That is the Lenten question: What will crack us open?
Not to guilt, but to the grief that becomes solidarity. To the love that refuses to look away from the tent cities and the bomb craters—from every place where the world God loves is being unmade.
Come out into the light.
Nicodemus eventually does. By chapter 19, he is the one who finally comes out into the open, publicly claiming a crucified man as his own after the disciples have scattered.
Something happened to him between the night visit and the tomb. Something cracked open.
The Spirit is not a national resource or a tool of empire. It moves toward the hungry child in Gaza, the unhoused man on a freezing sidewalk, and the family in Tehran.
The Spirit moves toward the whole world and asks us whether we will move with it.
This is what it looks like to love the world with conditions. This is Nicodemus in the daylight, clutching his robes.
Gustavo Gutierrez, father of liberation theology, wrote: “You say you love the poor. Name them.” Is our faith general enough to be costless, or particular enough to mean something?
We fund a campaign in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands, many of them children. We maintain an embargo against Cuba that denies people medicine. And at home, we pass laws criminalizing poverty, sweeping the unhoused out of sight so the comfortable don’t have to see.
01.03.2026 23:34 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
This makes for an uncomfortable Sunday in the U.S.
As we read of a God whose love extends to every corner of creation, our government drops bombs on Iran—another chapter of military aggression dressed up as security, where lives abroad are treated as expendable.
John 3:17 breaks everything open: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Not your nation. Not your tribe. Not the people who share your politics. The world. The whole, interconnected, groaning world.
John B. Cobb Jr. wrote that divine love does not protect us from suffering, but suffers with us.
To be “born from above” is not a private transaction. It is entry into a new way of being with the world—responsive to a presence that calls all creation toward wholeness.
Jesus doesn’t let him finish. “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
It stops Nicodemus cold. He takes the metaphor with literal gravity. To be reborn means everything he has accumulated—his credentials, his security—must be released.
Nicodemus comes at night. That detail is never accidental in John’s Gospel. Darkness is the language of those who are not yet ready to be seen.
A man of influence slipping through the shadows to ask a question he cannot afford to ask in daylight: “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher from God.”
The kingdoms are still on offer.
Lent asks us to say no. To admit where we’ve bowed to comfort or the illusion that stability equals peace.
The angels come after. But first, the forty days.
Suchocki: God’s power is not coercion but love, the power that calls forth the best in every situation.
When Sanders says we must confront the greed of the billionaire class, it sounds less like a slogan and more like a refusal.
And I am moved. I see leaders refusing. Refusing weapons money. Naming Gaza plainly. Standing with workers. Insisting healthcare is a covenant, not a commodity.
23.02.2026 00:15 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Cobb Jr: the divine lure is always toward love and justice, not preserving arrangements that serve the few.
23.02.2026 00:15 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0What is being done to the Palestinian people is a genocide. Calling it softer is its own wilderness temptation.
23.02.2026 00:15 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0We’re watching that script in real time. Those brokering peace are often the ones who armed and profited from the suffering they now claim to resolve. That isn’t peace. That’s empire managing its portfol
23.02.2026 00:15 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
One week into Lent. Already in the wilderness.
The temptation isn’t cartoonish. It’s sophisticated. Accept the kingdoms on the world’s terms. The tempter arrives not as a villain but a pragmatist: this is just how power works.
“I’ll give you all these if you bow down and worship me.” Jesus responded, “You will worship the Lord your God and serve only him.”
— Matthew 4:9-10, CEB
My NYC peeps! I’m headed to NYC (Manhattan) Monday for a work trip. What we thinking about the weather? Should I rebook for a Tuesday arrival? I’m set right now to land at LGA after 5p.
My midwestern brain says ehh it should calm down by then, but let me know if it will be a mess.
Peter wanted to stay on the mountain. But Jesus led them back down.
The transfiguration was not escape. It was clarity about whose voice to follow in the mess.
So that is what I am trying to do. Listen to that voice. And follow it into the work.
On the mountain, God did not say, “Listen to whoever polls best.”
God said, “Listen to him.”
And Jesus says:
The kingdom belongs to the poor.
You cannot serve God and wealth.
Universal healthcare is not extreme.
Affordable housing is not extreme.
Living wages are not extreme.
These are expressions of human dignity.
As Whitehead wrote, “The purpose of God is the attainment of value in the temporal world.”
John Cobb says it plainly:
“God does not determine what we do. God calls us to what we can become.”
But you cannot hear that call if you are drowning in pundits telling you to move to the “center.”
Process theology has shaped how I hear this moment.
God does not coerce. God persuades. God lures.
The future is not a trap set by elites. It is open, creative, unfinished.
I am tired of being told moral convictions are liabilities.
Tired of being told opposing genocide is naïve.
Tired of being told solidarity with the poor, immigrants, or trans siblings is inconvenient.
As if conscience were a luxury.
That question feels urgent right now.
Whose voice is setting our imagination?
We are drowning in political noise. The same consultants. The same strategies. The same calls to be “realistic.”
Not because Moses and Elijah do not matter.
Not because tradition is irrelevant.
But because when the voices compete, Jesus sets the direction.
Then God speaks from the cloud:
“This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him.”
Listen to him.