take up only 0.00000058% of the universe’s 14 billion year history, but this is our time, our debut on the world’s stage. The universe will not see our likeness again, no matter how long it endures. Shakespeare’s words should be written across our bathroom mirrors to grace us every morning that we awake, “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again!” Perhaps if we read the bard’s seven word exclamation at each arising, we will not let another day pass by unnoticed because we absorbed ourselves in things that have no lasting value for us or those people God has shared with us. Jesus’ advice offered at the Sermon on the Mount has never been surpassed:

‘Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow.’ Matthew 6:34, Message

Jesus may just as well have said, “Don’t waste a single day of your miraculous existence.” In the same sermon, he warned us to not be seduced by those things that glitter but cannot make a life. They sparkle for a while, but their shimmer fades almost as soon as we acquire them:

‘Don’t hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or—worse!—stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it’s safe from moth and rust and burglars. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.’ Matthew 6:19-21 Message

Jesus is not saying our concrete needs don’t matter. He tells his listeners on that grassy hillside in Galilee that ‘our Father knows our needs even before we ask’ (Matthew 6:8). But our physical needs, while important — ‘give us this day our daily bread’ (Matthew 6:11) — are not what make a life. No, love, generosity, empathy, understanding, weeping, laughing, hugging, kissing, talking — those are the parts of us that will outlast our lifetime and reach into eternity.

The key to life is to lift and bend

Due to his own wasted years, Paul knew what makes for a real life and wrote about it in Galatians. Having first taught the letter in 1975, fifty-one years ago, and having taught it many times since, I have often wondered if Paul thought it would be his last missive. The crucial substance of all his subsequent letters is forecast in Galatians. Seven or so years later the apostle would significantly expand his message in his Letter to the Romans, but the meat of Paul’s most acclaimed letter can first be found in Galatians.

From that perspective, it is all the more important how Paul ends Galatians. He may have thought it would be his final word on the gospel that Christ miraculously shared with him — the last apostle: ‘Last of all, Jesus appeared to me. I was like someone who wasn’t born at the right time’ (1 Corinthians 15:8).

Rounding the bend on his letter’s conclusion, Paul emphasizes how to live day-to-day in Christ. Like his teacher Jesus, Paul’s instruction is concrete, not ethereal. Jesus Christ became a human being and lived, worked, talked, prayed, and served. Those who follow him must do the same. Perceiving his Lord’s witness leads Paul to write: ‘Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ’ (Galatians 6:2). The sentence must have astonished those first listeners in north-central Turkey. After all, Paul had ranted his disdain for the Law of Moses through much of the letter. Here at the end of the letter, he insists the law of Christ is fundamentally different from the Jewish Law he worked so hard to keep in his younger years. Christ’s law is not imposed from outside of us, but wells up from the inside once we submit to the love and Lordship of Christ. Jesus says as much when he is being pursued by the Pharisees who try to arrest and silence him: ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the Scripture has said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water”’ (John 7:38; taken from Isaiah 58:11).

The living water that springs up in us will direct our love outwards beyond ourselves to lift the burdens of others. Paul uses the Greek word baros for burdens, which means a crushing load, a weight no one person can carry. Solo Christianity is not an option. All of Paul’s letters emphasize that not only do others in the fellowship need us, but also we cannot realize our fullness in Christ without sharing our life together. In Romans, Paul gets more explicit about our need for one another in the church. ‘For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others’ (Romans 12:4-5).

Paul’s warns believers about thinking they are too good, too busy, or too illustrious to bend down and lift up another. The fantasy of self-sufficiency and self-importance will land us in a barren desert of our own making. The Living Bible, my mother’s favorite translation, renders Paul’s words in just the way she would have said it herself: ‘If anyone thinks he is too great to stoop to this, he is fooling himself. He is really a nobody’ (Galatians 6:3).

And since you and I won the conception lottery and beat the 1 in 400 trillion odds to be born into this world, shouldn’t we endeavor to be a somebody instead of a nobody? After all, “Thy life’s a miracle.”

SOURCES

Binazir, Ali, “Are You a Miracle? On the Probability of Your Being Born,” The Huffington Post, June 16, 2011. Article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/probability-being-born_b_877853?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

“Identical Twins Are Not So Identical, Study Suggests,” The Guardian, January 7, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jan/08/identical-twins-are-not-so-identical-study-suggests?CMP=share_btn_url

Lightman, Alan, “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing,” The Atlantic, June 2, 2026. https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/the-ordinary-miracle-of-existing/687351/?gift=oc6pwaK_FALza6X-Xeky_rro2gWmLoh1mbng6EVWpNs&utm_source=copy-

PHOTO CREDITS

Just Born! Photo by Alex Hockett, Dallas, TX

Western Interior Sea, Photo compliments of Wikipedia

The Milky Way, Photo compliments of National Geographic Kids

Edgar Finds his Blinded Father, Photo compliments of Reading Shakespeare with Dennis Abrams

Bending Down to Help Another, Photo by Tom Parsons, Cardiff, UK

Into thin-er air

On Friday, July 24, our first day-off in Denver, we ventured into the mountains. Other than the bracing view of the Rockies to the west, our new home, for all its boasting as the Mile-High City, is every inch a busy American city, with congested traffic, impossible parking, 40,130 hectares of asphalt and concrete, numerous homeless persons, and ever-present thrumming of noise. The fact that we live two blocks off of Federal Boulevard and merely three miles from the intersection of I-25 and I-70, fondly known by locals, as the “Mousetrap,” may account for the latter observation.

To “get away from it all,” and to take our places as novice Coloradans, Kay and I struck off to Golden Gate Canyon State Park, located just above Golden. The fact that we drove to the state park in forty-five minutes is an obvious benefit of living in Denver, a simple feat unmatched in our former home in Texas. Once we turned right off of U.S. Highway 6, the road began to snake its way up to the state park in a series of switchbacks and hairpin turns, letting us know we had accomplished a complete urban escape.

As novices, what we did not count on was the heights to which the twisting road was taking us. The park headquarters sits at 8,250 ft. above sea level, which is a 3,000 foot climb from our house in Denver, which sits at 5,280 feet. However, our former home is San Antonio, where we had lived for fifteen years, sits at merely 662 ft. above sea level. By the end of our hike at Panorama Point, we would reach 9,360 feet, which I realize is inconsequential for natives, but for Kay and me that was an increase of 8,698 feet in less than two weeks’ time. Headaches and fatigue captured us by the end of our hike.

Those minor ailments did not detract from the glories we encountered on our four-mile hike. We chose the park’s Raccoon Trail, which was listed as moderate and mostly shaded. For our first time outing, it proved to be the prudent choice, with just enough inclines and descents to make it interesting, and it was strenuous enough for two seventy-somethings. Once on the trail, we were reminded that hiking is a full-body workout, requiring use of our core muscles, balance of our lower extremities, as well as providing us excellent aerobic training.

Being enveloped in nature is the greatest benefit of hiking, and the Raccoon Trail offered us an easy exit from city life into the wilderness. We crossed mountain streams, wandered through copses of Aspens, caught the aromatic scent of Balsam Poplars, and sighted — for the first time — a male Hairy Woodpecker. With his black burglar mask and snappy herring bone feather outfit, he is the dandy of the Colorado forest. As we climbed the final hill up to Reverend’s Ridge, so named for the circuit riding preachers who traversed Golden Gate Canyon beginning in the 1850s, we felt refreshed by the wilderness and ready to head back down to our newly adopted Denver home.

Hurry up and wait

If our first Friday day-off led us up to a mountainous wilderness, the next Friday foisted us on a different kind of wilderness ascent — the Denver County Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Our second initiation into Colorado culture was to purchase our car tags. We had no idea when we set our from house at 6:50 AM that we were in for an experience more akin to fraternity hazing than an orderly governmental transaction. To be sure, I am not a man who expects the mechanisms of government to function like an Apple computer. Individual needs are not the foremost consideration. I know this because I served in the U.S. Army where our mantra was “hurry up and wait.” Secondly, Kay and I have registered our vehicles in five different states before arriving in Colorado. Suffice it to say that none of them equals the exasperating folderol we had to navigate so that we could pay $600 of road taxes to our newly adopted state. The state of Maryland comes in second, but Colorado is far and away the most maddening of the six.

Kay and I were up to the challenge. The day before, we had successfully obtained our driver’s licenses from the state DMV — not to be confused with the county DMV. We made an appointment online, arrived ten minutes early, were seen at the appropriate time, and completed our tasks during my lunch break. Encouraged by our good experience, we decided to spend the early hours of our day-off acquiring Colorado tags for our two cars. We checked the website and carefully packed all the listed documents into a manilla envelope — identification, proof of address, car titles, Texas registration, and auto insurance. Just to be sure, we brought along proof of employment, birth certificates, passports, and our lease agreement.

We were in for the Mile-High landslide of disappointment. We began our day-long entanglement with the DMV at 7:10 AM, and we finally walked out of the double glass doors at 2:37 PM. For the chronologically challenged that is 7 hours and 27 minutes. The madness of the enterprise revealed itself at once. At 7:10 AM, just ten minutes after the DMV opened, the line of citizens — adults, toddlers, babies, and individuals on walkers, stretched beyond the face of the building and wormed into the parking lot. Not one parking space was available, so I dropped Kay off to secure our place in line while I circled the neighborhood seeking a parking spot amidst the various signs threatening “fines, ticketing, towing, and remittance of our first born child.”

An hour and fifteen minutes later, we finally entered the office. We were greeted by a intake clerk, who immediately told us that we lacked our “Vin Verification” document. We replied that it was not listed on the website. To which she said, “Yes, our website needs some updating.” Nevertheless, we were allowed to claim our number to be served, but we would not be able to register both cars because a visible inspection has to be made of our VIN numbers — even though it is prominently noted on the car titles, Bill of Sales, and the registrations.

We were instructed to wait outside until we were summoned back into the building. Although the day was heating up, and seventy or more people were in process at the DMV facility, there was one — count one — picnic table at which people could sit outside. The rest was brick, concrete, and asphalt, with trash profusely strewn all about the area.

About 9:00 AM we received a text summoning us back into the building. We followed a track of arrows on the floor to the waiting room. We sat for another hour before we were invited to see a service representative. We exited with a set of car tags for one of our cars about 10:20, 3.5 hours after we arrived. We rushed home, changed cars and headed to an Air Care facility to get an admissions test and a VIN Verification for auto #2.

The DMV service representative had warned us not to return to the same facility to register our second car because they were so overrun with customers that they would not be able to help us. Therefore, we trekked across town to another DMV situated in a strip mall, which at least meant there was plenty of parking. At 11:35, we stepped into a long line that snaked through a suffocating, un-air-conditioned hallway. We were finally admitted into the building an hour later. The intake clerk carefully checked our paperwork to find it complete. Again, we received an electronic number and were directed to wait outside, where no seating was provided. Thirty minutes later we were summoned by text, and we took our seats inside. We saw a service representative an hour and fifteen minutes later and finally exited the DMV for the day at 2:37.

A surprise benefit of queuing in the interminable lines winding outside the Denver County DMVs is that you meet some remarkably resilient people. Early in the morning, we talked to Kendra, who moved to Denver from Tampa. She serves as a nurse anesthetist in one of the expansive medical centers in the city. Friday was her one day off. A little later in the morning, we were seated next to Anna, a third-year medical student. She begins her first rounds as an advanced medical student in the hospital next week, and was desperately trying to register her car before she started her 12-hour rotations. In the afternoon, we were in line behind Shanika. She is the mother of three children, ages 8, 6, and 3, and manages a 150 unit storage facility. All three women had pressing work commitments. Shanika, in particular, was pressed for time — both by work and family commitments.

The DMV needs a significant overhaul. Rather than examining their flow of services from the state’s side of the equation, they should consider the trials a Colorado working person must endure to register their automobile. If the DMV takes a page from the late Steve Jobs and looks at their process from the citizen’s point of view, these questions will surely emerge:

• Why is the DMV’s website not kept up-to-date with its exact requirements to register a vehicle?

• Why can’t citizens register for an appointment online as they do to get their driver’s license? In that way, workers can inform their supervisors of a set time they must be absent.

• Why can’t citizens submit the majority of their documentation online before they arrive at a DMV facility and be informed in advance what additional papers they must bring with them to a DMV facility? This would alleviate individuals from standing in a line for over an hour and then be told they do not have the necessary documentation.

• Why does the physical VIN Inspection, which is required by a minority of states in the U.S., cost $25? It takes about two minutes to complete the inspection. Registering an automobile is already a very expensive household expense, and our citizens are strapped for cash.

• Why can’t the DMV facilities be made more attractive and inviting? At least pick up the trash on the sidewalk and provide comfortable seating if people continue to be exiled outside the building.

The word bureaucracy comes to mind when considering the DMV. The word is a unique combination of the French word bureau (desk) with the Greek suffix kratia (rule). Unsurprisingly, bureaucracy means “rule by desk.” We often hear that dealing with a bureaucracy can be “an uphill battle.” The saying is apt in the case of governmental agencies like the DMV because citizens are herded into a long snaking line plodding our way “up” to the desk. By design, it is a vertical relationship.

Americans should remember, however, that the word democracy is derived from two Greek words — demos (the people) plus kratos (power) — “rule by the people.” A democracy rules from below and is focused on beneficial horizontal relationships. The people choose the individuals to govern the republic…and the people can also oust them from office. Bureaucracies like the DMV are necessary, but they do not have the final word in this country. The people do, and “we the people” must be clear about the treatment we deserve and demand it.

Vertical Morality

Fulminating about the DMV brings to mind a particular vertical challenge with which American Christians are confronted today. “Vertical Morality” is a concept being tossed around by significant numbers of fundamentalist and nationalistic Christians of late. I, in fact, agree with the primary principle of this concept: The ultimate authority for what is right and wrong, for how we are to live our lives, and how we are to treat others comes from outside of ourselves. That authority proceeds from God.

Jesus, in fact, demonstrates this. When asked what was the greatest of the commandments, he quotes two portions of the Torah, ‘The most important one is. “Love the Lord our God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:29-30 taken from Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18). When defending compassionate actions on the Sabbath day, Jesus draws from the prophets, ‘God declares I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ (Matthew 7:12 taken from Hosea 6:6). And when Jesus becomes fed up with the hypocrisy demonstrated by the religious celebrities, he draws his rebuttal from the Prophet Isaiah:

‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain, for their teachings are merely human rules.’ Matthew 15:8-9 taken from Isaiah 29:13

Jesus is clear that all moral authority comes from God, yet he dismisses any notion that God governs us from some bureaucratic desk in the sky. God, instead, rules through his son, who has come to earth as one of us. In fact, Jesus proclaims that the arrival of the kingdom of God, that is the the of God on earth, has begun with his appearance. Jesus declares that the rule of God has commenced through him over 100 different times in the Gospels. In Mark, the first of the four Gospels, Jesus’ very first words are, ‘The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news’ (Mark 1:15).

What then is the main feature of the kingdom of God on earth? Jesus demonstrates the main feature of God’s rule: He willingly goes to the cross. Why? To show God’s immeasurable, immutable, unending love for us. Jesus initiates God’s vertical rule by extending God’s love horizontally to all of us. Jesus repeatedly lambasts his critics for their indifference to spreading God’s love, mercy, forgiveness, and generosity to other human beings.

The modern proponents of Vertical Morality dress up their judgments with the same pious locutions Jesus’ critics used two millennia before. To maintain strict vertical obedience to God, they insist that empathy must go. In other words, the effort to understand the feelings of another, to put yourself in others’ shoes, to become vulnerable in the face of pain — has become the favorite target of those advocating a purely Vertical Morality.

Given Jesus’ words and repeated actions to relieve suffering, this adulteration of the gospel seems not only unattractive but patently un-Biblical. How did it arise and appeal to such a large swath of Christians? This anti-empathy movement gathered the most traction in February 2025 when Elon Musk, with his 241 million followers on X (formerly Twitter), joined Joe Rogan on his podcast, which draws 11 million listeners per episode. On the show, Musk announced that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” He elaborated: “There’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself… We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.” In a nutshell, Musk, the richest man in the world, insists that showing compassion to outsiders jeopardizes the long time survival of insiders.

Without empathy, however, the Christian faith becomes sterile philosophy. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his son…’ (John 3:16), undoubtedly is the most quoted verse from the New Testament. In this picture, humanity is the ultimate outsider. God steps into the shoes of human beings in the knowledge that we are unable to save ourselves, but He can and does through Jesus Christ. Without a doubt, the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection are the most cosmic acts of horizontal empathy in the 13.8 billion year history of the universe.

Getting sideways with God

What are we to do then to counter this insidious cheapening of the Good News? We should acknowledge that vertical obedience to God is best demonstrated through horizontal acts of love. Paul professes this aspect of God’s rule more succinctly than anyone before or after him: ‘The whole law can be summed up in a single commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”’ (Galatians 5:14). At the same time, Paul knows from personal experience that just like we are unable to save ourselves from the destructive consequences of sin, we are equally unable to love others sacrificially as Christ demonstrates. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ remedies the first, while the Holy Spirit comes to our aid in the second.

In this latter part of his Letter to the Galatians, Paul resists vilifying his adversaries, the false teachers who have rolled into the region to undercut Paul’s message of ultimate freedom in Christ. Instead, Paul points out the great adversary within us — the flesh. In Greek, the word for the flesh is sarx, a term Paul repeats ninety-one times throughout his letters. The word carries both a physical and figurative meaning. Physically, the word refers to the soft tissue of a living body — the muscle, tendons, ligaments, and skin that cover the human skeleton. The physical connotation of sarx is that human beings are mortal. Our bodies will continue to decay until they inevitably fail and we die.

The second, more figurative meaning of sarx, is human life turned inward. For Paul, sarx represents the ego, the insatiable desire of human beings to satisfy selfish desires, whether they be material, sensual, or for individual power. Worse still is that the person enamored with sarx, the ego, believes he can go it alone, that he has no need for God. Ironically, such persons begin to believe they have risen above human frailties and imagine they are in some way immortal. For those reasons, Paul declares, ‘For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other to prevent you from doing what you want’ (Galatians 5:17). A person cannot have it both ways; one cannot be guided by the Holy Spirit and the flesh simultaneously. Worse, sarx’s great masquerade is that it offers ultimate freedom, when caving to the ego always lands us in human bondage. Eugene Peterson convincingly translates Paul’s description of the slavish life that results in the ego-driven life for modern readers:

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on. Galatians 5:19-21 Message

Accordingly, when one hits bottom by pursuing the insatiable desires of the ego, she will try to rectify the damage by what she knows — human effort, or, as Paul characterizes it, the Law. Human effort, no matter how nobly begun and industriously pursued, inevitably locks us up in a prison of our own making. Just ask any addict, inmate, or someone looking back on the smoldering remains of a marriage and family. Paul is writing from experience. He left a trail of pain in his wake during his ego-fueled years when he devoted himself to the Law and the eradication of those following Jesus. God saved him from himself on the Damascus road. Once he conceded to Christ’s love, instead of being ego-obsessed, he became Spirit-directed. He confesses the difference in this way: But what happens when we live God’s way?

He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely. Galatian 5:22-23 Message

We cannot attain the Holy Spirit on our own. It is a gift from God; it is pure grace, just like our salvation. It comes from above. Yet look at what happens. The Spirit-filled person lives with a sense of compassion, sees others as holy beings, and is loyal in his or her commitments. In other words, God’s Spirit directs our love outward — horizontally and courageously. Without exception, the person who loves God loves others.

Photo Credits

Couple at the Base of a Mountain: Photo by Tom Jur, Poznań, Poland

People in a Long Line Outside a Government Office: Photo compliments of WKARK, Little Rock, AR

Showing Compassion to Another: Photo compliments of Greater Good in Education

Reaching Out to Another: Photo compliments of Relevant Magazine

And on the eleventh day they rested.

At 4:07 AM on Tuesday, June 30, Kay and I set out from Cape Neddick, ME on our twelve-hour journey to Staunton, VA. Our goal was to arrive in Denver on Friday, July 10, so that I could begin my work as Interim Dean of St. John’s Cathedral. Interrupting our journey from Maine to Colorado would be a stop at our condominium in San Antonio, where we would pack up our furniture and household goods to place them in storage. We also had to separate out those things we would need to spend the year in Denver.

We were trying not to think about packing up our home as we set out on our drive in the early AM. On that first day of the journey, we skirted the western precincts of both Boston and New York City, joining the stampede of commuters charging into America’s largest and eleventh largest cities. Kay took over in Connecticut, and drove us down one of the state’s three leafy parkways. Our miles spent on the parkway proved to be a needed respite before joining I-81 outside of Harrisburg, PA. The final four hours of our drive to Southern Virginia were spent dodging the semis that swamp that hectic north-south interstate.

Arriving at our friends’ picturesque horse farm in the Shenandoah Valley, we relaxed through the late afternoon and evening before setting out the next morning at 4:20 to make the eight-hour drive to Birmingham — the shortest leg of our journey. Weaving our way through the Appalachians, passing Roanoke, Blacksburg, Bristol, Knoxville, Oak Ridge, Chattanooga, and Gadsden, we arrived at Kay’s sister’s townhouse a little after noon. Kay and Anita filled the entire afternoon and early evening with quirky card games and lively conversations that sisters share. I was free to take a four-mile walk and read until supper.

Recharged, we began the dreaded fourteen-hour drive home the next morning at 3:50 AM. We chose I-20 over the coastal route on I-10. The choice proved providential because a few miles west of Shreveport, LA, our GPS directed us off the interstate and onto blue highways that diagonally cross East and Central Texas. Taking this new route, we avoided I-35 and the gridlock plaguing Austin for twenty-five miles in each direction. Instead, we made our way south through the lush farmlands and pecan orchards of Linden, Henderson, Nacogdoches, and eventually made a right southwesterly turn through Lufkin, Bryan, College Station, Bastrop, and San Marcos. We arrived in San Antonino at 6:10 PM. Kay and I unpacked the car and walked over to the HEB grocer to buy some simple supper items. No sooner did we finish eating than we fell into bed.

Our bodies were still tuned to Eastern Time, so we were up the next morning at 4 AM and started packing up our house. For the next three days, we loaded up all the pots, pans, appliances, breakables, linens, paintings, and books we had accumulated over our fifty years of marriage. One item at a time disappeared into the light brown boxes until all vestiges of “home” were removed. During the same time, we took six car loads of donations to Goodwill and Boysville and repeatedly returned to Walmart to replenish our packing supplies. We skipped the July 4th commemoration completely. Elbow deep in packing paper and tape, we hit the bed so exhausted that we did not hear a single firework fired from Ft. Sam Houston less than two miles from our bedroom.

On Monday at 8:30, the packers arrived. Surveying the thirteen pillars of boxes extending from floor to ceiling, they were amazed by the amount of work Kay had accomplished in the kitchen and dining room. In less than four hours they completed the packing of our china, glassware, and large paintings.

The next day, Tuesday, July 7 — just one week from the morning we left Maine, the movers loaded our entire household in a truck and delivered it to a south side warehouse. At the same time, Kay and I packed our two cars with clothing, spices, books, and other items we would need during the course of the next year. The cabs of both cars were so crammed that I’m certain we resembled the Clampetts of the Beverly Hillbilly’s. All done at 5 PM, we retreated to a friends’ house, jumped into their pool, and sipped a jumbo gin and tonic.

On Wednesday I had an 8 AM doctor’s appointment and afterwards Kay and I relaxed for the remainder of the day. We could barely muster the energy to speak to one another. Then on Thursday, July 9, we began our two-car caravan to Midland. A pall settled on us during this leg of our trek. Catherine Grace, our 43-year-old daughter, had died on that day just one year before. The anniversary proved to be much harder than we anticipated. With the passing of a year, the loss of our only daughter took on a wrenching finality. The five hour solitary drive offered us both a chance to remember, pray, and cry in our own ways. Fortunately, we were spending the night with two lifelong friends who knew our daughter and had helped us shoulder our pain during the previous twelve months.

We were out the door again at 4 AM to complete our final eleven-hour drive to Denver. The beauty of the Texas Panhandle surprised us both. It was far more verdant than we imagined. The landscape was peppered with large melon and potato farms and immense herds of fat cattle. Driving through Dalhart, TX we were reminded that this four-state region, where Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Colorado meet, took the brunt of the Dust Bowl environmental tragedy during those desperate years from 1930-1939.

Crossing out of Texas, we beat a path through the northeast corner of New Mexico. After a short break in Clayton, NM, we joined I-25 in Raton. The interstate threaded through the foothills of the Rockies. Our drive was exhilarating until we approached Colorado Springs, where the traffic was so choked that we crawled the last seventy miles to Denver. We pulled into the driveway of our new home at 2 PM Mountain Time. From the porch extending from our third floor bedroom, we looked east to see the glittering skyscrapers of downtown Denver, and we looked west to survey the far-reaching range of the Rocky Mountains.

Stuck in the future

Once we unpacked the cars, Kay curled her arm around my waist and said, “Three states more and we would have crossed the entire United States.”

I was proud of the two of us. We had driven 3,094 miles by car, packed up our entire house, prepared to spend the year away from the support and landmarks with which we’d become accustomed, and still managed to stay married. Not a bad week and a half’s work for two septuagenarians.

The downside of driving so far, packing so hurriedly, and immediately starting a new job is that I was stuck in the future. Every day was a preparation for the next. The present was largely lost to me. Praying, thinking, reading deeply, writing anything more than a list, or having meaningful conversation became impossible because I was consumed with what was to come.

I have lost track of the present at other times, even without crossing thirteen states in a handful of days and packing up all our worldly possessions in three. When I do that, I lose touch with myself, and worse, I lose touch with God and with those people God has shared with me. My obsession with the future fills me with a perpetually lengthening list of “What Ifs.” While my conscious self can corral these anxious feelings, the walls break down during the night and my subconscious mind assails me with irrational fears. For literally weeks before we set out on our epic journey from Cape Neddick, my sleep was haunted with worry surrounding the tasks before Kay and me. Adding to my frustration, is the fact that while I was tortured with concerns about what may befall us, I was unable to act in a future that had not yet arrived. Add to that, the future never arrives in quite the way we predicted, which reminds me of Mark Twain’s well-worn quip about the future: “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

While it sounds trite to admit we can only live in the present, the statement is unquestionably true. Looking back, our regrets about the past will eat us up with shame. We can repent and make amends, but we cannot relive those days. In much the same way, we can make responsible preparation to support our prospective dreams, but we cannot live and act in an imagined future. Worse, pulled back by the regrets of our past or pulled forward by the fantasies of our future, we neglect the present, the only foothold we have in this transitory life.

The Sacrament of the Present Moment

Evelyn Underhill, the early 20th century English mystic who was pivotal in the renaissance of contemplative spirituality, wrote and spoke extensively about the importance of Christians rooting themselves in the present. Underhill’s work was so compelling that she became the first woman in English history to lead spiritual retreats for Anglican clergy. She surprised clergy by debunking the idea that Christian spirituality is somehow an escape from the everyday. Instead, Underhill insisted that we encounter God in the routine experiences of daily life — no matter how unexciting or unvarying.

Borrowing language from Jean-Pierre de Caussade, the 18th century French Jesuit priest and spiritual writer, she emphasized the “sacrament of the present moment,” meaning that God’s divine will is revealed in the comings and goings of daily life. In much the same way that the church’s ancient sacraments reveal the ultimate reality of God to us by using earthy substances such as bread, water, wine, and oil, the “sacrament of the present moment” does the same when we fully attend to the here and now — whether in the kitchen or in a cathedral. In her 1946 book, Life As Prayer, Underhill declared:

‘God is always coming to you in the sacrament of the present moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament; however unexpected its outward form may be, receive Him in every sight and sound, joy, pain, opportunity and sacrifice. For a lack of attention, a thousand forms of loveliness elude us everyday.’

We should remember that Jesus repeatedly held up farming, fishing, building, cooking, laboring, and shepherding as examples of the kingdom of God in our midst. Life in Christ is rooted in what is actually happening today in our rudimentary chores, customary interchanges, and surprise meetings. Because Christ’s will is so often expressed to us in our routine occupations, be it housework, homework, writing letters, preparing legal briefs, or other tedious tasks, we must be faithful to the work demanded of us on any given day. Furthermore, because Christ’s presence is discovered in the faces of friends and strangers, we should never look askance at any human encounter, to include the painful ones. Perceived that way, our daily life becomes sacred and not just the dressed up parts.

All through my teenage years I, like so many other boys, made extra money by doing yard work. Even after I was older and secured construction and factory jobs during the summer months, as well as winter and spring holidays, I would cut grass, pull weeds, plant gardens, and rake up leaves and pine straw. Pine needles are prolific in Alabama. Throughout September, October, and November the needles from the Loblolly and Longleaf Pines carpet every yard in the neighborhood. I was called upon to rake up the matted pine straw, which in many yards had sat on the lawns so long that it was now three to four inches thick and rife with grayish-white mildew. The work of raking up the matted pine straw was messy, stinky, and took many hours to complete. Unlike many of my teenage peers, I did not mind the tedium. An hour or so into the work my mind would shift into contemplation. During those hours of repetitive tedium, I considered the kind of life I wanted to live, the future I yearned to share with Kay, rehearsed stories I wanted to write, and experienced my first flushes of romance with God. The pastorate has its share of monotonous tasks. Sunday worship is the result of a procession of mundane weekday tasks. When I am open to God’s grace, my work leads me, not to disdain, but to those deeper places where the Lord speaks to my heart.

That’s not to say I am not task oriented. Every morning in my journal I make two lists. First, following Oprah Winfrey’s example, I recount all those things for which I am thankful. (Kay’s latest culinary gift makes the list nearly every morning!). Next, I construe a “To Do” list, and I am doggedly determined to complete each task by day’s end. Last night I put off my bedtime by an hour to adhere one last checkmark on my list. While it may be commendable that I get things done, my single-minded pursuit of my daily goals can keep me from unplanned human interactions…in other words, interruptions. The late Henri Nouwen confessed for all of us Type-A’s, “My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.”

Yesterday, in fact, I was surprised to learn that I was expected to attend a late afternoon meeting with the Worship Committee. After arising at 4:30 AM to get ahead on my correspondence, trouble-shooting my computer, iPhone, and iPad with our IT technician, powering through back to personnel interviews, and sitting through a quarterly calendar meeting so replete with special events that I imagined I had been dropped off at Madison Square Gardens — a visit with the Endodonist sounded better than a 4 PM committee meeting.

No sooner did the Cathedral Sacristan call the meeting to order than my expectations did a 180° turnaround and a smile erupted on my face. Seated around the table were the Cathedral Vergers, the Layreaders Coordinator, the Head of the Altar Guild, the Director of Communications, the Canon for Parish Life, and the Bishop-in-Residence. What struck me was the profound commitment that each of these persons had for God and the parishioners of St. John’s. Here they were at the end of their workdays, too, and yet they exhibited unfeigned ardor in preparing worship for the hundreds of people, known to them and unknown, who would sit, kneel, pray, sing, cry, and laugh in that cavernous cathedral. By grace and their meticulous preparation those same people will encounter God. I drove home not even noticing that the downtown traffic was bumper-to-bumper so that I was inching my way home in the 97° heat. Elation, not exhaustion, took hold of me through a surprise encounter I had previously dreaded.

To participate in God’s grace, we must be present in the moment or bypass the opportunity. For example, Kay and I ventured into the commercial area near our home. We were looking for a quiet neighborhood restaurant. We were taking note of the operating hours posted on the door of a small Thai restaurant, when a fifty-something gentleman sitting on a bench outside the restaurant piped up to say, “If you are looking for the best Thai food in this city, look no further. The place may look dinky, but it is in a class of its own. Between Google and Yelp, they have received 5,000 reviews. Just beware of the heat. Any dish rated above mild+ will incinerate the insides of any Anglo.”

Kay and I introduced ourselves and learned the man’s name was “Adam.” His fourteen year-old son, “Little Adam,” was seated next to him (an unlikely name to hang on a kid who stretched out to six feet or more). Big Adam proceeded to review every category of bistro, diner, dive, and haute cuisine establishment in the Mile-High City. I next asked Adam where he lives in town and that prompted him to run through his entire biography stretching from Los Angeles to Long Island. In a word, Adam was lonely, and our chance encounter ministered to him as well as it benefitted us. What if we had rushed away, our minds dead set on the next thing instead of lingering on the sidewalk to hear Adam’s story? An opportunity to demonstrate Christ’s love would have been lost because the God-moment would have passed.

Love is present tense

Paul encourages the new believers he has discipled in Galatia to take hold of the procession of God-moments they are given. ‘For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment; “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”’ (Galatians 5:14). This is an scandalous statement from a man who studied the Torah for five to ten years under Gamaliel, the leading Jerusalem rabbi of the age. Fifteen years later, Paul encounters Christ on the Damascus Road and all the abstract notions of the Jewish Law are usurped by the concrete immediacy of Christ’s words and example. A quick overview of the Gospels shows how Jesus ministered to one individual after another regardless of how those encounters interrupted his plans:

The Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:4-26), the Gerasene demoniac who lived amongst the tombs (Mark 5:1-20), the crippled man who had been languishing beside the Pool of Bethesda for thirty-eight years (John 5:1-9), the woman with the continuous menstrual bleeding (Luke 8:43-48), the man born blind (John 9:1-7), blind Bartimaeus sitting on the side of the road in Jericho (Mark 10:46-52), the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was tormented by a demon (Matthew 15:21-28), the ten lepers who dare to approach Jesus and beg him to heal them (Luke 17:11-19), and Zacchaaeus the tax collector, the pariah of Jericho, with whom Jesus chooses to have dinner (Luke 19:1-10).

Christ is the present physical manifestation of God on earth — Emmanuel, God is with us (Matthew 1:23). We are called to emulate his witness and love those whom God directs our way in the midst of our busy days. Paul, for his part, is no longer enchanted by self-serving tenets dictated by his former religious life — circumcision chief among them. Paul graphically declares;

‘You who want to be justified by the Law by being circumcised, have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. For in Christ neither circumcision not uncircumcision counts for anything. The only thing that counts is faith working through love.’ Galatians 5:4-6

In other words, Paul is saying, ‘All of you are wasting your time on this elaborate initiation rite to get into the club. Don’t you see, your lives have turned in on yourselves. What really matters is loving like Christ loved — today.’

Paul could have just as well been writing to American Christians in the 21st century. We are no longer fixated on circumcision, but we are obsessed with throwing up the appropriate incantation to guarantee our place in heaven. In doing so, we have stepped into the same quagmire as the ancient Galatians. Focused on our solo liftoff to Paradise, we are fixated on an abstract future with God at the expense of serving Him with concrete acts of love today.

On many occasions, I asked the congregations I served, “Why would you want to spend eternity with God when you show no interest in Him now?” Our preparation for an eternal future with God is to be like his Son, flesh and blood emissaries of God’s love in the daily grind. If we live in the present, open to Christ’s unassailable grace and obedient to the incessant leading of the Holy Spirit, the future will take care of itself.

SOURCES

Underhill, Evelyn, Life As Prayer, London: Longman Group, LTD, 1946, 185. First American Edition, Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1991.

Nouwen, Henri, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975.

PHOTO CREDITS

Moving Day - photo compliments of Hansen Brothers Moving

Truck-congested Traffic outside NYC - photo compliments of KTLA

People Worshipping at St. John’s Cathedral - photo compliments of Martyn Hart Legacy Society

Postcards from Babylon: The Church in American Exile by Brian Zahnd

In 2017, Brian Zahnd was on a three-day retreat at Conception Abbey in rural Northwest Missouri. Zahnd occasionally came to the abbey to enter into the daily rhythm of Vigils, Lauds, Eucharist, Vespers, and Compline. Founded by Swiss monks in 1872, he is often the only guest joining the sixty-five active monks resident there.

On this visit, however, Zahnd was deeply troubled by the horrible truth that so much of the American Church is being corrupted by strident religious nationalism. While trying to unburden himself to the Lord, he discovered the Lord wanted just the opposite — to give Zahnd a new burden. On a walk, he asked the Lord what He specifically had in mind. The answer was clear and unequivocal: “It’s time to write some postcards from Babylon.” Two years later, Postcards from Babylon was published. Zahnd took the title from 1 Peter 5:13, where Peter cryptically ends his letter with ‘from Babylon,’ a 1st century Christian code word for Rome.

The driving question of the book is drawn from Zahnd’s encounter with God at the abbey: “Does contemporary Christianity represent the countercultural way of Jesus or has it become merely an endorsement — perhaps even a cheerleader — of Americanism? Large numbers of churches have undertaken the latter in the misguided belief that “Make American Great Again” somehow coincides with exalting Christ and his kingdom. It is a mistake to imagine America is some type of idealized Biblical Israel, Zahnd states. Rather, America is a kind of Biblical Babylon in a long line of Babylons.

‘If American Christians imagine America is a kind of Biblical Israel, we will inevitably make the mistake of thinking that the apparatus of the American government—including the war machine—are commissioned by God for divine purposes. Thus to “Make America Great Again” is imagined to be supported by divine warrant and connected to the salvation of the world.’

Zahnd states that he does not follow the donkey of the Democratic Party, nor does he follow the elephant of the Republican Party. No, Zahnd declares that he follows the Lamb, the slaughtered Lamb who stands in the center of the throne in Revelation 5:6. He impresses on his readers that to follow the Lamb, Jesus Christ, is to follow him, not only spiritually, but in practice. Zahnd states that God, through His Son Jesus Christ, would rather die than kill His enemies. The wounds of Christ on the cross are the entry points where the worlds violence is absorbed and destroyed. The insidious, brutal sin of humanity dies on the cross and death is conquered by this outrageous, unfathomable love. The cross is not just the instrument of our atonement but the gateway to redeeming our politics. After all, politics is taken from the Greek word polis, the city. Our politics are how we act in the places where we live, how we treat our neighbors, how we want our nation to act in the world.

The reader may be surprised to find that Zahnd is not unduly troubled by Trump’s character. The president has repeatedly told the American people and the world, for that matter, who he is. Zahnd is far more disturbed by the overwhelming, uncritical support that Christian evangelical leaders have bestowed on him, as if Trump’s agenda is Christ’s own. A disturbing example of this misguided idolatry was voiced in 2016 by Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the twelve-thousand member Dallas First Baptist Church and Trump’s spiritual advisor. In an interview with the Dallas Observer, Jeffress said:

‘When I am looking for a leader who’s going to sit across the negotiating table from a nuclear Iran, or who is gonna be intent on destroying ISIS, I couldn’t care less about the leader’s temperament or his tone or his vocabulary. Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that is the feeling of a lot of evangelicals. They don’t want Casper Milquetoast as the leader of the free world.’

Zahnd declares that Jeffress and so many other leaders do not want Jesus, the Prince of Peace, the one who turns the other cheek, the one who goes to Calvary to be crucified. No, they want Barabbas. If they had been in Pontius Pilate’s courtyard that day, they would have added their voices to the crowd:

’Away with this man Jesus! Release Barabbas to us!’ (Barabbas had been thrown into prison for an insurrection in the city, and for murder.)

“Who are we calling for? Jesus or Barabbas?” Zahnd does not let his readers off the hook.

Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, by Rachel Held Evans

On May 4, 2019, Rachel Held Evans died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN. She was thirty-seven and survived by her husband Dan, her son Henry, three at the time, and her daughter Harper, eleven months. I was struck by the fact that Rachel was born in my hometown, Birmingham, at St. Vincent’s Hospital, where our daughter, Catherine Grace was born. (I am using “Rachel” instead of “Held,” because to read her books is to feel like you know her as a friend.)

Christians all over the nation grieved Rachel’s death. One of our brightest lights for earnest Christian pilgrims had gone out . Coming out of a loving, yet rigid evangelical home and church, she forged a new way, especially for former evangelical women, to embrace a buoyant, clear-eyed, generous life in Christ.

Rachel settled in Dayton, TN and joined the Episcopal Church. Fittingly, her first book, published in 2010, was titled, Evolving in Monkeytown (later Faith Unraveled). However, it was her second book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master (2012) that catapulted her to fame. In the book, she reported on her life while literally living the Bible’s command for an entire year. One of the major Christian publishing houses, LifeWay, refused to carry the book because she used the word “vagina,” a fact that only increased interest in the book at other outlets. Overnight, it became a New York Times bestseller and Rachel became a hero to those who felt felt like “Christian misfits” in their post-evangelical life of faith. Her third book, released in 2015, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, is her memoir about leaving evangelicalism and finding a new home in liturgical church traditions. From no one else has the modern Episcopal Church had such fervid promotion. Two of Rachel’s books were published posthumously: a children’s book, What is God Like and a collection of her essays, Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning and Reimagining Faith.

Inspired, published in 2018 is Rachel’s fourth book. Without an ounce of false humility, I can say that I am outclassed by Rachel’s deep understanding of the Holy Scripture. I have spent the better part of nine years in seminary, yet I have not attained her broad understanding of the Bible, which extends from the Garden of Eden in Genesis to the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. Neither do I demonstrate Rachel’s playfulness with the compendium of the stories found in the Good Book from start to finish. In her playfulness, she imitates the ancient Jewish sages from the 1st to 5th centuries AD who wrote the Midrash and the ancient church fathers from the between the 2nd and 8th centuries AD who composed their colorful commentaries on the Scripture. Rachel insists that God not only “inspired” the messages He wanted to communicate, but God intertwined His artistry with humans to create the most memorable stories in history.

After her insightful introduction of the the Old and New Testaments, Rachel covers the waterfront of the entire Bible. Her chapter headings include: Origin Stories, Deliverance Stories, War Stories, Wisdom Stories, Resistance Stories, Gospel Stories, Fish Stories, and Church Stories. In reviewing the different types of stories and various genres in the Bible, Rachel does not hold back. She dares to say things that many of us have been thinking about the Scripture, but have been afraid to say — like why is war sometimes exalted in its pages. Yet her bedrock belief about the Bible is that “our relational God has given us a relational text, one that, should we surrender to it, reminds us that being the people of faith isn’t as much about being right as it is about being part of a community in restored and restorative relationship with God.”

Along with Rachel’s trenchant understanding of the Bible is her conviction that grappling with the stories of the Bible is key to our development as mature Christians. The texts we do not like or fully understand often lead us into new frontiers of faith. This attitude is antithetical to those who flip through the pages of the Bible as a sort of almanac of answers or continually recite comforting passages while neglecting the discomfiting ones. On this accord, she quotes Case-Western professor Timothy Beal:

‘The iconic idea of the Bible as a book of black-and-white answers encourages us to remain in a state of spiritual immaturity... In turning readers away from the struggle, from wrestling with the rich complexity of Biblical literature and its history, in which there are no easy answers, it perpetuates an adolescent faith.’

Throughout Inspired, Rachel returns to three points: 1. Biblical inspiration is less about taking down word-for-word divine dictation and more about inspiration. 2. The Bible invites participation, not just interpretation. 3. The story of Scripture is unfinished and we’re part of it. From these three points, she challenges the reader with two questions: 1. What practices would help you engage the Bible more fully going forward? 2. In what ways are you participating in God’s ongoing story?

Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus; Become Like Him; Do as He Did, by John Mark Comer

“Show me a person’s habits,” says John Mark Comer, “and I will show you what they are truly most passionate about, most dedicated to, most willing to suffer for, and most in love with.” With that sentence, Comer distinguishes himself as a modern day Benedict and a prophet of what American Christians most need to hear. To be a Christian means that we must live day to day in a very different way within a culture that not only misunderstands us but can also vigorously oppose us.

This is not new news to Christians. We should recall that the first name given to those who followed Jesus was The Way (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22; and John 14:6). Implicit in the title is the fact that, from the beginning, Christians lived out their faith in concrete, even measurable ways. With that in mind, the Biblical thesis for Comer’s book is taken from the latter part of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.’ (Matthew 7:13-14). Jesus both tells us and shows us how to live a real life, a full life, and yet many American Christians today opt to be swept along in our consumeristic, egocentric culture, thereby forfeiting the abundant life promised by our Savior (John 10:10).

My comparison of Comer with Benedict is not embellishment. Benedict, for his part, became very disillusioned with the decadence, moral corruption, and spiritual emptiness of Rome in the early 6th Century — even though the city and what was left of the empire had supposedly been Christian for over 150 years. At the same time, Benedict was alarmed by the breakdown of civic order as Rome began to fall — both externally due to a succession of “barbarian” invasions and internally due to avarice, licentiousness, and amorality. Beginning in 500 AD, Benedict formed a dozen or so communities around the mountainous region of Subiaco and thirty years later founded his cornerstone community further south at Monte Cassino. Benedict created a rule for his communities that provided a balanced blueprint for living a Christ-centered life within a communal family. It provided an orderly, practical path to living in the way of Jesus without the inflexible extremes of the earlier desert monastics.

Comer, like Benedict, prescribes a rule of life. He readily admits that the term sounds off-putting to modern ears. However, he connects the term rule to the Latin regula. Some scholars argue that regula initially meant the slats of wood used to build a trellis in a vineyard. For a “vine to bear much fruit,” what does it need (John 15:1-10)? “A trellis—a support structure to lift it off the ground and index it toward the light, give it room to breathe, and guide its growth in the right direction. Without a trellis, a vine only produces a fraction of the fruit it is capable of, and the little it did bear would be highly vulnerable to disease, damage, and dangerous predators.” So, modern Christians, as much or more than ancient ones, need to build a trellis of habits to support our life in Christ. If we fail to do so, our faith life becomes airy philosophy and empty of concrete substance.

Episcopalians will applaud the book and commend Comer for understanding their historic way of life. Much of what Comer prescribes was first instituted by Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), who wanted to make the Benedictine way of life available for everyday individuals and families. Beginning with his first Book of Common Prayer, published in 1549, Cranmer offered Christians a regimen of structured daily prayer, spiritual formation through congregational worship, and instruction based on the ancient paths of faith rendered in the Bible, Creeds, and Catechism. Looked at that way, the Book of Common Prayer is not as much a worship guide as it provides a definitive framework for our lives as disciples of Jesus.

In fact, Comer’s preferred term for an individual Christian is not disciple but apprentice. Every Christian apprentices to Jesus, which is a whole life process of being with Jesus so that we become like him and do as he did. The process is dependent on a rule of life which includes daily prayer, lifelong formation, service, Sabbath, and commitment to a community of faith. That is the quiet revolution that will, again, change the world.

The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese

Just as he did in his earlier novel, Cutting for Stone, in The Covenant of Water, Verghese discloses an exotic world largely unknown to Westerners. In the former, he tells the story of two brothers growing up in a Christian mission hospital on the outskirts of Addis Abba, Ethiopia. The Covenant of Water, reveals the peculiar world of Thomistic Christians found in the southwestern tropical region of India known as Kerala, which borders the Arabian Sea. Presently, there are 6.14 million Kerala Christians who ardently claim the origin of their peculiar faith tradition began as early as 52 AD, when Thomas the apostle is said to have brought the gospel to India. Residing in the lush water world of Kerala, these Christians practice distinct liturgical traditions as well as strict spiritual disciplines taken from Christian, Jewish, and Hindu customs.

Verghese’s novel is an epic chronicling three generations of one Kerala Christian family extending from 1900 to 1977. The central character is the matriarch of the family known solely as “Big Ammachi,” a term for “grandmother” in the Malayalam language of the region. Big Ammachi marries into a prosperous farming family at age twelve, only to learn that the family maintains a dire medical secret referred to in whispers as “The Condition.” Because of “The Condition” and the psychological scars that attend it, Big Ammachi’s family endures torturous tragedies in each successive generation. That being said, these tragedies cannot eclipse the cycle of joys that erupt from the web of relationships woven amongst family members and those friends and workers surrounding them.

Evocative themes are repeated throughout the epic. Because Verghese is a board certified Infectious Disease physician and a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, medicine and healing are persistent themes. In Covenant of Water, innovative surgeries and cutting edge treatments for leprosy are highlighted. Dr. Digby Kilgour from Scotland enters the story as a talented surgeon who spends the residue of his life treating incapacitated lepers in the Kerala region. It should be noted that Big Ammachi’s granddaughter, Mariamma, becomes a gifted surgeon, fulfilling a long-held dream of the family.

Kerala is surrounded by ocean, streams, swamps, and lakes, so it is ironic that Big Ammachi’s family’s curse is connected to water. Ironically, Kerala’s affluence is supported by its canals, backwaters, rivers, and monsoons. The presence of so much water provides abundant harvests of coconut, rice, jack fruit, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and pepper. Water is the source of both life and death.

Tradition and progress are an inescapable backdrop of the novel. The caste system remains pervasive, even amongst Christians in Kerala. Uncrossable boundaries are erected between lifelong colleagues and fellow workers. At the same time, the British Empire casts a dark shadow of colonialism upon the region. Big Ammachi’s family desires to be free of their overlords and the repressive ancient culture of India.

On a final and personal note, Verghese’s book provides an effective study of marriage. Unions that begin with great promise, crash on the shoals of hubris and jealousy. Others thrive, even though couples are separated in age by ten or more years and brought together in arranged marriages and, far worse, when a disfiguring disease physically separates husband and wife. The author is clear that a couple’s romance cannot be sustained unless freedom, especially creative freedom, is granted to one another. At the same time, Verghese insists that marital love is spiritually sustained by powers that transcend flesh and blood.

The novel enchanted me, not because of high drama, but because of Verghese’s ability to paint ordinary lives as extraordinary. Big Ammachi’s family is a portrait of every family, withstanding a succession of challenges, while at the same time, reveling in the unexpected joys that imbue their lives.

Doc, by Mary Doria Russell

Maria Doria Russell, who speaks nine languages, has a Ph.D in biological anthropology from the University of Michigan, has taught gross anatomy at Case Western, and has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, the British Science Fiction Award for best novel, and the James Tipitree Award for best writer of 1996/1997 — was determined to set the record straight about Doc Holliday. Through exhaustive research, Russell dismisses the yellow journalists of Holliday and Wyatt Earp’s day who discredited the reputation of Doc Holliday by depicting him as a cold blooded killer.

In truth, Holliday was a cutting edge dentist, who, at age 22 when diagnosed with aggressive tuberculosis, is forced to leave his beloved Georgia and his nascent dental practice to make his way to the West. First, he moves to Texas, where he meets his longtime companion, lover, and business associate, the fiery, highly educated Hungarian Kate Harony. From the onset of their relationship, the two converse in Latin as easily as English. To follow the cattle money, they later move to Dodge City, Kansas, where Doc can play high stakes poker.

While he makes far more money at the card table, Holliday works exhaustively to establish a substantial dental practice. In short order, Doc is known as the most talented, up-to-date dentist in the entire region. He slowly becomes devoted to his friend Wyatt Earp, but their friendship is not based on Holliday’s facility with a firearm. Again, the author is adamant, that he is not the obdurate gunslinger depicted in dime store novels and comics of the day. No, according to Russell, he is a highly educated, Southern gentleman, stoically facing his death with candor and valor. Those characteristics, and not combative ones, are what draw Earp to Holliday.

Surprisingly, gunfights play a very small part in the novel. Instead, Russell marches out the diverse characters populating the western plains of the United States following the Civil War. Ranchers, drovers, whores, a Chinese laundryman and entrepreneur, and an Austrian Jesuit priest color the pages of Russell’s book. Most of all, the reader is drawn to Holliday as a man of substance, who already has one foot in the grave before the famed gunfight at the OK Corral. To note, four years after Russell published Doc, she completed her historical novel about the gunfight at the OK Corrall — Epitaph.

Bishop Doane’s Dog

“Give me a push,” was Mr. Mendlemann’s clipped greeting, even though I made I detour to visit him. I was rushing to the bank with a deposit to head off an embarrassing overdraft fee before visiting a disgruntled parishioner, when I felt compelled to see him for the second time that week. Mr. Mendlemann lived at a local nursing home. A staunch Missouri Synod Lutheran from Maryland, most of his family members were dead or too infirm or far away to visit.

I found Mr. Mendlemann alone in the Dining Hall. Lunch had been over for an hour, but he had tarried behind, not knowing what to do with himself. When he lifted his head to see me, he did not smile or greet me, but commanded, “Give me a push.”

I presumed he wanted to take a stroll outdoors. That summer day, like most in Texas, promised to be a furnace, but a few stray clouds floated overhead casting some shade over the nursing home garden. Pushing his wheelchair toward the door leading to the garden, Mr. Mendlemann instead directed me to his cramped room.

Under my arm, I was toting my prayer book. My plan was to read a few prayers and beat a quick exit back into my manic schedule. Yet, as soon as I entered his room and offered my hello to his Catholic roommate, Pastor Mendlemann pointed to a stately worn volume on a shelf above his bedside table, Best Loved Poems of the American People. I placed the book in his shaking, shrunken hands and watched warily as he made the turning of each page seem a Herculean task. He found the place and lateraled the book back to me. He wanted me to read the selection Bishop Doane on His Dog.

Bishop Doane, the speaker in the poem, begins “I am quite sure he (his dog) thinks that I am God — Since he is God, on whom each one depends.” The dog’s trust in the bishop’s beneficence never falters. Bishop Doane, who actually served as the Episcopal Bishop of Albany, NY from 1869 until his death at age 81 in 1913, laments that his faith in God pales beside that of his dog’s faith in him:

He looks love at me, deep as words e’er spake;

And from me never crumb nor sup will take,

But he wags thanks with his most vocal tail.

And when some crashing noise wakes all his fear,

He is content and quiet, if I am near —

Secure that my protection will prevail.

So, faithful, mindful, thankful, trustful, he

Tells me what I unto my God should be.

I was further surprised that once I finished reading Mr. Mendlemann took my hands firmly in his. He bowed his head and prayed that we would trust and adore God in raspy words so unadorned that I knew they echoed from his heart. There in a nursing home room, with the aroma of urine and Clorox, and the sound of wheelchairs, shuffling feet, and the irritating buzz of the intercom, a man whose body was failing was holding the hands of a younger man who was racing around pleasing neither God nor himself.

He gave me a push.

A Tale of Two Men

In my mind, I return to Mr. Mendlemann’s room quite often, especially when I imagine my scrupulously kept schedule and dogged work ethic are unique alleluias to God. How misguided I can be thinking my efforts please God, when written across most every book of the Bible is the invitation to put our trust in God, or to borrow a line from Bishop Doane — to be “faithful, mindful, thankful, and trustful.”

What Mr. Mendlemann knows is that it is only through trusting God that we are led to love Him. The apostle John succinctly says as much, ‘We love God because He first loved us’ (1 John 4:19). From Eden to the New Jerusalem, it is made clear that it is only when we trust in God’s love, we are given the ability to love Him and love others. Christians, clergy included, continually get this backward, trusting instead that our own enterprising efforts will please God and equip us to love others generously.

John Mark Comer, one of my new young heroes, says it this way, “Our job is not to self-save; it’s to surrender.” Only after we surrender to God and trust in Him will we be on the road to Christian maturity. Until then, we are mired in spiritual infancy.

Paul is the poster child of getting this badly wrong before finally getting it right. He sets out like Don Quixote on a quest to vanquish God’s enemies. In this case the enemies were those earliest Christians known as The Way. Even though these first adherents of The Way considered themselves Jews like himself, Paul deemed them dangerous counterfeits. He secured an appointment from the High Priest of the Jerusalem Temple to act as chief bounty hunter and was determined to round up followers of The Way and eradicate their numbers, and muzzle their message. When Paul falls into the dust of the Damascus Road, he begins to realize how backward he had things.

That is why in Galatians, his first letter, he so loudly beats the drum to pound his point home that our trust in God’s love comes first. Our love for God follows suit, as do our works of love. Our efforts are the fruit of that love born from that trust. Paul is insistent that once the Galatians get that they will live free lives as children of God and will become purveyors of His love. It simply doesn’t work in reverse.

A Tale of Two Sons — Galatians 4:21-31

That is why Paul marches out his story of Abraham’s two sons— Isaac and Ishmael. Before he gets knee-deep in his paraphrase of Genesis 16-25, he states that his retelling of the saga is allegorical (Galatians 4:24). Paul, therefore, is not posing a referendum on Christianity versus Judaism. Instead, he is holding up Abraham’s two sons Ishmael and Isaac as symbols. Ishmael, the child born of Abraham and a slave woman, Hagar, represents the slavish life centered on human achievement. Ishmael is conceived when Sarah and Abraham become discouraged over the lack of the child God promised them and take matters into their own hands. Abraham’s and Sarah’s distrust of God causes a domino effect of pain, which is mainly visited on Ishmael and his mother Hagar. Paul deems the story illustrative of those slavishly clinging to the old covenant conceived at Sinai and centered on the Law. They hurt themselves, and they hurt others.

Bible readers may recall that Paul considered the Law a temporary caretaker, a paidagōgos, who in ancient societies was a slave assigned as guardian of the male heir in a wealthy household until the son came of age (Galatians 3:19–29). By making this connection, Paul is emphatically telling the weak-kneed, indecisive Galatians to “grow up!”

Isaac, the son born of Abraham and his wife Sarah, represents the free life centered on trusting God. The child is miraculously delivered by Sarah when she is 90 years-old, just as God had promised from the beginning (Genesis 17:15-17; 21:2). Isaac’s birth was the result of divine action in the face of a natural impossibility — Sarah was barren, both parents were old, and yet God’s word created life where the flesh, that is human endeavor, could not. Thus in Paul’s allegory, Isaac represents the new covenant resulting from the grace showered on humanity through the sacrificial love of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. What was once impossible through human effort, the re-union of sinful humanity with God, is now realized through Christ’s passion and resurrection.

After his rendition of the Old Testament allegory, Paul levels a key question at the Galatians: Do you wish to live according to the flesh, kata sarka, that is according to your own efforts, or do you wish to live according to the Spirit, kata Pneuma, that is according to God’s promises (Galatians 4:29)? To live according to the flesh is to chain oneself to the grind of human effort. To live according to the Spirit, is to be freed by divine grace to love God and love others. The good news of the latter moves Paul to break out in a song:

‘Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband.’ Galatians 4:27 taken from Isaiah 54:1

The Prophet Isaiah originally offered this song to the Israelites when they were hopelessly captive in unassailable Babylon. Against all odds, God will bring them home. Paul, for his part, offers the song as a prophecy to the Galatians. Israel’s exile in Babylon is a prelude to their restoration. Sarah’s barrenness is a prelude to God’s miraculous birth of Isaac. The Galatian’s former ignorance of Christ’s grace is a prelude to their freedom.

Paul quits singing when he considers the meddling teachers who have worked to draw the Galatians away from God’s grace to a rigid adherence to the Law. He levels a stinging insult at them: If the Galatians follow these teachers and go back to observing the Law, they will not become Abraham’s heirs, as they advertise. Rather, they will become slaves like Hagar and Ishmael. Therefore, the agitators are not, in any way, to be accommodated. They, like Ishmael, must be exiled from the community. Paul punctuates his demand by quoting from the Genesis account, ’Drive out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave will not inherit with the son of the free woman’ (Galatians 4:30 taken from Genesis 21:10).

A Tale of American Christians

Few modern Christians are enticed to adopt the Mosaic Law. On the other hand, many are tempted to measure their standing before God by their moral performance, church attendance, and some these days by their demonstrated patriotism. A considerable number of American Christians have been beguiled to believe that association with the right political party is essential for God’s approval. This is akin to the Galatians aligning themselves with the agitators, those they presume are the “right kind of people.” Paul reminds believers that our identity as God’s children rests on God’s faithfulness fulfilled through Christ, not on our own faithfulness, nor on our alliances.

Ironically, surrendering to God’s grace is the miraculous multiplier of sacrificial acts of love. Christians live by what God has done for them, not by what they can accomplish for God. The result is a life marked by gratitude, humility, confidence in God’s love, and freedom to serve others without the burden of constantly trying to prove oneself worthy of acceptance.

SOURCES

Comer, John Mark, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, become like him, do as he did. New York: Waterbrook, 2024, 75.

Fellerman, Hazel, The Best Loved Poems of the American People, New York: Doubleday, 1936, 578.

PHOTO CREDITS

Man and His Dog, photo by Charlie Green, USA

Two Men Praying, photo by Tony Lomas, USA

Young Woman Feeding Needy Children, photo by Elianna Gill, USA

Two words

I hadn’t even opened my mouth when he said, “Sit down!” Not “Good morning.” Not “Get started.” Not “Good luck.” Just “Sit down”

It was the first day of my homiletics class in seminary. Each student was required to prepare the introduction of a sermon based on a Scripture passage we had been assigned. I rolled into class thinking my first paragraph was a real showstopper. When the professor asked who would like to go first, I cockily raised my hand, walked to the podium, unfolded my paper, took a breath, checked my notes…and before my lips formed the first word he said, “Sit down!”

Taken completely aback, I tried to respond, “But…”

“I said sit down, Mr. Gahan!”

Red faced, angry, and humiliated, I sat down. Then Dr. Hilmer Krause commenced to give us one of his imperative preaching tenets: “You must connect with the people, not with your text.”

“A sermon is not an essay,” he went on. “The congregation is not awaiting sonorous, polished prose. They await the word from God that has been given to you to share with them on that particular day, certainly not an airy discourse to be put in a dead letter volume of homiletical masterpieces. Besides, once you look down at your text, a quarter of the congregation has switched you off like a radio.”

Angry or not, I had learned more in the first ten minutes of this seminary class than entire semesters spent in others.

The class was all practicum. When Dr. Krause lectured, his words were in response to one of our sermons, which we delivered at every class session. He saw no sense in rhapsodizing about the finer points of the homiletical arts. He knew that most of us in the class — Lutherans and Episcopalians alike — were headed to parishes that could only support a single clergy person, which meant that most of us would be preaching twice on Sundays and once on Wednesdays. No time was wasted on theory. Getting over the fear of preaching, connecting our preaching to the Scripture, and exorcising bad examples of preaching from our past provided the daily class agenda.

The 3-Way test

Once I overcame the mortification I suffered on that first day, I looked forward to the Thursday morning classes all week. As soon as we walked in the door (no one dared to be late), one of the eight of us would stride up to the podium — sans notes. All of us showed measurable improvement week by week. Along the way, we learned Dr. Krause’s three inviolable tests we had to put to every sermon we prepared for his class. These three additional questions round out Krause’s Four Preaching Tenets

One — Is God in the sermon?

Two — Who is God in this sermon?

Three — What am I asking the people to do?

Four — Are you connecting with the people or only with your text?

He did teach us how to exegete, that is interpret Bible passages. And he explained the broad sweep of the lectionary, which includes the Scripture readings assigned throughout the seasons of the church year, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. While I benefitted from all of Dr. Krause’s wisdom, his Four Tenets of Preaching that have followed me around to every parish, school, and overseas mission where I have served, and they have saved many a congregation from homiletical misery and spiritual deception.

While Tenet #4 deals with how the preacher delivers a sermon, Tenets 1, 2, & 3 deal with the sermon’s composition. These three merit further explanation. First, Is God in the Sermon? At first glance that may seem like a silly question. However, every preacher knows it is easy to speak fervently about a moral concern, a social problem, political upheaval, or interpersonal difficulties and never bring God into the sermon at all. 2,700 years ago, wise men in King Hezekiah’s court warned: ‘”Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths’ (Proverbs 3:5-6). Pursing my own way, I’ve written several passionate sermons, real stem winders, only to realize it was full of “Pat,” but lamentably God was absent.

The second, Who is God in this sermon? is far more seductive. As Krause said, “If the god in your sermon is not the one revealed by Jesus Christ, you’ve got the wrong god.” What he meant, of course, is if the grace expressed throughout the life, death, and resurrection of Christ is not front and center in your sermon, you need to start over. Recall what John says in the magisterial prelude to his Gospel: ‘No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known’ (John 1:18). Again, it is extremely easy to prepare a riveting sermon that is all about pursuing self-help, or aligning with the right side, or becoming a moral standard, but the message is effectively graceless. It is therefore a dead letter.

The third test, What am I asking the people to do? is the part most preachers leave off altogether. God said through the prophet Isaiah, ‘When my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it’ (Isaiah 55:11). When the preacher stands before the people on a Sunday morning, he or she is not free agent. No, he or she is an emissary of God. Therefore, when we interpret a word of God from Holy Scripture for His people, it is not merely for their edification or entertainment. No, God expects a response, a change in direction, a healed family, repentance, a transformed life.

The preacher is the message

In 1964, the pioneering Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote this enduring statement: “The medium is the message.” In other words, the means made to deliver information matters more than the actual content of the message.” In this hyper-tech, digitized new world in which we find ourselves, McLuhan’s words ring truer by the day. Hilmer Krause never invoked McLuhan’s name in our classes, but his preaching tenet — You must connect with the people, not with your text — proved his understanding of the visionary Canadian’s work. The preacher is essential in delivering God’s word and in no way incidental to the task. If the preacher’s authenticity is communicated to the people, they listen. If not, no matter how studied, erudite, and eloquent the delivery, the message is lost.

A senior pastor once told me, “Once the people know that you love them, you can do anything, but until they know that, you can do nothing.” Another pastor, who tutored me in the beginning of my ordained life, added, “Your preaching must always reflect your pastoral ministry.” In other words, the pastoral work you do amongst the people during the week is as important, or perhaps more so, than your sermon preparation. Now, I am a Bible thumper. I love the study of the Scripture and I get excited every opportunity I have to share the Good News contained amongst those sixty-six books. Nevertheless, the people tune in every week mainly because they know I care deeply for them.

Taking it up a notch, we consider Jesus Christ the incarnate Son. Jesus Christ is God come to earth and he fully reveals God and God’s will for humanity. He embodies God and His message. Likewise, those who put their trust in Christ and are filled with his Spirit, also embody God. In McLuhan’s terminology, we are the medium. The gospel message is now part of us. Thus it is apostasy to deliver anodyne, lifeless messages. Furthermore, because the message lives in us, we should be able to deliver God’s word without being quarantined in the text. Connect with the people. See how they react. Do you need to accentuate the last point? Do you need to explain it better? We will never know if we are looking down instead of up.

Putting Krause to the test

The summer after I took Krause’s homiletics class, I was called by the Archbishop of Labrador and Newfoundland to serve in his three most isolated churches, Francois, Gray River, and Ramea Island on the southern coast. All three were on the North Atlantic and only accessible by water — the high seas of the Grand Banks to be specific. Kay, our three children, and I moved from Austin, TX to these isolated outports to give the long serving priest there a sabbatical over the summer.

To say it was culture shock is not saying nearly enough. One thing I learned right away was that every person in the villages, ages two to ninety-two, filled the churches on Sunday. I also learned that you had to keep eye contact or you would completely lose them. They loved Bible stories brought to life, and if I inserted something like, “Oh, I see I’ve gone on way too long,” they would cry, “No, go on, minister, go on!”

Newfoundland with its strange culture, rampant unemployment due to the closure of the Grand Banks to fishing, and its attendant despair became my laboratory to test Krause’s Four Preaching Tenets. For a misplaced Texan from an ultra-cosmopolitan city, the tenets proved to be instant connection. I have never looked back. I learned that when I preach, even with my failings and inadequacies, it is a living, breathing message from God.

A broken relationship

If I had taken a harder look at Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, I would have seen that the apostle was 2,000 years ahead of McLuhan in his understanding that the “medium is the message.” When the Galatians forfeit the freedom of the gospel for the straightjacket of legalism, Paul reminds them of when they first met a year or two before. ‘Back then, you welcomed me as an angel of God,’ he tells them (Galatians 4:14). What has happened since then, he wants to know. By reminding them of their past relationship, he departs from his intellectual argument for a moment and appeals to their emotions. He wants them to recall that their reception of the gospel was tied to their heartfelt reception of him personally. Why now would they dare to take on a decidedly impersonal faith based on following a rigid rule after they had begun their faith in Christ in such a liberating, personal, and patently authentic way through him?

With their initial meeting in mind, allow me to share the story of Paul’s initial encounter with the Galatians in the Good News Translation. This is the translation in which I first read the Bible and through which I began to experience a more personal relationship with Christ through the written word:

‘I beg you, my friends, be like me. After all, I am like you. You have not done me any wrong. You remember why I preached the gospel to you the first time; it was because I was sick. But even though my physical condition was a great trial to you, you did not despise or reject me. Instead, you received me as you would an angel from heaven; you received me as you would Christ Jesus. You were so happy! What has happened? I myself can say that you would have taken out your own eyes, if you could, and given them to me. Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?’

‘Those other people show a deep interest in you, but their intentions are not good. All they want is to separate you from me, so that you will have the same interest in them as they have in you. Now, it is good to have such a deep interest if the purpose is good—this is true always, and not merely when I am with you. My dear children! Once again, just like a mother in childbirth, I feel the same kind of pain for you until Christ’s nature is formed in you. How I wish I were with you now, so that I could take a different attitude toward you. I am so worried about you! ‘Galatians 4:12-20 GNT

A personal gospel

Notice that Paul reminds them that when he first met them he did not cunningly try to coerce them to believe in Christ, just the opposite, in fact. When he arrived in Galatia, he was sick, weak, and suffering. He was in no position to inspire them. The false teachers who followed Paul however, have a self-serving agenda. They make much of the Galatians to separate them from Paul. Once doing that, they will deftly draw the Galatians away from the liberating gospel they learned from Paul to the incarcerating Law-based faith they are peddling. ‘Those other people show a deep interest in you, but their intentions are not good.’

A grace-full gospel

Paul humbly adds that when he fist showed up in Galatia, it was he who needed them and not the other way around. Paul’s specific infirmity is unknown; although from this passage it seems he may have suffered an unattractive and debilitating eye malady. ‘Even though my physical condition was a great trial to you, you did not despise or reject me… I myself can say that you would have taken out your own eyes, if you could, and given them to me.’ Paul’s surprising observation is that it was the Galatians who first showed grace to him and not the other way around. Such expressed love obviously touched Paul. So it is doubly hard to understand why they are now tempted to jettison this life of generous grace for a life-less adherence to the Law. The first is inherently personal; the other is decidedly impersonal.

A joyful gospel

Paul is flabbergasted and wants to know why the Galatians are turning away from the grace they once exercised on his behalf that brought them such joy? He insists that the selfless kindness they extended to him during those earlier days graphically exemplifies the life of grace. Also, the fact that the Galatians lovingly received him before they fully knew what benefit he would be to them portrays how grace precedes any merit or worthiness we may have. About a decade later, Paul will declare what I have long considered the centerpiece of the gospel: ‘God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:8).

What is so astonishing about the passage is that Paul in no way seems to be defending himself, his message, or his reputation. Instead he focuses on the very humbling first encounter he has with the Galatians. Using their own selfless actions as a model, he calls them back to the freedom and intimacy of the gospel they first embraced when they “embraced” him with his off-putting illness. Paul contends the Galatians are a living portrait of Christ’s gospel of grace.

A flesh and blood parable

Paul’s living portrait can also be seen as a flesh and blood parable. By reminding the Galatians of their first meeting, Paul is trying to shake them awake and thereby evoke their shame and repentance. Considered that way, Paul’s initial encounter with the Galatians can be compared to the sobering parable the Prophet Nathan told David after the king’s descent into adultery and murder. The prophet’s parable about the poor farmer and his pet ewe lamb that is stolen and eaten by a rich man incites raging anger in David, and he demands to know the rich man’s identity. Nathan bluntly answers, ‘You are the man’ (2 Samuel 12:1-15). Paul, emulating Nathan, holds a mirror up to the face of the Galatians so that they awaken from the sleep of their seduction.

The encounter also works in a more positive way. Paul’s initial meeting with the Galatians is like Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan, but in reverse. Paul is the man robbed, beaten, stripped naked, and left for dead on the side of the perilous Jericho Road. Seeing how utterly unattractive and needy Paul appeared, the Galatians could have easily shunned him. They did not, but instead welcomed him and nursed him back to health. They practiced prodigious grace. Here it should be remembered that Jesus directs the Parable of the Good Samaritan to a lawyer who first asks, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ and subsequently asks, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ (Luke 10:25-37). Grace, not stringent rule keeping, lies at the heart of both questions.

By recounting this first meeting, Paul personifies his desperate appeal to this first congregation that he established. He exclaims, ‘My dear children! Once again, just like a mother in childbirth, I feel the same kind of pain for you until Christ’s nature is formed in you’ (Galatians 4:19). Realizing his friends have regressed, Paul demonstratively declares that the Galatians need a rebirth of the faith they once exemplified.

Walking around gospels

While I am interested in the development of preachers, I am far more interested in the rebirth of everyday, walking around Christians. People will be drawn to Christ through us, repelled by Christ through us, or worse still — completely indifferent to Christ for having known us. ‘You are neither hot nor cold,’ declares the exalted Christ in the last book of the Bible, ‘therefore, I will spit you out of my mouth’ (Revelation 3:16). To be no more than an anodyne presence to those we meet seems worse than being a patently graceless one. Using Dr. Krause’s tenets to evaluate our witness, we should ask ourselves:

PHOTO CREDITS

Confetti Celebration, by Ambreen Hasan, San Francisco, CA, USA

Burned Out Preacher, compliments of The Christian Post

The Good Samaritan, compliments of Europeana, thought the European Union

On call

“Call me anytime, day or night.” I had just met Frank (not his real name) that afternoon. He was not a member of the parish I served. Somehow we ended up at the same table at a city sponsored mental health conference. As the last speaker concluded his remarks, Frank slid his card across the table to me. I recognized the name. He was the president of the largest commercial construction company in the region.

We were walking out of the city auditorium when he added, “Pat, I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for twenty-three years. I stay healthy by helping others get free. This is not an option for me.”

Thirty years ago, I had little idea of what he was talking about. Frank sensed my confusion. “Listen, I am sure you are a good preacher and all, but you can’t help an alcoholic get sober. You can’t hear what he or she is saying to you. So when someone like me shows up in your office, call me.” When we shook hands in the parking lot, Frank repeated, “Call me anytime, in the middle of the workday or in the middle of the night.”

Driving back to the church, I winced to think that I would ever contact Frank. He was a bit militant for my polite Episcopal tastes. Besides, I completed hours of pastoral counseling exercises and had served two clinical internships. How could a layman, a construction company magnate at that, be more capable than I would be with an addict?

Three months later, the answer showed up in my office. A local television news anchor and his wife made an appointment. When they arrived, I felt certain the handsome couple wanted to discuss a child’s baptism or how to join the church. It was none of the above, and they did not waste any time getting to the point. Their marriage was falling apart. Trying to look professional, I took out a yellow pad and asked them to describe the problems they were experiencing. The couple looked across the sofa at each other. After an uncomfortable pause, the man said, “My wife’s drinking is out of control.” I forced a smile and responded, “I feel certain we can forge a way to save your marriage.”

The wife abruptly interrupted me. “Don’t ask me to quit drinking.”

“What about your marriage?”

“I love my husband, but I am not going to quit drinking.” Her statement was as chilling as it was unequivocal. Ten minutes into the counseling session I was fresh out of answers. My blank yellow pad sat on my desk as a glaring indictment of my inadequacy.

I excused myself and stepped out of the office to call Frank. The receptionist informed me that he was in a board meeting. “I am Patrick Gahan, an Episcopal pastor, he…” She did not let me finish. “Oh yes, I’ll get him.”

Three or four minutes later Frank answered. I quickly described the couple and the problem. What he said next, I remember word for word, “I’m coming. Whatever you do, keep them in the office until I get there.”

When Frank arrived, he took over, and I left him alone with the couple. I was as ashamed as much as I was relieved to abandon the scene of my incompetence. The couple sat and talked to Frank for two hours or more. As they departed, I could tell the wife had been crying. I never saw the couple again, but as far as I know they were still married when I left the area several years later.

Frank and I frequently crossed paths in the ensuing years. However, he never disclosed anything about them or their progress, except to say, “Pat, you’re not an alcoholic, so you don’t know what its like to be trapped in addiction. She knows very well that drinking will destroy her, but she is even more afraid of being free of it.”

Starting over every day

My encounter with Frank and the fashionable couple proved to be a necessary warm up. The next parish I served in an artsy southern suburb of Austin, TX had over fifty recovering alcoholics in the pews. Those fifty took me to school. “Donna” (not her real name either) served as the “headmistress.”

Other than some Benedictine monks with whom I prayed from time to time, these were the first Christians I knew who declared they had to restart their faith walk with Jesus every day. Donna said, “There’s never a day, not one, that I don’t want to take a drink. Sometimes that is all Jesus and I talk about.” The fifty had no abstract notions about their faith in Christ. They clung to him as a matter of life and death.

Sometimes one of the fifty would act badly to a spouse, to a friend, to me, or lash out at some unsuspecting soul at the church. Occasionally, one would disappear for a day or two, go on an ill-advised spending spree, or send out a spat of angry emails. Donna would simply explain, “That’s their alcoholic behavior showing up again.” She was unfazed as she explained that even though God had delivered them from drinking, many of the hurts, fears, and attendant bad behaviors erupted now and again.

Because I was close to the fifty, I was not shielded from their ups and downs. Some had been sober for decades. Others for a handful of years or only months. Regardless, they all taught me what it means to truly need a Savior and to daily renew their trust in him. Alcoholics Anonymous Step #2 was a living reality for them: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

The limits of willpower

Each one told me stories about families destroyed, jobs lost, friendships severed, and the tonnage of shame they bore. Subsequently, they did not give a polite nod to Christ. No, they cleaved to him like a life raft in a menacing ocean. I am not ashamed to admit that after getting to know Frank and Donna, I leaned on the recovery community wherever I served. Any notion that I could bring about the healing of an addict was abandoned. Someone from the inside of the illness was needed.

On the other hand, I learned from the recovery community that very little separated me or any other Christian from the struggles they faced. For one, not one of us is the woman or man we want to be. We have taken one detour after another and ended up disfiguring the person God created in His image. Although Christ has saved us from our sins and estrangement from God, we fall back into bad behaviors fueled by our selfishness, hurts, and fears. Second, we cannot become well or whole until we get brutally honest with ourselves and own up to our missteps and the messes we’ve made of our own life and the lives of those closest to us. When we quit equivocating and masking our sin, we are eager for the dawning of a new day so that we may start over in the light of Christ’s forgiveness and redirection. Third, and most importantly, we do not have enough willpower to get well without Christ. To keep trying is like spinning the wheels of our car in sand and repeatedly pushing the accelerator. We don’t get free but just sink deeper into our mess. Most any sober addict can tell us as much and for that we should be thankful. Pastor John Mark Comer candidly expresses the gratitude rank and file Christians owe to our sisters and brothers in recovery:

One of the many gifts of the addiction community has been its unsparing honesty about just how weak and in need of grace we all are, and just how inept our willpower is. (At some level, we are all addicts.) AA, from its start, acknowledged we needed a higher power to get free. We who got ourselves into this mess cannot get ourselves out. We are too broken to put ourselves back together again. Too lost to find ourselves. When we unmask the human facade of self-delusion, we realize just how utterly unlike Christ we are in the deepest recesses of our hearts. We are forced to confront our true natures—how warped and wounded we really are. We need help, power from beyond us. We need grace.

I have lost count of the many times I have attempted to reorder my life, undertake a promising self-help program, and declare the advent of a “new me,” only to fall on the rocks of my personal delusion. I cannot heal myself. Only God can. That is not to say that our willpower is of no consequence. God will use our efforts to make room for his grace to operate in our lives. Again, John Mark Comer is helpful here: “The main function of self-effort (willpower) in our formation is to do what we can do—make space to surrender to God via the practices of Jesus—so God can do what we can’t do: heal, liberate, and transform us into people of love.”

On my better days, I own up to Comer’s words. For example, I try each morning to “make space to surrender to God” by sitting in a quiet corner of the house. I take Jesus at his word that it is best to ‘go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father…’ (Matthew 6:6). I set the timer on my watch to ten to twenty minutes, during which time I will most often offer a repeated prayer with each breath — something like “Jesus, let me rest in your love.” I say it over and over until the prayer follows me around for the rest of the day. Occasionally, I will pray psalms I have memorized, such as Psalm 23 and 51. The Hand Prayer we teach to children continues to help me order my prayers around confession, thanksgiving, intercession, personal petition, and praise.

Without fail, when the timer alerts me, I kneel down and offer this well-worn prayer from the St. Augustine Prayer Book, authored in 1947 by the monks of the Holy Cross who founded my high school and, in doing so, changed the course of my life:

O God, thou art my God who has made me for thy self. O Lord, Heavenly Father, to thee I devote my heart and my entire life. Grant me thy grace I implore thee, that this day I may live as in thy presence, and walk in the path of thy commandments, following the example of my Savior Christ, and being made like unto him, Give me thy Holy Spirit that, trusting only in him I may overcome those sins which beset me.

Vouchsafe, O gracious God, to me and to …, such blessings as we need both temporal and spiritual. I ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN.

I do not hold myself up as some paragon of Christian devotion. Instead, I see myself as helpless as any one of those in the recovery community I’ve had the privilege to know. Like them, I need to make space every day for God to redirect my life and make me whole. My willpower must be used as the on-ramp of His transforming grace, certainly not as an end in itself, for that would send me back into the dead end cul de sac of self-reliance and self-worship.

Paul’s road to recovery

As I have become more honest about myself, Paul has spoken ever more persuasively to me. When he was knocked down into the dust of the Damascus Road, it was a lot like my being “taken to school” by Frank and Donna. When Paul took a hard look at himself, he realized, as I did, he could never attain a relationship with God, nor become the person he desired by relying on his own faculties, regardless of how clever and educated he had become. “Only a Power beyond himself could restore him.” So, it is best when we read Paul to realize that he is speaking to himself as much or more than he is lecturing anyone else. His heated warnings about strenuously relying on the Law as a ticket to transformation are spoken as a sympathetic insider and not as a critical outsider. All good preachers heed his example.

So, in Galatians 4, when Paul marches out a son from a well-to-do Roman family as an example, it’s not a stretch to think he is talking about himself. Paul, after all, was born into a prosperous merchant class family in Tarsus, a booming commercial and influential Roman city. We are never told that Paul was an heir to a family inheritance; however, three times in the Scripture Paul plays his Roman citizenship card to demand a higher level of respect (Acts 16:37-39; 22:25-28; 25:10-12). The son that Paul uses in his example has not yet reached the age of his “majority;” he is still considered a minor and does not yet have legal say over his affairs:

As long as the heir is a minor, he has no advantage over the slave. Though legally he owns the entire inheritance, he is subject to tutors and administrators until whatever date the father has set for emancipation. That is the way it is with us: When we were minors, we were just like slaves ordered around by simple instructions (the tutors and administrators of this world), with no say in the conduct of our own lives. Galatians 4:1-3 Message

I am using Eugene Peterson’s Message version of Galatians 4 for clarity; however, most English translations render his ‘simple instructions’ as ‘elemental spirits.’ Peterson’s “simple instructions” is closer to its Greek counterpart — stoicheia. The word literally means “things lined up in a row,” like letters of the alphabet. These instructions are necessary, but as we mature, we transcend them. For Paul, the Mosaic Law is stoicheia, which reveals God’s will for humanity, but it is insufficient to save us or change us. For that, we need a “power greater than ourselves.” For that, we need Christ. So Paul continues:

When the time arrived that was set by God the Father, God sent his Son, born among us of a woman, born under the conditions of the law so that he might redeem those of us who have been kidnapped by the law. Thus we have been set free to experience our rightful heritage. You can tell for sure that you are now fully adopted as his own children because God sent the Spirit of his Son into our lives crying out, “Papa! Father!” Doesn’t that privilege of intimate conversation with God make it plain that you are not a slave, but a child? And if you are a child, you’re also an heir, with complete access to the inheritance. Galatians 4:4-7 Message

With Christ’s coming into the world, Paul is reminding the Galatians that they have reached their “majority.” Their day has come. No longer do they need the constraints of the Law to keep them in line. Christ’s death and resurrection have opened to them a new dimension of human existence. Whereas the Law reveals the way God desires them to live, Christ, by destroying the power sin and death, has freed them to meet God’s desires.

Christ’s gift of freedom is punctuated by restoring their intimate relationship with God. In effect, the communion that Adam and Eve have with God in the Garden, has been reestablished. Humanity’s alienation from God has miraculously ended. This is not some far-off, hoped-for panacea for the Galatian congregation. Immediately after Paul shared the gospel with them and they put their trust in Christ, they began experiencing the Holy Spirit in their individual lives and throughout their congregation. The Spirit has freed them to a have a relationship with God like Christ’s. So they now address God the way he does, ‘Papa! Father!’ (See Mark 14:36)

Knowing that the Galatian fellowship has experienced this staggering demonstration of the Spirit, Paul cannot understand how they have been seduced by opportunistic false teachers to step back and follow the intricate requirements of the Law. In so doing, they are dispensing with the expansive free life of grace they have been experiencing in Christ. Just a bit a earlier in the letter, Paul bluntly challenged his young congregation’s decision to jettison their liberty in the Spirit:

Remaining Free

Paul’s fear is not that the people will respect the Law — he certainly does — but that they will depend on it, which is the same as solely trusting themselves (See Romans 3:31). The Law is instructive, but it has no power to save or change us. While Paul cannot understand how they could abandon grace so easily, he can see why. Human beings in every age default to willpower as a means of grasping for control. In so doing, they end up in a prison of their own making. Recall the wife of the new’s anchor who could not conceive of a life without alcohol. Freedom terrified her.

At one time, every Christian lived inside that prison. Paul did, and it turned him into a vicious bounty hunter and an accessory to murder (See Acts 9:1-2; 7:57-58). Frank and Donna did, too, and it dehumanized them and turned them against their families and friend, and it led to one job loss after another. Then Christ unlocked their prison doors as he did ours.

And Frank is right, we can only stay free by telling others how they, too, can get free.

SOURCES

Comer, John Mark, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become like him, Do as he did, New York: Waterbrook, 2024.

PHOTO CREDITS

Getting Free, compliments of Belinda Fewings, photo taken on Ponte Vecchio Bridge , Florence, Italy

Drinking Alone, photo by Zachary Kadolph, Greensboro, NC

AA Meeting, photo compliments of CNN

Two People Sharing, photo by Priscilla Du Preez, Northern Alberta, Canada

Just passing through

“Clergy are temporary help.” The comment broadsided me. Serving as rector of my first church, I was young, vain, and fairly sure my name would be added to the pantheon of Episcopal all stars. By some miraculous math solely of God’s doing, the East Texas parish was growing faster than any other in the diocese, both in attendance and income, facts which served to bolster my youthful misappropriated conceit.

Regardless of my puerile hubris, the church had suddenly outgrown our facilities, such that I asked for a grant from the diocese to build a larger nursery and Sunday school rooms. The diocesan treasurer drove the ninety miles to our church to close the deal. He no sooner arrived that I began to excitedly share with him our exponential growth percentages and subsequent plans for campus expansion and innovative programming. Thinking he was impressed, I rattled on, until he interrupted me mid-sentence. “Pat, you do know that clergy are temporary help?”

I felt like I’d been slugged in the gut. Here I was regaling a top ecclesiastical official with my array of accomplishments, and all he could do was tell me I was transient help, like a seasonal farm worker. I was indignant, yet sometime later his words came true as if prophesied by Elijah. After five years, I moved on to another ministry six states away. The rector who followed me was dismissed abruptly for sexual misconduct with a staff member. In less than a year’s time, the second rector, a very pastoral, winning clergyman, suddenly left the Episcopal Church to become a Roman Catholic. The third, while he remained longer, eventually left the parish to start an alternative church in the area, thereby splintering the congregation. All the gains made during my tenure were erased like a sand castle on the beach when the tide comes in. The carefully sculpted parapets, towers, barbican, ramparts, and palisades disappear, leaving not a trace.

Any notion I had of some heralded legacy in that far corner of Texas was as flimsy as the cobweb precariously hanging in the far corner of my office. All at once I felt like Shelley’s Ozymandias. In Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias, the 13th Century Pharaoh Ramses, builds a colossal statue in tribute to himself. Its remains are discovered by a traveler in the Sinai desert 400 years later, who shares this observation with the poet, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” stand upright in the desert, but they no longer have a torso or body attached to them. Looking closely, the traveler reads the statue’s inscription on a “lifeless” block of stone:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

The poem then continues when the traveler adds:

“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Shelley, who died at age twenty-nine, reminds readers that our dreams of immortal legacies are fruitless. No matter how many portraits or sculptures are made of our likenesses, no matter how many proclamations or pronouncements are issued to our credit, no matter how much wealth or property we hand down to our heirs…our earth’s debut is temporary. The Psalmist best captures the brevity of our lives:

God turns us back to the dust and say,

‘Go back, O child of earth’…

You sweep us away like a dream;

we fade away suddenly like the grass.

In the morning it is green and flourishes;

in the evening it is dried up and withered. Psalm 90:3, 5-6

The wise man and woman never forget their own mortality. Fantasies of imperishability do not advance but hinder our development as human beings. We really don’t have “all the time in the world,” which may propel us to make enduring deposits of love in others rather than creating lifeless tributes to ourselves.

One passage after another

The brevity of our lives should come as no surprise. After all, a human lifetime is a procession of deaths. We essentially die to one chapter of our lives as we move onto the next. We look with admiration at the one who pushes through adolescence to take on adult responsibilities; whereas, we look with pity at another who is stuck in juvenility.

I have long been drawn to the Hindu understanding of our life passages. The first of the four stages is that of a student, the Brahmacharya Stage, which is a period of formal education, acquiring knowledge, and character building. The second is that of a householder, the Grihastha Stage, where after marriage the individual raises a family, pursues a career, and accrues wealth to support children and the community. Stage three is that of a retiree, or Vanaprastha, a time marked by grandchildren where the individual slows down, pushes away from business and material attachments to focus on spiritual growth. Finally, in the fourth state the individual becomes a renunciant, Sannyasa, where one renounces worldly concerns and enters more and more into contemplation and union with God.

These ancient stages were delineated in India around the 5th Century BC, about the time of the Hebrew Prophet Malachi. They are a reminder from a markedly different culture that our lives do not travel in a straight line. A spiritually healthy human being comes to the end of one stage and allows it to die in order to progress to the next. Writing this on the eve of Mother’s Day, I am reminded of my wife’s counsel to many harried young mothers in the parishes we have served. “When you are raising children you think this stage of your life will go on forever, but trust me, it passes very quickly.” In other words, savor this time when your children’s lives revolve around your own. Rather than being morbidly nostalgic about the transience of the child-rearing years, Kay often goes on to say that the empty nest stage is replete with life in a different way.

All stages of life are temporary. To cling to our children when they are adults inhibits their lives and stifles ours. To amass material possessions instead of holding them lightly and letting them go, is to retain, at most, a false hope of immortality or, at the very least, a shallow definition of ourselves. The temporality of our lives, as well as the succession of brief passages that make up our lives, are not burdens but gifts.

A community of priests

Likewise, realizing I have been “temporary help” in the churches that I have served has been a gift, too. And it has changed how I perceive congregations and transformed how I go about my work. Regarding the first, I have developed a deep humility about all parishes — large and small. In fact, I never walk into a church building that I am not overcome with a sense of the thousands, if not millions, of prayers that have been offered there before I arrived. It is a priestly role to offer prayers in the congregation. Therefore, the rector or pastor is never the sole priest leading a gathering of congregants. No, everyone in the room who has put their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ is a full-fledged priest of God.

Of all people, that all-business treasurer of the diocese led me to open the Bible to see that I was not a super priest leading a collection of underlings. Not hardly. I was just one priest amongst many. From start to finish the Scripture witnesses to this truth. At Sinai, where Israel is transformed from a rabble into Israel, God declares that they will be to Him ‘a kingdom of priests and a Holy nation’ (Exodus 19:6). In Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he states that believers in Christ offer praise and good works, such that their lives become ‘a living sacrifice’ (Romans 12:1). The Letter to the Hebrews declares believers in Christ no longer need an intermediary, for ‘they can boldly approach the throne of grace to receive forgiveness’ (Hebrews 4:15-16). In 1 Peter, believers are described as ‘living stones being built into a spiritual house and offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God’ (1 Peter 2:5). Peter goes on to say, those in the church have become what God envisioned at Sinai, ‘a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession’ (1 Peter 2:9). Punctuating this fact, the final book of the Bible, Revelation, twice proclaims that Jesus has made his followers ‘kings and priests to God’ (Revelation 1:6 & 5:10).

Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, observes that when he is sitting in a church congregation anywhere in the world and he sees the people file back to their seats from receiving Holy Communion, its as if each one has been set afire. The archbishop perceives them the way Israel saw Moses when he descended Mt. Sinai after speaking with the LORD. His face was so bright that it hurt the eyes of the beholder. Between the Bible’s testimony and the archbishop’s, I have come to view parish congregations in a whole new “light.” Those sitting in the pews, standing to sing, kneeling shoulder to shoulder at the communion rail are a radiant assembly of God’s priests, of which I am but one.

The Episcopal Church supports the view of the priesthood of all believers. For me, the most stirring moment during Holy Baptism occurs right after water is poured on the head of the individual. The presider then directs, “Let us welcome the newly baptized.” To which the congregation responds:

The statement is unambiguous. The newly baptized is being welcomed into the church, “the household of God,” whose members are — everyone of them — priests.

While this Biblical view may be shared in varying degrees by the 70 million Anglicans worldwide, historically Episcopal congregations in the U.S. have had to exercise their priesthood. When Church of England parishes were being established in the American colonies beginning in 1607, the English authorities would not give them any funding, nor would they allow any bishops to oversee the congregations. Fending for themselves, they developed a democratically elected vestry system to govern and fund the infant church. The leadership for the churches did not come from the outside but emerged from within the people. Furthermore, because all clergy that served the colonies had to be trained and ordained in England, there was a chronic shortage of pastors, especially during the 17th century. The laity regularly led Morning and Evening Prayer in the churches, having to exercise their priestly roles for years at a time.

Once my understanding of the congregations I served changed, so did the understanding of my own role: I was one priest serving amongst many others. My renewed understanding was liberating. The proclamation of the Gospel, the spiritual formation of souls, the pastoral care of the hurting, the ministry to the poor, even the leading of worship — is not my work, but ours. My job as an ordained person and chosen presbyter is to remind the people in the pews that they are the priests of God and to inspire and train them to undertake their role. In most congregations this takes a lot of getting used to, for most Christians today perceive their part in the church as a passive one, certainly not that of a priest. That view is also convenient because it foists all the spiritual and pastoral responsibility on the professional clergy. This is a deadly recipe, leaving congregations to repeatedly await the arrival of their next Moses and then watch their vitality and numbers decline when a beloved pastor leaves or retires.

My fellow clergy, even some of my closest friends, almost groan anytime I utter the phrase ‘priesthood of all believers.’ A few even seem to have their eyes roll back in their heads. I continue to beat this drum because I do not know how the church will ever get healthy until we realize we are priests and undertake the attendant role and responsibilities. Some clergy, I imagine, worry that if the people in the pews come to know they are priests then the clergy’s special role will be diminished. Not at all. The priestly people making up a congregation need a lifetime of training and forming. Every parish becomes its own seminary. The role of the pastor is not lessened but magnified…but with just one important caveat, the clergy work amongst equals — not subordinates.

Accordingly, I shed my titles, i.e. “Father,” “Doctor,” “Reverend,” and so on, some fifteen years ago. I am not ashamed of the titles. I earned them and clung to them for a long time. Perhaps I needed the titles during that earlier passage of my life. A sudden awareness took hold of me. If all believers in Christ are made “priests” at our baptism, then shouldn’t I, too, go by my baptismal name, “Patrick?” I suppose I was influenced by the late Joseph Bernadin, who upon being named the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago in 1982 and Cardinal in 1983, routinely introduced himself to congregations by invoking a line from Genesis, “I am Joseph, your brother.” On public busses and trains in Chicago, which he continued to use, he would tell other riders, “Just call me Joe.”

Bernadin seemed to have a premonition about the temporary nature of his life. At age 68, only thirteen years after his elevation to cardinal, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When the cancer metastasized to his liver, he turned over the leadership of the archdiocese to an auxiliary bishop and wholly devoted himself to ministering to other cancer patients at Loyola Hospital in Chicago. He died as he lived, holding lightly the vaunted titles bestowed on him, while holding closely those entrusted to his care, knowing full well that love alone endures.

Temporary measures

Pointing out the difference between what endures as opposed to what is temporary is an overriding concern of Paul’s. In Galatians, as well as in his later Letter to the Romans, the apostle points out how the Mosaic Law’s role as a temporary measure meant to lead to the life of faith. Never was it conceived by God to be an end in itself, but rather the Law was to introduce the more expansive life of faith as witnessed in the life of Abraham. Paul, in fact, cites that the Law was given at Sinai 430 years after God had already made His covenant with Abraham based on the patriarch’s faith (Galatians 3:17). The Law, therefore, was not given by God to surpass his promises first made to Abraham but to support them.

Here it is important that we step back and consider why the covenant made with Abraham is so enduring and liberating. First, we should recognize the context of Abraham’s call from God. The call follows two dark stories in Genesis: the Great Flood (Genesis 6-9) and the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11). In the first, God destroys the earth over his disgust with humanity, and in the second, God separates and disperses humanity across the globe because of their arrogance and idolatry. The downward spiral from Eden and Cain had never been arrested. Unexpectedly in Genesis 12, just after God has dispersed human beings into the far corners of earth, He calls Abraham to leave his ancestral homeland at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in present day Iraq and ‘travel to a land that I will show you…and I will make of you a great nation’ (Genesis 12:1).

Although he is seventy-five years old, Abraham does as God commanded him and leads his family on the 1,200 mile journey. Arriving in Canaan, their destination, it is not long before Abraham bewails to God that he cannot ‘become a great nation’ when he and his wife Sarah have no child and are well beyond childbearing years. It is the dead of night when Abraham makes his lament, and God, in turn, invites Abraham to step outside his tent and count the stars in the sky if he can. God then says, “So shall your descendants be” (Genesis 15:5). The Scripture then records Abraham’s concise response, ‘Abraham believed the LORD and the LORD credited it to him as righteous’ (Genesis 15:6).

In other words, Abraham was in a relationship with God because he trusted Him. This, after all, is what God had desired from the beginning of His creation — a trusting relationship with humanity. Looked at against the backdrop of the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, and Adam’s and Eve’s duplicity in the garden, Abraham is God’s restart of humanity. While not perfect, Abraham is the new man who demonstrates the faith God relishes in us. That is why Genesis 15:6 — ‘the righteous shall live by faith’ — is echoed throughout the Bible — Habakkuk 2:4; Galatians 3:11; Romans 1:17, and Hebrews 10:38.

So, Abraham’s demonstrated faith in God’s promises is the gold standard of the Bible — and, indeed, of Israel. The Law given at Sinai is subordinate to the life of faith. In fact, the Law’s purpose is to reveal how poorly we often are at living in fidelity and trust with the LORD. To this, Paul throws out a rhetorical question and its answer: ‘Is the Law then opposed to the promises of God? Certainly not!’ (Galatians 3:21a). Yet then just as quickly Paul makes it clear that the Law cannot, in any way, confer life with God the way that faith can (Galatians 3:21b).

If that’s the case, why did God roll out the Law in the first place? Paul tells us that ‘the Law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith’ (Galatians 3:24). The apostle’s imagery is particularly effective. The ‘disciplinarian’ Paul has in mind was known in the 1st century Roman world as a paidagōgos, a senior household slave who watched over the young son of a prosperous household to keep him out of trouble. The oversight of the paidagōgos would continue until the son entered adulthood and came into his promised inheritance.

Paul compares the Law to a paidagōgos. It temporarily served as humanity’s guide until the appearance of Jesus Christ. To that point, Jesus declares, ‘Something greater than the temple is here’ (Matthew 12:6). He is saying that he embodies the immense grace and love of God that goes far beyond the dictates of the Law and the cycle of temple sacrifices.

In all fairness, the ancient Hebrew prophets and poets perceived the Law, not as a list of 613 demands, but as the will of God to be taken to heart. Psalm 1 declares for instance: ‘He who delights in the Law shall become like a tree planted by springs of water bearing fruit in due season’ (Psalm 1:3). No doubt Jesus had this psalm in mind when he spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well: ‘I will cause a spring welling up into eternal life to rise up within you’ (John 4:14).

I would hasten to add that most of us need the Law until our spiritual outlook matures to see the expansiveness of our life in Christ. Paul lyrically describes this necessary spiritual transition in his most quoted piece of writing; ‘When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish ways’ (1 Corinthians 13:11). When we are young or perhaps new in our Christian faith, we need the basics in black and white. But our life in Christ is so much richer than a series of do’s and don’ts. When Christ calls us, we are like Abraham with a new world and new life unexpectedly opening up before us. We are suddenly called out on a lifelong journey where we are shaped by the increasing knowledge of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Like Abraham we have the faith that there is always more to come. That is a far cry from merely trying to live between the lines or checking the right boxes for a ticket to heaven after death.

No indeed, Paul wants us to know that a largess of life, such that we never imagined, is available to those who grow beyond the temporality of the Law to undertake the eternal faith of Abraham. In his Letter to the Ephesians, Paul speaks of ‘becoming mature and attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ’ (Ephesians 4:13). When that happens, our vision expands with our spirit. No longer do we see lines separating people of faith, regardless of their origin, flavor of worship, race, nationality, or family composition:

‘For now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to the black and white world dictated by a disciplinarian, a paidagōgos, for in Christ we are all children of God through faith. As many of us who have ben baptized into Christ have now been clothed with Christ. So, there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of us are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs to the promise he long ago received.’ Galatians 3:25-29

PHOTO CREDITS

Temp Wanted Sign, compliments of Linkedin

Ozymandias, compliments of Susan English

Tongues of Fire, compliments of Kevin Cardenart

Joseph Bernadin, compliments of Wikipedia

No longer divided, compliments of Teluga Christian Fellowship of Colorado

Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood

The hinge point in this novel, though subtle, occurs during a routine errand in the car. The driver, the unnamed narrator of the novel, whimsically comments to the passenger, Sister Helen Perry, a well-known activist nun: “Once while driving this road I saw a man suddenly jump into a sewer at the side of the road over there, and I did not see him reemerge.” Rather than take the narrator’s observation as a passing curiosity, Sister Perry responds, “The man is you, isn’t it? You are trying to disappear.”

The narrator is in her mid-fifties when she leaves her life in Sydney, which includes her work as well as her marriage, to move to a remote monastic community of Anglican nuns in the dry plains of New South Wales. Her exodus is magnified by the fact that she is not a believer and does not join the order as a nun. Instead, she lives there as a guest, seeking refuge from a world she finds increasingly overwhelming and, as she says, “thin.”

Sister Perry, though often causticly judgmental in her speech and actions, is right about the narrator. The narrator does not object but realizes that she has tried to disappear from the world, while Perry has chosen to act in it. Their terse interchange brings back an earlier scene in the book where the narrator cuts off all of her email and even goes so far as to refuse to open any mail sent to her. It is starkly ironic that the narrator has spent her adulthood as a front-line climate activist yet now seems not even to want to be reminded of the world she once worked so hard to save.

The narrator’s escape from the world is not possible. She no sooner settles into her newly claimed quietude than the convent is overrun with a mice infestation of truly Biblical proportions. The rodents eat through all the food containers, they are in the walls, in the chapel, and even in the bedrooms running over the nun’s bodies and through their hair at night. Each day the narrator and the nuns shovel mounds of dead mice they have trapped or poisoned over the garden fence. They refer to the infestation as “the plague.”

Secondly, the world has crashed into the sequestered convent through the death of one of the community’s younger sisters. The sister left the secluded convent for the mean streets of Bangkok to rescue trafficked and abused women and girls. To stop the young nun, a demented priest savagely murders her. Now her remains have been brought back to the convent for burial. As her body lies in state awaiting burial, the narrator and the nuns cannot escape the violence of the world that has crashed headlong into their sanctuary.

Thirdly, the young nun’s body is escorted by the famous activist nun, Helen Perry. This further complicates the narrator’s desire to escape the world because she and Perry grew up together in the community outside of the convent. They were not friends. Quite the contrary, the narrator was guilty of publicly demeaning young Perry.

Gathering all of her courage, the narrator attempts to make amends with Perry, but she will not let the narrator off the hook for her past reprehensible behavior so easily. Perry echoes the staunch conviction of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, there is “no cheap grace.” Herein lies the novel’s key lesson: substantive spiritual answers only come when an individual looks honestly at her own history and her part in the world’s brokenness. Like Israel leaving Egypt, the plagues follow us into the wilderness until we turn around and confront them.

This America: The Case for the Nation, by Jill Lepore

Far from touting globalism in her short volume, This America, Jill Lepore argues that a clear understanding of the United States’ distinctive storied and tortured past is essential to defend our democracy at this time. Our country is unique in the parade of nations. Unlike most others, the United States was not formed by a shared ethnicity. Instead, the United States was shaped by shared universal principles that are enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. At the same time, our nation’s history is fraught by the long shadow of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans — horrific acts that violate the creeds our founding fathers signed in 1776 and 1787.

To illustrate how the United States’ betrayal of our fundamental principles lives on, Lepore reveals the sharp distinction between patriotism and nationalism. She declares that patriotism in rooted in love of country, shared principles and values, as well as a commitment to civic well-being. Nationalism, on the other hand, she describes as exclusionary, harnessed to identity politics, and exaggerated fear of ethnic groups and races. Faced with the tension between these two, Lepore calls for a “new Americanism,” which embraces equality, citizenship, and the rule of law. These qualities stand in direct opposition to exclusion and hatred that we see erupting around us.

To that end, Lepore implores readers to refuse to cede love of country to the illiberal nationalist forces arising in the United States. She reminds readers that America has been a beacon to seekers the world over. Today, our nation’s light is subdued by more exclusionary definitions of our republic. A recent example of a more restrictive definition was voiced by J.D. Vance on July 25, 2025, when he addressed the Clermont Institute in San Diego, CA. In his speech he insisted that our country is rooted in “blood and soil” as opposed to the shared beliefs proceeding from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the lessons of our 250 years of history. He focused on American identity being fixed in “a homeland” where families have been buried for generations, asserting that this “heritage” is what people fight for and not for principles inscribed in our nation’s founding documents. The vice president would lead us to believe that the Declaration, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are worthy of historical displays but little else.

Throughout the 138 page text, Lepore highlights the words and actions of Benjamin Franklin — “We have a republic, if you can keep it;” Abraham Lincoln —“A house divided against itself cannot stand;” Franklin D. Roosevelt — “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself;” and Ronald Reagan, who borrowed Jesus’ words to declare — “America is a shining city upon a hill.”

Perhaps it is best to end with the words of Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, inspired the American colonies to demand independence: “A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of the new world is at hand.” If we are still stirred by Paine’s words, a “new Americanism” is at hand, but it must be one that is founded on the bedrock of our nation’s history and creeds.

Theo of Golden, by Allen Levi

In his first novel, Allen Levi has written an enduring meditation on the sacredness of human life. The book’s plot is simple. An elderly man, Theo Decker, hailing from New York City, mysteriously appears in the small city of Golden, Georgia. As he gets to know the people in Golden, he asks that he be addressed simply as “Theo,” nothing more. He never reveals his last name to the citizens there. He eventually tells his closest friend in Golden that he was born in a small village in Portugal’s wine country. No other biographical information is forthcoming.

On his first morning in Golden, Theo enters a coffee shop where he spies ninety-two framed pencil drawings hung in rows across the walls of the shop. The drawings depict the faces of residents of the city from all walks of life. Each drawing is as unique as the person it captures. Enamored by the artistry and the human qualities each reveals, Theo sets out to buy each drawing and present it to the resident it depicts. Not a small task for an 86-year-old man. The delivery of the drawings drives the plot. The encounters unveil the unique stories, strengths, talents, and loves of the residents of that small southern city. At the same time, the individuals receiving the drawings experience small, yet transformative life changes due to Theo’s generosity and unexpected interest in them.

Throughout the novel, Theo guards his past like a vault. Nevertheless, the reader suspects he carries within him a great amount of pain and possibly regret. Neither saint nor sinner. Theo demonstrates what it means to live each day fully alive, while carrying the pain of the past. The themes of the novel are gradually portrayed through his succession of encounters with the citizens of the town. The book’s main theme, the sacredness of life, is accompanied by themes of memory, regret, friendship, and redemptive grace.

Levi’s novel picks up speed at the end, when Theo’s biography suddenly comes to light. His life before Golden is important, but not nearly as much as his life at the end. Theo is a prophet calling the people of Golden to live every day in love with life and the people God puts in their path. As Theo declares, “Most people miss the best parts of life because they are looking for something bigger.” Or, as he quips at another time, “The point isn’t to be remembered—the point is to have noticed.”

Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy

When a strange woman is washed up on the shore of remote Shearwater Island, unconscious and badly wounded, the dark secrets of the island begin to come to light. The strange history of the Salt family living there and the imminent destruction of the world’s environment rise painfully to the surface.

Shearwater Island, located between Antarctica and Tasmania and five day’s sail from the Australian mainland, is the home of United Nations Seed Repository. The future of the world’s biodiversity is held in vaults there. But now the island and the seeds are rapidly being covered by a rising ocean. The Salt family have been deserted by the scientists who have fled the rising waters. Stoic, resourceful, and resilient, the four family members harbor a frightful secret. What the Salts did not foresee is the increasing destruction across the planet wrought by the melting arctic permafrost, which will dislodge them from their sanctuary and force their secret into the open.

Dom Salt, the father of the family, retreated to Shearwater eight years after the death of his wife. Raff, his oldest child at eighteen, deals with bouts of intense rage and loneliness. Fen, Dom’s seventeen-year-old daughter, refuses to sleep in the house, as she has become more at home amongst the sea lions and penguins than with people. Orly, now nine, has a near genius IQ and is enamored with ecosystems, especially the diversity of plant life.

Rowan, the mysterious woman who washes up on the shore, is in pursuit of her missing husband, Hank Jones, the lead scientist on Shearwater. The Salts know more than they are saying. Yet as the dark revelations about Hank begin to spill out of them, seawater breaks into the seed vault. A rescue ship is on the way, but the stormy seas delay the five’s rescue and the retrieval of the seeds.

Much like McCogaghy’s earlier novel, Migrations, this is an eco-drama that will keep the reader turning pages. At the same time, her character development is superb. The psychological struggles of each one of the five are wholly believable and give the novel an interior quality in the midst of the global catastrophe raging around them.

On Desperate Ground, by Hampton Sides

Some kind soul, for the life of me I can’t remember who, handed me this book and said, “If you read this, you will understand your dad better.” I acknowledged the unexpected gift and quickly shelved the book, unprepared to reenter my father’s war and his subsequent war with us, his family. My dad fought in the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir during the worst months of the Korean Conflict. Until he died, he never left that frozen ground littered with slaughter. That is why his wife and four children could not live with him. He could not live with himself without repeated doses of bourbon. The first dose was administered at 8 AM each morning with a chaser of cherry Kool Aid. No matter how often and how much he drank, it was never enough to quell the impenetrable darkness exploding from within him.

When I did gather the courage to read the book, my blinders were removed. I stepped onto that sub-zero battlefield where my 17 year-old dad faced the onslaught of thousands of Chinese soldiers attacking his position in one wave after another. He survived the relentless seventeen days of battle, but his spirit left him. I now understand why.

Early in this masterly written account, I learned why the only word we were categorically forbidden to say aloud in our home was “McArthur.” A curse word or a racial epithet would get our ears boxed or a swift swat on the bottom. Mention “McArthur” and your pants were coming down and Dad’s belt was coming out. Why? General Douglas McArthur’s genius was eclipsed by his vanity at Chosin. His unconventional island-hopping strategy to defeat the Japanese in WWII’s Pacific Theater, as well as his masterful, albeit unexpected, move to land troops at Inchon at the beginning of the Korean Conflict are laudatory. Nevertheless, at Chosin, McArthur refused to face the indisputable fact that Mao Tse-Tung would cross the border to attack the Marines and other United Nations’ forces. In all, 120,000 Chinese regulars streamed out of China into North Korea, outnumbering U.S. troops and their allies by four to one.

During the days of battle, the temperature plummeted to -20° to -37° Fahrenheit. The extreme, arctic-like conditions caused more casualties from frostbite and other non-combat injuries than enemy fire in some units. The sub-zero temperatures caused oil to freeze in weapons and batteries to be instantly depleted in radios, drastically diminishing the Marines ability to defend their positions. My dad was nearly crippled from the frostbite he endured. For that and for the demons that inhabited him, my dad blamed McArthur. Hampton Sides agrees. McArthur, riding the waves of fame, ignored the Chinese threat and did not insist on the logistical support needed in such a harsh environment. As a matter of fact, McArthur did not spend a single night in Korea during the entire conflict.

On the other hand, great leaders do emerge at Chosin. While the Marines and their U.N. allies suffered 12,000 casualties, 20,000 were able to escape the encirclement of the massive Chinese army. This heroic rescue is mainly due to the calm, steady leadership of Major General Oliver Prince Smith, Commander of the 1st Marine Division. He opened the way for the “Frozen Chosen” to make the 70-mile march to the safety of the seaport at Hungnam. Once when asked about this massive retreat, he answered, “We’re not retreating but advancing in a different direction.”

General Smith’s most colorful subordinate was Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller, who commanded the 1st Marine Regiment. Once he realized his units were completely surrounded, his men were surprised when a grin erupted on his face. “Now they can’t escape us. We can fire in every direction.”

Sides spends many pages in the book extolling the selfless deeds of enlisted men. One of my favorites was Private Hector Cafferata from New York. As the Chinese advanced on his position, most of his fellow Marines were killed or fighting while terribly injured. Trying to defend their position, Cafferata has to both fire his rifle and, at the same time, deflect a fusillade of grenades. In his own words, “For the rest of the night I was batting hand grenades away with my entrenching tool (a small foldable shovel) while firing my rifle at them. I must have whacked a dozen grenades that night with my tool. And you know what? I was the world’s worst baseball player.”

In 1952, Cafferata received news that he had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and was asked to come to the White House to receive his medal. Instead of rejoicing, Cafferata asked if they could just send him the medal through the mail. Then he added these words so indicative of the heroes of Chosin Reservor:

‘I’m not a hero. I hate heroes. And I hate medals. There’s plenty of guys who did more than me. They didn’t get recognized. All they got was dead.”

Syria’s Secret Library: Reading and Redemption in a Town Under Siege, By Mike Thomson

I cannot recall a book, no matter how entertaining, that combined my concern for God’s oppressed people with my love of reading. Also, the book dispelled notions I had long held about people of a vastly foreign culture who practice a very different religion from mine. For that reason and others, Syria’s Secret Library, by the British foreign correspondent Mike Thompson, should be required reading for all of us who are sickened by the anti-intellectual, divisive, and cruel world in which we now life.

The book records the heroic efforts of three college-aged men, Anas, Abdul, and Basit, and one young woman, Sara, who establish a library in their besieged city of Daraya, situated about five miles southwest of Damascus. In due time, they choose Amjad, a mere fourteen year-old with an all-consuming passion for books and learning, to serve as the Head Librarian.

Starting a library in the midst of such terror and destruction was a miraculous act of courage. Beginning in 2011, Bashar al-Assad’s government forces surrounded the town and subjected it to relentless bombing, sniper fire, and starvation. The brutal siege lasted four years. The residents who remained in the city lived among ruins, with scarce food, medicine, and electricity. While most of Daraya’s 80,000 residents fled the area, the five established a secret library in the basement of a bombed out building — eventually collecting 10,000 volumes to serve the 8,000 beleaguered residents who remained.

With their schools and public library decimated by the government’s bombardment, the three college-aged men daily risked death by stealthily going through the crumbling remains of residences and offices to rescue books that had been left by those escaping the city. Often they would have to make the excursions at night to avoid deadly sniper fire. Every book was carefully annotated with the address of the residence or business where it had been found, so that one day — when Daraya was safe again — the books would be returned to their owners. Surveying the gray, totally decimated city, the boys’ act of annotating the books was one of miraculous hope that one day their neighbors would return.

The library was kept secret so it would not become a target of the Assad regime. Its location was spread amongst the residents solely by word of mouth. Inside this quiet refuge, shelves lined the walls with novels, philosophy, history, religious works, poetry, and textbooks. Books on Christianity and Judaism were set alongside books on Islam. Even books on marital love-making were available, but these were placed on the top shelves! Abdul, the most voracious reader of the quintet, checked out the Arabic translation of Hamlet, which enchanted him. While assisting in the hospital, he would spend every break absorbed in Shakespeare’s 1599 classic. For so many of the oppressed residents of Daraya, the library became far more than a collection of books—it was a sanctuary from war and a symbol of intellectual freedom in a country long marked by censorship. Anas, one of the library’s founders, boldly declared:

‘We don’t ban any books. We are open to those on all subjects. We believe that by excluding books we do not agree with, we would just be helping to raise ignorance.’

During the worst of al-Assad’s onslaught against Daraya, the library became a lecture hall and space for continuing education. Inspired by the young men’s clandestine library, two young women started a primary school to teach the remaining children in Daraya, numbering around seventy between the ages of five and twelve. Often they would have to move the classes into a dark basement during bombardments, but they rarely cancelled school. No student died at school during those four perilous years, but twenty of them perished in their own homes from artillery bombardments and sniper fire. Sara, one of the intrepid teachers confessed why she and her associate risked so much to teach the menagerie of students who hailed from Muslim, Alawite, and Christian families:

‘I don’t want this new generation to have their intellectual development held back the way ours was. So I try to teach them to think for themselves and express their own emotions. Since the uprising this is much easier. We are now free to protest against the regime here in Daraya.’

Eventually, Assad’s forces overwhelmed the rebel fighters. At the end, only 700 amateur fighters defended the city. With only handheld weapons, they withstood daily artillery barrages and aerial strikes for four long years. Finally surrounded, the rebels surrendered and all those remaining in Daraya were given the choice to either go to a safe area in Damascus controlled by Assad or go to the city of Idlib, 200 miles north of Daraya, which was still controlled by rebels. All of the “librarians” chose Idlib, except for Amjad, who, at age fourteen, was forced to go with his parents to Damascus.

When the librarians arrive in Idlib, they discovered there was no library in the city and the books for sale are far too expensive. Eventually, two of them started a mobile library to serve all of Idlib. But it is the memory of the Secret Library that inspired them to believe in a different future for Syria, one dominated by free ideas and books in place of bombs. Abdul, the most poetic of the five, described the influence of the library in this way:

‘The library gave birth to a movement of knowledge and learning, and enabled us to explore new things. It was also our sanctuary and our minaret. It guided us through all the horrors, lit the path we should take and inspired us to carry on. It taught us that a fighter without knowledge is not a hero, but a gangster. The library’s many books were fuel for our souls. They gave us back our lives. While bombs rained down from the skies, we discussed new ideas, learned from the past, and planned for the future. The library united us all. It was an essential part of Daraya, and what it stood for. Looking back, the Secret Library was not only our savior, it was our biggest weapon against the regime.’

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, by C.S. Lewis

During the same time Lewis was writing the seven volumes of the Chronicles of Narnia, he took a break and wrote this spiritual autobiography. The book, unlike the Chronicles and The Screwtape Letters, which he wrote eight years before Chronicles, is not playful, as one would expect, but mainly intellectual and metaphysical in content. Even so, Lewis’s memoir is a beautifully written, starkly honest account of his reluctant conversion to Christ when attending Oxford in the 1930s. Readers who are drawn to literature will find the book particularly satisfactory, as Lewis records his voluminous readings in the classics, English and American novels, histories, mythologies, and poetry.

To that point, the book’s title is taken from the beginning line of one of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) sonnets: “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind, I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom…” Lewis identifies with the English Romantic poet. Throughout his young life, Lewis seeks that encounter that lies beyond human experience. He names that spiritual encounter “joy.”

Lewis’s lifestory begins at his Belfast home, which he recounts as nearly idyllic. He has his books, hours to enter into his imagination, and a willing playmate in his brother Warren, whom he will call “Warnie” in later years. His mother dies when he is nine years-old, leaving the two boys with a devoted but emotionally distant father. Nevertheless, Lewis experiences his first moments of “piercing joy” playing in his brother’s carefully constructed toy garden, which to Lewis, reflected Paradise. At the same time, he began reading Norse mythology and The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, and Paul Revere’s Ride by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1887-1882). The books and poems captivated Lewis during his early primary school years.

With his mother’s death, however, Lewis is sent away to England to boarding school. He entered the Wynyard School at age nine. The tiny school was run by a cruel and unstable headmaster known as “Oldie” to the boys, who metes out endless corporal punishment on the small group of boys entrusted to his care. Utterly miserable, Lewis begins to lose his connection with joy and disregard Christianity as a hollow, dutiful religion.

Later, Lewis is sent first to Campbell School, in East Belfast in Northern Ireland and a year later to the Malvern School, in the West Midlands of England. Once again, the young Lewis would cross the Irish Sea. Both Schools were better experiences for him than Wynyard, for he was challenged academically and aesthetically. For the first time, he developed friendships outside of his relationship with his brother. Nevertheless, he continued to drift away from a life of faith. (I will caution the reader here that Lewis candidly discusses the adolescent sexuality that was practiced amongst the boys. Lewis, for his part, seems unfazed by these prurient discoveries, which held no interest for him.)

At age sixteen, finally persuading his father that he detested boarding school life, Lewis was sent to live and study in Surrey, England at the home of William T. Kirkpatrick, known as the “Great Knock.” This was a period of tremendous intellectual growth for Lewis and where he was prepared to enter Oxford. In the mornings and early afternoons, he translated Greek and Latin under the “Great Knock’s” able tutelage. In the early evenings, he translated French with Mrs. Kirkpatrick. After a year or so, Lewis began actually thinking in these languages, which led him to deftly translate German and Italian, as well. He even read French novels for entertainment during his leisure time. The “Great Knock” was an avowed atheist, which had a significant impact on Lewis who idolized him.

In 1917, at age eighteen, Lewis’s plans for Oxford were derailed and he was drawn into the horrors of WWI. He reported to the trenches in France that same year. Leading his platoon into battle in 1918, a British artillery round fell short of its target severely wounding Lewis with shrapnel to his chest, his legs, and one piece pierced his lungs. The large piece of shrapnel in his chest could not be surgically removed until 1944. He had suffered with it for twenty-five years.

When Lewis entered Oxford at age twenty, his intellectual defenses against faith in God began to crumble. His study of philosophy, especially Idealism — that reality consists of ideas, consciousness, or spirit — moved him away from the “Great Knock’s” strident Materialism — the philosophy that only matter exists and that there is no supernatural. Also during this season of life, he was drawn to G.K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man (1925) and George McDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women. Both moved him to conversion, about which he confessed, “I was the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.”

Surprised by Joy is not Lewis’s most accessible book, but it may be among his most important. The memoir reveals one of the twentieth century’s greatest minds being slowly and unwillingly persuaded that the thing he most resisted was true. He was dragged into faith by logic and evidence, fighting the whole way. This makes the conversion all the more compelling. Once Lewis surrenders, he discovers the joy he had been seeking since before his grade school years. Modern Americans, with all of our pseudo-intellectual resistance, will find a willing ally in Lewis, who does not come to Christ easily or thoughtlessly.

PHOTO CREDITS

Back to School, photo by Eliott Reyna, Dallas, TX, USA

Immigrants from 20 Countries Say the Pledge of Allegiance before becoming United States Citizens, photo compliments of The Daily Breeze, Torrence, CA, USA

Marine at Battle of Chosin Reservoir, photo compliments of Reddit

Hamlet, Arabic Edition, photo compliments of Amazon

WOE IS…MOTHER

Thanksgiving 1969 was my first visit home from boarding school. Arriving at St. Andrew’s atop the Tennessee Cumberland Plateau in mid-August, I had run through the expected bouts of homesickness along with all the freshmen boys crammed into St. Martin’s dormitory. So, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, when the Greyhound dropped me off at 19th Street North in the thick of downtown Birmingham I was ready to sprint up Red Mountain towards the towering iron statue of Vulcan to see my mother and three siblings. Admitting as much, even now I am ashamed of the silo of woes I fired upon my mother after our initial embrace that day.

The problem was that Paul Ehrlich had taken up residence in my fifteen year-old brain. The year before I entered St. Andrew’s, Ehrlich published his signature book The Population Bomb. The book turned out to be all the rage for Boomers in the late 1960’s, eventually selling 3 million copies. My earth science teacher, with his bell-bottom trousers and mutton sideburns, was quite taken by Ehrlich’s book and assigned the text on the first day of class. At only 240 pages, it was a fairly easy read, even for goofy freshmen boys. On the other hand, Ehrlich’s predictions were nightmarish, so much so that I couldn’t put it down and afterwards could not eradicate his prophecies from my head. Possessed by the dark forces conspiring against planet Earth, I let loose a cannonade of Ehrlich’s auguries to Mother even before I unpacked my suitcase.

Ehrlich’s predictions were apocalyptic. He was convinced humanity was already in a death spiral. His main thesis was that human population had already exceeded the planet’s capacity, and its estimated exponential growth was leading us to a worldwide catastrophe. Ehrlich described the earth’s demise in vivid, petrifying detail. I was transfixed by the horror of it all as if reading a Stephen King novel. Today’s posturing politicians pulling mildly sexual novels from high school library shelves look inanely provincial when considering freshmen boys entrusted with Ehrlich’s dynamite.

The overpopulation explosion, Ehrlich explained, would lead to mass famine beginning as early as the next decade. Asia, Africa, and Latin America would be the first to succumb. Food, water, land, and raw materials would be depleted faster than they could be replenished. Surging population would lead to mass habitat destruction and mushrooming pollution, which, in turn, would cause a worldwide ecological collapse. Inevitably, scarcity would lead to societal breakdown resulting in wars and revolutions. Ehrlich became the international prophet of doom after his visit to Delhi, India in the mid-1960s. On a “stinking hot taxi ride” through the city he experienced his “emotional realization” of the population explosion. (Kegan, Merchant, The Conversation)

I scarcely took a breath as I spewed out Ehrlich’s doomsday predictions at my mom. To her credit, she listened attentively. Nevertheless, the thought must have crossed her mind that she sent child off to school only for him to return as a mix between Chicken Little and the Prophet Jeremiah.

‘The reports of humanity’s death are greatly exaggerated.’

Paul Ehrlich died last month at the age of 93. For a man who was trained in Lepidoptera, the study of butterflies, his epochal forecasts took flight. The problem for that terrified high school freshman and for millions of others, it seems, is that he was almost entirely wrong. But, as Kevin Williamson, longtime correspondent and editor for National Review, recently wrote in The Dispatch, Ehrlich loved to hug the limelight. So, at times, his unsupported predictions were farcical. Williamson repeats Ehrlich’s madcap prognosis for fat people: “The day may come when the obese people of the world must give up diets, since metabolizing their fat deposits will lead to DDT poisoning.”

What’s not so funny is the population decline that Ehrlich encouraged. In the aftermath of Ehrlich’s dire warnings coupled with significant societal changes, the United States, Europe — especially Eastern Europe, Japan, South Korea, and several of the island nations have experienced significant birthrate declines. Since 2000, Ukraine’s population, for multiple reasons, is down 33%. The most frightening ramifications of The Population Bomb was experienced in China’s police state from 1982-1984, where Williamson reports the One Child policy resulted in as many as a 100 million forced abortions. (Williamson, Dispatch)

‘It’s no so bad being green.’

The one resource Ehrlich grossly underestimated was human ingenuity. His contemporary, the American agronomist Norman Borlaug (1914-2009) reset human history with his Green Revolution. Through his research and initiatives, grain yields in Mexico have increased by 250% since 1970. Between 1965 and 1972, India’s wheat productions doubled. Rice yields across Asia are up nearly 300%. Disease resistant seeds, synthetic fertilizers, more efficient pesticides, and scientific crop breeding changed the landscape of farmlands around the world. Without Borlaug’s Green Revolution, wheat prices today would be abut 150% higher and rice prices around 125%. In contrast to Ehrlich’s prophecies of doom, Borlaug is credited with an ingenious, optimistic vision that saved a billion lives worldwide. For that, he won the Nobel Prize in 1970. (Pingali, National Academy Of Sciences)

If my bell-bottomed, sideburned earth science teacher had bothered to look into Ehrlich’s hypotheses a bit deeper, he would have discovered that his celebrity doomsayer was mostly regurgitating theories from 170 years before. My 18th century colleague in the Anglican ministry, Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) concluded that the growth of the global population would consistently outgrow the power of the earth to produce enough food to feed them. His 1798 publication, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, was widely circulated and was reviled by as many as it convinced. In typical Enlightenment fashion, Malthus attempted to prove his theory using mathematical calculations, stating that whereas food supply increases at an arithmetical rate — 2, 4, 6, 8 — population increases at a geometric rate — 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. (Malthus Population, Environmental History)

While his science raised eyebrows, the recommendations that resulted from his work became known as his “Dismal Theory.” Some of his proposals were reasonable, for example that couples should marry later, use contraceptives, and some families should emigrate to lessen the strain on food supplies in more densely populated areas.

His more “dismal” recommendations were derived from his efforts to discontinue England’s “Poor Laws,” which provided public relief in the form of food assistance, shelter, and medical care for the lower classes. One wonders what Bible Malthus read for his ordination examinations! However, when barraged with public outrage, he defended his recommendations by stating that assistance to the impoverished accelerated the population further. Besides, he noted, if these drastic steps were not taken voluntarily, “positive checks” would occur involuntarily in the form of famine, wars, and diseases. (Introduction to Malthus, Penn State)

Paul Ehrlich became the most notable Neo-Malthusian. Other well-known contemporary personalities who, from time to time, have espoused Malthus’s “dismal” science include Jane Goodall, English primatologist; Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” and Bill Maher, television commentator and comedian.

‘The poor you will always have with you.’

By the looks of things, they should have had a little faith. Since 2000, a miracle has been taking place across the earth. Global poverty is decreasing at a rapid rate. Twenty-five years ago, the 189 member states of the United Nations set a goal to drastically reduce the worldwide level of severe poverty. Astonishingly, the poverty rate since the UN made that resolution has declined from 43% of the global population to 13%. Again, human ingenuity was the reason. This go-round it was not agricultural advances but economic growth. About two thirds of the income advances have been realized in China and…sorry Paul Ehrlich…India.

The miracle does not have to end. The World Bank estimates that a $466 billion investment will decrease the world poverty rate to 1%. To put the investment in perspective, that is less than half the cost of the tax credits the Big Beautiful Bill has allocated to the top 1% of the wealthiest citizens in America. Jesus said, ‘The poor you will always have with you,’ but perhaps not as many as we thought (Mathew 11:26; Mark 14:7; John 12:8). (Miracle, The Economist)

Miracles never cease

The Economist adds that according to research from Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, along with Michael Gemstone of the University of Chicago, 60% of survey respondents in first world countries said they would be willing to give up .05% of their income to end extreme poverty. Imagine that. Instead of the richest country in the world spending a billion dollars per day on bombs, we would, instead, invest in raising the poorest of the poor out of destitution. Of course, to do that would take more than dollars; it would necessitate the erasure of an “us versus them” outlook on the global community. Altering a line from astronaut Neil Armstrong, “.05% would be a small step for a man, but a giant leap for humanity.”

NO MORE US & THEM

Galatians 3:10-14

¹⁰For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.’ ¹¹Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law; for ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith.’ ¹²But the Law does not rest on faith; on the contrary, ‘Whoever does the works of the Law will live by them.’ ¹³Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’— ¹⁴in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

It is easy to get lost in the weeds of this passage, one of Paul’s most difficult. Yet, in the final analysis, his message is that Christ’s death on the cross has established a new age. The towering distinctions separating Jews from Gentiles or any races or nations, for that matter, have been erased. God’s blessing is being poured out lavishly on all. Individuals and communities need only to step out and trust the faithful love of Christ to experience a giant leap of new life in the Spirit.

Identity theology — Galatians 3:10

When Paul was writing his letters, the Jerusalem temple was still standing and the sacrificial system was in full swing. At a minimum, two perfect lambs were sacrificed each day, one about 9 AM and another at 3 PM. Most days many other animals were sacrificed as sin offerings as well. Furthermore, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, celebrated in September or October, was the holiest day of the Jewish year then as it is now (Leviticus 23:27-28). When the temple was still standing, an elaborate liturgy was led by the High Priest on that day, to include the sacrifice of one goat while another was chased out into the wilderness. 1,600 years after Paul, the great Bible translator William Tyndale dubbed this second goat the “scapegoat.” Together, the two animals symbolized the sacrifice of repentance and the subsequent carrying away of the people’s sins.

Rome executed Paul about five years before it demolished the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD; thus, he never knew Judaism bereft of the sacrificial system. Nevertheless, through his understanding of the Scriptures, his main concern was not that the Law was unable to deal with human sin. His overriding concern were for those who derived their identity from the Law:

For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.’ 3:10 (Quote from Deuteronomy 27:26)

Richard Hays, the New Testament scholar who has tutored me through the denser “weeds” of Paul’s letter, makes two salient points here about individuals and communities basing their identity on the Law. First, he warns that to live under the conditional curses and blessings of the Law is to enter into a cycle of futility. Later, in his Letter to the Romans, Paul describes the exasperation of choosing to yoke oneself to the Law:

As it is written (in Psalm 14): ‘There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one.’ Romans 3:10-12

Paul is not making a universal statement here about humanity’s proclivity to sin. No, he is illustrating the impossibility of finding peace with God or with yourself if you base your identity on the Law. It is to enter into a mad cycle of inadequacy.

Second, Paul is making an appeal. Israel’s sad saga with God is one of repeated failures to keep the Law and suffering the consequences. A roller-coaster ride of defeats, exiles, and enslavements annotate Israel’s interminable up and down relationship with God. Even Moses, before he sends Israel across the Jordan River into their Promised Land, makes this painful prediction:

‘For I know that after my death you are sure to become utterly corrupt and to turn from the way I have commanded you. In days to come, disaster will fall on you because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord and arouse his anger by what your hands have made.’ Deuteronomy 31:29

Because Paul has been part of this mad cycle for much of his life, he warns his charges that they are under a curse if they choose the Law over grace. Hays muses that Paul is telling the Galatians, “If you affiliate yourself with those who place their hope in obeying the Law, i.e. the false teachers, you are joining a losing team—not because obedience is theoretically impossible, but because Israel historically has failed…”

Paul holds this truth to be self-evident — Galatians 3:11-12

Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law; for ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith.’ But the law does not rest on faith; on the contrary, ‘Whoever does the works of the Law will live by them.’ 3:11-12 (Quotes from Habakkuk 2:4 & Leviticus 18:5)

Paul does not want the Galatians to think he pulled these convictions out of the air. He states is it ‘evident,’ dēlon in the Greek, which means he derives his points from Scripture. Using the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk as his authority, it is self-evident from Israel’s sacred history that the Law does not have the power to set people right with God. Paul will again use the quote from Habakkuk 2:4 as the centerpiece of his comprehensive Letter to the Romans.

Next, the wily apostle flips a switch, and rather than use the Scripture as his authority, he does battle with it. He asserts the line from Leviticus, ‘Whoever does the works of the Law must live by them,’ does not rest on faith — ek pisteōs. With this, Paul alludes to his former argument that Abraham, who lived well before Moses, established faith as a basis for a relationship with God. The injunction from Leviticus trails God’s promise to Abraham by four centuries.

A brand new world — Galatians 3:13-14

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’— in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. Galatians 3:13-14 (Quote from Deuteronomy 21:23)

The Greek word for redeemed here is exēgorasen, which means the “freeing of a slave.” Staking one’s identity and future on the Law, according to Paul, is a form of slavery, a warning that Paul will issue again in Chapter 4. Again, I must emphasize, however, that the Law, the Torah, is not a curse. Paul is emphatic about this in Romans 7:12 — ‘The law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.’ The Torah did not become a curse because it was flawed. It became a curse in the hands of sinful humanity who could not fulfill it.

What Paul has come to understand is that the Law was never given to Israel so that they could earn God’s favor. No, the Law was given to Israel at Sinai as a sign of God’s love for them. Recall, that God gave the Law to Israel after He had already rescued them from Egypt, which at the time of the Exodus was the mightiest nation on earth. The Law was therefore given as a symbol of Israel’s belonging to a loving, redeeming God. Also to keep the Sabbath and practice other Laws were gestures of gratitude to God for the grace already conferred on them. Kay, my wife and editor, remarked: “God gives us the Law so that we may live in covenant with Him and with each other. It is a gift to lighten our lives. We took the gift and turned it into a burden.” Kay’s words echo the Prophet Ezekiel’s when he previews the new life God has in store for Israel and their renewed relationship with the Law:

Reflective of the same love God extended to Israel when he ‘heard their cries’ and rescued them from the curse of slavery through His servant Moses, God liberates those enslaved by the Law through his Son. Christ takes the consequences of our sin — and every person’s sin for all time — on himself. It is on the cross that Jesus demonstrates how far God will go to show His love for us. That is the solid ground of love on which we set our faith.

Paul makes the outrageous claim that ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by becoming a curse for us.’ Here we are confronted with the fact that Christ was not merely a good teacher, a compassionate healer, or a long-suffering martyr. No, Christ’s work was, from the moment of his birth, to be completed at Calvary. The eternal Son of God takes on human flesh precisely to stand in humanity’s place. Fully human, Christ represents all humanity on the cross. Fully divine and without sin, Christ could endure the curse of hanging on tree without being destroyed by the barbarous, dehumanizing act.

What cannot be missed here is that with Christ’s crucifixion the old world under the Law has died and a new world shot through with God’s Spirit is afoot. Paul declares that believers receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. Once we put our ultimate trust in the faithfulness of Christ and his work on the cross, we begin to experience the electric presence of God, not only within ourselves but acting within our community. Knowing this, Paul can’t imagine why the Galatians would ever want to return to the old unsatisfying life on the hamster wheel to nowhere. We must recall, too, that the Galatians are Gentiles. Christ’s crucifixion universalizes God’s offer of new life to everyone — regardless of race, nation, ethnicity, or social status.

Today, as a matter of fact, I made my way to my biannual barbecue — that is my twice per year appointment with the dermatologist. Before the doctor came in with her can of frozen hellfire, I enjoyed a long conversation with her medical assistant, who had only a year ago moved to our city from San Diego. Our talk quickly moved to faith matters, and at one point she said, “When I moved to San Antonio, I experienced a second conversion of sorts. Being on my own, I had to trust Jesus in ways I had resisted in the past. It was then that I began to experience the guidance and peace of the Holy Spirit.” She continued, “Before then, I thought my faith in Christ was simply a ticket to the afterlife. I now know it’s the gateway to real life — now!”

Ironically, this young woman has come to know what Paul was trying to tell the Galatians. Even the desire to obey God is a gift from God. The Spirit imbues us with grace to live the life we thought was out of reach for us.

The choice before us can be personified in the contemporary personalities of Paul Ehrlich and Norman Borlaug. Ehrlich bewailed the law of scarcity, that there’s not enough to go around. Humanity is in free fall. Borlaug boasted a world of grace, that there is more than enough. Human beings need only to share what God has given to them.

SOURCES

Hays, Richard B., Galatians: The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Nashville: Abingdon, 2000.

Keegan, Brian, C. & Merchant, Emily K., “The long shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ is evident in anti-immigrant efforts today,” The Conversation, March 31, 2026. https://theconversation.com/the-long-shadow-of-paul-ehrlichs-population-bomb-is-evident-in-anti-immigration-efforts-today-279151#:~:text=

“Introduction to Malthus, IPAT (equation) and Overpopulation,” Penn State Department of Geography. https://courses.ems.psu.edu/geog430/node/644#:~:text\

“Malthus, Population and environment, a short bibliography,” Environmental History Resources, https://www.eh-resources.org/malthus-bibliography/

Pingali, Prabhu “Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Vol. 109, No. 31, 2012. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0912953109

“The price of a miracle: what would it cost to end extreme poverty?” The Economist, April 11, 2026. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/04/09/one-neat-trick-to-end-extreme-poverty?utm_

Williamson, Kevin D., “Paul Ehrlich was wrong about everything,” The Dispatch, March 17, 2026. https://thedispatch.com/article/paul-ehrlich-was-wrong-about-everything/?utm_source=teaser&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=williamson_031726

PHOTO CREDITS

Paul Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb,’ 1st Printing, photo compliment of the NY Times

Team Tomato Celebrates in Niger, photo compliments of U.S. Embassy

Global Mamas Sewing Consortium in Ghana, photo compliments of U.S. Embassy

Ezekiel’s Vision, Raphael, 1518, Galleria Palatina, Florence, Italy

MAKING A SCENE IN THE CITY OF LIGHTS

Leave it to me to make a scene in one of the busiest spots in Paris. Last week, Kay and I were sightseeing with our youngest son John and his wife Aurora in Marais, a colorful area of the city replete with medieval architecture, an ancient Jewish quarter, and a robust, somewhat bohemian, nightlife. While in Marias, we spent the afternoon at the Musée Carnavalet. Housed in a cavernous 16th century mansion with 42,000 square feet of display space spread over 100 rooms, the museum offers a captivating as well as comprehensive history of Paris.

My three companions had moved into the next room of the museum, when I spied a special exhibit honoring the 250 Years of Friendship Between France and the United States. Our two countries’ long relationship began with the arrival of the young Marquis de Lafayette off the coast of South Carolina on June 13, 1777. The young French aristocrat was only nineteen years old when he reported for duty at George Washington’s headquarters in Middlebrook, New Jersey. Although he had never seen combat, Washington immediately commissioned him a Major General. Three months later he proved his mettle at the Battle of Brandywine near Philadelphia. The teenage general was shot in the leg during the eleven-hour battle, but he refused treatment until he led his men to safety. Washington was so impressed by the young man’s valor that he gave him command of a division in the Continental Army.

Lafayette’s valor was matched by his diplomatic skills, for he was key to bringing France to America’s aid in our eight year war for independence against Great Britain. While Benjamin Franklin was the primary diplomat negotiating the alliance, Lafayette returned to France in 1779-80 to personally lobby the French court. His country began to covertly send money, weapons, and gunpowder. Due to Lafayette’s and Franklin’s repeated entreaties, in 1780 France sent naval fleets and troops, including an army under the command of General Rochambeau. With the arrival of the French, America’s victory was assured.

Without Lafayette it is questionable whether the colonies would have prevailed. Even so, the war did not end until six years after Lafayette’s first battle alongside Washington. The two, it is said, became like father and son. In fact, the marquis named his only son after Washington — Georges Washington Louis Gilbert de La Fayette. When Lafayette died in 1834 at age seventy-six, the United States sent over a crate of dirt from Bunker Hill to cover his grave.

America’s opportunity to repay France for its assistance came 134 years later on April 6, 1917, when the Congress and President Woodrow Wilson committed U.S. troops to defend France from Germany’s invading army midway through WWI. During the first two years of the conflict, the U.S. remained neutral. In those two desperate years, France lost 2 million soldiers and Great Britain 1 million. On July 4, 1917 — of all days — U.S. doughboys marched through Paris. Upon arrival, their commanding officer, General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing announced, “Lafayette, we are here!” Nineteen months later, WWI ended with an unqualified allied victory.

Lafayette’s intwined story with America’s was not over. On August 7, 2002, during George W. Bush’s presidency, Congress voted to make Lafayette an honorary citizen of the United States. He is one of only eight individuals afforded this rare honor. The others include: 1. Bernardo de Gálvez, who was a Spanish hero of the Revolutionary War; 2. Casimir Pulaski, a Polish officer who distinguished himself in the Revolution and became the “Father of the American Calvary;” 3. & 4. William Penn and his wife, Hannah Penn, who established the “Province of Pennsylvania” in 1681; 5. Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued Jews from the Nazi holocaust in Hungary and subsequently disappeared into the Soviet gulag; 6. Mother Teresa, the 4’11’ 95 pound Albanian who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta; 7. Winston Churchill, who gathered international support to defeat the Nazis and the Empire of Japan in WWII; 8. and, of course, the Marquis de Lafayette.

After reading about the young courageous Lafayette and the pantheon of honorary Americans with whom he is remembered, my emotions were set on a thin edge. What I encountered next, caught me entirely off-guard, and had me repeatedly reaching for the handkerchief in my back pocket. A Parisian public school class — 5th graders, I guessed — created a video presentation of the French people creating and subsequently donating the Statue of Liberty to the United States. In keeping with the doughboys’ arrival in Paris on Independence Day, the gift was made on July 4, 1884, just nineteen years after the end of our bloody Civil War. The immense statue was not erected and placed in New York Harbor until October 28, 1886, due to the magnitude of the construction and the considerable funding needed to complete it. Only through one of the first “crowd-funding” efforts led by Joseph Pulitzer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York World did the 141 foot, 225 ton monument finally take its place to greet all who approach the shores of New York City. Assisting Pulitzer in his fundraising efforts to erect the mammoth statue was the American poet Emma Lazarus, a Jewish citizen of New York. Her sonnet, The New Colossus, was read at the dedication, and its text has adorned the base of the great statue since 1903. These lines from Lazarus’s poem are often repeated:

We moderns may not comprehend the impact the Statue of Liberty had on the war-weary American people. Those who were present for the dedication or read about it the next day in the newspaper, would have heard the message of Lady Liberty echoing across New York sound. Less than a generation before, 700,000 of America’s sons had died on battlefields as far north as St. Albans, Vermont and as far south as Ft. Myers, Florida. And those boys had come from families of no less than fifteen different ethnicities and races. The United States, for its inception, has been a melting pot of people from diverse races, ethnicities, and religions held together by a common creed of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

I continued to watch the schoolchildren’s production that was as entertaining as it was informative. Several times the entire class disappeared through a portal to time-travel and experience the history they were reporting. Coming to the end, two features of their video most impressed me. First, the fact that primary aged schoolchildren were creatively immersing themselves in an international history lesson was hopeful. Presently in the U.S., our deficits in history education are leading to a lack of civic engagement. In 2024, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni ran a survey drawn from 850,000 college students representing 1,500 colleges and universities. 63% could not identify John Roberts as the chief justice of the Supreme Court; over 50% named Thomas Jefferson as the “father of the Constitution” instead of James Madison; 89% did not know that the phrase, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” is taken from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; and a third of college students did not know the term lengths for U.S. senators or representatives. (ACTA)

Second and more importantly, I was impressed and actually quite moved that French schoolchildren trusted that the United States would retain its seemingly inviolable connection with their country. Until recently, I, too, took it for granted that my country prized its long relationships with France, other European countries, and Canada. Yet because Europe would not rally to support the U.S.’s illegal and ill-conceived war against Iran, President Trump is threatening to withdraw from NATO and to remove our military bases from Spain and Germany. On March 31, he ranted, “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us.” (Divorce, Economist)

His threats should embarrass Americans…frankly because Europe has “been there for us.” In its seventy-seven year history, the one and only time NATO has enacted Article 5, the collective defense agreement among member nations, was to support the United States when we were attacked on September 11, 2011. During that same time, Gander, Newfoundland, population 11,890, provided a safe airport and support for 6,500 stranded travelers who could not land in New York due to the terrorists’ attacks. Newfoundland, a Canadian province as economically poor as Arkansas or Mississippi, refused any remuneration for their hospitality. Remembering those generous acts and having served in Newfoundland for a short period, made listening to the ignominious, dismissive rants by our president all the more painful. Confronted with the trust we have broken amongst our allies and with those school children on the video who expect far more from us, I began to break down right there in the middle of the Carnavalet. People made a wide berth around the bald man with his head in his hands.

THE POWER OF TRUST

On January 20, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney began his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland warning that the international rules-based order is experiencing a fundamental “rupture,” not a mere transition, signaling the end of post-Cold War stability — also known as the Pax Americana. He then made a quip that has been repeated all around the world: “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” In other words, the three great military powers in the world want to consume smaller nations, not assist them. At the end of his sixteen minute speech, the prime minister received a standing ovation. Only two others in the history of Davos had received such approval — Nelson Mandela and Volodymyr Zelensky.

The “rupture” cited by Prime Minister Carney could just as easily been termed a breach of trust. And while he did not name the United States nor our president, he was telling the august crowd that America has broken trust with its long-standing allies and with middle-sized and small nations around the world. In its place, America, “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” had aligned itself in a tripartite axis, dividing the world into Sino, Russo, and U.S. spheres of influence. Under the spell of the Trump administration, we are erasing the bonds of gratitude, cooperation, and shared beliefs that have distinguished the free world from despotic, illiberal regimes. The world those French fifth graders envision is being destroyed. We have broken trust with them and with all children of their generation in every country where they are growing up.

Trust is no small thing between citizens and their governments, nor between one nation and another. Trust is a critical element for children to grow into confident adults. Trust is the glue of marriages at every stage. Trust makes for safe workplaces and schools. Trust is how good teams become champions. Trust is far more important than rank on the battlefield.

Human beings are wired for trust, as are our families, nations, and confederations of nations. So, it comes as little surprise that trust is the essential ingredient in our relationship with God. In four short verses, Paul marches out this gospel truth to the newly formed Christian congregations in Galatia, as well as to his critics. His carefully chosen words are key to understanding his short argument, so bear with my explanations.

TRUST COMES FIRST

Galatians 3:6-9

6Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,’ 7so, you see, those who believe are descendants of Abraham. 8And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’ 9For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.

Something observable, measurable, and, indeed, wonderful has happened to the Galatian Christians. They know it. Paul sees it. And so do the interfering false teachers, who arrive late and now want to pour cold water on the miracle the Galatians have experienced. Those interlopers want to douse the Holy Spirit that was set loose in the congregation the moment the Galatians first put their trust in Jesus Christ, the crucified Messiah (See 3:1-5).

Paul is thoroughly miffed. But rather than storm about undercutting the false teachers’ demand that the Galatian males line up to be circumcised and both males and females observe a long laundry list of laws, he turns to Holy Scripture, which for Paul is the Old Testament. Utilizing his considerable understanding of the Bible that he garnered during his ten or so years of study with the great rabbi Gamaliel, Paul proves that trust is the indispensable ingredient of our relationship with God.

Real I.D. — Galatians 3:6-7

To make his point that trust is crucial for anyone to be in relationship with God, Paul goes right to a Biblical heavyweight — Abraham. 1st century Jews considered Abraham their “father.” This should not surprise us because Abraham is considered the father of three religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Paul is nothing if not a savvy communicator. So, he cleverly begins his argument:

‘Just as Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness…’ 3:6

The late New Testament scholar Richard Hays explains that the conjunction ‘Just as,’ which is kathōs in Greek, links the Galatians’ miraculous reception of the Holy Spirit with the Biblical story of Father Abraham. Paul then proceeds to retell the great patriarch’s story by relating a key incident from his life in Genesis 15. The chapter opens with Abraham fretting that he and his wife Sarah have no heir, and in their advanced years they have no prospect of begetting a child. Hearing his complaint, God directs Abraham to step outside of his tent, look up, and attempt to count the stars. While the old patriarch is studying the heavens, God promises him that his offspring will be as numerous as the multitude of stars he is unable to count. At that, Abraham believed God’s promise and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. In the Greek, the sentence reads almost like a judicial verdict. Abraham’s act of believing God’s outrageous promise to him that he would have myriads of progeny, even though he is a man in his mid-eighties with a wife in her mid-seventies, reckons him righteous with God.

A short word study is essential here. First, the Greek word for believed is pisteuo, a verb that can mean believe and trust interchangeably. The noun form of the same word, pistis, can mean belief, trust, and faith. Biblical Greek uses these closely related terms to convey a single concept of active, committed reliance on God. Second, the Greek for reckoned is logizomai, which can mean reckon, impute, or pronounce. The latter, pronounce, may be the best choice to evince the sense of a court room verdict. Finally, the word righteousness is a prominent noun in the New Testament — dikaiosýnē. The word means approved or made right. With his skillful understanding of Greek, Eugene Peterson brings further clarity to the verse:

Abraham believed God, and that act of belief was turned into a life that was right with God.

God pronounces His verdict that Abraham is in right relationship with Him well before the patriarch is commanded to circumcise himself and all the males in his clan (Genesis 17:23-26). While circumcision is a physical mark of Abraham’s covenant with God, the heart of the covenant is Abraham’s trust in God’s promise. Paul emphasizes this fact in the second half of the sentence:

‘…so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham’ 3:7

Hays clarifies the statement through his rendering of the Greek:

‘No, it is not the circumcised who are Abraham’s children; rather, those whose identity is derived from faith, these are Abraham’s children.’

Paul’s argument is constructed in such a way as to distinguish “faith people” from “circumcision people.” Here I should reiterate two points I have made previously in this study of Galatians. First, the Law is not to be denigrated. It is a gift from God. The purpose of the Law is to single out Israel as God’s ‘kingdom of priests, His holy nation and possession’ (Exodus 19:5). Considered that way, the Law is to be a sort of uniform that we wear, distinguishing us as people who love and serve God. Christians routinely don this uniform when we attend Sunday worship, fast during holy days, read our Bibles, or keep morning and evening prayer times.

That being said, our modern sensibilities lead us to acknowledge that our Christian life must be more than show, more than daily and weekly habits, more than a series of ecclesiastical events. Being baptized, circumcised, confirmed, ordained — what have you — means very little if we do not put our heartfelt trust in God. Without trust, we become like those Jesus calls down as hypocrites, which literally means “those who wear a mask.” And we all know that we can only hide behind a mask for so long. Eventually our lack of substance, our lack of trust, will un-mask us as a fraud — especially to ourselves.

The Bible Gets a Word In — Galatians 3:8-9

Paul adeptly compares Abraham’s faith that God would given him progeny, even in his old age, with the Galatians who have put their trust in God as revealed to them in Jesus Christ. At this point, we are ready to say, “Case closed. Well done, Paul.” Not so fast, the apostle is not finished. Paul was never one who was lost for more words.

Thus, to press his point home, Paul animates the Scripture and imagines it speaks directly to Abraham:

And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’ 3:8 (See Genesis 12:3 & 18:18)

The Scripture’s message to Abraham is a forecast of the gospel, which will be fully realized in Jesus Christ. However, Paul does not mention Jesus here at all. That omission is purposeful because Paul wants to emphasize that the salvation of all nations, Jewish and otherwise, has been God’s eternal plan all along. He wants both his Galatian charges and his critics to acknowledge that God didn’t come to the end of His rope with humanity and in a last ditch effort send in Jesus in a desperate rescue effort, like a divine Seal Team 8. No, the Scripture speaks to the ancient father of Israel to confirm that the faith he models is the avenue for all people at all times to be brought into relationship with God. This is the gospel, the good news that all people can be reconciled with God and brought into His embrace by trusting in His indomitable love for us.

Paul uses two words here that merit a closer look. First, justify is taken from the Greek dikaioó, which is the verb form of the noun dikaiosýnē — righteousness — that Paul used in 3:6. Again, this is a word taken from the Greek courts, and it means the judge acquits an individual of a crime. To trust God, like Abraham, is how we are acquitted, made right, with God and brought close to Him.

The second word to examine is the Greek word for Gentiles, which is ethnē. While the word can mean Gentiles, it is equally correct to translate ethnē as nations or all people — as is used in Genesis 12:3. Paul is saying there is no inside track, no in-crowd with God, only a faith-crowd drawn from all races and ethnicities of people ranging across the earth. This is no small pronouncement coming from a man who once claimed a very exclusive spiritual status. He was a Jewish Pharisee, personally educated by one of the greatest rabbis of the 1st century. In modern parlance, that would make Paul like 1st draft pick in the NFL (See Philippians 3:4-6). Nevertheless, eleven years after Paul writes this letter to the Galatians, he writes one to the first church he establishes in Europe, which reveals just what he thinks about his previous rock star status:

‘Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord… not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the Law, but that which comes through faith in Christ,, the righteousness of God which comes through faith in Christ.’ Philippians 3:8-9

Then, to complete this semantically rich section of his letter to the Galatians, Paul concludes:

‘For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.’ 3:9

A true child of Abraham puts his complete trust in God. The use of familial language here is helpful. Think of the utter security you felt as a child in the presence of your parents. I can recall as a college student returning to our tiny crowded apartment on 1st Avenue in Birmingham. My mother moved there with my three younger siblings once I left to attend college in Texas. Bunk beds were set up in the living room where we three boys would have a place to sleep. After having considerably more ordered private space at the university, you would think I would have been terribly uncomfortable in that claustrophobic apartment on the wrong side of town where police and ambulance sirens screamed all through the night. Not at all. That first night home under my mother’s roof, feeling so loved and secure, I would sleep twelve hours or more. This is that faith of Abraham Paul wants us to emulate. It is not a faith that is airy, abstract, or just for show. Rather, it is a faith that is experienced at every turn in our daily life. It is the faith into which Jesus invites all of us —

SOURCES

Hays, Richard B., Galatians: The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Nashville: Abingdon, 2000.

“Losing America’s Memory 2.0: Civic Literacy,” ACTA, July 8, 2024. https://www.goacta.org/resource/losing-americas-memory-2-0/

“The transatlantic divorce,” The Economist, April 11, 2026. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/04/09/recriminations-over-iran-have-heightened-the-risk-of-a-break-up-of-nato?

PHOTO CREDITS

Father Lifting Up Daughter at Sunset, photo by Mohamed Awwam, Maldives

Lafayette’s Grave, Cimetière de Picpus in Paris, France, photo compliments of American War Memorials Overseas, Inc.

Abraham Surveys the Stars of the Sky, painting by Joel Schoon-Tanis, United States

Teenager Sleeping, photo by Maria Budanova, Russia

ASHAMED

“What’s got hold of you?” she asked and I winced. When I did not answer, she added, “I’ve never been ashamed of you until now.” Then I wanted to dig through the floor and disappear.

My mother had never spoken to me in that way. As her oldest, I had always been her go-to, her confidant, the dependable one. Not now. She was ashamed of me. I was ashamed of myself.

Earlier that afternoon I had arrived at home for Thanksgiving break. My boarding school allowed no weekends off campus, which meant I had not been home since mid-August when I reported for early football. The house looked more decrepit than I remembered, like one good wind would blow it down. White paint was peeling off every exterior surface, screens torn out from the windows, rain gutters dangling off the eaves. The interior was not much better. Every piece of living room furniture was covered with slipcovers the color of chicken gravy. Several floor joists had rotted so that traversing the house was like walking atop a banjo. No phone, no television, and only one faltering floor furnace to heat the entire house.

My boarding school digs were hardly luxurious, 18th century Shaker is more like it, yet coming home felt like a decent into a Jakarta ghetto. Our Birmingham landlord was adamant. He would make no repairs. “You’re lucky I rent it to you at this price,” he threatened. I couldn’t imagine another family waiting in line to take our place. Alone in the house and fixating on the landlord’s greedy intransigence, I became angrier by the minute as I awaited Mother’s return from her work at the hardware store. She had scarcely crossed the threshold with my youngest brother in tow and carrying a bag of groceries, when I blurted out, “I don’t care what I have to do. I will make money and lots of it.” She did not answer at first, only frowned and headed to the kitchen to unpack the groceries. When she emerged, she looked at me, not with anger, but with deprecating pity and said, “Pat, what’s got hold of you? I’ve never been ashamed of you until now.”

I don’t know what possessed me to greet my hard-working mother in that way. Insulting the sacrifices she had made for the four of us children, I sounded like the self-important bigots she loathed. Her words made me want to disappear beneath the banjo floorboards.

SPELL-BOUND! Galatians 3:1-5

‘Can you hear me now? - Galatians 3:1

Something even worse than my childish selfishness has possessed the Galatian Christians. False teachers show up after Paul left them the year before, and they are quickly undercutting all that Paul taught them. Specifically, these false teachers are insisting that these new believers observe the thirty-nine categories of Sabbath regulations and keep the other tenets of the Mosaic Law, to include the requirement that all the males be circumcised. When Paul hears this disturbing news while 350 miles away from the young congregation, he has no choice but to write them a letter. Midway into his missive, Paul lets loose. He dispenses with niceties. The gloves are off. He is screaming across the miles that separates him from the first church he founded:

‘You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?’

“Bewitch,” basinkō in the Greek, is a term Paul lifts from 1st century witchcraft. It refers to “casting an evil eye” on someone. The angry apostle accuses the false teachers of being sorcerers and the Galatians as being their hapless suckers. If you compare these interlopers to today’s army of swindlers who relentlessly phone elderly Americans to confuse, scare, and defraud them, you will understand the magnitude of Paul’s ire. People he loves are being deviously scammed — bewitched, if you like.

From what are the Galatians being cheated? The living gospel of Jesus Christ as encapsulated in Paul’s statement:

‘Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.’

Notice the connection of “eye” here with the seduction of the false teacher’s “evil eye.” Paul does not mean that these Galatians, whom Paul only first visited in 47 AD, were actually present for Christ’s execution seventeen years earlier. No, what Paul means is that through his evocative preaching, the people began to perceive the crucifixion as if with their own eyes. Good preaching still summons such riveting pictures. If not, the message is as forgettable as it is lifeless.

Additionally, the image of Christ crucified should remain fixed in the believer’s imagination. Paul, in fact, uses the past participle of the word “crucified” — estaurōmenos, which means this past action, Christ’s crucifixion, continues into the present. This is much the same way as Christians perceive the Eucharist. When we partake of Holy Communion, Christ’s great love for us through his sacrificial death becomes a present reality for us. A person does not have to be Roman Catholic or Orthodox to experience this truth, just hum a few bars of Were you there when they crucified my Lord, and see where the words take you.

The words get under your skin - Galatians 3:2-3

Like a parent exasperated with a child and saying, “Just tell me one thing, young man…,” Paul slaps down a question before the Galatians for which both they and he already know the answer:

‘Did you receive the Spirit by doing works of the Law or by believing what you heard?’

This is the first time Paul mentions the Spirit in his letter. His point is that they have already received the Holy Spirit, and they continue to experience the presence of the Spirit within their congregation. Being circumcised, observing the Sabbath, and keeping elements of the Mosaic Law did not play any part in the Galatians receiving the Spirit of God. Paul’s question for the Galatians is comparable to Peter’s after he preaches a stirring sermon describing Christ’s crucifixion to the household and friends of Cornelius the Centurion, all of whom were Gentiles. As soon as Peter finishes his graphic sermon, the Holy Spirit descended on the entire gathering, leading Peter to ask, ‘Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we (Jewish Christians) have?’ (Acts 10:47).

Thus, the answer to Paul’s multiple choice question is clearly “B.” The Galatians received the Holy Spirit by believing what they heard, which, of course, is identical to the conclusion Peter made at Cornelius’s house. The Greek ex akoēs pisteōs primarily emphasizes the message and secondarily the hearer. Therefore, a more accurate rendering of the phrase is ‘the message that has the power to elicit faith.’ If the emphasis fell primarily on the hearer’s act of believing, faith could subtly become another form of human contribution — something you bring to the table. But by grounding the emphasis in the proclaimed message, Paul is clear that the initiative lies entirely outside the person. The initiator is God; the receiver is the individual. That is why we call it grace, because the message comes to us as a divine gift. The gospel arrives first and faith is awakened in response to it. The Galatians did not work up the Spirit by their religious zeal and elbow grease. No, they received the Spirit because the message of the cross came to them and they trusted it. It is the grace of God’s good news that produces faith, which, in turn, unleashes the gift of God’s Spirit amongst the community of believers. To put the emphasis on the hearer is to slide back to square one, tying our belief and new life in Christ to our personal abilities — like painstakingly adhering to the Law. It is a mad merry-go-round that leads, not to fulfillment, but to exhaustion.

This does not ameliorate an individual’s part in apprehending the gospel. We openly receive the gift of the message which rouses our faith. I can compare this to the semester in grade school when my teacher read us Huckleberry Finn. I did not know such a world existed. For those thirty minutes each day, I was aboard that raft on the Mississippi alongside Jim and Huck. Mark Twain’s words took hold of me in such a way that I had never before experienced.

Paul describes our reception of the gospel message in the same way but even more so. The apostle memorably recasts this truth in Romans 10:17: ‘Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.’ Eugene Peterson adds more clarity to this passage in his brilliant translation:

‘The point is, Before you trust, you have to listen. But unless Christ’s Word is preached, there’s nothing to listen to.’

Continuing into v.3, Paul paints the Galatians a vivid word picture of circumcision in much the same way as he did with Christ’s crucifixion in v.1.

‘Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?’

It is important to note that the literal Greek reads ‘you now seek to be completed by the flesh.’ Even though Paul was well-aware that the rite of circumcision starts with his Old Testament hero Abraham in Genesis 17, he thinks it is patently ridiculous that a person or congregation would begin with a dynamic relationship with the Spirit of the living God and then strive to complete his relationship with God by undergoing a procedure on his penis. Even Abraham was told by God that circumcision would serve as a ‘sign of the covenant between Me and you’ (Genesis 17:11). What could be more of a sign of the relationship of a people with God than sharing His active Spirit among them? Evidence of the Holy Spirit can be seen all about the community of believers, whereas the evidence of circumcision is entirely private and seen by no one. Paul’s insists that the presence of the Holy Spirit in the congregation is a far more indicative sign of God’s presence than circumcision. The Spirit actually edifies, educates, and convicts the community of believers. While the Mosaic Law can aid us in living within the lines, only the Spirit can forge us into God’s people.

Suffering for nothing - Galatians 3:4-5

For those who conclude that Christianity is merely a head trip, Paul has news for them. What drew Paul to Christ in the first place was that from the moment he first believed in him he began to live in a new reality. Christianity is an embodied, existential experience. While it is true that our life in Christ is fueled by the mysterious Holy Spirit, Christianity is essentially a concrete experience, not an ethereal one. Knowing this, Paul asks the Galatians yet another pointed question:

‘Have you suffered so much for nothing—if it really was for nothing?

The Greek verb paschō can mean either “suffer” or “experience.” With Paul’s emphasis throughout his letters on “being crucified with Christ,” suffering may be the better choice (Galatians 2:20; 5:24; 6:14; Romans 6:6; Colossians 2:20). Whether “suffering” or “experience” is the best choice, Paul’s point is unchanged. Why would the Galatians cashier their divinely en-Spirited experience with Christ for a catalog of manmade requirements? Anglican priest J.B. Phillips, during the 1941 Blitz in London, translated this passage for his suffering teen charges in this way: ‘Surely you can’t be so idiotic as to think that a man begins his spiritual life in the Spirit and then completes it by reverting to outward observances?’

Paul is nothing if not persistent. He repeats the central question he earlier posed in v.2 in a cleverly different way:

‘Well then, does God supply you with the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the Law, or by your believing what you heard?’

The late Richard B. Hays, long time professor at Duke Divinity School and on whom I have relied for this study, translates the literal Greek here in what I believe is most helpful: ‘Therefore, the One who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles in your midst—from works of the Law or from the message of faith?’ “Supplying,” which is epichorēgōn in the Greek, as well as “working,”energōn, are both participles modifying the Spirit and miracles respectively and thus denote continual action. The Galatians have continually experienced the Spirit and the miracles it produces amongst them since the day a year ago when Paul shared the message of faith with them. To think their intimate experience with God must somehow be ratified by completing acts of the Law, is as absurd as it is a waste of their time. (Hays, Galatians)

Allow me to explain why this is so absurd by using an example from my wife’s vocation. Remarkably, at age nineteen, she became an RN with an associate’s degree from Samford University. Subsequently, she scored the highest grade in her graduating class on her state nursing board examination. For the next five years, she served in Cardiac and Medical Intensive Care Units and was the unit supervisor in a regional hospital. Because of my military duty, she did so in three different states. Regardless of those achievements, when she began her work on her Bachelors of Nursing degree, she was required by the university to re-test in every practical nursing area, and at great expense, I might add. Think about it. Kay had already passed her state boards and had experienced the most demanding areas of nursing, yet now she was being made to ratify her experience through hours of examinations for a second time. This is not far off the false teachers’ demand that the Galatians undertake the voluminous demands of the Law to somehow sanction their life as Christ’s believers, even though they had been experiencing the dynamism of the Holy Spirit in their congregation for months.

And now another word about the Law

I fear my Jewish readers will think I am denigrating the Mosaic Law. I am not. The Law was given to Israel, much like the manna, the quail, and the water during the exodus in the Sinai wilderness — all signs that they were loved by God and belonged to Him. About keeping the Sabbath, the Lord said through Moses, ‘Say to the people of Israel, “You shall keep my sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout generations, that you may know that I, the LORD, sanctify you”’ (Exodus 31:13). The Sabbath, therefore, is a recurring weekly reminder of the covenant bond between God and His people. The Law’s demands were not arbitrary; they are meant to make Israel visibly different, a holy nation set apart for God’s purposes among the peoples of the earth. In this sense, the Law is less a ladder to climb toward God and more a uniform worn by those who already belong to him — an outward mark of election and covenant identity. This is precisely Paul’s point: God’s people have now been given a new more personal and more edifying uniform — the Holy Spirit. Spirit-filled congregations not only share intimate communion with God, but others witnessing their love and self-giving will be drawn to them and subsequently to God. The Spirit, therefore, is the electric, dynamic uniform we wear to give glory to God and draw others into His embrace.

WHO HAS BEWITCHED YOU, AMERICA?

It’s one thing to be called out by your enemies, but it’s quite another when it’s your friend. The Galatian Christians experienced that with Paul. He loved them and had high hopes for them, but he was terribly disappointed with them. The same is true for me. My mother trusted me and had dreamed that one day I would make a difference in a world that had terribly mistreated her — but then I acted as callous and greedy as others. For that, she gave me an earful.

Two Mondays ago, March 23, the same thing happened to the United States. A longtime, devoted admirer told the truth about us, and it really hurt. In an interview with Reuters, Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, rebuked our nation. The rebuke was read by more than just a few people. Reuters has the largest readership of any news source on the planet, reaching over 1 billion individuals each day. To put that in stark terms, that is 998.5 million more persons than watch Fox News each day.

I read a synopsis of the interview in Heather Cox Richardson’s March 26th Substack news report. Richardson is an acclaimed author and history professor at Boston College. Her report is titled Letter from an American and is read by 2.5 to 3 million people daily. Richardson’s summary of Balakrishnan’s interview was a gut punch.

Singapore’s Foreign Minister simply told the unvarnished truth about America’s u-turn. She declared that for eighty years the United States has been the international champion supporting the principles of the United Nations, the guarantor of a worldwide free market economy, the protector of independent states, and the bulwark against tyrannical regimes. In a word, our nation has been the role model and the safeguard for smaller nations like Singapore.

Under the aegis that the U.S., Britain, and other nations have provided, Singapore has emerged as the great miracle of the 20th and 21st centuries. In 1965, the average annual wage of a Singaporean was $500. Today it is $80,000 — $90,000. They have risen to one of the highest, if not the highest per capita income in the world. At the same time, the small country, less than the size of Rhode Island and only a bit larger than New York City, is an amalgam of ethnicities — Chinese, Indian, and Malaysian all living in the same neighborhoods. And yet, their parliamentary democracy is eminently successful. Balakrishnan gives America the credit. “Basically the Pax Americana turbocharged reform and opened China for decades. It has been unprecedented. It has been great for many of us. In fact, I will say that for all of us, if you look back 80 years.” She no sooner extolls the U.S. than she lets loose the sucker punch:

‘Now (America) has become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor. But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.’

A “revisionist,” a “disruptor,” and “the foundation is gone.” I read this and felt sick at my stomach as I realized the rug has been pulled out from beneath the citizens of the world. The U.S.A., which has been the hope of the world, the defender of the weak, the setter of democratic norms — has relinquished that role for one far less noble. Under Trump, we are instead aligning the U.S. with Vladimir Putin of Russia, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and we are being pulled around by our noses by Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. The first three are oligarchs and brazen enemies of democracy and freedom of speech. The fourth is an opportunist desperately trying to stay out of jail. All the while, our traditional, faithful allies are denigrated repeatedly by the White House.

What knocks the wind out of me is not that Trump has aligned himself this way or that he has made billions off the highest office in our land. No, what hurts me the most is that our congressional leaders and so many citizens of our land are bewitched by this man — even as his administration spends a billion dollars a day on an unconstitutional war. What will his supporters see when they finally wake up from his spell?

SOURCES

Bendeich, Mark, “Transcript of Minister for Foreign Affairs Dr Vivian Balakrishnan’s Interview with Reuters Global Managing Editor for World News Mark Bendeich, 23 March 2026,” Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs. March 23, 2026, https://www.mfa.gov.sg/newsroom/press-statements-transcripts-and-photos/transcript-of-minister-for-foreign-affairs-dr-vivian-balakrishnan-s-interview-with-reuters-global-managing-editor-for-world-news-mark-bendeich--23-march-2026/

Hays, Richard B., Galatians: The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Nashville: Abingdon, 2000.

Richardson, Heather Cox, Letter from An American, March 26, 2026.

PHOTO CREDITS

Bewitched, photo by J.J. Jordan, U.K.

Young Jewish Boy Kissing the Torah Scroll, Photo compliments of Patheos

LAPD officers arrest a protester dressed as Lady Liberty in chains, following clashes near the Metropolitan Detention Center during the “No Kings” national day of protest in Los Angeles on March 28, 2026, Photo by The Atlantic

On April 1, 1942, April Fools’ of all days, Desmond Doss did the most foolish thing imaginable. He joined the U.S. Army. Already working diligently for his country’s defense at the Newport News Naval Shipyard, he could have easily secured a deferment. More notably, however, was the fact that Doss was an ardent Christian in the Seventh Day Adventist’s tradition, which meant he refused to kill another human being and would not bear arms. Three years later on May 5, 1945, his battalion was engaged in one of the bloodiest assaults of WW II, if not the entire history of warfare. His unit attempted to scale Okinawa’s Maeda Escarpment, the 400 foot sheer cliff know by the men as Hacksaw Ridge, in order to attack a heavily fortified Japanese position. Doss’s battalion was driven off the ridge by a vicious, bloody counter-assault by a teeming number of enemy troops. On that day and the terrible night that followed, the question lingered amongst the choking sulfurous smoke, the agonized cries, and the littered bodies of dead and dying GI’s. Why was Doss on Hacksaw Ridge in the first place?

The horrific night of May 5 saw every able-bodied American soldier scurry down the steep cliff on hastily constructed rope ladders – all except one soldier – PFC Desmond Doss. Unbeknownst to the others, he remained atop the ridge, skulking amongst the Japanese patrols, to rescue his wounded comrades. One by one, he harnessed their broken and bloody bodies with ropes and lowered them to the safety of the forward combat aid station. In all, Doss saved seventy-five GI’s that night; although, his fellow soldiers insisted the number was closer to one hundred. Each time Doss successfully lowered a wounded soldier to safety, he offered the same prayer, “Lord, please let me get just one more.” What would have happened to those men if PFC Doss had not remained on that gruesome ridge with them?

Six months later, on October 12, 1945, now Corporal Desmond Doss stood on the lush, manicured lawn outside the White House. On that brilliant autumn day, Doss was there to receive the nation’s highest award, the Congressional Medal of Honor. President Truman took the hand of the corporal and held it throughout the reading of the citation. Before the President loosened his grasp, he said solemnly, “You really deserve this. I consider this a greater honor than being president.” Why would the President of the United States, arguably the mightiest man on earth, make such a claim?

While Doss’s heroism makes for a sweeping cinematic story, it seems a fool’s errand to most of us. Confronted with so great a slaughter, choking smoke, tormented cries, and seething chaos, we would have fled down Hacksaw Ridge with the hundreds of other rational men. Yet one foolish man remained, and his sacrifice resulted in seventy-five men having a future as well as the countless progeny who followed them. Doss remained atop that terrible ridge for those men he saved and the procession of unnamed children who would follow. For them, he was anything but foolish.

In the same way, many, if not most, believe that Christ’s tragic climb to Calvary and his ghastly crucifixion there were foolish. This consensus is hardly new. A mere thirty years after Christ was executed on the cross, Paul confronted his self-satisfied, urbane critics in Corinth with these words:

‘The message of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God’ (1 Corinthians 1:18).

To those who imagine they are just fine the way they are – “thank you very much” – the cross is ridiculous, macabre theater, a fool’s errand, for sure. But to those of us who know that sin threatens to destroy us, or at the very least, disfigure us into hollow, half-persons, the cross is the radiant expression of God’s glory and our only hope. The people sleeping soundly in their beds on May 5, 1945 may have wagged their heads in comfortable, distant astonishment when they fetched the morning paper from their front yards and read of Doss’s acts on Hacksaw Ridge. Those seventy-five he carried, harnessed, and lowered into the arms of the awaiting medics knew personally that Doss had saved them. A world of difference separates the two experiences.

What if Doss had not stayed atop that ridge and instead clambered down the rock face with the rest of the troops? He would have returned home to Virginia and likely been hailed as a unique hero in his hometown, a moral witness and standard. He would have had yarns to share with his children and grandchildren. No one would have thought less of him, but his story would no longer be told today because no one was saved. In the same way, many of us settle for a cross-less Jesus, one who shared insightful stories and stood as a moral vanguard against oppressive imperial power and compromised religious practice. That Jesus is admirable but cannot save, so we’re left upon the ridge with life seeping steadily out of us. That irreducible fact is what led Paul, an erudite, cosmopolitan, highly educated, citizen of his age, to confess to those same Corinthians:

‘When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come to you proclaiming the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified’ (1 Corinthians 2:1-2).

Paul knew what every woman and man knows who has become painfully aware of our sin, our pressing need for healing, and the humbling fact that we cannot perfect ourselves. Without the cross, without Christ willingly sacrificing himself to evil men, we are lost, and our religion has little to offer us beyond catchy adages, self-improvement schemes, and an ancient, winsome role model.

This is in no way a pessimistic message. Heavens no, for once we take an honest inventory of ourselves, confess our sins to God, and ask him to put the cross between our old person and the new one we are becoming, an incredible lightness is given to us. It is as if we are standing on the White House lawn with President Truman and Corporal Doss on that bright October day. The dark storms of evil that conspired to destroy the United States and our allies were turned back by men like Doss, and the sun shone again. Likewise, the onslaught of darkness that threatened to annihilate us was defeated by the crucified Christ so that we can now walk in the light. On this accord, Christ himself predicted:

‘When I am lifted up (on the cross), I will draw all men and women to myself’ (John 12:32).

The unequaled faithfulness of God exhibited in the crucifixion of the sinless, obedient Son calls out to us like the deafening foghorn and blinding beacon of a lighthouse along the threatening rocky shore of the North Atlantic. We are the ships battered against the waves of anger, greed, lust, addiction, and un-forgiveness, when we hear his unmistakable call and are led safely back to port by his dazzling light. Christ’s voice resounds like a foghorn in the night watches, “You can be healed. You can be whole.” Paul’s contemporary, Peter, put it this way:

‘Christ himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed’ (1 Peter 2:24).

The light of the crucified Christ reaches out to every man and woman. This light cannot be dulled or obscured by human ingenuity or demonic designs (John 1:5). Therefore, we should not be surprised when the light catches us while running from the truth about ourselves or knocked off our feet by self-inflicted spiritual wounds, for Jesus constantly prays, “Father, just let me get one more…just one more.”

A Prayer Offered at the Foot of the Cross

Blessed Jesus, I stand here in the shadow of your cross, where you sacrificed yourself for me. Overcome with gratitude, I confess that I have been fleeing from you and the truth about myself because I know, only too well, that I am not the person you graciously created me to be. My sin is eating away at me and because of it, I sometimes hurt those I love the most. I confess my sins to you, and I ask you to forgive me and heal me. Jesus, make me the person of your dreams. Make me more and more like you. Put your glorious cross between the old me and the new me you are fashioning through your grace. I ask this in your Name, the Name above all names, Jesus Christ. AMEN.

Next week The Letter will continue with our study of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians.

PHOTO CREDITS

Kneeling at the Foot of the Cross, photo by Amir Arefi

Corporal Desmond Doss, the only Conscientious Objector of WWII to Win the Medal of Honor, photo compliments of War History Online

Christ Crucified, by Diego Velázquez, 1632, The Prado Museum, Madrid

Dear Friends of the Pilgrim Letter,

Most of us give little thought to what we eat, much less with whom we eat. We choke down a granola bar with our coffee, pick up a burger in the drive-thru for lunch, and sit at a TV tray for supper not realizing that we are ignoring the most routine sacred act. To share a simple meal with another Christian may be our most consequential we do.

Paul centers his Letter to the Galatians, not on abstruse theological propositions, but on table manners — who we invite to eat with us. This should not surprise us. Most of our churches are centered around tables, concrete symbols of our life in Christ, a life that is meant to be graciously shared with others.

These days, however, many American Christians live a hyper-privatized version of our faith. The good news is that we can change that, transforming most any meal into holy communion.

Thank you for joining me on the Greatest Adventure, Patrick

A PLACE AT THE TABLE

In 1969 I entered a strange new world. I was fourteen when I enrolled in a monastic boarding school that seemed more connected to a mysterious medieval past than to the rollicking, rebellious 1960s. Habited monks moved furtively across the campus, incense clouds billowed through the chapel doors, and on many mornings a shroud of fog sat upon the quad, accentuating the school’s otherworldly aura. During my early days there, I thought I had awakened on the set of a Bela Lugosi horror film.

A reclusive nun taught ancient history, Latin, and Greek, with the conviction that all beneficial wisdom ended with Zeno, Plato, Seneca, and Cicero. Further perplexing me was the fact that I was no longer a ninth grader but a “third former,” and I was not in my fall semester but attending “Michaelmas term.“ Our English teacher, Mr. Jones, assigned us to read The Outsiders, by T. E. Hinton, which was the only indication we were inhabiting the 20th century.

The school’s most consistent vestige of a bygone era was formal meals. Both at lunch and dinner we sat at assigned tables, and at the evening meal, regardless of temperature, students were required to wear a coat and tie. A “master,” a teacher or priest, presided at the head of the table with the rest of us seated in descending form order in a counter-clockwise arrangement. Sixth and fifth formers sat at 11, 10, and 9 o’clock, and so on, leaving us lowly third formers situated at 1, 2, and 3 o’clock. The seating was hardly arbitrary, because all food bowls and platters were passed in a counter-clockwise direction. Many nights I settled for lima beans and cornbread. In a school where the sixth formers were charged by the headmaster to “uphold the traditions of the school,” no one dared to cry foul or request, “More, please.”

Forgive my invocation from David Copperfield. Truthfully, I loved my strange, anachronistic boarding school from the first day I arrived. I loved the arcane, masculine, deeply religious atmosphere of the place and the melange of boys — most of us were boys in those early days — who matriculated there. We hailed from most every state, with all manner of temperaments, from all social and economic orders, and from all races. Ours was the first private school in the South to integrate. To that end, a tobacco heiress devoted the corpus of her considerable income to seek the highest academically performing black students throughout the South and offer them full scholarships to boarding schools like ours. Imagine my culture shock to discover that the smartest kids in class were black.

I, too, received a full scholarship, not because of my stellar scholarship, but because of my family’s extreme poverty. The monks had mercy on a number of us poorer kids. At the same time, the school drew many boys from wealthy families.

The multifarious make up of our student body hearkens me back to our formal, sit down meals. Granted the fare was simple, and at times when the school’s funds were low, the food was downright spartan. Nevertheless, we all ate together, rotating table assignments, both for lunch and dinner, every six weeks. This meant that no one could be avoided. No one could be ignored or anathematized. Twice a day we had to sit at the table with one another. Until that time, I had never shared a meal with a black person — very few from 1960s Birmingham had done so. But at the same time, I had never sat at a table with wealthy kids either. My life was conformed to my race, economic strata, and the fact I was being raised by a single mother — which deemed me a pariah in polite southern circles.

White trash

In fact, not long before I went away to boarding school, I helped our next door neighbors put a new asphalt shingle roof on their home. By that time, we had lived next to our neighbors, a blue-collar working class family, for several years. Their son was my age and my constant companion. On the day of the big roofing project, I eagerly joined my friend, his dad, and our neighbors’ cousins in hauling the roofing tiles up the ladder and then setting, tarring, and nailing the tiles in place. It was hot, dirty, and thoroughly exhausting work. However, a savory award awaited us, its aroma wafting from the kitchen, over the eaves, and onto the roof where we toiled. When our work was complete, all the workers were invited to share a fried chicken dinner, the piece de resistance of southern cuisine. Climbing down the ladder to join the rest of the crew, I heard my friend’s mother say, “Just hand Pat a glass of iced tea. I don’t want that white trash sitting at my table.” I was humiliated and devastated that longtime neighbors held that opinion of me.

That’s why the family-style meals at my boarding school meant so much to me. I could suffer through a supper of lima beans and cornbread. Belonging meant far more to me than calories, and that’s saying a “mouthful” since all teenage boys are voraciously hungry all the time. The monks were wise to demand we share meals in this way. Our schoolmates could not remain strangers, no matter how different we were from one another. The monks were also Biblically astute. Jesus forges his revolutionary community — not with memorable platitudes and lists of core values — but by having those disparate people drawn to him sit at tables and eat together. Still today, of all the things Christians do together, the most intimate and transformative is to share a table.

Sharing a table during Lent and Ramadan

Of all places, I was reminded of the importance of eating together, not by Christians, but by Muslims. A friend sent me a Wall Street Journal article comparing out Christian Lenten practices with those of Muslims during Ramadan. For the first time in thirty-three years, Lent and Ramadan take place at the same time. In fact, this year Ramadan began the evening before Ash Wednesday.

The author of the article, Stephen Adubato, is a devout Christian and a professor of philosophy and theology at Seton Hall. Recently, Adubato was telling a Muslim friend about Christian practices at Lent, such as abstaining from meat on Fridays and eating only one full meal on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. His friend responded, “kinda sounds like diet Ramadan.” During the thirty days of Ramadan, Muslims go without food or drink from sunup to sundown.

Comparing the athletic religious disciplines of Christians versus Muslims is not the core of Adubato’s message. His main interest is not the rigor of our respective fasts, but rather what we do to mark the conclusion of our fasts. Christians, for the most part, conduct their Lenten fasts as a matter of personal piety. Perhaps taking Jesus’s admonition about fasting to a stoic level, ‘When you fast, do not look dismal as the hypocrites do…’(Matthew 6:16), we do not share the experience with other Christians. Muslims, on the other hand, always come together at sundown to break the fast. Encountering this fact in his own multiethnic neighborhood, Adubato laments:

There’s something compelling about Muslims’ making harder sacrifices in the midst of our instinct-driven, self-indulgent culture. I wish the Christian observance of Lent had the communal dimension Ramadan has, with the breaking of the Muslim fast almost always done together at the mosque, at home or in restaurants. (Adubato, WSJ)

Reading the article, I am reminded that Westerners’ extreme individualism degrades our Christian life into a lifeless “me and Jesus” arrangement, where we personally contract with our Savior to deliver us from planet earth when the time comes. Nothing in the New Testament could lead us to such an empty conception of our religion. We are saved by Christ and fashioned by the Holy Spirit to experience life together, regardless of our differences. The table at my boarding school provides a ‘colorful” example. It is doubtful that the eight of us — black, white, rich poor, urban, rural — sitting across from one another in the dining hall would have ever elected to share a meal together except that the school chose each one of us to attend school there. In somewhat the same way, Christ chooses each one of us to follow him — ‘you did not choose me, but I chose you…’ (John 15:16) — to live a very different kind of life, not in solitary but with the community where he places us. We belong at the table with each other, for it is in the company of other believers that we are reminded of who we are because of Whom we worship.

TABLE FELLOWSHIP or WHAT’S GOT PAUL SO HOT UNDER THE TOGA?

But when Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. Galatians 2:11-12

“You are what you eat,” is a familiar adage. Yet it may be far more accurate to say, “You are where you eat.” Paul’s entire Letter to the Galatians is encapsulated in his confrontation with Peter over where he eats his dinner. At Antioch, when Jewish-Christian emissaries from Jerusalem show up, Peter will no longer dine at the same table with Gentile-Christians, for he does not want to be observed breaking the Jewish food and social purity codes. Paul, never a shrinking violet, gets right in Peter’s face and tells him that ‘he stood self-condemned’ (2:11). For Paul, if the gospel creates one new humanity in Christ, segregated tables, dividing Jewish-Christians from Gentile-Christians are a brazen contradiction of that promise

Paul would wince at my terms Jewish-Christian and Gentile-Christian. He contends that in Christ we are forged into a single body. Therefore, table fellowship is not some arbitrary nicety; it is a living example of who we have become in Christ. Gentile believers are not second-class, b-team members of the church. Heavens no, we have been made one family in Christ. Secondly, the reason Peter stands condemned in this matter is his public refutation of justification, the power of God’s grace that makes believers one body. Paul uses this term in its noun, verb, and adjective forms over 100 times in his various letters. Justified is translated from the Greek verb, dikaioutai, which is a forensic term taken from courts of law meaning to “acquit” the accused. But there is more. The person who is justified is made righteous through God’s power of grace, a power completely beyond the believer’s control. In other words, each one of us stands before God guilty as charged. However, Jesus Christ faithfully goes to the cross and undergoes the punishment we deserve. We put our faith in his faithful sacrifice, and he acquits us of our sins. Some six years later, in his Letter to the Romans, Paul will explain Christ’s gift in this way, which is the centerpiece of the good news:

Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:7-8

His faithfulness clears us unrighteous sinners completely and refashions us into righteous persons. Now that all believers — of every color, ethnicity, and social class — are saved by Christ’s grace-full act, how can we possibly maintain divisions between us?

This confrontation between Paul and Peter has immense historical overtones. The Letter to the Galatians was foundational to the Reformation. Martin Luther curiously called the Letter “my Katy von Bora,” which was his wife’s name. Luther relied on the letter so much that he considered it his wife, his sacred partner, because it provided the essential Biblical argument for a faith-based understanding of salvation over and against a works-based salvation. The Reformation made much more room at the table!

Now, lets take a detailed look at the entire chapter.

Jerusalem Visit & Apostolic Recognition OR ‘Don’t give an inch to these bums!’ Galatians 2:1-10

‘Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up because of a revelation and set before them... the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles…’ Galatians 2:1-2

After Paul returns from his 1st missionary journey that takes him to Galatia, yet before his 2nd missionary journey that will take him back to Galatia and then on to Greece, he finds it necessary to return to Jerusalem. The influence of the false teachers is growing, and Paul asks that the Christian leaders in the Holy City, notably James and Peter, put an end to these interlopers’ devious meddling. Paul purposely takes Titus with him, an uncircumcised Greek convert, to more personally push the question. The meeting is set to be private — not some spectacle. Furthermore, Paul insists that he was not summoned by the hierarchy but was lead to them through a personal revelation from God (2:1-2).

The private tête-à-tête goes well at first. The gospel message he was sharing amongst the Gentiles met with the others’ approval, and Titus was not compelled to be circumcised (2:2-3). All is going swimmingly until a bunch of the false teachers, or as Paul terms them, false believers crash the private party, but they cannot sway Paul or the Jerusalem leaders. Paul’s determination to make no deals with the false teachers is illustrated in the Greek phrase he uses — oude pros hōran, which means “not even for a single hour” or “not for a moment” did they consider a compromise with these meddlers. Why not just to keep the peace? Because the gospel message cannot be compromised (2:5 & Acts 15:1-11).

Of course, Paul could be cavalier, if not down right abrasive. He writes that the three main leaders of the Jerusalem church, James, Peter, and John, ‘contributed nothing to him’ and conceded the ministry to the Gentiles to Paul’s people and they would continue to minister amongst the Jews. The trio did make one appeal to Paul and his cohorts — to ‘remember the poor’ (in Jerusalem), which Paul aggressively undertakes (2:6-10). Note: Only in the Acts 15 record of this meeting, Paul’s group is asked to ‘abstain from food sacrificed to idols and to refrain from unchastity’ (Acts 15:29).

The Antioch Confrontation OR Some things are easier said than done — Galatians 2:11-14

Other Jews joined Peter in his hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?”’ Galatians 2:13-14

The key word in this passage is “hypocrisy” (2:13). The Greek word that Paul uses is not the familiar hypokrites but sunupokrinomai, which is collective and means “to join others in an act of hypocrisy,” “to play a part in an act of deception.” Demonstrably, the fallout of Peter’s hypocrisy is that other Jewish Christians and even Barnabas, who has accompanied Paul both to Galatia and to Jerusalem, turn their backs on the Gentile believers and refuse to sit with them at meals. The word elucidates how destructive it can be to “follow the crowd.”

Paul calls down Peter with a rather cryptic censure ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?’ (2:14) Grant Richison, a professional Ice Hockey player turned pastor, carefully clarifies this somewhat circular passage:

Paul says that Peter, as a converted Jew, accepted Gentiles as a principle of grace into the body of Christ. He lived as a legalistic Jew before his conversion, but after becoming a Christian and especially after his revelation that Gentiles were accepted into the body of Christ (Acts 10), he believed in and practiced the grace principle. If Peter accepted grace, how can he go back to legalism? It is impossible to have both. If he was right under grace, he is wrong to return to the law. He cannot simultaneously live under both law and grace; the two beliefs are mutually exclusive. (Richison, Verse by Verse)

A practical truth is rendered in the confrontation between Peter and Paul. The Jerusalem agreement that there is no distinction between Jewish and Gentile believers, is far easier to reach in a private meeting than in the public arena (Acts 15:6-11 & Galatians 2:1-10). Maintaining this egalitarian path under community pressure to do otherwise can be tough sledding.

The Big Question OR ‘Did Jesus die for nothing?” - Galatians 2:15-21

‘We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.’

Galatians 2:16

Paul begins this theological section of Chapter 2 with a personal concession. He admits that even those who are Jewish by birth know they cannot be set right with God by keeping the law but only through faith in Jesus Christ (2:16). The essential meaning of the phrase, faith in Jesus Christ, has long been debated. In Greek, pistis Christou, can be interpreted two ways: The first, faith in Jesus Christ, means the believer puts his trust in the person of Jesus Christ. This has been the dominant interpretation. However, the second, faith of Jesus Christ, which also grammatically correct in the Greek, is equally compelling. The believer in this case, puts his faith in Christ’s faithfulness to God. In this latter understanding, the believer realizes he is not made right with God through his act of believing but through trusting in Christ’s fidelity to God. Specifically, Christ obediently sacrifices himself on the cross (see Philippians 2:5-11). We’ll see that Paul expresses this second interpretation at bit later in the chapter (2:20).

Next Paul tackles another sticky question that must have been hurled at him by one of the interlopers. Essentially, the query is ‘If believers put their trust in Christ, which moves them away from trusting the law, does that make Christ an accessory to sin for drawing people away from the law?’ Paul’s answer is explosive — mē genoito, meaning “Absolutely not!” or perhaps better said “God forbid!” (2:17) What Paul says next is both surprising and ingenious: ‘If I build up those things which I tore down, then I prove myself a transgressor’ (2:18). He creates an image of demolition and reconstruction. Paul admits that he has “torn down” something — the wall of Torah observance as the marker separating Jew from Gentile within the believing community. God, through Christ, has ended the hurtful nonsense that Peter and Barnabas fell prey to earlier when ostracizing Gentile believers. The gospel is not made up of abstract reasoning but of concrete, flesh and blood relationships with God and with one another.

The power of this relational faith through Christ is magnified in Paul’s startling personal statement that follows: ‘I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ (2:20). The apostle is saying that he has undergone a death to his old life trying to fulfill the law, which was an impossible task. In fact, the law actually led to Jesus’ death; therefore, Paul participates in Christ’s death. His faith now is in the faithfulness of Christ — not in his own fallible abilities. Also note that Paul’s relationship with Christ is not merely transactional, but he now experiences a mystical union with him — ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.’

Paul ends his theological argument with a bang of the gavel: ‘I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification came through the law, then Christ died for nothing’ (2:21). The cross either means everything or it is meaningless. There is no middle position. To add legal observance to faith as a co-ground of justification is not to supplement the gospel but to nullify it — to declare that the death of Christ was unnecessary.

Furthermore, when Christians separate themselves from other Christians because of differences in race, cultural understanding, economic or social standing, political leanings, or points of view, we are graphically denying the grace of God as demonstrated in Christ’s faithfulness. Our salvation is solely a gift. Therefore, our tables should be considered an extension of that gift completely open to the colorful array of those drawn to our Savior.

SOURCES

Adubato, Stephen, “What I Learned about Islam during Lent,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2026. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/what-i-learned-about-islam-during-lent-82992063?st=ZQ3ZpK&reflink=article

Richison, Grant C., Verse by Verse, Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2006.

PHOTO CREDITS

The Dinner Party, by Tracy Ostmann-Haschke, Chicago, IL

Muslims Breaking the Fast During Ramadan, by SBS News Australia

The Beautiful Diversity of Christians, by Peter Graystone, Emmanuel Church, Croydon, U.K.

Dear Friends of the Pilgrim Letter,

Both our life in Christ and our life in a democratic nation depend on the freedom to tell the truth. With the war in the Middle East accelerating and expanding, the administration is embellishing news from the front and threatening to muzzle media outlets which report the truth.

Paul experienced a similar challenge in Galatia, where he established his very first churches. After he departed the area, false teachers streamed in to the churches denigrating Paul and truncating the truth of the gospel. Paul writes his heated ‘Letter to the Galatians’ to set things right.

To assist in our understanding of Paul, I have added a detailed explanation of the mysterious fifteen years following his conversion on the Damascus Road, which are sometimes termed ‘The Hidden Years.’

As always, thank you for joining me on this Greatest Adventure, Patrick

FAKE IT UNTIL YOU…BREAK IT?

Donald Trump’s favorite dismissal of information he does not like is to deride it as “fake news.” In the decade prior to his January 2026 inauguration, he authored 3,500 social media texts attacking the press. On average, he assailed the news media every single day for ten years, taking no days off. According to the U.S Press Freedom Tracker, he has described news reports as “fake news” nearly 1,500 times and termed the media the “enemy of the people” at least seventy times. (Jones, Poynter). White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt, has adopted her boss’s tactic and regularly dismisses news stories or questions from reporters as “fake news.”

This repeated antic might be ignored as comical or “that’s just Trump” if we weren’t in an undeclared war with Iran with immense costs. As of Saturday, March 14:

13 U.S. service members have been killed.

1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, to include 160 children in a girls’ school.

773 Lebanese civilians have been killed.

10,000 Iranian civilians have been injured.

1,933 Lebanese have been injured.

12 Israeli civilians and 2 soldiers have been killed.

16 civilians from the Gulf States have been killed.

3.2 million Iranians have been displaced from their homes.

830,000 Lebanese have been displaced from their homes.

$16.5 billion spent by U.S. in first 12 days of war (Berger, NPR News)

As news reports streamed in over the weekend, the president was livid about the media coverage of the war. On the social media platform X, he ranted:

‘The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (in particular), and other Lowlife “Papers” and Media actually want us to lose the War. Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts! They are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America. Fortunately, as proven by our Great and Conclusive Election Win in 2024, the People of our Country understand what is happening far better than the Fake News Media!’

In a 400-word post on Truth Social on Sunday, the president seconded FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s threat to prosecute news media organizations for treason. (Ray, Forbes & Adams, Daily Beast)

Earlier, at a briefing on Friday morning, March 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blasted CNN’s report that the administration miscalculated the war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz. Pulling out the administration’s favorite mantra, Hegseth railed:

‘Fake news from CNN reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz. Patently ridiculous, of course. For decades, Iran has threatened shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. This is always what they do, hold the strait hostage.’

With three cargo ships belonging to Japan, Thailand, and Liberia badly damaged and two Iraqi tankers ablaze, it seems someone in the Pentagon or White House underestimated a thing or two along the way.

Also, if the strait is open for business, why did the president lift sanctions on Russian oil? So far, Russia has raked in $6 billion during the firsts few days of the war. During that same time, they have provided Iran with special intelligence to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East. So while the U.S. is bleeding cash, we are rewarding a despotic nation that is providing the means to attack us and has relentlessly pummeled Ukraine for four years now? (Richardson, Letter)

A more patriotic press?

During the Friday press conference, Hegseth added, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network (CNN), the better.” He went on to complain that the headlines were not favorable to the war, and that he wanted a more “patriotic press.” (Timotija, The Hill & Walker, Truthout) After hearing Hegseth’s criticism last Friday, CNN senior political commentator David Axelrod observed, “It feels like a decision has been made that if the war news isn’t better, better to attack those who report news of the war.”

For Hegseth, “a more patriotic press” would be one that served as a dependable mouthpiece for the administration. Russia 1 is Putin’s go-to mouthpiece and The People’s Daily does the same for Xi Jinping. Even conservative Americans should wince at any notion of an officially recognized “patriotic press.” From our nation’s founding, we have considered a free, critical, unfettered press as essential to our republic.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the Anglo-Irish politician and “the father of modern conservatism,” impressed upon America’s founders, especially John Adams, the importance of a free press. Burke was reported to say that the “Reporters’ Gallery” was more important that the other three branches of government — the congress (in his case the parliament), the judiciary, and the executive branch. He made this unexpected claim because the press functions as an unofficial, yet critical, fourth branch, protecting democracy by providing transparency and checking government power. What’s more, a free press informs citizens and shapes public opinion. During this time of international conflict, the most “patriotic press” is one that reports casualties, costs, and complications of the war to citizens truthfully, clearly and candidly. After all, in a democracy the people rule, and it is the people who bear the costs of the war in human lives, taxes, scarcity of resources, and the upending of their security. (Tran, Yale Law)

A REAL APOSTLE WITH THE REAL MESSAGE

‘You had me at hello.’ Galatians 1:1-5

Just as Burke forcefully established that an independent press is vital for our free life in a democracy, Paul fiercely insisted that the true gospel is essential for our free life in Christ. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, his first, is an emotionally charged missive on that subject. While none of his letters could be classified as casual or laid-back in content, Galatians is written to light a fire under its readers. Paul is steamed when false teachers arrive in Galatia shortly after he established the first churches there. The interlopers level three challenges at him, which Paul believes will severely detract from the neophyte Galatian believers’ life in Christ: 1. Paul is accused of not being a true apostle. 2. Because he is not a true apostle, his gospel is defective. 3. Therefore, the gospel he preached to these new Gentile believers a year ago is being replaced with a false one, one that entails following the entirety of the Jewish law.

The shape of ancient letters

Drawing on his middle-class education, Paul answers his critics using the accepted four-part Hellenistic letter style with an opening, thanksgiving, body, and conclusion. Most of his letters maintain the Hellenistic construction, albeit his letters are much longer than the ninety-word average of most Greco-Roman correspondence. The traditional opening of a Hellenistic letter listed the author as well as the recipients of the letter. It is best to think of this first part as sort of an envelope for the letter with specific delivery instructions. Also, in the opening. Paul would add “grace and peace.” Bridging the two worlds he inhabited, he would use the Greek word for “grace” - charis but use the Hebrew or Aramaic word for “peace” - shalom. 1 Corinthians 1:1-3 provides a good example of Paul’s Hellenistic opening.

Next comes the thanksgiving. In this second section, Paul most often offers a prayer for the recipients of the letter. Furthermore, within the body of the prayer, he reveals the central theme of the letter. Romans 1:8-15 is indicative of Paul’s thanksgiving.

The body of Paul’s letters consists of two main sections. The first half is comprised of the theological instructions Paul wishes to impart to the congregation. The second half imparts the way to actually live out the instructions he has delivered to them. See Romans 12:1 to see how the division between the two sections reads.

Paul, of course, ends his letter with a typical Hellenistic conclusion. This is the newsy part of the letter, where he sends out greetings to specific members of the congregation and offers news about himself and his associates. Whereas Paul’s letters were dictated to a scribe, he often would write the conclusion ‘in his own hand.’ This personal touch not only added legitimacy to the message, but also bespoke the intimacy Paul feels for the church members. Look up 1 Corinthians 16:13-24 for an example of Paul’s conclusion. (Paul’s Letters, Ave Maria)

Turning Good News into bad — Galatians 1:6-9

The fact that Paul abandons this standard structure of a Hellenistic letter by skipping the thanksgiving altogether, alerts the reader that Paul is on an irate tear. ‘Grace and peace’ are scarcely dictated to his scribe, when he lets loose, ‘I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ’ (1:6-7). Paul’s ire is expressed in his use of the compound Greek word metatithemi, which has military overtones. The word literally means to “exchange sides” or “turn traitor.” These new Christians have not just slipped up a bit, they have betrayed the Lord who saved them.

With his next breath, Paul curses the false teachers who have bewitched the Galatians with this graceless, ego-driven religion. What they have offered is not just a different version of the gospel, it is a complete departure from the truth revealed in Jesus Christ. Paul denounces these false teachers and any other intruders who attempt to beguile the young congregation in the future. ‘Even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! (1:8) The Greek for “accursed” is even stronger — anathema, which means “given up to destruction.”

‘Again, what is the gospel?’

What is the content of this gospel that Paul proclaimed to the Galatians that has been truncated by the false teachers? The Greek word for “gospel” is euangelion, which is a compound word made up of eu = “good” + angelon = “message.” Gospel, the “good message,” is the foundation of Christian faith, representing the embodiment of God’s grace and rule. Simply stated, we put our faith, not in ourselves, but in the faithfulness of Christ The Bible Project defines gospel this way:

‘In the New Testament, gospel refers specifically to the message that Jesus Christ died for sins, was buried, and rose again, defeating death to restore God’s kingdom and offer salvation to all who believe.’

God, through Jesus Christ, extends four miraculous promises to humanity. First, through Christ’s death, our sins are forgiven. Although we have grossly marred the life we’ve been given by God, we can be restored to complete wholeness and be drawn back into a right relationship with our Creator. Second, because Christ was resurrected, we no longer need to fear death, for it has no hold on us. We will follow the one who is the first fruits of our salvation (1 Corinthians 15:20-23). Third, by Christ’s ascension and the gift of the Holy Spirit, our humanness is “raised” and our image-ness in God is restored (see Genesis 1:27). Fourth, now that sin and death are defeated, God has already begun to restore his perfect kingdom working through those who put their trust in Christ. We share in the risen life of Christ, such that we become a living letter from him (2 Corinthians 3:2-3). (Euangelion/Gospel, The Bible Project)

Paul insists the false teachers are an anathema to God because they have contorted the divine gift of His good news into something manmade and devoid of grace. By insisting the men in the Galatian churches be circumcised and both men and women rigorously observe the Mosaic Law, they have centered the gospel — not on God but on man. Besides that, the gospel is not the purview of humans or even the angels in heaven to amend in any way. The gospel is God’s gift to humanity and ultimately to all creation.

Important Note about the Law: I would be irresponsible if I did not add that the law, the Torah, was also God’s gift to humanity. Before God delivers the law to Moses, God gives him this message to share with the people of Israel assembled at the base of Mt. Sinai:

‘Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ “These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.”’ Exodus 19:5-6

The law was meant to draw Israel closer to God, to reveal His will to them, and to ultimately transform every one of them into walking, breathing emissaries of the God who delivered them from slavery in Egypt. Paul knew this. He lived and died as a Jew. However, he realized that in his day the law had been misrepresented by those in power and had become more of a legalistic burden and less of a gift. Trying to stringently keep the law, Paul became a bounty hunter, the worst version of himself. Thus, he comes to understand that Jesus fulfills the law. His sacrificial life and death extends the grace of God that was intended by the law.

Paul is not a company man — Galatians 1:10-12

In the same way that the gospel is not a human construction but divinely given, Paul’s conversion to trust in Christ was divinely bestowed and not the result of his own volition. Moreover, the gospel message he proclaimed to the Galatians before the false teachers arrived was divinely bequeathed:

‘The gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (1:11b-12).

Looked at that way, Paul is akin to Abraham, who receives a “revelation,” a call from God, to ‘Go to a place I will show you’ (Genesis 12:1). Paul’s revelation from God is similar to Abraham’s in that he, too, is called to go to lands in Asia and Europe to which God directs him and share the good news entrusted to him. Abraham traveled a total of 1,600 miles in his lifetime. Paul, with the benefit of the substantial Roman road system, traveled 10,000!

Paul, a man with a past — Galatians 1:13-24

While Paul identifies with Abraham, he mentions the patriarch twenty times in his letters, his call from God is even more dramatic. In 33 or 34 AD, perhaps the very year Christ was crucified, Paul experienced the beginning of his electric conversion. It was a “beginning” in that Paul marinates in his new life in Christ for fifteen years before he undertakes his first missionary journey to Galatia. These years are sometimes termed Paul’s “hidden years.”

At the time of his first encounter with Christ, Paul, known by his Jewish name, Saul, was serving as a bounty hunter for the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem. Paul was commissioned to round up new followers of Christ known as “The Way.” On this trip, he has warrants from the High Priest to purge the city of Damascus of this pesky sect. Paul is drawing close to the city when a bright light blinds him, throwing him to the ground, and he hears:

‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ To which he replies, ‘Who are you?’ And the answer resounds, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.’ Acts 9:3-7

[Note: Luke, the author of Acts, will begin using Saul’s Greek Name, “Paul,” in Chapter 13, when he and Barnabas strike off on their first missionary journey. For consistency, I will use the name “Paul” throughout this essay.]

At the same time Paul is blinded and dashed to the ground, Christ appears to Ananias in Damascus, an elder of The Way, and tells him to minister to Paul. Knowing Paul’s violent reputation as a bounty hunter, Ananias is reluctant to get started. But the Lord is having none of it:

‘Go! This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.’ Acts 9:11-19

Paul regains his sight, is baptized by Ananias, and miraculously starts preaching in the synagogue in Damascus. The people in Damascus are stunned by his radical about-face. Regardless, his preaching is so powerful that he baffles those who question him, as he resolutely claims Jesus is the Messiah for whom the Jews have long awaited.

Into the wilderness

Paul leaves Damascus and travels south to the Arabian wilderness in present day Jordan to pray and to reconcile his deep knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures with the reality of the crucified and risen Messiah. It is important to note here that Paul was reared in a prominent merchant class family in the prosperous city of Tarsus in what is now south-central Turkey. Because he was a Jewish son born into privilege, he was sent to Jerusalem at about age fourteen to study under the most famous rabbi of that day, Gamaliel. He would have continued his training under the rabbi master for six to eight years. It is equally important to note that Paul was a Pharisee, a sect whose members maintained an ardent hope in the coming of the Messiah. They believed when the Messiah appeared, he would draw the scattered Jewish people back to Israel, vanquish their Roman overlords, reestablish the line of David to rule over Israel, and enkindle fervent adherence to the Mosaic Law (Acts 22:3 & 23:6).

For three years in the wilderness Paul prays and contemplates what has been revealed to him. When he returns to Damascus in about the year 37 AD, his preaching and teaching are even more fiery than before. This precipitates the rage of Damascus’s religious leaders, and they conspire to assail him at the city gates and kill him. Catching wind of the plot, Paul’s new followers lower him in a basket through an opening in the city’s walls (Acts 9:23-25).

A short jaunt to Jerusalem

Paul skedaddles and makes the 140-mile journey to Jerusalem. Followers of The Way in the holy city are terrified of Paul. Thankfully, Barnabas, a respected leader among them, tells Paul’s story, opening the door for him to stay with Peter and spend some time with James, Jesus’ brother who has become the leader of the church there. Gathering his confidence, Paul begins to move about the city and preach freely. In no time at all, attempts on his life are made, and he must make quick tracks out of Jerusalem (Acts 9:26-30; Galatians 1:18-20).

The Bible goes quiet

What Paul does for the next six to seven years is a mystery, save for one sentence in Galatians: ‘Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, and I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea that are in Christ; they only heard it said, “The one who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy”’ (1:21-23). Scholars conjecture that Paul returned to Tarsus to hone his craft as a “tentmaker,” which enabled him to fabricate awnings and other commercial products for merchants from leather and heavy cloth. He repeatedly asserted to the churches he founded in Greece that he did not take payment from them, but worked to earn his keep and help others:

‘I have not coveted anyone’s silver or gold or clothing. You yourselves know that these hands of mine have supplied my own needs and the needs of my companions. In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus himself, “It is more blessed to give than receive.”’ Acts 20:33-35

We can surmise that during this time Paul is quietly maturing in Christ and marinating in the Scriptures. He is nearing his fortieth birthday, when Barnabas grabs him out of obscurity and takes him to Antioch where the two preach for a year or so in the city. During Paul’s first stay in Antioch the name “Christian” is first used to describe the followers of Jesus (Acts 11:25-26).

Because a famine was gripping the land, Barnabas and Paul were entrusted to take famine relief collected by Christian leaders in Antioch to the church in Jerusalem (Acts 11:27-30). After successfully delivering the aid, the two then return to Antioch for two years. While worshipping, praying, and fasting with Christians in the city, the Holy Spirit spoke to the church leaders to ‘set apart Barnabas and Paul for the work to which I have called them’ (Acts 13:1-3). With that, the two set off on their first missionary journey, picking up John Mark along the way.

Charting Paul’s Hidden Years c. 33-48 AD

Paul’s comings and goings during the years following his conversion can be immensely confusing to grasp. Reading the Acts of the Apostles, it is clear that throughout his entire ministry the man never slows down unless stuck in a Roman prison! These first fifteen years after his conversion are particularly difficult to conceptualize because some of those years are shrouded in mystery. Nevertheless, I will do my best to render an amateur’s chart of those years:

33-34 AD Saul (Paul) converted in Damascus Acts 9:1-19; 22:6-16

34-37 AD In Arabia and Return to Damascus Galatians 1:15-17

37 AD Escape from Damascus Acts 9:23-25; 2 Cor. 11:32-33

37-38 AD 1st Visit to Jerusalem Galatians 1:18-20; Acts 9:26-30

38-43 AD Learning and Maturing in Tarsus Galatians 1:21; Acts 9:30

43-44 AD Barnabas Takes Paul to Antioch Acts 11:25-26

44 AD Famine Relief to Jerusalem Acts 11:27-30

46-48 AD Return to Antioch, Mission Work Acts 13:1-3

48 AD Beginning of First Missionary Journey Acts 13-14

49 AD Paul Writes His Letter to the Galatians

From where did Paul’s immense understanding come?

Now that the false teachers have sown doubts about Paul’s teaching and authority, he must retake the high road and convince them of his divine apostleship. After all, it is Paul who gives theological substance to the Christian faith and adeptly explains, to both his generation and ours, the personal, as well as the cosmic ramifications of Christ’s birth, death, resurrection, and ascension. He does not brag about his associations with the big names of the nascent church. In fact he does exactly the opposite. He writes that he was chosen by God before birth and divinely tutored:

‘But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me,* so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being.’ Galatians 1:15-16

Paul confidently declared, ‘I was born for this!’ Penning the earliest document to be included in the New Testament, he sets the tone for the other eight authors of the twenty-six books that follow: Proclaiming the unmitigated truth of the gospel is the avenue to our free life in Christ. In somewhat the same way, Edmund Burke served as a prophet for America’s founding fathers. In a democracy, those who honestly report the news are as important as those who make it.

SOURCES

Adams, Cameron, “Trump Demands Death Penalty for Reporters in Unhinged War Rant,” The Daily Beast, March 16, 2026. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-demands-death-penalty-for-reporters-in-unhinged-war-rant/

Berger, Ava, “These are the casualties and cost of the war in Iran 2 weeks into the conflict,” NPR News, March 14, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/14/nx-s1-5746623/iran-war-cost-deaths

“Euangelion/Gospel,” The Bible Project. https://bibleproject.com/videos/euangelion-gospel/

Jones, Tom, “10 years of Trump, 10 years of media attacks,” Poynter Institute, June 17, 2025. https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2025/decade-donald-trump-fight-free-press/

“Paul’s Writing Style,” Ave Maria Press, Jan. 13, 2009. https://www.avemariapress.com/blogs/engagingfaith/st-pauls-writing-style#

Ray, Sidlatitya, “Trump Backs FCC Chair’s Threat To Revoke Broadcast Licenses Over Iran War Coverage,” Forbes, March 15, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/03/15/trump-backs-fcc-chairs-threat-to-revoke-broadcast-licenses-over-iran-war-coverage/

Richardson, Heather Cox, Letter from An American, Mar. 13, 2026.

Timotija, Filip, “Hegseth blasts CNN: ‘The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” The Hill, Mar. 13, 2026. https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5782562-hegeseth-criticizes-cnn-iran/amp/

Tran, Delbert, “The Fourth Estate As The Final Check,” Yale Law School, Nov. 22, 2016. https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/fourth-estate-final-check

Walker, Chris, “Hegseth Whines About Iran War Coverage, Demands “Patriotic Press” Instead,” Truthout. Mar. 13, 2026. https://truthout.org/articles/hegseth-whines-about-iran-war-coverage-demands-patriotic-press-instead/

PHOTO CREDITS

Woman reading Wall Street Journal, photo compliments of Karen Bleier in The Week

Iraqi oil tankers on fire in Strait of Hormuz, photo compliments of Reuters

Paul’s conversion on the Road to Damascus, by Caravaggio, Parish Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome

Dear Friends of the Pilgrim Letter,

A few nights ago, Kay and I watched the 1995 Rob Reiner film The American President, starring Michael Douglas, as a widower president, Martin Sheen, as the Chief of Staff, Michael J. Fox, as the President’s Assistant for Domestic Policy, and Annette Bening, as the president’s girlfriend. I was repeatedly moved by the obvious respect Reiner held for the presidential office and the noble manner with which Michael Douglas carried out his part. In regard to that, I learned that Robert Redford declined the part because he thought the script should magnify the romantic elements of the film over the role of the presidency.

Reiner’s emphasis is demonstrated most poignantly in a line, delivered not by Douglas, but by Annette Bening, who, during a quiet moment at Camp David, asks the president, “How do you have patience for people who claim they love America, but clearly can’t stand Americans?” Sitting on the sofa next to Kay, I could not help but think that at this moment in our nation Bening’s question is far more appropriate than it was thirty-one years ago in 1995. Flag-waving and sloganeering greet us at street corners, supermarkets, and parade across our television screens, yet we are not seeing much love extended to our citizens these days. Deep cuts to medical and food programs, protections lifted for clean air and water, brutal — even deadly — martial tactics directed at citizens and guests in our cities, and a major war begun in the Middle East without a single word to Congress represent a blatant disregard for Americans. No amount of rationalization could lead Bible-reading Christians to condone these love-less actions.

In this week’s Letter, I direct our attention to censorship and the suppression of information by the administration and some state governments. In the public education arena, my own state of Texas has become increasingly repressive, especially in its frenzy to ban library books. Do we suddenly find ourselves at a “Fahrenheit 451” moment? If you recall, Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel depicts a future American society where books are outlawed and where the nation’s firemen no longer prioritize safety but instead burn every book they find. “451° Fahrenheit,” Bradbury’s strange title for his book, is the temperature at which book paper spontaneously burns to ash.

Bradbury’s “burning questions” include: How can our citizenry be truly free if we block their access to knowledge — even knowledge which challenges the status quo? More importantly, Bradbury’s novel begs the question if governmental leaders truly love the people, why would they actively keep information and knowledge from them? Can a government serve the citizens while at the same time curtailing their freedom?

With this growing challenge in mind, I could not help but realize that Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is “ignited” by an attempt at censorship. Paul’s critics want to silence him. In particular, they wish to suppress his message to the Galatians of their incredible freedom in Christ.

Thank you for joining me on the Greatest Adventure, Patrick

BOOK FAIR OR BOOK SCARE?

Last school year, various Texas school boards across the state banned 540 books. Some of the most notable titles include A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess (which I read in sophomore English); The Color Purple, by Alice Walker; Looking for Alaska, by John Green (a young adult title that I recently read and reviewed); and The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. The school district just north of where I live in San Antonio has pulled for review both Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley and A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams — both texts I was assigned in high school in 1971, a year when young Americans joined massive anti-government protests across the land, resulting in 12,000 arrests. Now with the passage of Texas Senate Bill 13 this month, which gives parents ever greater control over book censorship in schools, expect the list of banned books to grow exponentially. In fact, the aforementioned school district has temporarily closed all of its secondary school libraries to consider the appropriateness of 195,000 texts. The libraries serve approximately 3,120 students on their middle and high school campuses. Adding insult to injury, this school district along with some others are using AI tools to scan texts for objectionable material. Rather than depending on knowledgeable, mature readers to make reasonable recommendations, the state districts have turned to machines. About this method, Laney Hawes, an activist with the Texas Freedom to Read Project, retorts, “AI doesn’t fully understand the community, Books and stories are all about the human experience. Isn’t that the point of books? (Price, Library Journal)

These emotionally charged bouts of censorship weaken the education Texas students receive. They will certainly be less challenged. Most of the book titles that have been removed deal in some way with sexual issues or with America’s racial and civil rights history. Do we really imagine that teenagers are not grappling with their own sexual awakenings and the confounding questions those awakenings bring about? Have we conveniently forgotten the challenges of our own adolescence? Do we want to exchange what may well be a reasoned, developed, and personal approach to sexuality offered in a book for the ribald, hedonistic, and altogether impersonal versions of sex hawked on the internet? Regarding the latter, in 2022, the American College of Pediatricians reported that 54% of American adolescents had watched online pornography by age thirteen. 39% of boys and 23% of girls had viewed scenes of sexual bondage. Those percentages have surely increased during the last four years, while the ages of children viewing these online sites have no doubt markedly decreased. (Pornography, College of Pediatricians)

At the same time, what benefit is it to “whitewash” America’s most enduring sin of racial injustice? Why do we want our children shielded from the dehumanizing struggle of 23 million of our nation’s citizens and the heroism of those who sacrificially worked for equality and civil rights? As we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation, do we want the next generation of Americans to live up to the words of the Declaration of Independence or discard the document’s message as outdated nostalgia?

To make a purely practical point, if a son or daughter brings home a book that contains sexual themes or historical violence, parents can engage that material with their child and have substantive conversations. On the other hand, junior’s internet viewing will be solely secretive, and the confusing or even disturbing scenes he or she views will certainly not be shared but insufferably internalized.

Texas is facing challenges in higher education, as well. Texas A&M University, with its 75,000 students, has the largest student body of any single campus in the U.S. The university has been the focus of national news by canceling six courses and substantially modifying hundreds of others this academic year — both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The university incited near ridicule by restricting the teaching of Plato’s Symposium in at least one course. Administrators deemed its discussions on gender and sexuality in conflict with state-backed policies banning “race and gender ideology.” A professor was instructed to remove the text. Written in 385 BC the Symposium is hardly salacious fare. It is ironic that the philosopher who introduced the world to ethics and educational ideals is being censored by an institution of higher learning — one built upon Plato’s legacy. On the other hand, it is laughable that we fear disturbing individuals in their twenties by challenging information about human sexuality. Are these absurd restrictions about students or peacock politicians? The American Association of University Professors responded to A&M’s administration critically and cogently:

Silencing 2,500-year-old ideas from one of the world’s most influential thinkers betrays the mission of higher education and denies students the opportunity to engage critically with the foundations of Western thought. A research university that censors Plato abandons its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust—and should not be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning. We are deeply saddened to witness the decline of one of Texas’s great universities. (AAUP-TAMU Chapter & Blinder, NY Times)

Worlds apart

When did we go from treasuring books and the knowledge they impart and imagination they awaken to fearing them? Hope in this matter has sprung up in the most unexpected place — Damascus, Syria. Sitting on the same latitude as Dallas, TX, yet 6,958 miles to the east, Syrians are in love with books. On February 5, opening day for the 57th Damascus International Book Fair, 250,000 visitors streamed into the city’s International Convention Center under a banner that read, “History We Write - History We Read.” 500 publishing houses from thirty-five different countries were represented at the ten day festival. Remarkably, Charles Darwin’s On Origin of Species was available, along with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, The Theory of Everything, and The Grand Design. Also on the shelves were provocative romantic selections by the Irish writer, Sally Rooney, to include Normal People, Intermezzo, and Conversations with Friends. Each title had been translated into Arabic.

After fifty-four years of repressive, authoritarian rule under Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad as well as thirteen years of brutal civil war, Syrians are hungry for free expression and access to knowledge — even knowledge that rattles their Islamic worldview. Most surprisingly, many titles at the book fair were made available in the Kurdish language. The Assads persecuted the Kurdish minority in Syria for decades through structural discrimination, denial of citizenship, and violent crackdowns. So far, the new administration is allowing this freedom. The people seem determined to keep it that way. (Book fair, The Economist)

Quite by chance, I am reading Syria’s Secret Library, by the British foreign correspondent Mike Thompson. The book records the heroic efforts of several young men, college age and younger, who establish a library in their besieged city of Daraya, situated about five miles southwest of Damascus. The youngest of their number, Amjad, a fourteen year-old with an all-consuming passion for books and learning, served as the Head Librarian.

Beginning in 2011, Bashar al-Assad’s government forces surrounded the town, subjecting it to relentless bombing, sniper fire, starvation tactics in a brutal siege that lasted four years. The remaining residents lived among ruins, with scarce food, medicine, and electricity. While most of Daraya’s 80,000 residents fled the area, these young men established their secret library in the basement of a bombed out building — eventually collecting 10,000 volumes to serve the 8,000 residents who remained. (Library, NY Times)

With their schools and public library decimated by the government’s bombardment, the young men daily risked death by stealthily going through the crumbling remains of residences and offices to rescue books that had been left by those escaping the city. Often they would have to make the excursions at night to avoid deadly sniper fire.

The library was kept secret so it would not become a target of the regime. Its location was spread amongst the residents solely by word of mouth. Inside this quiet refuge, shelves lined the walls with novels, philosophy, history, religious works, poetry, and textbooks. Books on Christianity and Judaism were set alongside books on Islam. Even books on marital love-making were available, but these were placed on the top shelves! For the oppressed residents of Daraya, the library became far more than a collection of books—it was a sanctuary from war and a symbol of intellectual freedom in a country long marked by censorship. Anas, one of the library’s founders, boldly declared:

‘We don’t ban any books. We are open to those on all subjects. We believe that by excluding books we do not agree with, we would just be helping to raise ignorance.’

During the worst of al-Assad’s onslaught against Daraya, the library became more than a quiet place to read and check out books. It also became a lecture hall and space for continuing education. Inspired by the young men’s clandestine library, two young women started a primary school to teach the remaining children in Daraya, numbering around seventy between the ages of five and twelve. Often they would have to move the classes into a dark basement during bombardments, but they rarely cancelled school. No student died at school during those four perilous years, but twenty of them perished in their homes from artillery bombardments and sniper fire. Sara, one of the intrepid teachers confessed why she and her associate risked so much to teach the menagerie of students who hailed from Muslim, Alawite, and Christian families:

‘I don’t want this new generation to have their intellectual development held back the way ours was. So I try to teach them to think for themselves and express their own emotions. Since the uprising this is much easier. We are now free to protest against the regime here in Daraya.’ (Thompson, Library)

Love America but hate Americans?

Censorship and the repression of knowledge are never the friends of democracy. In fact, the word democracy originated in 5th century Athens, about the same time Plato was born in that city. It is a compound Greek word made up of demos — “the people” and Kratos — “rule.” Hence, “the people rule” or “people power.” But the people cannot rule the republic if they are uninformed. That is why autocrats, despots, and tyrants always restrict the free flow of information. Think of China’s control of the internet and its battalions of sleuths eavesdropping on its citizens’ electronic correspondence. Far worse is North Korea, “the Hermit Kingdom,” whose people have been cut off from the world’s literature, news, and discourse for the past seventy years. Russia, for its part, has systematically restricted information across the vast country by creating “a sovereign internet,” RuNet, which is designed to disconnect the populace from the global web, enforcing strict censorship and criminalizing dissent. Key measures include blocking Western social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) and news sites, throttling platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, and penalizing VPN usage. (Putin, Radio Free Europe)

Even here at home, we must consider the president’s manipulation of large media outlets, such as CBS, and his insistence that late night comedians be silenced. Satirists are high on the administration’s target list because they effectively expose the truth about government and politics much more evocatively and memorably than news commentators. Consider the impact of Saturday Night Live skits. Don’t forget that the administration pulled all federal funding — $1.1 billion — for public radio and public television when it dissolved the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which had helped support public media for a half century. In some states, National Public Radio is the only news source available in rural areas. (Funding Cuts, Common Cause)

Curtailing free speech and open access to information is, at its heart, an attack on freedom. Governments posture that the suppression of knowledge is for our protection. Actually, these actions are meant to control citizens, and “control” is never the same thing as love.

CENSORING ST. PAUL

Introducing Galatians

At its heart, Galatians is about the freedom believers have in Christ and one of the earliest attempts to squash that freedom. The gospel or good news that Paul preached to the Galatians one year before—salvation through the grace of Jesus Christ—was being discredited. The spiritual freedom of believers was in grave danger. False teachers conspired to gain control over the young, impressionable congregation of Gentile Christians. Neither love of God nor love of the people played any part in their efforts.

Paul is furious with the Galatians, but even more so with the shyster teachers who are bewitching them. Paul works hard and risks much to establish the Galatian churches in what is now Central Turkey. The Roman province of Galatia comprised a considerable territory, including the ancient cities of Perga, Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. Paul and his stalwart companion Barnabas set out to evangelize this area on their first missionary journey in 48 AD. Amazingly, this is only eighteen years after Christ’s resurrection. I should add here that young John Mark, who will write the earliest Gospel account, initially travels with the duo.

Paul’s disciple, Luke, gives a report on the two’s courageous exploits in Acts 13-14, to include a mob’s attempt to murder Paul by stoning in Lystra (Acts 14:19). In that near fatal episode, the frenzied people stone Paul and drag his limp body out of the city. They suppose he is “stone-cold” dead. However, they no sooner depart than Paul pops back up, wounds and all, and defiantly waltzes back into the city. The next day Barnabas and he begin the walk to Derbe, sixty miles southeast of Lystra, where Paul preaches for as long as a week (14:20-21). Not satisfied with his initial gospel crusade, Paul refuses to take the more reasonable shortcut back to their headquarters in Antioch in Syria. He instead retraces his steps and preaches in the Galatian cities a second time. Also during this return trip, he appoints elders to care for the neophyte congregations, and adds a preaching stop in Perga. Paul did not initially preach in that city because of John Mark’s sudden defection from the crusade. (Acts 14:21-25 & See 13:13).

After completing their 1,400 mile trek, Paul and Barnabas arrive back in Antioch to report the successful planting of the new churches (Acts 14:26-28). No rest is in store for the duo, however, as false Christian teachers arrive in town who demand that male Gentile believers line up to be circumcised, and that all believers, both male and female, must keep the entirety of the Jewish law. This confrontation in Antioch compels Paul and Barnabas to hightail it to Jerusalem, the base camp of both the apostles and the false teachers, to straighten out this matter (Acts 15:1-29). In the end, it is Peter, Paul’s sometime nemesis (See Galatians 2:11-14), who saves the day and declares to the assembly:

‘So why are you now trying to out-god God, loading these new believers down with rules that crushed our ancestors and crushed us, too? Don’t we believe that we are saved because the Master Jesus amazingly and out of sheer generosity moved to save us just as he did those from beyond our nation? So what are we arguing about?’ (Acts 15:10-11, The Message)

It is important that we review these two confrontations with the false Christian teachers in Antioch and Jerusalem because they are part of the same misguided group who arrive in Galatia shortly after Paul and Barnabas depart the region. They convince many in the neophyte church that they must follow the Jewish law in order to be saved — eradicating the Galatians’ newfound freedom through grace and replacing it with a degraded religion based solely on human endeavor. The false teachers’ dubious intent is further magnified by the fact that the Galatian congregations are made up of Gentiles with no connection to Mosaic Law.

Paul is incensed. Less than one year has elapsed since he preached the good news of liberation to the Galatian churches. Unable to immediately repeat the 1,400 mile round trip, Paul sits down and dictates a letter to the churches. It will become the earliest document in the New Testament, will set the table for the four Gospel writers who follow, and will repeatedly correct the trajectory of the Christian church throughout the ensuing ages.

For example, in 1535, eighteen years after he nailed the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Church door, Martin Luther wrote in his Commentary on Galatians, “To mix law and Gospel not only clouds the knowledge of grace, it cuts out Christ altogether.” Luther realized he was in the same struggle with the church authorities of the late Middle Ages as Paul was with the false teachers of antiquity. Ultimately, Luther’s struggle struck the match of the Reformation and Paul’s ignited the miraculous spread of the church and the compilation of the New Testament.

In our own day, Tim Keller, who died of pancreatic cancer less than three years ago, preached, “Galatians is like a little bomb. There’s dynamite in it. It’s not a very long book, but it brings a big punch… We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Christ than we ever dared to hope.”

Keller realized that 1,977 years after Paul wrote his Letter to the Galatians we need Paul’s message more than ever. Paul knew that he was incurably sick due to his alienation from God until Christ made him well and drew him into the embrace of the Father. From the moment he became aware that Christ healed him, he could not help but tell others the good news of what had happened to him and the grace of God to make everyone well who hears that good news and puts their faith in what Christ has done for them. His adversaries, on the other hand, wanted to silence the telling of that good news and replace it with one centered on human effort, which is no good news at all — but brings about bondage rather than freedom.

All in all, Paul would travel 10,000 miles to share that news. He did it because he loved the people to whom God sent him. His adversaries loved their religion, but not the people. And here we are again. So many Christians aligned with the current administration profess a cultural religion, one based on exercising power, targeting legislation, and ruthless expulsion. Just as there are “people who love America but hate Americans,” there are many who love the Christian religion but despise many other Christians.

SOURCES

“AAUP @ Texas A&M University Condemns Banning of Plato,” AAUP Blog, Jan. 7, 2026. https://aaup-texas.org/blog/f/aaup-texas-am-university-condemns-banning-of-plato#:~:text=(8)

“A book fair in Damascus is a window on the new Syria,” The Economist, Feb. 19, 2026. https://economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/02/19/a-book-fair-in-damascus-is-a-window-on-the-new-syria

Blinder, Alan, “Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato,” NY Times, Jan. 7, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/tamu-plato-race-gender.html?

Mikhail, Dunya, “In a Syrian Town Under Siege, a Secret Library Kept Dreams Alive,” New York Times, Sep. 28, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/books/review/syrias-secret-library-mike-thomson.html?

Price, Gary, “Report: Texas Schools are Using AI to Screen Library Books Under New State Law,” Library Journal, Oct. 29, 2025. Excerpted from the Austin American-Statesman. https://www.infodocket.com/2025/10/29/report-texas-schools-are-using-ai-to-screen-library-books-under-new-state-law/#:~:text=

“Putin Signs New Measure Tightening FSB Control Over Russian Internet,” Radio Free Europe, Feb. 21, 2026. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-internet-law-restriction-tech-censorship/33684027.html

“The Impact of Pornography in Children, The American College of Pediatricians, Updated August, 2024. https://acpeds.org/the-impact-of-pornography-on-children/

Thompson, Mike, Syria’s Secret Library, London: W&N Publishers, 2019.

“Trump’s Funding Cuts Are Already Gutting Rural Public Media Stations Across the Country,” Common Cause, Aug. 6, 2025. https://www.commoncause.org/articles/trumps-funding-cuts-are-already-gutting-rural-public-media-stations-across-the-country/

PHOTO CREDITS

Open and Closed Books, by Kateryna Hliznitsova, from Ukraine

Daraya, Syria, by Mahmoud Sulaiman, Daraya, Syria

Amjad, the 14 Year-Old Head Librarian of Daraya’s Secret Library, by Daraya City Local Council

Are Smartphones Destroying Teen Mental Health?, by Vox

Dear Readers of the Pilgrim Letter,

This my ninth collection of book reviews since I began writing the Letter twenty-six months ago, and it may be the best. As usual, there is a sundry of genres represented, which reflect my eclectic and somewhat wandering reading interests. In this assemblage, you’ll find a moving memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks about the sudden death of her Pulitzer Prize winning husband, Tony Horowitz. Wendell Berry’s ‘Hannah Coulter” is the only novel I included, but it gives readers a heart-warming read as well as a heart-rending view into rural America’s decline. Berry’s novel is complimented by Beth Macy’s ‘Paper Girl,’ which is her clear-eyed chronicle of Urbana, Ohio’s plummet. The account is particularly painful because Urbana is Macy’s hometown. I review ‘The Best Essays of 2025,’ in which I found a clutch of evocative writings. Walter Isaacson’s short book, ‘The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,’ about the Declaration of Independence, is essential reading for any of us wanting the 250th anniversary of our nation to actually mean something substantive. Finally, I review three religious titles that I greatly enjoyed. The first is a biography of Jesus, by the celebrated British historian Paul Johnson. The second is a creative look at the Holy Eucharist, which is also a call to action for Christians. Third, is Ferguson Butler-Gallie’s inventive history of Christianity centering on twelve churches scattered across the world. One, 16th Street Baptist Church, happens to be in my hometown.

As always, thank you for joining me on the great reading adventure, Patrick

PAPER GIRL: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, by Beth Macy

Rural counties and the Rust Belt are strange places to look for hope in America today. Yet those places draw veteran journalist Beth Macy. In 2014, she published Factory Man, where she chronicled the personal cost of “off-shoring” American businesses through the experience of a furniture manufacturer in Basset, VA. Macy followed that with the publication of Dopesick in 2018, which reports the twenty year trajectory of the opioid epidemic as it spread from depressed Appalachian towns to the glitzy Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. In Paper Girl, which Macy released in 2025, she gets far more personal, for it is a story of returning home to face the perilous descent of her once proud city of Urbana, OH.

Macy reiterates several times in Paper Girl that Urbana’s citizenry, for most of its history, boasted that it was an important stop on the famed Underground Railroad, which helped 100,000 slaves escape to freedom between 1860 and 1865. Today, however, more Confederate flags fly from homes than Star Spangled Banners. She adds that when she was a girl delivering the local afternoon newspaper — hence the title of her book — Urbana had an expansive middle class due to its cutting edge aeronautics industry. No more. The factory was sold and resold and shrunkened to a shell of its former size. No one seems to know who now owns the plant or where they live — certainly not in Urbana.

Growing up in poverty, Macy hooked her wagon to a Pell Grant and was able to matriculate through four years of college. However, successive Democratic and Republican administrations decreased that program which lifted so many into the middle class. At the same time, those same legislators on both sides of the aisle drastically cut funding for state universities, which resulted in tuition increases of 112-179% over the past twenty years. The resulting decrease in educated Urbanans intensified the sense of hopelessness, anger, and conspiratorial fervor. Of course, what happened in Urbana is happening all over our nation.

What makes Paper Girl unique as an exposé is the fact that Macy loves her hometown and all the wounded people in it — even those who are patently unloveable, unapproachable, and now hostile to her. Also, Macy’s broad outlook and deep understanding of America’s travails lead her to conclude that not all of our troubles arrived with the Trump administration. He capitalized on our nation’s pain, but the damage had already been visited on small cities and country towns by a procession of administrations. Free trade, deregulation, hyper-capitalism, and the reduction of substantive grants and opportunities have all contributed to the blight across our nation. At times these complicated problems seem incurable. Immersed as she is in these immense challenges that beset us, she has, at times, dreamed of leaving the U.S., especially with the rise of authoritarianism exhibited by the new administration:

‘Like many of my friends who are scared of living under a fascist regime, I love the idea of moving to Portugal. I also dream about living in my ancestral Irish homeland, where (on a visit) my hip pain went away… But there is a world of resistance to hatred and the systematic betrayal of democracy that demands us to stay and fight. We must scramble for hope fiercely, the way a farm girl wrestles a muddy sow.’

The Best American Essays 2025, edited by Jia Tolentino

Because I am an amateur essayist, I love to read the work of the professionals. Annually, a generous selection of the year’s best non-fiction writing appears in The Best American Essays. Adding to the enjoyment of reading the collection is that the editor for each particular year is given the freedom to choose essays that particularly resonated with her or him. Jia Tolentino, a young staff writer for The New Yorker, is the 2025 editor. Her personal confession that she actual needs this unique genre of writing resonates with me:

‘The essay for me serves as a crucial reminder that, while life frequently feels unfathomable, you can commit to a type of work that will force you to begin to fathom it. This work requires you to have a clear and mostly unforgiving understanding of who you are… The work also asks me to move toward a better version of myself: someone clearer and more honest and more present than the woman who’s otherwise zoning out on the bus and buying milk with Tap to Pay, living thoughtlessly through the parts of each day that never make it to permanent storage.’

My experience resonates with Tolentino’s. I may read reams of pages about certain political matters, social challenges, historical events, or religious questions, but my understanding only comes with writing about it. Also, once I put my thoughts, reactions, fears, and hopes into words, I, like Tolentino, am on the “move toward a better version of myself.” It is like the words take up residence in me. No doubt that is part of what St. John had in mind when he wrote about the Word as an active presence in our lives: ‘In the beginning was the Word… In him was life, and the life was the light of all people’ (John 1:1-5).

In all, Tolentino included twenty-one essays in the collection. I hungrily read each one of them and was inspired by all but four. Three of the essays reflect the deep personal pain shared by the writers for family members still struggling in war torn or blighted regions around the globe. Of the three, I was particularly drawn to Khalil Abusharekh’s contribution, Zeppole (aka Awama). The author, who now lives in Houston, TX, tells the story of getting a prized pair of new shoes as a boy while living amidst the dire poverty of Gaza. Hannah Keziah Agustin, who is presently studying at New York University, writes another essay, Homeland Fictions, that tugged at my heartstrings,. In it, she describes the favela where her family and neighbors homesteaded on the outskirts of Manila. Once she leaves to study in the United States, her neighborhood is unceremoniously bulldozed by developers, making her feel desperately homeless. Guggenheim Fellow Eula Biss writes about the hardships and heartbreak she encounters in South Africa. In the essay, Love and Murder in South Africa, Biss depicts the heroism of Stephen Biko, who was beaten to death by authorities in 1977. He was only thirty years old.

Two of the essays rose to the top of the list for me. In the first, Man Crossing an Ice Field, Laura Glen Louis tells the desperate story of her husband succumbing to dementia. Once a brawny adventurer, investigative scientist, and riveting teacher and author, her husband is gradually hollowed out before her eyes. She vividly describes the root of his decline:

‘Imagination allows us to roam. Memory allows us to relish, to recall, return, enjoy, to evoke, to call again. Without imagination, possibility atrophies. Without memory, the day, the hour, the moment is lost, as if with each step the earth under our soles falls into the dispassionate abyss.’

I equally enjoyed Gone for a Spell, by Angie Romines, and originally published in the prestigious Kenyon Review. I was most drawn to the religious content of the essay and the fact that Romines and her husband deserted the evangelical faith that had formed them and had given them purpose earlier in their marriage. While she does not comprehensively reveal the reason for their break with evangelicalism, she does conclude her essay by stating that when she tucks her children into their beds, they “won’t lie awake imagining hell as I did when I was half their age, because I have made sure no one has taught them what hell is.” Reading her words, my mind races back to Khalil Abusharekh’s essay about Gaza and the children who do not “imagine hell” but live in the middle of its precincts.

Memorial Days, by Geraldine Brooks

On Memorial Day 2019, Tony Horowitz collapsed on a sidewalk in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was rushed to George Washington Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. A mere sixty years before, the esteemed Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent and bestselling author was born in that same hospital. News of his sudden and unexpected death careened into the lives of his two sons and his wife of thirty-five years, Geraldine Brooks.

Brooks, herself a celebrated Pulitzer Prize journalist and bestselling author, wrote Memorial Days as a plaintive memoir of their devoted marriage and the love of friends and family that surrounded her during the confusing and deeply painful days that ensued after Horowitz’s unexpected death. At the same time, it is a sobering account of the painful public encounters she and her boys endured in the aftermath of his demise. The dehumanizing treatment she received from both medical and civic leaders is disturbing — and Brooks is a well-known bestselling New York Times author!

Her memoir actually begins four years after her husband’s death when she decides to retreat to rustic Flinders Island, situated between mainland Australia and Tasmania. Brooks spent weeks on the island, only rarely encountering others. Her stated goal was ”to suffer the way I should suffer.” Caught in the cataract of engagements, publishing deadlines, and the avalanche of changes that the death of a spouse brings, she had not been able to fully mourn the loss of the man she adored as well as the loss of the “golden years” they had assumed would be theirs. The memoir, therefore, moves back and forth between the past frenetic days surrounding Horowitz’s death in the U.S. and the present contemplative days on the remote Australian island. Upon arriving at Flinders, she declares, “I have come to realize that my life since Tony’s death has been one endless, exhausting performance. I have cast myself in a role: woman being normal.”

Brooks does not seek closure on Finders; rather she seeks to vividly remember her husband and learn to live with the loss she has experienced. She maintains that the death of a spouse or a child necessarily changes a person and the marks of the loss are never shed — nor would she ever want them to be. Brooks also asserts that in the face of death a person has the right to reclaim personal space and quiet to accustom herself to the new reality in which she lives.

An interesting side note is that Horowitz was on a multi-city book tour when he collapsed from exhaustion and heart failure. The book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, is a historical travelogue following the path of Frederick Law Olmstead through the pre-Civil War South. Olmstead is the celebrated architect of Central Park in New York and of the magnificent parks threading through the whole city of Louisville, KY. To date, Horowitz’s book has sold tens of thousands of copies.

On that accord, as Brooks’s retreat nears its end, she makes this resolution: “I do know this: My job is to carry his light. To keep him vibrantly illuminated for my sons, and their children—his grandchildren—whenever they get here.”

Hannah Coulter, by Wendell Berry

“Belonging” is the theme of Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter — how we “belong” to the land and to one another. Narrated in the first person by Hannah Coulter, she tells the story of her life from childhood to old age in the fictional farming community of Port William, Kentucky. Working on a struggling farm as a child, she “belonged” to her grandmother, who loved her completely and taught her all the rudiments of farming life and of womanhood. As a young woman, she marries Virgil Feltner, a prosperous, college educated farmer, who dies in World War II. A young widow, she raises their daughter in the house of Virgil’s parents, who extend their love to them selflessly — insuring they know they “belong” there with them.

After some years, another Port William war veteran returns home, Nathan Coulter, and the three of them begin a new life together, albeit much harder than the farming life she shared with Virgil. Nathan and Hannah need each other in the restoration of their bedraggled farm and the need intensifies their mutual “belonging.” The two forge a long life together on a farm just beyond the bounds of the Feltners. Two sons are born to them. The farm, totally rundown when they purchase it, is life-giving rather than life-depleting. Hannah admits as much, when she says, “By our work we kept and improved our place, and in return for our work the place gave us back our life.” The farm gives all five in their household a sense of profound “belonging.”

Hannah’s and Nathan’s hopes for a successor to keep the land is dashed in post-WWII America. Their eldest son, Mattie, becomes an engineer and eventually rises to the position of CEO in a cutting-edge company on the West Coast. When he visits Port William, he seems to absently look past his parents and the farm. Caleb, the younger son and the most interested in farming, is beguiled by the academy and becomes a college professor. Hannah suspects he yearns to “do” farming instead of abstractly teaching about it. Margaret, her child fathered by Virgil, teaches in Louisville and, with no warning, endures a humiliating divorce. She owns the Feltner farm and conspires with her father to keep it up, yet she will not return. Hannah mourns her three children’s loss of place, of having no place where they truly “belong.” She declares, “There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.” She wishes she could bequeath that certainty to her children, but industrial agriculture, the mass exodus from rural America, and massive societal shifts have drawn them away…and yet, alas, not to a better life.

Children leave home, familiar family farms disappear, and the life, once rock solid, gradually fades away. Hannah does not give into despondency and regret. Instead, she is thankful for what has been given rather than angry over what has been lost. Besides, she is given a glimmer of hope when Margaret’s son, Virgie, unexpectedly arrives at her house to work the farms. Perhaps he may even stay. So, as she nears the darkness and the end of her life, Hannah contemplates, “Port William has never been the same place two minutes together. But I think any of what it has ever been it will always be. It is an immortal place.”

Jesus: A Biography from a Believer, by Paul Johnson

Earlier reading Paul Johnson’s A History of Christianity and A History of the American People, I was eager to read his biography of Jesus — a tall order for any writer, even a world-renowned historian. The first lines of the book drew me into the text:

‘The world into which Jesus was born was harsh, cruel, and unstable. It was also materialistic and increasingly wealthy. The great fact of geopolitics was Rome and its possessions, in the process of transforming itself from a republic into an empire. Between 50 and 60 million people now came under Rome’s laws. The expanding empire was based upon muscle power rather than technology, thanks to 15 million slaves, who constituted one-third of the population in the towns…’

Johnson’s profile of Jesus is distinctive because Johnson, an esteemed member of the English academy, is a believer.

Because Johnson is a practicing Christian, he subtlety uncovers that the world into which Jesus was born, lived, and died has numerous crossovers into other chapters in human history as well as our present time. The Judaism of Jesus’ day was in great need of reform. Jesus’ unending duels with the Pharisees, scribes, and priests bear this out. Johnson compares the situation redolent of Christianity at the time of Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer in the 16th century. While Judaism called for endless observances and a growing labyrinth of commandments, Jesus insisted that what God most requires is a change of heart. Very often this change of heart is directed toward those who were considered of little or no account, invisible, in fact. Those undergoing this change will hear Jesus welcome them, ‘Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you’ (MT 25:34).

Johnson writes in awe of Jesus’ teaching method using parables. Jesus’ storytelling captivated his audiences, yet, at the same time, he used few words in his parables and often ended the story abruptly. Johnson declares, “The essence of a Jesus parable is to stimulate thought, to encourage people to think for themselves, to puzzle out religious mysteries — a mystery is a secret revealed by God that would not have been known had Jesus not revealed it.” When Jesus completed a parable, he left his listeners to cogitate on what he said and discuss with one another what he meant. In that way, Jesus’ words were alive to his 1st century audience in much the same way as they are to us today.

One of the most valuable gifts Johnson offers the Christian or the seeker is his cogent, chronological presentation of Jesus’ biography. He is able to weave the four gospels together in an almost seamless narrative, which is no small order. Along the way, Johnson pays particular attention to Jesus’ connection to women, children, and others who were largely marginalized in the first century Mediterranean world. In addressing Jesus’ exercise of miracles, Johnson asserts that he used them sparingly, for fear he would become known as an itinerant wonder-worker.

Johnson makes an unanticipated addition to the text. From his study of Jesus’ life, he felt confident enough to develop “Jesus’ New Ten Commandments. About half of these new commandments caught me off-guard…yet in a good way:

1. Each of us must develop a true personality — to see ourselves as unique creations

2. Accept and abide by universality — that is, see the human race as a whole

3. Respect the fact that we are all equal in God’s eyes

4. The need for love in human relationships

5. We are to show mercy just as God shows it to us

6. Live a balanced life

7. Cultivate an open mind

8. Pursue truth

9. Exercise power with restraint and moderation

10. Show courage

A most curious aspect of Johnson’s biography is that he only quotes the King James Version of the Bible throughout the text. He makes no apologies for his choice: “The King James Version combines better than any other (translation) a high degree of accuracy with archaic verbal elements which remind us that we are dealing with events of two millennia ago. It is also a work of art.” I should add here that when I was studying Hebrew in seminary, I used the KJV to check my translations. The accuracy of William Tyndale’s and Miles Coverdale’s 17th century translation is hard to beat and its words are poetry to the eyes and ears.

The Sacred Meal, by Nora Gallagher

Author Nora Gallagher asserts that “many of us are asking, ‘How should I live? How should we live?’ We come to faith communities with those questions eager for an answer. The response to seekers is mixed. Gallagher adds, “Sometimes they are taken seriously, even answered, and sometimes the church sticks us on a committee.”

Her humor is disarming. The church can most always put on a good “show,” but we can be lousy at shepherding seekers into a transformed way of living. Recounting her own mid-life journey back into the Episcopal Church after a long hiatus, Gallagher admits the familiar ritual drew her Sunday after Sunday. Sometime later, she discovered that if she didn’t act on what she heard in the Gospels and what she did in the Holy Eucharist, then no substantive change actually took hold in her life.

‘The trouble was, I had trouble connecting it back to my daily life. Church was like a nice concert. I went to the “theater” on Sunday, felt uplifted or moved, but couldn’t figure out how to integrate those feelings into my own experience; so gradually they faded as the week wore on. I didn’t connect. I suspect that many people who faithfully attend church remain in such a state and don’t really know what to do about it. What I finally understood was that simply going to church didn’t do it, but neither does not going to church.’

Gallagher goes on to argue that the Holy Eucharist, the central act of worship in the Episcopal Church and many others, is not an abstract doctrine, nor is it a routine passive experience. No, it is a relational act — one we share with Christ but also with our fellow believers. Reflecting on the the Parable of the Great Banquet (LK 14:15-24) and other passages, Gallagher notes that Holy Eucharist is a portrait of our life in the Kingdom of God. Christ is our host and the invitees bridge the spectrum of colors and classes of people who surround us. Looked at that way, the Eucharist is an invitation to experience the Kingdom of God now in this life as well as later in the nearer presence of God. Jesus Christ, God who has become man in the Incarnation, directs us to the most human of acts — eating together — and makes that the simple act a place of transformation.

In that way, Gallagher sets the Sacred Table both in the church and in the world. The Lord reveals himself at the table as generous, sacrificial, embracing, and reconciling. We pray to be transformed to be more and more like him in our families and communities; thereby feeding others with compassion and understanding. On this score, the Roman Catholic liturgy strikes the right chord. Their most familiar term for the celebration of Holy Eucharist is the Mass, which is taken from the final words of the old Latin mass — Ite, missa est, which means, “The mass is ended. Now go!” Sustained by the bread of life and filled with new wine, we step into the fallen world as an agent of God’s transformation. Gallagher concludes we can do so with nothing to fear because…

‘…if Christ is everywhere, he is in us. We are his body now, his hands and feet. We are all the ongoing incarnation. Go out into the world, knowing you are blessed.’

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, by Walter Isaacson

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’

In celebration of America’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, our nation’s birthday, Walter Isaacson has written a concise, powerful book to remind Americans who we really are. Isaacson, the celebrated historian who has written the biographies of such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Eisenstein, Steve Jobs, Henry Kissinger, and most recently, Benjamin Franklin, takes only sixty-seven pages to prove that America’s celebrated place in the world is formulated in that one sentence and not in our military, technological, or economic power.

Equally important is the fact that Isaacson makes it clear that the framers and signers of the Declaration did not fully live up to its precepts. Most telling is that slavery in the U.S. exploded from under 700,000 at the Revolution’s end in 1790 to nearly 4 million by the onset of the Civil War in 1860. Women, for their part, would not be treated “equally” in the republic until 144 years later, when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted and they were given the right to vote. And now with constitutional and civil rights being broken by agents of our own government in Los Angeles, Chicago, and most brutally and cruelly in Minneapolis, it seems we have forgotten more of the Declaration than we have remembered.

My favorite part of the book is where Isaacson discusses “The American Dream,” which he contends is beautifully illustrated in Franklin’s establishment of public libraries. Franklin’s motto for the public library was, Communiter Bona profundere Deum est, “To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine.” 141 years after Franklin’s death, James Truslow Adams would popularize the term “The American Dream,” in his 1931 book, The Epic of America:

‘“The American Dream” is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.’

Benjamin Franklin would have been thrilled that Adams chose the Library of Congress as the place where “The American Dream” can best be experienced. For Franklin, the pursuit of knowledge is one of the great equalizers and emancipators of our great republic. In that same spirit, Adams wrote about surveying one of the reading rooms in the Library of Confgress:

‘The seats filled with silent readers, old and young, rich and poor, black and white, the executive and the laborer, the general and the private, the noted scholar and the schoolboy, all reading at their own library provided by their own democracy.’

With current events making us heartsick, it is time for us to read up on the dream of America and who Americans are meant to be in our own country and as living testaments to the world. Isaacson believes that one great sentence may set us back on our feet.

Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings that Made Christianity, by Ferguson Butler-Gallie

Of all the histories I have read about the Christian faith, Twelve Churches is the most unique and certainly one of the most effective. That’s because Butler-Gallie yokes our religion’s history to the places where Christians have long practiced their faith in Jesus Christ — their churches, from the immensely grand and the unobtrusively simple. Churches, after all, are primarily places of worship. The were intentionally built as places where people encounter God.

While examining these twelve churches, Butler-Gallie explores Christian themes that have emerged from those particular congregations during their histories. The themes include: birth and death, beauty, power, violence, faith, purity, profit, justice, the nation, hope, and even sex. He begins his history in labyrinthine Church of the Nativity. Using the layers of history beneath the basilica, he discusses the tiers of stories that contribute to Christianity’s beginnings. Across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Butler-Gallie takes the reader to Canterbury Cathedral, whose history is indelibly connected to the brutal murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket on December 29, 1170. There in his own country, Butler-Gallie looks at the ugliness of human power and violence in church history, which never equals the power of God’s forgiveness and reconciliation.

On the remote heights of Mt. Athos, Greece, the author takes the reader to Pantocrator Monastery, established in 1357. The monastery’s discipline regarding poverty, obedience, and celibacy is so strict that not even female animals are allowed on the property! Spending time with the brothers on the mountain gives Butler-Gallie a platform to discuss the place of regular and necessary discipline in every Christian’s life. On the other hand, at First Meeting House in Salem, Massachusetts, established in 1629, he shows readers what happens when Christian discipline and correction go terribly awry. At First Meeting House, church discipline parted ways with the gospel and thereby resulted in the killing of twenty-five individuals during the notorious Salem Witch Trials. In his discussion of discipline Butler-Gallie adds an illuminating fact that many Christians conveniently overlook:

‘Of the thirty-eight parables Jesus told across four Gospels, sixteen of them involved teaching his followers about how they ought to use money. Of all the social and moral issues which feature in his teaching, this is by far the largest number, considerable more than, say sex or violence. It is perhaps because money is so obviously a worldly thing, a thing made up by humanity and therefore innately prone to misuse.’

Not surprisingly, my favorite of the twelve churches Butler-Gallie covers is set in my native city, Birmingham, Alabama — 16th Street Baptist Church. On September 15, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the church in retaliation for the Civil Rights “Children’s Crusade,” which began at the church. Four girls were killed in the bombing, three were fourteen and one was eleven. Twenty-two others were wounded in the blast. The last Klansman responsible for the bombing was not brought to justice until 2002 — thirty-nine years after the tragedy. Some of the parents and grandparents did not live to see that day. At the same time, the 16th Street Baptist Church continues with its mission to preach Christ and his clarion call for justice. In that the people of that brave congregation are a role model for all churches everywhere.

PHOTO CREDITS

Little Boy with a Book, photo compliments of Ben White

Dear Friends of the Pilgrim Letter,

Mainstream media, Twitter, Blue Sky, Google, public media, and Facebook are flooding us with reports and opinions about the Supreme Court’s tariff decision and the president’s explosive response. Quieter voices on both sides of the aisle have stepped away from the fray to tell Americans that the tariffs, though promised to bring financial relief to the U.S, have not made a dent in our $38.7 trillion national debt. Put in layman’s terms that’s a shared American debt of $113,000 per every citizen. Instead, the hundreds of billions in tariff revenue have only served to offset spending. At the same time, we are learning the hard way that U.S. importers and customers bear 80-90% of the cost of tariffs. Go no further than the supermarket, Amazon, Walmart, or Target to experience that fact.

The administration’s tariffs are no more than a classic ‘bait and switch’ operation. While we were ‘baited” with promises of ‘liberation,’ instead we are swamped by national debt, suffer higher prizes on food and household necessities, and endure the consternation our international neighbors. The ‘switch’ was on, and the American people were easy marks.

In this week’s Letter, I discuss a much more insidious and destructive ‘bait and switch’ scheme of the administration that threatens to silence us and hearkens a significant departure from the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. James Talarico, the bold Texas State Representative, unequivocally reveals two ‘bait and switch’ efforts of the administration in his interview with Stephen Colbert. Every Christian, regardless of affiliation, should take notice.

We’ll begin with a few laughs, as I introduce you to my most colorful childhood villain. (Please excuse the ethnic insensitivity of my 1960’s youth.)

As always, thank you for joining me on the Greatest Adventure, Patrick

ARCH VILLAIN

No wrongdoer, no malefactor, no miscreant scumbag fired my middle school heart with more loathing than Tojo Yamamoto, the vile professional wrestler. All of us at Homewood Junior High had fathers, uncles, and neighbors who returned two decades earlier from the battlefields of WWII, and many fought in the Pacific. Tojo Yamamoto, whose real name was Harold Watanabe, capitalized on our darkest conceptions of the war by anointing himself Admiral Yamamoto, IJN (Imperial Japanese Navy)…think Pearl Harbor. In the National Wrestling Association, he was known as a “heel,” that is one who incites the anger and disgust of the audience. The Von Brauners, who made up a “heel” tag team, relished fomenting the ire of the wrestling crowds by wearing Nazi Iron Crosses during their matches. The Sputnik Masked Men would show up in their flaming yellow and USSR-red masks. One look at the duo and the hometown crowd would break out in deafening boos.

Of course, the heels’ job was to fill seats at the National Wrestling Association matches on Saturday nights at the Boutwell Municipal Auditorium in downtown Birmingham. Clips of Tojo baiting good-guy wrestlers would appear during commercial breaks of our afternoon cartoon show Cousin Cliff. After seeing two or three of these clips, kids all over the city were begging their parents to attend the match on Saturday night. I never got the invitation, but I would have jumped at the chance. I would have given most anything for Tojo to get his just desserts.

Occasionally, I would stay up late enough to catch a televised match. From the late 1950’s until 1962, Channel 13, WAPI, televised matches beginning at 10:30 PM. Promoters Nick Gulas and Roy Welch provided the ringside commentary. Starting in 1965, the CBS affiliate Channel 42, WBMG, started broadcasting in Birmingham, giving the city a glut of three television stations. They immediately added Live Studio Wrestling to their schedule. Sterling Brewer became the well-known voice of Birmingham wrestling, and Powderly Auto Sales and Epp’s Jewelers were longtime sponsors of the broadcasts.

Funny, none of us, not even the most naive of my friends, thought these wrestling matches were real. Like the cartoons we relished, these wrestlers were slapstick comedians. How different they were from the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC) we see today, where the violence is nearly pornographic in content. Nevertheless, that old time wrestling crew, telecast in grainy black and white, put on a good show for pre-teen boys. Tojo could rile us into a lather. Not too long ago, the legendary Hulk Hogan confessed that on one occasion “Tojo hit me in the throat with his cheap shot, I fell through the ropes...(onto the floor). He then grabbed a cigar out of a guy’s mouth and dropped it in my boot.” Those were the antics that kept us glued to our monochrome RCA’s.

Tojo knew how to raise the temperature in the auditorium and keep it that way. His most effective tactic was his bait and switch. Webster defines bait and switch as “advertising goods which are an apparent bargain, with the intention of substituting inferior or more expensive goods.” In pro wrestling, the strategy takes a nastier turn. One wrestler feigns defeat and the desire for friendship, only to slam his opponent the moment his guard is down. The bait is the offer of friendship and a truce. The switch is the unexpected pummeling that follows. Tojo was a master of this dastardly move. His favorite mark was Ronaldo Leonard Rositani, or, as we all knew and loved him in Birmingham — Len Rossi. He was a handsome, muscularly sculpted Italian with a mane of thick dark hair. In other words, he cut an exact opposite profile from Tojo, who was round faced, corpulent, and bald. We adored Len Rossi. He was our Lone Ranger in tights. Yet over and over again, Tojo, flat on the mat or escaping the ring in fear, would bait Rossi to his side with a gesture of defeat or friendship. Then, all at once, the switch was on. All manner of Nipponese furor would be visited on the chiseled face and wavy dark locks of Rossi’s head. The crazy thing is that not only did Rossi repeatedly fall for Toyo’s well-rehearsed scheme, we did too.

A WOLF IN BELTWAY CLOTHING

Who’s cancelling now?

Last Tuesday, February 17, CBS attempted to block Stephen Colbert’s late night television interview with Texas State Representative James Talarico. Not to be deterred, Colbert conducted the interview with Talarico after Tuesday’s airing of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and released it to the general public on YouTube. Three days later, 5 million people had watched the interview, whereas Colbert’s late night show averages 3.61 million viewers. That’s a boost of 1.39 million viewers. Add to that, Talarico’s campaign for senate added 2.5 million dollars in donations during the first day of the YouTube video’s release. (Talarico, Houston PBS)

Rather than trumpet his twist of good fortune of garnering the interview, Talarico immediately expressed concern to Colbert over the Trump administration’s continual bait and switch practices targeting the American people. Instead of ending the “cancel culture” as they promised, Talarico commented, the administration and the Republican Party have grossly extended its bias. Talarico declared to Colbert that the American people did not get what they voted for.:

‘This is the party that ran against cancel culture, and now they’re trying to control what we watch, what we say, what we read. And this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture, the kind that comes from the top. They went after The View because I went on there. They went after Jimmy Kimmel for telling a joke they didn’t like. They went after you for telling the truth about Paramount’s bribe to Donald Trump.’ (Colbert/Talarico, YouTube)

Culture bait

Talarico went on to insist that the most consequential tactic the administration is using is the culture wars. They use hot button cultural issues as bait to distract citizens from the real meat and potato issues. Donald Trump was elected to secure the southern border and to make goods and services more affordable for working Americans. While he has succeeded in the first, the American people are unhappy with the out-of-control gestapo operations exercised by Homeland Security — especially as witnessed in Minneapolis. Regarding the second issue, affordability, the administration has largely ignored it and occasionally ridiculed the need. Instead of delivering their economic promises, the White House has deftly executed a switch by stoking the fires of fear over DEI, college curricula, transgender care and rights, voting abuses, and abortion. Whipping its base into bouts of fury, the administration goes merrily on its way rewarding the very rich while ignoring the issues affecting working Americans. Talarico went as far as to accuse the administration of being like any other bait and switch scam artists. They get their “mark” — in this case the 349 million American citizens — to look the other way while they rob them of economic fairness and opportunity:

‘There is a point to this (the administration’s) craziness. They want us talking about Furries and bathrooms. So, we don’t realize that they are picking our pockets, that they are closing our schools, they are gutting our health care, and they are raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for their billionaire donors. The culture wars are a smoke screen because the real fight in this country is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom.’

At most every speaking engagement or interview, the young congressman restates the bedrock deception advanced by MAGA leaders: Christian Nationalism. The bait that the administration offers to evangelical churches dotted across the American landscape are cultural promises — anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-trans, anti-woke, anti-immigrant and pro-gun rights. The switch, of course, is that none of these causes — whether one judges them good or bad — hit anywhere close to the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The heart of the gospel is found in John’s simple, yet incisive words: ‘Let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love’ (1 John 4:7-8). Or, reminiscent of our summers singing our hearts out at Vacation Bible School: Red and yellow, black, and white, they are precious in his sight.

Talarico, for his part, fiercely renounces the empty religious appeals of the administration by flatly stating, “There is nothing Christian about Christian Nationalism. It is the worship of power—political power, social power, economic power—in the name of Christ.” The ultimate spiritual authority of Jesus Christ is diluted by overarching demands of the state. Jesus demands humility, care for the poor, generosity, and justice. Those bedrock gospel principals find no place in the administration’s goals and rhetoric. (Talarico’s alternative, The Intelligencer)

‘I think in our (Christian) faith that we’ve got to get back to those fundamentals. My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas. And when I was little, he told me that Christianity is a simple religion. Not an easy religion, he would always clarify, but a simple religion because Jesus gave us two commandments. Love God and love neighbor. And there was no exception to that second commandment. Love thy neighbor regardless of race or gender or sexual orientation or immigration status or religious affiliation.’

Compare Talarico’s remarks to the bellicose comments of the White House’s Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller to CNN’s Jake Tapper on January 7. To many, Miller’s comments sound clear-eyed and highly rational. To the mature Christian, however, his words sound like those of Emperor Nero or Josef Stalin:

“The future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology. We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.’ (Miller’s arguments, Newsday)

Contrasting Talarico’s comments to Stephen Colbert with Miller’s to Jake Tapper set a stark decision before every American Christian — evangelical, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, or mainline Protestant. Will we follow Christ and his gospel forged by his love demonstrated on Calvary’s cross or will we take the bait and be drawn into a false gospel driven by power and division? Once we’ve made the switch, many will find they’ve been robbed of the joy, peace, and freedom we once knew in Christ. That’s a terrible price to pay for being played.

“There is nothing Christian about Christian Nationalism. It is the worship of power—political power, social power, economic power—in the name of Christ.”

JUSTICE IS NO SIDELINE FOR THE LORD

Amos 8:1-14

A bait and switch scam pulled on the little guy

Citizens are always easy marks by those in power. Amos insists working class Israelites are being played, which is contrary to God’s stern guidance for the nation as written in the Torah (Exodus 22:21-24). God desires justice for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Unfortunately, the LORD of hosts, the commander of the angel armies, has looked upon the Northern Kingdom of Israel and judged them guilty of intentionally exploiting the weakest in the realm. Amos insists that the LORD who judges them is no tribal God, nor is He some Canaanite fertility deity. The LORD who judges is Israel is sovereign over every nation and all creation, and He can depose any king or prelate. Amaziah, the Chief Priest of Bethel, and Jeroboam II, the King of Israel are soon to be unseated (Amos 7:9, 17). Amos’s message significantly contributes to the gospel message. Look no further than Mary’s Song in Luke 1:46-55, or to Jesus’ mission statement delivered in his hometown found in Luke 4:18-19, or to Jesus’ description of the final judgment in Matthew 25:31-46. Dr. Carol Dempsey, a Dominican nun and professor of Biblical studies at the University of Portland in Oregon, writes, “Amos’s portrayal of God is disturbing, but from a metaphorical perspective, the description is effective in a time when political, social, and religious leaders were amassing more and more power and wealth at the expense of the poor.” American Christians must ask the question, are we once again living in such a time. (Dempsey, Collegeville Commentary)

As Chapter 8 opens, Israel’s businessmen are all set to exercise their ancient version of the bait and switch. Amos begins the chapter by describing an ominous vision the LORD has given him. The vision consists of summer fruit, which is a homonym in Hebrew for the end. Israel’s bloody end is near. Why? Because they trample on the needy and destroy the poor in the most insidious ways. First of all, the character of the businessmen is revealed in their eagerness for the Sabbath or some other religious festival to be over so they can get on with selling their grain. But the business owners do not deal fairly with the working class. They manipulate the scales to benefit themselves. Far worse, they bait the poorest customers with promises of bargain grain prices, when, in reality, the owners switch out the good grain and sell them the pitiful sweepings of the harvest instead. This is detestable on two counts. For one, the customers are getting a lesser product than advertised. For another, the Torah forbids selling the gleanings of the wheat. That part of the harvest should have been left on the fields for the poor to gather at no cost (Leviticus 19:9-10; 23:22). The owners’ disregard, if not disdain, for Israel’s spiritual life is showing up in their daily actions.

Finally, these loathsome businessmen think nothing of taking advantage of those poor who have fallen into penury. They simply buy the individuals as slaves and then traffic them for profit. Amos declares that not a single one of their miscreant deeds goes unnoticed by the LORD, for He is sending an earthquake, famine, and a terrifying eclipse as a sign of His judgment upon Israel’s leading citizens that this is, indeed, the end. ‘I will make it like the time of mourning for an only child,’ says the LORD, ‘and in Israel the only sound will be that of bitter weeping.’

The worst part of God’s execution of judgment against Israel will not be the losing of their ill-gained wealth or the lack of food and water. The worst will be a famine for the word from the LORD that they will experience. This is an interesting turn around for the elites. Since they cared nothing about participating in worship on the Sabbath and on holy days, they will now experience nothing but silence from the LORD. Amos describes the people staggering from sea to sea and wandering from north to east in search of the word of the LORD. In other words, the people have been rendered rudderless and aimless without God’s direction. It seems the LORD has pulled a much more surprising and painful switch on them!

Amos 9:1-10

Nowhere to hide

Many recall hearing the comforting words of Psalm 139 read at a Christian burial. Verses 7-10 are particularly consoling:

Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning

and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,

and your right hand shall hold me fast.

Many recall hearing the comforting words of Psalm 139 read at a Christian burial. Verses 7-10 are particularly consoling:

The psalm must have already been in circulation during Amos’s time because he reverses David’s beatific lyrics to deliver a scathing sentence to Israel. Chapter 9 begins with Amos’s final vision. He sees the LORD standing beside the altar; however, the Hebrew may better be translated the LORD was standing on top of the altar at Bethel, which was King Jeroboam’s personal sanctuary. The vision of the LORD perched atop the altar begs the discomfiting question: Who is the real King of Israel? The LORD’s presence shakes the shrine’s threshold to the point that it nearly collapses. Amos then voices the LORD’s vengeance reversing the familiar, formerly comforting, imagery from Psalm 139:

Not one of them shall flee away,
not one of them shall escape.
Though they dig into Sheol,
from there shall my hand take them;
though they climb up to heaven,
from there I will bring them down.
Though they hide themselves on the top of Carmel,
from there I will search out and take them;
and though they hide from my sight at the bottom of the sea,
there I will command the sea-serpent, and it shall bite them.
And though they go into captivity in front of their enemies,
there I will command the sword, and it shall kill them;
and I will fix my eyes on them
for harm and not for good. (Amos 9:1-4)

Amos 9:11-14

Grace is the final word

Amos’s prophecies leave ancient Israel and the modern reader 2,800 years later breathless and hopeless. Blood is smeared all across the pages of the book, and the screams of Israel leap from the print. Then, with no introduction, Amos voices God’s reprieve. Israel will suffer judgment. They will experience a devastating defeat and those who are not killed will be scattered across the Mediterranean at the hands of the Assyrians. Nevertheless, in God’s time Israel will be restored and the nation will be far more glorious than before. The unified, expansive kingdom of David, Israel’s past salad days, will be reestablished. What’s more, the land will become become so rich and fertile that it will rival the Garden of Eden. No sooner will the farmers harvest the land than a plow will ready the same field for the next crop. Such overlapping, lavish fecundity will appear supernatural. The LORD declares, ‘Things will be happening so fast that your head will swim, one thing fast on the heels of the other. You won’t be able to keep up. Everything will be happening at once—and everywhere you look, blessings! Blessings like wine pouring off the mountains and hills. I’ll make everything right again for my people Israel’ (Amos 9:13-15 Message)

Amos is not the sole prophet who ends his message with words of miraculous hope. Isaiah concludes with a vision of a new heaven and and new earth where future Israelites will reside (Isaiah 66:22-24). Jeremiah issues God’s new covenant where He will put His law within them and write across the people’s hearts (Jeremiah 31:31-34). Ezekiel, the anchor of the big three prophets, promises Israel a heart transplant, ‘A new heart I will give you, and new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out your heart of stone…’ (Ezekiel 36:26). Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, ends his prophecy with a word of forgiveness, ‘The LORD does not retain his anger for ever, because He delights in steadfast love…He will tread our imperious iniquities under foot and cast our sins into the depths of the sea’ (Micah 7:18b-19). The Judean blue blood prophet Zephaniah rants about religious perversions in the three chapters of his short book, yet he ends with a blissful picture of the battered people of Jerusalem returning home: ‘I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth. At that time, I will bing you home’ (Zephaniah 3:19b-20a). Joel, who prophesied in Judah well after both the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions, offered a word of hope after the land was ravaged by a devastating locust infestation that led to famine and despair across the land: ‘So that you shall know that the LORD shall dwell in Zion…the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and the hills flow with milk, and all the stream beds of Judah shall flow with water…’ (Joel 3:17-18). Malachi claims the final message of the prophets. Indeed, he has the last word of the entire Old Testament, and he extends the greatest hope of all: ‘The Lord of hosts says that for you who fear my Name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in his wings. You will then go forth like calves from the stall’ (Malachi 4:2). The promise of Jesus Christ rises from the page.

I conclude our study of Amos with these words of future hope to encourage you to continue your reading of the Hebrew prophets. At times, these ancient voices from the 8th to the 4th centuries BC seem to be speaking directly to America today. That’s because they are. God’s word is timeless. Yet the prophets circle back to the same bedrock Biblical truth. Neither the nation nor the powerful have the final word. God does.

SOURCES

Adkison, Michael, “Senate candidate James Talarico raises $2.5 million after Stephen Colbert interview controversy, campaign says,” Houston, PBS, February 18, 2026. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2026/02/18/543768/james-talarico-raised-2-5-million-stephen-colbert-interview-controversy-jasmine-crockett/

Colbert, Stephen, “Rep. James Talarico On Confronting Christian Nationalism, And Strange Days In The Texas Legislature,” Feb. 17, 2026.

Dempsey, Carol J., “Amos, Hosea, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk,” New Collegeville Bible Commentary, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013.

Kilgore, Ed, “Talarico’s Alternative to the MAGA Conquest of Christianity,” The Intelligencer, Feb.18, 2026. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/talarico-hegseth-maga-american-christianity.html

“In his own words: Stephen Miller’s arguments for White House actions in US cities and abroad,” Newsday, Jan. 14, 2026. https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/stephen-miller-venezuela-greenland-minneapolis-s76978

PHOTO CREDITS

Charilie Brown and Lucy, Photo by Charles M. Schulz and compliments of LinkedIn

Tojo Yamamoto, Photo compliments of Pro Wrestling Wiki Fandom

James Talarico, Middle School Teacher, Photo taken at Rhodes Middle School, San Antonio, Texas (West Side) — an underserved school in a low-income area

Gathering the Gleanings of Wheat, by Arthur Hughes, 1856

Dear Friends of the Pilgrim Letter,

Lent has arrived. So I begin this letter by recalling the first Ash Wednesday service I attended without being cajoled by my mother or grandmother. What began as a cunning scheme to get out of school early, eventually grabbed my eleven-year-old attention once those ashes were smudged across my forehead.

Amos, for his part, furiously tries to grab the attention of the leading citizens of Israel to act justly, especially in defense of the working class. He issues sobering threats and terrifying visions, but nothing seems to work. The elites have walled themselves off from those in need. Amos eventually tells them their fine houses are going to burn down around them, with nothing left to show for their luxurious lifestyle but ashes.

America’s leaders have done much the same as those in Amos’s day. The administration seems more and more walled-off from the needs of the common citizen and instead seeks to fuel the wealth of well-connected developers and well-heeled investors by inviting the contamination of our air and water. We must demand action from the Congress and pray that, like Job, our leaders will one day soon ‘repent in dust and ashes’ (Job 42:6).

May you have a holy Lent, and thank you for joining me on the Greatest Adventure, Patrick+

THE GREAT ASH WEDNESDAY ESCAPE

For Ash Wednesday 1965, I hatched a plan to spring free Charlie Boyd, Gus Costello, and yours truly. I approached my mother on Shrove Tuesday and asked if she would write a note to my teacher requesting that I be allowed to attend the noonday Ash Wednesday service. My mother looked at me with a mixture of delight and befuddlement. Had her 11-year-old been touched by an angel? Miss Lois Harper, on the other hand, my 5^th grade teacher and a member of the Mt. Olive Primitive Baptist Church, examined the note and slapped it on her desk with a dismissive “Harrumph.” Birmingham public schools in the 1960’s were unapologetically Protestant Parochial Schools — Baptist outposts of a sort. Just before the Pledge of Allegiance each morning, we stood at rigid attention, as Miss Harper placed an LP recording of her tittering alto voice singing ‘Bless this house O Lord we pray, make it safe by night and day…’ As this was in the days of immediate, incontestable corporal punishment, every student – Jew and Christian alike – sang with bravado.

Having secured their parents’ permissions, as well, Charlie, Gus, and I were released from class at 11:30 AM on Ash Wednesday. Miss Harper could not bring herself to announce our release, so she just pointed at the door, and the three of us were off. We walked out of Shades Cahaba Elementary on East Oxmoor Road and followed the sidewalk for a mile or so to All Saints’ Episcopal on West Hawthorne. We entered the dark, stained-glassed nave at 11:55. On that day, not one whisper could be heard, even though the pews were already full. The three of us, neatly dressed in navy pants and white shirts – making us look like Mormon missionaries – were led to the front row by Mr. Ebaugh, President of Guaranty Savings and Loan. Mr. Ebaugh ushered every service at All Saints’ with the exception of his own burial.

Mr. Abbot, the rector, opened the service with the arresting words from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, ‘Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all those who are penitent…’ I looked over at my two friends. Charlie Boyd, who never missed a Sunday at Dawson Memorial Southern Baptist, steeled himself for the pagan ritual. He told me later that he imagined we might sacrifice a live cat on the altar, but I told that him we saved that for Palm Sunday. Gus Costello, on the other hand, whose ancestral church was Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, had never attended worship in English, and never one led by an un-bearded priest.

Because we were on the front pew, the three of us knelt, genuflected, and exercised the holiest deportment of our lives. At the imposition of ashes, we three eleven-year-old, sans parents, took a deep breath when the ashes were smudged on our foreheads with the words, ‘Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” I was not sure what had just transpired between God and me — but something was up.

True to Mr. Abbott’s form, a former naval commander in WWII’s Pacific Fleet, he took the service from soup to nuts in 24 minutes. Fully ashed and communed, the three of us walked out the heavy oak doors of All Saints’ Church. For the rest of the day, we were completely free to fill our pockets with penny candy at the Phillips 66 station, climb trees at Homewood Park, sneak into the Teen Center to play pool and ping pong, and talk about the inscrutable mysteries of females.

At the time, if we had developed the wherewithal to think about it, we would have realized that we were far freer than that. Repentance is the interstate highway to the free life. Knowing that, Ash Wednesday, and all of Lent, for that matter, is not a time for morose introspection that leads to loathing and despondency but for honest self-examination that leads to illumination and liberation.

This fact is magnified by the fact that today Christians all over the world will receive the imposition of ashes, return to their seats, and then offer with one voice Psalm 51. Considered to be the poem that David penned after he committed adultery with Bathsheba and ordered the murder of her husband, Uriah, the words let us know just how far we human beings can sink (2 Samuel 11:1 - 12:13). ‘I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me’ (v.3). We may not be guilty of either one of those two biggies. Nevertheless, we know what it is to be unable to sleep, mix in polite company, pray, or look at ourselves in the mirror because of an unfeeling word we spoke or a cruel action we took that murdered the spirit of someone in our path. This is the worst kind of prison. In utter desperation, we join our words to David’s, ‘Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me’ (v.12). We can endure most anything but to be set adrift from God’s presence.

Our remedy is rendered in the last lines of the psalm: ‘The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise’ (v.18). Once we are broken open, we can receive what God has for us. These days as I kneel before the altar reciting the psalm, I realize the ashes smudged on our foreheads communicate two vivid truths about human beings: One, we are mortal; this enfleshed life I’ve enjoyed for seventy-one years will end. Two, some things I have said, done, and thought need to burned up and thrown on the ash heap, so I can start afresh with what remains of my life.

Headed to Easter

Lent is the journey from the ash heap to the free life. As early as the 2nd century AD, Lent began as a forty-day preparation for new converts. Those new to the faith, known as catechumens, were baptized on Easter Day, the only day many of those early Christian communities administered baptism. This practice was ratified by the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. However, it took the tireless innovator, Pope Gregory I, “Gregory the Great,” (pope: 590-604) to formalize the season. Setting Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent, he extended the season to forty-six days, which includes Sundays, which are never considered fast days. More importantly, Gregory directed all Christians, not just the catechumens preparing for baptism, to join in the six weeks of preparation and self-examination for Easter.

Curiously, Lent was not the original title for the season. Quadragesima, meaning “fortieth” was it’s Latin title until the Middle Ages. As nation states began to emphasize the use of their native languages, the term Lent was adopted, which is taken from Old English lencten, meaning “spring or the lengthening of days.” As spring signals a renewal of the earth, Lent stirs believers to expand or lengthen their spirits to be able to receive the miracle of Christ’s resurrection. Pope Gregory likened Lent to Jesus’ time in the wilderness. Through fasting and isolation, Jesus looked solely to the Father for his strength and was steeled to resist the Devil’s expeditious enticements. Above all, Jesus would not be detoured from the journey to his crucifixion and resurrection. We emulate Jesus by undertaking our own forty days of preparation, where we deny ourselves comforts, such as alcohol, fatty foods, and sugar, that can anesthetize our physical and spiritual sensitivities. At the same time, we undertake practices, such as prayer, Bible reading, and acts of mercy and justice, which draw us closer to Christ.

We begin Lent with ashes, the incineration of those past words, deeds, and thoughts that we have carried around for long enough. Those ashes, more airy than a feather, are blown away and forgotten, just as God had repeatedly promised, ‘I will remember your sins no more’ (Isaiah 43:25; Jeremiah 31:34; Hebrews 8:12, 10:17). On Ash Wednesday, we become lighter and more able to make the forty day journey.

WHEN YOUR HOUSE BURNS DOWN AROUND YOU

Amos 6:1-14

Ashes accompany the horrifying prophecy in Amos 6. Retreating to their luxurious mansions in Samaria, feasting on veal and lamb, drinking wine by the bowlful, the leading citizens of Israel have insulated themselves from the needs of the rank and file populace. They are indifferent to the growing injustice in the land. Because of their heartless blindness, the wealthy are complicit in the spiraling denigration of the citizens in Israel’s capital city.

Therefore, Amos announces the harrowing words of the LORD, ‘I am giving your city and everything in it to the enemy that approaches.’ Amos paints a future picture of Israel in the aftermath of the Assyrian Army’s onslaught: the complete destruction of the capital city Samaria. Mansions either collapse from the bombardment or burned to to the ground — the latter is more likely. Family members arrive at one of those once fine houses to collect the lifeless bodies for burial. Huddled in one of the closets, they are surprised to find someone still living and even more taken aback when that lone survivor whispers, ‘Please don’t raise your voices and, by all means, do not mention the Name of the LORD. You might arouse Him to mete out more destruction upon us.’

Amos ends the chapter with a strange riddle. Standing at the gate of the city, he asks the leading citizens if they can see how foolish they are to defy the LORD’s persistent commands to care for the poor and demand justice to those unable to stand up for themselves.

Do you hold a horse race in a field of rocks?

Do you plow the sea with oxen?

You’d cripple the horses

and drown the oxen.

And yet you’ve made a shambles of justice,

a bloated corpse of righteousness,

Bragging of your trivial pursuits,

beating up on the weak and crowing, “Look what I’ve done!”

Enjoy it while you can, you Israelites.

I’ve got a pagan army on the move against you. Amos 6:12-14 Message

Plagued with Trouble

Amos 7:1-7

In Chapter 7, Amos shares three of God’s five visions of judgment with the people. As can be predicted, the visions are disturbing. In the first, Amos describes a plague of locusts devouring Israel’s second crop of hay. The king and the elites have already reaped the first harvest and are sitting pretty. The working class citizens will bear the brunt of the infestation when the second harvest is destroyed. Quite unexpectedly, Amos pleads with the LORD, ‘Don’t let this happen to the little people. They are too weak to recover.’ The LORD concedes. The plague of the locusts is withdrawn.

Next, Amos describes an out-of-control wildfire that will completely devour Israel like a terrible rising ocean in a tsunami. Recall the pictures of the nightmarish Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025. Again, Amos begs the LORD to revoke this plague, and the LORD, a second time, concedes.

The third plague is quite different from the first two. Amos is shown a plumb line, a simple carpenter’s tool that uses gravity to test whether a wall is straight. The LORD then declares, ‘I have hung this plumb line in the midst of the people, and I have found that they are way out of line. I will not relent again. The crooked house of Israel is coming crashing down upon their heads. The LORD’s disgust is particularly directed at Israel’s fraudulent practices of worship and the king’s unconscionable reign.

The Nation Vs. The Lord

Amos 7:10-17

Israel’s elites have heard enough. Amaziah, the Senior Priest of the National Shrine at Bethel, reports Amos’s latest rant to King Jeroboam. ‘Boss, he says you are going to die in battle and the entire population will be captured and herded into exile.’ We can assume the king dispatched Amaziah to get rid of the pesky prophet. Approaching Amos, Amaziah attempts removing him through insults, ‘Go back down south where you belong. Let your handlers down there supply your next paycheck.’ Unfazed, Amos retorts, ‘I’m not paid for this. I don’t even aspire to be a prophet. Heck, I’m a rancher. But the LORD commanded me to come up here and give you a piece of His mind.’ Amaziah should have exited while he had a chance, because the prophet’s personal message from God to him is chilling:

‘Your wife will become a whore in town.

Your children will get killed.

Your land will be auctioned off.

You will die homeless and friendless.

And Israel will be hauled off to exile, far from home.’ Amos 7:17 Message

FAR FROM THE FUMING CLOUD

We are living in a modern day rendition of Amos’s Israel, where federal leaders, walled-off from the realities of life for the common citizens, dispassionately concoct every manner of injustice against them. Nowhere is this better seen than in the administration’s reckless — if not terrifying — destruction of clean air and water protections. The United States is suffering a barrage of these short-sighted actions; thus, I will attempt to list a sample of them along with linked citations for further study:

1. 66 Coal Plants Exempted from Clean Air Regulations — In April 2025, coal plants were no longer required to reduce emissions of toxic chemicals such as mercury, arsenic, and benzene. These plants extend from Colstip, Montana, to Coal Creek Station, North Dakota, to Oak Grove, Texas. Those three plants, in particular, are major polluters. Breathing in mercury, arsenic, and benzene cause severe neurological damage, cancer, respiratory diseases, and cardiovascular issues. Lest we Texans feel out of harms way, the Oak Grove Coal Plant is in Richardson Country, just 50 miles southeast of Waco, and its pollutants are easily carried on the wind to Austin and San Antonio. (Trump Exempts Coal Plants, AP) & (Impacts of Electric Power Sector, EPA).

2. Weakened or Rescinded Methane Emissions from Oil and Gas — Since January 2025, the administration allows increased methane emissions from the oil and gas industry. The non-partisan Institute for Policy Integrity estimates this change will result in an increase of 7,461 new cases of child asthma, an increase of 3,922 hospital admissions or emergency room visits, nearly 140,000 days of missed work, and the possible expenditure of $21 billion in health costs. Texas leads the list of states that will be most adversely affected by this change, followed by North Dakota, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Louisiana. (Tracking the Damages, Policy Integrity)

3. Lifting Protections for Many American Waterways — The administration is drastically narrowing the definition of rivers, streams, and wetlands that will be protected in the United States. This means a large swath of the nation’s waters will no longer be safeguarded from agricultural and industrial pollutants. By the new definition, only 2.4% of wetlands in Arizona would be protected and only 5% in Iowa. With roughly 81% of Texas wetlands now exempt from federal permits, developers and industrial projects in Texas can often dredge or fill these areas without the lengthy federal review process previously required. While this reduces “red tape” for construction and agriculture, environmental groups warn it significantly increases the risk of flooding in areas like Harris County, where wetlands act as vital sponges for storm surges. Texas is home to over 7 million acres of wetlands, and no alternative legal protections exist. (U.S. Wetlands Protection, E & E News) (Wetlands, Bayou Waterkeeper)

4. Repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding — The most sweeping anti-environmental action by the administration to date is the repeal of the Endangerment Finding. Based on extensive scientific and health research, the 2009 finding clearly established that six key greenhouse gases (GHGs)—including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride —threaten public health and welfare, establishing the legal foundation for regulating climate pollution under the Clean Air Act. It concluded that atmospheric concentrations of these gases endanger current and future generations. The impact of repealing the Endangerment Finding on American citizens will be profound, as all emissions standards from U.S. automobiles and trucks have been erased. “The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo T. Oge, who served as the E.P.A.’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents. “Nothing. Zero,” she added. “Not many countries have zero.” (No Clean-Air Rules, NY Times)

Wake Up and Smell the Benzine

The administration sells these repeals and rollbacks as economic savings for the American people, when, in reality, these changes will dramatically drive up health costs and thereby raise insurance premiums. With this draconian decline in clean air and water, American’s quality of life will significantly decrease. Children and the elderly will bear the worst of the environmental consequences with soaring new cases of asthma and other respiratory diseases in coming months. It is a fact that 50% of emissions from industrial plants travel 400 miles or more from their source. (Downwind, Grist)

Those making these decisions along with those ratifying them are often protected from the immediate fallout of their actions by escaping to their golf resorts, mountain retreats, and beach hideaways…that is until the day they realize they are living downwind and downstream of their deeds. What’s more, the hypocrisy of trumpeting “Make America Healthy Again,” while simultaneously filling the air and water with toxic pollutants is downright diabolical.

Discussing this with my wife, she reminded me of the most memorable scene in the March 2000 film Erin Brockovich. Julia Roberts plays the lead as a research assistant for a down-and-out plaintiff’s attorney, played by Albert Finney. The two are representing the people of Hinkley, California, who have experienced soaring cancer rates due to high volumes of the toxic pollutant hexavalent chromium running off as waste water from the local Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) power plant. In the scene, Brockovich urges an aggressive, pitiless lawyer representing PG&E to drink the glass of water in front of her, saying, “We brought that water in special for you. It’s from a Hinkley well.” The defense attorney’s eyes open wide with terror as she freezes with the glass to her lips. She sets the glass back on the table and sternly announces, “This meeting is over!” Actually, PG&E’s case had just gone up in flames and turned to ashes.

SOURCES

Begert, Blanca, “Coal plant pollution can be deadly — even hundreds of miles downwind,” Grist, Feb. 27, 2023. https://grist.org/climate-energy/coal-plant-pollution-can-be-deadly-even-hundreds-of-miles-downwind/#:~:text=

“Human Health & Environmental Impacts of the Electric Power Sector, EPA, Dec. 12, 2025. https://share.google/FVbUhXwlU43MhfKUW

Daly, Matthew, “Trump exempts nearly 70 coal plants from Biden-era rule on mercury and other toxic pollution,” AP, Apr.15, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/trump-coal-power-plants-epa-exemptions-zeldin-2cd9f2697b5f46a88ab9882ab6fd1641

Tabuchi, Hiroko, “With Latest Rollback, the U.S. Essentially Has No Clean-Car Rules,” New York Times, Feb. 16, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-emissions-regulations.html?

“Tracking the Damages of Regulatory Rollback,” Policy Integrity, Feb. 13, 2026. https://policyintegrity.org/tracking-regulatory-rollbacks?utm_source=chatgpt.com

“Two years after Sackett, fewer wetlands are protected. We need local and state solutions,” Bayou City Waterkeeper, Mar. 27, 2025. https://bayoucitywaterkeeper.org/two-years-after-sackett-fewer-wetlands-are-protected-we-need-local-solutions/#

Wilson, Miranda, “Trump plan waives protection for 80% of U.S. Wetlands,” Energy & environment News, Nov.17, 2025. https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-plan-waives-protection-at-80-of-wetlands/#:~:text=

PHOTO CREDITS

Child receiving imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday, Photo compliments of Paul Burkhart, The Long Way Home

Young man reading the Bible, Photo compliments of Dwell With Christ

Plague of locusts in Kenya in 2020, Photo compliments of National Geographic

Industrial plant spewing pollution, Photo compliments of Alexander Psiuk

Dear Readers of the Pilgrim Letter,

With Friday looming as the congressional funding deadline for the Department of Homeland Security, I am sending out the Letter a bit early. American Christians have this window of opportunity to let our representatives know what reforms we wish to see in the conduct of ICE agents and other immigration enforcement officers.

The apprehension, detention, and transport of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos 1,300 miles from his home has finally broken through the indifference of many citizens. At the same time, the systemic fear being visited on all school children in Minneapolis and St. Paul by their own government is thoroughly inconsistent with who we believe we are as a nation. The Prophet Amos has a thing or two to say about that to Israel and now to us!

Read on, and make a few calls to your representatives when you’re finished. And, as always, thank you for joining me on the Great Adventure, Patrick

A FIVE YEAR-OLD AND THE CONSCIENCE OF A NATION

The photo of a five-year-old boy in a blue bunny hat with floppy white ears and wearing a Spider-Man backpack being apprehended by towering ICE agents can break through the stoniest of Americans’ hearts. Liam Conejo Ramos, age five, was detained by ICE agents on Tuesday, January 20, when he arrived home from school. He was subsequently shipped to the Dilley Detention Center, 1,300 miles away from home. American Christians, even those who had been largely in-step with the administration, began to pay attention. Philip Kennecott of The Washington Post said the photos of Liam hit the public like the Vietnam War photo of the “Napalm Girl” published in The New York Times on June 9, 1972. Kennicott asks will the image of this scared, downcast little boy finally “shock Americans into demanding an end to this cruelty?”

The administration instantly issued its expected lie about the episode, declaring that Liam had been abandoned by his father who had run away leaving his son in the driveway. In fact, both had been picked up and immediately sent to the Dilley Detention Center in Texas. Neighbors further observed that the agents tried to use the boy as bait to lure his pregnant mother and other adults out of the house. Lisa Jarvis of Bloomberg News noted that Ramos’ father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, was in the U.S. legally, had an active asylum claim, and that he had no criminal record. Discovering that, Jarvis was moved to ask two questions:

1. Why was the boy not handed over to his mother instead of sent to Frio County Texas 1,300 miles from his home and his mother? 2. What damage are we doing to our children if they think they can be apprehended by scary masked men on the way home from school or that their families may have disappeared from home during their absence? (Boy’s Photo, The Week)

On Saturday, January 24, Judge Fred Biery of the U.S. District Court in San Antonio, seventy-five miles northeast of Dilley, was approached about the injustice. The San Antonio Express-News reported that the judge’s response was “as legally sound as it was scathing.” Biery crafted his decision in less than 500 words:

‘The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas (Stephen Miller has set a 3,000 person a day quota), apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures.

Apparent also is the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence.’

Biery goes on to quote Thomas Jefferson’s warning about kings and tyrants in the Declaration: “‘King George sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.’ He then went on to disclose that the Executive Branch’s issuance of (its own) warrants does not meet the Fourth Amendment’s test of “probable cause… It is rather like the fox guarding the henhouse!”

Then for good measure the judge concluded his admonition by listing two passages from Holy Scripture:

‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these’ (Matthew 19:14). And ‘Jesus wept’ (John 11:35). Beneath the Biblical references, Judge Biery attached a widely circulated photo of young Liam being arrested. (Judge, San Antonio Express-News)

Surprising no one with their unwavering cruelty, on February 4, the administration filed a motion to expedite the deportation of five-year-old Liam to Ecuador merely five days after the judge’s ruling to release the boy and his father. Hoping for an “out of sight - out of mind” result, government officials seek to quell the worldwide furor over the United States’s savage treatment of a kindergartner.

Since returning home to Minneapolis, Liam’s father reports that his little boy has frequent nightmares. While the two were in custody in the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, Liam repeatedly asked his father what they had done wrong to be treated in this way. (Woodward, The Independent) (Ulloa, The NY Times)

FULL COURT PRESS

Amos 5:1-26

Injustices visited on the “little people” is a recurrent theme that runs through the Book of Amos, written 2,775 years before Liam was apprehended by ICE agents. In Chapter 5 alone, the LORD entreats the people of Israel to ‘come to Me’ three times. God is not inviting the people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to worship Him. They are already doing plenty of that, but their words are falling on God’s deaf ears. Why? Because the LORD is calling the the people to return to Him by acting justly — especially in the law courts, where the powerful are taking advantage of the poorest, weakest, and the smallest in their land.

Accentuating the gravity of their unjust dealings, Amos opens the chapter with a funeral — Israel’s, to be exact. “Virgin Israel has fallen,’ Amos laments, ‘never to rise again.’ The prophet’s use of the term virgin evokes the death of one dying in her prime and without leaving progeny. The virgin leaves behind no remaining evidence of her existence. Amos’s use of the virgin’s premature death, paints a clear picture of Israel’s doom. The nation is in its prime, its leaders are wealthy and the government has forged powerful alliances. However, neither their money nor their military compacts will save them from marauding Assyria, which will wipe out any trace that their once prosperous nation ever existed.

Upon hearing the LORD’s judgment from the lips of Amos, they are eager to go to their mountain shrines at Beersheba, Bethel, and Gilgal and make urgent intercessions to Him. Amos tells them not to bother. ‘You are doomed to exile, and the reason you are doomed is that you twist justice and cheat the little guy out of their rights.’ Amos then takes a breath and quotes the words of a well-known hymn to the crowd. The lyrics remind the people that the LORD for whom he speaks is not some tribal deity. No, He is the God who put the stars in the sky, created the days and nights, and poured out the waters on the earth. Then sounding a bit like Bill Cosby (“I brought you into the world, and I can certainly take you out”) — the prophet assures the people that the mighty Creator can also undertake another of His roles — the terrible Destroyer.

Amos tells Israel that their depravity is specifically showcased in the law courts. Held outdoors at one of the gates leading into the city of Samaria, the wealthy and powerful hate anyone who challenges injustice or who dares to speak the truth. Those same leading citizens have augmented their lavish livelihoods by cheating the poor, and when they are taken to court by those whom they have swindled, the powerful stealthily pay bribes to the magistrates to insure justice is not served. The system has become so sick that Amos concludes that making an appeal is useless:

Justice is a lost cause. Evil is epidemic.

Decent people throw up their hands.

Protest and rebuke are useless,

a waste of breath. Amos 5:13, The Message

Amos’s unrelenting denunciations depict Samaria as a latter day Sodom and Gomorrah. Recalling Lot and his family, Amos goes as far to say that if some return to the LORD and act justly, perhaps a small remnant will be saved from Assyria’s dreaded armies who are swiftly approaching from northern Mesopotamia. The prophet adds that the terror visited on Israel will be so great that citizens will be wailing in the middle of the city’s stately streets and, at the same time, Israel’s farmers will fall into sobs between the rows of grapes and olives in their vineyards.

Listening in horror to Amos’s prophecy, the people begin to plead for ‘the day of the LORD!” Amos assures the crowd that the last thing they really want now is a visit from the Holy God. They have totally ignored the LORD in their daily lives while, from time to time, putting on feckless shows at worship. If the LORD shows up now, ‘He’s turning the lights off — not on. You will feel like you are running from a ravenous lion only to end up in the deadly clutches of a mama Grizzly. You may breathe a sigh of relief when you escape into your house only to discover two dozen rattlesnakes slithering down the walls.’

Israel’s crippling malady is, again, pointed out to be her empty worship. Here in particular, Amos decries Israel’s ecstatic ejaculations at worship yearning for God’s Judgment Day to arrive. Resembling a bunch of twenty-first century, tight-fisted, self-absorbed American suburbanites at an auditorium praise service beseeching “Jesus to return,” Israel is in lousy spiritual shape to request an audience with the Almighty. Instead of going from one giddy worship experience at the shrine at Bethel and then racing off to Beersheba’s shrine, and next to the Gilgal shrine, and then circling back to Bethel again, Amos repeats, ‘Come to Yahweh and live, really seek the Lord and His righteousness and live.’

How much more of Amos’s roiling words can the people take? He has unmasked their duplicity. Nevertheless, the prophet is not finished. He gathers up the LORD’s judgment against Israel in the book’s most memorable summary, which here is poetically rendered by the late Eugene Peterson:

I can’t stand your religious meetings.

I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions.

I want nothing to do with your religion projects,

your pretentious slogans and goals.

I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes,

your public relations and image making.

I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.

When was the last time you sang to me?

Do you know what I want?

I want justice—oceans of it.

I want fairness—rivers of it.

That’s what I want. That’s all I want. Amos 5:21-24, The Message

Amos’s message hit American Christians close to home. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. repeated this part of Amos’s prophecy twice — once in 1955 at the Montgomery Bus Boycott and again in 1963 on the Mall in Washington, DC during his famous I Have a Dream speech before a crowd of 260,000. King recited the lyrical lines of the Bible like the Prophet Amos himself, ‘But let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream’ (Amos 5:24). This line of Scripture is engraved in black granite at the entrance of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL, as if to say to us God’s demands never change.

Arrested by Amos’s words chiseled into the black marble, we should not in any way be surprised that the current administration wants to white-wash exhibits in the Smithsonian and in the national parks, while simultaneously attempting to do the same at all levels of public and private education. That’s part of the same playbook that propels the administration to try to quickly deport a helpless five-year-old boy out of the country. They want to ameliorate any historical reminder of injustice and deaden the conscience of the nation. Yet how they love their quasi-religious rallies and richly choreographed videos, which disguise the darkness of their designs. To all this, we can hear the timeless call of God through Amos, ‘Come back to me. Come back to me and act justly.’

DANGER! SYSTEM MALFUNCTION!

What American Christians are witnessing in Minneapolis is not a series of missteps, a lapse in judgement here and there, or the actions of a few overly zealous agents. No, what they are seeing in Minneapolis is what Amos saw in Samaria — systemic injustice. And not surprisingly, the administration’s overarching implementation of injustice is most clearly seen as it is exercised against the weakest in the city — children.

On the same day that ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, other agents swarmed the campus of Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis during the school’s dismissal. Students and teachers were pepper-sprayed and many youth were traumatized. Lila Dominguez, a junior at Roosevelt and a reporter for the school’s online newspaper, wrote, “It’s hard to process these things, especially when they are happening at our front doors. The second I got home from Roosevelt today at 5 PM the first thing I did was hug my dad tight. It is so important to be with the people you love during this time.” (Leingang, The Guardian)

Immigration enforcement on school campuses had been disallowed since 2011, when President Obama issued a presidential memorandum to that effect. The Biden administration continued the policy. Immediately upon taking office, President Trump revoked the memo in January 2025. The result has been to proliferate fear amongst students of all ages.

To meet the needs of their students and families, the metro schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul have instituted distance learning — an impersonal innovation both teachers and students thought they had seen the end of with the decrease in Covid-19 cases in the winter of 2021. Lest we minimize the scope and difficulty of implementing distance learning across these two school systems, we should note that the Minneapolis Public School District includes 98 schools comprised of 29,063 students, with a 60% minority enrollment, while 30.9% of the students are economically disadvantaged. St. Paul Public School District contains 102 schools with 32,145 students. The district’s minority enrollment is 70%, and 51.9% of students are economically disadvantaged. 25,724 of the two districts’ students are from needy families. Imagine the difficulty of extending distance learning into that number of struggling households. (Education Report, U.S. News & World Report)

Forty percent of elementary age students are staying home. Often their parents are remaining at home, too. Undocumented adults, those with active asylum claims — like Liam’s father, and many American citizens of Latino and African descent are afraid of being detained or harassed. This has prompted other parents to collect and deliver food to those families hiding at home, while deftly evading ICE agents. One Spanish teacher in Minneapolis is setting up a system whereby individual parents with citizenship become a contact and a shepherd for one of the 250 families sheltering at home. The teacher admits, “This has become an obsession for me. My husband says I’m manic, you know? I don’t sleep. But when I saw two families exchanging photos, I just cried the whole day.”

One of the parents who collects donated food, sorts it, and then delivers it across the city to families admits that many of the volunteers are showing signs of burnout. No wonder, these same women have been serving families since December 1 when Operation Metro Surge began. At Christmas, they also delivered bags of toys to the children. What keeps the volunteers going is knowing how much harder it is to be stuck in a small, stuffy apartment with your children day after day for well over two months now. One of the volunteers admitted, “I keep thinking, if I was trapped at home, what would I want? And it’s, like, I’d want LaCroix water, and coffee, and, I don’t know, some good popcorn.” (Witt, The New Yorker)

WHAT CAN I DO — TODAY?

In the face of the increasing childhood trauma in Minneapolis that may soon be repeated in other cities, Democrats in Congress are demanding ten reforms for ICE agents before they will agree to continued funding for the Department of Homeland Security. The reforms make common sense and are far more in keeping with the Constitution. Using your 5 Calls app, you may wish to voice your support for several or all of these reforms:

1. Targeted Enforcement — Agents can only enter private property with a judicial warrant, not one generated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Also, no person may be held in immigration detention until it is verified that they are not a U.S. Citizen.

2. No Masks — ICE and other immigration enforcement officers will no longer wear masks.

3. Require ID — Agents must prominently display their badges, which show their ID number and last name.

4. Protect Sensitive Locations — Hospitals, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts are to be off-limits to agents.

5. Stop Racial Profiling — Prohibit agents from stopping, questioning, and searching individuals based on their language, accent, race, or ethnicity.

6. Uphold Use-of-Force Standards — Enact a law to require reasonable use-of-force standards for immigration officers and remove from duty any agent accused of use-of-excessive-force until a thorough investigation is finalized.

7. Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight — Preserve the rights of states and local jurisdictions to prosecute potential offenses of use-of-excessive-force. Also, states must first consent to large-scale ICE operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.

8. Build Safeguards into the System —Facilities where individuals are detained must abide by the same standards as state and federal jails and prisons. Immediate access to a person’s attorney must be granted and visits to detained individuals must be allowed.

9. Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking — Require every agent to use body cameras when interacting with the public. Body cameras may not be used for creating databases for tracking individuals involved in 1st Amendment activities.

10. No Paramilitary Police — Agents should wear standardized uniforms — not para-military gear. (Campbell, The Guardian)

SOURCES

Campbell, Lucy, “Democrats’ 10 demands to ‘rein in’ ICE — the full list of proposed reforms,” The Guardian, Feb. 5, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/05/democrats-ice-reforms-funding-bill?CMP=share_btn_url

“Education Report,” U.S. News and World Report. https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/minnesota/districts/minneapolis-public-school-district-100071#:~:text= & https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/minnesota/districts/saint-paul-public-schools-104201

“Judge provides a guiding light on deportations: In his ruling to release child and his father, judge calls out an administration lacking moral, legal standing,” The San Antonio Express News, Feb.1, 2026. https://eedition.expressnews.com/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=92c81895-8ff0-4565-8810-e12614b13077&share=true

Leingang, Rachel, “‘My hands were really shaky:’ high school journalist documents ICE raids,” The Guardian, Jan, 18, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/18/minneapolis-ice-raids-high-school

“Minneapolis: The power of a boy’s photo,” The Week, Feb. 2, 2026. https://theweek.com/politics/minneapolis-power-photo-liam-ramos

Ulloa, Jazmine, “U.S. Seeks to Expedite Deportation of 5-Year-Old Liam Conejo Ramos,” The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/us/us-deportation-liam-conejo-ramos-minnesota.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Witt, Emily, “Minneapolis Postcard: Mutual Aid,” The New Yorker, Feb. 9, 2026. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/the-schoolchildren-of-minneapolis

Woodward, Alex, “Trump administration wants ICE to quickly deport five-year-old Minneapolis boy and dad days after release” The Independent, Feb.6, 2026. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/minnesota-deportation-ice-liam-conejo-ramos-b2915418.html#

PHOTO CREDITS

Liam Conejo Ramos being loaded into an ICE vehicle, Photo compliments of NRC News, The Netherlands. This is the photo Judge Biery attached to his decision.

The Napalm Girl, First published in The New York Times. Photo taken by Nhu Huyen And Nick Ut of The Associated Press.

ICE on the campus of Roosevelt High School, Photo compliments of Minnesota Public Radio.

Liam and his father released from ICE custody, Photo compliments of Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro and telecasted on CNN.