The Greek word commonly translated as "disciple" in the New Testament is μαθητής (mathētēs). For context, μαθητής means learner, student, or apprentice. To be a disciple, in the Greco-Roman (and Jewish) sense, you would attach yourself to a teacher to learn from them (how they thought), imitate their way of living, take on their worldview as your own, and ultimately become their legacy to pass on their teachings and ways to other generations. The word "disciple" is used over 250 times in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, which means it is not only important to the Christian faith, but it also defines how we experience it.

Gregory of Nazianzus wrote in the fourth century,

Discussion of theology is not for everyone. I tell you, not for everyone—it is no such inexpensive or effortless pursuit. Nor, I would add, is it for every occasion, or every audience; neither are all its aspects open to inquiry. It must be reserved for certain occasions, for certain audiences, and certain limits must be observed. It is not for all people, but only for those who have been tested and have found a sound footing in study, and, more importantly, have undergone, or at the very least are undergoing, purification of body and soul. For one who is not pure to lay hold of pure things is dangerous, just as it is for weak eyes to look at the sun’s brightness.1

Gregory wrote this to confront approaching theology as theory and instead taught that theology is about who you are becoming (or discipleship).

He isn’t saying the gospel is for some and not all—Gregory was a fierce defender of the totality of the gospel’s work; he is saying that depth in knowing God is reserved for those able to receive it by, as he puts it, undergoing purification of body and soul.

As I wrote in a previous article, the contemporary tendency has been to emphasize individual salvation, whereas we should emphasize discipleship. So many Christians have made a decision of belief, but so few have made the decision to become a disciple of Christ. The irony is, Christianity is not, in its original sense, a religion. It has become a religion with its own doctrines and beliefs to define the tenets of our community as the historical Church, but it was not founded as a religion.

In fact, the first time we see the label “Christian” appear is in Acts 11 in the city of Antioch, modern-day Turkey, near the Syrian border. Disciples of Jesus were scattered throughout the region due to persecution that broke out after the stoning of Stephen (in Acts 7).2 Cyprus and Cyrene, among others, proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Hellenists (or Greeks), and a great number believed and, as verse 21 says, “turned to the Lord”—language of discipleship.

Verse 26 says, “So it was that for an entire year they (Barnabas and Saul) met with the church and taught a great many people, and it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called ‘Christians.’” Note that “Christian” is the label given to disciples. Meaning, they are disciples before receiving the external designation of Christian.

There is actually historical evidence that “Christian” was used derogatorily in Acts 11, indicating that outsiders in Antioch saw this group as distinguished from other forms of Judaism. Nevertheless, the point remains that Christian was never the internal identification of followers of Jesus; disciple was.

While the term disciple is used over 250 times in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, the term Christian is used only twice, both in Acts,3 and never in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Again, this indicates the early Church was not striving for sheer belief, but for discipleship, which belief serves as a means to. To truly believe, for the New Testament Church, was to follow. Without following as a disciple, did one ever, truly, believe?

For redundancy yet clarity, I must reiterate that discipleship is not what defines the finished work of Christ. The gospel is that Christ finished sin, death, and the grave as and for his entire Creation, eternally. Discipleship is what we do with that.

We can define modern discipleship in the same way the ancients defined μαθητής (mathētēs):

• Attaching (joining) yourself to a teacher to learn how they think.

• Imitating your teacher’s way of living.

• Taking on your teacher’s worldview as your own.

• Becoming your teacher’s legacy, passing down their teachings and ways to other generations.

The teacher is Jesus. Jesus is referred to as “teacher” or “Rabbi” over 60 times in the gospels. All who join themselves to Jesus, as disciples, are called to mimic his ways (Paul, in Ephesians 5:1, says we are to be imitators of God), to take on his worldview, and to pass it down to future generations. Which means the purpose of the Church, the community of disciples, is in essence to pass down this legacy to others.

But before we speculate about the tangibility of the Church functioning within the scope of authentic discipleship, we must explore how we ourselves are to step fully into our own calls to be disciples of Jesus.

Comprehending the love of God

Paul, in Ephesians 3:14-21, writes:

¹⁴ For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, ¹⁵ from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. ¹⁶ I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, ¹⁷ and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. ¹⁸ I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, ¹⁹ and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

²⁰ Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, ²¹ to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.4

Verses 20-21 are called a “doxology,” a liturgical praise to God (similar to a song we might consistently sing or a common phrase we might cling to as a community), and it is set within the context of Paul’s prayer to the gentile church. His prayer is that the church, empowered by the Spirit as a dwelling for Christ, have the power to know and comprehend the breadth, length, height, and depth of the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge, so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Pause…

His love “surpasses all knowledge,” yet Paul is praying that we be empowered to “know” and “comprehend” it. The root Greek word for “know” is γινώσκω (ginōskō) and means to know, understand, and be assured of. The root Greek word used for comprehend is καταλαμβάνω (katalambanō) and means to lay hold of, grasp, obtain, attain, or even seize.

Isn’t it impossible to know what is unknowable? The love of God is a love that, according to Paul, surpasses the ability to comprehend it. It is unfathomable. And yet, his prayer is that we both know and comprehend it—that we understand it and lay hold of it.

Meaning, as disciples of Jesus, there must be a way for us to know what is otherwise unknowable. Enter the doxology of verses 20-21.

²⁰ Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, ²¹ to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.

He is able to do far more than we can ask or imagine, which, in context, is to know the love of God. God reveals his love to us, for us to know it, experience it, lay hold of it, and share it with others. Which means, apart from God’s work, we are unable to grasp the magnitude of the love of God.

More clearly, without discipleship, where we cling to our teacher (Jesus Christ, empowered and sealed by the Spirit, revealing the Father) and learn his ways (love), we cannot grasp the breadth of the love of God and, therefore, can’t fully grasp the gospel, which is the revelation of the love of God.

Herein lies the heart of discipleship. It’s not that the love of God isn’t there for everyone and everything in Creation; it’s that to experience it—to know it—requires the work of God within us. And God does this work in us when we tether our lives to his, in the Son.

Furthermore, it’s not just knowing love as an emotion or principle; 1 John 4:8 teaches us that God is love. To know love is to know God, and to know God is to know love. As disciples, by following and learning from Jesus, we are learning the love that surpasses all understanding, because that love is God himself.

The hidden irony of our day is that we emphasize belief because it’s an easier entry into the gospel than the call to discipleship. Belief costs nothing; discipleship costs everything. However, the only way to truly know the gospel, which is to know love, is to know God. And, the only way to know God as he desires to be known is by choosing to join our lives to Christ as apprentices (another word for disciple) to his life and way; to see the world as he sees it, and to lay down our lives as he laid down his.

As we follow him in his ways, we will start to comprehend, little by little, this love which adopted us from the foundations of the earth (Ephesians 1:4). And in comprehending, we will be “filled with all the fullness of God,” as Paul writes in verse 19 above. That language is the language of discipleship. Similar to Elisha picking up the mantle and being filled with a double portion of his teacher Elijah’s anointing (2 Kings 2), so are we filled with the anointing and fullness of our teacher, Jesus Christ, the Son.

A community of disciples, passing down a legacy

I mentioned it earlier, but the purpose of the Church, the community of disciples, is to pass on the legacy of our teacher to others. What is the best way to draw others to follow the one we’ve laid down our lives to follow? For others to see in us what we see in him (Jesus).

In 1 Corinthians 11:1, Paul tells the church of Corinth to “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” I’m curious if this has been the call of evangelism all along. If we, the Church, can learn to follow Jesus as disciples, the world will see Jesus in us.

Gregory later writes in Oration 30:

“God will be all in all” when we are no longer what we are now, a multiplicity of impulses and emotions, with little or nothing of God in us, but are fully like God, with room for God and God alone. This is the “maturity” towards which we speed. Paul himself is a special witness here… “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; but Christ is all in all.”5

The answer to so much strife and inconsistency in our day is what it has always been: a simple yes to follow.

For one who sees a snake trampled down, especially if he knows its former ferocity, no longer doubts that it is dead and completely weakened, unless he is perverted in mind and does not have even his bodily senses sound. For who, seeing a lion being played with by children, does not know that it is either dead or has lost all its power? Just as it is possible for the eye to see that these things are true, so when death is played with and despised by those believing in Christ, let no one any longer doubt, nor be unbelieving, that death has been destroyed by Christ and its corruption dissolved and brought to an end.1

“The gospel,” for early Christians, meant a complete renewal of all things. Though they lived, as we do, in the tension between what was started by Christ at the Resurrection and what will be finished by Christ in the Second Coming, the totality of the Son’s work in the Incarnation was undeniable. This finished work is foundational to the Christian faith. Salvation has come from the Son, through the Son, in the Son, to the human race, which the Son became (John 1:14).

Coupled with the finished work of the Son is the recognition that we, as human beings, could not, and cannot save ourselves. The Old Testament law was not given to provide humans the means to redeem ourselves; the law was given so that humans could see the inability of our best efforts to redeem our own brokenness, in full color. As Paul writes in Romans 7:7, “If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.” This suggests two things:

1. Humans could not save themselves, but could and did lose sight of God, and in losing sight of God, lost sight of life (John 1:4 says, “In Him was life”). In losing sight of life, they were left with death, which is the absence of life. Humans needed a revelation (or revealing) of God to restore our sight and life. As 1 John 1:2 says, “This life (referring to Jesus) was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us…”

2. If the lamb was slain “from the foundations (beginnings) of the world” (Revelation 13:8), and we were chosen “in him (Jesus)” from the foundations (beginnings) of the world (Ephesians 1:4), the Incarnation was not God’s response to human sin, but was God’s plan from the beginning, knowing all along the problem of human sin would be dealt with through the Son, which is why this gospel is a complete renewal of Creation, not the reward for a fraction who do the right thing(s). We couldn’t do “the right thing,” so Christ did it for us.

As an aside, the “finished work” of Jesus suggests that a previous work was started. This finished work is far greater than we’ve ever imagined. Jesus wasn’t just finishing the work of his three-year ministry; he was finishing the work of Creation, turning it back to Eden and beginning the process of restoring it to what God, first and finally, called all things in Creation: good.

Anselm of Canterbury wrote,

The human race, clearly his most precious piece of workmanship, had been completely ruined; it was not fitting that what God had planned for mankind should be utterly nullified, and the plan in question could not be brought into effect unless the human race were set free by its Creator in person.2

The vision of the gospel in the early Church, seen in the teachings of Irenaeus of Lyons, Athanasius of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa to name a few, emphasized justification through the finished work of the Son in light of humanity's collective sin. The cross was understood as God’s complete victory over sin, death, and evil. It spoke of Christ becoming the second and final “Adam” (Romans 5; 1 Corinthians 15:47) to redeem the work of the first Adam once and for all. It spoke of liberation from our bondage to death and the healing of corrupted human nature, thus the Creation.

The secondary beliefs that founded the gospel of the early Church were:

• God responds to sin with love.

• The Incarnation was God’s original and only plan.

• Jesus became humanity to eternally reconcile us to God, as in the beginning. He came to us.

• The difference between the condition of human beings in the old and new covenants is the Incarnation. We, on this side of the Resurrection, exist in the Incarnate Son who is eternally divine and flesh as one.

• Salvation means Christ has begun and will finish the work of restoring us and the Creation to exactly what they were created to be, from the beginning.3

Why the original gospel is better news.

The good news is better news than most of us have learned, most of our lives. Therefore, the work of modern discipleship is less about what Jesus is doing and more about who Jesus is. If we can recover the vision of who Jesus is, we will clearly see what he is doing and where he is going.

In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Paul is combating teachers who have come into the churches of Galatia to redefine their mission and identity. These teachers are unidentified Jewish leaders urging Paul’s converts to be circumcised into the Jewish faith. Apparently, they are intrigued because Paul’s letter reads as if many of them have at least considered circumcision.

What the people of Galatia were wrestling with, and what we often find ourselves wrestling with in our own faith, is getting to God through good works (the law) versus the work of Jesus. I believe we wrestle with this because we’ve never fully understood the good news as the finished work of God's promise.

In chapter 4 of Galatians, Paul uses an Old Testament allegory to explain the difference between being enslaved to a life of effort-driven performance and being free in the effects of the promise. He writes,

²¹ Tell me, you who desire to be subject to the law, will you not listen to the law? ²² For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. ²³ One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. ²⁴ Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. ²⁵ Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. ²⁶ But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother. ²⁷ For it is written,

“Rejoice, you childless one, you who bear no children,
burst into song and shout, you who endure no birth pangs;
for the children of the desolate woman are more numerous
than the children of the one who is married.”

²⁸ Now you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac. ²⁹ But just as at that time the child who was born according to the flesh persecuted the child who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now also. ³⁰ But what does the scripture say? “Drive out the slave and her child; for the child of the slave will not share the inheritance with the child of the free woman.” ³¹ So then, friends, we are children, not of the slave but of the free woman.

Verse 1 of chapter 5 finishes his thought, reading, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

Much of our current experience with the gospel has come through Hagar. It has enslaved us in a life defined by doing. It has made salvation about us, “asking Jesus to come into our hearts,” as if “our hearts” can contain God. The very notion that we are the ones who ask Jesus into our hearts underscores our desire to control the gospel by our own doing. Though we are incapable of salvation, as we’ve established and is well agreed upon, we insist on authority.

But salvation is about God bringing us into his heart. It’s about God, while we were still sinners, dying for us (Romans 5:8). We are children of Sarah, the free woman. We are children of the promise. We are a product, not of what we’ve done—good or bad, but of the promise of God. What is the promise of God? Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

Karl Barth wrote,

To put it in the simplest way, what unites God and us men is that He does not will to be God without us…that He does not allow His history to be His and ours ours, but causes them to take place as a common history. That is the special truth which the Christian message has to proclaim at its very heart.4

Our decision to follow Jesus is critical, not because it saves us—we are incapable of “saving us”—but because Jesus has saved us. We have the privilege of following Jesus as disciples, not because it earns us life, but because we’ve inherited eternal life through and in him. We can call on God the Father as “Abba” not because we’ve done all the right things, but because Jesus reconciled us into adoption as sons and daughters of God.

1 John 4:18 puts it best, saying, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.”

The gospel is the better news. It’s time we start believing it.

• Kids wearing costumes.

• Kids bringing buckets to go around to different cars (we’ll say doors) to get candy when they say, “Trick-or-Treat!”

• Hay rides through a dark wood where deacons hid in ditches to jump out and scare congregants.

• Pumpkin carving.

• (One year) a haunted house that would scare the hell—literally—out of people. The pastor was waiting at the end of the path through the haunted house to give an invitation: “If you were to die tonight, would you want to live through this forever? No? Then, ask Jesus into your heart.” We had hundreds “get saved” that year and, frankly, never saw them again.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is.

Origins of Halloween

Halloween, believe it or not, originates in the Church. What was originally called All Hallows’ Eve began as a Christian vigil before All Saints’ Day, observed on November 1, and All Souls’ Day on November 2. The three days together are traditionally known as Allhallowtide, a time dedicated to remembering saints, martyrs, and all souls of the faithful who have departed. Though today’s American Halloween customs have broadly diverged from their liturgical context, the roots of the holiday remain firmly planted in the Church’s historical story.

Christians have, from the earliest centuries, frequently set aside times to honor martyrs and saints, especially in light of persecution. As early as the 4th century, we have record of St. Ephrem of Edessa in a hymn mentioning a feast to All Martyrs.1 St. John Chrysostom preached a sermon in the 5th century on “all the Saints who suffered martyrdom throughout the world.”2 These older celebrations often followed Easter or Pentecost—Chrysostom’s sermon likely was a post-Pentecost All Saints commemoration. The tendency, and need, to celebrate the faithful who had gone before was ever-present within early Christianity, independent of any pagan holidays.

In the Western Church, All Saints’ Day took form in the early Middle Ages. In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel at St. Peter’s Basilica to all saints, and some accounts place this occurrence on November 1. Over the following century, observance of All Saints on November 1 spread. By 835 A.D., Emperor Louis the Pious, highly influenced by Pope Gregory IV, issued a decree making November 1 the official Feast of All Saints throughout the Carolingian Empire.

Liturgically,3 All Hallows’ Eve is the evening vigil (on October 31) that precedes All Saints’ Day. Major Christian feasts begin with a vigil the prior evening (think of Christmas Eve preceding Christmas). The vigil includes evening prayers or a Mass to celebrate the Feast. All Hallows’ Eve is a sacred time of reflection on the souls who have departed. Medieval England sometimes referred to All Hallows’ Day, indicating the evening (of October 31) and day (of November 1) were liturgically connected as part of one holy observance.

Reformation Day

Interestingly, October 31 is also Reformation Day—a day when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church in 1517. Many scholars agree that Luther chose October 31 because crowds would attend Mass the following morning to celebrate All Saints’ Day. Because of the connection between October 31 and the Reformation, Protestant Europe—which became Protestant America—lost touch with the original role of October 31, as many Protestants celebrate Reformation Day in place of Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve.

However, in many traditions, All Hallows’ Eve remains intact. For example, in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Occasional Services, there is an official liturgy for All Hallows’ Eve (October 31). During this service, Scripture is read, such as The Witch of Endor in 1 Samuel 28:3-25, The Vision of Eliphaz the Temanite in Job 4:12-21, The Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37:1-14, and The War in Heaven in Revelation 12:(1-6)7-12. The liturgy opens with this note:

This service may be used on the evening of October 31, known as All Hallows’ Eve. Suitable festivities and entertainments may take place before or after this service, and a visit may be made to a cemetery or burial place.4

The liturgy offers prayers throughout that acknowledge the reality of evil and death but also celebrate Christ’s triumph over darkness.

In a sense, our dressing up in costumes and making light of evil and death is a way of affirming Satan’s defeat—rather than something we fear, we make fun of it.

In the 10th-15th centuries, Christians in parts of Britain and Ireland observed Hallowtide (another word for Allhallowtide) through a custom called souling. On All Hallows’ Eve, poor children would go door-to-door offering prayers for the dead in exchange for small cakes, called soul cakes. This was deeply Christian: giving and receiving of alms and goods centered on a Church holiday.

Furthermore, Ronald Hutton notes, “The wearing of disguises at Hallowe’en first appears in Scotland in the sixteenth century… a custom related to guising and to the Christian feast of All Hallows rather than any pagan rite.”5

Halloween in Contemporary America

The fundamental transformation of Halloween began with the arrival of Irish and Scottish immigrants in America in the 19th century. These immigrants brought their Halloween folk customs to a Protestant America with little to no established liturgical connection to All Hallows’ Eve. Outside of Catholic tradition and communities, Halloween was virtually unknown to Americans.

Irish and Scottish immigrants came to America during the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. During the famine, children and youths went out “guising” on Halloween, carving lanterns from turnips or pumpkins and begging for apples, nuts, or coins, while in costumes. As these families immigrated to America, this tradition caught hold and rapidly grew in popularity. By the 1930s, trick-or-treating had become a widespread tradition that continued to evolve into the activity we participate in today. Large corporations took advantage of this popularity, and Halloween is now one of the most lucrative holidays for big-box stores.

Almost all of our current Halloween practices are less than a century old. Yet, the connection to the ancient Church celebration of saints and souls remains. Attempts to connect Halloween to cultic festivals, such as the popular Samhain, are historically disjointed. Historian Nicholas Rogers concludes, “[Samhain] did not offer much in the way of actual ritual practices… Most of these developed in conjunction with the medieval holy days of All Souls’ and All Saints’ Day.”6

What Are We to Do, Then, With Halloween?

In my opinion? Have fun!

Martin Luther said, often quoted by C.S. Lewis, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” If you want to take a more liturgical approach to it, one commentator writes, “All Hallows’ Eve is a time for reflecting on our mortal state, for acknowledging our natural fear of mortality…and for remembering the various monsters and spooks that have given concrete shape to these fears across the centuries.”7

What decorations and images do you see around Halloween? Skeletons, tombstones, etc. While some take it too far, these images originate in Church History as a time to recognize death as a very real thing that Christ has overcome. Halloween is a moment to begin acknowledging those who have gone before us—some giving their life for the kingdom of Jesus. The association of Halloween with the demonic is mainly attributed to modern horror films and books, not to historical reality. Historical truth will always remain the essence of a life formed by Christ, his story, and being fully alive—and a life a lot less religiously rigid.

I did NOT write this to tell you that you must celebrate Halloween with 30-foot skeletons in your yard; I wanted to provide a historical perspective in an otherwise misunderstood season.

So, here’s to eating so many pieces of candy that we eat lettuce and broccoli for weeks!

Two friends once travelled out to sea. Along the way, they struck a rock, and a hole formed in the bottom of their boat. As water began filling the boat, one cried out, “We must jump and swim!” The other responded, “No, we must try to fix the hole.” For an hour, they argued back and forth, longing to prove themselves right, until the boat filled with water, and they drowned. They were too far from shore to swim, and the hole was too big to fix. The sad part is that they had a radio beside the steering wheel that could have been used to call the Coast Guard for help.

We are living in a cultural moment where the art of disagreement has been lost, and the cost is profound. In many ways, we’ve even forgotten how to talk. One overlooked consequence of a society shaped by social media and smartphones is that words have become increasingly detached from their meanings. Honest communication has two inseparable parts: what you say and how you say it. The first conveys information; the second conveys emotion—how you actually feel. True conversation weaves both together. When one is missing, dialogue collapses into hollow diatribes: words that tear down instead of build up, that make enemies instead of friends, that spring more from hate than from love.

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Debate has been an essential part of thriving societies since the earliest civilizations. Arguably, no other people debated as well as the Greeks. Aristotle expressed, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”1 Similarly, Isocrates wrote, “Discourse is the leader of all our thoughts and actions.”2

Discussing differing views, face-to-face, allows a society to progress and innovate. It moves us beyond talking points and biases, into the realm of human life, experienced in time and space. It calls us to understand the perspective of another and the experience within which their perspective has developed. In short, it allows us to remain curious while increasing our understanding of fellow humans.

This begs us to ask: What happens to a culture when debate grows worthless and tribalism3 takes its place?

Aristotle writes, “For it is by debating that the truth is established, since the conflict of opposing arguments brings about a clearer understanding.”4 If you reverse-engineer his statement, untruths are established in the absence of debate. When humans turn to tribalism, fueled by our select news outlets and social media algorithms, we unknowingly begin to sever the fabric of community and truth.

It’s not just philosophy that recognizes the need for debate; Church history is built on the foundation of debate. For example, the Council of Nicea in 325 AD was convened in response to what is known as the Arian Controversy. Arius was one of the most prestigious and popular presbyters of the city of Alexandria. The bishop of Alexandria was Alexander, who clashed with Arius in a debate over whether Jesus was coeternal with God. Arius’ famous motto was, “There was [a time] when He was not.”5 This debate sparked widespread interest to the point that Emperor Constantine decided to call a universal council—that is, the First Ecumenical Council—where arguments were heard from both the Arian and the Alexandrian perspective.

The council concluded that Arianism was heresy and that Jesus is equally God, coeternal, and of the same substance. This is the first time a framework for Trinitarian theology was established. As the Nicene Creed states,

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.

America itself is founded on the outcomes of vigorous debates. Some of the most notable are:

• The Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists in 1787-1789 centering on whether to ratify the US Constitution to establish a strong central government or to protect against the establishment of such a government. The result was the addition of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution.

• Abolition vs. Slavery in the 1800s, which ultimately led to the Civil War, resulting in the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the emancipation of slaves.

• The Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s which included debates over segregation, voting rights, and equality. The outcome was the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

While there are undoubtedly many other debates that have shaped America, these examples serve as moments where people held strong opinions but were eventually moved toward progress.

There is value in disagreement. Disagreement is part of the human experience because every human is unique, comes from a distinctive background, and has a specific story. If everyone around you agrees with you and you are never challenged to think differently, then you live in an echo chamber that breeds division and stagnation.

Plato writes, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”6

Yet what the past few weeks—and indeed the last five years—have laid bare is that most Americans inhabit one-sided worlds, where like-minded voices endlessly affirm their opinions, and anyone who dares to differ is cast as an enemy. All the while, the ways of Jesus are maligned with political arguments, neglecting the teachings of Christ for the beliefs of a preferred political party. We view humans as pawns in a game where victory is determined not by compromise and peace, but by defeating the other player.

Like the two men in the boat with a hole in the bottom, we will drown in our attempts to draw the other to our side rather than live by humbling ourselves, listening, and meeting in the proverbial middle.

The problem is exacerbated in the Church by a general malaise toward Jesus and a lack of understanding of the faith we claim to have. The Evangelical Church has turned the gospel of discipleship into a gospel of cheap grace, the deadly enemy of the Church.7 It prefers raised hands, repeated prayers, and metrics over active participation in the good news—the εὐαγγέλιον or gospel—of Jesus. The message of Jesus wasn’t just “believe;” it was “follow.” You can believe and not follow, but you’ll never follow without belief.

As the Evangelical Church grew seeker-sensitive, it became increasingly indifferent to the way of Jesus. The result is a societal vacuum where the kingdom of God is designed to exist, but has instead made way for political power masked with Christian language.

Hosea 4:6 prophecies that God’s people perish for a lack of knowledge. So much in our day is said in the name of Scripture and Christ that neither Scripture nor Christ ever said, stood for, or would support. The space within, which is supposed to be filled with increasing knowledge, understanding, and practice of the kingdom of God, is instead filled with feel-good posts and carefully selected verses-of-the-day.

The Church is the anchor of society, modeling a way of living in peace with those who are different and calling others to do the same (see Hebrews 12:14, Romans 12:18, and James 3:17). This societal juncture can be an awakening and renewal, but only if it thrusts us away from political dogma, propaganda, and ideology, and toward human beings.

Nevertheless, history warns us that when the Church forgets this calling—when it trades its witness for political influence—the results are devastating.

Christian Nationalism and Faithful Witness

In 1933, Paul Althaus, professor of theology at the University of Erlangen in Erlangen, Germany, wrote, “Our Protestant churches have greeted the turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle of God.”8 What was the turning point of 1933? The appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. Robert Ericksen comments on this statement from Paul Althaus, “It is important to note the enthusiasm in this statement. Hitler represented not just an adequate politician or the best choice of the moment, but a gift from God and even a miracle. It is also important to note that Althaus was almost certainly correct in claiming to speak for Protestants in general.”9

There are multiple accounts of pastors joining the Nazi party,10 and editorials, such as those written in the national Lutheran newspaper, use prophetic scripture to indicate God’s providence and blessing for Germany through Hitler’s rise to power.

Pictured below is a church in Germany, around this time, sporting a swastika under Jesus on the cross.

And the entrance of another church whose sign has a cross on the right and a swastika on the left.

If this sounds familiar, it is because modern America has also seen the merging of politics and religion as a gift from God. One article by NBC News quoted a ‘celebrity evangelist’ as saying, “There’s a different dialogue about spirituality happening in America, and with Donald Trump, God has given permission to take it right to the White House.”11

Christian Nationalism is a political and cultural ideology that seeks to merge a particular vision of Christianity with the identity, values, and governance of a nation. It sees a country as having a religious mandate. The problem is not a government shaped by the teachings of Jesus; the problem is when the teachings of Jesus are warped and shaped by the ideas of a government. I grew up pledging allegiance to both the American flag and the Christian flag before our morning classes began. In almost every church across the country, the American flag is prominently displayed alongside worship, the Word, and the Sacraments. I love America and am so thankful to live here. I have great national pride in family members who fought for our freedom. Yet, I also see the damage Christian Nationalism has caused to the Christian faith and the coming kingdom of God.

Nancy Duff asks, “When the American Flag is given a prominent place in many Christian sanctuaries and the will of God is believed to coincide with the goals of [a political] party, have Americanism and Christianity become almost the same thing; or, at least are they understood to be compatible partners in a common mission?”12

What do we do when policy and Christian ethics collide? Does the Church stand up to what it is fundamentally against, regardless of what side of the aisle it comes from? Or, does it move the line of what it is against just beyond the policy in question?

How do we handle treating immigrants like dogs when Leviticus 19:33-34 says, “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” How do we respond to death and war when the prophet Isaiah, in Isaiah 2:4, envisions a day when, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.”

Karl Barth writes, “What is Christian is secretly but fundamentally identical to what is universally human.”13 The line the Church cannot cross is where Christianity moves from being for all humans to being for some humans within a particular governmental system.

Regarding Germany’s Christian Nationalism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “[We have] gathered like eagles round the carcass of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ…The result is that a nation became Christian and Lutheran, but at the cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap. Cheap grace…won the day.”14

Christian Nationalism resulted in the German Protestant Church’s complicity in the Nazi Party’s killing of approximately 6,000,000 Jews. The Deutsche Christen of the German Church passed the Aryan Paragraph in September of 1933, which removed pastors and church leaders of Jewish descent from their positions, to prove the church’s loyalty to the new Nazi state.15 Orthodoxy became secondary to political influence and power.

The call of both John the Baptizer and Jesus is to repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near. Repentance, or μετανοέω, means to change your perspective—how you think. The language of “kingdom of heaven” was in direct opposition to the kingdom of Rome. John and Jesus are saying, “It’s time to change how you think about everything because a new kingdom is here and that kingdom will be what your allegiance is to.”

The church desperately needs to divorce itself from the influence of government and turn back to its sole influence in Christ, the Son. We are called to pray for, actively engage, and honor our country and leaders, but we are not called to conform our faith to the pattern of their ways.

The Way Back Home

John M. Perkins remarks, “I believe that there is a vision-shaped vacuum in the soul of the church that will not be satisfied by man-made strategies or philosophies, but only by His vision of the church victoriously fulfilling the divine mandate.”16 This ‘divine mandate’ is living out what it means to be humans made in the image of God, following the ways of Jesus into his kingdom, until “the earth [is] filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).

When the people of God were exiled to Babylon for failing to heed the prophets’ warnings, they lamented, “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there, we hung up our harps.”17 Humans are strongly inclined to keep doing what is comfortable until proven detrimental. Cheap grace ends at the symbolic shores of Babylon. Yet the call of Jesus remains: “Repent and follow me.”

As the world pressures us to double down on our biases, cling to political allegiances, and silence conversations with those who differ, now is the moment to return to Jesus. It is the time to recommit ourselves to authentic discipleship, growing in faith and deepening in understanding; to remember that the Church is not an arm of America—or of any earthly government—but the living embodiment of God’s kingdom.

We must learn to debate well; to have differences, and those differences make us stronger. We must move beyond a keyboard or phone and into the spaces where we can look each other in the eyes and witness the story behind our words. We must remember that we are all human beings, made in the image of God, who are on the same team. You never truly win a fight with another human being, because we are all pieces of a larger humanity. If one loses, we all lose.

Surround yourself with people who are different than you; who challenge you to become a better person and carry different opinions on things. Differences allow us to progress as a people.

Finally, become deeply rooted in a church family that embodies these ideals and honors the space for people from all walks of life to experience the kingdom of God; a church family that values discipleship and active participation in the gospel more than hype, metrics, or politically correct theology.

Augustine of Hippo wrote, “The earthly city has created for herself such false gods as she wanted, from any source she chose—even creating them out of men—in order to worship them with sacrifices. The other city, the Heavenly city on pilgrimage in this world, does not create false gods. She herself is the creation of the true God, and she herself is to be his true sacrifice.”18

Maybe this isn’t the end of civilization, but the beginning of a new spirit within our civilization. One where the kingdom of God reigns in the hearts of God’s people and the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our LORD and of his Christ.19

The Greeks were some of the finest thinkers and storytellers in history. Their significant contributions to understanding human disposition have endured long after their empire. Of these contributions, Greek philosophy and myth stand out.

A myth is a story that elucidates the human condition and defines the world around us. Compared to how you leave the movie theater enlightened to live differently after watching an emotionally transformative film, the Greeks used myths to provoke clarity and purpose in an otherwise disjointed and cluttered world.

One myth, in particular, is poignant regarding pastoral integrity. That is the myth of Prometheus.

As the myth goes, in the initial days of human existence, humans knew the day of their death, or as Eugene Peterson puts it in his retelling of Prometheus’ myth, ‘We knew our limits.’1 Prometheus, a Greek god, saw that human motivation was reduced to the cognition of mortality. In compassion, he responded by doing three things:

1. Removing the knowledge of the day of death from humans.

2. Placing blind hopes in humans (ambition).

3. Stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans (technology).

By removing the knowledge of the day of death, humans were freed from the shadow of mortality and drifted toward living as if immortal. By embracing blind hopes, humans could strive to reach beyond the boundaries of their humanity. Finally, with the instrument of technology (fire), humans had the means to accomplish anything they set their minds to.

Humans now saw themselves as gods. Yet, the truth of their ontology never changed; they were still humans. They were living in a way (as a god) that was impossible for their existence (as humans).

Zeus, the chief of the Greek gods, retaliated by chaining Prometheus to a rock in a secluded mountain where vultures tore him apart and ate his liver. The myth says the liver grew back each night, so the retribution was fresh daily.

Eugene Peterson writes,

Prometheus: daring, bold, compassionate, intelligent—raising the standard of living, expanding the scope of living, deepening the resources for living. But bound: chained to the rock, showing the consequences of trying to improve the human condition by giving us ambition and tools without at the same time giving us foresight and training us in self-knowledge. It is the story of Western civilization; incredible progress in things, defiantly unmindful of the nature of our humanity, unimaginable suffering in persons.2

Living Like Gods

This myth, as its genre suggests, is a myth. It doesn’t tell us blunt history as it factually happened. However, history is not a direct matter of a myth. The story serves as a reminder of a philosophical error that the human race has fallen into: living like gods. In this way, the story is very relevant to modern America.

This god-like delusion is no better in the Church. In its original state, the Church was known as holy, set apart, or ‘other than.’ The Nicene Creed affirms, ‘We believe in one holy catholic (or universal) and apostolic Church.’ The Apostle’s Creed likewise professes, ‘I believe in the holy catholic (universal) Church.’ Holy is a distinctive of something (or someone) that is not like everything else. For example, God is holy because there is no one like God.

Therefore, the Church holds a harmonious value in the created order that no other institution holds—it is holy.

Yet, the Church is contemporarily reduced to a common institution. There is little distinction between the Church and other temporal organizations or activities. And in this reduction of worth, pastoral integrity has desperately faltered. Pastors who once shaped their vocation through prayer, the sacraments, scripture, and guiding their flock have evolved into business leaders whose success is measured by metrics and expansion.

Congregants are no longer those conscious of their mortality, yet simultaneously aware of an eternal God inviting them to participate in his grand work; they are consumers moved by their desires and cravings. Like in the Prometheus myth, the limits have been removed from the people's minds; they have god-sized ambitions and the technology that promises—emptily—to be the means to achieve these ambitions autonomously. Nevertheless, they, like Prometheus, live with something eating them on the inside. No matter what they do or who they think they will become, the vultures wait for their daily rations in the morning.

The answer to the inner turmoil is clear: restoring humanity to humanity. The problem is that those called to do this work have bartered it away. The people became gods, and many pastors became culpable. Elder boards care more about the number of people attending a service than about the awareness of what God is doing in His church through us mortals. Pastors read more books and listen to more podcasts on leadership than they pray and read the scriptures, because that’s what their people prefer and their boards expect.

People want answers to life's questions and view pastors as those called to provide them. They need to know what God is doing, why God is doing it, when God is doing it, and how God is doing it. They need the means to continue to live as gods, which, as Genesis 3 reminds us, is foundationally ‘understanding.’3

St. Augustine prayed in Confessions, ‘You were within me, but I was outside of me, and there I sought You.’4 We live in anxiety, depression, fear, doubt, suspicion, protection, and safety because we have lost sight of the Holy One within. In losing sight of God, we created for ourselves gods—namely, we set ourselves up as gods and demanded that life bow to our desires and needs. But we aren’t gods. Like in Prometheus, having the means to act like a god doesn’t change the fact that we aren’t gods. The danger in endeavoring to live like a god when we are fundamentally human is that we often aspire to live beyond our capacities, thereby experiencing the crushing consequences of failure and a loss of worth.

The End of Pastoral Integrity

This consequence has become the self-fulfilling core of yielding pastoral integrity and shape (I struggle with it on a rolling basis). As humans invited to participate in God's work, pastors live at the intersection of calling and occupation. We bear the urgent divine zeal of the holy; we see a world in need of hope, care, and love, and know the answer is the εὐαγγέλιον (good news). Therefore, we begin our pastoral vocation by bathing our sermons in passion, calling our people up the mountain of discipleship where we can see ‘the kingdom of this world become the kingdom of our Lord and his Messiah.’5 We begin with faith and a profound awareness that God is God and will have His way with us and our church.

Initially, rejection and apathy roll off our shoulders, as we attribute them to growing pains. Then, after only a few short years—perhaps even after just a month or so—our zeal for the holy transforms into something more predictable and secure: shopkeeping. We confess that expectations of a rapidly expanding industry threaten our dreams of a life-giving church and a transformed city. The people want quick results and shortcuts that can be neatly marketed as momentum. We find that the fastest way to get people to leave for the church down the street is to commit to long obedience in the same direction. A new building project, ministry, or campaign will do the trick; get the people excited about anything, and you’ll be a successful pastor.

By the way, eradicate those sermons that are ‘too deep’ for the people. They won’t come back if they don’t leave ‘encouraged’ or if the sermon is ‘over their heads.’ Just preach about good plans, good news, everything working out well, everyone growing wealthy and prosperous, and you’ll have a flourishing church marching toward the prize: ‘Mega.’

Side note: In every other sector of society, we praise learning. To learn, you must be introduced to something you do not yet know or understand, be trained to understand it, and thereby learn what you did not know. In short, we value things being initially over our heads in every other part of our lives, except for our relationship with God. If a five-year-old doesn’t grasp multiplication, you don’t discard it and continue teaching 2+2, because that’s what they comprehend; you persist in teaching multiplication until they ‘get’ it. The gospel is over all of our heads until we learn. The process of learning the gospel is discipleship and formation.

Sound familiar?

This is the narrative that pastors often find themselves in, and—in America, at least—none of us are immune. Most of our people have been misled into thinking they are gods, and they live like gods. The expectation of the gods is, ‘Give me what I want.’

Pastors are forced to be what they are not: leaders of organizations labeled as ‘church.’

Research suggests up to 91% of pastors have experienced burnout,6 65% feel lonely,7 70% battle depression,8 and nearly half have considered quitting in recent years.9

Why has the pastoral vocation grown so weary? Pastors are not business leaders marketing and selling a product better than the business down the street, so that more people will come to their store instead of the others. They are not financial investors expected to create inspirational strategies to cultivate the viability of the business. They are not self-help gurus offering motivational quotes, so people can continue to play god.

They are shepherds of the holy, keepers of the sacred. They invite you beyond Prometheanism into discipleship. They guide you back to your mortality so that you can be liberated to live under God's reign and worship. They are the prophets communicating visions of Eden.

The Church is the only institution in our society that tries so hard to be what it is not. A grocery store is content providing produce, a doctor’s office is happily stewarding people’s health, and a barbershop is satisfied working with hair. Yet the Church is constantly trying to be something other than holy ground.

What are we to do? How do we restore pastoral integrity to finally break away from the American consumer church that annihilates the future of the virtuous manifestation of ‘holy’ in our midst?

Cultivating Self-Awareness

You are not God.

The quicker you concede you are not God, the faster you can be liberated to humanity again. The problem in the Prometheus myth was not what humans were given but what humans were not given. While receiving good things in themselves, they lost the means to use them correctly: mortality and self-awareness.

As those in Christ, we live eternal life—that is, the life of God. Christ liberated us from the dread of our mortality. Yet, we must remember that apart from God, we are mortal. We live in his freedom, through his life, in his finished work. Ephesians 2:9 NLT says, ‘Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.’ We did nothing to earn salvation, so we retain dependence on God to receive salvation.

We have preached salvation without self-awareness. We have made ourselves our saviors rather than those who are the beneficiaries of a work only God could accomplish for us, in love.

We will never have all the answers, and we aren’t supposed to, because we aren't God. We trust that God’s story unfolds in the world and that it ends well, not by our inadequate standards but by God’s sovereign standards.

In modern America, we repeatedly pray to gain understanding and achieve our goals, scrutinize the Bible to support our decisions and lives, preach sermons about our assignments and purpose, and tithe when we feel inclined (usually not at all, and certainly not a whole tithe). Church is a means to an end; the destination is us and our kingdoms.

However, orthodoxically, prayer is an act of remembering that only God is God, so we can live free from the tyranny of playing god. Scripture places us in the story of God spanning time, space, and people groups. Sermons equip us to live the life of the kingdom of God. Tithing reminds us that God is God, and everything we have is from his hands—we are not in control. The Church, therefore, is a community of ordinary saints living out dynamic participation through discipleship to Christ, who calls us to lay down everything and follow Him.

Returning to anthropological and theological orthodoxy, pastoral integrity and shape are restored. We deal with the holy. To deal with something ‘other than’ will require a philosophy ‘other than’ the world around us.

Nevertheless, someone has to light the proverbial match and start the journey home. For pastors, renewal begins with you and is initiated with prayer. Return to your first love and let your life be a magnetic example of coming to your senses and learning to live again.

Jesus repeatedly withdrew to pray, usually in solitude. That is a lousy marketing and engagement strategy, yet many were drawn to him. His ministry didn’t engage the delusional god within the people's cognition; it engaged the human heart. His primary announcement began with ‘repent’ (for the kingdom of heaven is at hand). Μετάνοια (translated repentance) means to change your philosophy (how you think and perceive) so that it produces a new direction. You can’t engage the kingdom of God until you allow a new reasoning to take hold of your faculties.

For the majority of the people Jesus preached to, the philosophy they were turning from was one built by religion and tradition, not necessarily sin.

As pastors, μετάνοια comes through prayer, offering ourselves to the account of God in scripture again, and a liberated conviction that we are not gods; we don’t have to push things to happen beyond the bounds of our humanity, and God is writing the story. Our call is shepherding. To shepherd, we must call our flock out of the toil of playing god with their lives. Will this cause rejection? Indeed. No one willingly gives up power, even if that power is destroying their lives.

Yet, through surrender, even death, comes resurrection life. What if this generation isn’t the end of Christianity in America but the beginning? What if the umbrage in the pastoral vocation is a holy call to return to our first love?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Ethics,10

Knowing of good and evil in disunion with the origin, man begins to reflect upon himself. His life is now his understanding of himself, whereas at the origin it was his knowledge of God. Self-knowledge is now the measure and the goal of life…

Now anyone who reads the New Testament even superficially cannot but notice the complete absence of this world of disunion, conflict, and ethical problems. Not man’s falling apart from God, from men, from things and from himself, but rather the rediscovered unity, reconciliation, is now the basis of the discussion and the ‘point of decision of the specifically ethical experience.’ The life and activity of men is not at all problematic or tormented or dark: it is self-evident, joyful, sure and clear.

What is more intriguing about these butterflies is the self-sacrificial posture they bear witness to on their return pilgrimage north after the winter is over. It takes three to four generations for them to reach their final destination. The first travels some distance, lays eggs, and dies. The eggs grow up, travel a little further, lay eggs, die, and so on, until the final generation, often called the super generation, is established and ready to journey back to Mexico as fall approaches once more.

Every colony of monarch butterflies is anchored by a harmonious vision of home and long obedience. Some generations voluntarily take a journey they will never see the fullness of, but do so for the sake of other generations making it home. Like the monarch butterfly, every disciple of Christ is anchored by a unified vision of home and long obedience for the sake of something much more significant than themselves.

To what extent have we traded these simple realities to satisfy the contemporary need for instant gratification? Furthermore, how has this exchange contributed to our deficient formation into the likeness of Christ that only comes through a life given to long, obedient discipleship?

To recover the authenticity of the earliest Christians, we must return to their way. It was a way marked by tribulation, cultural injustice, and significant persecution. Yet, their devotion to enduring and long obedience allowed the Church to grow stronger and the good news of the Son to remain a timeless call shared by all following generations, namely our own.

What is long obedience? 

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘The essential thing “in heaven and earth” is…that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and always has resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.’1 The phrase ‘long obedience in the same direction’ became the title for Eugene Peterson’s book on the Psalms of Ascent (Psalms 120 - 134) and has since grown into a mantra for the life of the ordinary saint. Eugene Peterson saw the crisis of discipleship as worthy of examining over 40 years ago. Today, recovering the original simplicity of the Jesus way is necessary.

Using the Psalms of Ascent and insights from Eugene Peterson and others, I desire to offer a pathway to recovering simple obedience for a more extraordinary story. Following Christ as a Christian disciple calls us on a pilgrimage home, from our backgrounds, perspectives, stories, and cultures to a place where we are all defined by who we collectively become rather than what we individually produce.

The Psalms of Ascent were likely sung, possibly in sequence, by Hebrew pilgrims as they went up to Jerusalem to the great worship festivals.2 The geography of the land also played a role in this ascent as Jerusalem was the highest city in Palestine, and so all who traveled there spent much of their time ascending.3 However, the pilgrimage wasn’t just a physical ascension to a higher location; it was a metaphoric and symbolic ascension to spiritual maturity.

These journeys, which took place three times a year, were rhythmed breaks from lives marked by work, struggles, and routines to be reminded that humans are, at their core, people redeemed by God—for the Israelites, a people whom God found in Egypt and delivered to the promised land—and part of an extensive, diverse family. In essence, the Psalms of Ascent, and accompanying pilgrimage, reinforce that humanity is a consequence of God’s redemption, protection, and promise. Yet, they meet us on a road that begins at a lower place, with the Psalmist pleading, ‘Deliver me, O Lord, from lying lips, from a deceitful tongue.’4 As Eugene Peterson writes, ‘There is wonder upon unexpected wonder on this road, and there are fearful specters to be met. Singing the fifteen psalms is a way both to express the amazing grace and to quiet the anxious fears.’5

To ascend to our joyous destination, we must face all our fears, anxieties, and wanderings, for it is only by facing what holds us down that we ascend to what lifts us. Only when a person faces the humdrum, dull ache stranded in our souls from seasons of tireless production and hardships can they be free to rediscover the joy of being one with their Creator. This is the long obedience. It is a long trajectory of one foot in front of the other, baptized in cadences of home, remembering that God brought you here, sustains you here, and will lead you out. God goes before you, behind you, beside you, around you, and within you.

So we sing our songs again and head home, as spiritually as necessary, to remind ourselves of our heritage's assurance and recapture Christ's simple, patient way.

Practicing long obedience in the pilgrimage of ascent.

In his book Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton tells of a man in a yacht who set out to discover a new land only to miscalculate his course and end up right where he started. Chesterton told this story to ask the question, ‘How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?’6 Long obedience in the same direction gives us the thrill of discovery, yet continuously and ultimately discovering the place we set out from. The place we set out from is not our making but God himself.

We begin our journey in the distress of a deliverance cry (Psalm 120:1-2), but do so by going to God (represented as Jerusalem) from God as our origin and home. Who we are, and where we are, in Christ, is the grace given to us to take the journey of ascension.

Psalm 121:1-2: I lift my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come from? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.

Martin Laird reminds us,7

When you set off on a pilgrimage of ascension, though you begin in the desperate anticipation of all you carry with you in spirit, you discover God isn’t waiting for you to reach him but is setting off with you in grace. Therefore, you can be delighted with resilience and joy. Your perspective is moved from the distress of despair and war to your helper. Peterson writes, ‘Psalm 121 is a quiet voice gently and kindly telling us that we are, perhaps, wrong in the way we are going about the Christian life, and then, very simply, showing us the right way.’8

Psalm 122:1: I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’

With your eyes fixed on home, from the grace of the one with whom you are joined, you see clearly that the remainder of the pilgrimage can be endured and that you are being transformed at every point of elevation. However, your joy is in your choice to walk. No one is forcing you to ascend; you choose to ascend on a journey you believe will refresh you.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes the journey of discipleship as being pulled ‘out of the realm of finite into the realm of infinite possibilities (which is the one liberating reality).’9

The choice to follow the leading of our shepherd is a choice to die on the path to living out the infinite possibilities of our lives in Christ. When the choice is made, there is an immediate sense of intent in the face of initial uncomfortability. With the hills in sight, you look to the helper and declare gladness in the invitation to come home.

As you ascend, you feel the courage to worship, foreseeing the mercy of a present Father.

Psalm 123:1-2: To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens! As the eyes of the servants look to the hand of their mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, until he has mercy upon us.

You remember that the Lord brought you here, and allow thanksgiving to become a prophetic lens through which you see your life.

Psalm 124:2-3a: If it had not been for the Lord who was on our side, when our enemies attacked us, then they would have swallowed us up alive…

You anchor yourself in trust of your God, who remains, endlessly, the rock on which your life is secure.

Psalm 125:1: Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.

You dream of a day when every wrong is made right and everything lost is restored.

Psalm 126:1: When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

You give up authority of your life’s story and submit to the beauty of what he is writing in you and humankind.

Psalm 127:1: Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.

You grow up in the fear of the Lord, revering God's capacity to keep you in the right relationship with him.

Psalm 128:1: Happy is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways. You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be happy, and it shall go well with you.

You start to pray audacious prayers.

Psalm 129:5: May all who hate Zion be put to shame and turned back.

You start to see the beauty in the long obedience that you would never see striving for instant gratification.

Psalm 130:5: I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.

You realize that your posture, obedience, direction, and election mean much more than your words—three of the final four chapters of the Psalms of Ascent shrink dramatically. Where despair once ruled your soul, a quiet peace now reigns.

Psalm 131:2a: But I have calmed and quieted my soul.

You rediscover your purpose, which, like Chersterton’s man in the yacht, is where you’ve come from and where you are going.

Psalm 132:13: For the Lord has chosen Zion; he has desired it for his habitation.

With your final resting place ahead, the culmination of a long obedience in the same direction, you rejoice in the unity of the people, from all regions, cultures, stories, and backgrounds, coming together through a heart bent on home and a persevering walk.

Psalm 133:1: How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!

All is made right, again.

Psalm 134:3: May the Lord, maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.

Will you choose the long path?

In Henri Nouwen’s book The Inner Voice of Love, he writes, ‘Stop wandering around. Instead, come home and trust that God will bring you what you need.’10 What if the disorder we often feel—the nagging ache for something more—is the call to long obedience to the path of ascension? 

In twenty-first century America, Christians live no differently than anyone else. We have become workers for the sake of fast, quantitative production: more money, more power, more comfort, more security, etc. We get products delivered same-day, ‘connect’ with others via a five-second long text message, spend our lives on devices algorithmized to steal our attention from the life and beauty in front of us, and wonder why we aren’t fulfilled. None of these comforts are inherently evil, but they become snares when they distract us from what truly matters. What our souls, our innermost beings that make us who we are, are crying out for is the pilgrimage of patient, uncomplicated, and long obedience because they ache for home and know that in finding home, they will be made right again.

In the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the first question is, ‘What is the chief end of man?’ The answer? ‘To glorify God and enjoy him forever.’

God desires you to glorify him by enjoying the life you live in him, and that he lives in and through you, but to find the liberation to do so, and break the disease of despair that the years of disappointment have carried, you must once again take the pilgrimage of ascension. When the journey home becomes a consistent rhythm for our lives, we will live in the blessed assurance that from Zion, all is blessed.

Can you recognize the dull-ache of home within? Or, has it grown into a chronic pain of the soul? Do you long for a day when ‘justice rolls down like a river,’11 and every wrong is made right? Hear the call to ascend and know that ‘on the mountain of the Lord, all things will be provided.’12

Matthew 11:28-30  MSG

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.

I preached this sermon recently at Dream Church. You can listen to it here:

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In the beloved Christmas classic Home Alone, Kevin, the main character, is told by his older brother Buzz that the old man next door (Marley) is a child murderer who puts his victims in buckets of salt, which he later uses to clear his driveway. Because of this, Kevin spends the entire movie assuming Marley is a murderer. By the film’s end, Kevin is caught by bandits, who he has sent through all kinds of agony. The bandits are about to ‘whack’ Kevin when Marley hits the burglars with his shovel out of the shadows and sets Kevin free.

Kevin was told Marley was a murderer; Kevin witnessed, personally, Marley as a savior.

I can’t help but suppose this humorous Christmas film accurately depicts how we construct ideologies about the workings of our relationship with God. Many of our presumptions of who God is to us and the Creation are rooted in popular, contemporary notions that Scripture tells the story of a God who is only for some. In this view, God’s acceptance in the Old Testament is limited to Israel, and God’s acceptance in the New Testament is limited to the Church. Yet, Karl Barth reminds us, ‘What is Christian is secretly but fundamentally identical with what is universally human.’1

I propose that Scripture tells the story of God working to reconcile all humans to himself and each other, centering on the Incarnation of the Son of God.

Biblical Backdrop

John’s gospel has a unique connection with the opening of the book of Genesis. John 1 and the Creation poem in Genesis 1 speak of origins. Genesis 1 tells us that God created everything in the beginning. Yet, John’s gospel goes further and speaks to the eternal condition of the Son being with God, as God. In other words, Genesis creatively speaks to what God has done; John speaks to who God is in the Son—Jesus.

John calls the incarnate Son the Word (λόγος). Justo L. Gonzalez writes, in reflecting on how early apologist Justin Martyr thought of Christ as the Logos,

According to a tradition of long standing in Greek philosophy, the human mind can understand reality because it shares in the Logos or universal reason that undergirds all reality. For instance, if we are able to understand that two and two make four, the reason for this is that both in our minds and in the universe there is a Logos, a reason or order according to which two and two always make four. [John’s] Gospel affirms that in Jesus, the Logos or Word was made flesh. Thus, according to Justin, what has happened in the incarnation is that the underlying reason behind the universe, the Logos or Word of God, has come in the flesh.2

By declaring that the Incarnate Son is the Logos, John expresses that the reasoning behind everything in Creation is found in Christ. This is the foundation of the argument of my thesis about the grand witness of Scripture. Colossians 1:15-16 tells us, ‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.’

All creation, including humanity, finds existence in the Son and purpose, as Colossians states, through him, as the Logos, and for him, as God. If we read Genesis and all of the Old Testament through the knowledge of the Son and what the Son has accomplished on behalf of all Creation, we begin to see that woven into the fabric of Scripture is the understanding that God is a God of all people, of all time, and has always worked to reconcile his people to himself.

In his book Reading Backwards, Richard Hayes writes, ‘In the new situation created by the death and resurrection of Jesus, Israel’s Scripture is to be comprehensively construed as a witness to the gospel.’3 If this is the case, and I believe it is, we can journey into the depths of Israel’s Scripture (the Old Testament) and find a ubiquitous witness of a reconciling God.

Israel’s Scripture

Genesis 1 and 2 give us an account of the ordering of the cosmos in the beginning. These are more than mere history; these are poetry communicating truths beneath the surface. Pinpointing a specific time frame for the authorship of Genesis is particularly difficult given the current evidence; however, the time of Babylonian exile is most often suggested as the likely period in which Genesis took shape, similar to the book we have now. The period for the Babylonian exile was around the 6th century BCE.

Ancient cosmology, as in the Genesis 1 and 2 stories, is function-oriented rather than material-oriented. The ontological beginning of a thing was measured when it began functioning as it was designed to function rather than when it materialized. John Walton, professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College, wrote in The Lost World of Genesis One,

If we follow the sense of the literature and its ideas of creation, we find that people in the ancient Near East did not think of creation in terms of making material things—instead, everything is function oriented. The gods are beginning their own operations and are making all of the elements of the cosmos operational. Creation thus constituted bringing order to the cosmos from an originally nonfunctional condition.4

The beginning chapters of Genesis tell us that God has formed a functioning creation as a cosmic temple, culminating in day seven when God rests—an ancient Near Eastern way of saying a god has taken their place in their temple. Again, Walton writes, ‘The inauguration of the functions and the entrance of the presence of God to take up his rest creates the [cosmic] temple.’5

However, not long after this account of the original functioning of the universe, the euphoric peace turns chaotic again. The newly created humans choose a tree of the knowledge of good and evil over a tree of life. The difference between the trees? One offers control (knowledge that will make one like God); the other offers life (dependent on God retaining the understanding that elevates humanity where it wasn’t meant to be through its power). Genesis 3 is where the context of Babylonian exile grows relevant. The people of Israel and Judah were exiled from their Eden—the Promised Land. They were exiled because they turned away from God. They chose the tree of knowledge and neglected life. Genesis 1-3 reminds Israel—and us—of God’s original intent and how we have poorly stewarded that original intent. 

Genesis then tells of a righteous man, Noah, who would become the seed of recreation through a universal flood. God would send the creation back to its original state, as the waters cover the deep, to—symbolically—recreate the world. Despite the unsuccessful recreation, a marvelous mystery took place in the flood. Humans did not change; God did. Perhaps that’s the point of the flood narrative: to show us a change in philosophy on the part of God rather than a change in morality on the part of humans. In the book A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, we read,

The flood story focuses on God and God’s commitment to the world. This God expresses sorrow and regret; judges but doesn’t want to; goes beyond justice and decides to save some, including animals; commits to the future of a less that perfect world; is open to change in view of experience with the world and doing things in new ways; promises never to do this again…God is the one who has changed between the beginning and the end of the flood, not human beings.6

God commits to the creation as-is rather than throwing the whole thing away. If humans were to return to their proper functional design, it would be God’s work, not theirs. God understands that committing to humans means he will be the one to suffer. Yet, God creates humans in his image and likeness so that a day could come when he would tear through the barrier, take on humanity, and redeem us from the inside. Already, from the start of Genesis, we see the forming of the foundation for ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο (the Word becoming flesh).

As redemption through recreation falters, God chooses to bring his purposes to fruition through a family. That family is the family of Abram (later, Abraham). God longs to redeem all nations through Abram and his family, not redeem Abram and his family out of all nations. Genesis 12:3 says, ‘...in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

The rest of Genesis tells the story of Abraham’s lineage through Isaac, Jacob—later Israel—and Jacob’s sons who would become the heads of the tribes of Israel, and the family’s settling in Egypt through the leadership of Joseph, a son sold into slavery by the others.

Ironically, the families of the sons who sold Joseph into slavery end up in slavery themselves, and Exodus opens by recalling how Israel found itself in Egyptian slavery, desperate for redemption. Through plagues and much back-and-forth with Pharoah, the people of Israel are set free under the leadership of Moses, and in the waters of the Red Sea, their enemies are destroyed.

When the Israelites reached Mount Sinai, the place that set the precedent for the rest of Scripture, God readied them to enter into a covenant with him. This covenant and law within make Israel the nation through which the world would be redeemed, fulfilling God’s covenant with their father Abraham that every nation would be blessed through him [and his lineage].

In Exodus 19:5-6, the Lord says, ‘The whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’ First, the Lord clarifies that the whole earth is his, echoing Psalm 34:1, which asserts the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness within it. We can only properly understand Israel’s purpose in the ultimate plan of God within the understanding that the entirety of the Creation is the Lord’s. Israel, at Sinai, is anointed as the priests of God’s cosmic temple. The role of a priest is to be an intermediary between people and God. For example, Aaron announced the people’s sins over the head of the scapegoat and sent the goat into the wilderness, carrying away the people’s sins. In this instance, in Leviticus 16, the priest (Aaron) is an intermediary between God and the people.

Israel is called a kingdom of priests to the whole earth. Israel’s being a holy nation, or set apart, was not so that God could reject other people, groups, and nations; it was so that Israel could act as a bridge between the nations and God. With this in mind, we must see the tension in the Old Testament—good and bad kings, rejecting God for false gods, and all the major and minor prophets calling Israel back to her original purpose and identity—as part one of the story of a creation made whole and the humans within that creation restored.

The Old Testament—Israel’s Scripture—is critically important because it tells us that God must step into our self-made delusion of what it means to be human and redeem it from our side. It could happen in no other way, and we are confident it could happen in no other way because we see the strain of our most significant attempts and failures throughout the Old Testament.

We leave the Old Testament corpus recognizing that although God’s people have a holy call, they are no different ontologically from anyone else. ‘Reading backward,’ as Richard Hayes suggests, we realize the call of God’s people, represented in Israel and the Church, is to be the means through which the entirety of the human race ultimately discovers that the Incarnate Son has brought them delightfully close to God.

Isaiah 2:2-4 NRSV

In the days to come

the mountain of the Lord’s house

shall be established as the highest of the mountains,

and shall be raised above the hills;

all the nations shall stream to it.

Many peoples shall come and say,

‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways

and that we may walk in his paths.’

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,

and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between nations,

and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn way any more.

Born is the King

With the backdrop of the Old Testament in mind, we can properly discern the New. Jesus, the Incarnate Son, is born into a world dramatically different than the one Malachi leaves us with. Israelites are now Jews in a Greco-Roman culture. Everyone spoke a new language, Koine Greek, though many Jews spoke Aramaic (a Hebrew form). The people of God were spread across the Diaspora.7 Although many were ‘home’ geographically, they were indeed foreigners in their land. Israel needed a King. Israel needed a new David to rise, destroy the Romans, and send them back to their former glory.

The prospects of Jesus’ assent to David’s throne were good. Jesus was from the right family line, carrying the anointing of all the divine prophecies and signs.8 Yet, what unfolded in Jesus’ life was completely unexpected. Jesus did not come to conquer the Romans so that Israel could be restored; Jesus came to include the Romans and everyone else in a new Israel—a new creation—governed by peace. Jesus wouldn’t kill Romans through war; he would be killed by Romans—with the Jewish leaders’ approval—as an act of laying oneself down for the sake of peace and restoration.

In commentating on the gospel of John, The Death of the Messiah from The Anchor Bible Reference Library says, ‘[Jesus’] whole purpose is to come to [the] hour and drink [the] cup in order to glorify God’s name and fulfill the Scriptures.’9 If Jesus is fulfilling the Scriptures in his ministry, death, burial, and resurrection, we are invited to see the Scriptures within the finished work of Christ. Christ reconciling the human race means the Scriptures are ultimately looking for a day when complete reconciliation occurs.

However, the question remains: How can we be sure that Jesus’ reconciliation, thus the scope of Scripture, is for all and not only some? How can we be sure that this reconciliation fulfills the Old Testament?

We turn to Paul’s epistle to the Romans, particularly Romans 5. In one of the most significant philosophical writings in the Bible, Paul takes this moment in his letter to help listeners understand the magnitude of what took place in Christ. He begins his argument by reminding listeners that Christ died for the ungodly while we were still weak. (Romans 5:6) The word translated weak (ἀσθενῶν) can also be translated as helpless or sick. In other words, Christ reconciled us through his death while we were broken. Origen of Alexandria commented, ‘For we were ungodly before we turned to God, and Christ died for us before we believed.’10 This eliminates the notion that we need to do something to unite ourselves to the reconciling work of Christ. Christ accomplished this work while we were ‘lost’; therefore, ‘this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the results of works, so that no one may boast.’11

We already feel tension between Paul’s philosophy and American modernity’s philosophy. The majority believe (rightly) that salvation is by faith, not works, but many have also distorted that to mean that it is our faith that saves us. Christ saved us while we were faithless. Therefore, faith plays a crucial role in living out our salvation, but faith does not save; Christ does.

Paul then builds on his argument by declaring the proof of God’s love for us is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners12 and that it was while we were enemies that we were reconciled to God through the death of his son.13 It is through Jesus Christ our Lord that we have now received reconciliation.14

Yet, the question of how this happened remains. Paul is aware of this and spends the rest of Romans 5 describing how reconciliation for all was accomplished and how the Old Testament’s Scripture is fulfilled through Christ’s work.

According to Paul, sin came into the world through one man: Adam. Paul takes us back to the story’s beginning to place Christ there and thread Christ from the beginning to the present to the end (eternally). Sin resulted in death. Because death is the result of sin, and all have sinned, death has come to all. We are all the seed of Adam and connected in our susceptibility to sin and death. However, Paul states in Romans 5:14 that Adam was only ‘a pattern of the one who was to come.’ The word for pattern is τύπος and carries the idea of an anticipative figure. I like the imagery of Adam as a ‘prophetic signpost’ to the one who was to come. In other words, we know about the one to come because we’ve seen the one who has come.

In The New Interpreter’s Bible, N. Thomas Wright writes, 

The thought is of a die or stamp that leaves its impression in wax: Paul’s meaning seems to be that Adam prefigured the Messiah in certain respects…, notably in this, that he founded a family that would bear his characteristics.15

Then, the climax of the argument Paul presents in Romans 5. The free gift is not like the trespass. What is the free gift? Grace through Christ. ‘For if the many died through the one man’s trespass (that of Adam), much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.’16 Adam’s permeating death modeled how one man’s actions affect all who come from him.

Nevertheless, Christ’s permeating life was greater than Adam’s death because Christ preceded Adam (John 1:3) and proceeded from Adam (in the Incarnation). Adam, sin, and death have always been wrapped up in Christ. A more excellent gift of grace finished its effects through the Incarnation and Passion of Christ.

To make the argument abundantly clear, in Romans 5:18, Paul states, ‘Therefore, just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.’ The Greek word for all is πάντας, which means the whole. The whole human race experienced the sting of death from the one man: Adam. Yet, in an even more excellent way, the entire human race experiences the justification and life from the one man: Christ.

Finally, before moving to Chapter 6 and what we should do in response, Paul speaks to the Law. This work in Christ seems to diminish the need for the Law, and possibly the Old Testament built on the Law, altogether. However, for Paul, the Law is necessary. He says, in Romans 5:20-21, ‘But law came in, so that trespass might increase, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so grace might also reign through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

Cyril of Alexandria wrote regarding these verses, ‘The law came as the revealer of our common weakness so that the human race would appear even more clearly to need the aid of the medicine of Christ.’17 Pelagius commentated, ‘The amount of sin has been revealed so that the greatness of grace might be known and so that we might pay back a corresponding debt of love.’18

In a few unsuspecting verses, Paul ties up the story of the Old Testament with the story of Christ and the reconciliation of all in the New. The Bible is one congruent story whose scope is all.

According to Douglas Campbell,

God’s Son came to save the human race undoing the destruction of Adam, not just the destruction of Jews. Hence it seems that exactly the same rationale should apply. God will not let humanity go. In contrast between divine benevolence and human recalcitrance fought out in the space that is the human race, God will win…And we can be confident, in view of this, that God really is a covenantal God, committed to us all permanently and irrevocably.19

Karl Barth, in musing on Romans 5, wrote,

God takes man’s transgression seriously by taking it upon Himself: He himself becomes the sinner and dies in man’s place and so makes both sin and death pass away. Adam and Christ are thus distinguished from each other. The history of Israel under the Law shows that there is no way from the sin of Adam to the grace of Christ, but that there is a way from the grace of Christ to the sin of Adam. The Law excludes Adam from the grace of Christ, but by fulfilling the Law Christ can take upon himself Adam’s sin. Adam excludes Christ: but Christ includes Adam. Adam does not become Christ, but Christ, without ceasing to be Christ, becomes Adam as well. And because Christ thus identifies Himself with Adam’s sin and Adam’s death, Adam the sinner becomes a witness to Christ, the Reconciler.”20

Implications for Ministry

Now that I have established the grand scope of Scripture, how should we respond in ministry? As in past times, the Bible today is weaponized for agendas that isolate people or people groups from those ‘on the inside.’ Even the Church is more divided than ever against itself. We have little room for critical thinking, debate, discussion, healthy disagreement, and the unity of differences in one united mosaic—to use the Scriptural picture from Irenaeus of Lyons—of Christ’s reconciliation.

At a minimum, the scope of Scripture demands that we contend for the justice of all people. It calls us to live with the humbling posture of becoming less.21 The ministry we’ve been given as the Church is not to save the world—Christ has already accomplished this—but to witness to the world that it has been radically loved, redeemed, and carried home. Our purpose is not to find Adam in humans but Christ, the Logos, in humans despite the presence of Adam.

The Church, as the new priests within the cosmic temple of Creation, is to mediate between God’s people (the human race) and God until the ‘knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea’ (Habbakuk 2:14). We are to love as he has loved us. We are to tell the story of God that roots us in the story of who we are. C. Kavin Rowe writes,

The story of everything is a story about all there is. The very earliest Christians believed that the God who elected Abraham and his offspring and who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead was the one who made all that is not God. There is God and not-God, and that is all there is.

When, therefore, you tell a story about God, you are telling a story about everything.22

When we find ourselves within the grand scope of Scripture, we discover that all of Creation is standing on tip-toe, waiting and yearning for our unveiling so that with us, it can experience freedom.23 We, as the Church, are the first fruits of what is meant to be a kingdom that is ever-expanding until it includes the entirety of Creation.24 Let us, therefore, know every living thing as worthy of justice, righteousness, and redemption, until the day when we see it come to pass.

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