Romans

The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is working to infiltrate the whole creation with God's love.

When I combined the popular ideas of God in my mind, I ended up with a strange stew—a lover God who would torture me with fire if I stepped out of line and bless me with diamonds if I obeyed. In other words, my image of God had a serious borderline personality disorder.

In 1983, Kenneth Mitchell and Herbert Anderson wrote that "death is only one form of loss." This would have been unthinkable for Christians half a century earlier.

As God's people, we are the remnants and promise of new life.

The three readings for this Sunday have few obvious connections. But they do each point to forms of holiness: Genesis points to vocation, Romans points to faith, and John points to rebirth.

Faith, birth, vocation: our readings offer us profound, intimidating terms for thinking about what it means to be in relationship with God.

The doctrine of justification really occurs only in Romans and Galatians. But wherever you look in Paul's letters, you see him arguing and working for the unity of the church.

On a Sunday when John the Baptist's call for repentance roars in our ears, we need reminders of the precedence of gift, the prevenience of grace. For John's sermonic cry to "prepare the way of the Lord" can seem all task and no gift. It calls out the Pelagian in all of us, the voluntarist who wants to build the kingdom. Careless hearing leads us to imagine that if we "make his paths straight," he will come.

We cannot choose who God will call into Christ’s body in baptism.

Christ as weapon, Paul?

Christ as weapon, Paul?