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.

Meditations on the Resurrection

Preached at Silverton Friends Church, Jan. 12, 2025

I've been preaching on what scripture says the crucifixion of Jesus means to us, and today I want to talk about the resurrection.  Let me just say that without the resurrection and the loosing of God's Holy Spirit on those waiting for it, the crucifixion is just another death of a good man. One meaning of the resurrection is that Jesus is who he claimed to be, and he is a reliable witness to the character and purposes of God. Now on to the rest of the sermon.

I have a friend I’ll call Dorothy whom I met at the Pacific Northwest Quaker Theological Conference. This was a biennial meeting of women from North Pacific Yearly Meeting, what at the time I called liberal Quakers.

Dorothy stood up in our closing unprogrammed worship and said the following: “Some of you know that i occasionally see Jesus.” I was not expecting this.  She went on, “I first saw him while I was in heavy traffic in Seattle, and other drivers were getting on my nerves. I looked over at the passenger seat and there he was. He said, "Dorothy, do you have to use such language?” This was not all of the conversation, but I remember only this. I was both impressed and a little envious. I’d love to see Jesus in his glorified and yet identifiable physical self.

Some years later, Dorothy stood and said that Jesus had shown up  (while she was exercising, if I remember correctly) and told her he would be her personal trainer for the following year. She was looking forward to this. As it turned out, her personal training took her through breast cancer. She survived both the cancer and the treatment, and she learned about accepting help rather than being the one giving help.  

For many, the thought of seeing Jesus, or for that matter, his mother Mary, fills them with skepticism. People who see what they call apparitions are particularly credulous or vulnerable in some way, and their experiences can be dismissed as delusions.

But not dismissed by me. Dorothy is a grounded, sensible, scientific type person, and she occasionally sees Jesus. And she isn’t the only one. 

I’m not sure whether it was Jesus or a messenger from God that I met one despairing day.  I was sitting in church, weeping quietly over my pain over memories of my childhood, and I couldn’t bear it. So I got up and drove toward Champoeg Park. I came to a place in the road where the pavement had been removed and there were barriers with “No Through Traffic”; as I sat there stuck about what to do next, a big green boat of an American car came from the other direction.  The driver, whom I did not see clearly, leaned out of the window and said, “You can make it through.” I received this as the word of Jesus to me, and it comforted me.

You may have your own stories about hearing or seeing Jesus.

Robert Willis, the Dean Emeritus of Canterbury Cathedral, put morning prayers on youTube during the pandemic. He helped me through the pandemic and to this day. Dean Robert said the best evidence for the resurrection (for those who have not seen Jesus personally) is in the book of Acts. This chronicles how people behaved who had seen the risen Jesus, and there is no other good explanation for their behavior and their attitudes. (YouTube "How We Know the Resurrection Was Real, start around 11:28)

In the culture of a religious power base, the one that manipulated the Romans into killing Jesus: 

they are unafraid 

they speak their truth 

their confidence knows no limits

they hold authorities accountable for wrong-doing

they urge everyone to repent (which means to change one’s mind)

they promise hope

they forgive

Here are some of the things those first Christians said:

After healing a well-known beggar on the steps of the temple, Peter and John were hauled in before the priests, the temple guard, and the Sadducees, the religious power base and their muscle. These folks told them to shut up and lie low.  Here’s what they replied: “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you more than to God, you judge. For we cannot but speak the things we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19)

Not long after, the apostles were imprisoned for preaching, and an angel let them out.  They were again brought before this group of powers that be, who said, “We commanded you not to teach in this name, and instead you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and intend to blame us for this man’s death.”

But Peter and the other apostles answered and said, “We ought to obey God rather than men.  The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you murdered, raised him up to his right hand to be prince and savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins, and we are his witnesses to these things and so also is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” When the leaders heard this, they were furious and plotted to kill the apostles.… They beat the apostles and again commanded them not to speak in the name of Jesus and let them go. So they departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for Jesus’ sake. (Acts 5:29, 60)

Ignoring these orders, Stephen, a man full of faith and grace, preached and did miracles. A conspiracy arose to accuse him of blaspheming Moses and God, so he was brought before the council.  He took the opportunity to review the history of the Jewish nation at length and God’s call on them, ending like this: “You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! you always resist the Holy Spirit as did your fathers before you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers.” They ground their teeth in rage. Then Stephen said, “Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” (Acts 7:56)

They hauled him outside the city and stoned him to death, leaving their coats with a young Pharisee named Saul.

And as Stephen was dying, he said, “Lord, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, do not charge them with this sin,” And when he had said this, he fell asleep. (Just a side note, Jesus also viewed death as sleep, which we can understand better since the news of the resurrection.)

And then there is the meeting Saul the persecutor had with Jesus: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4) It’s worth nothing that no one else saw or heard anything. Saul’s spiritual blindness manifested in physical blindness, and he had to be led to Damascus. His personal encounter with the risen Jesus resulted in a life dedicated to making the good news known, often at great personal cost; it eventually cost him his life, as tradition has it.

Paul writes many times about how important it is that Jesus died and rose from death to glorified life. It’s too much to read all the passages, but here’s a sampling:

Romans 4 ending

Just as Abraham’s faith counted for him as righteousness, when we believe in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, our faith counts for us as righteousness, our faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, Jesus whose surrender to death contains our side-slips, our falling, our failing, and whose resurrection from death contains the pronouncement from God that our guilt is removed and we are just what we ought to be, innocent and righteous..

Indeed, Paul rises to exhilarating heights in Romans 8 as he lists out what the resurrection means to us: 

We are not condemned;

We walk according to God’s spirit in us; 

We are God’s children.

“If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. (Romans 8:11)

Paul doesn’t gloss over the fact that life here will be difficult for any number of reasons calling them “these present sufferings”: Both the creation and we ourselves groan, eagerly waiting for the redemption of the body, and the earth, For we were saved in this hope, which we do not yet see.

His hope gives him the courage to say this: These present sufferings are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us…For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:18, 38-9)

This is what the resurrection means for people of faith in the God who raised Jesus from death. 

Jesus himself said that he listened to what his Father told him and did what he was told; and that he was doing only what he saw his Father doing. He told his disciples that he was going away and that the Father would send them the Spirit of truth who would guide them into all truth.

The early Quakers affirmed the idea that Jesus is present to teach His people himself. We can see that they were fearless in preaching this insight; they were confident when facing authorities; they listened and obeyed.

The Spirit that descended on Jesus and filled Him, that galvanized the first generation of Christ-followers and their descendants the early Quakers, (and other renewals too numerous to mention) is the same Spirit the resurrection lets loose all who believe, including us. How do we live according to the Spirit?

 As James wrote, “If anyone lack wisdom, let that person ask of God, who gives to all liberally and doesn’t scold.” (James 1:5)  Let us, full of the hope given us by Jesus rising from death, ask, listen, and obey.

Meditations on the Crucifixion and What It Means for Us: Taking Up the Cross and Dying Daily

Preached at Silverton Friends Church, December 8, 2024

Novelist Flannery O’Connor, in her novel Wise Blood, wrote about a street preacher named Haze Motes who has given up on religion, and preaches the Church without Christ.  He harangues people with this: “Where in your time and your body has Jesus redeemed you.  Show me where because I don’t see that place….If you had been redeemed … you would care about redemption but you don’t.”  (84, 72) I’m still intrigued about what Jesus’s crucifixion and our redemption means for us, and as Haze wonders, what it means specifically in our daily lives.  

Let us just remember that Jesus ministered and died and was resurrected in a world where the Roman Emperor was a god and demanded worship, where his own homeland and was occupied by the Roman army and governed by Roman puppet rulers, and where executions took place in public and with regularity, for offenses from theft to murder to political protest and insurrection. So what Jesus says applies under those very unpleasant circumstances.

We’ll start with what Jesus said before the crucifixion about what it would mean to be his follower. In Mark 10, with similar passages in Matthew and Luke, Jesus tells his disciples, “All those who want to follow me will have to deny themselves, take up their crosses, and then follow me.” Matt 16:24, Mark 10:24; Luke 9:23. I have puzzled about what I am denying when I deny myself, because I have also felt confident that God loves that self, and God wants me to rejoice in my life and humanity. But what I want us to consider is that denying oneself refers to saying no to the need for admiration, approval, praise, control, fame, power, position.

We can see that no one wanted to hear that message, because shortly after, two disciples, expecting him to become king, wanted Jesus to promise them pride of place on his left and right hand. Understandably, this infuriated the other disciples (who may have regretted not getting in there first) until they heard Jesus’s answer:  You don’t know what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with? They answered: We are able.  In hindsight we can see the giant warning in Jesus’s metaphors, but they didn’t have our understanding that the cup was his suffering and the baptism was his death.

Jesus said, “You will indeed drink the cup that I drink and you will be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with, but those seats of honor are already assigned.“ 

Then he went on to say some home truths about power vs discipleship to his followers then and now; “The nature of rulers is to lord it over their people, the great ones exercise authority over the people; You can’t be like that. Whoever wants to be one of the great ones must be your servant and whoever wants to have first place must be the slave of all.  

For even the Son of Man (namely Jesus) did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.”

Remember this verse: 

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me: and the life which I now live in this body I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

Gal. 2:20

So what does it mean that we are with Jesus in his crucifixion? What does it mean to pick up the cross daily? St. Paul was working on this when he wrote, “I die daily.” Or this: “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” (Gal. 6:12)

The idea of “denying one’s self” links up with “the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world” and “Christ lives in me.” These truths can help us live meaningfully and hopefully and humanely in troublesome times.

In early November, I pulled out The Roots of Goodness and Resistance to Evil by Ervin Staub, which I referenced last time I was here. Staub was sheltered from the Nazis by a Christian family, which began his interest in why people choose goodness in circumstances which make it dangerous to get involved, circumstances where evil is easier.  The writer I want to bring in today is Tzvetan Todorov, who grew up in totalitarian Bulgaria. As a scholar, he inquired into the nature of virtue under the Nazis and in the concentration camps and wrote about it in Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. 

One of his main conclusions is to differentiate between heroic and ordinary virtues. And this is where we can see how dying to the world, denying one’s self, and Christ living in us can help us make decisions about our responses and responsibilities.

We aim for ordinary virtues, rather than heroism.

Heroes are courageous and willing to risk their own lives for an ideal; but also Heroes are careless of others’ lives. Heroes are willing for any number of  people to die so that the ideal can survive; the beneficiary of their deaths is an abstraction such as humanity or history or democracy or freedom. heroes prefer the ideal to the real.

People of ordinary virtues are also courageous and willing to risk their lives, they also refuse to accept that things have to be this way, they also do not mindlessly follow orders. But, unlike those of heroic virtues, they prioritize the safety and escape of other people.  They embody the ordinary virtues of dignity (remaining a subject with a will) and caring (contributing to the welfare of others). In complete contrast to the heroes, they live or die for individuals rather than for ideas. The beneficiaries of their courage are real individual persons. They will be active bystanders, aware of their surroundings and their companions and choosing to disrupt the actions of hatred and violence that afflict them. At the same time, it is best not to be a martyr if possible. As Jesus advised, “Be wise as the serpent and as harmless as the dove.” Pay attention, be aware, and intervene with as little harm done as possible.

I grew up in Central Africa under a military dictatorship, and during two civil wars.  In the one from 1960, a young man who had studied in the U.S. and was on the army's hit list took refuge in the house of a Quaker missionary doctor. When the soldiers came to his door, Perry met them and said, "This man is a guest in my home. If you want to take him, you will have to take me also." This seemed too risky to the soldiers, since they were afraid that the U.S. might retaliate if they harmed an American, so they went away.  The young man was spirited across the border and eventually found safety in the U.S.  Perry used his privilege as a white American to deflect violence without making the situation worse and without harm to anyone. He exemplified a person of ordinary virtue.

How does this relate to taking up the cross and dying to self?  First, dignity and caring, the ordinary virtues, are not about exercising power, only choice.  It is hard for humans to give up trying to be the powerful one, the leader, the charismatic prophet, particularly if there are followers to be had.  Second, recognizing that I am responsible to do all the good I can for as long as I can removes the impulse to go out in a blaze of glory, glory being another kind of ego trip.  Third, my impulse to remain as safe as I can takes a back seat to my choice to disrupt violence, hatred, and evil. Fourth, I don’t waste my time saying I care; instead I do caring actions.

St. Paul says that our old worn-out habitual self is crucified with Jesus. Certainly the instinct of facing danger with fight, flight, or freeze are old habits that we can choose against.  Certainly the natural and unhelpful impulse to grasp the upper hand, to be or to follow idealistic leaders is something we can question. Paul says that this old mindset is dead on the cross, and that from now on we should choose not to serve it. He calls it sin, and I want us to think about this meaning something other than lust or avarice, something instead that causes us to acquiesce to systemic evil.  He says in Galatians that he is dead with Christ, and the life he lives now is lived by the faith of God’s Son. He is alive because Christ is faithful. He says that because Christ is raised, we also will live with him in a setting where death has no dominion. (Romans 6:6-9) Thus we do not fear death, but also we do not run towards it.  “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain,” is not the slogan of a man hurrying toward martyrdom.  

I want to draw attention to the number of times Jesus simply evaded dying by slipping away in the crowd. Even when he was encircled by a mob of angry and self-righteous men wanting to stone an adulterous woman, he responded to their mood quietly and disruptively, standing with the woman, but not inciting or inviting violence toward her or himself. When he protested against the systemic evils of temple merchandising and priestly corruption  by overturning tables, he exposed only himself to retaliation, and when he was captured in the garden, he made certain his followers lived to see another day. He made his choices with dignity and purpose, and he cared for those within his sphere.  This is a leader who is dead to ego needs and alive to God and his neighbors.

As we face into an uncertain and worrisome future, I encourage us to be persons of ordinary virtues, persons who recognize everyday evil and choose to act to diminish, deflect, or disrupt it rather than ignore it or comply with it. Let’s live so that we show in our time and body where Jesus has redeemed us. Let us respect our own ability to choose, let us care for our neighbor, and let us rejoice in the faithfulness of Jesus who lives in us.