Let us live by walking with Jesus, so that our Neo-Pagan neighbors, the witch, and frankly a lot of us Christians, can put down our crystals, our superstitions, our vision boards, and our bound sage in order to live out a liturgy of life, with rituals, practices, and behaviors that reflect who we are as followers of Christ.
As Jesus hung on the cross there would be no last second escape. No Greek goddess would swoop in to rescue him. He suffered alone. And yet even in that suffering he declared his victory on the spiritual battlefield to be your victory.
God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.

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As astounding as co-eternity and co-equality with the Father in majesty and glory is, this is not the most significant answer Jesus gave in this Gospel reading, not for us at least.
The celebration of Trinity Sunday–the only church festival specifically dedicated to a doctrine–reminds us of the necessity of confessing that the one God exists in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Celebrate the 4th Year of the 1517 Podcast Network with a Special Gift.
Pentecost is a flashback. It drives us back to the past. It also propels us forward into the future.
If you want something empty, the tomb is the way to go. The point of the manger is that Jesus was in it. The point of the cross is that Jesus was on it.
1517 would not exist without the leadership, friendship, and faithfulness of Pastor Ron Hodel.
There is someone outside of I, someone outside of you, that our faith and hope is in.
So, we pray. Not just in times of need, but we pray at all times. Because this is part of what it means to be saved.
We worry about the fact our days are as grass – so we try to scratch out a place for ourselves, to make a permanent, lasting place, to climb to higher places and succeed, more often than not, only to hurt each other in the process.
Jesus opens for us a way to walk through suffering and to sing our song of salvation as we talk to our heavenly Father.
Make no mistake, sinners are in fact being pursued by a most hideous beast called sin, death, and the devil, unleashed and striking continuously.
What we have in our reading is a picture of how God deals with a lack of understanding.