27th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C, RCL)

I was 29, agonizing over a decision, when I came upon a little book by Robert Ochs.

Our texts du jour include passages from Lamentations and Habakkuk that lament or anticipate the desolation of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. What’s it like when calamity or God’s judgment leaves the land, the houses or the people desolate?

As wildfires raged nearby, the lectionary readings spoke to the uncertainty and fear of being displaced.

An emphasis on the decision character of faith has a long and deep history in the American psyche going back to our Puritan and evangelical ancestors. From Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney to Billy Sunday, Billy Graham and their successors, faith, as encountered in the idiom both of born-again revivalism and of religious “progressives,” has served as shorthand for “I have decided to follow Jesus.” But the biblical meaning of faith cannot be reduced to individualistic voluntarism.