​I was asked to post my talk from Sunday. Much of this discussion is drawing from Dr. Willie James Jennings commentary, Acts.

We’ve been journeying through the book of Acts looking at the birth of the church and the movement of the Spirit to bring Jesus’ reign of healing and renewal on the earth. The revolution had begun. The revolution continues today in us as God’s healing community. For the revolutionary movement that began in Jesus is now being lived out in his followers. For through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, humanity is being redeemed and a new community of equality, dignity, and inclusion was emerging as the disciples were filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and restored in their vocations to be God’s image bearers on the earth.
 
This week's text finds us in chapter 4. So far, we’ve read about Jesus sending his followers to be healing agents in the world, ascending to the Father, and then pouring out the Spirit at Pentecost on all people in a remarkable in-breaking of the kingdom where men and women, slave and free, rich and poor, and many cultures and nations gathered in Jerusalem that day heard the gospel in their own language. The long-awaited age of salvation had come, and the timid and confused disciples were transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit and preached with boldness and conviction. Thousands joined this revolutionary Jesus movement to become a part of this new Jewish community marked by generosity, inclusion, and devotion.
 
I invite you to listen to a tale of two temples. For we begin to see the conflict escalate between the religious authorities who held power in the Jerusalem temple and this revolutionary community who are now the new temple filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered to do the healing ministry of Jesus. Remember, the Holy of Holies was the sacred chamber in the temple of God’s presence that only the high priests could access, yet when the rupture of sin was healed through Jesus, the veil was torn open. On Pentecost, the ancient prophecies were fulfilled as the Spirit of God was poured out on this new community. Yet we begin to see the conflict between these two temple realities here in Acts almost in parallel fashion. Last week, we recounted the story of Peter and John going to the temple and healing the lame man. Yet now we see that they are facing opposition from the powers, not unlike Jesus did. Thus, we see this template emerge—that to follow Jesus and to do the liberating, healing works of Jesus ensures that we will upset the powers.
 
In my own life, I’ve experienced this a number of times. I remember distinctly when I was about 18, we were hosting a prayer meeting to pray for the youth in our city on Sunday nights. And I was on volunteer staff for a big church at the time. When the Spirit began to really show up in our meetings, word got out. We began to invite some of our friends who were tired and burnt out from all the ministry to come and find refreshing and soak in the presence of God. For the Spirit was really moving. But this threatened the powers. And it wasn’t long before I was called into the youth pastor’s office and essentially interrogated. Eventually they shut our meeting down because our meeting wasn’t sanctioned by them. We were a threat. This story illustrates the tension surrounding the nature of God’s temple and the nature of God’s church. Is it a building, an organization, or an institution that can be controlled and curated? Or is it the wild and untamable Spirit embodied in the community of God's people and poured out indiscriminately in the world?
 
I invite you to read the text in Acts 4:1-22 and see what stands out? Notice where there is some conflict for you in this passage? What is the Spirit disrupting? Where is there some clarity for you in this passage? What is the Spirit confirming?
 
While Peter and John were addressing the people, the priests, the chief of the Temple police, and some Sadducees came up, indignant that these upstart apostles were instructing the people and proclaiming that the resurrection from the dead had taken place in Jesus. They arrested them and threw them in jail until morning, for by now it was late in the evening. But many of those who listened had already believed the Message—in round numbers about five thousand!
 
The next day a meeting was called in Jerusalem. The rulers, religious leaders, religion scholars, Annas the Chief Priest, Caiaphas, John, Alexander—everybody who was anybody was there. They stood Peter and John in the middle of the room and grilled them: “Who put you in charge here? What business do you have doing this?”
 
With that, Peter, full of the Holy Spirit, let loose: “Rulers and leaders of the people, if we have been brought to trial today for helping a sick man, put under investigation regarding this healing, I’ll be completely frank with you—we have nothing to hide. By the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the One you killed on a cross, the One God raised from the dead, by means of his name this man stands before you healthy and whole. Jesus is ‘the stone you masons threw out, which is now the cornerstone.’ Salvation comes no other way; no other name has been or will be given to us by which we can be saved, only this one.”
 
They couldn’t take their eyes off them—Peter and John standing there so confident, so sure of themselves! Their fascination deepened when they realized these two were laymen with no training in Scripture or formal education. They recognized them as companions of Jesus, but with the man right before them, seeing him standing there so upright—so healed!—what could they say against that?
 
They sent them out of the room so they could work out a plan. They talked it over: “What can we do with these men? By now it’s known all over town that a miracle has occurred, and that they are behind it. There is no way we can refute that. But so that it doesn’t go any further, let’s silence them with threats so they won’t dare to use Jesus’ name ever again with anyone.”
 
They called them back and warned them that they were on no account ever again to speak or teach in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John spoke right back, “Whether it’s right in God’s eyes to listen to you rather than to God, you decide. As for us, there’s no question—we can’t keep quiet about what we’ve seen and heard.”
 
The religious leaders renewed their threats, but then released them. They couldn’t come up with a charge that would stick, that would keep them in jail. The people wouldn’t have stood for it—they were all praising God over what had happened. The man who had been miraculously healed was over forty years old.
 
What I notice is that liberation is disruptive. For as soon as the disciples began to join in the healing ministry of Jesus, they face the same opposition from those who killed him. Peter preached with boldness the gospel of Jesus, and yet these words became fighting words the moment that they brought concrete liberation for broken people. These words brought about direct confrontation with those in power. Jesus not only spoke these words but was the Word and challenged and confronted the powers, both spiritual and human. In some ways, this moment was inevitable. The struggle against those in power that marked the life and death of Jesus was coming for them as well. The great illusion that we are susceptible to is that as followers of Jesus we can live a path different from Jesus and his disciples. We believe that somehow we can be loved or at least liked or at least tolerated or ignored by those with real power in the world. Yet this illusion forgets our location—that we are common, everyday people proclaiming liberation and the provocative truth that violence and death are no longer the ultimate power.  Jesus is risen!

These words touch two intersecting nerves, the religious and the political. We see this dangerous cocktail portrayed today in Christian nationalism. For some, it is heresy to say that Jesus is the power of God. For others it is sedition to say that Jesus is the power. Only criminals touch nerves at this level and receive the consequences: for they were arrested and put in custody. Theologian Willie James Jennings says this:

"Real preaching and authentic teaching is inextricably bound to real criminality. Christians of the modern West have never really grasped our deep connection to the criminal mind. We should always understand ourselves as those called to be secular critics who unrelentingly call into question the gods of the age – that is the prevailing social, cultural, political, economic, and academic logics that support or are at ease with the status quo of grotesquely differentiated wealth and poverty, uneven access to the necessary resources for life and health, and forms of sublimely stubborn oppression masked inside social conventions." 

The powers always embody and support the status quo that keeps people imprisoned and oppressed. So what does it mean that to follow Jesus is to become a criminal disciple? What does it mean  to get into some good trouble, John Lewis style?
 
This weekend, we celebrate Juneteenth and the spirituality of liberation that was practiced by enslaved people, who despite the legal and social reality, sang spirituals that declared healing was coming and  salvation was possible. Our Black brothers and sisters have cultivated a deep spirituality that we must learn from. They know that liberation means becoming an enemy of the state. They know the powers that seek to incarcerate, enslave, kill, and oppress—that continue to withhold full emancipation for Black Americans today.  And yet, they have cultivated a deep hope and black joy as resistance to the powers as they continue to sing, “There is a balm in Gilead, this I know, this I know.”
 
Peter and John are judged just as Jesus is judged, but Jesus had gone before and showed them the way. Instead of trying to escape the place of judgment, they seize it. And Peter becomes like the great jazz master, Louis Armstrong. He states this motif that will be repeated again and again with endless variations. Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. The table is being turned over, and an upside down world is being turned right side up in these words. Peter stands next to the man God has healed not by the powers of the world nor the elite, but by the power of the Holy Spirit. Yet this threatens the powers. Peter is in essence saying,  "You do not have the power of God to heal the broken. You do not have the power to raise the dead. You do not have the power to save. Only Jesus can."
 
Peter begins to open the scriptures even as Jesus did, quoting Psalm 118, a text the people would have been very familiar with from their own scriptures. Yet Peter reveals Jesus as the stone that was rejected by the builder, but has become the cornerstone. These again were provocative words directly tying Jesus to their Messianic hopes. The Lord who is their strength and song and has become their salvation. As the healed man who had been disabled his whole life now stands clutching their side, this connection between salvation and healing cannot be missed. These words are often interchanged throughout the scripture. Salvation is a salve, a healing balm. Jesus is the cornerstone for this new community, and yet the builders rejected him. The builders are the judges and the powerful who institutionalize life, enact social orders, and create unjust systemic structures. Yet Jesus is enacting a new social order that saves, heals, and liberates. No one else can do that.
 
Jesus dismantles the dichotomy between the spiritual and the social. Notice what the man whom Peter and John healed does. He “entered the temple,” where, as a lame man, he was never allowed before. This salvation, this healing, restores him to community. This community is visceral, embodied, palpable, personal. What a stunning moment it must have been for a beggar who had sat alone all day, ostracized, his disability the topic of discussion, his condition the cause of sideways glances— now to be welcomed into community and invited into God’s presence. This had social, economic, cultural, and political ramifications. What salvation! What healing! What liberation!
 
The new temple of Jesus community is now where people encounter God’s generosity and healing presence. In truth, this is what the old temple was always meant to be. Yet now God’s healing presence was unleashed by the Spirit upon the common, everyday people to heal all that is broken. And this is our same invitation today if....

If we will reject the status quo and dare to challenge and disrupt the powers and gods of the day in order to join the liberating and healing community of Jesus.

​In Advent, we sing the haunting words, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, remembering that Christ has come as Love incarnate, in flesh and blood, to liberate all creation that is groaning and longing for redemption. A redemption in which we now participate, and the consummation of which we anticipate.

This is our hope in a world brimming with suffering and turmoil. It is this hope, however faint at times, that God is here with us, our Immanuel. Christ came as Creator to redeem all of creation.

"For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God."

"We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies."[Romans 8:19-23]

We consider the glory and the scandal of a God who entered into the bodily experience of humanity and the grit and dirt of earth suffering under the tyranny of evil — in order to recreate it!

There is much we can learn as we humbly realize our place in creation not as gods but as creatures and stewards of God's glory, healing, and beauty on the earth.

"Creation is God’s gift to us as a first teacher and she is a teacher for life. Although God may be an abstraction to us, in spite of all our efforts to make God concrete through theology, story, ceremony, and song, creation is the one solid, concretized demonstration where God exists. God embodies the wonders of sunrise to sunset each day. God shows God’s self in the rainbow, the song of the loon, and the dance of the Sage Grouse. God’s presence is there in the birth of every living creature and again in its death. And God is revealed throughout the life of every single cell and every complex system on earth and beyond."

"Each of us, along with all living creatures, encounters creation before we can read or understand ideas about religion. Shared by all, that primordial sense of coming to grips with our earthly context is humanity’s deepest spirituality. The earth is our first, most consistent, and most continuous teacher." - Randy Woodley, Mission and the Cultural Other: A Closer Look.

This Advent, we long to reclaim an earthy and embodied spirituality that takes the incarnation of Christ seriously. Jesus came in flesh and blood, in vulnerability, humility, and weakness. Jesus entered into a particular culture, place, and time — born to a poor family in a backwoods town in an occupied land.

Our Immanuel, is still here, God with us, in bodies and in dirt.


by Jessica Ketola

​I've been writing more about what it means to be a Christian in the dirt — meaning how we live the incarnation, this mystery of glory housed in flesh and bone, embodying love and stubborn hope for new creation in the soil of our everyday lives and the places we inhabit.

Radical Hospitality as the scandalous welcome of God is central to our practices as a faith community. For the kingdom of God is like a big, long banqueting table, full of friends, strangers, neighbors, misfits, and sojourners. I love the invitation of the table. For there is something so earthy, bodily, and yet mystical that happens around the table. When we break bread together, we feel a sense of connection, delight, community, and presence.

So much of how we imagine gathering as the community of God’s people is around the table. Hospitality has been a pillar of Christianity over the millennia as Christians have cared for the sick, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. Far from the modern, Martha-Stewart-influenced notions of hospitality meant to impress, hospitality was the means of grace to care for those in need. “Welcoming the stranger… is the most often repeated commandment in the Hebrew Scriptures, with the exception of the imperative to worship the one and only God" (Theologian Orland Espín).

In the New Testament, Jesus displayed a radical inclusivity and welcome in which he modeled a spirituality that is shown to the least of these — the hungry, the needy, the prisoner, and the sick (Matt 25). Hospitality comes from two Greek words: philos which means “friend” and xenos which means “stranger.”

Hospitality is the love of strangers.

As followers of Jesus, we are called to love our neighbor and the stranger —those who are often excluded and neglected in society. And this is very challenging today. We are so fragmented in our society. We don’t know our neighbor. We have largely outsourced and institutionalized care for the stranger. We are prone to gather in our homogenous groups, and we don’t often bump up against those who are different from us. We are often isolated from the real needs and hunger of the oppressed and the poor. And we are afraid…that we’ll be overwhelmed, that we’ll be pushed to our limits, that we won’t have enough time, money, and resources…

Yet, Jesus invites us into another way — a way of abundance that combats the scarcity we feel. We are invited into radical love and generosity. Jesus modeled a scandalous and highly controversial faith that welcomed and included those in society who were outsiders. This greatly offended the Pharisees and still offends us today.

Jesus befriended those on the margins, those who were invisible, those who were oppressed, and those without power, privilege, and voice. And he was highly criticized by the religious people of the day for hanging out with the wrong people. The wrong race, the wrong religion, the wrong gender, the wrong status. But we must understand this.

This. Is. The Gospel.

Its essence is radical welcome and inclusion. We see this as Jesus welcomed women, Samaritans, crooks, adulterers, and lepers, many of who were considered to be no less than dogs. No one is outside of God’s mercy and grace. This gospel transforms communities. It breaks down all the divides. The kingdom invitation is for everyone. Slave and free. Rich and poor. Educated and uneducated. Jew & Gentile. Christian & Muslim. Indigenous and refugee. Every shade of black, brown, and white. Straight and gay. Conservative and liberal. Everyone is invited to the table of God.

Because of this, I believe that radical hospitality is central to who we are as a church. For it is the essence of the kingdom.

This is the extravagance of the feast of God.


by Jessica Ketola​

We've been talking about our value of Creative Liberation — a value at the heart of God's work on the earth. Yet, so often we have read the scriptures from a location of privilege and have failed to see that this gospel is good news to the poor. We must decolonize our faith and decenter whiteness, for the Biblical narrative is largely written from the perspective of those who are oppressed. I believe we must reclaim a faith where our conversion to God demands our conversion to our neighbor. Theologians like James Cone, Gustavo Gutiérrez, William Jennings, Miroslav Volf, Renita Weems, and many others can help us understand liberation as a central theme of the Biblical narrative. One of the gifts of graduate school is being introduced to many different perspectives, ideologies, and thought leaders, and I've been ruminating on the intersection of gospel and culture.

Does the gospel of Jesus Christ transform culture? Many Christians today believe in a gospel that transforms the soul but not society. This question then lies at the heart of a Christian’s socio-political understanding. For me, it is a resounding “yes.”

For if the arc of scripture begins with the goodness and shalom of Creation and ends with its restoration in New Creation, then it follows that we are to be participants in this work of transformation. “Can the conclusion be avoided that not only is shalom God’s cause in the world but that all who believe in Jesus will, along with him, engage in the works of shalom? Shalom is both God’s cause in the world and our human calling.”[1] Shalom is the underpinning for a socio-political understanding that seeks human flourishing, justice, and right relationships with God, self, neighbor, and creation. This vision of human happiness and wholeness found in the inseparable love of God and neighbor informs my belief in a Christ who transforms culture.

Ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr’s models for Christ and Culture prove helpful here. [2] Two of the most predominant approaches today hold moral weight, Christ Against Culture and Christ Of Culture. The former offers a faith deeply committed to preserving holiness and a counter-cultural life. The latter offers an engagement with culture and an ability to contextualize faith in the language and forms of the day. Yet, one without the other offers a misshapen gospel. I believe that Christ Transforming Culture demonstrates an incarnational model that holds these two together — in love of God and neighbor, piety and justice, love incarnate in the neighborhood for the flourishing of all. We need a "radical evangelicalism [that] offers a tradition and a trajectory that is biblically based, Christ-centered, and socially involved—a gospel that embraces forgiveness and holiness for individuals and redemption and wholeness for the world." [3]

It is a travesty that piety has been separated from justice in the sociopolitical sphere. For politics is nothing more than the interrelationships between people and how power is shared, a realm ripe for the preservation of salt, liberation from oppression, and restoration of communities.[4] This kingdom liberation does not locate itself in the kingdoms and empires of this world – either in confusing God’s kingdom with a political agenda or in hopes of gaining worldly power or dominion. Rather, it is located once again in the justice and shalom of “right relationship” or “righteousness.” It is in the explicit call of scripture to care for the most vulnerable and needy in our communities, “not in rights asserted against one another” [5] but in responsibilities of humanity’s covenantal bond and “inescapable mutuality.”[6] Faith without works is dead, and a religion that has largely failed to address the injustices of our times is an impotent one. “Christians have not done enough in this area of conversion to the neighbor, to social justice, to history. They have not perceived clearly enough yet that to know God is to do justice.” [7]

2020 was an apocalyptic year, a year of revelation. Amidst pandemic and protest, the deep seeds of racism and white supremacy were exposed in ways that captured our attention. The brutal violence white people’s privilege had distanced them from now played over and over on screens. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder that catalyzed demonstrations all across our nation, it was increasingly difficult to believe that racism was a part of our ugly past.[8] Though this was nothing new for black, latinx, or asian american communities, many white folks awakened to the systemic and persistent evil of white supremacy. This was a time of grief, outrage, and protest amidst the tide of police brutality against black and brown bodies. The prophets cried out, “I can’t breathe.” [9]

You can be sure that God heard their cries. For our God is a God on the side of the oppressed — those who are crushed, degraded, humiliated, exploited, impoverished, defrauded, and enslaved. Yet what was the response of God’s people? Did the Church hear their cries?

Many did not. Many chose to stay clear of the “politics” of the day in a Christ Against Culture stance. Others became even more entrenched in the particular ideology of their political party both right and left, unwilling to converse with the “other” in a Christ Of Culture approach. The polarizing divides were profound — splitting apart families, friends, and churches.

Similar to previous times of civil unrest, there was “the appalling silence of the good people” within the white church, who professed their love for all lives, denied their culpability, and proved to be a “great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom.” [10] There was a refusal to see, let alone address, the systemic nature of racism, resorting once again to a gospel that sanctions the personal over the social. The roots of this bifurcation go back to our country’s inception in the doctrine of the "spirituality of the church." This spirituality attempted to extricate the church from addressing the social evils of slavery, promoting a “Christianity [that] could save one’s soul but not break one’s chains.” [11] Yet, this hideous distortion of the gospel repeats in response to the outcries to value black lives. “Where were the saints trying to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves [oppressed communities], but to do away with slavery [the systems that brutalize and oppress communities]?” [12] Who was listening to the black and brown prophets of the day?

Fortunately, there is a remnant of Christians who believe that Christ Transforms Culture in the sociopolitical sphere. Those who were willing to repent of America’s greatest sin, white supremacy, offering more than “thoughts and prayers.” They listened deeply to a perspective that contradicted their own. They learned a hard and grievous history. They stood in solidarity with the oppressed in protests and vigils. They followed the prophetic witness of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latinx theologians and church leaders, engaging in civil action. They spoke out against white supremacy in their pulpits and among their peers not without cost, insisting that all created in the divine image share in equity and justice. They wrestled profoundly and lamented their complicity, beginning to find ways to take up the cause of the oppressed, amplify marginalized voices, and elevate black lives.

Yet Christians today must commit to the long, hard road of a lived repentance, “for our conversion to the Lord implies this conversion to our neighbor” — a radical transformation where we come to know “Christ present in exploited and oppressed persons.” [13] “We are not to stand around, hands folded, waiting for shalom to arrive. We are workers in God’s cause,” [14] joining the Spirit’s work of peace-making, justice, and liberation on the earth.


by Jessica Ketola


[1] Nicholas Wolterstorff, “For Justice with Shalom”, in Until Justice and Peace Embrace: The Kuyper Lectures for 1981 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 72.
[2] Reinhold Niebuhr, “Types of Christian Ethics,” In Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture, Glen H. Stassen, Diane M. Yeager, and John Howard Yoder (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 15-29.
[3] Donald W. Dayton, Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 200.
[4] Matthew 5:13, Isaiah 58: 6-7, 12
[5] Karen Lebacqz, “Implications for a Theory of Justice,” in From Christ to the World: Readings in Christian Ethics, eds. Wayne Boulton, Thomas Kennedy, and Allen Verhey (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 257.
[6] Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr, 1963, 1.
[7] Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Liberating Spirituality,” in Spiritual Writings (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011), 49.
[8] “‘I Can’t Breathe’: The Refrain That Reignited a Movement,” Amnesty International, June 30, 2020, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/i-cant-breathe-refrain-reignited-movement.
[9] Jessica Ketola, “A Time of Reckoning, Revelation, Repentance, and Reformation: The Epiphany of America’s Greatest Sin,” Medium, January 12, 2021, https://medium.com/interfaith-now/a-time-of-reckoning-revelation-repentance-and-reformation-7003c588875b.
[10] King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 4.
[11] Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019), 38.
[12] Kathleen Jorden, “The Nonviolence of Dorothy Day,” in From Christ to the World: Readings in Christian Ethics, eds. Wayne Boulton, Thomas Kennedy, and Allen Verhey (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 443.
[13] Gutiérrez, “Liberating Spirituality,” 48.
[14] Wolterstorff, “For Justice with Shalom,” 72.

Photo: Touching Strangers Series by Richard Renaldi

As a community, we are shaped by our shared values —those things that we fiercely love and hold dear, our "non-negotiables"  — one of which is  is Deep Listening.

DEEP LISTENING
We listen deeply to the Spirit at work within our own stories, the stories of our neighbors, and the stories of our place until we become fully immersed in the mystery of God’s Story of love that heals us and heals the world.

This posture of Deep Listening locates us well in the humility and self-giving love of Christ's example. Jesus Christ, who spoke Creation into existence, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself of all privilege and power to take on our humanity and enter our world, laying down his life for love (Philippians 2). The scandal of the incarnation is profound.

We also are invited into this cruciform practice to enter the world of others for the sake of love. Yet often, we are caught up in our own worlds, occupied with our own self-interests and the demands of our lives. How do we repent, shift, and orient our lives differently in order to live lives of love?

How do we enter the worlds of others?

​How do we give up our privilege, our biases, our comfort, and our preconceived ideas to truly listen — deeply and thoughtfully? How do we pause before rushing in with our own experiences and worldviews? How do we slow down to listen well and let our hearts be impacted by the stories of our neighbors?

This is vital as we seek to incarnate love in our everyday lives. History is full of the atrocities of imperialism, colonization, racism, and gentrification. Often we fail to enter the world of the other, to esteem their interests higher than ourselves, to truly listen and honor the wisdom of their stories. “For our conversion to the Lord implies this conversion to our neighbor” — a radical transformation where we come to know “Christ present in exploited and oppressed persons.”[1] We are called to listen deeply to the stories that contradict our own, allowing them to affect us, shape us, and form us in the radical love of Christ.


[1] Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Liberating Spirituality,” in Spiritual Writings (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011), 49.

by Jessica Ketola
ur

Sometimes it seems overly idealistic or naive to continue talking about the beautiful community God has called us to when the world around is groaning and heaving with tumultuous birth pains. For what good does it do to talk about love and justice in a world of hate, violence, and injustice? Yet, I am reminded that the self-giving, non-violent, enemy love that Jesus preached and embodied has the power to change the world.

Few are those who truly believe this, and fewer still are those who actually live it out. Dorothy Day was one of them. Day was a social activist, journalist, Catholic convert, mother, political radical, pacifist, servant of God, and more. Yet Day embodied what it means to put faith into action for social justice, deeply seated in her conviction to serve the poor and vulnerable. Her prophetic witness continues today.

Whenever I groan within myself and think how hard it is to keep writing about love in these times of tension and strife which may at any moment become for us all a time of terror, I think to myself, "What else is the world interested in?" What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships. God is Love. Love casts out fear. Even the most ardent revolutionist, seeking to change the world, to overturn the tables of the money changers, is trying to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship with each other of love. We want with all our hearts to love, to be loved. And not just in the family but to look upon all as our mothers, sisters, brothers, children. It is when we love the most intensely and most humanly, that we can recognize how tepid is our love for others. The keenness and intensity of love brings with it suffering, of course, but joy too because it is a foretaste of heaven.*
​
As you seek to live into a way of love, let this encourage your hearts. It is only within the love of God and neighbor that we see heaven here on earth. This is the way God's kingdom comes.
So we pray for the Spirit of God to infuse our hearts, minds, spirits, and bodies with the power of love. May we have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to perceive God's redemptive work all around us. And may we have the courage to take some risks, to put our bodies in the way of grace, to step in and join God there. Enter into the mystery of communion you were created for. Love and be loved.


​by Jessica Ketola

* Excerpt from "On Pilgrimage," The Catholic Worker, April 1948, 1, 2, 11.

More Than Enough
Last Sunday, we talked about the Spirit-empowered community that is activated and graced with spiritual gifts. These rich and varied gifts are meant to function together as a body. The metaphor of the human body in I Corinthians 12 is a provocative critique of the individualism of church life today. Yet, we see that whenever the Spirit is poured out in renewal movements beginning with the first Pentecost and throughout church history, this type of Koinonia community emerges. Koinonia (κοινωνία) is the New Testament Greek word referring to shared community, fellowship, joint participation, and gifts jointly contributed. It is what happens when the Spirit indwells the beloved community.

"There was an intense sense of togetherness among all who believed; they shared all their material possessions in trust. They sold any possessions and goods that did not benefit the community and used the money to help everyone in need. They were unified as they worshiped at the temple day after day. In homes, they broke bread and shared meals with glad and generous hearts." (Acts 2:44-46)

Revival and reform movements throughout church history are accompanied by a return to primitive Christianity, social concern for the poor and the marginalized, generosity, sharing of resources, and egalitarian impulses that catalyze the "ordinary" person to contribute their gifts. When this happens, we know the Spirit is at work!

For this does not happen naturally. You know those people. You know yourself. We tend to be self-absorbed and myopically focused on meeting our own needs. Overwhelmed with the demands of life, we believe the lie that there is not enough. It is only by the Spirit of God that we are graced to live into another reality. When the community comes together to offer their gifts, there is always an abundance of riches. There is always more than enough.

The Story of Stone Soup
The Story of Stone Soup is an old, European folk tale that illuminates the power of community to move us from scarcity to abundance.

Once upon a time, there was a great famine in which people jealously hoarded whatever food they could find, hiding it even from their friends and neighbors. (Perhaps they hid their toilet paper too.) One day, a kindly-looking stranger came into a village and began asking questions as if he planned to stay for the night.

“There’s not a bite to eat in the whole province,” he was told. “Better keep moving on.”

“Oh, I have everything I need,” he said. “In fact, I was thinking of making some stone soup to share with all of you.” He pulled an iron cauldron from his wagon, filled it with water, and built a fire under it. Then, with great ceremony, he drew an ordinary-looking stone from a velvet bag and dropped it into the water.

By now, hearing the rumor of food, most of the villagers had come to the square or watched from their windows. As the stranger sniffed the “broth” and licked his lips in anticipation, hunger began to overcome their skepticism.

“Ahh,” the stranger said to himself rather loudly, “I do like a tasty stone soup. Of course, stone soup with cabbage — that’s hard to beat.”

Soon a villager approached hesitantly, holding a cabbage he’d retrieved from its hiding place and added it to the pot.

“Wonderful” cried the stranger. “You know, I once had stone soup with cabbage and a bit of salt beef as well, and it was fit for a king.”

The village butcher managed to find some salt beef . . . and so it went, through potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on, until there was indeed a delicious meal for all.

This is the power of the Koinonia community and offers a beautiful vision for spiritual gifts. The "magic" of the stone is the unquantifiable Spirit that transforms the ordinary into the sacred, turning a measly two fish and five loaves into a feast for 500. A carrot or onion on its own is a meager bite, but when offered to the collective pot of community, it becomes a delicious meal that nourishes all.

All Things Become Possible
The importance of the neighborhood comes front and center as one of the last vestiges of community today. I see a microcosm of this every week at our neighborhood dinners. Each one brings a bottle of wine, a plate of cookies, a green salad, some warm bread. But when it all comes together, it is a beautiful feast —and feast we do! This Tuesday was especially poignant as we had many new faces and our home overflowed with the abundance of goodness when 28 neighbors came together across different backgrounds, cultures, and stories. Carnitas and barbacoa were piled on warm corn tortillas with guacamole, fresh salsa, Mexican rice, beans, and cornbread. Longtime residents shared stories with new homeowners. Culinary artists delighted while the comics entertained. The young and energetic coddled the babies of tired and worn parents. The toddlers and the pups ran in circles buzzing with excitement. Everyone contributed, and everyone was filled. No one left hungry of stomach or heart.

This economy of the Spirit defies scarcity and breeds daring imagination. All things become possible. Small, motley groups of people become the instigators of big, beautiful dreams. Those on the margins of the neighborhood are pulled into the center. The unspectacular and overlooked become goldmines of hope. The most unlikely characters become creators of goodness and healing.

"Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood." -Walter Brueggemann

If we are to live into a new imagination of what it means to be the church today, we desperately need the Spirit of God to move in our midst. We need to be filled again, emboldened, and empowered into radical generosity to offer our gifts to each other and to our neighbors in a world in which all things are now possible!


by Jessica Ketola

We have been exploring the myriad of ways that the Spirit moves and speaks to us. Sometimes God moves in ways that are so far outside our western, rational worldview, and sometimes God moves in the minute, ordinary stuff that is easy to miss. A quick read through Acts reveals that God is far more mysterious, wild, active, and powerful than we know! Visions, encounters, strange languages, healings, conversions, earthquakes, prison escapes, people transported in the Spirit (how is that even a thing?), social revolutions, the birth of churches... And yet God also moved in the very ordinary practices of gathering in a home, breaking bread, and learning to share life together. Though often we like to put God in a box that we can understand and control, God defies the box.

We know this because of Jesus, who was definitely an "out-of-the-box" kind of person, perfectly revealed to us what God is like. Full of grace, love, and mercy — and yet kind of a badass revolutionary. He always did the unexpected, upped the ante, turned the tables, reversed power, and shifted the narrative.

So today, the question I'm sitting with is this:

In what ways is God moving that are unexpected? And do we have eyes to see?

Do we have the eyes of faith? It is hard to have faith in such a cynical world, and yet Jesus said that if we have only a mustard seed of faith, we can move mountains.

Jesus was matter-of-fact: “Embrace this God-life. Really embrace it, and nothing will be too much for you. This mountain, for instance: Just say, ‘Go jump in the lake’—no shuffling or hemming and hawing—and it’s as good as done. That’s why I urge you to pray for absolutely everything, ranging from small to large. Include everything as you embrace this God-life, and you’ll get God’s everything. [Mark 11:22-24 The Message]

The very definition of the unexpected means that it will surprise us. Perhaps it is bigger than we dare to imagine. Perhaps it is right under our noses. Perhaps it is hiding in Jesus disguised as the least of these. God, give us eyes to see what you are doing — the people you see, the humble ways you are at work, and the scandalous invitations of the Spirit. 

So what are the mountains in your life that seem immovable?

What seems impossible? Your unbelief? Your love of comfort? Your fear? What are the dreams that you have buried because they are too big or too daunting to acknowledge? If you really give yourself permission to believe that all things are possible with God, what is the Spirit inviting you to?

As followers of Jesus and people of the Spirit, we know that God can do far beyond what is possible in the natural. While we continue to experience heartbreak, loss, and suffering in this world, we live with great hope for we know that God is at work to redeem and restore. 

Saying yes to the wild and unexpected Spirit will take us out of our comfort zones,. It will lead us beyond what we can manage or control. It will push us to the glorious agony of hope, interdependence, and trust. 

My prayer for you this week is that as you spend time recharging in God's presence and listening for the voice of the Spirit, you will be given the gift of the mustard seed. May love immerse you, and hope revive you. May you be given eyes of faith to see the world anew — both in the ordinary particularities of your everyday lives and in the extraordinary ways that God is at work to do more than you can hope or imagine.

Nothing is Impossible.
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​“It is certain that we may always live close to God in the light of God’s presence, and that such living is an entirely new life for us; that nothing is then impossible for us, because all things are possible with God.”
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 391

"God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us." [Ephesians 3:20-21 The Message]

As a community, we have been in a process of articulating what we deeply love, what we are passionate about, and what matters most. Through a community process of discernment, we have come up with these collective values:

DEEP LISTENING
 
We listen deeply to the Spirit at work within our own stories, the stories of our neighbors, and the stories of our place until we become fully immersed in the mystery of God’s Story of love that heals us and heals the world.
 
Through deep listening, we embark on the journey inward coming home to the love we were created for. We cultivate sacred rhythms in which we are healed in the loving gaze of God in whom we live and move and have our being. We listen and attend to the Spirit’s deep work within us and through us. We embrace mystery, foster curiosity, hold paradox, and seek to understand the worlds of those who are different from us. We exchange certainty for empathy, resist easy platitudes, and enter into lament as well as celebration. We learn to listen deeply to our own stories, the stories of our neighbors, and the stories of our place in such a way that it provokes us, heals us, and calls us deeper into God’s Story of redemption in the world.
 
 
CREATIVE LIBERATION
 
Made in the divine image, we offer our creativity and gifts joining in God’s work to restore goodness, justice, and peace between us and God, neighbor, ourselves, and all of creation.
 
We are a community of artists, makers, and creators made in the image of God. The ultimate act of creativity is God’s redemption of the world back to its original vision of goodness. We step into our God-given vocation as co-creators to join God’s work of justice and healing in the world. Embarking on the journey outward, we become a launchpad of creative liberation: inspiring and equipping people to become creative activists and peace-making advocates of the Spirit in the contexts in which they live, work, and play. We join in the Jesus movement to bring good news to the poor and liberation to the oppressed, healing broken hearts, opening blind eyes, dismantling unjust systems, creating new social economies, and restoring the environment (Isaiah 61).
 
 
RADICAL HOSPITALITY
 
We extend the wide welcome, belonging, and generosity of the table of God — where the lonely become family, strangers become friends, the disgraced are honored, and enemies become allies in beloved community.
 
We extend the wide welcome, inclusive belonging, and lavish generosity of the table of God. Radical hospitality is the remedy for the isolation and shame we feel, infected with society’s message that we are never enough. We tear down the walls of fear and exclusion and move toward one another on the journey together in self-giving love and commitment. We receive with gratitude the gifts and stories of the other, while respectfully and unashamedly offering others our gifts and stories as well. We feast at the table of extravagant grace, entering into deep listening, vulnerable authenticity, mutual care, and a commitment to loving people, especially those left out and underappreciated. We value difference and make room for everyone at the table. We embrace the beloved community in all its beautiful diversity recognizing that our flourishing is bound up together.
 
 
EMBODIED PRACTICE
 
We practice the way of Jesus together embodying love in real time and real space with real people committed to the flourishing of a particular place — making God’s goodness as plain as day.
 
In a culture where church means shopping and consuming community and is often disembodied, incongruent, and largely disconnected from our everyday lives, we dare to imagine a beautiful alternative. We believe that living into the way of Jesus takes practice — and that our faith is much more than something we add to our already busy, stressed out lives, but rather, it is a way of life. We want to follow Jesus in the gritty stuff of our everyday lives where we see the consequences of our actions, where our faith becomes real and more than just mere talk. We are the church called to faithful presence — to embody love in real time and real space with real people committed to the flourishing of a particular place — making God’s goodness as plain as day. We encourage all to find their plot of the garden within the community and the neighborhood they live and get their hands dirty!

Cultivating a vision of hope in a world of despair

Love. It’s the thing that makes the whole world go round. In this time of prolonged societal disruption, grief, and suffering, it is now more important than ever to have practices that ground us in the love of God. God who set the world in motion is at the center of the Cosmos pulling everything and everyone into the divine force of Love.

Love is remaking the whole world.

Love is the most powerful force, nd nothing can separate us from the Love of God. Nothing, no thing, can stop the eternal work of God. No pandemic. No injustice. No natural disasters, politics, illness, losses, or crises. Nothing can separate us from this love.

I know I need to hear this. I need to feel this. I need to know this deep down. As the uncertainty and losses of the pandemic persist, love is what carries me, nourishes me, and sustains me. Whether it is visible or not, I need to know that God is at work right smack dab in the middle of the mess. I need to believe in the goodness of God and the power of Love.

And I don’t think I’m alone. This year, the Apple TV comedy, Ted Lasso, became an instant hit telling a heart-warming tale about an American coach hired to rescue a Premiership football team in the U.K. — despite a total lack of experience. The show’s popularity speaks to how its optimism and hope were tremendous gifts amid the darkness of a pandemic world. One of the things that seemed to resonate deeply is Ted’s Lasso faith in God and humanity. He envisioned a world of goodness and love. The bright yellow sign that he posted in the locker room is now a meme everywhere — BELIEVE!
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This is a message that we need to hear, a vision we need to see. Ignatius of Loyola, who was a Spanish Catholic priest and theologian in the sixteenth century and founder of the Society of Jesus (The Jesuits), offered us a vision of a world held in love. You see, he observed that our vision largely controls our perception and experience of the world and thus is at the heart of our spiritual journey. It’s often said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But Ignatius Loyola reverses the saying:

“When I believe it, I’ll see it.”

If we think the world is a bleak place, full of evil, greedy, selfish people who have no love for God or each other, that’s what we will see when we look around. If we think that our world is full of goodness and opportunity, a place that God created and sustains and loves, that is what we’ll find.

Ignatius offered this vision in the Spiritual Exercises intended to help people grow in their love for God, beginning with the Principle and Foundation.

God who loves us creates us and wants to share life with us forever. Our love response takes shape in our praise and honor and service of the God of our life.

All the things in this world are also created because of God’s love and they become a context of gifts, presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily.

As a result, we show reverence for all the gifts of creation and collaborate with God in using them so that by being good stewards we develop as loving persons in our care of God’s world and its development. But if we abuse any of these gifts of creation or, on the contrary, take them as the center of our lives, we break our relationship with God and hinder our growth as loving persons.

In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance before all created gifts insofar as we have a choice and are not bound by some responsibility. We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a more loving response to our life forever with God.

Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening life in me.

[What Is Ignatian Spirituality? by David L. Fleming, SJ]

What stands out to me is this.

Everything has the potential of calling forth in us a more loving response in our life with God.

This means that EVERYTHING in our lives right now — the joys and the sorrows, the gifts and the losses, the disillusionment and the hope, the beauty and the brokenness, the grace and the struggle…everything has the potential of calling us deeper into the love and life of God. Everything.

Nothing is wasted.

Not the last two years of what sometimes feels like Groundhog Day on repeat — days of uncertainty, anxiety, polarization, grief, protest, boredom, Netflix binging, pajamas, Zoom calls, and quarantine. For our God is a God of redemption, a God of the impossible, a God who brings fruitfulness out of barrenness and life out of death.

We began this year with the Advent invitation to believe, joining in the ancient chorus of saints who like Mary echoed a deep and resounding yes to birth the holy. For nothing is impossible with God.

I believe that we must begin to see through the eyes of faith. For negativity and cynicism dominate the airspace these days. I get it. We are feeling the prolonged effects of collective trauma, isolation, and loss. And yet there is another reality that is greater than any suffering or evil — God’s kingdom of Love is here healing and remaking the whole world.
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So what do you see? What do you believe?

In the literal and spiritual fog of this season, can you put your trust in this Love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things “(I Corinthians 13:7). Love is all that matters. No one, no circumstance, no thing can take love away. When everything else is shaken, only love remains.

So however your battle-worn souls come today, love is here to greet you. Love welcomes you into a space just for you. You can lay all your worries and burdens, your striving and your surviving aside for just a few moments to slow down, breathe, inhale, and exhale. Experience the Spirit here with you, present, now. Sit in the loving gaze of your Creator. Receive deep nourishment as you root down deep into the abundant and eternal love of the Divine. I encourage you even now and through the coming days and weeks to meditate on this love of God and to begin to shift your vision to see the world through eyes of hope, faith, and love.

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, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. 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, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:16–21)

May you experience profound grace to believe in a God who is able to accomplish abundantly far more than you can ask or imagine.

For what you believe, you will see.
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So why not join the long history of saints, reformers, and dreamers and follow the seminal message of the hour….BELIEVE!

​by Jessica Ketola