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I am loved by God for all that I am created to be, without exception. In today’s gospel Jesus is saying he did not come for those who are so righteous they stand in judgement of their fellow human beings — he came for all of us who need spiritual healing, comfort, and restorative guidance — and at some point in this life that is every one of us.
Let’s assume for today that God does want personal communication with us, he is our mover and Trinity is our way of understanding the movers’ ways of communicating and being present with us. That is what I experience, direct communication with God. So, let’s wonder about some readings.
If you want to know and understand the mission of the church in the world, you couldn’t go far wrong reading and meditating on the Solemn Collects. The catechism says that mission of the Church is to reconcile all things to God in Christ. That’s the ministry Paul claims for himself and for the church at Corinth. The Solemn Collects spell that ministry out in detail.
“Gifts can only be gifts when we give them entirely away. The true meaning of our lives emerges when we humbly receive and generously give The Holy Spirit’s Love Divine to everyone. This Love Divine that flows generously through us is Christ’s deep river of living water.”
Guest preacher Nicole Starr is diakonal minister with the United Church of Christ and works as a District Court judge in Ramsey County where she holds tightly to the ideal that “justice is what love looks like in public.” (Dr. Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary).
Jesus is preparing to leave his disciples, and he knows what challenges and trials the future holds for them and those who will follow them, the suffering and pain, even the violence that will be brought against these beloved who have known him and struggled to understand his teaching, and he promises that God’s Spirit will come to them and abide with them when he is gone. He calls this Spirit, “Advocate”. In Greek, this word is “paraclete” a word that Johannine scholars have studied and debated and admired for millennia, and can mean “lawyer”, or, more accurately, an attorney for the defense. Seeing the conflicts and struggles of the church on the horizon, is Jesus assuring his disciples – “Don’t worry, I’ve got a great lawyer for you!”? Perhaps.
“The song is ‘Lead me, Guide me’- In asking to be led, and guided we must have trust and have hope in the guide who is bringing us to a place with which we are unfamiliar yet we believe our divine Leader knows what and where is safe refuge and the best place for us to be spiritually, physically and emotionally.”
The Holy Women teach us how to speak the joyful truth in love even when we feel afraid. We must ensure that women on the margins of dominant culture, who have survived the horrors of coloniality, can speak joyful truth in love, especially in the face of man-babies who are terrified of love and truth. Marginalized women have been proclaiming the joyful and life-giving Gospel truth for centuries.
Jesus speaks the words that echo across history: “It is finished.” Not “I am finished.” Not “This is the end.” But “It is finished”—the work of love, the work of reconciliation, the work of bearing the world’s brokenness.
Teachers did not wash the feet of their followers. Jesus challenges a system that says some people are less than others. The Roman system required free men to demonstrate their superiority through speech and action. In the act of washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus very deliberately and profoundly transgresses gender expectations.
“It’s hard to believe resurrection/freedom can happen when folx have been walking dead for so long…hungry for so long…low for so long. It is hard to believe that wins can happen for them when they have been told for so long that they were losing…losers…a lost cause. After white supremacy and patriarchy tells us we are nothing for so long, it is understandable that we come to underestimate others and ourselves, assuming that we’re just not ‘fill-in-the-blank’ enough to do the thing that needs to be done – that we long for and that the world needs.”
“How often do you and I experience testimonies – stories of God – that push against our understanding of how God has been revealed to us through scripture or through our own experience? How do we handle these conflicting narratives?”
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