Prayer against the Machine

Preached at Wayside Friends Church

January 25, 2026

The question I want us to think about is this:  Is prayer the most important act of resistance to evil that we can take? I think it is. 

Prayer is a gift to us from God, a means of grace, a grace. It is a gift we need to open and to use for our own sakes but also for the sake of our world—both the world of humanity and the wild world. We need to pray, and everything else needs for us to pray. God tells us to pray, God helps us when we pray, and God can speak into us when we pray.

There is so much praying going on in the Bible.  I invite you to look through the Old and New Testaments to see just how often people talked with God—and heard from God.  Prayers make up the longest book in the Bible, the Psalms, and remind us that hymns too are prayers. Some of the prayers are raw with anger and sorrow, and others dance with joy. 

We can see from the Biblical examples that no subject is off limits and no emotion is out of bounds.  In fact, the best thing to do with our joy, our contentment, our sorrow, our rage, and our despair is to tell God about it.  But just telling is not enough.

There is also listening to God. This is hard work since God rarely speaks aloud, but if we have the faith to pray, we can have the patience to sit with God until God speaks into us in one way or another.  

Jesus had a lot to say about prayer.  He counseled privacy, simplicity, persistence, and trust in God’s character. He also had some things to avoid: vain repetitions, showing off, hypocrisy, calling down fire on other people. 

When his followers asked him to teach them to pray, the prayer we know as the Lord’s Prayer was his answer.It recognizes our close relationship to God with the word “father,” and also signals respect with the idea of God’s kingdom arriving and the need for our obedience with “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven.” 

This prayer recognizes that God forgiving us for our errors and trespasses is intertwined with our forgiving others for their errors and trespasses. 

It includes a request that God care for our daily needs. It asks God to guide us away from temptation and to rescue us from evil. 

As with all other fixed prayers, this prayer can be said mindlessly, without noticing how far-reaching it will be when God answers it.  But it has worldwide implications.

Though Jesus prayed much in private, he had several prayers that were public enough to be written down.  I won’t include John 17, though it is well worth reading and taking to heart. But here are 5 short examples of public prayer, 3 of them from the cross itself.

When Jesus came to the home of Mary and Martha after Lazarus had died, they bemoaned his tardiness in getting there. “If you had only been here, my brother need not have died,” they reproached him. “ When Jesus arrived at the tomb, he looked up and said, ‘Father, I thank you that you hear me. I know that you always hear me, but I’m saying this for the benefit of the people standing here so they  may believe you have sent me.” And then he called Lazarus out of the tomb (John 11).

It just may be that sometimes God asks us to pray our prayer out loud, taking the risk of public humiliation if the answer is not immediate or not what we hoped for. Whatever follows our prayer may be spectacular in the moment or ignite a slow burning fuse for later illumination. 

Jesus also invited three disciples to watch with him in the garden on the eve of his crucifixion, telling them to pray that they not fall into temptation. Then he prayed aloud, perhaps essentially for the same thing: “Father, if it be possible, if You are willing, let this cup pass from me; yet not my will but Yours be done.” He prayed this earnestly, sweating blood. God sent him angels to strengthen him, but the cup did not pass away from him. And the disciples slept through it, exhausted from sorrow (Luke 22:42). 

Three other public prayers were from the cross.  I don’t know the exact order but intuitively, this is how I see them.  “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Matthew 27:46). “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). These three prayers out of extreme suffering from which God has not delivered him illustrate that for Jesus, and for us, the priorities are generosity of spirit issuing in forgiveness, despair honestly expressed, and the choice to trust through it all.

Prayer cracks our hearts open to God, and as we make ourselves present with God, as we present ourselves as living sacrifices to God, God enters through that crack and changes everything.  

We learn we can trust God. We become more open to hearing God and more willing to do what God tells us to do. We invite God to fulfill God’s will on earth—praying against the injustice and greed and selfishness and violence, praying against the worship of power and money, praying against our own tendencies to repay evil for evil, an eye for an eye or worse, and praying in combat with the systems by which humans oppress and depress each other.

We do not know how far these prayers reach, only that we must pray them.  And we don’t have to fear getting them wrong, because, as St. Paul tells us, God’s Spirit prays through our prayers, even though we don’t know for sure how to pray.  St. Paul also tells us to pray without ceasing, carrying our hearts throughout the day open to God as much as we can, listening as well as telling.  

I’ll tell you a couple of stories about prayers and pray-ers in the Bible.

The first is the story of Jonah. I think it’s fair to imagine that Jonah prayed to God to aid Israel against their enemies, as anyone might do. Instead, Jonah heard from God that he should go preach to Israel’s worst enemy, Assyria. Jonah ran the opposite direction. Famously, his ship nearly went down in a storm, and he confessed that they would have to throw him overboard to stop the storm. When they did, a fish swallowed him, at which time Jonah prayed, from inside the fish. His prayer, summarized, went something like this, “In despair, from the depths of the grave, I called for help; you hurled me into the sea and your waves swept over me.  Worse than that, I feared I had been banished from your sight. But you saved me from the grave. Even as I was drowning, I prayed to you, and I will do what you say when you save me from this mess I’m in.” 

After the fish vomited him up, Jonah went to Nineveh in Assyria and preached that the judgment of God would fall on them in 40 days.  To his shock and horror, they all repented and changed their ways. So God changed course and didn’t destroy them.  

Jonah was very displeased and angry and said to God: “This is exactly what I expected, and that’s why I ran away. I knew you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending disaster. Now kill me, for I’d rather die than live.”  And because of the character of God, a lesson about compassion comes to Jonah rather than punishment.

And there are lessons here for us, too, about prayer and action. When we pray, we open ourselves to God, and what God will say in that opening may surprise and shock us. Our action comes out of what God tells us to do. We may not love it. We may run from doing it. But it will still be waiting on the other side of whatever ordeal we put ourselves through to avoid it. When we pray for God’s will to be done, we are opening ourselves to being the ones to do that will.

The second is the story of Saul, later to be known as Paul (Acts 9). A devout Pharisee, Saul prayed several times daily for the redemption of Israel. Saul was therefore full of anger at those who exchanged their loyalty to Israel for their loyalty to the risen Christ. They preached sermons accusing their own community of faithlessness and murder, and Saul made it his job to punish them. He began to destroy the church, dragging men and women to prison. 

It doesn’t take much imagination to think that the church prayed mightily to God as they scattered from Jerusalem. They likely prayed along the lines of Acts 4: 24-31, something like this: “Sovereign God, you made the heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through David, saying, why do the nations of the earth rage, and plot, and take their stand, and gather together against the Lord and the Christ? They conspired against Jesus, whom you anointed, and carried out their will against him, with violence you allowed and even wove into your plan.  Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your words with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus." And this prayer shook the room where they met, and they were filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.

So the believers in Damascus waited for Saul, bringing with him his authorization to arrest them and haul them off to prison. Do you think they prayed to the sovereign God, calling God’s attention to the rage and violence of those opposing the Way of Christ, and opening themselves to be agents of God’s Spirit, speaking God’s words with boldness? I’m sure they did.  

And what happened? The risen Christ confronted Saul directly, called him to account, explained to him just who and what he was doing, and told him what to do next.  The light of Jesus blinded him for three days, making him helpless, rather than powerful. 

And one of those praying in Damascus, Ananias, heard also from God, heard something he didn’t want to hear.  “Go to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying.  He has seen a vision that you will come and restore his sight.” 

Like Jonah, Ananias was reluctant.  “You know, Lord, that this is the man responsible for violence against your church and that he has come here to continue to oppress your followers.”  

But God insisted:  “This is my chosen instrument to carry my name to the Gentiles and their kings, and even also to the Jews."  

So Ananias obeyed, Saul received his sight, both physical and spiritual, and he was baptized into the Way and set about right away preaching to the Israelites to prove that Jesus is the Christ.  In a nice reversal, they conspire to kill him.  He fled Damascus, and the rest of his world-changing life is in the book of Acts.  

But you know, what Saul, now Paul, was called to do was alien to his natural yearnings.  In Romans 9-11, he expresses his heartbreak over his nation. He says he would be willing to be accursed if they would only see the light and welcome the Christ.  He says, “My heart’s desire and prayer to God is for the Israelites to be saved. Their zeal for God is misguided, based on their own rules for right living, not on God’s, and they refused to submit to God’s righteousness. They did not recognize that Christ is the end of the law.” In other words, they refused to present their bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, true worship, and to be transformed by God’s spirit by the renewing of their minds.  Instead, they remained conformed to the world’s systems of power and violence. 

Against those systems, prayer is our most radical resistance.

Here’s my hope. This sermon will have challenged you to pray, to pray humbly, authentically, vigorously, asking God, who is just as well as merciful, to intervene on behalf of humankind. Pray as specifically as you want for the results you believe to be on God’s agenda for nations, for neighbors, for yourself. Let there be space in your praying for God to move in and on you. When God moves you to act, do what you’re told. 

Prayer affirms our hope in God; obedience affirms our faith in God; and love affirms our kinship with God.

Jesus and the Miracle of Jonah

Preached at Entiat Friends Church

March 22, 2015

Have you ever noticed that Jesus went out of his way to bring up the story of Jonah? Jonah has to have been the least favorite prophet for Jewish folks who every day thanked God they were not Gentiles.  Jonah shows up running from God’s call to go to Assyria, Israel’s enemy, to the city of Nineveh, to preach to non-Jews.  His efforts to avoid God’s call land him in cold water and then in the belly of a fish.  He personally repents, and God gives him another chance to obey.  When he does, the people of Nineveh repent so thoroughly that even children and animals wear sackcloth and ashes.  Jonah waits for God to destroy Nineveh, and instead God forgives them, to Jonah’s angry dismay.  So when Jesus brings up the sign of Jonah, he is not only talking about disappearing for three days and coming back  (his coming death and resurrection) but also about the idea that God might care for the enemies of the Jews, the Romans, and other Gentiles as well.  No wonder these references made people mad. 

Each time Jesus mentions Jonah, he does so in the context of clarifying what is really important to God. This means that we can look at what comes right before and right after to help us understand what Jesus is clarifying. These clarifications take four or five main directions.

Here are the passages:

Matthew 12, summary of context: After being confronted for “harvesting” grain on Sabbath and healing a man’s hand on Sabbath, Jesus asserts he is Lord of Sabbath.  After being accused of casting out demons by a demon, Jesus asserts his authority over demons and warns against attributing the work of God to the devil. Then he says:

 “How evil and apostate, how faithless to God are the people of this day! You ask me for a miracle? No! The only miracle you will be given is the miracle of the prophet Jonah. In the same way that Jonah spent three days and nights in the big fish, so will the Son of Man spend three days and nights in the depths of the earth. On the Judgment Day the people of Nineveh will stand up and accuse you, because they turned from their sins when they heard Jonah preach, and I tell you that there is something here greater than Jonah!” (Matthew 12) Following this, his mother and brothers show up and Jesus asserts that his true family are those who hear and obey God. Then he tells the story of the Sower and the Seed and the various kinds of Soil.

Matthew 16, summary of context: After being confronted for eating with unwashed hands, Jesus asserts that uncleanness is a heart condition, not a problem with hands. He heals a Canaanite girl, a Gentile, and feeds a crowd of over 4000 in a Gentile district, Decapolis. The Pharisees and Sadducees ask him for a sign.  Then he says this:

“You can foretell the weather from the sunset or sunrise, but you cannot interpret the signs concerning these times. How evil and godless are the people of this day! You ask me for a miracle? No! The only miracle you will be given is the miracle of Jonah.” (Matthew 16) Following this, Jesus warns his disciples against the “yeast” (teaching) of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Luke 11, summary: Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, praises Mary for listening, teaches the disciples to pray.  Jesus heals a demon-possessed boy, and the crowd speculates he is doing so by the power of the devil.  Jesus asserts that the kingdom of God has come among them, and that the blessed ones are those who hear and obey God.  Then Jesus says:

“How evil are the people of this day! They ask for a miracle, but none will be given them except the miracle of Jonah. In the same way that the prophet Jonah was a sign for the people of Nineveh, so the son of Man will be a sign for the people of this day. … On the Judgment Day the people of Nineveh will stand up and accuse you because they turned from their sins when they heard Jonah preach; and I assure you that there is something here greater than Jonah!” (Luke 11) Then Jesus talks about letting  light shine without blocking it, so that others can see by it.  He attends a dinner at a Pharisee’s house and takes the opportunity to confront their emphasis on external piety without caring for cleaning up their hearts.

Although each passage occurs in its own context, threads of meaning tie the contexts together.  Here are those threads.

First, the context teaches us that God cares more about humans and their needs than about the Law. When we look at what precedes and follows these comments by Jesus, we find the following.

Matthew 12 raises the issue of Sabbath-keeping. Several Old Testament prophets condemned Israel to God’s judgment specifically for breaking the laws about Sabbath.  So you can imagine that folks who carefully followed the law like the Pharisees are shocked when Jesus’s disciples “harvest” and eat some grain from fields as they walk along on the Sabbath, and when Jesus heals a man with a paralyzed arm on the Sabbath. These actions and Jesus’s words make the Pharisees so angry they plot to kill him. Jesus reprimands those with a legalistic view of the Sabbath by reminding them of what Hosea the prophet said: God desires goodness, kindness, faithfulness, not sacrifices.  This means that the actions proceeding from a good, kind, faithful heart are what God has as a priority.  Jesus announces to the legalistic folks that even they would pull a sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath, and that doing good to humans on that day is also important and perfectly lawful.  He asserts that he himself, “the Son of Man,” is Lord of the Sabbath. 

Second, Jesus shows that we cannot limit God’s generosity and grace to those who are like us, and that if we limit these for others, we limit them for ourselves.

Jesus heals a man possessed by an evil spirit in both Matthew 12 and Luke 11.  The Pharisees attribute this miracle-working power to the devil rather than to God.  Jesus says that this is first impossible, and second unforgiveable.  Why is it unforgiveable?  Because when the Pharisees refuse to welcome the healing and freeing power of God for others, they set themselves outside it as well.  I can’t be forgiven if I’m not willing for God to forgive others; I can’t be healed if I’m not willing for God to heal others; I can’t be the one God chooses to live in if I won’t allow God to live in others, also. And further, God does all the good we see—every good and perfect gift comes from God.  If the Pharisees had known God, they would have known this truth. When Jesus teaches about prayer in Luke 11, he gives his followers a model prayer and encourages them to persist in praying because God is good and gives good gifts.

Third, Jesus goes on to say that no one gets to sit by and stay neutral. 

Those who meet him have two choices—to gather close like fish in a net, or like folks welcomed into a home, or to run away in terror, to scatter. He also points out that we can tell what is in people’s hearts by what they say; perhaps this is like the psychological tendency to project on others what is actually true (and what we dislike) about ourselves. There is no way to stop this process except to admit the nature of our own hearts and open them for God to change. The gospel of John puts it like this:  this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world and people prefer the darkness because they think it hides their evil deeds.  C.S. Lewis puts it this way: God is the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from (Mere Christianity).

Fourth, Jesus warns his listeners to be authentic and make sure the light in them isn’t darkness. He makes that really specific by accusing the Pharisees of hypocrisy—cleaning up their facades while carrying around greed and wickedness; tithing spices while neglecting justice and the love of God; loving status while being dead inside; loading up others with burdens while offering no help to carry them; building monuments for the prophets while planning to kill Jesus.

In Matthew 16 and Luke 11, Jesus warns his followers about the yeast of Pharisees and Sadducees—their teaching and their hypocrisy.  Their teaching is that only by careful obedience to the Law can a person be redeemed, and their hypocrisy is that they teach this while allowing themselves loopholes and justifying their disobediences. God doesn’t like this:  God wants us to repent for own disobedience and to be merciful to others, giving them room for God to work on them without attributing the work of God’s Holy Spirit in them to the devil.

Fifth, Jesus teaches that obedience is the identifying characteristic of the family of God. When Jesus turns around and hears that his mother and brothers have come to see him, he spreads his arms wide to include all his followers and says, “All who do what God wants them to do are my family.” When a woman blesses Jesus’s mother, Jesus in reply blesses those who hear and obey God.

What might keep people from obeying God? The story of the sower and the four kinds of soil illustrates how having hard hearts, being unwilling to suffer, or worrying about money prevents people from hearing and obeying the good news.  But some accept it, let it sink into their hearts and grow, and bring forth the good, kind, faithful actions that show their hearts have changed into good, kind, faithful hearts.

To summarize the threads of meaning in this passage:

Religious hypocrisy separates people from knowing God; authenticity makes knowing God possible.  How can we become more authentic? The way to authenticity is honesty about our neediness before God and obedience to the voice of God’s Holy Spirit.

We can put human needs ahead of rules because God authorizes us to do so.

We have to keep God’s justice for ourselves and distribute God’s mercy on others.

We have to take our light out from under the barrel of politics and legalism and obey the mandate to be a light to the world.

Jesus says that the answer to our fears is to gather with him, to press closer to him, and not to split up and run for it. 

Our stance toward those in need around us is to heal, to give food, to set them free from the evil one.  Our stance toward ourselves is to focus on the inside of the cup, not the outside, and be honest about what’s there. 

What exactly is “the miracle of Jonah”? Is it that he was swallowed by a fish and then vomited up?  That previews the burial and resurrection of Jesus. Is it that he actually did obey God?  Though certainly not his preference, yet he did what God said. Is it that God used Jonah to redeem people who were enemies to the Jews and who did not know God previously? This is a sign that God’s love and redeeming work are for the whole of humanity, not just the Jews.

We are called to listen to God and obey. Jonah eventually did this. Jesus always did this.  Jesus promised us the Holy Spirit, who is voice of God to us, guiding us truly and guiding us closer to truth.  Jesus himself is the Truth.  Like Jesus, we point to a God who cares that all repent and be redeemed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  This frees us to live at peace with God, reconciled with God, able to look into God’s eyes and see the love there, and to share that reconciliation with others.

Jesus, Jonah, and Authenticity

Preached at Homedale Friends Community Church

May 6, 2012

Jonah has to have been the least favorite prophet for Jewish folks who every day thanked God they were not Gentiles.  Jonah shows up running from God’s call to go to Assyria, to the city of Nineveh, to preach to non-Jews.  His efforts to avoid God’s call land him in cold water and then in the belly of a fish.  He personally repents, and God gives him another chance to obey.  When he does, the people of Nineveh repent so thoroughly that even children and animals wear sackcloth and ashes.  Jonah waits for God to destroy Nineveh, and instead God forgives them, to Jonah’s angry dismay.  So when Jesus brings up the sign of Jonah, he is not only talking about disappearing for three days and coming back  (his coming death and resurrection) but also about taking the possibility of reconciling with God to the enemies of the Jews, the Romans, and to other Gentiles as well, despicable as they are.  No wonder these references made people mad.  They understood he was saying that God loves more people than the Jews.

When I started thinking about Jesus referring to Jonah, the above was what I thought would be the main idea. However, each time Jesus mentions Jonah, he does so in the context of clarifying what is really important to God.  These clarifications take five main directions.

Here are the passages:

Then some Pharisees and teachers of the Law say, “Teacher, we want to see you perform a miracle.”

“How evil and apostate, how faithless to God are the people of this day!” Jesus exclaims.  “You ask me for a miracle? No! The only miracle you will be given is the miracle of the prophet Jonah. In the same way that Jonah spent three days and nights in the big fish, so will the Son of Man spend three days and nights in the depths of the earth. On the Judgment Day the people of Nineveh will stand up and accuse you, because they turned from their sins when they heard Jonah preach, and I tell you that there is something here greater than Jonah!” (Matthew 12)

Jesus says, “You can foretell the weather from the sunset or sunrise, but you cannot interpret the signs concerning these times. How evil and godless are the people of this day! You ask me for a miracle? No! The only miracle you will be given is the miracle of Jonah.” (Matthew 16)

Jesus says:

“How evil are the people of this day! They ask for a miracle, but none will be given them except the miracle of Jonah. In the same way that the prophet Jonah was a sign for the people of Nineveh, so the son of Man will be a sign for the people of this day. … On the Judgment Day the people of Nineveh will stand up and accuse you because they turned from their sins when they heard Jonah preach; and I assure you that there is something here greater than Jonah!” (Luke 11)

Since each passage occurs in its own context, I looked for threads of meaning that tied the contexts together.  Here are those threads.

First, the context teaches us that God cares more about humans and their needs than about the Law.

Several Old Testament prophets condemned Israel to God’s judgment specifically for breaking the laws about Sabbath.  So you can imagine that folks who carefully followed the law like the Pharisees are shocked when Jesus’s disciples “harvest” and eat some grain from fields as they walk along on the Sabbath, and when Jesus heals a man with a paralyzed arm on the Sabbath. These actions and Jesus’s words make the Pharisees so angry they plot to kill him. Jesus reprimands those with a legalistic view of the Sabbath by reminding them of what Hosea the prophet said: God desires goodness, kindness, faithfulness, not sacrifices.  This means that the actions proceeding from a good, kind, faithful heart are what God has as a priority.  Jesus announces to the legalistic folks that even they would pull a sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath, and that doing good to humans on that day is also important and perfectly lawful.  He asserts that he himself, “the Son of Man,” is Lord of the Sabbath. 

Second, Jesus shows that we cannot limit God’s generosity and grace to those who are like us, and that if we limit these for others, we limit them for ourselves.

Jesus heals a man whom an evil spirit has made unable to see or speak.  The Pharisees attribute this miracle-working power to the devil rather than to God.  Jesus says that this is first impossible, and second unforgiveable.  Why is it unforgiveable?  Because when the Pharisees refuse to welcome the healing and freeing power of God for others, they set themselves outside it as well.  I can’t be forgiven if I’m not willing for God to forgive others; I can’t be healed if I’m not willing for God to heal others; I can’t be the one God chooses to live in if I won’t allow God to live in others, also. And further, God does all the good we see—every good and perfect gift comes from God.  If the Pharisees had known God, they would have known this truth. When Jesus teaches about prayer, he gives his followers a model prayer and encourages them to persist in praying because God is good and gives good gifts.

Third, Jesus goes on to say that there is no sitting by and evaluating. 

Those who meet him have two choices—to gather close like fish in a net, or like folks welcomed into a home, or to run away in terror, to scatter. He also points out that we can tell what is in people’s hearts by what they say; perhaps this is like the psychological tendency to project on others what is actually true (and what we dislike) about ourselves. There is no way to stop this process except to admit the nature of our own hearts and open them for God to change. The gospel of John puts it like this:  this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world and people prefer the darkness because they think it hides their evil deeds.  C.S. Lewis puts it this way: God is the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from (Mere Christianity).

Fourth, Jesus warns his listeners to be authentic and make sure the light in them isn’t darkness.

He makes that really specific by accusing the Pharisees of hypocrisy—cleaning up their facades while carrying around greed and wickedness; tithing spices while neglecting justice and the love of God; loving status while being dead inside; loading up others with burdens while offering no help to carry them; building monuments for the prophets while planning to kill Jesus.

Jesus warns his followers about the yeast of Pharisees and Sadducees—their teaching and their hypocrisy.  Their teaching is that only by careful obedience to the Law can a person be redeemed, and their hypocrisy is that they teach this while allowing themselves loopholes and justifying their disobediences. God doesn’t like this:  God cares more about repenting for one’s own disobedience and being merciful to others, giving them room for God to work on them without attributing the work of God’s Holy Spirit in them to the devil.

Fifth, Jesus teaches that obedience is the identifying characteristic of the family of God.

When Jesus turns around and hears that his mother and brothers have come to see him, he spreads his arms wide to include all his followers and says, “All who do what God wants them to do are my family.” When a woman blesses Jesus’s mother, Jesus in reply blesses those who hear and obey God.

What might keep people from obeying God? The story of the sower and the four kinds of soil illustrates how having hard hearts, being unwilling to suffer, or worrying about money prevents people from hearing and obeying the good news.  But some accept it, let it sink into their hearts and grow, and bring forth the good, kind, faithful actions that show their hearts have changed into good, kind, faithful hearts. 

Religious hypocrisy separates people from knowing God; authenticity makes knowing God possible.  How can we become more authentic? The way to authenticity is honesty about our neediness before God and obedience to the voice of God’s Holy Spirit.

• We can put human needs ahead of rules.
• We have to keep God’s justice for ourselves and distribute God’s mercy on others.
• We have to take our light out from under the barrel of politics and legalism and obey the mandate to be a light to the world.

Jesus says that the answer to our fears is to gather with him, to press closer to him, and not to split up and run for it.  Our stance toward those in need around us is to heal, to give food, to set them free from the evil one.  Our stance toward ourselves is to focus on the inside of the cup, not the outside, and be honest about what’s there. 

We are called to listen to God and obey, just as Jesus did.  Jesus promised us the Holy Spirit, who is voice of God to us, guiding us truly and guiding us closer to truth.  Jesus himself is the Truth.  Like Jesus, we point to a God who cares that all repent and be redeemed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  This frees us to live at peace with God, reconciled with God, able to look into God’s eyes and see the love there, and to share that reconciliation with others.