Word of Life Church Podcast

"It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how a human being becomes good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that… The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties—but right through every human heart and through all human hearts." -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

The truth can change a manIn the wisdom of his daysIt whispers soft but constantlyYou cannot live this way–The Call, “When”In the madness of modernity how do we cultivate the practices of prayer and contemplation that give us a life that we can live?

"On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but in the dawn." –G.K. Chesterton

In 1977 NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft, and for forty years it has continued its long journey into interstellar space. Today Voyager is more than thirteen billion miles from home. Aboard Voyager is a golden record; one of the songs on the golden record is Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground. It's a blues moan. It has no lyrics. It's a song about death, the most bitter of all human experiences. It's a song that belongs to Holy Saturday.

At the cross the sin of the world coalesced into a singularity where it was both borne and forgiven by God in Christ. The structures of sin (“the sin of the world”) that entangles and implicates all of us reached its hideous apex in the crucifixion of the Son of God. At Golgotha the sin of the world gathered in a Good Friday singularity where it was absorbed and forgiven and thus dispelled.

When Jesus was in the home of Simon the leper on Wednesday during his last week, a woman poured a bottle of costly perfume on him while he sat at the table after dinner. The group around the table scolded her. But Jesus commended her. They thought what she did was shameful. Jesus saw it as beautiful, because she was preparing his body for burial. What she did was an act of worship and in it we discover that two components working together make Christian worship a beautiful thing—intentionality and expression. Both are needed. Expression without intentionality ends up in heartless worship and intentionality without expression ends up in lifeless worship. But together they bring out of us something very beautiful.

On Jesus’ last Tuesday, he speaks to us with unfiltered clarity. The temple and it’s systems which perpetuate injustice has walked the way which leads to destruction. As the end of Jesus’ life draws near, he speaks to us about the things of utmost importance. How might we avoid the same fate as this temple and the city which surrounds it? We must let Jesus lead us in the way of neighborly love.

On Monday of the final week before his death Jesus interrupted the operations of the Temple by driving out the sacrificial animals with a whip and flipping over the tables of the money changers. We are accustomed to calling this the "cleansing of the Temple." But is that what it really was? Or is there a better to way to interpret Jesus' provocative action in the Temple?

There's always some dude on a horse. The most famous dude on a horse is Alexander the Great (356–323 BC). Even his horse is famous—the warhorse Bucephalus (355–326 BC). At the same time when Alexander and Bucephalus were conquering the world, the Hebrew prophet Zechariah gave a different vision of a different kind of king. Zechariah prophesied that Israel’s king would not be like Alexander the Great, riding a warhorse and conquering by killing. Instead, Zechariah prophesied that Messiah would come with gentleness and humility, riding a lowly donkey and teaching peace to the nations.

Jesus came as a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy where the wolf and lamb come to eat together. The mission of Jesus is revolutionary because Jesus wants to save both the oppressed and the oppressor, both the abused and the abuser, both the offended and the offender, both the lambs and the wolves. All people are invited into his saving embrace. We can experience a kind of forgiveness that leads to reconciliation if lambs tell the wolves how their actions make them feel and if wolves ask, "Will you forgive me?"