Day: June 26, 2022

What do we do when everything is wonderful and terrible and all too much?

Maybe that starts with praying the kinds of prayers that make people say, “What’s wrong with those people? Are they okay? Should we call someone? Should somebody do something?”

This priest gathered the people who had married to a foreigner. And those people confessed their sin, and divorced their spouses, and sent them away. And that was wrong.

The truth is that the fierceness of women has led people out of oppression and shaped nations. And someone in our scripture is about to learn what a woman can do.

It is hard to hear, because we all want to imagine that we would have stepped over the edge and been heroes. But it is true, because we all have the chance to be heroes right now.

That is how change happens: a little bit at a time, and, only then, all at once.

In our trauma, we turn to sin as a balm for the pain. In our sin we traumatize one another. And there are only so many ways that the cycle can end.

The world of masks and hierarchies and inside and outside is not the world that God created. It is a world that is broken.

Either way, they erased Junia. Either way, they erased this woman who was prominent among the apostles. And who the early church had recognized as a woman and an apostle.

And the thing is those are my kids. Those are our kids. And not just the ones who come to this church, but all of them. Because there is no such thing as other people’s children.