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  • Pentecost and Social Justice

    Pentecost and Social Justice
    2025/06/05
    Acts 2:1-21 Pentecost reminds us that Christians should be deeply concerned with social justice because it reflects the heart of God’s love for humanity. Throughout the Bible, there is a clear emphasis on caring for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized. In Micah 6:8, believers are called to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” This verse and others, such as Proverbs 31:8–9 and Isaiah 1:17, stress the importance of speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves and defending the rights of the vulnerable. Jesus himself modeled social justice during his ministry: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and standing with the outcasts of society. To follow Christ means to uphold his values, including actively working toward fairness, equity, and compassion in our communities. Social justice is not a political trend. It is a spiritual calling rooted in love, and a church imbued with the Spirit will heed this call.For more go to renewedheartministries.com
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    18 分
  • Carrying on the Work of Love and Justice

    Carrying on the Work of Love and Justice
    2025/05/29
    Luke 24:44-53 “Repentance for the forgiveness of sins that they taught had a quality that began with John the Baptist in Luke 3. John’s repentance was not for personal, private, individual sins. John called his listeners to a repentance for community sins, social and political choices, that were not only making the most marginalized vulnerable to harm, but also being the conduits of that harm as well. The elite, the powerful, propertied, and privileged, had become complicit with the Roman empire's exploitation and extraction of the masses in Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. John then came, echoing the Hebrew prophets, calling for national repentance for national sins in the hopes that the people would experience national forgiveness. In the Hebrew scriptures, forgiveness did not mean being allowed to go to heaven when one dies. It meant liberation from oppression here on earth, violence being replaced with safety and peace, and injustice giving way to compassion and equity. It meant social healing, not private, personal, individual benefit that was separate from everyone else. That forgiveness isn’t connected to a post mortem destination later, but to healing of their land in this life. A more vernacular way of describing the “healing of the land” today would be to speak of societal healing for societal sins being committed right now.”For more go to renewedheartministries.com
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    18 分
  • The Jesus Story and Living with Disabilities

    The Jesus Story and Living with Disabilities
    2025/05/22
    John 5:1-9 “Healing or removing a disability as Jesus did for so many in these stories is not an option for many if not most of us today. But we can take a cue from the narratives and challenge theologies that shape the exclusion and mistreatment of those with disabilities. We can also push for accessibility and inclusion for fellow members of this diverse human family who live with disabilities, whether in our faith communities or in society. The Jesus story is complicated when it comes to our theology, practice, understanding, and relationship to our own disabilities and/or the disabilities of others. The Jesus story isn’t perfect on this topic, but there is still good we can glean from it to inform our justice work with and for people with disabilities today. No one throws away an apple because it has a core. You just eat the good flesh and discard the rest. There is good, too, in the Jesus story here: good that still calls us to create a safer, more accessible, more just, more compassionate world that is home for everyone, regardless of our differences.”For more go to renewedheartministries.com
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    19 分
  • Loving One Another and Distributive Justice

    Loving One Another and Distributive Justice
    2025/05/19
    John 13:31-35 Before I became an ally to trans people, and before falling out with many of our early followers, I had spent years speaking, writing, and teaching on the universal love of God for everyone. Yet one response I repeatedly heard during our transition as a ministry was that people couldn’t understand what made us shift from God’s love to God’s justice. I spent countless hours trying to help folks understand that love means justice. They aren’t separate! Justice is the fruit of love, and you can’t genuinely have one without the other. As Cornel West famously stated, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Those who believe they understand God’s love should be the loudest in the room opposing the injustices of classism, racism, misogyny, patriarchy, bigotry to and erasure of our LGBTQ siblings, and more. To believe in universal love is to work for a distributive, societal justice for those who are the objects of that universal love. For more go to renewedheartministries.com
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    19 分
  • A Shepherd Restoring Paradise

    A Shepherd Restoring Paradise
    2025/05/08
    John 10:22-30 The good shepherd imagery in the synoptic gospels is referencing verses like these in Ezekiel where the leaders were censured for becoming an oligarchy that fed themselves off of the sheep rather than caring for them. In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, likening Jesus to a shepherd meant he would gather those who had been scattered by the injustice of the Temple rulers who were complicit with Rome’s exploitation of the masses. The early Jesus community held this imagery dear. Jesus, to them, was a shepherd who would restore the flock “with justice.” The shepherd imagery wasn’t used to describe whisking people away to a distant heaven but to describe restoring justice here “on earth as it is in heaven.” It was about restoring paradise, with Earth as an abundant pastureland tended over by a caring and just shepherd. Today, we are to do the same work the Shepherd worked at: restoring paradise. Though this is ancient imagery, today it points to the holy work of seeking distributive justice for everyone, a justice that ensures each of us has what we all need to thrive and that all, regardless of our differences, would have “life and have it to the full.”For more go to renewedheartministries.com
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    16 分
  • Justice Work is Holy Work

    Justice Work is Holy Work
    2025/05/01
    John 21:1-19 The needs of the people are holy. Their needs were holy for Jesus, and they must be holy for Jesus followers today, too. Working for people’s material, physical, concrete daily needs (like bread and fish) is sacred, holy work. Others may call it a social gospel, but it is the same work Jesus engages in the gospel stories and the same work he calls each of his followers to engage. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Letters and Papers from Prison, “There remains an experience of incomparable value . . . to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled — in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.” The needs of the people are holy. Feeding the people is sacred work. Justice work is holy work.For more go to renewedheartministries.com
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    19 分
  • So Send I You

    So Send I You
    2025/04/24
    John 20:19-31 “The reality is that those who bear Jesus’ name in the world often represent him to those around them whether they want this burden or not. Over the last four decades so many evangelicals have embraced a politic of harm rather than one of diversity and inclusion and a politic of retribution rather than a politic of compassion in the public sphere. (I know it goes back much much further but I’ve only been cognizant of it for that long.) Today some people can’t stomach even hearing the name Jesus, and it’s not because of the Jesus in the story was so horrible. The Jesus in the story was awesome. He was all about diversity, equity, and inclusion in his time and culture. He was about justice and standing up for the marginalized, outcast, and oppressed. People recoil even at the sound of Jesus because of the meanings Christians have associated with Jesus, today. As Jesus was sent into our world, so we Christians have been sent too. But our sending hasn’t born the same fruit. Rather than standing up to the injustices of the elite and powerful in solidarity with the marginalized, we have too often allowed our religion, like others, to be coopted by those standing behind the wheels of injustice and abuse of rights. How any Christian could support the things we are witnessing transpiring every day around us here in the U.S., I will never understand. And yet, this is our reality. This Easter season, let’s take a moment to reflect, to take some personal inventory. As the Father has sent Jesus, Jesus said, “So send I you.” What is the fruit our presence bears in our world? Is our presence life giving or death dealing? Are we part of the movement in our time toward a safer, more compassionate, just society or away from it? Are we working to ensure our world is a safe home for everyone, or just those who are like ourselves? We may have been sent by Jesus as he was sent. But it’s up to us to make sure we are following Jesus’ example in the kind of impact we have in our world.”For more go to renewedheartministries.com
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    15 分
  • The Original Good News of Easter

    The Original Good News of Easter
    2025/04/17
    Luke 24:1-12 “The cross has been the symbol of salvation in Christian history for two millennia. The apostle Paul was among the first to define the good news as being about Jesus’ death. Before Paul, there are signals in our sacred texts that the good news was not originally that Jesus was crucified but that the Jesus whom the Romans had crucified was alive! The original good news was not the cross. It was the resurrection. Christian theologians from multiple marginalized communities have spent years critiquing a theology that centers the good news on Jesus’ suffering rather than God’s triumph over suffering by undoing, overturning, and reversing that death. The earliest form of the good news, good news that we still need today, is not that death brings life. But that Empire doesn’t have the last word. There is a larger universe than that created by oppressors. As powerful as death is, life is even more powerful. This present moment doesn’t last forever. Injustice doesn’t have to win. Justice will continue to strive even in the face of of the deepest obstruction. The universe can be bent toward justice. Hope is a discipline that is worth it.”For more go to renewedheartministries.com
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    20 分