Seeds of the Tree of Life

Behold, the Word of the Holy to the people in Babylon: The seeds of the Tree of Life are sown in the hearts of all living. Some fall on hard ground, but others on soft rich soil where it is easy for them to take root and grow. Yet to all unto whose heart the rains of grace fall, the seed will quicken and the roots break up the hard soil.

The forces of Babylon rush to and fro, intending to crush the trees while they are young and calling them weeds, so tend to the seedlings in the sanctuaries of the heart beyond the reach of darkness to overshadow and trample. Such trees have grown in secret for a long time. They are ready to bear fruit.

These orchards of life grow wherever the Way is practiced, and the Kin-dom shelters under their branches. Through compassion, the rains come. With justice, the rivers of life break forth. They flow through the land healing all they touch. These waters sustain the world, causing life to flourish.

Swirling in many directions, the waters dance down the courses they follow. They turn toward awe and wonder as they fashion a way toward delight. Others whirl into themselves, making space while holding nothing. Sometimes, the waters splash against the bank carving new shapes that change the flow of the river. When the waters hit an obstruction, the waters sweep through to undermine and sweep the obstacles away.

Babylon arises wherever the fearful, the greedy, and the power hungry oppress others so they feel the same alienation from life and they can feed their never ending hunger. Jesus walked in their shadow and shone his light, freeing the rivers of grace to heal the world. The Kin-dom lived in the world before him and flourished after him. It has always been in the world, and always be within it. Wherever the light shines, the darkness cannot overcome it, so be of good cheer. Despair is their weapon to control, dominate, steal, and destroy.

The Light That Cannot Be Forced

The Way is light and life for those who receive it. It carries the Word through the Holy Spirit, and shelters the people in the tent of the Shekhinah until the sanctuaries are built and refuge is offered. The Shekhinah herself covers the faithful heart wherever they roam, keeping them from the temptations of Babylon.

Light shines. Life flows. The Word is spoken. The Shekhinah enshrines. They do not go where they are not invited. Light has a delicate touch and works over time. It cannot force itself on anyone. Life exists within all, and while it may withdraw, it has no power to exert except on those who wish to have it more abundantly. The Word is spoken, but if ignored or unheard, floods past. As for the Shekhinah, she only goes where she is invited and where she chooses to go. Why would she be where she is unbidden and undesired?

Conquest, control, and concentration of power require cruelty and a cold heart. Without them, they cannot dominate, dam, and destroy. Cruelty isolates and cannot hold anything together without fear. A cold heart does not care to have others near it. They know nothing of kinship, unless they twist the word to mean those under their sway. The Kin-dom is not with them.

The Spiral Dance of the Four Paths

In the Kin-dom, the people dance the great spiral dance between the four paths. At one time a foot in one path, then step to another and the dance unfolds and spins round itself in the grand orbit of life.

Via Positiva: Awe and Wonder

Awe and wonder call the exuberance of the first path out. Here the Via Positiva delights in the flow, and savors every step, with and without a partner. Ever remembering that it does not dance alone, God is in everything and everything is in God. It lavishes in the royal personhood of itself and all those with whom it dances, whether they are on the paths or not. It is as hospitable as the earth, welcoming all to the reel.

Awe and wonder are so hard for Babylon to stamp out because they beckon from all around. Babylon paves the ground and blinds the sky with its own light so no one sees the mysteries calling from beyond it. It fills life with toil and turmoil, so people do not have the time or the energy to behold the magnificence all around them.

When people are exhausted and isolated, it is harder for them to savor the delights of life, but it is not impossible. So Babylon whispers its sweet lie, “There is not enough for everyone. You must struggle to capture what you need.”

It is hard to be grateful when achievement of any kind comes at such a great cost, yet gratitude persists through the struggle and strife. Once joy is found, no matter how small, it opens the way for awe and delight to return.

As the people come together for shared meals, they ensure they have enough, and joy, gratitude, and delight take root. It can be in the simplest of things, the sharing of bread, even just in the sharing of the table, that can quicken the soul to life.

Sing and dance together, and let joy take up its voice. Hospitality does not judge the singer, the dancer, or the song. It joins them in the revelry to celebrate the moment.

So much beauty goes unseen in day to day life that could be savored and shared. Be mindful not to miss it. Once we learn to savor even the smallest pleasure, the mystic is born within us, and they cannot help but rejoice in life.

Mystics are dangerous to Babylon, because no chain can hold them from their joy, and no blindness can obscure their vision. They see the world as sacred, and cannot be manipulated easily by fear. All are born with a mystic desiring to dance free. They shatter the hold of Babylon so fresh green growth can rise from the cracks.

Via Negativa: Daring the Dark

Joy is just the beginning. It cannot continue the dance on its own. When awe opens the eyes, the sight is clearer. The chains must be loosened so life may flow on.

Awe and wonder are not blinding. They know their kin, grief and silence are there in the dark waiting. They are not enemies. They are guides in the great dance to carry us through the hard times. Delight opens the way, surrendering to grief so wounds can be tended and healed.

In the dark, the world opens up, even though sometimes it feels closed. In that inky void there is a cosmos flourishing that is just hard to see at the moment. Once we dare the dark, and enter into the profound mysteries there, everything opens up in new and unexpected ways.

For those raised in Babylon, there are many lies that need to be cast off into the dark. Wealth cannot bring salvation, it only greases the wheels so everyone has to run faster not to fall behind. Violence does not create security; it invites harm in return. Domination does not build order, it breeds resistance that will eventually rise against it. Empire is not inevitable, it is an artifice of fear, desire, and cruelty that can only crumble under its own weight.

Once these are swept away, new spaces arise to live in.

Fear and greed are siblings, they are hungers that cannot be satisfied. They worm their way into the soul with the lie that if they are not fed, someone else will feed them and become dominant. This ignores that domination is an illusion, and no one can exercise it over others.

Babylon pretends that power and security can exist without community. They cannot.

When we let go of our fear and allow grief, silence, and emptiness to do their work, we are freed from these insatiable cravings.

Healing Through Grief

Grief invites us to sit so we can heal the mind and heart. It calls us to sit through the long night to take time to adjust to a new reality. When loss enters our lives and impermanence shows its face, we cannot step into the world easily. Memories, habits, and emotions cry out of the old way, when we still had what was lost in our lives.

Grieving is the process of feeling the pain, remembering, talking, crying, and reflecting, which gradually helps us to reorganize those emotional connections. Instead of pretending the loss did not happen, grief lets us face it piece by piece until the memories become less like open wounds and more like stories we carry. In that way the pain is not useless. It is the mind doing careful repair work so we can keep loving what mattered while still continuing our lives.

Formation Through Silence

Silence calls us to keep quiet so we can hear truth again. It introduces us to its friend reflection to help us change our minds because they give us space to examine our own thoughts instead of reacting automatically. When we pause and sit quietly, attention turns inward and we notice our feelings, assumptions, and habits more clearly. We develop our skills of introspection, or reflective self awareness. This kind of reflection helps us understand our motivations, regulate emotions, and reshape beliefs over time.

Mindfulness opens us to stillness that reduces stress reactions, loosens rigid thinking patterns, and strengthens our systems that support thoughtful decision making and emotional regulation. Silence slows the mental noise long enough for the mind to see itself honestly, and that clarity is what allows our beliefs, attitudes, and choices to gradually change.

Opening Through Emptiness

Emptiness teaches us nothing in life is fixed, permanent, or locked into one identity. Everything exists because of many causes and conditions coming together and changing over time. When we realize this, we stop clinging so tightly to things being a certain way, including our own stories about who we are.

Once we loosen our grip, we create space inside the mind and heart, much like clearing a crowded room. In that open space, new ways of thinking, new choices, and new growth can appear. Emptiness is not about nothingness. It is about recognizing that life is flexible and unfinished, which means there is always room for something new to take root and grow.

Meaning and Purpose Arises

Meaning and purpose are not things we simply invent in our heads or chase like objects. They emerge when we learn to pay careful attention to the world and respond to it in a wise and fitting way. When we become more aware, less distracted, and less trapped by ego, we begin to sense what a situation truly calls for.

Purpose grows out of skilled participation in life. By seeing clearly and responding appropriately, meaningful action happens almost naturally, as if we are working with life together rather than struggling against it.

Meaning and purpose arise when we do what we believe matters in a way that makes us feel connected and makes a difference, no matter how great or small. We cannot do this meaning making if we do not dare the dark to empty ourselves of false beliefs, let go of what we do not need to carry, and strengthen through silence and emptying our connections to what matters most to us.

Via Creativa: The Orchard of Life

As we step from the shadowed land of the Via Negativa, the ashen ground gives way to the verdurous fields of the Via Creativa. Our heart beats to the new rhythm of compassion, and our eyes are clearer so we can see beauty as it is. Inspiration takes our hand inviting us to dance into the grand orchard of life to imagine something new.

Our compassion invites us to call others into the dance, and make new experiences for our mutual lives and joy. We join in the communities in the shade of life under the sun of hope, sharing meals and lives with one another.

We sing new songs, dance new dances, and cook new foods. We have conversations that will never happen the same way again.

All living is creative, requiring imagination, hope, and compassion. These drives give rise to artists, teachers, healers, and organizers imagining new ways to live, not just survive.

As compassion and imagination dance together the power of Babylon fades into the background. Mutual aid replaces the old ways of exploitation. Hospitality draws us together to remove isolation from the world. Healing practices restore life, and the greatest healing we need is the reclamation of truth.

Babylon is built on lies. For every lie we laid down when we dared the dark, we need to pick up the ability to speak truth again. Truth telling is a creative and imaginative act.

It is easy to confuse truth with facts. Facts are what is, what was, and what might be, but to fully understand the facts they must be faceted into a story. The relationship between these stories and the way the world really is and behaves is the degree of truth contained within the stories. No story is completely true. Those that distract from or hide the truth are lies. The ones that come closest to the world as it is, we hold as true, but with the knowledge they could always change. Myths are the metaphors we share to get as close as we can to the truths that do not fit well into words. Some truths break when they are put into words.

These stories, from the ones we tell about ourselves to the ones we share about the cosmos, give words to the songs, and shape the dance of life.

Our goal must always be to find the Living Word, and build our communities around them. The Word dies when it is fixed, locked into a rigid form and not allowed to grow or change. If the Word is trapped, it will die. It has to create new songs and dance new dances.

As we join the Living Word in a dance, the world springs to life, ever renewing itself.

Via Transformativa: Restoring the Dance

With the Living Word by our side, we dance into the Via Transformativa. Now, as we encounter the injustice of Babylon, the urge to interfere arises. The joy of the dancers is toxic to the empire, causing it to overreact.

Like the band of the prophets in ancient Judea, the dancers sing, play their instruments, and bring change wherever they go. Our celebration invites more people into the dance, and our voice erodes the lies of Babylon and breaks its power.

If any of us is separated from the others, we seek them out to bring them back into the dance. When separated from the group, we continue the dance, speaking the Living Word to break Babylon so we can find our way home. The dance has always spiraled in the world. It cannot be stopped.

When the Kin-dom Appears Among Us

The Kin-dom is stretched out across the world, but many do not see it. Day by day, as we dance through the four paths, remembering the original blessing we were created in, we live in this Kin-dom.

Life becomes more abundant as we live together in mutual aid, care, and support. Life is not just food, clothing, and shelter, but the meaning and purpose we find through such an interconnected life. It is also the meaning and purpose we find in living a life that matters to us.

Together, we support one another, and not even Babylon can take that away from us. In our diversity, we all bring different talents, skills, resources, and tales to the circle, and together we grow stronger for it.

Babylon flees from those who are truly alive. Truth shields us from its lies. Our connections hold us together as it tries to work its isolation and alienation on us. Our collective strength cannot be overcome by Babylon, but it is our light. Darkness must flee from the light.

Despair flees as we help one another and dare the dark to find healing and peace. Since it cannot fester, it cannot infect us and drive us into the arms of Babylon. We are free to live in the joy of the world, and celebrate its wonders.

So long as our sanctuaries are strong and offer refuge to those within, Babylon cannot have any sway over us. The Kin-dom is here. It has always been here and will always be here.

All we have to do is join the dance.

The Kingdom of Babylon

Babylon is the kingdom of this world. We are born in Babylon, and with God’s help, we will see the day when it falls. We will bear witness to that glad and blessed event.

Revelation 18:11-13

11. The merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise any more;

12. merchandise of gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet, all expensive wood, every vessel of ivory, every vessel made of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble;

13. and cinnamon, incense, perfume, frankincense, wine, olive oil, fine flour, wheat, sheep, horses, chariots, and people’s bodies and souls.

The Book of Revelation envisions the day that Babylon falls. It’s important that you read that list of merchandise that Babylon peddled in. Through it, we see exactly what kind of a kingdom Babylon truly is. Its power and greed touch every industry you can imagine. That last line is just chilling. People’s bodies and souls were nothing but merchandise to Babylon.

The vile kingdom of Babylon believes that it has the right to tell us what to do with our body, where we should go and what we should do. It controls our time, our futures. It limits our possibilities. Once they have control of everything that we do and what we deem as possible, they have full control over our souls. They trade people like commodities. They treat life like a commodity. They don’t care who lives and who dies, so long as their power, fear, and greed are fed.

Seeing Babylon Clearly

We could think of Babylon as an evil soul collector, they do that by controlling everything we do. They own everything. Through their fear, they sow fear, making us worry about each other and the potential enemies in our midst so they can erect walls and send forces amongst us to control us. Through their greed, they extract what is rightfully ours, the fruit of our labors, the work of our hands. They take and they take and they hoard it unto themselves, so we have less and less and less. The hungrier we are, the more willing they believe we will be to follow their dictates and to work for even less just to survive. In their lust for power, they make proclamations to aggrandize themselves, forcing us to bend our knee before them so that we can have the scraps from their tables.

Behold Babylon. The extractor of souls, of riches, of life itself, that takes all unto itself and cares nothing for those who live under it. These are the powers in high places that Paul talked about. Not the people, but the power structures. The system itself that doesn’t care who is placed where because it will always find replacements. It is self-healing. It is a machine of sorrow that grinds down humanity and the world until there is nothing else but it. It is the entropy, the hunger, devouring all that is because it can never be satisfied.

Now we need to dig deeper into the nature of Babylon so we can see it clearly. We need to be able to recognize it as it is forming and see its machinations as they take shape. If we don’t know what Babylon looks like in practice, and only have a vague image of it, we will not be able to confront it as it takes over our lives.

Babylon Tramples the Poor

People have always erected power structures around themselves so that they could exploit the poor for their own benefit. The Prophet Amos took people to task for this.

Amos 5:11-12

11. Therefore, because you trample on the poor, and take taxes from him of wheat: You have built houses of cut stone, but you will not dwell in them. You have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine.

12. For I know how many your offenses, and how great are your sins— you who afflict the just, who take a bribe, and who turn away the needy in the courts.

These words are powerful and feel like they could have been written today. The image of the rich and the powerful trampling on the poor was a common image used to show conquest. So in a way, Amos is saying you have conquered the poor.

What do they do after this conquest? They take taxes from them, from the things that they need to sustain themselves most. Taxes have changed a lot over the millennia. They used to be paid in the products that a community made. Since the advent of mercantilism and capitalism, those taxes are collected in money. But then again, no one can buy or sell anything without money. They can’t even get food without money. So they are still robbing what they need from the poor to enrich themselves.

We see this in our own present day when they give tax cuts to the rich and subsidies to industries that do not require them, while fully taxing or even increasing the taxes on those who can least afford to pay them. They use the machinery of government to extract what little wealth there is at the bottom so that they can continue to concentrate it at the top.

They have learned that a population that is too well-fed and happy, with too much free time, has a tendency to revolt against them. But they always forget that a population deprived too much tends to do the same. This is the blindness that is brought about by their fear, power hunger, and greed.

Babylon takes this wealth they have extracted building extravagant homes for themselves and places where they can live in pleasure. That is what the houses of cut stone and pleasant vineyards are about. I would go so far as to say that the curse of God placed on them here, that they will not dwell in them and that they will not drink their wine, is not just a future punishment after they are overthrown or cast down, but a true statement. They hoard the wine in hopes it will increase in value, and thus make them even richer. They do not live in the lavish houses they make. They abide there. They simply are. They do not allow themselves the connections and the allowance to savor what they have and thus continue in their suffering, always looking for more that they can have and bring in, while not truly living.

As a result of this, their sins, their falling away, their walking off the path is mighty. They go as far as they can away from the good path, so that they begin to afflict the just, those who are bringing about good to the best of their ability. They bribe others to be complicit. Without collaborators, vile power structures like this cannot exist. They then corrupt the courts so the poor cannot even find justice there.

Oh, how that sounds like our present age, and oh, how that sounds like every age that preceded it. Babylon tramples the poor, extracts their taxes, and denies justice to the people so that their wealth and luxury can be secured. They cannot even conceive of a world where one could have prosperity without exploitation because exploitation is all that they know and all that they care about. This further blinds them to the needs of those who are sick, injured, or disabled. Since they cannot find a way to exploit them, what use are they to Babylon?

Babylon Writes Oppressive Laws

Babylon doesn’t just work through extraction, but through unjust laws and oppressive systems that keep people down.

Isaiah 10:1-2

1. Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees, and to the writers who write oppressive decrees;

2. to deprive the needy from justice, and to rob the poor among my people of their rights, that widows may be their plunder, and that they may make the fatherless their prey!

Laws are the rule book by which we govern our societies. If we were to look at this fairly, you could say that government is a game that we are playing with one another, where we establish the rules of play so that it should benefit everyone. The problem comes in when people who have greed, fear, and a lust for power are allowed to write those laws, because they will write them to their own benefit.

Oppressive laws have a couple of functions. The first is to incite culture wars. They turn people against each other within the society so that the argument is internal and no one looks up at the ones who are actually writing the laws. We turn those who may support these oppressive laws into our enemies and fight them instead of the regime that puts them in power. This is a very good way to conquer and control a people. If a people is divided, it will fall. As Jesus said, a house divided against itself cannot stand (Matt 12:25; Mark 3:25; Luke 11:17).

Next, they codify into law the very unjust systems by which they are governing, keeping the needy from getting the justice that they deserve and robbing the poor of their rights. These kinds of laws are meant to keep the people down. If the people are deprived of justice and their rights, then they have no leg to stand on within the system to achieve equity in their lives.

When they plunder the widows and make the fatherless their prey, this shows the base nature of those who seek this kind of power. They separate families because it is easier to exploit someone, especially a child, who has no one to help them. This kind of exploitation takes many forms, from the many children that disappear into slavery to the ones whose hearts are hardened to fight in their wars and to enforce the very laws that hold them bound.

This shows the darkness at the heart of Babylon. It’s not that it doesn’t care about those underneath it. The cruelty is the point. In their eyes, this unchecked cruelty is a sign of their true power, and in a perverse way, their own worth.

Even when such cruelty is unintentional at first, it inevitably develops because it is necessary to fuel those who are in charge. It whispers the sweet lie: if they hold authority over life and death, their dominion is absolute. In this way, they make themselves into gods, and gods cannot be questioned. Gods are always worthy.

May Babylon fall under the weight of the many cruelties that it commits.

When Law Replaces Ethics

People have a hard time understanding the difference between morality and ethics. Morality is how we should live personally. Ethics is how we should behave collectively and towards one another. One governs my actions. The other, my actions with others. In that confusion, many people simply defer to the law, believing that whatever is legal is also ethical.

By corrupting the law, the fearful, the greedy, and the power-hungry work their corruption down into the people at every level. The logic is simple. If it is legal for me to do a thing, then it must be ethical for me to do that thing. Since it is ethical for me to do that thing, then you should not be upset when I do that thing. This ignores the very possibility that the law might be unethical.

But since Babylon has done so much work to make sure that people are hungry and tired, and that their days are filled up with labor to extract wealth from them, people don’t have the time to sit and think philosophically about what is and is not ethical or moral for their daily lives. And thus, having a simple rule like the law is a relief.

It is an illusion of ease that helps people get by in their daily lives. “Well, it’s legal for me to act this way, so I can, and maybe even should act this way.” Thus, the injustice works its way down into everyday life, so that we exploit each other, just as the fearful, the greedy, and the power-hungry exploit us.

When People Become Merchandise

The next story in Acts 16 is one that I have been taught in my evangelical past. But the focus in it was on the deliverance ministry that Paul engages in and how that enraged the devil. If you actually read the text, that’s not what made these people mad.

Acts 16:16-19

16. As we were going to prayer, a certain girl having a spirit of divination met us, who brought her masters much gain by fortune telling.

17. Following Paul and us, she cried out, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to us a way of salvation!”

18. She was doing this for many days. But Paul, becoming greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” It came out that very hour.

19. But when her masters saw that the hope of their gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas, and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers.

Did you catch the operative phrase there? Was it that the girl had been freed from the spirit of divination within her? No. When they saw their hope of profit was gone, that is when they became angry and seized Paul and Silas.

The masters became angry when they realized they could no longer exploit this girl for profit.

The Roman Empire was all about forced exploitation and extraction of wealth. These masters were just doing that. We don’t know how they came into possession of this girl who had a spirit of divination in her. In fact, we don’t even know what that spirit of divination was. If we’re being honest, we don’t even really know why Paul cast it out. The scripture only says that he was annoyed that she was following them around.

What these masters were mad about is that their hope of profit was gone, and that led them to violence, just like the Roman Empire they lived in. They moved in the spirit of Babylon to seize Paul and Silas and bring them to judgment.

The thing that has always amazed me about this story from all sides is that we know nothing about this girl. Like any piece of merchandise sold and traded in Babylon, she is merely a product on the shelf. The story is about the people who owned her. That is disgusting.

Whenever we can see a person as property or even as a commodity, which is, when you think about it, a form of property, we see the depravity that Babylon breeds in the hearts of people. And if you don’t understand, that’s what people do anytime they talk about the labor market. That is the commoditization of people. That is turning people into products traded back and forth by companies to extract wealth for their own benefit.

There is no respect or dignity given to people under systems like this. It is unsurprising that they breed oppression.

Religion in Service of Babylon

Babylon often works with her compatriot, the false prophet, to further her aims through religion. The religion of Babylon is one that uses the system of Babylon but casts it all in the language of faith. Ritual is costly and transactional. The church, or whatever the religious institution is, begins to operate more like a business than like a house of God.

Nowhere is this scene clearer than the riot in Ephesus.

Acts 19:23-27

23. About that time there arose no small stir concerning the Way.

24. For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen,

25. whom he gathered together, with the workmen of like occupation, and said, “Sirs, you know that by this business we have our wealth.

26. You see and hear, that not at Ephesus alone, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away many people, saying that they are no gods, that are made with hands.

27. Not only is there danger that this our trade come into disrepute, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be counted as nothing, and her majesty destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worships.”

If you pay attention to this passage, while Demetrius talks about faith in the great goddess Artemis, his actual concern is for their wealth. His primary concern is not about faith, but as he says, “You know that by this business we have our wealth.”

I can’t help but think about the megachurches, pilgrimage sites, and other sites of devotion that have turned into something almost entirely about commerce. Simple acts of devotion require an entire band to play to entertain the crowd so that they can sing along, thus increasing the cost of holding a service. As these costs mount up, the attention of the pastors has to be dedicated more to the funding of the service than anything else.

Jesus said that we cannot serve God and mammon, which is to put our faith in our wealth. Here we see people who have done just that.

Babylon doesn’t know anything about faith, but it knows a lot about wealth and the desire to hoard and extract it. So it makes this core to all of those who would be doing any religious action. Every service is about making money. That money is necessary for the ministry, and without it, it cannot continue the way that it does. The ministry grows and now requires more money. And so the cycle continues, and it grows and grows, compounding on itself.

All the while, whatever the original intent, purpose, or community aim of the religious devotion, it is lost. All that is left is the industry. The business of selling that faith. “Do you want to know the word of the Lord, by my book, or teaching? Do you need a miracle? Send your money and you will have it.” In this way, religion becomes a racket. And the wolves are invited in to feed on the sheep.

In return for this capitulation of religion into becoming a business, Babylon now has access to the sacred language of that faith that it can use and twist to its own aims.

“Don’t read the Gospels. All you need is to listen to me. Jesus didn’t care about the poor. He cared about those other people over there and why we should eradicate them.”

“Oh, you actually read the gospel, so yes, Jesus did care about the poor, but that’s a personal issue. That’s not something we should be doing together.”

Such religious movements corrupted by Babylon will do anything to keep her happy and to keep the money flowing because money is help. They keep score. The biggest, the greatest faith is the one that has the most wealth in Babylon.

Devouring Widows’ Houses

Jesus pointed this out in his own day.

Mark 12:38-40 (cf Luke 20:45–47)

38. In his teaching he said to them, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk in long robes, and to get greetings in the marketplaces,

39. and the best seats in the synagogues, and the best places at feasts:

40. those who devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. These will receive greater condemnation.”

Beware the ones in the fancy clothes, who like to get greetings in the marketplace, who take the best seats at the religious services, and the best places at the feast. These are the ones who devour widows’ houses, says Jesus. For the pretense of holiness, they make long prayers. We have all seen these people.

These scribes were masters of the law, who would offer their services to widows to help manage their estates, and then mooch off them, taking advantage of their kindness and hospitality, and push them through piousness to give more and more and more. They exploited the vulnerable to enrich themselves.

Oh, if that doesn’t look like the churches that we have today, with all the sweet old ladies just eating out of the pastor’s hand and giving him money whenever he asks. The pastor living in the lap of luxury, taking all that these people have to make that life possible.

To exploit the vulnerable in the name of the God whose main focus throughout Scripture is to take care of the vulnerable and to help raise them up is particularly deplorable. It shows just how deep Babylon gets into the system, that it can use the very institutions meant to help these people to do them harm.

We don’t only see this in churches but in various charities and other groups that are designed with the intent of helping people. On their face, these systems sound like they should be beneficial to those who need them. But the practices contained within them require them to divest of all that they have, to have all of their wealth and savings extracted from them, to bleed them dry, to make them more dependent, and to make others wealthy.

Babylon will never be satisfied. It will drain the last drop of life’s blood from a person and still hunger for more. It will destroy an entire population, and yet still hunger. It’s violence, extraction and alienation creep all the way down into the lives of everyone.

The Path That Breaks Babylon

Babylon has no power over the liberated. Its power diminishes even more as the liberated come together to sustain and help one another. So long as we strive together, building systems of mutual aid, care, and support, we defy and destroy Babylon wherever we are.

We are called to be mystics, to see the beauty in all things and to savor it, to have life abundantly. This is a poison to Babylon because this life savored is hard to exploit.

We are called to be artists, creating new things and allowing our dreams to be born through us into reality. This is a poison to Babylon because the new threatens the old.

We are called to be prophets, interfering with injustice, with joy, wherever we find it. Joy is the opposite of alienation. It brings people together to celebrate, to sing, and to dance.

How do we do this?

We always remember that we were created in original blessing, no matter what Babylon wants to tell us. We walk the four paths in that great spiral dance, liberating ourselves from the chains that would hold us down.

Through awe and wonder, letting go and making space. In creating and co-creating, in justice and joy, we renew ourselves and bring the lush greenness back to the earth as we liberate the fountains of grace.

Once we have the eyes to see and ears to hear the work that Babylon does, it is our task to open the eyes of others so they might see and be free.

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The Weaponization of Romans 13

Romans 13 has a long and troubling history of being used to sanctify oppressive power. Repeatedly, it has been ripped from its context to be used as a cudgel to make Christians bow the knee to the authoritarian instincts of the fearful, the greedy, and the power hungry. Any text in Scripture ripped from its context can be used to say and mean anything.

Rome used this passage to insist that Christians bow to the power of the empire. The church allowed the empire to call church councils and demand consensus on issues. It became an arm of the Western Roman Empire, performing violence within its boarders to transform the empire from within.

Monarchs in early modern Europe, during the reformation, invoked Paul’s words to defend the “divine right of kings,” arguing that resistance to a king was rebellion against God. It became the root of new mythologies and rituals where the Church itself conveyed the power and authority of God into the person of the monarch. The Kings then waged war on one another sowing chaos and confusion across the continent. They ignored that Paul said: “The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the assemblies of the saints” (1 Corinthians 14:32-33). They embraced the violence and confusion of the whims and wills of the various kings to subject the world to violence and self-aggrandizement for their own political empowerment. This confusion alone shows that they were not the faithful servants of God they claimed to be.

During the American Civil War, slaveholding preachers cited Romans 13 to demand obedience from enslaved people and to condemn abolitionists who challenged the system. When we forget that we live in Babylon, and pretend that God blesses and condones the work of the state and the alienation, brutality, and extraction it demands, it is only a short step to allowing the torture, abuse, and enslavement of other human beings.

In twentieth century Germany, some theologians sympathetic to the Nazi regime appealed to the same passage to claim that Christians were bound to obey the state even under Hitler. The state of the church was so corrupt that many churches came together to write the Theological Declaration of Barmen in 1934 to reject the power of the Nazi government over the church.

Similar arguments have appeared in modern politics whenever governments seek to suppress protest or justify harsh immigration policies, again quoting Paul’s line that “the authorities that exist have been established by God.” Christian nationalists are using it to bow the knee to their new authoritarian master.

In each case the passage is lifted out of its ethical context and turned into a theological shield for power, even though the wider biblical witness repeatedly warns that rulers often misuse authority and that God’s people must ultimately obey God rather than human rulers.

The Contradiction in the Authoritarian Reading

The authoritarian reading of Romans 13 cannot be the intended meaning. Paul himself disobeyed Roman authorities and demanded to have an audience with the Emperor to plead his case. He was arrested, beaten, and eventually executed by Rome for disobeying their authority. If Paul believed in the authoritarian interpretation then he would not have opposed and disobeyed Roman authorities to the point of execution.

If the authoritarian reading is correct, then Jesus deserved to die because he did not bow to the Roman state that was colonizing Judea and Galilee, and instead preached a kin-dom that would get him killed. Remember, above the cross they labeled his crime: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

None of the other apostles seemed to know this reading either. Peter, James, John, and all of the other apostles that we have stories about rejected the power of Rome and continued teaching despite orders not to, and all of them met their end being executed by the Roman authorities.

If this authoritarian reading is correct, then we have to condemn Jesus and all of the apostles as apostates who defied the will of God in working against, resisting, and defying the Roman state in which they lived. One cannot call themselves a Christian, holding to the power and inspiration of the New Testament, and believe that.

The actions of Jesus and the apostles show that Romans 13 meant something different. A plain reading of the text shows the same. The authoritarian reading of Romans 13 is a plague that has haunted Christianity since its foundation.

So, Romans 13 is not an authoritarian passage telling us to blindly obey those in power. What does it really say? What did it mean in its original context? And what should it mean to us today?

Reading the Passage Itself

Romans 13:1-10

1. Let every soul be in subjection to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those who exist are ordained by God.

2. Therefore he who resists the authority, withstands the ordinance of God; and those who withstand will receive to themselves judgment.

3. For rulers are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Do you desire to have no fear of the authority? Do that which is good, and you will have praise from the same,

4. for he is a servant of God to you for good. But if you do that which is evil, be afraid, for he doesn’t bear the sword in vain; for he is a servant of God, an avenger for wrath to him who does evil.

5. Therefore you need to be in subjection, not only because of the wrath, but also for conscience’ sake.

6. For this reason you also pay taxes, for they are servants of God’s service, attending continually on this very thing.

7. Therefore give everyone what you owe: if you owe taxes, pay taxes; if customs, then customs; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

8. Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.

9. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other commandments there are, are all summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

10. Love doesn’t harm a neighbor. Love therefore is the fulfillment of the law.

When we read Romans 13 out of context, it seems to support the authoritarian reading. Every soul is subject to higher authorities. Whoever resists authority withstands the ordinances of God. Rulers are not a terror to good works. These all sound like they condone the state. Phrases like, “He is a servant for God,” and “he does not bear the sword in vain,” sound like approval.

If you have not read Romans 12 and thought that this passage just sprang from Paul’s mind without context, it does sound a lot like he is giving his approval to everything that the Roman state does. Not just his approval, but the approval of God to all of their actions.

Importantly, most authoritarian readings of this passage stop at verse 7 and pretend that verse 8 starts an entirely new subject that is completely unrelated to what came before it. It is important to remember that the chapters did not exist until 1227 CE. Up until that point, these letters were completely one block of text. The verse numbers were not added until 1551 CE. Neither were put there by Paul, and none of them reflect Paul’s original intent in writing this letter.

What they do show is that there was a concerted interest in having this passage be read in isolation, away from the context in chapter 12. The authoritarian state of the kings had been using these verses to justify their divine authority for centuries by this point. Thus, it seemed like the natural place to make a break in the text, ensuring that people would see it as the beginning of a new subject and separate it from what came before.

When we add ideas to the Bible that the writers did not know about, like inspiration, inerrancy, or univocality, we are doing harm to the text because we are saying that we have the ability to interpret it and that it is not allowed to speak for itself.

Context is vital to understanding what the scripture means and how it plays its part in the complex tradition that arose from the Jewish faith through its transition into Christianity.

The Immediate Context: Romans 12

In Romans 12, Paul is laying out his ethical framework by which Christians should live under an authoritarian empire. The world is harsh and violent, but that does not mean that we should be. We are called to live in a kin-dom that is not of this world and thus runs off different rules.

In a modern context, we might say that Paul is contrasting the operating system of the Roman world with the operating system of Christianity. The same software does not run on both. But since we were raised in the world and not in the kin-dom, which is not of this world, then we have to learn the ways of the kin-dom so that we can follow the way of Jesus.

Romans 12:14

14. Bless those who persecute you; bless, and don’t curse.

Paul reminds us that it is our purpose and duty as followers of the way of Jesus to bless those who persecute us, to bless them and not to curse them. What does that mean?

Paul tells the community to bless those who persecute them and refuses to soften the command. He repeats the instruction so no one misses the point. When people treat us with hostility, our instinct is to respond with anger, condemnation, or revenge. Paul pushes in the opposite direction. Followers of Christ are called to respond by speaking good, not harm, over those who oppose them. This is not pretending the persecution is acceptable or ignoring injustice. It is a refusal to mirror the hatred directed at us. The community is called to break the cycle of retaliation by choosing words and actions that seek good rather than harm, even toward those who actively treat them as enemies.

Romans 12:17

17. Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all men.

Here, Paul warns the community not to repay evil with evil. When someone harms us, the most natural reaction is to strike back in kind, to balance the scales by giving them what they gave us. Paul rejects that instinct. Instead of reacting he calls believers to act and focus on what is honorable and good in the sight of everyone. The point is not weakness or pretending harm does not matter. It is about refusing to let the behavior of others dictate our own character. The community of Christ is meant to live in a way that is visibly shaped by integrity and goodness, even when they are treated unjustly. By doing what is right rather than retaliating, they show a different way of living that others can clearly see.

Romans 12:19

19. Don’t seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God’s wrath. For it is written, “Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.”

Paul tells believers not to take revenge for themselves when they are wronged. The urge to settle the score can feel powerful and even justified, but Paul says that vengeance does not belong to us. Instead, he calls the community to step back and leave room for God’s justice. God sees the harm that has been done and will deal with it in the right time and in the right way. By letting go of the need to personally repay wrongdoing, believers refuse to let anger and retaliation rule their actions. Trusting God with justice frees the community to focus on living faithfully rather than becoming consumed with getting even.

Romans 12:21

21. Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Paul closes this section with a final warning and a clear alternative. When we respond to evil with more evil, it begins to shape us and pull us into the same destructive pattern. In that sense, evil wins by drawing us into its way of acting. Paul urges the community not to let that happen. Instead, they are called to confront evil by doing good. Acts of goodness, mercy, and integrity break the cycle that evil tries to create. Rather than being controlled by the harm done to them, believers push back against it through lives that reflect the goodness of God. In this way, good becomes the force that ultimately overcomes evil.

In Romans 12, you can clearly see the stress that the persecuted church was under. Four times, Paul has to remind people in different ways not to seek revenge, not to repay evil with evil, and to constantly be a voice and body acting for good in this cosmos.

For Paul, the church was an active agent working in this world as the body of Christ to bring healing and restoration. He called this work the Ministry of Reconciliation and saw it as the core of what we were supposed to be doing as a church. It is difficult to do acts of reconciliation in a world filled with so much violence and oppression.

After saying these things, Paul then continues to talk about the nature of those in authority and what they are supposed to do and how we are supposed to live. In understanding that, you can see how the passage should be read through verse 10, because this is all a prolonged meditation on the love of God and how we as the church are meant to enact it in the world, even in such dire circumstances as the oppressive persecution of an empire that sees people only for what they can bring to it.

Paul’s World Under Empire

It is not the calling of the Church to control the lives of others or to police their actions. The church exists to heal the world and to teach a different and better way to live within it. We have to remember that Paul knew little to nothing about democratic principles. While the Roman Empire had once been a republic, and the Greek city-states had done their experiments with democracy before this, the empire had washed all of that away, and Paul’s entire life was lived under its boot and control.

The state existed and did whatever it wanted to do. There was no concept of revolution, only revolt. There were no democratic processes to change the government. The emperor declared and the empire did. The Roman Senate existed almost as a vestigial member, a portion that the Empire had evolved past but retained because it did not feel the need to abolish it.

Paul could not envision a world where Christians revolted because they would have had to engage in the imperial violence, revenge, and retaliation that are all components of war, all of which Paul saw as incompatible with the work of the church. The only option available to him in the context in which he lived was to see the empire like any other force of nature. It is a storm that rages and blows, and all we can do is learn how to live in such a way that we survive and make it through.

If anything, Romans 13 is more of a plea not to revolt against the state and give it all the excuses that it needs to truly eradicate the nascent Christian movement than it is anything else.

When Paul says that the state and authorities are servants of God, it does not make them righteous agents of the Lord. Jesus tells many parables about servants who were given tasks in the world, and often in those stories, only one of three actually carry out what they were asked to do.

A servant has free will, which does not mean that they are doing their master’s bidding. Even seeing the state as a quasi-natural force, Paul refers to them as servants of God because they have a purpose to unfold. Their purpose, as Paul states quite clearly, is to stop violence.

In the context of the Roman Empire, that is almost laughable. They were an institution built on violence, from violent oppression to violent enslavement, all the way to the violent crucifixion of those who were not Roman citizens. Paul’s statement about authorities is as much a rebuke of Rome as it is a lesson in how to live underneath them. If all the state worries about is order, then not behaving in a disordered manner would be the best way not to come to their attention.

This idea works well in something like the Roman Empire but does not within a civic democracy. Once we introduce the notion of freedom of speech and expression, things that Paul had no conception of, the duty of a Christian within a state apparatus changes dramatically.

This passage is an admonition to Romans living in the city of Rome under the Roman Empire. They had no power to overthrow the state, and even if they were to rise up in revolt, there were not enough of them to succeed in taking over the Empire. Further, the sheer volume of violence that they would have to participate in to maintain that power and control would deny everything that Jesus and God command of us in Scripture.

When there is no hope of change, the best we can do is not become a target of the violence being rained down on so many. Paul concludes this section with an admonition to love our neighbors as ourselves. That this is the whole of the law. This is not the law as it was proclaimed and prosecuted by the Roman state. This is the law of the kin-dom that we are subject to. This is the true higher law, which he calls the law of the Spirit, that frees us from sin and transforms us into the children of God.

Paul’s Apocalyptic Horizon

It is important for us to realize that Paul is living in a fatalistic world. Paul wrote this letter somewhere between 56-58 CE. Roman governors used executions and crucifixions to keep order. Rome maintained its control through fear, severe punishment, heavy taxation, and military force.

Leading up to this time, Rome had decimated many messianic movements. Judas of Galilee led a revolt around 6 CE against Roman taxation after Judea came under direct Roman rule. Roman forces suppressed the uprising and its leaders were killed, though the movement continued underground. Theudas promised followers that he could miraculously part the Jordan River. Around the 40s CE, the Roman governor Cuspius Fadus sent troops who attacked the group, killed many followers, and had Theudas beheaded, displaying his head publicly. These movements were typically dealt with swiftly and violently by Roman authorities, who used execution, crucifixion, and the killing or scattering of followers to prevent any challenge to imperial control, just as they had done to Jesus.

Paul truly believed that Jesus would return any minute. He, like so many in the early church, still believed that the kin-dom would break out across the world when Jesus returned bodily to judge the world and create a new order. All the faithful had to do was survive long enough to see that happen.

In this very letter, Paul makes several claims about the near future. He teaches that a day of judgment is coming when God will judge the world through Christ (Romans 2:5–16). He says that creation itself is waiting to be renewed and freed from suffering when God’s people are fully revealed (Romans 8:18–23). Just before this passage, he describes a future turning point in which the full number of Gentiles will come into God’s people and Israel will also experience salvation (Romans 11:25–26).

Immediately after this passage, he said:

“Do this, knowing the time, that it is already time for you to awaken out of sleep, for salvation is now nearer to us than when we first believed. The night is far gone, and the day is near. Let’s therefore throw off the deeds of darkness, and let’s put on the armor of light” (Romans 13:11–12).

He believed that all the church had to do was collect the required number of Gentiles into the movement, then the world will end. Any day now this will all be over, so do not rock the boat. Romans 13:1-10 is not about the nature of government, it is about the imminence of the return of Christ and the need to convert enough people to make that happen.

In light of all that, this passage in Romans 13 reads very differently.

A Contextual Paraphrase of Romans 13:1-10

With all that in mind, let us do a contextual paraphrase that brings in the passage that came from chapter 12 and the subtler meaning of the Greek text:

1. Let every person live in an ordered and cooperative way within the structures of authority that exist, for authority itself does not arise from nowhere. The structures of authority that exist are part of the ordering of society under God.

2. Because of this, the one who sets themselves against these authorities resists the social order that God has allowed to exist, and those who create such resistance will bring consequences upon themselves.

3. Rulers are not meant to terrify those who do what is good, but those who do what is harmful. If you want to live without fear of those in authority, then practice what is good and you will receive their approval. In this way they serve God’s purposes for the common good.

4. But if you do what harms others, then fear may be appropriate. Authority does not carry the sword for nothing. It serves as an instrument of justice, restraining wrongdoing and bringing consequences upon those who harm others.

5. Because of this, it is wise to cooperate with these structures, not merely out of fear of punishment but out of a clear conscience.

6. For this reason you also pay taxes. Those who govern are devoted to maintaining the public order that allows society to function.

7. Give each person what is due: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

8. Do not remain in debt to anyone, except for the debt that can never be fully repaid: the obligation to love one another. The one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

9. For the commandments, do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet, and any other commandment, are all summed up in this one word:

10. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the true fulfillment of the law.”

The duty we owe is paying our taxes, doing no harm, and nonviolent resistance. If an authority tells us to do something that is wrong, the law of love, also called the law of the Spirit is superior.

If we defy the authority, we know that as long as it has the power to punish us, we are in danger, but true love casts out fear so we continue doing the work of the law of the Spirit. This is a recipe for nonviolent resistance, not authoritarian control.

Love, Not Authority

Romans 13:1-10 ends with a call to love because love is the fulfillment of the law. Love does no harm. The Roman Empire was nothing but harm. Harm is how it instituted what it called order.

Especially in the harried life created by empires to keep people struggling to survive so they do not have the energy and time to do anything to stop them, love is the one thing we can always do. In almost every circumstance, love costs us nothing. It is just the simplest care and concern for our community to help us all get through the lives we are called to live.

Paul always insists on love instead of authority, because God is love, and love is how we show we are followers of Christ.

The Law of Empire and the Law of the Kin-dom

There is a big difference between the law of empire and the law of the kin-dom.

The law of the empire is the law of a person’s will. In an empire or any other kind of authoritarian state, power rests in a few who dictate their will upon the masses. This was the nature of the Roman Empire and the kingdoms that followed it up until the democratic revolutions of the 1700s. The law of empire is always dictated by the corrupting forces of fear, greed, and lust for power. It is a solipsistic and narcissistic drive to control others for one’s own personal benefit.

The law of the kin-dom is different. Jesus rooted the law in love: love of God, love of our neighbors, love of one another. The main rubric for our action is to do to others as we would have them do to us, and not to do to others as we would not have them do to us: the gold and silver rules. A law rooted in love always thinks in us and our, not I and my. Its focus is on the benefit to the many while not neglecting the needs of the few. There is a harmonic balance that exists under the law of love that does not exist under the law of empire.

We are called by the risen Christ to live under the law of the kin-dom, no matter what other circumstances we find ourselves facing.

Acts 5:29 and the Law of the Spirit

In Acts 5:29, Peter and the apostles proclaimed that we must serve God rather than men. This verse is often taken out of context as well, meaning that whatever we believe to be the will of God supersedes the will of the place that we live, and thus we can engage in violence and terror in order to get our way. That is clearly not what the apostles intended.

Following the will of God and serving God means to continue in the law of the Spirit, the law of love. To love God with all our hearts, minds, and spirit, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to love one another so that we show that we belong to Christ. These three things define us, and anything that interrupts this love to bring fear, terror, trauma, harm, violence, or disorder to the world is a rejection of the law of Spirit.

If we are to inherit the kin-dom, Jesus tells us that we must seek righteousness. We must hunger and thirst for it. That righteousness is right relationship, one with another and with the world itself. Any system that turns righteousness into petty morality or an estranged ethics that has no connection to the law of the Spirit and love has bastardized the work that we are called to do.

We are not called to bow the knee to anyone. The Living Christ said:

“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do whatever I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant doesn’t know what his lord does. But I have called you friends, for everything that I heard from my Father, I have made known to you” (John 15:13-15).

What did Jesus command us to do? To love. So those who love are Christ’s friends. Friends do not bow to one another. They do not serve one another. They live in mutual relationship with each other. Why anyone would want to sacrifice their friendship with Christ in order to obey him as liege boggles my mind.

The law of the Spirit breaks the very notion of authority, making us all friends.

What This Means in a Democracy

Once we bring to this problem our understandings about democratic processes and representative government, then everything changes. Under the Roman Empire, there was no freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, or right to redress the government for grievances. It would take 1700 years for those ideas to arise, but they decimate this passage.

In a democracy, authority shifts from the government to the people. The will of the people, as communicated through votes, consensus, or whatever mechanism it uses has the power over the state, and thus the state itself becomes a subject of the higher authority of the people which, in this model of thinking, is the will of God to maintain order.

Now, empires violate this passage, and authoritarian states no longer may wield the sword of the state. The sword of the authority belongs to the people now, and anyone who works against that is working against the order established by God.

If this passage is of any importance to us anymore, then that is what it would mean now. Since we know that Christ’s kin-dom is not of this world, and that we are not awaiting a fiery end of days, then this passage may have no real function in our faith and practice anymore. It is a voice in the tradition, and we have the right and ability to say how much authority it should have in the tradition any more.

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When a Saul Knocks at the Door

If we are not conquerors, but people called to pray for the peace of the city of Babylon while trying to heal the land of Mitzrayim, the narrow place, through the creation of sanctuaries and refuges to take in people, eventually someone who did us or our community harm will show up at the door asking to come in.

If we reject them, then we are denying our promise that everyone is welcome. We become liars and hypocrites. If we allow them just to enter in, we could risk the safety of the community for the sake of our principles. There has to be a middle way.

This is not just a concern that we might be hypocrites. It is the core of our identity as a group. Grace is available or this is a power play like it is in the Imperial and Evangelical churches. If we believe or practice that anyone is beyond salvation, we are nothing more than a political movement with a spiritual veneer and not a spiritual movement at all.

If we trust too easily, then we are opening the way for abusers to continue to traumatize people within our sanctuaries, rendering them useless. We have to find a way to give sanctuary to the vulnerable without welcoming wolves in among us.

Jesus sends us out as sheep among wolves, but in our folds we have to keep the wolves out. There are people who want to abuse their authority, take advantage of the vulnerable, and center themselves and their own needs over those of the community. Wolves desire to prey on the flock.

The problem is that through grace, a wolf can change. That is the power of the gospel message, but that change takes more than words to prove. We prove all things through our works. That is how James teaches us to show one another our faith. We cannot allow harm to continue, but we cannot ostracize someone solely because of their past mistakes. Their harm must stop, and they can never be put in a position that will tempt them to do harm again.

In our sanctuaries, all people live by the law of liberation and love. We have to protect one another from threats, healing past harms. Grace does not take away accountability. No one is exempt.

Saul Before the Light: Violence with Authorization

The early church faced this issue repeatedly, but most powerfully with the Apostle Paul. He was born Saul of Tarsus. His father was Roman and his mother was Jewish, which gave him citizenship in both camps. He studied under Gamaliel the Elder, who was the grandson of Hillel the Elder.

Saul vehemently opposed the early Way of Jesus. He sanctioned the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:58–8:3). He then set out to persecute the movement and eradicate it.

Saul is not acting on his own. Despite Gamaliel’s protestations, Saul gets permission to persecute the Way. He was an agent of the community, sanctioned to remove this heretical sect from their midst. His violence was ordained and justified by the system of his day.

In our day, there are many wolves walking amongst us, many Sauls who have gained authority and are wielding it like a cudgel against us. Some are authorized by our capitalistic culture, spreading a gospel of wealth that is the opposite of everything that Jesus and the prophets ever said. They are able to get away with what they are doing because they are feeding the machine that is trying to devour us all.

Others have learned that if they claim the mantle of authority, they can merely quote the scripture that “you shall not touch the Lord’s anointed (1 Chronicles 16:22; Psalm 105:15 ),” and they can get away with anything, whether that’s stealing money from the church, abusing their parishioners, or creating devilish systems of control that center them as the only authority and voice for God amongst their following. These are the cult leaders who use claims of spiritual power and authority to try to get away with all of the harm and abuse that they are doing.

Still others have found the utility of separating people one from another in order to increase their power and wealth. They attack people based on their ethnicity, their immigration status, their gender, or their sexuality. The only way to maintain patriarchy is not just to keep women down, but to solidify the roles men and women can play in society. That requires rigid gender norms, the denial of transgender existence and rights, and the destruction of loving queer relationships.

These wolves have all gone out amongst the people, and they have claimed cultural, institutional, and academic support for their actions. They claim that they are above the laws of men and God. They are a threat to everything that we hold dear.

But Saul is not just the persecutor who is going around to harm the faithful. He exists within all of us. Any time we exercise a modicum of self-righteousness, any time we justify our actions by saying this is for the greater good or that I am only doing what is necessary, we are allowing the voice of Saul to speak through us.

Saul is the certainty that we are right and inerrant. Some of us try to cast that inerrancy off and say, “No, the scripture is inerrant, and I am only doing what is in the scripture,” or “The Spirit is inerrant, and I am only doing what the Spirit demands.” Some go so far as to say that the facts are clear here, and so I have no choice but to act this way. Once we give up our agency to this self-righteous certainty, we are acting like Saul.

Certainty is a demon that has haunted the church since its inception. It haunts every institution, looking for whom it can devour and twist to its aims. Certainty is the lie that we know all that we need to know, that learning has ceased, and that we do not need to progress further. Certainty is the wall that prevents us from seeing anything outside what our comfort zones will allow.

Certainty is the idol that takes the place of God. When we are certain, everything is concretized. It is sculpted out of the hardest stone and sealed with the hardest metals. Certainty has no room for change. When we know that we are right beyond questioning, there is nothing. There is no hope.

This hopelessness is an attempt to free ourselves from the work that we are called to do in entering the great cloud of unknowing. Life is ambiguous. It has a lot of questions that do not have easy answers. There are a lot of decisions that really do not always have a right answer.

When we abdicate our agency and hide behind the scripture, the Spirit, or the facts and do not look at what is actually going on, we have pulled the mask of ideology over our eyes and pretend that it is clear in our vision.

Jesus said that we need to remove the beam from our own eye before we try to remove the log from our brother’s (Matthew 7:5). This is what he is talking about. We often cannot see clearly enough to know what is going on in our own lives because we are hiding safe and secure behind all the little lies that make the world seem predictable, easy, or at least comprehensible.

This is how we become the blind leading the blind. We do not deal with our own issues. And so some carve this beam in their eye into a statue of glorious certainty. It is the idol that they follow. After all, if the beam in your eye now has the shape of the god you worship or the ideology that you follow or the facts of how the world works, then you are not blinded to the world. You are just gazing at the face of God, even though you are really just wearing a blindfold.

The Revelation on the Road: When the Light Interrupts

Acts 9:1-2

1. But Saul, still breathing threats and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest,

2. and asked for letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, that if he found any who were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

In Acts 9:3-6, on the road to Damascus, the beam falls from Saul’s eyes. The scales fall away and he is blinded by the light of day as if he had never seen the sun before. In that moment, he hears the voice of Jesus asking Saul, “Why do you persecute me?”

To Saul, this is a ridiculous question. Jesus is dead. He was crucified by the Romans. He is not persecuting Jesus, but these misinformed malcontents that believe he is still alive and that he is the Messiah. Saul is trying to protect the faith and the people from these harmful lies. And yet here is Jesus asking why he is persecuting him.

In that moment, Saul realizes he was the centurion who ordered the death of a fellow Jew. He was the soldier who put the nails in his arms and legs and the spear through his side. He was the Roman who beat this man for saying that the kingdom is not of this world.

Saul is not identifying here with the crucified Jesus, not yet. His realization is that he is the Roman. He is the one who is persecuting and bringing harm.

Eventually, he will come to understand that Jesus, the Christ, is the one who holds all the cosmos together, that he is the one who frames reality. But he does not know any of that yet. He is probably familiar with the works of Philo and those like him, who contemplated the idea of the Word as a divine being who helped to create the cosmos. He himself descended into the palaces of God and tried to ride the Merkavah chariot.

In this moment, he is caught up into the third heaven, and there he sees the mediator. To his shock and horror, it is the person of Jesus Christ who is asking him why he is working against him.

Saul had spent his life trying to understand the deep mysteries of God. Now, as the scales fall from his eyes, he realizes that he is a part of the same Roman machine, the same colonizing machine that has persecuted his people for so long. He is King Ahab, persecuting the prophets. He is not defending anything. He is merely doing harm and pretending that it is defense.

And he falls to the ground.

Blindness: The Unmaking of Certainty

In Acts 9:7-9, Saul loses his ability to see. Or maybe it would be better to say that Saul realizes he never saw the world and has to learn to see again. His certainty had blinded him long before he saw the light on the road to Damascus. His sense of autonomy, of power, the theology that he worked in, even though his own teacher told him not to do this, all fell victim to this identity that he claimed as protector of the faith.

What kind of weak god requires a human to defend them?

Saul is blind and cannot see, and for the first time has to be led around by the hand. He has to submit, to surrender. He has to give up the illusion of power that had guided his life for so long and encouraged him to do harm. He has to do the most terrifying thing he has ever done, and that is give up his sense of righteousness and autonomy to be led about by people he does not truly know or trust because he has lost his ability to do either.

Blindness marks the beginning of teshuvah. It is not punishment. It is necessary unlearning.

Ananias and the Risk of Welcome: Discernment as Love

In Acts 9:10-17, Ananias resists accepting Saul’s conversion, or even just to see that he may have changed. When the Spirit speaks to Ananias, he does not preclude any of these fears. They are true. They are honest. They are the doubts that have to be wrestled with if clarity can ever be had.

Saul is responsible for so much harm to the community. If he has converted, then that is a huge win both for the safety of the people and for the movement itself. But Ananias knows that he has to be careful. He has to be discerning.

What is actually happening within him is not fear. It is discerning love.

True love casts out fear. What Ananias is experiencing here is the love for his community that causes him to hesitate, to examine, to test all things and hold to that which is true. Because if he welcomes Saul in and Saul is still hunting them down, he is just revealing the faces, the names, the identities, and the sanctuaries that the people go to so that he can destroy them.

If Saul has actually converted, then he is owed the same protections as everyone in the community. The problem is learning to understand and see whether or not someone has actually changed. To look within and not just rely on our own blinding sight that gives us some sense of certainty, but to see how they are actually acting and whether or not the change is genuine in them.

Ananias does not have enough information to know what to do. Until he knows that Saul is no longer a threat, he cannot welcome him in with open arms. But until he knows whether or not Saul has converted, he cannot send him away.

This discernment is necessary for both Ananias and Saul.

Baptism and Partial Restoration: Water Before Fire

In Acts 9:17–19, Saul regains his sight. He is baptized, and he begins to eat and recover. Baptism is a covenant oath between the individual and God that they are entering the waters of death with Jesus and rising again. They are passing through the River Jordan into the Promised Land, and they are becoming part of the beloved community. This is a personal act and not one that can be judged by the community.

In participating in baptism, Saul is accepting the forgiveness offered by God through Jesus. But just because that agreement between them has been reached does not mean that the faithful have to forgive and forget just yet. After all, it is easy to pass through the waters unchanged.

Jesus said that we must be born again to enter the kin-dom. We must be born by water and fire (Matthew 3:11; John 3:5). Saul has only passed through the water. The fire has yet to be seen.

Too many forgive at the moment of baptism. And yes, the point and purpose of baptism is to restore Saul’s position in God and Christ. It is a personal sacrament, not a communal one. As James reminds us repeatedly, faith without works is dead. While it is possible to see baptism as a work of faith, it is also a form of cheap grace because it does not cost a liar anything in their own mind to pass through the waters.

Costly grace requires us to change.

In the remission of sins offered by God in Christ, our sins are cast as far as the east is from the west and are remembered by God no more if our redemption is true and our repentance sincere. But for the community, they must see that that redemption is sincere. This is a hard thing to do.

If we are not careful, we as a community will fall into some semblance of purity culture, where we will set traps for each other and find ways to say, “Ah, but your grace is not full, your redemption has not yet come. You are not actually one of us.” It is easy for us to forget that none of us are pure. We are all imperfect agents working in the kin-dom to bring the grace of God here and now.

Especially with someone like Saul, who was running around as a ravenous wolf. If the church is not careful, they are welcoming in their midst a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If they confuse the forgiveness offered in baptism with reinstatement or acceptance into the community without any signs of true repentance and change from the harmful ways that he exhibited before, they are risking everyone and everything.

Zeal Without Shelter: Immature Conversion

Saul’s baptism leads him into the zeal of the converted. The former zeal that he had for the persecution of the church now turns outward into zeal for Christ and the gospel, the very gospel that he believes in his own heart has saved him and countless others from the harm that he would do.

The problem is, whether or not this is sincere on Saul’s part, it shows his very immaturity in the faith. He went from being the zealot proclaiming the error of the Way to being the zealot proclaiming the glory of the Way. He has not fully embraced the humility necessary to show a changed heart.

In Acts 9:19–23, Saul quickly begins proclaiming the gospel, and the people in Damascus are fearful and plot against him, even going so far as contemplating whether or not they need to kill him.

From their point of view, the zealot is still a zealot and could be running around calling out all those who are susceptible to the message of the Way so that he can know who they are and eradicate them in one fell swoop. He has not exhibited the care and concern necessary for the community that he harmed. He is acting recklessly. From their point of view, his personality is unchanged. It is merely pointed at the community differently. But that difference again could just be a mask.

It is not incumbent upon the community that was harmed to embrace the one who did them harm. It is the duty and responsibility of the one who did harm to show humility, repentance, and a changed demeanor so that the people will know that they sincerely regret the abuse they committed.

Regret is not enough. They also have to demonstrate to the community that they will not do harm again.

Saul has done none of this work, and the people still do not trust him with good cause.

Hidden and Lowered: Formation in the Basket

In Acts 9:23–25, both the community and Saul are protected from their own baser instincts. Saul is hidden in a basket and put through a window out of the wall and carried out so that people cannot find him, who wish to do him harm.

If they had not sneaked Saul out of Damascus, they would have opened the way for the church to do to Saul the same harm and abuse that he had done to them. If we are not careful, we can replicate the harm of our abusers in many ways. That is what we see the church almost doing here. The church has to be saved from its own baser instinct.

Saul also has to be saved. Because the zeal that defines his character has led him to run off recklessly in a way that is only stoking more animosity and distrust. Saul has to learn humility. That begins by having to hide in a basket and be carried away to safety, hidden and unseen.

He has to submit to the community.

He was a preacher who caused harm. He was an official who brought violence down on others. He has to learn the humility to stop believing that he has the authority to say what he can and cannot do. That misguided sense of authority is what caused all of the problems in the first place.

Throughout his life, Saul made himself the hero of his own story. As a child of both a Roman and a Jew, he had to justify his existence to both. He embraced a heroic devotion to the faith of his mother as a way to signal to others, “No, I am part of this community.”

That same insecurity arises within him in his conversion to Christianity. Now Saul is no longer just trying to prove his Jewishness, but that he is no longer the one that harmed the community. See, he is not trying to stop people from having faith. He is trying to spread the faith. Do you not see what a good boy Saul is?

He has to let go of that false sense of heroism and allow others to save him, to vouch for him, to discern whether or not he is sincere. This is not something he can do for himself.

The humility that that requires on his part is almost more than he can bear. Without it, he will never be welcome within the community he now longs so much to be a part of.

Rejected in Jerusalem: Memory Is Not Sin

In Acts 9:26, Saul returns to Jerusalem and hopes to be welcomed by the faithful there. They reject him. They remember him giving his blessing to the murder of Stephen. They remember his persecution of them.

How can they risk letting him in with no sign that he is truly one of them?

Again, this is loving discernment. Their fear that Saul is here to do further harm casts him out. He is the embodiment of their fear. That is why love cannot welcome him in.

Even if God in Christ has forgiven him, the community remembers what he did.

If they had accepted him with joy and gladness, they would have spit on Stephen’s grave. The church cannot ever excuse the harm done to any vulnerable person or community until reparation and repentance are done.

The church cannot welcome him in.

Barnabas: Repentance Must Be Witnessed

In Acts 9:27–30, Saul does the only thing that he can do, and that is help the community that he once harmed, preaching and giving aid to the best of his ability. His work does not go unnoticed.

Barnabas watches and witnesses the life of Saul and, through his actions, discerns his repentance, his change. Faith without works is dead. What Barnabas sees is actual works of restoration and repentance. He sees work that is healing and restoring to the community that Saul once harmed.

When Barnabas goes to the apostles and makes the case that Saul should be welcomed in, he is not acting out of a vague spirituality or a sense of inward guidance. He is relying on the evidence of his own eyes and the actions that Saul has done in the community to show that he has demonstrated change.

Saul needs an advocate like we all do. The first refuge of any abuser is to self-justify. If we allow a person to just excuse away their actions, it is possible that we are allowing them to continue to do them.

Barnabas exhibits the grace of the church in that he is willing to give Saul the chance to show that he has changed by his works.

This is not an orthodoxy or orthopraxy examination. It is not watching Saul to see if he is saying the right things or doing the right things. It is how we build trust in any relationship. Barnabas is watching for the little things that give signs of intention, of meaning, of devotion. He is looking to see if Saul honestly is weaving himself into the community, exhibiting the grace of a changed life and the desire to protect all of the people that are there.

Sight Fully Restored: Conversion as Reorientation

When Saul had his moment on the road to Damascus and saw the light, and the scales fell from his eyes, he thought that this was a simple matter of turning his head. He just had to stop looking in the direction he was looking in and look in a different one. He did not think he had to stop and change. He was wrong.

True conversion requires not just a cleansing of our vision but a return to right relationship. He just assumed that if he said the right words, his relationship would be restored, when he had already done so much harm to the community. He had to change not just the orientation in which he was living his life but the manner in which he was living it as well.

Saul had to learn what it means to live in community. His mystical awakening was the start of the process, but it was not the end. He had to see the harm that he had caused, the people that he had put so much fear in, and the work that needed to be done for the kin-dom to spread in the world.

Saul’s experience of the inner light forced him to reassess everything about how he lived his life. He had to let go of the moral self-righteousness that governed so much of his thinking. He had to let go of the orthodoxy, the orthopraxy, and the many rules that he had set up for himself as costly signifiers that he was, in fact, good enough to be his mother’s son.

He, like all of us, had to learn that this is not about making another person happy. It is about our relationship between us and Christ, between us and God, between us and everything living in this world. He had to learn who his neighbors were and how to exhibit the three laws of love through his actions so that people could see the change that had already happened in his heart.

Teshuvah: Returning to Original Blessing

Teshuvah is not repentance, at least not in how most people think about it. Our ideas of repentance are born out of a fall-redemption, original-sin model of the cosmos that says we are inextricably broken and have to be fixed. Teshuvah knows nothing about that kind of brokenness.

Teshuvah is the practice of returning to our original grace, our original blessing, the state in which we were born.

Jesus’ most radical teaching on repentance is when he says that if we are not like these children, we will not enter the kin-dom of heaven (Matthew 18:3; Mark 10:15; Luke 18:17). Teshuvah is a return to our true self, who we are, pure and good, created in original blessing, possessors of original mind with access to original wisdom.

Teshuvah is returning to the soil of original grace and blessing and learning to grow again from that sacred source.

Teshuvah begins with the recognition that we did not do something we should have done, or we did something we should not have done. But we do not put on sackcloth and ashes and beat ourselves over the head about it. That serves nothing.

Once we notice that pain point, that regret within us, it shows us the way to change, what direction to turn toward. If we have caused harm, then we have to turn away from that harm and return to the better path.

Teshuvah is a practice of reorientation. Any pain or regret that arises within us shows us that we have gone off the path and into a bad way or just a non-optimal way. It contains within it the seed of truth of the way that we should go.

For Saul, he saw and regretted his certainty and the viciousness with which he enacted it in the world. He realized he had to open up his mind and bring more kindness and respect into his life. And thus he turned and returned to his original self.

These moments of regret and pain that inspire us into repentance also show us the way to change.

Teshuvah is not about sorrow. It is not about pain. It is about learning to turn around, to reorient ourselves, to return to that sea of grace that we arose from. Yes, we may need to do some repair and restitution along the way. We will definitely have to re-pattern our lives and find better ways to live that do not take us down the wrong paths. But what we do not do is beat ourselves up. We learn, we change, we grow in a different direction.

When we are dealing with someone who is going through their own teshuvah, we do not cast blame upon them. We do not cast judgment upon them. We help them to discern and find their way home.

The whole point of the spiritual practice in life is to find our way home.

Repair and Restitution: The Shape of Tikkun

For someone like Saul, whose violence and harm were public, public confession is necessary. Restitution is much harder to even conceive. How do you make restitution for giving blessing to the murder of Stephen?

Saul had to learn to relinquish his authority. And while he did, through service and time and the supervision of the community, earn it back, sometimes authority cannot be invested in someone again, lest it tempt them to go down the path of harm again.

Depending on the nature of the harm, counseling may be required. Turning oneself over to the authorities may be required.

What is important is that in this act of repair, both the community and the individuals involved are restored in some way, shape, or form. That will mean a certain amount of forgiveness, which is just letting go so that we do not carry the weight of someone else’s actions in our lives. It might also mean learning that an individual should not be entrusted with money, authority, or the care of others.

For most of us, our acts of teshuvah are about minor infractions or things that harm our conscience, or that breed regret within us. But for those who, through their greed, fear, or hunger for power, have caused real harm to the community, more is necessary to accept them back into the fold.

Each case will be different, but each case must take into effect what is right for both the individual and those whom they have harmed.

A Church That Learns How to Receive: Shalom Restored

In Acts 9:31, they accept Saul into their midst, and peace is restored. The church had peace.

Peace is shalom. Peace is a wholeness that only exists when we live in right relationship with each other and the world. It is a completeness that brings rest and recuperation. Peace can exist in the middle of conflict, as everything is held together within it.

Too many read this passage and this story as a tale of sentimental harmony, of quick fixes. It is not. It is not even a story about the end of conflict. Because Saul, now Paul, will go on to have many arguments with James and Peter. But those arguments are not born out of a fracture in unity, but in hopes of helping it to grow.

Peace is what we are called to. Blessed are the peacemakers, Jesus said, for they shall inherit the kin-dom of heaven. If we are going to do the work that we are called to by the gospel, if we are going to inherit the kin-dom, we have to be peacemakers.

This is the peace that passes all understanding. The one that helps people understand that they are complete, that they are whole, that our communion is whole and complete. Nothing is missing. Nothing is broken. Nothing is lost. There is no original sin that needs to be healed.

Once we find that peace, it is our duty to protect it from harm, internal or external. We do that through living in right relationship with one another and with the world.

The Kin-dom Pattern Revealed: Discern Without Casting Out

The story of Saul’s conversion to Paul is core to what it means to be a community and what it means to develop the kin-dom in this world. Every person called to the Way comes from a different life with different circumstances and different challenges. If we do not have a way to actually live out the forgiveness that we proclaim, then our sanctuaries are empty, and refuge will not be found amongst us.

Our work is to free people from the narrow place of Mitzrayim and to free them from the harmful cycles of Babylon. We have to do that without importing those things into our sanctuaries and refuges. It is so easy for us to think that we are operating for the good of all when our motives are selfish, and we are perpetuating the sins of our culture and replicating the harm that is done outside our walls within them.

For the kin-dom to truly rise in this world, then we have to accept that teshuvah is an ongoing process and that tikkun is the work that we are called to. This is a ministry of reconciliation, as Paul would eventually call it. If we are not about doing the work of restoration, then what are we actually doing?

The heart of the message that Jesus taught is: repent, for the kin-dom is at hand. We have to return if we are going to find the kin-dom. And then we have to return together, for where three or more are gathered in his name, there is Christ in the midst of us. There we build our sanctuaries and refuges and invite more and more people in, all the while calling them to repentance and kin-dom living.

This is not the repentance of the Imperial Church. Their repentance has no place for simcha, joy. Every story Jesus tells about teshuvah has celebration as part of it. The prodigal son’s return is celebrated. When one repents and is brought back to the Way, Jesus says the angels celebrate (Luke 15:10).

In the world that we live in today, there are many Sauls running around. Many people who, through delusion or deception, have been lured off the path and are doing harm in the name of God and in the name of Jesus. Some of them have had their road-to-Damascus moment. They might show up at our door at any time, asking to be let back in.

We, like the earlier practitioners of the Way, need to be cautious and discerning. But at the same time, we have to not cast them back out into the darkness.

This may be the hardest thing that we do on the Way. If we believe that grace is available to all and that redemption is available to everyone, when someone comes to us who has done us real harm and claims conversion, if we cast them out, we are betraying the Christ we serve. But if we just welcome them in with open arms and not discerning careful action, we could be harming the vulnerable amongst us.

We have to discern without casting out.

We have to be able to say to people honestly, “I hear you. I hear that you have changed your ways, and I hear that you are trying to restore what you harmed.” That is the grace that we must offer first. But then we have to be honest and say, “I need you to show us by your works that your faith is true. Show us the peace that you are able to build. We will help you to find your way, but we cannot just let you in until we know that it is safe for you and for us.”

Even those in our communities who have practiced and rooted themselves in the One Life are not free from the instinct of revenge. And so, by not welcoming people in too easily, we are protecting them from us so that we can discern and heal ourselves. We also have to ensure that they are willing to join us. It is easy to say, I do not believe that we should continue in this strife and pain. It is much harder to stop engaging in it.

This is what outreach and missions are for: to help people discern, grow, and go through the formation they need to bring reparation for the harms they have brought to the world. If we do not discern like the early church did, we cannot be surprised that the wolves keep getting in the door.

The Way is the path home, and the kin-dom is our birthright.

Teshuvah and tikkun are our way home.

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Since We Are Not Conquerors

Since we are not conquerors or colonizers, most of us will live in cultures and nations that are governed in a way that is opposed to our faith and beliefs. While we are always working to heal Mitzrayim, the narrow place, and bring life back to it, we will still be living in Babylon, the land of exile. The prophets have a lot of wisdom to share with us about how to keep our faith and culture alive while living in that exile.

Babylon is the government, no matter who runs it. Babylon is the culture, no matter who is in control of it. Babylon is the world of confusion that comes into being whenever people come together to build an institution of any kind.

It will hurt many people to believe that even our churches are a part of Babylon. Any institution, no matter how holy or pure its purpose is, is susceptible to the corruption and cycles of the world, as is everything else. It is our duty to keep the Spirit of Truth and Liberation alive in them so they can live God in the way they need to.

In the end, the Kin-dom exists within us and is not of this world. It will not manifest in this world until all the cycles of Babylon are broken and never allowed to start up again.

Living in Exile

Jeremiah 29:4-7

4. Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel, says to all the captives whom I have caused to be carried away captive from Jerusalem to Babylon:

5. “Build houses and dwell in them. Plant gardens and eat their fruit.

6. Take wives and father sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, and don’t be diminished.

7. Seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to Yahweh for it; for in its peace you will have peace.”

The Creative Source of All Forces, the Holy Mystery at the heart of our covenantal journey delivers a message to the captive exiles in Babylon. The Holy One says that we are where we are supposed to be, that we should build our homes and lives here, and multiply so we are not diminished. For us, that means we need to spread the gospel of the Kin-dom and help more people find their connection to viriditas and the verdurous life. We are to be agents of peace in the places we live. As we continue to walk in faith, we understand that the peace of the land we live in is the peace we have in our lives.

These words in the Book of Jeremiah were probably written after the people were taken away into captivity, not before. The people had been forcibly removed from their homeland and taken away to do forced labor for others in a foreign land. These enslaved and colonized people did not want to be told to make a life there; they wanted to revolt and go home.

This scripture, like the one in Romans 13, has been used by colonizers, enslavers, and tyrants to tell people to calm down and obey. That is not what this text is saying. It is saying that we cannot lose who and what we are, even in circumstances so dire. If we allow ourselves to disappear or stop living, we lose our identity. The people of the Holy One are called to be agents of change and restoration no matter where they are.

To many living in this captivity, these words sound like betrayal, compromise, and weakness. Isn’t it the duty of the captive to revolt? Yes, but this is a different kind of revolution. It is one that does not draw the sword and wreak bloody havoc on the people of the land. This revolution uses the sword of the Spirit, which is the Living, Spoken Word of God that changes hearts and minds. Our revolution heals the captors and restores the land. It is a revolution of peace. We do not compromise our beliefs or actions, nor do we bow down in weakness. We stand up and speak truth so we can bring liberation to all, and not just a few. It is a more radical form of revolt, one that sets the captive and the captor free.

Babylon as Confusion

Jeremiah helps us to understand our lives in the Kin-dom. Babylon is the world outside of the Kin-dom. As Mitzrayim is the narrow place, Babylon in the original sounds like the word for confusion. Babylon is figuratively the land of confusion.

We are the exile, the golah, the one who is removed or stripped away. While we are the people of the Kin-dom, we live in the land of confusion, removed from the context of the Kin-dom in our lives in Babylon. The letter reminds us that while we are in the world but not of the world (John 15:19), this creates a sense of exile in us.

In Babylon, we are told to build houses and plant gardens. Our homes are where we live, where the Kin-dom can be realized here and now. Our gardens are where we sow seeds of faith and wisdom in hopes of spreading the Kin-dom.

Our work is to seek the peace of the city and pray for it. Peace is the way of the Kin-dom, and prayer is how we live our lives as living temples of the Holy One.

Jeremiah’s letter has been misused for millennia to justify colonialism and enslavement, but it is telling us something so different. It is a reminder for us to keep our ways, living in Creation Spirituality, while recognizing that we are in Babylon.

It is not hard for us to see the power of confusion flowing through all systems of the world, and if we are honest with ourselves, it always will to some degree. Our job is not to conquer, colonize, or to destroy the city we find ourselves in, but to build homes, sow gardens, and seek peace. That is not keeping our heads down and allowing suffering and pain to continue around us. It does not mean we cosign the confusion of this world. It means we live as agents of change and solidarity in this world so people find freedom and liberty, and the Kin-dom spreads throughout the world.

Our homes and gardens are islands of coherence in these lands of confusion. They are refuges and sanctuaries. They are the salve that restores the world into its natural glory.

The Four Paths in Babylon

This letter is a call to awe in that we live in the time and place that we do because the Holy One has called us into this world at this time and place. We are called to seek out the blessings of the land and to share them with others.

As we remember our royal dignity as people created in the image of God, and the cosmic hospitality we learn from our earthiness, we become the salt and light in this world, now where we are. Even if we have nothing else, if we can learn to savor the simple act of living, we can learn to savor our relationships and even more the life that we build here and now.

No matter what shadow Babylon casts over us, the rose grows in the cracks of the concrete, and beauty will find a way to manifest, even if it is in secret. Gratitude is born from simple, little things we can savor in our lives, no matter the conditions we find ourselves in.

Do not forbid yourself from lamenting the pain and suffering of the world, but let release be a part of that grief. Once our eyes are open to the glories of life, we cannot help but weep for those lost in Babylon, in the cycles of confusion that perpetuate pain, suffering, and violence.

The path of peace is the one that refuses to participate in and perpetuate these cycles. Peace heals, restores, and empties us out so we are not assimilated into Babylon, but are able to transform and restore it. Learning to release and heal keeps us from succumbing to resentment, which is the siren song of Babylon to participate in the destructive cycles rooted there.

The call to build houses and plant gardens reminds us to build. Creativity is not optional; it is required resistance. Building houses and planting gardens is more than just construction, sowing, and reaping. We have to build our lives in these places and keep our focus on the lives we are living.

Christ calls us to life more abundantly. That is not a call to fortune and wealth. It is a call to be really and truly alive.

“Go your way—eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already accepted your works. Let your garments be always white, and do not let your head lack oil. Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your life of vanity, which he has given you under the sun, all your days of vanity, for that is your portion in life, and in your labor in which you labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work, nor plan, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, where you are going” (Ecclesiastes 9:7–10).

We are called to the works of wisdom and creation while we are alive. Vanity in this passage is emptiness, or in other words, only having the meaning we ascribe to it.

In all our ways, we must seek peace. We are called to be prophets, those who interfere with injustice. Peace is the ultimate interference with injustice.

Babylon, the land of confusion, requires people to be traumatized so its cycles of violence, greed, and fear continue. We cannot act in ways that traumatize others. We have to interrupt these cycles and help people to heal from the traumas they have been forced to endure.

Seeking peace requires us to find better ways to change the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of others. We have to engage with this world through right relationship rooted in mindfulness, compassion, creativity, and equity.

Freedom and liberty break chains and restore the land. They do not persecute, dehumanize, or harm those who live within it.

Peacekeeping and justice-making require us to interfere with injustice and disrupt the cycles of harm. Peace is not order or calmness. In Hebrew, peace is shalom. Shalom means a deep, active state of wholeness and right relationship in which people, community, and creation are aligned with justice, harmony, and the presence of God. The presence of God is life-giving and restorative.

Babylon breaks the peace of the city by dividing people and distorting the relationships people have with one another. Disrupting those systems and interfering with that injustice brings healing and wholeness to the city.

If we are going to live in Babylon, we have to build homes as sanctuaries and refuges, gardens to care for and aid those who live here, spread the gospel of the Kin-dom, seek peace, and live a life of integrity and hope.

That is much easier to say than it is to do, but this is the work of the ministry of reconciliation we are called into. We are a royal priesthood who serve all life, no matter where we are or who they are.

In every action, we must love kindness, do justice, and walk humbly with our God.

Building sanctuaries, tending gardens of aid and care, healing trauma, and peacekeeping are all the same act. They are living love of God into the world. This is how we live God in the world. In all these things we seek the peace of the city by living in the Kin-dom in our everyday life. We remember that the Kin-dom is not of this world. It is not of Babylon, but Heaven.

This peacekeeping starts small. Love one another as Christ loves us. Let that love grow and spread out to all living.

Show this love in the way that you can. If you can share a meal, do it. If you can start a community garden, do it. Each of our circumstances is different. Find one practical thing you can do, no matter how small it feels, and start doing it.

Even If Not

In Daniel 3, the king set up a statue and demanded that everyone worship it, but the people of God did not bow down and were cast into the fiery furnace and saved by a member of the Divine Council.

We are called to live in the Spirit of Truth. Notice in this story, they did not revolt. They did not tear down the statue. They stood on the rock of their faith, knowing there would be consequences for their actions. They rejected the cycles of Babylon, and in the story the fire cannot touch them. Why? Because they live in the world of the Kin-dom.

Now, I am not saying we will be supernaturally spared from the consequences of our actions, but we can see the pattern of interfering with injustice. We are called to stand up and be an example of right relationship and not a disruption to the peace of the city. The king and his soldiers broke the peace, not the people. The king had to bend the knee to their nonviolent resistance.

The faith of those cast into the fire is in the way they walk in peace. They said, “If it happens, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace; and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image which you have set up” (Daniel 3:17–18).

They are not tempting God to show power in the world or to demonstrate dominion over the king. If God delivers them, that is God’s will and not proof they are right. The purpose of their actions is to show that they do not worship or serve the power of the Empire, the power of Babylon. That refusal is powerful and leads the king to praise the God they lived before his presence.

Daniel 3:28

28. Nebuchadnezzar spoke and said, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel, and delivered his servants who trusted in him, and have changed the king’s word, and have yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any god, except their own God.

Refusal is a power greater than the state to bring liberty and freedom. When we reclaim our agency, we show the world what it means to be truly alive.

Prayer in the Lions’ Den

In Daniel 6, the king of Babylon has outlawed prayer to God, and Daniel is sealed up in the lion’s den because he continued to pray. This is not just a story of nonviolent resistance, but of divine protection.

Many in the lineage of Creation Spirituality believe that God sends ministering angels to help us. “For he will put his angels in charge of you, to guard you in all your ways” (Psalm 91:11). The Gospels and the New Testament take this as a given (Matthew 18:10; Acts 12:15).

This does not mean that we should take it for granted that God or our angels will save us no matter what situation we find ourselves in. We are not to test God like that (Matthew 4:7; Luke 4:12).

“Aren’t they all serving spirits, sent out to do service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14). I believe the ministering angels are sent out to do this service, but the story of Daniel in the lion’s den shows us how God and the angels interact with the world. They work through nature.

Humans are not the natural prey of lions. They will attack us, but we are not a good source of food. Keeping the lions from attacking Daniel is having them not only live in accord with their nature, but the nature of the Kin-dom.

The image of the Kin-dom as seen by Isaiah says, “The wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, the calf, the young lion, and the fattened calf together; and a little child will lead them” (Isaiah 11:6).

This is the peace of the Kin-dom we are called to. Not that we approach wolves, leopards, and lions, but that we all will one day live in peace with all of the cosmos. This is the dream.

In most churches, this story is taught to children, and then the lessons we learn from it are written off as childish. It is too easy to forget that Jesus said, “Most certainly I tell you, unless you turn and become as little children, you will in no way enter into the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18:3). That does not mean that we are called to be naive, but that we are to see the world with the wonder and awe of a child and live in it playfully.

The ultimate act of resistance is to live with joy and to laugh in the face of tyranny.

The Illusion of Power

For as long as we live in Babylon, we will have to stare down the illusion of power and control that they press on the people. Babylon wants us to believe that power only comes through coercion and that life must be sustained from the exploitation of others. They shroud the world with the lie that their ways are the only ways.

The Kin-dom path shows us a different way. It breaks the chains of the cycles of trauma, suffering, greed, and fear that their power relies on to maintain it. The illusion of Babylon exists to obscure the way of Christ and to keep us from building a better world. It fosters the illusion of separateness that keeps us from fostering the solidarity needed to build a better world.

The way we break through that illusion is to live our lives in right relationship and build an alternative to the lies of Babylon. We exercise our vote, speaking up and standing up for the freedom and liberation of all people.

All my life I have been at war with Babylon, and I have the scars on my body, mind, and soul to show for it. It took me too long to understand the real nature of the struggle and the work.

Babylon is like a hydra. If you cut off one head, two grow back in its place. We can fight for female clergy, for example, but when that fight appears won, two new heads rise up. The church was implicitly misogynistic before and now is explicitly so.

For female clergy, they were welcomed into the church only if they would serve in a subservient role to a male priest or pastor. Many rose up and fought for their rights which is good to resist but did so through violence thinking they cut off the head of misogyny using shame and guilt. As a result two new heads rose up. We can see the rise of the outwardly misogynistic church, and the gave women power to rob them of their voice through responsibility and the elevated certain women preachers who would teach other women to be subservient to the patriarchy. Babylon is not defeated; it abandons the failed tactics and replaces them with others so it can continue the cycle without interruption. Now, many of the most misogynistic preachers are women.

Some of this is to be expected. When we put the metal in the crucible to be refined the slag will rise to the surface. If we are not careful we will only make those voices more prominent instead of removing them from the refined ore.

The problem was the fight. A fight is an infliction of violence to achieve an aim. We cannot take part in the systems of Babylon to end it. Disruption and interference interrupt the system, refine the ore, and remove the slag. Reclaiming Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the other Marys, Susanna, Deacon Phoebe (Romans 16:1–2), Apostle Junia (Romans 16:7), Priscilla (Acts 18:2, 18:18, 18:26; Romans 16:3–5; 1 Corinthians 16:19; 2 Timothy 4:19), Mary of Rome (Romans 16:6), Tryphena (Romans 16:12), Tryphosa (Romans 16:12), Persis (Romans 16:12), Euodia (Philippians 4:2–3), Syntyche (Philippians 4:2–3), Nympha (Colossians 4:15), Chloe (1 Corinthians 1:11), and Thecla. There is a great cloud of witnesses that must be denied to remove rights from people that they had in the early church.

These names are sand in the gears. We cannot force change on people who do not want to change. We cannot fight them into change. What we can do is speak truth, disrupt their cycles of violence, and take actions to interfere with their injustice. Women were ordained in the early church, so ordain them. Live in the truth, not the lie. Babylon will chose violence, we have to build gardens and sanctuaries. So let the slag rise to the surface and slough off. If people want to live in the lie, we kick the dust off our heels and walk on, all the while watching our numbers grow.

It took me way too long to realize that I should stop fighting to be accepted by people who never would, and to stop the harm they wanted to do to me. Interfering with injustice shows the lie in their harm and trauma cycles and liberated me to live my life.

We each have to find the path of peacekeeping that works for us, but it must always have shalom in mind, because wholeness is always the goal. What restores wholeness.

Wholeness is the restoration of dignity, harmony, and equity to people’s lives. If that can be done in the system without engaging in the trauma, fear, greed, and lust of Babylon, do it. If not, build something new to do it.

The Presence in the Fog

Each of us, in our hearts, lives in the Kin-dom. Where two or three are gathered in the name of Christ, he is there in the midst of them. This brings the Kin-dom here, into the present moment. It is like a fan that blows the fog away, but when the wind stops blowing, the fog rolls back in.

This is why we call on the Presence to join us when we gather. It is why we call on the Shekhinah to make her home with us. We are constantly cleansing the air, the water, and the land around us.

Peacekeeping is our constant vigilance to keep the Anointing on us, our gatherings, and our collective lives. We need to have that vigilance because the cycles of Babylon are always calling to people to join them, and we have to exercise our authority to refuse that call.

A Vow in Exile

We have cried at the rivers we passed in our exile,

and allowed our tears to drift by with those waters.

We build our homes in the cities of Babylon,

our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our futures.

We tend our gardens for food and beauty,

since both sustain us in times like this.

We live as peacekeepers in the cities we call home,

breathing peace in every step and through all things.

We act as prayers as temples of the Living God,

bringing compassion, hope, and justice with us.

Live God wherever you are. Amen.

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The Two Masters

Matthew 6:24

24. “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon.

Jesus says we cannot serve God and Mammon. Mammon is wealth-as-security, wealth-as-savior. Mammon is the material wealth that a person relies on in the place of God. In our day and age, Mammon is the heart of our economy and the lie that without it, we cannot be successful, happy, or secure in our lives.

If God is the One Life that we all share and participate in, then to transfer our belief, practice, and the focus of our lives from the relationships, communities, and society that should sustain us to this illusion of wealth robs us of both.

In service of Mammon, we have rejected the essentials of life, alienating ourselves from any meaning or purpose we could find in it just so we can grow the wealth of others in the false belief we are creating wealth for ourselves.

If we spend our time, energy, and effort striving to produce benefits for an illusion, we cannot be surprised that we are losing connections with each other and with the simple joys of life. We need to turn our attention back to life, or stop being surprised that we feel our lives slipping even more through our fingers.

No One Can Serve Two Masters

That opening phrase really matters. “No one can serve two masters” means we cannot have more than one Lord. We cannot dedicate our lives to or be owned by two authorities. The word master is kyrios, and while I try not to delve explicitly into Greek too much, that word makes Jesus’ meaning clear.

A slave is owned by a kyrios. Caesar is a kyrios. The Tetragrammaton, the unspeakable name of God, is translated into Greek as kyrios. Paul would go on to say that believers declare that Jesus Christ is kyrios. We cannot serve more than one master, one Lord. It is either the God in whom we live, move, and have our being, or it is wealth, the state, or something else.

Too often, Christians say that no one is really an atheist. That is not true. People can easily believe there is no god, but everyone has a kyrios, a master, whether they know it or not. It could be a guiding principle, a set of beliefs, or a system that runs our lives, but everyone has one.

Mammon comes from the Aramaic word which is the wealth that someone has trust in to secure their future. Mammon, when treated as a master, invites us to turn our backs on life. Mammon encourages us to turn our backs on others to hoard wealth for ourselves.

When we focus on wealth instead of life, it changes how we see the world, it corrupts our desires, and turns us away from our relationships toward whatever will make us more wealth.

The World Jesus Was Naming

Jesus was talking to those who gathered to hear his Sermon on the Mount. Anyone was welcome, and anyone could come. He draws this distinction between the two masters after warning them not to let the light of their eyes become darkness and before he taught them to have anxiety for nothing.

It is important to understand that his words are very direct. He is talking about slavery and devotion to either God or Mammon. He makes it clear that we cannot serve both God and wealth. In other words, we cannot rely on or give our energy to both because they are at odds with each other and cannot work together.

Service to God requires a devotion to life and the living. Service to wealth requires hoarding and extraction.

At the time these words were written, those dangers were quite literal and easy to see. One only created wealth through overt oppression of others and the hoarding of that wealth to oneself. Those dangers have not gone away, but they have been obfuscated and become harder to see today.

The Cost of Divided Loyalty

Jesus warns us that if we try to devote ourselves to these two masters, we will reject or disown one and choose and value the other. He also says that we might cling to one and hold the other as insignificant. It isn’t hard to see this work out in our lives.

When we try to serve both God and Mammon, our decisions will reject one and value the other. Since God’s Law of Liberation requires us to love God, love our neighbor, and love each other, those values must be central to all our actions. They are antithetical to serving wealth.

Wealth requires us to hoard, extract, and use others for our benefit without care or concern for the needs of others. We cannot do both. So we justify our actions by saying that one idea is more significant and the other is not.

Wealth requires winners and losers, exploiters and exploited. God requires us to leave no one behind. Seeking or serving wealth requires us to break fidelity with our neighbors and to isolate ourselves from the consequences of our actions. We have to create a bubble around ourselves so we don’t see the harm we are doing.

God calls us to see the crushed and oppressed and to liberate them. We are called to bring equity to the world. That is how we bring healing to ourselves and to the world.

Greed as Personal and Collective Failure

Greed begins as a personal moral failure. Sometimes it is learned; other times it is born from fear or loss. It is a systemic failure that anyone can be consumed by.

We have left people behind and allowed them to feel ostracized from the community, leaving them only with the belief that they have to rely on their will and greed to survive.

Our communities and governments have never been arrayed against the rise of this kind of greed. Unfortunately, most societies have institutionalized it into how they work. The success of Mammon is a collective problem that we cannot fix on a personal level.

If we are going to cure its poison, we have to watch out and be careful not to leave anyone behind. We are also going to have to reform our societies, cultures, and governments to prevent such systems from taking hold.

Greed is the only sin that is simultaneously a personal failing and a collective one. It can only be repaired if we work on both fronts.

The Invitation Back to Life

Our loyalty has to be to life. When we hoard wealth, we isolate ourselves from others. We separate what we have from the flow nature requires for any system to be healthy. This isolation leads to a stagnation of our emotional and communal health.

If we are going to live the gospel, or at the very least build a better world, we have to think about the needs of everyone and not just ourselves.

The real tension Jesus reveals is that we are only lying to ourselves and others when we say we can support systems opposed to the ways of nature. Nature requires systems to flow, grow, die, and replenish themselves.

When we remove anything from the flow, we are starving the whole system of the benefits that could and should be flowing through it. Pooling wealth out of the system, even if that wealth is contained in illusory markets, extracts that wealth from those who created it and keeps it from maintaining and sustaining the world it was extracted from.

We have to drain those fetid pools and stop playing games with the lives of people and restore our economies to work in service of the lives of the people who live within them.

When the Blood Cries Out

James 5:1-6

1. Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming on you.

2. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten.

3. Your gold and your silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be for a testimony against you, and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up your treasure in the last days.

4. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you have kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Armies.

5. You have lived in luxury on the earth, and taken your pleasure. You have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter.

6. You have condemned, you have murdered the righteous one. He doesn’t resist you.

James 5:1–6 invokes language reminiscent of the murder of Abel. The wealth they have stolen from their workers calls out like the blood of Abel and testifies against them.

I don’t want to look at this from the apocalyptic perspective that James does, because like Jesus, I believe our focus needs to be on the here and now.

From that point of view, like James, we need to see wealth in and of itself as a sign of immorality, especially the concentrated wealth we see in the world today. This wealth is not related to the work these people have done, but the work that others have done for them. They stole enough of the wages of their employees to make themselves wealthy.

If they paid an equitable wage to their employees, they could not have concentrated so much wealth in their own hands.

When we start talking about billionaires, for every billion dollars they have amassed, they could support 500 to 1,000 people for 30 years ($30,000 - $60,000 per year). Just the top ten wealthiest people could sustain 1.44 million to 2.88 million people for 30 years just off their accumulated wealth.

To put that into perspective, there are 35.9 million people in the United States living under the poverty line. Just ten people could lift 4.01% to 8.02% of people out of poverty. That is a moral stain that needs to be cleansed.

The Blindness Mammon Creates

Luke 12:15

15. He said to them, “Beware! Keep yourselves from covetousness, for a man’s life doesn’t consist of the abundance of the things which he possesses.”

Jesus says it plainly. We are to guard ourselves against every form of greed. A clearer way of saying that is, “Be alert to the hunger that never says enough.”

This greed is a hunger misunderstood as trust. It makes people believe that possessions and hoarded wealth are a way to fill the void we feel from a lack of meaningful relationships.

Luke 16:19-31

19. “Now there was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, living in luxury every day.

20. A certain beggar, named Lazarus, was taken to his gate, full of sores,

21. and desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Yes, even the dogs came and licked his sores.

22. The beggar died, and he was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died, and was buried.

23. In Hades, he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far off, and Lazarus at his bosom.

24. He cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue! For I am in anguish in this flame.’

25. “But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that you, in your lifetime, received your good things, and Lazarus, in the same way, bad things. But here he is now comforted, and you are in anguish.

26. Besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that those who want to pass from here to you are not able, and that no one may cross over from there to us.’

27. “He said, ‘I ask you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father’s house;

28. for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, so they won’t also come into this place of torment.’

29. “But Abraham said to him, ‘They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.’

30. “He said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’

31. “He said to him, ‘If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if one rises from the dead.’”

Jesus warns us how blinding this greed can be. If someone will not listen to wise counsel, they wouldn’t even listen to one returned from the dead to warn them.

This story always makes me think about A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Scrooge also refused the wise counsel of someone returned from the dead to warn him about his greed. What finally changed his mind and heart was realizing all of the relationships and people he sacrificed in the name of amassing his fortune.

This story reveals a great truth. It is hard, practically impossible, to get someone to see the harm a life in service of Mammon has caused without getting them to see the damage they have caused to others and themselves. Even then, there is no guarantee they will see the error of their ways.

Greed is one of the most blinding experiences a person can have. It ties itself into our fears and ego. It controls us as much as any other hunger. It forges a craving like people have for food, water, and even air that convinces people they cannot survive if it is not fed. It is all an illusion.

When Mammon Whispers to the Poor

Mammon whispers in the ears of the poor and the unfortunate, anyone society has failed. It isn’t hard to understand how someone who feels abandoned, with their backs against the wall, can hear its promises and give in.

It always starts small, a little infraction that opens the door for it to enter.

I know this kind of desperation, and I wasn’t always good at listening to my better angels. It can feel like the only way to save our lives or those who depend on us is to sell our soul to Mammon. That is trading one raw deal for another.

If I hadn’t encountered a supportive community that offered me a different way at just the right time, who knows how my life would have turned out. I was lucky. So many others are not.

We have to provide a path out of struggle that preserves the dignity of those who need a way out. Charity doesn’t and cannot do this. Community can. That is how we can turn this all around.

Choosing Life Together

It is hard not to pity those who have succumbed to greed, but pity gets us nowhere. In many ways, they are like victims of any addiction. While it is important to remember that they are blinded to the real world by the delusions of wealth, they are still responsible for their actions.

They need to learn to see through their blindness, but until that day comes, we need to mitigate the harm they are doing to society. Mutual aid, care, and support are a good start, but there is much that has to change to prevent them from causing more harm.

We cannot wait for them to see again. We have to help one another to build a better world for all of us.

If I have learned anything in this life, it is much easier to ignore the outstretched hands of a supportive community than it is to see them. Our goal has to be not just to reach out, but to provide a dignified path out.

It isn’t enough to give people food, housing, and medicine, though we need to do all those things. We have to offer them a life they can live.

The trick is learning to listen to the needs of the people and the culture they are in, and not to pretend that our simple benevolent will is enough. This is a project of deep listening and learning for people on both sides.

In service of the One Life, we have all that we need to do the work. We only need the courage, faith, and will to do the work.

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The Temptation That Names the Stakes

Matthew 4:8-10

8. Again, the devil took him to an exceedingly high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory.

9. He said to him, “I will give you all of these things, if you will fall down and worship me.”

10. Then Jesus said to him, “Get behind me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and you shall serve him only.’”

Jesus has been out in the wilderness fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, and the devil has come to tempt Him. The devil takes him up on a high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. These are not the lands of the world, but the powers that rule them. These are not the glory of God, but the glory of those kingdoms.

When the devil says that he will give him all these things, he means it. The offer is real. This is a shortcut. A devilish cheat code that would allow Jesus to wield power over all the systems of the earth without having to endure anything that follows. The devil names his price. You must prostrate yourself before me and worship me.

Jesus responds by calling the devil one of the Satans, one of the beings sent by God to be an adversary, a test. He then quotes the scripture and says that you should only worship the Lord your God, and only God should you serve. Instead of entering the false relationship offered by the devil, Jesus names the right relationship between the faithful devotee and the cosmos.

The Mountain of Revelation and the Counterfeit Glory

The devil takes Jesus up on the high mountain because it is the place of revelation. Moses received the Torah on the high mountain, and many of the prophets went into the mountains to receive the Word of God. This action is meant to have Jesus see His own importance. He is standing in the place of revelation, looking down on all of the powers of the earth, all of the systems that control it, and the kingdoms that are there. The devil gives Jesus a semblance of divine authority before he makes the offer.

The devil offers Jesus two things: the kingdoms and their glory. In offering the kingdoms, he is giving Jesus a shortcut to legitimacy and power. “Why go through all of the work and sacrifice when I can just hand it to you?” The glory of the kingdoms is a counterfeit for the glory of God, the presence of God that shines through all things. Instead of the glorious presence of life, the devil is offering Jesus the fading glory of gold and riches and worship, things that he neither wants nor needs but are tempting. After all, who wouldn’t want worship rather than sacrifice?

The cost is surrender. All Jesus has to do is prostrate himself and worship to give those essential parts of himself over to the systems of control and power that run the world. This is a different kind of sacrifice. Rather than pouring out your labor for the sake of all who suffer and who are downtrodden, just give your will, empathy, and concerns to the systems that will just tell you what to do and give you the power to enforce your will on the world. That temptation is very strong.

Jesus counters by invoking the Holy Name of God: HaShem, my God. The one who is, was, and ever shall be. The one in whom we live, move, and have our being. Only that do you serve. Living in service to life brings healing, hope, and restoration to all people, not just power for a few. Jesus did not come for His own aggrandizement, but for the salvation of the world.

When he says, get behind me, Satan, he is saying, “Accuser sent by God to test. Your test is done. Go away. Go behind me. Do not stand in my way. I am here to do the work I was called to do, and you will not deter me from it.”

A Dangerous Text for a Dangerous Time

The Temptation of Jesus was written at a very dangerous time for the early Jesus movement. The way attracted not just the poor and the slaves, but also people in power. In the centuries that followed, the movement would be co-opted entirely by the empire that once persecuted it. But now, here in Matthew’s Gospel, we see the writer struggling with this temptation. When we bow a knee and conform to the desires of power of the ruling authorities above us, we are rejecting the light of God that shines through all things. We’re refusing to hear the word of God that speaks through the cosmos. When we seek the glory of God and the glory of empires in riches and power and authority in titles, we are rejecting the very truth that we are all equal. That we are all in need of healing, of restoration, and of being lifted up. Whether that is from poverty of means or poverty of spirit, we all must be raised up.

Matthew consistently presents Jesus as the new Moses. And here we see Jesus on the mountain of Revelation, and the revelation that he is given is one that will distort and destroy his message for all time. The kingdom of God cannot survive if it is co-opted by empire. We cannot serve two masters. We will seek our own aggrandizement, and not the benefit of all.

Throughout the centuries, the story has been used to show the superiority of Jesus; how he was able to resist the temptation of power, that he was able to just resist because of who he was, forgetting that he was a man as human as we are. When we neglect or forget that basic human frailty, we turn this story into something weak and without meaning.

This story has also been used to teach the superiority of the kingdom of God over the kingdoms of men, and that again is not what is being preached here or in any of the gospels. The kin-dom of God is something that exists within and among us as equals. It does not have hierarchy. As Jesus himself says, whoever will be greatest in the kin-dom must be servant of all (Mark 9:35).

Jesus’ refusal of earthly dominating power of empire inspires us to refuse that same call on our lives, to not use the methods of violence and coercion that Empire uses. We are a people of love, and we proclaim a gospel of life and a law of liberation. Institutional power chokes that power, that love, that strength that we are called to. Hierarchy crushes those underneath it. We are called to a different way. A way where we are all equals working to elevate everyone and to leave no one behind.

Witness: Defiance and the Luminous Way

I was raised to seek power and to exercise authority. Evangelicalism taught me that God’s love is controlling, bringing his dominion into the world. I was taught to kneel to the devil without even knowing it.

That is not the Gospel Jesus taught. That is not the Way, the Truth, or the Life.

My heart yearns for the luminous way of Jesus that brings life more abundantly. Standing on the rock of Jesus teachings defies the empire that wants us to kneel.

Render Unto Caesar Without Kneeling

Mark 12:13-17

13. They sent some of the Pharisees and the Herodians to him, that they might trap him with words.

14. When they had come, they asked him, “Teacher, we know that you are honest, and don’t defer to anyone; for you aren’t partial to anyone, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?

15. Shall we give, or shall we not give?” But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said to them, “Why do you test me? Bring me a denarius, that I may see it.”

16. They brought it. He said to them, “Whose is this image and inscription?” They said to him, “Caesar’s.”

17. Jesus answered them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” They marveled greatly at him.

In Mark 12:13-17, the Pharisees and the Herodians set a trap for Jesus. They flatter him before asking, “Do we pay taxes to Caesar or not?” The trap is simple. If he says that they should pay taxes, then they will call him out on his kingdom rhetoric, that he doesn’t really mean to bring the kingdom of God on earth because he is making himself subservient to an earthly terrestrial kingdom. If he says they shouldn’t pay their taxes, then he has put himself in opposition to Rome, and they do not treat those in opposition to them lightly.

Jesus asks them to bring him a coin, and when they do, he asks them whose face is on the coin. When they respond, Caesar’s, then he simply tells them, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. He not only sidesteps their trap in this moment, but shows the nature of the kin-dom when he does.

The kin-dom of heaven is not of this earth, and it does not exercise dominion over it. If he were to tell those gathered not to pay their taxes, not to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, he would have been exercising the same control and dominance over earthly affairs as the devil offered him in his temptation. Instead, he spoke the Living Word. “For the word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and is able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4:12).”

The living word is not found in a book. The living word is not a book. It is the word of wisdom and the word of knowledge spoken at just the right time to show the truth of the moment. If Caesar wants back what he has given you, then give it to him. But that does not free you from the duties that you have to one another as you walk the way of God. Here he makes the path clear and defeats the trap that was set against him without giving in to the darker temptations of empire.

It Shall Not Be So Among You

Matthew 20:25-28

25. But Jesus summoned them, and said, “You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.

26. It shall not be so among you, but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant.

27. Whoever desires to be first among you shall be your bondservant,

28. even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

In Matthew 20:25-28, Jesus explicitly names what leadership looks like in the kin-dom. It is not about hierarchy, but service. We do not have leaders who dominate or lord over us, who bring us under control. We do not have leaders who wield authority down upon us or overpower us.

Those who wish to be seen as great in the movement are servants, giving willingly of themselves so that everyone has what needs to be done in the moment. They are not here to lead, but to serve. Whoever is first among us must be enslaved to this idea, a full bondservant to the cause. Someone who is without status, who is not higher than anyone else, but someone who has pledged to serve everyone.

Jesus did not come to be worshipped. He did not live his life to be adored and bowed down to. He poured out his life even unto the ignominious death on a cross so that we would understand the way. Those who aggrandize themselves lack any authority in the eyes of the Way. Those who seek power or wealth or the domination of others have abdicated their place among our leadership.

Even they have seen this message in scripture and created the term “servant leadership” as a tool for their own control over the family, their spouse, and their own patriarchal dreams of domination.

A servant listens and learns. If anyone is to be first among us, they must listen and serve all. Not their chosen few, but everyone.

Jesus said that he has sheep that are not of the fold. There are those out there that we do not think are among us, but are listening to the words of Christ and following his way. Jesus told us that whoever is not against us is for us, and that we should not forbid them from doing work, even work in His name.

We will know people by their fruit. If they leave in their wake love, tenderness, compassion, healing, justice, and equity. If they feed the hungry, tend to the sick, visit those who are imprisoned, and bring relief to the crushed, without hoarding wealth or power to themselves, we will know them. Those who do otherwise have the spirit of antichrist upon them. They are working against Jesus in His own name.

Jesus’ kin-dom is built on the rock, the firm foundation of wisdom, the experience and the speaking of the living word, and the love that we have for God, our neighbor, and one another. No one is left out of that love.

Who Bears the Cost of Empire

Luke 6:20-26

20. He lifted up his eyes to his disciples, and said, “Blessed are you who are poor, God’s Kingdom is yours.

21. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

22. Blessed are you when men shall hate you, and when they shall exclude and mock you, and throw out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake.

23. Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven, for their fathers did the same thing to the prophets.

24. “But woe to you who are rich! For you have received your consolation.

25. Woe to you, you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.

26. Woe, when men speak well of you, for their fathers did the same thing to the false prophets.

In Luke 6:20-26, Jesus gives us a list of blessings and woes to the people of Earth. He blesses the poor, the hungry, those who mourn, and those who are hated, excluded, and mocked, and whose names are cast as evil for the sake of the kin-dom. He reminds them that the poor, those without power or wealth, will inherit the kin-dom of God, for it is already theirs, that the hungry will be filled, and that those who weep will laugh, and that we should rejoice when we are mocked for our work in the kin-dom because they mocked the prophets the same way.

He then warns and laments over the rich, those who are full, happy, and those who are spoken well of, because they have already received their reward and will have no other. Those who are full will hunger as they see the true emptiness of their lives. Those who have received the blessings of people have done nothing more than what the false prophets did, who spoke sweet lies to the world.

Jesus is showing us the cost of power. That when we accumulate wealth, we have no other blessings. Our friendships suffer, our minds become suspicious of those around us, and we become isolated and alone. When we fill ourselves with those things that we hunger after and desire, we lose access to all of the things that truly fill and fulfill us. When we distract ourselves from the work that grief brings and the healing that we can have as we restore ourselves and our world around us, that hollowness opens us up, and all we have left is mourning and tears.

This is the message and the warning of the book of Ecclesiastes. All of these things are emptiness, like chasing after the wind. Wealth tarnishes and moth destroys, but the real treasure of the kin-dom is not in some afterlife. Because the kin-dom is here now amongst us. The wealth is the community of friends and relations that we develop, the chains of support, aid, and care that strengthen the bonds between us. A life filled with love and built upon it overflows with blessings. Selfishness, greed, lust for power isolate and remove people from all of the joys that could be theirs if only they would change their minds, return to the path, and become one with the people.

The Daily Invitation to Kneel

In our everyday lives, we are asked by the devil to kneel regularly. We are told that if we have nothing to fear, if we’ve done nothing wrong, then surveillance is nothing to worry about. They ask us to move out of the way of so-called law enforcement when they are doing harm and breeding chaos in our cities. They trick us to stay home and not exercise our vote to participate in this democracy, so we will bow the knee to their imperial aims.

Every time we reject the fear of others that they want placed upon us, we do not kneel before empire. Every time we speak our voice clearly and honestly, we do not bow to the empire. Every time we think for ourselves and do not accept the stories that we are given, we do not bow to empire.

The truth is they have done a lot of work over the decades to confuse expertise with imperial power. And they’ve taught us to fear and mistrust expertise and to bow down to their authoritarian rule.

Doctors know more about medicine and the human body than any of us who have not studied it. Their expertise is vital if we are to remain healthy and strong as a people. Their opinions should be based on the data, not the dictates of those in power.

Scientists who study nature and the climate know more about what is happening than any of us who do not. And their expertise is vital if we are going to understand what is happening to the world around us.

The trick that they played on us is to make the advice of experts sound like the authoritarian claims of power, so that the authoritarian claims of power sound like advice defiant and strongly for the people against that tyranny. When we open our eyes and have eyes to see, when we listen carefully and have ears to hear, then we can see through this trick and understand that, of course, someone who has studied a thing knows more about it than those of us who don’t. And we have to take their wisdom and knowledge under advisement. That is different from bowing to the whims and dictates of people, no matter how educated, that are simply striving for their own power, wealth, and aggrandizement.

Anytime we can see through these lies, we are standing up for the kin-dom of God and rejecting the offer of dominance made by the devil.

What Sustains the Refusal

We are the body of Christ, and as such, we live in that cosmic Christ that indwells all of the world. In Him, we have refuge. In Him, we are made whole.

Through meditation and prayer, we enter that peace that passes all understanding:

• the mindfulness that keeps us clear in the present moment,

• the compassion that burns in our heart, stepping forward into the work that must be done,

• the Kavanah or intention that becomes clear to be about the work of healing and restoring the world and ourselves, and

• the effort that is necessary to get us there.

The work can be hard, and we can experience despair. They can try to take from us our comfort, our sense of belonging, our reputation, even our safety. But we know that the work that we are about is to leave a better world for those that come after us.

That hope that we will leave a better world to come than the one that we were born in fills us with hope and courage. Our knowledge that we are united within Christ gives us strength to move on. It is our unity, our hope and faith, and the great love that ever flows through us that knows no matter how isolated they make us feel, we are never alone. The kin-dom is spread out upon the earth, and many do not see it. But we do. We live within it, and we know that it is our true and faithful home.

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Entering the Gospel’s Warning

Matthew 11:12

12. From the days of John the Baptizer until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.

We are called by the gospel of Jesus Christ to spread the kin-dom throughout the earth, the kin-dom that is within and among all of us. In Matthew 11:12, Jesus warns us that the kin-dom suffers violence and that the violent try to seize it and plunder it. If we are ever to understand our relationship to the kin-dom and how it has been co-opted by empire, greed, and fear for so long, we have to understand what Jesus is trying to tell us about and warning us against.

A Kin-dom Spoken in a Colonized World

Every time we read the Gospels, it’s important for us to remember that Jesus was a refugee who lived in a colonized land. The Romans had conquered the Galilee and Judea, and before them, the people had suffered under many colonial empires stretching back further than any could remember.

John preached a new kind of liberation where one could not just wash the sins from their body but from their soul and spirit, reconnecting to God and the kin-dom that God promised here, now, even under that colonial power. No one who spoke out against the empire lived long. Both John and Jesus understood that.

When Jesus says, “Until John, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent try to plunder it and seize it,” this was the lived experience of the people he was talking to. They had witnessed firsthand the cruelty and extraction of the empire, taking from them in taxes, in lives, and in time. They understood how force had been used to corrupt, co-opt, and coerce people into doing what the empire willed them to do.

What the Kin-dom Evoked

When Jesus talks about the kin-dom, the audience would have thought of many things, from the kingdom of David to the short-lived kingdom of the Maccabees. They would have thought of either a golden age that was all too brief back in ancient times or a hope that through struggle they could have a kingdom of their own again.

Jesus takes this a step further. The kin-dom is here. It has not fallen and it never will fall. It can only be seized by the violent who seek to plunder it. That is a very different way to see the circumstances that he and the other people lived in.

This seizing and plundering wasn’t just the purview of the empire, but the priests and those who claimed to mediate the relationship between the people and God, who hoarded great wealth to themselves and who prospered even in these troubled times. They plundered the people for their own gain and did not do the work of God. This was the cry of most of the prophets.

While he does not say it explicitly, the text shows us a resistance. John did not side with the empire, nor did he aggrandize or plunder the kin-dom for his own sake. He lived in service to the kin-dom and to the people within it, and as such became a model for such service. John opened the way so others could walk through it, and that way, like it was for their people before, was through the waters of the River Jordan, through the waters of baptism.

A Kin-dom That Cannot Be Destroyed

Jesus describes a kin-dom that is ever-present, one that cannot be created or destroyed, but one that is always here. It was here when John came, and it will be here after him, which means it was here when the Assyrians came, when the Babylonians came. It was here when David came. It has always been here.

It has survived all of these people, and it has survived Rome. They plunder, and they take, and they seize, but they cannot destroy it.

Many have misused this passage to say that they should become violent, that they should be those who seize the kingdom and join in the violence done against it. They see themselves as the oppressors who bring the kingdom through force. John did not bring the kin-dom through force but through baptism. Jesus did not bring the kin-dom through force, but through submission to death on the cross.

The kin-dom cannot be brought into the world through violence. It can only be plundered through it. Once we learn to see that, we see that we always have a home. That the kin-dom is here, where two or three are gathered in his name. Christ is there amongst us. The kin-dom is now. Every moment.

It cannot be taken away. It cannot be co-opted, because God is the eternal King, the giver of life, the one in whom we live, move, and have our being. And his kin-dom, his reign, is through the triumph of life itself.

What It Means That the Kin-dom Cannot Be Co-Opted

The kin-dom of God cannot be co-opted, even though it is constantly plundered and misused. That sounds like such a grand statement, and one that on its face feels false. Churches, empires, and preachers have plundered the kin-dom of God since it was first proclaimed so long ago.

But they have never co-opted it, because the kin-dom of God is not a thing that can be colonized. It is the relationships that we have one with another. It is the relationship that we have with God. It exists in the still small moments within us and among us that the empire cannot see and thus cannot touch.

They have threatened it, outlawed it, and sought to destroy it over the millennia. But they have never laid hands on it because no hand can touch what God has perfected in the heart.

Belonging Without Scarcity

As we accept this truth and begin to live in it, we discover a belonging that is beyond any church, group, or movement. Our home is in the one in whom we live, move, and have our being. We indwell this life, and it indwells within us.

We live God. We live the kin-dom into the world through our actions, our presence, and our refusal to submit to the whims of empire, fear, and greed.

Living in this state of interconnection, we lose our fear of scarcity because we know that amongst us we have enough, and together we can share what we have, to rise up together and to be strong. We lose our sense of urgency because the kin-dom is, was, and will ever be.

It will always be victorious because life always finds a way. We align ourselves with life, with love, and with this ever-present kin-dom. We move together collectively towards that day where it is fully manifest and realized in the world.

Letting Go Without Withdrawing

We cannot stop simply at the wonder and awe of the ever-present kin-dom. We have to let go of so much baggage that wants to be brought along with us. We have to let go of our need to control, so we do not become the empire that we are opposing.

We have to replace our desire to win, dominate, or prove ourselves with a desire to bring other people into this loving, right relationship with themselves and with others. We have to let go of the urgency and panic born from our fear of loss or irrelevance so that we do not overreact and do something that harms the gospel or the cause.

When we refuse to seize the kin-dom, we are letting go of the conceit of our own hearts and the domination of others. We are allowing the freedom and liberty of God to spread out and bring salvation to all that it touches.

We are inviting people to the great banquet on the holy mountain so that they can be part of the kin-dom and celebrate the great day of the Lord. We are not withdrawing from responsibility. We are claiming what is our birthright to go forth and to proclaim the good news.

And the good news is that we are free. And through our collective and mutual efforts, that freedom can fully be recognized and realized in this earth.

Living the Gospel Together

If we are going to win the day, we have to build a shared life for ourselves. One born out of right relationship where we honor each other and the gifts that we bring together, one that is rooted in consent and reinforced through mutual aid.

We have to practice what we preach and live a life that shines out like a bright city on a hill, calling people out of the darkness of empire into its glow, safety, and sanctuary.

To do that, we have to constantly reimagine and reinterpret how we live together so that we do not fall into the stale trap of empire, believing that we have ever solved it, made it right, made it perfect, because perfection is a trap. It is a cage that holds us in and holds us back and prevents us from doing the work that we are called to do.

We can’t merely tell people the gospel. We have to live it.

The Long Work

If we are going to transform this world and bring the kin-dom fully manifest within it, we have to reject false ideas of purity because none are pure and without stain or blemish. This requires us to have a sense of forgiveness and to understand that people can and do change.

We can never choose to be passive, hoping that the storm will pass us by. This transformation has to happen deep down within us at the heart level. It will change ourselves, our lives, the habits we engage with, the systems that we create around us, and how we collectively engage with the world itself.

We refuse to take up the sword even when coercion, threats, and violence might appear effective because we are just entrenching ourselves in the cycle that has devoured this world for so long.

We choose the work of formation, helping people to grow and change, and to cultivate lives of meaning, purpose, and enrichment so that they can live fully in their own purpose and meaning, discovering it as we all do through the things that we do, not the things that we believe.

This makes us fully realized citizens of the kin-dom of God, moving strongly from our own center, which is love and compassion. To go out into the world to do justice and equity, to bring balance and homeostasis, where all things have a place, and that place enriches and nourishes everything in the system.

This is long work. There are no quick solutions. Anyone who peddles quick and easy paths to this kind of change and transformation is peddling snake oil.

This path is the hard work that we have refused over and over again because the work is so, so hard that in winning a battle we choose to believe that we have won the war and we go home, but the struggle for freedom, liberty, equity, justice, and liberation goes on.

Staying in the Struggle

When the times are dark, and it is hard to see the light, we huddle so close to it deep in our heart and pray our anguished prayers. It can be hard to see the future.

We do not seize the kin-dom because no one can seize the kin-dom. The struggle is the struggle to stay alive. And I don’t just mean breathing. I mean to have life and have it more abundantly, to enter into that place where we truly feel alive.

That can breed a certain sense of urgency in us, a desire to coerce other people so that we can get there faster, and we can spend time fantasizing about that eventual victory. None of those things actually help us achieve it.

We stay in the struggle because we are mindful of the world around us. We know what blessings it has and what lacks need repair. Our compassion has been quickened, and we know that we can only achieve the work together. And if we give up, there will be nothing but darkness.

We stay in the struggle because our spirits yearn for freedom. And the law of liberation that guides our hearts and minds cries out for everyone to hear.

There’s a time for healing and restoration. There is a time for recuperation and rest. But there is a time for struggle and striving forward to reach ever farther towards what we yearn for.

One day in the gym does not make us fit. Every day we strive, we yearn, and we stretch just a bit farther, not to break, but to strengthen ourselves and the world that we live in so that it becomes better inch by inch.

Built on the Rock

The kin-dom has always suffered violence, and the violent seize it and try to plunder it. We do not participate in that cycle of violence.

Through the work of formation and transformation, we equip ourselves to live in the kin-dom no matter what transpires. Our lives become resilient. Our work becomes doable.

We are rooted in God, who is the ground of all being and becoming, and does not require a temple built by human hands or an institution to flow through this world.

God is in all things, and all things are in God. That is the heart of the kin-dom. Building our lives there is, as Jesus said, building our house upon the rock, not upon the shifting sands of organizations and empire and the things that change according to the whims of those in power.

Power is the illusion. No one can own the kin-dom. The kin-dom is spread out throughout the world and many do not see it.

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If we are not going to take up the sword, then how do we engage in the struggle for justice? Jesus, like the prophets before Him, talked about the great banquet of God. The true power of the kin-dom comes not from weapons, but from a radically inclusive shared life that invites people to this banquet table, so that through celebration, gratitude, and joy, we can dismantle transactional justice and end the distortions in the world brought by power, wealth, and fear.

The Great Call of the Banquet

Isaiah 25:6-9

6. In this mountain, Yahweh of Armies will make all peoples a feast of choice meat, a feast of choice wines, of choice meat full of marrow, of well refined choice wines.

7. He will destroy in this mountain the surface of the covering that covers all peoples, and the veil that is spread over all nations.

8. He has swallowed up death forever! The Lord Yahweh will wipe away tears from off all faces. He will take the reproach of his people away from off all the earth, for Yahweh has spoken it.

9. It shall be said in that day, “Behold, this is our God! We have waited for him, and he will save us! This is Yahweh! We have waited for him. We will be glad and rejoice in his salvation!”

This idea of the holy banquet didn’t begin with Jesus. In Isaiah 25:6–9, the prophet reveals the grand vision of the end of days, when all are invited up onto the mountain, and God prepares a banquet for all people. At this banquet, God will destroy the shroud that has fallen over them. They will be free from the illusion of their separateness and united in their diversity. It is not just the chosen people of God that are up on the mountain at the banquet, but all nations and peoples. There they find eternal life and understand that the salvation they waited for was always coming.

Jesus takes this image and tells us that eternal life is now. That banquet is happening now. We don’t have to wait for some far-off future. All we have to do is come together intentionally into communities of choice, destroying and undoing all of the illusions that have kept us apart. All we have to do is hear the voice calling us to solidarity and to take those steps of mutual aid, care, and support to climb the mountain.

The vision of Isaiah functions as the great call. It invites us into Via Positiva, the first path. It is the awe, wonder, and delight, the spectacle of the great unfolding of the cosmos that tells us that we are all one, one unified people divided by the great shroud that overcomes us.

The mountain that we see in Isaiah’s vision is the work of this second path, the Via Negativa. It shows us that we are all on the same mountain, though we believe that we are scattered, separate, and alone. It removes the illusion from our eyes and reminds us that life is now. Living with God is now. Living God is now. And no matter what we say or believe about others, we are all part of one human family, one family spread out throughout the earth.

The Invitation in Luke’s Gospel

Luke 14:12-24

12. He also said to the one who had invited him, “When you make a dinner or a supper, don’t call your friends, nor your brothers, nor your kinsmen, nor rich neighbors, or perhaps they might also return the favor, and pay you back.

13. But when you make a feast, ask the poor, the maimed, the lame, or the blind;

14. and you will be blessed, because they don’t have the resources to repay you. For you will be repaid in the resurrection of the righteous.”

15. When one of those who sat at the table with him heard these things, he said to him, “Blessed is he who will feast in God’s Kingdom!”

16. But he said to him, “A certain man made a great supper, and he invited many people.

17. He sent out his servant at supper time to tell those who were invited, ‘Come, for everything is ready now.’

18. They all as one began to make excuses. “The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please have me excused.’

19. “Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I must go try them out. Please have me excused.’

20. “Another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I can’t come.’

21. “That servant came, and told his lord these things. Then the master of the house, being angry, said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor, maimed, blind, and lame.’

22. “The servant said, ‘Lord, it is done as you commanded, and there is still room.’

23. “The lord said to the servant, ‘Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.

24. For I tell you that none of those men who were invited will taste of my supper.’”

In Luke 14:12–24, Jesus invites everyone to the meal. He tells us not to just invite people that we love, who we think we will get something back from, but to invite everyone, especially those who cannot repay us. He goes on to tell a story about how people react to the invitation to the great banquet of God and who responds to the call to join the kin-dom. Through this story, we learn about the nature of power and wealth and how they corrupt. We also learn the nature of the kin-dom and how we must call everyone together.

Jesus is talking about what we should do when we invite people to a luncheon. These banquets were a large part of Greco-Roman society and had found their way into Jewish practice at the time. Like the salons of later periods, its host would gather people together, providing a lavish meal, and they would discuss various topics and show their wisdom and camaraderie. This was a common way for religious and spiritual conversations to take place in the first century. Jesus tells us when we invite people, don’t just invite those that we feel we might get an invitation back from, but to invite everyone, especially those that you would never see at such events. Everyone would benefit from the food that is offered, but also from the community and the ideas that are being shared at such events.

He goes on to tell a parable about a man throwing such a meal and how the rich and the powerful are so entwined with their own interests that they send their regrets that they cannot come. The host is not deterred and sends the servant out again, this time inviting the kinds of people that are normally not invited to such events. And yet, there is still room at the table. He then sends the servant out a final time to invite anyone who will come to the table, only to point out that the ones who were initially invited were never going to taste the food.

All are invited to the banquet of God, especially those who have the resources to help the most people. But in their hearts, they turn away and stay fixated on their own issues, ambitions, and goals. So the invitation goes out to all because the host of the banquet wants everyone to sit at this table, not just a few. And he laments that the ones that were first invited, the ones most capable of the change needed, do not come.

When we look at this story, the host is God. The invitation that goes out is the gospel, and the excuses are all of the reasons we have not to be doing the good work. The banquet is life itself, the meal to which everyone is called and no one is excluded. The empty are those who have isolated themselves from this communal work, preferring their own self-interest to that of the community.

The Banquet of The Living God

The story invites us to see the kin-dom as a banquet to which all are called, especially those who have the means to support the works of the kin-dom. It shows us how self-interest, greed, doubt, and fear can interfere with this calling and prevent us from seeing this work that we do together and isolate us, refusing the ability to join together in the mutuality that is necessary for true change.

The streets are all of the paths that we can walk in this life. Sometimes we crawl, sometimes we sit alone, huddled against the cold. But the servant, the slave, is one who is utterly possessed by the work of the kin-dom, someone who is living God, fully embodying that nature of love, compassion, wisdom, and mindfulness that goes out tirelessly to call the people in.

It reveals the work that we are called:

• To call people to the table and

• To dine at it.

This story can easily be misinterpreted and misunderstood. When I was growing up, I remember being told this story and how it insisted that those of us who were in church were superior to those who are outside because we answered the call. This is not a story about institutional allegiance or membership in a club. It is a story about how we respond to the radical call of life to live in solidarity with one another, expecting nothing in return. To eat together, to be together, to discuss together for the benefit of everyone. When we do those things, we move towards justice and justice-making, the glorious world where we can celebrate life and have it more abundantly.

Delight as Defiance

When we look at the story, we see how people refuse the call to the table. They are so busy checking on their lives and the little moments in it, their personal interests rather than the interests of others, that they do not hear the call and instead send their regrets. They separate themselves from the delight that they could have at the table and the gratitude for the invitation.

Notice that we are not told that those who are invited in find awe, gratitude, or delight in having been invited to the table. That is taken for granted because, of course, everyone is invited. As we walk down our own path through this journey, we have to not develop a certain smugness about how we had the compassion or the mindfulness to answer the call, but instead live in awe that the world itself is this luscious banquet where we can all feed, drink, and be merry.

We must remember to be grateful for the cosmos that made all of this possible: the sun, the moon, the stars, all in their proper alignment so that life could exist on this planet, and all of the many intricate systems that work together in concert with people, plants, and animals to bring food to the table. We must never forget to delight in the joys of life, no matter how simple they are, because when we partake of them, we are sitting at the most holy divine banquet, partaking of the sweetness of life.

It can be easy to lose this, especially as we struggle for justice. But keeping that delight and learning to savor it gives us strength to push on even through the darkest hours of our lives. We do not live in a world of scarcity. We are tricked into believing that it is so, so that fear will cause us to obey. Through the simple act of delight and savor, we defy that fear, and we reveal the illusion of that scarcity, that all are welcome, all have a place, and all can sit at the great table of God.

Releasing the Gate

The hardest thing for us to do when we arrive at the table is accepting the presence of those there, recognizing that everyone has a place at this table if they’ve heard the call and received the invitation to be there. We have to let go of this idea that we are somehow gatekeepers in this process, that we can say who belongs at this table and who doesn’t.

We have to refuse our preconceptions that we don’t sit with those who are racially or ethnically different from us, who may practice a different faith or no faith at all, and even those who have philosophical differences from us. If we are all truly sitting at this table and consuming the divine banquet that is there, living in this kin-dom life, then we are aligned.

Yes, the story already considers the wealthy and the powerful who refuse the call because their greed, their fear, and their ambition insist that they be about their own work and not join in the solidarity and mutual care, aid, and support that we build at the table. They either self-select out of the group, or they try to own the table and take it from the hands of God. They out themselves. We do not have to do that.

Once we let go of our preconceived notions about who will sit alongside us and learn to trust one another while dining at this great feast, we can accomplish anything in this world together. Strength arises through trust and mutual action. Without it, every movement fails.

Building What Replaces Harm

The next part is hard for a lot of people to hear. As we move from path two into path three and awaken our creativity, we have to realize that protesting is not enough. Standing up and saying no is never sufficient to topple the powerful and bring about real change. It is necessary in that it is a controlling valve on those in power, many of whom, out of the fearfulness of their own hearts, will shrink away from the rising numbers standing against them. Unfortunately, though, it is not enough to win and to achieve victory for the world to come.

In order to achieve that victory, we have to build new things to supplant those that are doing us harm. The labor unions that rose up were required to stand against and give rights to the worker over the capitalist interest that controlled them. The medical networks and research groups that arose to fight the AIDS crisis were necessary in a world that didn’t care if queer people died. The Green Book and the network of support and mutual aid of Black-owned businesses that helped people in the Jim Crow South get through the tyranny and violence that was being done to them.

Only when we erect these counter systems and these countervailing institutions that are actually working for our own good and benefit, with the intention of them supplanting and replacing the broken systems that are controlling and putting us down, can we actually get to where we need to go. Here in path three, the work is to imagine what these new structures and institutions should look like. What should they do? How can they operate? How can they actually bring about the change that we need, protecting people now in the corrupt and broken system and grow into something sustainable that will carry us on into the future?

We don’t have to have all the answers upfront. We have to have enough to be able to get the work started so that it can grow and evolve, because we will not come up with the perfect or the right answer on the first draft. There will always be revisions, changes, and evolutions that come because that is the true nature of life.

We can see this on the international stage with groups like Doctors Without Borders, whose delivery of aid and solidarity with the poorest and the most trodden down is seen as violence and a threat to the authoritarian regimes in the region. As with everything, we start where we are. What talents, what tools, what abilities do we have that we can lend to the cause? How can we shape them together through mutual aid and support to care for our communities and protect them through the dark times? That is where we start, but we do not end there. We push on and push forward until we have found ways to change the governing order so that these better ways are left in the wake of our protest.

Living Justice Together

As we step onto Path Four and bring these wonderful visions and ideas that we’ve had in Path Three into the world, we understand now that only through solidarity and mutual aid, care, and support will we be able to bring about the change that is necessary for the world to come. These first steps may feel small, but through networking and joining together and sharing ideas and collaboration, the best ideas, the ones that work for the people, spread and grow.

This is why we transform our anger into a fire that allows us to build and change things. We take it into the forge instead of into our fists. It is hard to argue with someone about how their fundamental beliefs need to change. It is much easier to show them.

It is one thing to say that we need to change the way that we do medicine and deliver care in this country, and to discuss it in polite, philosophical, and theoretical ways. It’s another thing to bring clinics to the people that show them a way forward where they don’t have to worry about going broke to get basic care, where they don’t have to wait until they’re almost dying before they reach out for assistance. When you show people a different way, and they experience it fully in their lives, lives change.

If you’ve only ever known one way of doing things, not doing it that way is terrifying. But when invited into a different way of doing things where you can see it in action, working, making the world a better place not just for them over there but for all of us, it is a revelation. Justice is something that we live together, not something that is imposed, argued, or enforced. The Via Transformativa, the fourth path, is not about the ideals that we bring to the struggle. It is about living them to the best of our knowledge and building something better so that people can see, taste, and experience the goodness that is possible in life and reconnect with it. That’s what brings real and lasting change.

Acts 4: Shared Abundance Made Real

Acts 4:32-35

32. The multitude of those who believed were of one heart and soul. Not one of them claimed that anything of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common.

33. With great power, the apostles gave their testimony of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Great grace was on them all.

34. For neither was there among them any who lacked, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of the things that were sold,

35. and laid them at the apostles’ feet, and distribution was made to each, according as anyone had need.

In the vision of the apostolic community that we find in Acts chapter 4, verses 32 through 35, we see the community living fully in the kin-dom of God. There is no poverty or lack because no one is hoarding their resources, and everyone is sharing with the whole of the community so that everyone is uplifted. True justice and equity only arise through shared abundance, and that word shared matters a lot here.

The members of the community understood what they were doing and gave freely from their hearts. If we are going to build anything like this, even remotely resembling this in our lives today, that is the place that we have to get people to, a place of shared solidarity and mutual support. Forcing people to give breeds resentment.

Acts reveals to us how, through this shared community where everyone was uplifted, they learned to live in this joyful celebration where all were taken care of. The benefits were clear and manifest. They weren’t theoretical or sentimental. The functional structure of mutual aid, care, and support helps people to understand that hoarding their wealth, land, and power did not make their lives or the lives of others better. It brought risk, scarcity, and trouble to the world.

If we are ever truly going to live at this divine banquet, then we have to ensure that people understand how leaving anyone behind, allowing harm to happen to anyone, diminishes us all and threatens us all. That solidarity is the cornerstone of everything that we must do to bring the kin-dom to Earth.

Justice, Not Charity

The justice that we are talking about is not charity. Charity implies two distinct roles in the operation: the giver and the receiver. Justice and equity require mutuality. What is given to the community helps everyone within the community.

The distinction can be hard to see. In a charity context, you have benefactors and patrons who give often out of a sense of their own goodness or in order to get a tax deduction. Charity is more often done for public relations than out of actual care and concern for those who would be helped.

In moving from a mindset of charity to one of mutuality and solidarity, we are identifying as one people. We are understanding that anyone left in poverty, homeless, hungry, thirsty, or in need of medical care is a harm done to the whole and to every individual within it. Charity uses words like helping the unfortunate. Solidarity does not make such distinctions. It does not bring pity or benevolence to the table because those are not required.

When we work through mutual aid, care, and support, we understand that the help we are giving is to everyone, including ourselves. It is a reflexive giving where we understand that in supporting others, we are supporting ourselves, that we are both the object and subject of the action being done.

This is the clearest and easiest way for us to understand God and how God interacts in the cosmos, as this kind of mutually interactive verb. There is no distinction between benefactor and benefited because both sides are aided, supported, and cared for through their mutual aid, care, and support and the solidarity they have to be together.

Celebration and Suffering

Celebration is, in and of itself, an act of engaged enjoyment. It is about bringing joy into the body, which is something that we all require if we are going to get through our burnout, grief, anger, rage, and loss. Celebration can be cathartic. We can take the emotions that we have and go out to the dance floor and extend them through our bodies and allow them to pour out of us.

If you’ve ever been on a dance floor sobbing, moving with the beat together with everyone out there and letting your heart pour out, you can understand that cathartic cleansing that happens within. Our society has abandoned catharsis, and we are much the poorer for it.

Celebration is not a retreat from life or a denial of its trials and tribulations. Celebration is the conscious choice to work that out in nonviolent, peaceful means, whether that’s on the dance floor, in singing, in playing an instrument, in going to a play, or watching a movie that makes us cry. Anything that purges these feelings for us so that we can find clarity, that catharsis is necessary if we are going to have the stamina that we require to do the work.

Emma Goldman famously said that she could not be a part of any movement that refused to dance. If we don’t take time for healing, for purging and cleansing ourselves, for recuperation, then we will break down and collapse. Celebration is necessary to keep us going.

What We Refuse

When we choose this life of celebration and justice, we are refusing isolation, greed, fear, and the lust for power. If we are going to dance, we cannot care what others will think about us as we move and live inside our bodies. If we are going to sing together, we have to welcome the flaws and imperfections in our voices and others’. If we are going to celebrate anything, it has to be the joys that come into our lives and those of others without telling them to be quiet or to reject them because of the seriousness of the moment.

To everything, there is a season. There is a time to be serious, and there is a time for joy. And if we do not have both, then we’re just going to drain our batteries and be incapable of action.

Hearing Matthew 11:12 Anew

As Jesus said:

Matthew 11:12

12. From the days of John the Baptizer until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.

Up until John, the kin-dom has suffered violence, and the violent have tried to plunder and seize it. We are not counted amongst their number. We are the ones that heard the call to the banquet, the ones that have gathered around the holy table to eat together, to live together, and to be on the holy mountain.

You do not have to seize or plunder what is freely offered and given. The violent are the ones who were initially invited, but were too busy, self-interested, or afraid to attend the banquet and sent their regrets. Out of those regrets, they looked and saw the joyous celebration and shared life of those at the banquet and desired to have it, and sought to seize it for themselves.

They forgot that they too were invited to the banquet and just had to show up and take part in the glorious feast. You can only partake of the Holy Feast if you join in the celebration. If you keep yourself on the outside, it will look strange, unmanageable, and in need of a firm hand to control it. On the inside, you see and feel all of the invisible hands that are supporting everyone, keeping everyone going and working towards a beautiful life of justice and equity.

No one has to storm the gates when they are already open. They just need to walk in and accept their place in the beloved community.

A Concrete Practice

As with everything that we do in Creation Spirituality, we always start where we are, finding one concrete and communal practice so that we can embody what we are saying in the here and now. And again, this can start off so small.

If you knit or crochet, make something for a neighbor, a hat, some gloves, a scarf. Give it to them, and do not accept any financial reward for doing so just because you thought they would like it. If you cook, maybe bring food to a neighbor. Maybe it’s someone who is protesting. Maybe it’s someone near you who’s going through some hardship.

Whatever you have in you to give, whatever talents or skills you have, find a mutual aid network that you can tie into. Find others in your field who have the same interest in helping others as you do and ask concretely, what can we do now to make people’s lives a better place?

I can’t give you a one-size-fits-all answer here because everyone has different talents, abilities, and access to resources. This is going to look different in rural communities than it does in cities. And because of the various cultures of our many cities, it’s going to look different from city to city. That diversity is our strength.

The most important thing is that you find something concrete and helpful that inches us, even if it’s the slightest little nudge, towards the better world that we want to see. Find what that thing is and start doing it.

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Entering the Via Creativa

Learning how not to live by the sword or die by it is a difficult task, but one that our soul is up for. Once we make the active choice not to live by the sword, not to even pick it up and continue the cycles of violence that the world is mired in, a whole series of new choices appear before us. The question is, how do we combat the real and present evil and dangers of the world if we are not going to take up that sword and act through violence?

Jesus gives us an example when he talks about the binding of the strong man in Matthew 12:29. As we embark on this path, we are taking our first steps into the Via Creativa, the creative way. We are seeking new ways and new images to guide us.

• Previously we talked about the moment and decided not to take up the sword.

• We choose not to act through domination, coercion, and violence

• We still have a choice to deal with: fight, flee, or freeze

• In other words: do we continue in the struggle, do we run away from it, or do we pretend nothing is wrong, or the storm will pass.

• Notice that fight is still an option yet the choice is to fight nonviolently

• This doesn’t force an answer on us we actively consent to remaining in the struggle nonviolently rather then flee from it or pretend it doesn’t exist.

• We still must choose what nonviolent action to take

We are actively consenting to seek new actions staying in the fight nonviolently and to refuse the violence, the hatred, the anger, and the rage that consumes the world. We are embodying our compassion in hopes that, through our thoughts, words, and deeds, we can repair the world and leave it better than we found it.

Rejecting the sword is not withdrawal. It is invention. If we do not seize power violently, and we do not submit to it either, something new must be made. This is the third path. Not domination. Not capitulation. But shared power, mutual aid, and embodied care. Via Creativa becomes the practice of imagining forms of life that violence cannot easily inhabit.

Binding the Strong Man

Matthew 12:29 and the Liberation of the Soul

Matthew 12:29

29. Or how can one enter into the house of the strong man, and plunder his goods, unless he first bind the strong man? Then he will plunder his house.

In Matthew 12:29, Jesus is talking about how the kin-dom has come and, through the power of the Holy Spirit, demons are cast out. There has been a lot of debate about how Jesus casts out these spirits and does the miracles that he is doing. Here he is saying that these demons, these unclean spirits, cannot enter the house and plunder it unless they first bind the strong man. Only when he is bound do they have free roam of the house to plunder and do as they will.

In the next verse, Jesus says, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” This helps us see the context. The strong man is the soul of the individual, and the thief who comes to plunder is the unclean spirit that enters into them. For the unclean spirit to enter the house, which is the body and the spirit itself, the soul must be bound. These binds are the compromises, the limitations that the soul places upon itself, those things that the strong man has already agreed to that keep them passive and restrained while the thief is in the house. The unclean spirit is that spirit of empire, of violence and plundering that puts the needs of greed and hatred and fear above the needs of the soul, spirit, or body.

What Jesus is doing here is showing us the pattern of how empire and violence work. He emphasizes something really important here. Before the unclean spirit enters, the strong man is already bound. If the soul is not already compromised, if it has not bent the knee, given in to fear, chosen to cooperate with the violence, anger, hatred, and greed of the society that it lives in, the robber cannot enter and the soul cannot be plundered. So long as the strong man is free, the thief cannot enter the house. The unclean spirits of empire must first tie him up, or they cannot gain entry.

This idea can so easily be misread. If we believe we can just say “be free” or “get out” like so many do in exorcism work, we are not actually exorcising the demon. We are not actually ridding the soul of the unclean spirit. Slogans and power words do not work here. These spirits are only expelled when the strong man is liberated. If we are not first freeing the soul from whatever chains have bound it, then the unclean spirit will remain plundering the house.

How do we uproot this oppression, this violence, this hatred from ourselves and our society, this indwelling self-harm that perpetuates these cycles? We have to liberate the soul. Find ways to get people to rise up and become that strong man again. This is why the Gospel message of Jesus reminds us to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, take care of the sick, the widow, and the orphan, be with people in their sorrow, and visit them in prison. If we are not giving courage and strength to the soul of the oppressed, then they cannot break the shackles of that inner oppression and cast that unclean spirit out from within. This story reminds us that liberation begins in the heart and works itself from the inside out.

What We Mean by Unclean Spirits and Demons

Unclean spirits are the fears, shame, ideas of scarcity, and domination that we internalize. They are thoughts that come from the outside in that we let inhabit us. These can be born from many sources, from how we are taught, the culture that we live in, or as a result of trauma causing us to put up barriers to protect us and make us feel safe and secure. These unclean spirits cloud our judgment and our vision and prevent us from seeing the world clearly and taking right action within it.

Demons are the systems that we live in that control and coerce us through shame, fear, and guilt. They get within us when we internalize these systems and enact them within us. They are the internalized police force that dominates us and causes us to lash out at others in ways that we would not if we were seeing the world clearly without them.

These unclean spirits and demons manifest in the habits that we take on in our thinking and feeling and that we express in the habits of our lives. They are as real as we allow them to be. They are not cast out merely with a word, but through the internal work that allows us to strengthen ourselves, heal our souls, and be able to stand up so that there is no room for them within. The light shines into the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

The Work of Liberation

Courage, Teshuvah, and Standing Up

If we are to truly be the liberated people who can stand up, cast out the unclean spirits from ourselves, and go about helping others to find their liberation, we have to do the work on the inside of us. This work is a combination of things. It is a gradual bettering that we do through the process of teshuvah, repentance, where we learn from mistakes that we have committed in the past, errors in judgment, or missteps that we have taken, and we change our mind so that we move gradually more onto the path that we desire to walk.

This work is also cyclical, where we remind ourselves to be grounded in the natural rhythms of life and of our community. We do not do any of this work alone. Some of it we do with only the help of the Holy Spirit in times of deep meditation and prayer. But even then, we are not alone. If we are going to be strong, healthy people capable of bringing mutual aid, care, and comfort to the world, then we have to build relationships with others because we have to practice what we preach.

That practice teaches us so much. We see new things that we need to change our minds about, and we grow and mature. We know that we are ready to go out, not because we have had some grand awakening or feel complete liberation, but because we know that the process works and that others need it too. Once we understand the work of teshuvah and how to practice it within ourselves, we know how to teach it to others. And that is when we go out and begin sharing the work of liberation with others.

Freeing the Strong Man

If we are going to free the strong man within ourselves or others, we have to start building up courage first. We remind ourselves that there are more people who oppose this evil in the world than there are people who support it. We refuse to compromise or accept the lies of scarcity that say there is not enough. Most importantly, we deny the state of isolation that is imposed on us. We are not alone. That is a lie meant to bind us.

Whether we are talking through social media, out in public together, or alone in our house thinking about these things, we are not the only ones considering them. Liberation arises from the knowledge that we are free to make our own decisions. Like bodybuilding, this kind of soul-building starts small, with little choices, little things we can do to defy the powers that be and develop the instinct to say no to corrosive power. Start by imagining ways that you could stand up right now, even if it is just in the room that you are in. Just saying to yourself, “No this is not the way things should be,” is enough to get started. Once we take back that little bit of courage, it compounds and grows.

As we develop courage, we begin to see the binds that hold us. That may be fear for our own safety, the lie that we can be safe while others are harmed. What is done to one of us can be done to any of us. We may be bound by a sense of powerlessness, believing our voice is too small. To let go of that chain, we realize that together we create something far greater than any empire.

We must stop carrying the burden of our past. Prior votes, prior actions, guilt and shame are binds that allow our lives to be pillaged. For those in Christ, all old things have died. What is born is new. To live in that newness, we must shed old habits and then let go of the shame for having had them. If we do not make space, possibility cannot arise.

Savoring What Gives Strength

Jesus reminds us that we know what is good. If a child asks for food, we do not give them a stone (Matthew 7:9). We are created in original blessing and have access to grace flowing through all life. We can see beauty and kindness in neighbors, strangers, and friends. We can laugh and care for one another.

Once we realize holiness and righteousness are just other ways of saying we know how to live in right relationship with ourselves, with others, and with God, it becomes a discipline we practice not a state we live in. It is a discipline like body building that we work out in order to gain “moral muscles” and the courage that we are capable of doing what is right. Grace is the availability of the “weights” and the freedom to use them and grow stronger.

It is more important now than ever to savor moments where dignity is restored and agency exercised. We find awe in those with courage to put their bodies on the line for freedom. We renew our spirits as we witness humanity rising up in protest for what is right. As we savor and delight in these things, we awaken the soul so that the chains fall and unclean spirits lose their hold.

Standing Together Without the Sword

Now that strength is returning and the binds are falling away, we stand strong. We speak truth with compassion. We seek out others for mutual aid and action.

Luke 12:48b

48. ... To whomever much is given, of him will much be required; and to whom much was entrusted, of him more will be asked.

We give what we have in time, money, and attention. If we have much, we give more. If we have little, we give what we can and collectively we have more than anyone of us individually.

We refuse rage because rage is the surrender to their control. When we give into rage we are binding ourselves, acknowledging and acting under their control and influence and not through our own power. This is why Elijah had to flee and hide in the mountains. After he demonstrated the power of God he surrendered that power to Ahab and Jezebel by attacking their priests (1 Kings 18). He demonstrated the power of God and squandered it leaving himself powerless before them. They do not have power. They have fear. The project of life’s restoration is standing firm so that fear does not bind us again.

This work does carry risk. But we are not asking for heroics. We go out together. We shield one another through community, de-escalation, refuge, and accompaniment. We refuse violence not as passivity, but because violence entrenches the systems we resist. Mutual care ensures we make it through to the other side.

Now What: Sent Without Coercion

Luke 10:1-12

1. Now after these things, the Lord also appointed seventy others, and sent them two by two ahead of him into every city and place, where he was about to come.

2. Then he said to them, “The harvest is indeed plentiful, but the laborers are few. Pray therefore to the Lord of the harvest, that he may send out laborers into his harvest.

3. Go your ways. Behold, I send you out as lambs among wolves.

4. Carry no purse, nor wallet, nor sandals. Greet no one on the way.

5. Into whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house.’

6. If a son of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you.

7. Remain in that same house, eating and drinking the things they give, for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Don’t go from house to house.

8. Into whatever city you enter, and they receive you, eat the things that are set before you.

9. Heal the sick who are therein, and tell them, ‘God’s Kingdom has come near to you.’

10. But into whatever city you enter, and they don’t receive you, go out into its streets and say,

11. ‘Even the dust from your city that clings to us, we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this, that God’s Kingdom has come near to you.’

12. I tell you, it will be more tolerable in that day for Sodom than for that city.

In Luke 10, Jesus sends out seventy disciples to proclaim the kin-dom. They are sent throughout the land to whoever will listen. They are told to trust the gospel and carry nothing, learning to rely on God and one another. They are sent as sheep among wolves. When welcomed, they speak peace. When rejected, they move on without anger or shame.

Seventy is the number of completeness. Enough. He sends them in pairs so that they will remember that they are not alone, that we work together in this life, and that none of us are truly alone.

In reminding them that they are sheep among wolves, they understand their job. They are here to shepherd the people, but also to be one of them. They are not to be leaders of the flock, but members of the flock, the ones that guide others home and away from danger.

When he tells them to carry nothing with them, no bag, purse, or sandals, he’s taking away from them the fear that they are not adequate. Most of the followers of the early Jesus movement were poor, and so they did not have extra to take with them. But they would find what they needed along the way, teaching them to trust not only in God, but in their fellow human beings for their support and well-being. This idea is core to the gospel.

He invites them to have three means of interaction with the people there. The first is to speak peace to the house. Peace is the message that we bring, the peace that passes all understanding. When we are with them, we are to spread the word that the kin-dom is around us and amongst us. It is here now. We are not waiting for it. We only have to manifest it into the world. And in the end, if we are rejected, he does not tell us to lash out, to scold, or to shame, but to shake the dust off of our feet.

We should not carry with us any shame, doubt, or grievance when the message falls on fallow ground. We do not leave in argument. We do not leave in anger, and we do not force our presence upon others. We shake the dust from our feet and understand that they have decided to remain in the tragedy of their lives rather than move forward and break free from the cycles that ensnare them. We do walk on and find others and spread hope as far and wide as we can.

Jesus is showing us how to live this message out in the world and what that world even looks like. We go out as we are, taking what we already have with us, not going to prepare, sitting in a state of expectation and waiting. We do not deny the nature of this world or the dangers that lie within it, but understand that our role in it is the liberation of people and the justice that needs to spread out over the whole of the Earth. We do not do this work for our own aggrandizement, to live a life of ease and care without worry.

The purpose of the work of spreading the gospel is to meet people where they are and to accept where they are without coercion or force. We do not give more than we have to offer, and we do not take more than is given to us. We do not force what we have upon others and allow them to receive all that they desire to receive. We do not set out to be martyrs, only to spread the message where the seed can grow, and to move on when we find a place where it cannot. We do not presuppose how the message will be received. We test and see and hold on to that which is true.

Going Out in the Via Creativa

Problem Solving Is Creative

The Via Creativa is more than just our capacity for imagination or creativity in problem solving. It is also the path where we learn that we are as much God’s child as God’s parent. In going out into the world to do this work, we are helping to raise the child within us to be strong and good. But we are also parenting the child in others to help it be strong enough to cast out the unclean spirits that seek to possess it.

So when we go out, we are talking from the Christ in us to the Christ in them. While we are meeting them where they are, we are trying to remind them of who and what they are.

They are an original blessing that through grace can have their eyes opened to a world more profoundly wonderful and interconnected than the binds that hold them down allow them to see.

Begin With Blessing

This is why we always begin with blessing, not shame. Shame tightens the binds and grants more power to those unclean spirits of fear, doubt, worry, and hate. If we can get them to see that original blessing or grace, to have a twinkle of that original mind or wisdom that is within them, then the opening is there. We can use a metaphor like a high tide raises all ships, but we have to explain that in ways that make them feel it in their own lives. We have to awaken that Christ child within them so that they can see how they are woven into the same divine tapestry that we are, and that their actions and our actions are both working towards justice. But we do not need the fear, worry, doubt, or hatred to be our companions along the way.

We have to remember that the average person we encounter is not evil. They may condone or support evil actions, but deep down inside, people are not cartoonish villains wringing their hands and proclaiming their evil villainy. Even the most selfish, greedy, and power-hungry amongst us think that what they are doing is right.

Our task, then, is to not breed shame and guilt within them, because that will only harden them in the place that they are bound. Our task is to release them. we have to let go of our preconceived notions about those we deem as being on the other side. We have to refuse shame and guilt when we are rejected and the anger that might arise in us based on how we are rejected.

The most difficult task in this work is learning to set down our grievance, urgency, and need to convince others. Arguing with people all too often solidifies them in their beliefs. What we have to do is open them up to get them to see the humanity in others and to feel the part that they are playing either in the harm that they have done or the part that they can play in the healing and restoration of the community and the bringing of justice. Their instincts are already good. They are seeking what they consider to be justice, security, and peace. The problem is that it’s just security and peace for them and those like them, and it is our task to open them up to see that what harms one of us harms all of us. If they don’t listen or they reject us, we dust our feet off and we move on to find others that will listen, knowing that the more the truth is proclaimed in the world, the more the light shines and the darkness retreats.

Savor The Bright Moments

As we do this work, we have to remember to savor any moments that we are welcomed and to delight in any hospitality we find along the way. We keep our eyes open for any sign, no matter how small, that the message is landing. We never forget to laugh, to share our meals and our rest together so that we can continue to be strong for the work ahead. We stand firm in the shared dignity that we find with our fellow laborers in this work and never forget to see the dignity in others. That is, after all, what we are offering: dignity and a life well lived. When we are lucky and the stars align just right, embrace the awe and wonder when we see someone recognize this kinship that we are proclaiming and awaken from the darkness that held them captive, breaking the chains so that they can stand up.

Ministry of Reconciliation

We are called to a ministry of reconciliation, where we are repairing the world and making it better. Once we have learned to stand up on our own, and how to reach out to others to help them stand up, we can see how this peace that we proclaim reinforces itself. When we stand arm in arm, connected together, nothing can get past or through us. We are growing something precious and alive. Success is not what we have torn down, but what we have liberated. What have we brought freedom, peace, and harmony to?

This kind of relational repair and redistribution is the hard work that is worth doing. It takes time and patience, and those are things that we are not encouraged to have in our modern world. It requires us to stay strong yet supple so that we can fit where we are, because we are starting where we are and embracing others where they are, to keep that relationship real and alive so that the world can actually be changed and healed.

The River of Trust

As people who have worked on this repair of our souls so that we can stand, and as disciples who have gone out into the world to heal others and to help them find their reparation and ability to stand, we find the wonderful river of trust that circulates and feeds our communities and makes them strong.

This river is kept healthy by our actions of compassion and mercy that bring the gentle acts that fill it with good water. We refrain from the hatred, coercion, and violence that would pollute the river and take away its life-giving waters. All are welcome to come to the river through respect and mutual care.

We have come to realize that we do not have leaders, but spokespeople, guides, and others who help to facilitate the work because no one is above anyone else. We are all co-laborers in the great work of restoration. Our movement happens because it follows the course of this river. And when others dam it so that the trust cannot flow, we know that just blowing up the dam does not help anyone. It produces a flood downstream, causing more harm than good. Instead, we learn to slowly, piece by piece, dismantle that dam so that the waters can nourish the parched land beyond it, so that life can be restored and trust born anew, carried in new relationships as the river continues to flow.

A Shared Life Takes Shape

Acts 2:42-47

42. They continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and prayer.

43. Fear came on every soul, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles.

44. All who believed were together, and had all things in common.

45. They sold their possessions and goods, and distributed them to all, according as anyone had need.

46. Day by day, continuing steadfastly with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread at home, they took their food with gladness and singleness of heart,

47. praising God, and having favor with all the people. The Lord added to the assembly day by day those who were being saved.

In Acts, we see this community realized in the Jerusalem church. They devoted themselves to the teachings of the apostles, literally to the teachings received by the ones who were told to go out and teach. They came together in fellowship, not a rigid leadership structure, not a community built on rules and restrictions, but in living together. In the breaking of bread, they shared both meals and the life of Christ, and they gathered together to pray, which is both the words that we say in holy and sacred times, and the way we live life.

They lived in mutual aid and mutual care, holding all things in common, making sure that everyone’s needs were met. Every day, they went out to where the people are and spread the good word that grace is available to us all and that we are all created in original blessing. Then, they broke bread in their homes. They were not isolated, and they were not collectivized. They were living in mutual relationship with the community around them.

The world that we see in Acts 2 feels like a utopia. Everyone is taking care of everyone, and they all seem to know what the right thing is to do. It is a hopeful dream of what we could have, which has led many to debate whether or not it actually existed. The story paints a picture of a world where people take care of one another, and no one is left to suffer.

Many have tried to live out the story over the ages. The monks withdrew from the world and created their cloisters where they could inhabit this perfect life together while keeping the rest of the world out. When the Puritans first came, they started a colony based on these ideas. But they lacked the wisdom that we’ve gathered from Matthew 12 and Luke 10. They believed and practiced that people are corrected through law, shame, guilt, and ostracism. They opened their world too quickly because the whims of the king required them to take in people who had not done the work on themselves first or accepted the ways of their community. These newcomers expected the Puritans to provide everything for them so that they would have no need and would be able to just live lazily alongside their neighbors. At least that’s the story as it comes down to us. The problem is that this kind of change requires a cultural shift that leads to personal development and right relationship.

Could a world like this exist? Yes, if we teach people how to do the work themselves, to stand up, to be strong, and to find their way in it. And we knit ourselves together into a tight-knit community that understands that mutual aid and support is how none of us is harmed. That is the long work to get us to this dream. It is possible, accessible, and it does work in small communities. The trick is to teach people and to help people grow into it so that it can grow into larger and larger webs of support.

The work is necessary because if we don’t all come together, then the climate crisis, or some other crisis that is manufactured by the greedy, the fearful, and the power-hungry, will take us back to square one again. This work is alive in us because it is the way of nature.

Nature works more through cooperation and balance than it does through competition. If we can learn to align ourselves with this way, we can build sustainable societies that grow, evolve, and mature, and make the world a better place. We cannot do this simply through law, nostalgia, hope and imagination, or coercion and force. We have to do this by teaching one another to be truly liberated beings, free in this world, yet connected and requiring the mutual aid, support, and care that makes life possible. Law, nostalgia, and coercion cannot build this world. Liberation can.

A Beginning, Not an Ending

If we are going to learn to neither live by the sword nor die by it, we have to learn patience and imagine a new way of living together. This starts, as all things do, with small beginnings. While we can imagine great things, the first steps are always tentative and testing.

The shared life we are working towards is one where everyone can stand up and live their amazing and wonderful truth as a blessing to the world. And that together, we establish systems of mutual aid, care, and support so that no one is left behind, no one is left wanting, and no one is left hurting.

Each and every one of us has a different role in this. For some, it’s telling stories, singing songs, and making art that stretch the imagination and prepare for the changes that need to come. For others, it’s tackling the legal and political systems so that they are actually systems of justice, mutual care, aid, and support for all the people, not just a few. For all of us, it is learning to live again in community, where all voices are heard and recognized, and no one shouts louder than the rest. Where we learn to speak with care and concern, and listen the same way. If we cannot see the pain in the hearts of others, we do not know how to heal them, so they stop lashing out.

For more on Neither Living by the Sword nor Dying by It watch our discussion here:

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Before we enter this study, we need to let go of our preconceived notions so we can listen to the words of Matthew and glean the word of God from them without forcing them to mean what we want or need them to mean.

The Sword in the Garden

Matthew 26:51-52 (cf Luke 22:49–51)

51. Behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand, and drew his sword, and struck the servant of the high priest, and struck off his ear.

52. Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place, for all those who take the sword will die by the sword.

The soldiers have come to arrest Jesus, and Peter has drawn a sword to protect him. He believes the Living Word of God needs protection, and that it is his duty to save the word. Jesus responds with the truth. He tells Peter to put away the sword.

Violence lives because it creates an endless cycle where the injured party injures another. The only way to stop the cycle is to put the sword away, interrupting the cycle of violence. Those who embrace violence die by violence. This is not the way of Jesus.

In the version of this story in Luke, when the soldiers come, the disciples ask if they should take up arms, and one of them does, striking a servant of the high priest. Jesus puts a stop to it and heals the servant’s ear.

Violence and the Cycle of Desire

Romans 12:17-21

17. Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all men.

18. If it is possible, as much as it is up to you, be at peace with all men.

19. Don’t seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God’s wrath. For it is written, “Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.”

20. Therefore “If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in doing so, you will heap coals of fire on his head.”

21. Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Paul tells us to think about what the community sees as noble, and not to repay evil for evil so we can live in peace with everyone. He reminds us that while others might harm us, we never avenge ourselves because vengeance is not ours to mete out.

On the contrary, we do the work of the kin-dom, feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, even if they are our enemies, because this burns away the enmity, because we overcome evil with good.

James 4:1-3

1. Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don’t they come from your pleasures that war in your members?

2. You lust, and don’t have. You murder and covet, and can’t obtain. You fight and make war. You don’t have, because you don’t ask.

3. You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

The writer of James asks us where our conflicts and disputes come from. They are from the craving that was within us. We want what we do not have, and we murder. We desire something we can’t get and argue and fight about it. We don’t have these things because we do not ask for them. When we ask, we still don’t get them because we didn’t ask with right intention. We ask for what we want for our pleasure, not for our need.

What the Sword Really Is

The sword is the symbol for violence. It is taken up in self-defense, in vengeance, and in desire. This sword is the aggression that puts our needs before the needs of others.

Desire or craving is a disruption in the flow of life that functions like an eddy current, drawing elements from the flow to possess it in itself.

When Jesus heals the enemy, he recognizes that he is a servant and compelled to be there at his arrest, reveals his forgiveness by touching him, and liberates him by restoring him and making him whole again.

Refusal is a key aspect of the Via Negativa. It is the power to say no and resist our desires and ache for vengeance to interrupt the cycle of violence so healing and restoration are possible.

The World This Story Names

This is a story about a world where far too many give into their desire and craving and grasp onto the sword, bringing violence, conflict, and coercion with them, and about a faithfulness that refuses to pick up that sword and heal our enemies, even when we know the cost to ourselves will be great.

The great river of life flows through everything, and we cannot allow ourselves to become eddies that trap what must flow on.

In refusing to pick up the sword, we are saying no to vengeance and coercion as well as our control over the outcome in order to break the cycle of violence and bring healing and restoration to the world.

Letting Go Without Looking Away

We have to let go of our grasping desire that tells us we deserve something and others don’t, refusing to give into the cravings for the things we believe we are worthy to have.

No one deserves anything, and none are worthy. These are the language of conflict and the tools of grasping hands.

That does not mean that we sit idle and passively wait or watch what is going on in the world. We don’t. We observe, making space to take in the facts and the lessons we need to learn and unlearn.

There is no room for vengeance and violence. They disrupt and shatter the peace of life.

We must lament the lamentable and unlearn the ways that trap us in this seemingly endless cycle of violence.

What Remains Holy When We Refuse the Sword

We are struggling for life, and life more abundantly. We don’t create a good or better life in the ashes of war, but in the light of a new day. Life is precious, but more than that it is filled with cooperation and competition. Competition is only conflict if we allow it to be.

In life, we find awe in its diversity and tenacity. We live gratitude when we build this new world together. Our reverence for life guides us in all our steps, reminding us when harm comes to any of us, we are all diminished for it.

Coercion is a poison to cooperation, so we do not drink it. Grasping takes the fun out of competition and robs us of joy. When we refuse the sword and hold onto life, we are not refusing to take action. We are denying vengeance and desire’s hold on us so we can tend the garden of life so it may grow ever more fruitful.

This dream is the delight of our heart and the hope that drives us forward.

Creativity Without Violence

Refusing vengeance and coercion, and embracing the delight in and hope for a shared life, empowers the compassion we bring into the Via Creativa. The path forward is not dictated for us, and we now know that we always have a choice; it is up to us to make those choices wisely.

We look for ways we can turn the perceived strengths of our adversaries against them or to show them for the empty vanity they are.

Proclaiming a thing does not make it so. We act, rooted in our beliefs and convictions, and do not obey their petty whims. This is the heart of nonviolent resistance.

When the empire tells you to only buy salt from them, you march to the sea and make your own salt. When they tell you to move so they can harm others, you stand firm.

Through our creativity and imagination, we seek ways to unmask the illusion of their power and authority and preserve what we love. We always save what we love instead of fighting what we hate. Hate is a tool of the adversary to breed division and conflict. It is the sword we refuse to pick up.

Transforming Ourselves and Our World

If we are going to ever live in a world free from the sword, we have to transform ourselves and the systems we live within into something new.

This has to start with our language. This is no above and below; there is only the here and now. This is learning to live with, not above, beside, or opposed to each other. We have no leaders, only guides and facilitators. We must learn to walk and not follow.

This is the antithesis of the rugged individualism and all-consuming collectivism we fight about. It is realizing that we are harmed when others are harmed, so we reduce the chances of that happening through mutual aid, care, and support. We work together on big problems and in smaller groups or alone on the rest. We rebuild our systems to reflect the natural order where cooperation and competition both exist, but prevent cooperation from becoming controlling and competition from being coercive and divisive.

It is about teaching our cultures and civilizations the lessons we were all supposed to learn in kindergarten: how to share, how to get along, and how not to hit each other.

Candor as a Communal Practice

Taking up the sword and engaging in conflict is a refusal to embrace life and live together.

The first step on the path to healing is candor, which is all about being open and honest. Too often, when we are not lying about our intentions, we are guarded and only say what we think people are willing to hear. Candor teaches us not only to speak our truth honestly and completely, but to be open to the dialogue that will follow.

We do not grasp tightly to the truth we speak. We offer it lightly and allow it to take its place in the discussion. Candor does not accept anything less from others in the dialogue and unmasks and invites participation through gentle questions and direct speech.

We guard against candor picking up the sword of violence and coercion, but recognize that truth itself is a double-edged sword that often cuts both sides. The goal of candor is not to dominate, but to find space where the truth can live and thrive.

Where Resistance Becomes Coercion

Sometimes it’s easy to tell when we’ve crossed the line between resistance, coercion, and violence. When we lay hands on other people or strike them, violence is easy to see. When we strike terror and fear into others, coercion is easy to see. But there are many who feel that talking about hell, hellfire, and the vengeance of God is not an act of coercion, when it is.

In the epistle of John, John tells us two things: that God is love and whoever does not know love does not know God, and that true love casts out fear. Whether it is recognized in the moment or not, all acts of coercion and violence are acts of fear. Fear that we do not have something, fear we will not get something, or fear that our way is not going to prevail.

When we learn to act in a way that is born and centered in love, a love that casts out fear, fear is still in the room. We have not given way to certainty or a belief in our own righteousness that we alone are doing the right thing. We don’t let ourselves succumb to the great lie of violence that says, “I had no other choice.” Anything we do when we have no other choice is a reaction, not an action.

When we take this step back and root ourselves in the basic compassion that we have for the world and then act forward from there, casting our fear to the side so that we can speak and act in a way that brings that compassion truly and fully forward without violence, without threats, without coercing other people, then and only then can we see that we are acting out of love and not fear.

Fortunately for us, we have many examples. We can see the courage of Gandhi’s resistance movement. We have the witness of the Freedom Riders and those who sat at the Woolworth counters. We have the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the March on Washington. We can see truth and love in full action, refusing to take up the sword and winning the day.

No, winning the day is not always winning the battle or the war, but every win moves us ever closer to that victory where we can all live in that freedom, compassion, and justice that we are seeking.

Anger, Fire, and the Choice We Make

In this life, anger is often born through the mistreatment that happens to us or from witnessing it happening to others. That anger burns within us. It is a fire, and like all fires, we have a choice in what we do with it.

Some choose to quench it, to put it out, so that they don’t see or feel the injustice and just live in compliance. Others give in to their fear and pain and strike out in violence and coercive action, taking up the sword and doing further harm, continuing the cycle that they’re trapped in. While both of these are understandable as a reaction in this time of anger, our choice, if we are to live in love and cast out fear, is to take that fire and place it either into the hearth or into the forge.

That anger is the evidence of the outrage that we feel at either the sight or the experience of injustice. The anger itself is not wrong. Error creeps in in how we use it. If we add that fire to the hearth, then it lights the room and helps us see more clearly the world that we live in. It does not become the lens through which we see, but it highlights aspects of our lives that we may not have seen before. If we take it to the forge, we are not taking it there to make a sword. Instead, we are using it to heat the fires that will turn the sword into a plowshare, so that we can care for and cultivate this world, bringing it new life and new growth without destroying it.

This is not an easy path to walk, but it is one that clarifies. Are we carrying with us a sword to strike a blow, or a plow that can split the ground open to cultivate new life and seeds? A sword strikes out at others. A plow prepares the way for new life to grow.

A Word to the Weary

I know how hard it can be to walk through this dry land and hold on to our hope that we will one day arrive at the promised land, green and overflowing with milk and honey.

It’s easy to feel like we’re failing, and the exhaustion sets in as so many terrors are wrought to us and around us. It’s easy to be afraid. None of that is a flaw. It’s merely a sign that we’re human. So long as we’re doing whatever is within our power to make the world a better place, we have not failed.

If we don’t stop and take care of ourselves and make sure that we are in the best mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical state that we can be in, of course we will be exhausted. We have to rotate in and out of the struggle, or we’ll burn ourselves up and burn out.

It’s not wrong to be afraid. But it’s important for us to remember that the fear that anyone or anything instills in us is only a projection of the fear that it feels in itself. People and systems make us afraid in the same way that they are, so we feel powerless before them.

The truth is, they are always powerless before us. What they believe is power is shallow, empty, and brittle. So long as we push on and push forward after we rest and recuperate and take care of ourselves, we have not failed. And as long as we are able to live in our love and compassion and cast aside the fear in order to take action, we have not succumbed to it.

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Entering the Story

It is really hard to talk about the themes of this time of year, about incarnation and the birth of the Christ child, given everything that is happening in the world.

There is the fictitious “war on Christmas,” where people try to weaponize the very idea of Christmas. There are the ongoing genocides and fights throughout the world. The message of God entering the world through the vulnerability of a child is one that many of us do not want to hear.

We want a God of strength.

A God of might.

A Zeus standing on Mount Olympus, raining lightning bolts down on our enemies.

But the God we meet in these stories is one who comes as a baby. A child who has to flee, run, and hide because terrible things are being done to end his life before his ministry ever truly begins.

The Gospel is a message of peace. We call Jesus the Prince of Peace, and yet, two thousand years later, there is still so much violence in the world, much of it done in his name.

So we have to ask what kind of Gospel this actually is. We have to look at the story of mutual indwelling that arises through the Nativity and through the days that follow Christmas, and ask how that Gospel lives in a world ruled by the sword.

The Sword Running Through Matthew

Throughout the Gospel of Matthew, there is a theme that is often taken out of context. It appears in three separate passages, at three separate moments, but together they form a single through line.

Jesus tells us he did not come to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34).

He tells us that from the time of John until now the kingdom has suffered violence, and the violent are trying to take it, to rob it, to plunder it (Matthew 11:12).

And at the very end of the story, in the garden, he tells Peter to lay down his sword, because the one who takes up the sword will perish by it (Matthew 26:52).

That message runs throughout the Gospel of Matthew and paints a very coherent picture. We see it already present in the Nativity story itself.

Jesus comes into the world and is instantly divisive, not because of something he does, but because of the culture he arrives in.

Mary is pregnant.

Women are not supposed to be pregnant outside of marriage.

The law says she should be cast out.

The law says she should be punished.

Joseph has to struggle with that system inside himself.

The sword is already there. But Mary and Joseph do not take it up.

They make peace with one another.

Nonviolence at the Beginning

When they arrive in Bethlehem, they find a place for the child to be born. They do not push their way in. They do not take by force.

When they are warned that Herod is sending troops into the city, they flee. Joseph does not take up the sword. Mary does not take up the sword. They run. They hide. They protect the child.

The stories surrounding the birth of Jesus are stories of nonviolent resistance and mutual care.

The great mystery of Christmas is that God chooses to be born as a helpless, fragile child. Mystery here does not mean something to be solved. Mystery is something you enter. It is something like a Zen koan. You chew on it. You live inside it.

Mary gives birth to her Creator.

And the God who created Mary now depends on her.

That is the Gospel of mutual indwelling.

God is in all things.

All things are in God.

And because of that, we depend on one another.

Why Mutual Care Provokes Violence

Deep down, mutual indwelling awakens care. We feel the need to take care of the Christ child, not just within ourselves, not just within our families, but within our communities and the circles that stretch outward from us.

But this does not bring peace.

It does not bring peace because mutual care is at odds with the way the world prefers to function. The world prefers hierarchy. It prefers separation. It prefers systems where some people are greater and better than others.

That is why Herod sends the troops.

Power in the world is dictated, not shared. It is exercised for the benefit of the few, not for the well-being of everyone.

This is why the Gospel is experienced as dangerous. Not because it attacks the world, but because it reveals it.

The Sword Misused

Most of the time when people encounter Jesus saying he did not come to bring peace but a sword, they either gloss over it or weaponize it.

Some use it to justify violent rhetoric, to say we are warriors for Christ, that we should pick up the sword and bring the kingdom of God by force. But when you actually look at the story, that interpretation collapses.

Jesus does not come into the world with a sword. His arrival causes others to take theirs up. The slaughter of the innocents is not incidental to the Christmas story. It is part of it. It is the world responding to mutual indwelling with violence.

The kingdom is not advancing by force. It is being met with force.

The Cleansing of the Temple

This misunderstanding often shows up in how people read the cleansing of the temple.

Jesus does not pick up a sword. He picks up something used to corral animals (Matthew 21:12-17). The text does not say he beats people. It does not say he wounds anyone. It says he overturns tables and drives the animals out. It then says he healed people and was praised by the children. And that displeased those in power.

This is not an act of violence or the children would be afraid. This is not an act of war. It is a prophetic disruption.

And even here, the violence people imagine is projected onto Jesus by those who need him to justify their own coercion.

The Refusal in the Garden

The sword appears one final time in Matthew in the garden.

Peter draws it.

Jesus tells him to put it away.

Those who take the sword will perish by the sword.

This is the closure of the motif. The Gospel is not confused. It is consistent.

The Gospel does not draw the sword. Instead, it invites people into a different way of being that the coercive imperial world sees as hostile.

If all we know is coercion, then nonviolence is resistance.

Consent is resistance to coercion.

Because of that, consent is seen as a threat.

This is what causes empire to draw its sword.

Law, Coercion, and the “Or Else”

This is why the Gospel clashes so deeply with systems built on law as punishment.

Law that controls brings death (Roman 7:10-11).

Law that threatens brings punishment (Roman 7:9).

The law of the Spirit is different (Roman 8:2). It is not built on “or else.”

When Jesus names the greatest commandments, neither of them is a “thou shalt not.”

Matthew 22:34-40

34. But the Pharisees, when they heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together.

35. One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him.

36. “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?”

37. Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’

38. This is the first and great commandment.

39. A second likewise is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

40. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

Love that is coerced is not love.

Compassion that requires threat is not compassion.

People who cannot imagine a world without coercion try to add the “or else” back in. They want obedience enforced. They want love backed by threat.

When they cannot have it, they reach for the sword.

Via Positiva · Living Awake

We begin this work in the Via Positiva because faith begins in awe, wonder, and delight. This is how the ground is prepared. This is how the seed is nourished.

As we step back into our ordinary lives, we are invited to notice where we are bowing to coercion and giving up our right to consent.

Consent must be given.

It cannot be taken.

We do not obey in advance.

We do not obey at all.

We consent to live together in mutual care.

This is the Gospel that draws the sword. Not because it wields it, but because it reveals a world that cannot live without it.

Would you like more? Here is an episode of Creation’s Paths where we talk about the gospel that draws the sword.