Free to be Faithful

“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”   —   Galatians 5:1 Are you a progressive or a conservative?   I’m not a fan of this question—and the false distinction informing it. It conceals wide swaths of shared values, the very foundation upon which we could build the solidarity our polarized society so desperately needs.   And what a terrible choice it demands: To embrace progressivism you must understand the past as nothing more than a shackle to be cast off, naively assuming—despite mounting evidence to the contrary—that doing so will inevitably lead to progress. To embrace conservatism, you must reject the future—God’s new thing a-coming—and instead romanticize an image of the past that never truly existed, freezing both present and future in its rigid, nostalgic grip.   Are these our only choices? I certainly hope not, for I cannot align myself with either the modern myth of progress or an enervating conservatism that refuses to embrace the rich dynamism of God’s good creation. Surely there is a way to be faithful to Christ’s calling in our time that moves beyond these twin yokes of slavery!   Caught in a similar dilemma, Paul speaks of a freedom in Christ that exists for its own sake. He proclaims a grace that cannot be earned, a grace that yet liberates us from our anxious pursuit of our own security. And in that liberation, we are freed—by faith—to reach out to one another in love. Paul’s words are full of tension: he describes a freedom that, through love, paradoxically leads us to “become slaves to one another” (Galatians 5:13b).   What kind of freedom is this, where love binds us in service to each other? Again and again, the gospel insists that the path of selfless service is the path to true liberation—the way of shalom. If we set our hearts on this way, if we embrace our freedom to be faithful, then no law can stand against us (Galatians 5:23b). Or, as St. Augustine once preached in a sermon on the first epistle of John: “Love, and do what you will.”   You will be hearing us use the phrase “free to be faithful” often in the coming weeks and months. Under this banner, we hope to gather a diverse Christian community to discern what faithfulness demands in the present age. Each generation faces new challenges for which our inherited religious tradition provides no simple, pre-packaged answers. Yet, at its most vital, the reformational spiritual tradition the ICS community claims offers profound wisdom and inspiration for our shared task of seeking redemptive responses to life’s contemporary trials. We want you to come alongside us as we embark on this effort. Your support and participation will help ICS become a vibrant gathering space for all sorts of Christians committed to exploring how their ancient faith can actively engage with the pressing issues of our time. Join us in embracing our freedom to be faithful! Shalom friends, Ron Kuipers More information is available below on our May 3rd Free to Be Faithful hybrid event, a conversation in Grand Rapids with Kristin Du Mez and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Read and interact with this reflection on Substack.

Leaning into Love

"Love will never invoke fear. Perfect love expels fear, particularly the fear of punishment. The one who fears punishment has not been completed through love."   —1 John 4:18 (The Voice) While researching and writing my PhD dissertation in the late 1990s, I finally got around to reading Rudolf Otto's 1923 classic The Idea of the Holy. In this book, Otto explores the human experience of the "numinous"—the "non-rational" side of religious experience that cannot be adequately captured in words yet seeks expression through religious ritual and symbol.   Otto describes the numinous with the Latin word mysterium, adding two adjectives: tremendum and fascinans. It is a mystery that excites both fear and fascination in the human heart, a simultaneous mixture of repulsion and attraction. On the tremendum side, one might think of a passage like Proverbs 9:10: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," or Moses hiding his face before the burning bush, "afraid to look at God" (Exodus 3:6).   However, as my colleague Nik Ansell often reminds me, Proverbs 9:10 does not say fear of the Lord is the end of wisdom—only the beginning. What kind of beginning? Nik suggests reading it as: "Facing the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Think of Moses again: Though afraid, he still approached the burning bush to receive God's liberating revelation. He did not flee this tremendous divine manifestation—this "strange sight" of a bush aflame that was yet not consumed. No, when God called to him from out of the bush he simply answered, "here I am" (Exodus 3:4).   Here, Otto's fascinans makes its entrance—the attraction that accompanies the fear. With this attraction in mind, we can read Proverbs 9:10 as inviting us to travel a special kind of path, a path toward knowing and eventually even befriending God. It is a path that takes us from the fear we quite appropriately experienced at the beginning of our sojourn—when we first met God as a terrifying, fascinating stranger—to something more fulfilled and complete.   This fascination or attraction encourages us to face our initial fears, rather than turn away from them. Through the fascinans, we discern a divine call leading us toward agape—a love that, in its fullness (teleia agape), leaves no room for fear (1 John 4:18). This is how I have come to hear the powerful message of 1 John 4: Leaning into the God who is love (1 John 4:8), we find our fears dissipating. How? By loving one another. "If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:12).   Alas, friends, my fears all too often gnaw and persist despite my desire to travel this path, which tells me that God's love is not yet perfected in me. We all have fears. We are human, how could we not? The question is: what do we do with them? Do we face them, even befriend them, transforming our relationship to them? Or do we flee them, allowing them to continue to pursue us?   When faced with a dilemma like this, the Gospel's message is clear: lean into love. Loving one another simply is how we confront fear. It is how we embrace the uncertainty in which, as Peter Gabriel sings in That Voice Again, "we are naked and alive." It requires vulnerability. It calls us to respond with compassion, to offer a cup of cold water to the thirsty. Let this instinct, this desire to love, finally, speak louder than all the fears that constantly surround it.   Shalom,   Ronald A. Kuipers

A Hope that Stays

“…and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”   —Romans 5:5 “Don’t climb too far up the hope tree, because when that branch snaps….”   I can’t exactly recall the first time I heard this colourful counsel, warning me to prepare myself for the likelihood of disappointment that all too often follows raised expectations. I think it might have come from the mouth of Henk Hart after I finally received my PhD, and we were discussing my career prospects in a shrinking academic job market. Better always to stay low to the ground, he advised, so you can more easily pick yourself up after the inevitability of disappointment.   However colourful and pithy this phrasing might be, something about it is off. In Romans 5 Paul tells us that true hope does not disappoint us, so by that logic we should fearlessly climb as high as we possibly can into its outermost branches. In that light, perhaps Henk was really advising me not to invest my hope in any specific expectation or particular outcome, but rather to remain tethered to a deeper hope that can help me weather such disappointment and give me the wherewithal to pick myself up and dust myself off when optimistic expectations are dashed, as they so often can be.   That way of understanding hope, I think, gets us closer to what Paul is talking about in Romans 5, and is also wonderfully developed in a new book by the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his brief volume The Spirit of Hope. There Han describes hope as an attuning mood that we can spiritually cultivate—together and within ourselves—and thus use to orient us in any situation (p. 24). Hope in this sense is not attached to any particular outcome but is rather a way of tuning into life such that, whatever befalls us—as when our best and worst laid plans lie in ruins all around—we still find the capacity to say, “and yet…” (p. 39ff.).   In our day, says Han, hope has a powerful enemy: fear. So long as our culture is ruled by fear, as it so often seems to be, it cannot inspire hope. We must therefore fight tooth and nail against our culture of fear because, whereas hope unites us, fear isolates us. And this is where God’s love enters the picture. Hope does not disappoint us, says Paul, because “God’s love has been poured into our hearts….” Hope is thus the tuning that keeps us locked into the channel of divine love and the redemptive possibility such love presents. In Han’s words:   Fear and love are mutually exclusive. Hope, by contrast, includes love. Hope does not isolate. It reconciles, unites, and forms bonds. Fear agrees with neither trust nor community, with neither closeness nor touch. (11)   We know we are attuned to real hope, then, when we survey a broken world and nevertheless understand that it is not forever frozen into what it has become, that its wounds and scars can be thawed and healed by the renewing power of our Messiah’s love—love we are called to emulate.   Such hope, then, does not ask, ‘How might I best survive amidst these ruins?’ Rather it asks, ‘How can we build a new community of love and blessing from these scattered shards?’ Hope, then, sees possibility where fear sees only futility, and hope understands that this possibility is always available to us no matter how bad things get. As John Steinbeck put it in The Grapes of Wrath:   I have a little food’ plus ‘I have none’. If from this problem the sum is ‘We have a little food’, the thing is on its way, the movement has direction…. This is the beginning—from ‘I’ to ‘we’.   There is finally something audacious and intrepid about hope, this movement from ‘I’ to ‘We’. Han describes it as “a searching movement”:   It is an attempt to find a firm footing and a sense of direction. By going beyond the events of the past, beyond what already exists, it also enters into the unknown, goes down untrodden paths, and ventures into the open, into what-is-not-yet. It is headed for what is still unborn. It sets off toward the new, the altogether other, the unprecedented. (5)   In these dark times, friends, I pray that God’s love infuses us with the hope that does not disappoint us, but rather stays with us, so that we can find each other, escape our isolation, and be inspired to build the community of solidarity, justice, and peace that God’s shalom way gives us the power to imagine.   Shalom, friends!   Ron Kuipers

Everything Old is New Again (even this title)

“And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new’.” —Revelation 21:5 “O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.” —Psalm 96:1 A curious thing happened to me between Christmas and New Year’s Eve: My nephew in Edmonton drew my attention to an LP that recently came into his possession called When in Our Music God is Glorified: A Recording of Congregational Singing. The back of the record sleeve lists ICS as one of its two institutional sponsors. Upon seeing this connection, my nephew asked me if I knew anything about the project. I had to confess I did not, as it predates my institutional memory (I first came to ICS in 1992 as a master’s student, and after making a few inquiries my best guess is that this recording was made in the early to mid 1980s). The album jacket says that the record was directed by Bert Polman, a hymnologist then working at Ontario Bible College. A quick Google search revealed that he would later teach at Redeemer University and then Calvin University, where he served as the Chair of the Music Department until 2013 when his life was tragically cut short by cancer. Now fully absorbed in this detective story, I next searched for Bert Polman’s name in ICS’s Institutional Repository and was greeted with three hits in the digitized archive of ICS’s Perspective magazine. One article, from 1976 (penned by none other than Lambert Zuidervaart when he was still an ICS student or ‘Junior Member’), reports on a talk Polman delivered as part of ICS’s Discovery lecture series called “Celebrating the Word-and-Sacrament.” In the article, Zuidervaart relays Polman’s conviction that the elements of Christian worship must be rooted in “an historical appreciation of Christian traditions.” Such appreciation, argues Polman, “reveals both that the Word and the Sacraments must enjoy a strong balance in our public celebrations, and that the Reformational principle, ‘Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda est’ means the Spirit makes all things new, not all new things.” This last phrase gave me pause, spurring me to think more about the distinction Polman here makes between renewal and novelty. What is the difference, I wondered, between ‘making all things new’ (Revelation 21:5) and ‘making all new things’? My first thought turned to the act of repairing a broken yet cherished possession, or maybe a neglected and dishevelled thrift store find in which we nevertheless spy good potential, so that it comes out ‘just like new’. The converse attitude, all too common in our consumer-industrial age, would be to dispose of the mounting pile of busted and unrepairable stuff we own (often designed with ‘built-in obsolescence’) and replace it with entirely new things, starting the vicious cycle all over again. Revelation 21, however, speaks of a Maker who so cherishes the fruits of that making that he throws nothing away, and instead busies himself lovingly restoring all that has been broken, desiring nothing more than to bring out the potential for blessing housed within every good thing he created. Yet, just as I start to understand Polman’s distinction in this way, I am also struck by the fact that one of the creatures God made, we humans, are uniquely capable of inaugurating new projects and initiating unanticipated trajectories, sometimes for good and very often for ill. Indeed, not only are we capable of making new things, but we are also called several times in the Psalms and even once in Isaiah to “sing a new song” and not simply to “make an old song new.” The Bible’s long-arc story of God making the broken world new and good again tells us that our part in addressing the wounds of a groaning creation will often require innovation, the imaginative development of new responses that somehow yet remain faithful to God’s original promise of renewal. God thus calls us to harness our imagination and creativity, our capacity for inaugurating new and surprising developments and trajectories, to this task. For remember, in “making all things new” God is also “about to do a new thing” (Isaiah 43:19).

Take the Help

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. 

—Hebrews 4:15-16

What kind of season are we living in, friends? In a time when our society is fracturing along growing fissures of frozen identity, in a time when anxious people of all political stripes are retreating into the presumed safety of their echo chambers, in a time when otherwise democratic nations are openly flirting with fascism, well, such time is, to say the least, eukairon—a time of need.

What we need more than ever in these times, I submit, are imaginations inspired by our Redeemer’s shalom way, revealed to us in scripture. Cultivating such an imagination will encourage us to build fellowship and solidarity with those people we are all too often tempted to write off, enabling us to peer into any and every human face and see there disclosed our Maker’s very image.

For almost six decades now, ICS has striven to help people from all walks of life answer God’s invitation to enter the promised kingdom of shalom, where everyone and everything is enfolded in the loving embrace of God’s justice and peace, divine arms that reach out to us in this very moment to—as the inspiring hymn goes— “gather us in”:

Not in the dark of buildings confining
Not in some heaven light years away
But here in this place the new light is shining
Now is the kingdom, now is the day

What an alter call this is! Jesus our Redeemer has been where we are, knows how we suffer, and has withstood the test. He is eager for us to bathe ourselves in his Father’s grace, just as he did. “Approach the throne with boldness!,” proclaims the writer of Hebrews, or in The Message’s translation: “So let’s walk right up to him and get what he is so ready to give. Take the mercy, accept the help.”

Thank you, friends, for the role you play in helping ICS impart this hopeful and empowering message to everyone we serve. I believe God created ICS precisely for such a time as this—a time of need, yes, but also a time to be rescued and retrieved, liberated to serve God’s healing and renewing work.

Shalom!

Ron Kuipers

(you can find this article, as well as others, at medium.com/regrowth)

Building Upon Love, In Love

Then we will no longer be like children, tossed around here and there upon ocean waves, picked up by every gust of religious teaching spoken by liars or swindlers or deceivers. Instead, by truth spoken in love, we are to grow in every way into Him—the Anointed One, the head. He joins and holds together the whole body with its ligaments providing the support needed so each part works to its proper design to form a healthy, growing, and mature body that builds itself up in love.

 

—Ephesians 4:14-16 (The Voice)

 

Back in my college years, I spent many summer days installing eavestroughs. Working from the roof, my partner and I would start in on the noisy work of hammering off the old paint-peeling galvanized metal to make way for the new, baked-on-enamel steel rolling off the machine at the back of our truck. On more than one occasion, the clatter would bring a child out of his or her home to ask us what we were doing. With a gleam in his eye, my partner would invariably respond, “Your house is broken, we’re taking it apart so that we can bring it into the shop for repairs.” I clearly remember one panic-stricken youngster’s fearful reaction: “But where will I live?!”

While moments like this brought some levity to our otherwise monotonous days, something in my heart could not let these children persist in their anxiety for very long. My partner always teased me about how quickly I cracked, as I rushed to assure them that their house was not going anywhere, and we were just doing some small restorations around the edges.

There is something both beautiful and fearful about the trustfulness of a child. We would be very different creatures if such trust were not our starting place. But because this trust can be abused, we learn as we grow older that we can’t believe everything we hear, and that we need to develop and practice the art of discernment. We call “gullible” those adults who seem to have failed to learn this lesson, and “suspicious” those who have learned it all too well.

It seems to me that Paul wanted to help the church in Ephesus chart a course between these two extremes. As an educator, I find it intriguing, and not a little terrifying, that in so doing he warns these parishioners against being seduced or misled—literally being “wave tossed” or “wind blown”—by the “religious teaching” or “doctrine” (didaskalia) put forth by deceitful schemers. Even otherwise authoritative teaching, it seems, can be put to destructive purposes if it is not spoken in love.

But there’s the rub: what does it mean to speak the truth in love? How do we know that we are doing so? What does “in love” add to “speaking the truth”? When I told that little kid that her house wasn’t going anywhere, was I doing anything more than simply correcting factually inaccurate information? I like to think so. I was also trying to assure her and thereby hoping to relieve her anxiety. My heart went out to her the moment I saw the fear well up in her eyes, and I listened to my heart by responding as I did.

By “speaking the truth in love,” Paul says, we grow “in every way” into the shalom of our Messiah, our Pathfinder who encourages us to follow him and comes to our aid when we falter. When we follow Christ’s example, we contribute to the vitality of a body that is built up in love. We know we are speaking the truth in love, then, when we see our teaching edify the students in our charge, when we offer them and help them assume a confident basis from which to make their own unique contribution to our shared life on this healing path.

Alas, there is no formula, rule, algorithm, or GPS that will guarantee in advance that we will always speak the truth in love. It’s more of an art than a science. What we can be assured of, however, is that there will be signs along the way to tell us how we are doing, and the perduring presence of the Holy Spirit to infuse in us the desire to make whole what has been shattered, to bring peace where there is fear and anxiety, and to create a world where the human instinct to trust one another is affirmed rather than abused.

Shalom friends,

Ron Kuipers

Wild God

The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. 

The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;

the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

 

The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl,
and strips the forest bare;

and in his temple all say, “Glory!”

 

—Psalm 29:7-9

 

Mere days after wildfires ravaged Jasper, Alberta, my family and I were getting ready to attend a Kuipers family reunion at my sister’s cottage near Golden, BC. Golden was under an evacuation alert at that time too. Fortunately, the winds changed, the temperature cooled, and we were able to go ahead with our much-anticipated visit.
 
At a bookstore in Golden, on a hazy day choked by smoke from the surrounding fires, I chanced upon a book by the musician Nick Cave, a long form interview with his friend Seán O’Hagen entitled Faith, Hope, and Carnage. What an apt title, I thought, and bought the book. While this book is many things, it is also a moving testimony to Cave’s Christian faith, a hard-won faith, born of suffering, in a God who, hovering over the roiling and dangerous possibilities of the fathomless deep, yet considered it well worth the risk to plunge into that abyss and transform its sheer possibility into a liveable cosmos, a wild world for God to love and for all God’s creatures to frolic.
 
But the history of this cosmos of proliferating possibility is also a history of carnage. In this world, taking up the joyful gift of life also means accepting the inevitability of suffering and grief. It’s part of the deal. The wild God blew a hole through Nick Cave’s life when he lost his teenage son Arthur in 2015. Instead of turning inward, however, Cave decided to work through his grief publicly, through his music and writing, in the hope that sharing his story might help others enduring similar pain.
 
Surprisingly, in the bowels of his pain and suffering, Cave discovered in himself and other grievers an emerging zeal, “an audacity in the face of things, a kind of reckless refusal to submit to the condition of this world.” (159). Simply sharing his grief, he noticed, also created the possibility for people to show him their care, offering small, loving touches and gestures that helped carry him and his wife Susie through their grief, leading him to draw the following incredible conclusion:
 

…I came to the conclusion that the world wasn’t bad, at all—in fact, what we think of as bad, or as sin, is actually suffering. And that the world is not animated by evil, as we are so often told, but by love, and that, despite the suffering of the world, or maybe in defiance of it, people mostly just cared. Susie and I instinctively understood that we needed to move towards this loving force, or perish. (170)

There is a deep message in Cave’s journey through the work of mourning—a journey from carnage to, dare I say, glory. His moving story of opening himself up to receiving a loving, albeit wild force amid his suffering, indeed a force that carried him through his suffering, will stay with me for a long time. It is a message well worth pondering at the start of a new school year, as we help students engage the pieces of our Maker’s wild, broken creation, and encourage them to discern the different, surprising ways these scattered shards can be put back together again.
 
Shalom, friends
Ron Kuipers

The Power of Mist

For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

—James 3:16-18

At the most recent meeting of the ICS Board of Trustees, Board Chair Dan Beerens opened the meeting with a reflection on a passage from the letter of James. It was not the passage cited above, but one that comes later, where James admonishes those arrogant enough to think they can determine their own futures: “Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” (James 4:14)

What I found intriguing about Dan’s reflection is how he quickly moved past the admonishment, and proceeded to take James’s claim that human life is but mist seriously and positively, asking the question: Does mist matter? Would we perceive our lives differently, less arrogantly, if we took the misty nature of our existence more seriously?

In Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, the poet Christian Wiman moves in a similar direction when he considers the fragility and isolation of human lives considered apart from their relationships: “Selves are nothing but memories of selves, and memories but the wispy entities that time and mind have conspired to keep. It’s a wonder we don’t walk through each other like ghosts.” (p. 75)

Why don’t we walk through each other? Maybe we do sometimes? I know that so often in our rapidly polarizing world we too easily look past each other. James’ letter has a lesson to teach us here, too. The letter urges us to turn from our “selfish ambition” and “boastful confidence”—our navel-gazing obduracy—to a wisdom from above that is, in stark contrast, gentle and willing to yield.

Which puts me back in mind of mist, and Dan’s question, “does mist matter?” It seems to me that mist only matters once it realizes that it is mist. Mist only matters when it realizes that, in and through its wispy, fleeting existence, it nevertheless has the power to condense on the porous surfaces of the cold creatures surrounding it and be transformed into life-giving water.

The good news here is that we are this mist, and when we turn from ourselves toward others with mercy and good fruit, we experience that wonderful condensation that transforms our very being precisely because we have responded to someone’s need. “And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.”

Shalom, friends!

Ron Kuipers

What Time is It?

Walk wisely toward those who are outside, rescuing lost time.

—Colossians 4:5 (Revised Geneva Translation)

In his brief but profound book How to Inhabit Time, my good friend (and ICS alumnus) James K.A. Smith introduces us to “the art of spiritual timekeeping” (see HIT, 16 ff.) This art, Smith tells us, attunes us to something more than chronological time, which the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin describes as “homogenous, empty time,” where one moment is qualitatively indistinct from the next, just another tick of the clock (for this and more, see Benjamin’s profound Theses on the Philosophy of History).

As Jamie points out, scripture often uses another Greek word, kairos, to speak of a different kind of time. Unlike chronos, Smith says, kairos names “a fullness of time, a time charged in a way that can’t be simply measured” (HIT, 18). This is the time that shelters the messianic possibility of redemption, a possibility which we might say inhabits chronological time like a wound coil, ready to spring into actuality at any moment.

In its translation of Colossians 4:5, the Revised Geneva Translation does a great job of evoking this kairological understanding of time. The New Revised Standard Version translates the Greek phrase in question, ton kairon exagorazomenoi, as “making the most of the time,” which to my ear sounds way too chronological. That last word, exagorazomenoi, literally means “to buy back” or “to buy out of,” and is often translated as “redeem.” We are closer here to the idea of “rescue,” I submit, than we are to the idea of “making the most of”!

The Revised Geneva translation provokes us to think more deeply about what Paul might be saying about time. In what way is our time lost, and how can it be rescued? Smith tells us that “spiritual timekeeping tries to discern where the Spirit’s restoration is already afoot in creation’s groaning” (HIT, 18). Could our attempts at such discernment be the way that we “walk wisely toward those who are outside,” thereby giving witness to God’s transformative work in the world, in time? Could that be what it means to rescue lost time?

So what time is it? Is it the time that is lost or the time that can be rescued? We put our hope and trust that God in Christ is bringing the latter to fruition, even as we are invited to participate in this dramatic salvage operation in our time. As Smith tells it: “In spiritual timekeeping, the watchword is ‘discernment’; faithfulness requires knowing when we are in order to discern what we are called to do” (HIT, 19). 

ICS’s Mission Statement reminds us that “the Gospel’s message of renewal shapes our pursuit of wisdom.” Stated in more explicitly kairological terms, we might say that “the Gospel’s hope for the rescue of lost time shapes our daily dance of (Smith again) ‘keeping time with the Spirit’.”

Shalom, friends!

Ron Kuipers

Recognizing the Appearance

They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”  Saying this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

—John 20:13-14

Things are not as they appear. Or so we are told. Appearances can be deceiving. Appearances are fleeting and transitory, while reality is permanent and unchanging. Ask Plato.

I can only imagine what it was like when our risen Messiah, after his crucifixion and burial, appeared to disciples like Mary Magdalene. As John tells the story, Mary sees Jesus standing before her, but she does not recognize him. Why not, I wonder? Is it because she cannot credit precisely this possibility: that the beloved teacher she saw crucified and entombed could be standing before her, very much alive?

Even when Jesus asks Mary why she is weeping, she still fails to recognize him, mistaking him for the gardener. It is not until Jesus utters her name, “Mary,” that she recognizes the cherished pathbreaker whose untimely death she had been mourning. I wonder what it was like for Mary in that moment. Was it like viewing those ambiguous drawings that can be seen now one way, then another, but never both simultaneously? Did her moment of recognition snap into place immediately, suddenly, dramatically, like when one finally sees the duck instead of the rabbit?

“Rabbouni!” she exclaims. Teacher. The moment she recognizes Jesus, that is the appellation she uses. How fascinating, as though Jesus had chosen to make his first resurrected appearance to his favourite student, Mary called Magdalene, the one he then trusts with the task of sharing this good news with the rest of his followers.

This pattern of appearance without immediate recognition will repeat itself many times as the resurrected Jesus approaches his other followers. In John 21, the disciples do not recognize Jesus until, after the miraculous haul of fish that follows his instruction to cast their nets on the other side of the boat, the “disciple whom Jesus loved” exclaims to Peter, “It is the Lord!” Indeed, the disciples on the road to Emmaus recognize Jesus only after he is gone.

Is there a common denominator to these instances of sudden recognition? Mary hears Jesus say her name, the disciples catch a miraculous haul of fish, the travellers to Emmaus have burning hearts as Jesus opens the scriptures to them. Perhaps these very different moments of recognition occur because these disparate followers suddenly recognize and understand the possibility the resurrected Jesus reveals and had been teaching them to recognize all along: the transformative possibility of redemption, where nothing is fatalistically condemned to be what it merely is, but can become more than that: restored, bounteous, glorious, and full.

Things are not as they appear. They are more than they appear. Thank God for that.

May we all come to recognize and embody the possibility our living Messiah reveals. Shalom!

Ron Kuipers

The Power of "With"

And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

—Matthew 28:20

The word “with” can be used to imply many different things. It can suggest potential proximity—“Put this book with the others”—or accompaniment—“Let me go there with you.” It can connote hipness, as when Grampa Abe Simpson vociferously complains, “I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was!” It can imply agreement and comprehension—“I’m with you so far”—or even a deep solidarity—“I will stand with you in your struggle for justice.”

With all these different uses and connotations of the word “with,” how might we understand the way that the resurrected Jesus uses the word when he says to his disciples, “I am with you always,” words he utters moments after he has charged them with the task of spreading his shalom way to the ends of the earth?

In the song “Can’t Hardly Wait” by The Replacements (one of my favourite rock bands from the 1980s) there is a cheeky line that always makes me chuckle, where singer Paul Westerberg intones: “Jesus rides beside me, but he never buys any smokes.” While I resonate with this image of Jesus as a steadfast travel companion on the road trip of life, I hope and trust that he is more than someone who is simply ‘along for the ride,’ mooching my last cigarette to boot! (In my case, as a non-smoker, the cigarette would have to be metaphorical.)

Perhaps it might help if we connect Jesus’ promise at the end of the gospel of Matthew to a claim made near the beginning of that same gospel, where the angel, echoing Isaiah 7:14, tells Joseph that the child Mary carries is the promised Messiah, the one who will be called “Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us” (Matt. 1:23)? Once we make this connection, we begin to discern the mysterious contours of this very powerful “with,” and the way Jesus’ promise includes but also moves beyond simple companionship.

The very word “with,” I think, says something about the nature of divine power itself, this messianic possibility that Jesus promises to make available to us. As ICS Emeritus Professor Jim Olthuis suggests in his book Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love, the power of this “with” is not a dominating or oppressive power, not an “over,” but rather a power that comes alongside us and empowers us—much like Jesus did, incognito, when he joined his erstwhile unwitting disciples on the road to Emmaus. 

Jim calls this power “withing,” and describes it as the way humans are uniquely called to image a Creator who desires to be with and love creation:

As God is with-us (Emmanuel), so we are to be-with others, cum amore (with love). “Withing” (power-with rather than power-over) is our gift and calling, be(com)ing the unique selves we are through relationship with other persons (intersubjectivity), with creation and all its creatures (solidarity), and with God (spirituality). In and with the impetus of love’s promise, we live-with, work-with, wrestle-with, suffer-with, celebrate-with the whole family of earth’s creatures, all of creation, and God. (xvi-ii)

Jim later describes “withing” as “a celebrating-with and suffering-with without submission or domination, a being-with in which we are true to ourselves even as we exist in connection with each other” (87).

How wonderful is this “with,” this divine connection that empowers us to connect—with the earth and all its creatures, with each other, and with God? How different it is from the kind of power we all too often seek, the power to dominate and control others, the earth, and even God? I ponder how deeply different is the way toward which our Messiah’s promise points us.

Shalom, friends!

Ron Kuipers

What Might These Words Still Take from Us?

But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.

—Luke 1:29 (NRSV)

In my ICS seminar on Ludwig Wittgenstein, I use an essay by Stanley Cavell that attempts to explain the intimate link that Wittgenstein posits between the meaning of words and the way we learn to use them. To illustrate this relationship between meaning and use, Cavell describes his infant daughter’s efforts to learn the word ‘kitty’: Witnessing her petting the family cat and saying the word ‘kitty’, he assumes she has learned the word, yet his conclusion is thrown into doubt when later he sees her stroking a furry pillow saying the same thing.

Cavell finds himself forced to conclude that, although she is well on her way, his daughter has yet to learn the word ‘kitty’; she has yet to master the various ways the linguistic community into which he is welcoming her do and do not use that word. He makes the point rather provocatively:

Kittens—what we call ‘kittens’—do not exist in her world yet, she has not acquired the forms of life which contain them. They do not exist in something like the way cities and mayors will not exist in her world until long after pumpkins and kittens do; or like the way God or love or responsibility or beauty do not exist in our world; we have not mastered, or we have forgotten, or we have distorted, or learned through fragmented models, the forms of life which could make utterances like ‘God exists’ or ‘God is dead’ or ‘I love you’ or ‘I cannot do otherwise’ or ‘Beauty is but the beginning of terror’ bear all the weight they could carry, express all they could take from us.

(Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 172-73)

Cavell’s gloss (the part I italicized) leapt from the page the moment I read it roughly twenty years ago. His words caught me completely off guard, and so I pondered them. Was he right to draw the tragic conclusion that most of us today merely go through the motions, simply mouthing empty platitudes when we use words like ‘God’ and ‘love’ and ‘beauty’, and that we do not let these words demand anything too deep or personal from us? A troubling thought, indeed.

In My Bright Abyss, which I have just finished reading, the poet Christian Wiman wonders whether the decay of religious belief among educated people in the West has caused this decay of language, or whether it is the other way around: “[D]o we find the fire of belief fading in us only because the words are sodden with overuse and imprecision, and will not burn?” (p.124)

How different is Mary’s response to the angel Gabriel’s greeting and announcement in Luke 1:28? Mary gives herself permission to be troubled and perplexed by the angel’s words—to let them hit—leading her to ponder “what sort of greeting this might be.” In her book Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories, Debie Thomas describes Mary’s response to Gabriel as “holy bewilderment.” She suggests that Mary’s holy bewilderment models for us a way to take distance from the all-too-settled dogmatic certainties and platitudes we have come to accept, the dead words that no longer burn, and search for ones that do. She thus finds Mary’s bewilderment to resonate with her own faith journey as she deals with the suffering, vicissitudes, and ambiguity that daily life visits upon us all:

What an interesting shock reality has been. Who knew that my life with God would actually be one long goodbye? That to know God is to unknow God? To shed my neat conceptions of the divine like so many old snakeskins and emerge into the world bare, vulnerable, and new, again and again? (p. 5–6)

I believe Thomas has hit on something important here, something of what Jesus meant when he told us to become like little children, filled with a child’s “sense of wonder, this excess of spirit brimming out of the body” (to quote Wiman once more) (My Bright Abyss, p. 160). Yet I do not think our Messiah’s admonition means that we must completely shed our first religious language. The demand we face, rather, is to prevent this first language, the basis for everything that follows, from becoming a dead letter. We must strive to maintain its original spiritual charge and vitality, so that it remains a trustworthy language that helps us love reality with the faith and hope that the restoration and renewal of all that is and has been broken is possible.

While the task of maintaining such spiritual vitality is a task we share as a community of faith, graced by God, I remain convinced that no human words, from the most inspired spiritual poetry to the most capacious and systematic theology, will ever be able to contain the profound divine mystery and charge that suffuses and transcends creation. So, the job of preventing these words from becoming settled certainties, the job of maintaining their ability to demand something from us by connecting us to the divine mystery they always fail to express, remains perpetually before us. Yet use these words we must, for as Wiman (again!) reminds us: “At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them.” (p.141)

And in this way, perhaps, we may welcome God (not to mention love and beauty, or kittens) into our world again.

Shalom,

Ron Kuipers

Silence Divine

“…and after the earthquake a fire,

but the Lord was not in the fire;

and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

—I Kings 19:12 (NRSV)

Do you recall the wonder you experienced as a child, that time when your eyes would not pass over so many things, but instead would alight upon and tarry over them? When you would search forever for a four-leaf clover, or sharpen your focus during that brief instant before the crystalline formation of a snowflake melted in your hand?

One of the tragedies of adulthood is our propensity to lose touch with this childlike sense of wonder, for there is a salutary reverence in this kind of attention, this silent posture of listening that opens us to the deep mysteries of God’s cosmos. As adults, the plans we make and the routines we follow dig deep mental ruts from which we find it hard to break free, even momentarily. Yet the health of our hearts and souls, not to mention our bodies and minds, demands we take regular sabbaticals from these everyday routines.

There are many places in scripture that seem to recognize this spiritual need to escape the noise of grownup life. Perhaps this is why, during Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness, Moses would set up “the tent of meeting” for “everyone who sought the Lord” far away from the main camp (Exodus 33:7). Perhaps this also explains why Mary, instead of helping her sister Martha with the domestic chores, “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying” (Luke 10:39). Or why the gospels report that, when the crowds pressed in on him, Jesus himself “would withdraw to deserted places and pray” (Luke 5:16).

The poet Christian Wiman expresses this spiritual need eloquently and insightfully in his memoir, My Bright Abyss, while reflecting on Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Having Confessed.” In that poem, Kavanagh counsels us to remain within our souls, to stay in “the unconscious room of our hearts,” where God might find us, and for this reason also worries about our efforts to view our souls consciously and abstractly, “from the outside.” The real issue at stake in Kavanagh’s poem, Wiman tells us, is “that the link not be broken, that every intellectual growth remain rooted in that early experience of ultimate insight, ultimate unknowingness, every word about God both responsive and responsible to the silence that is its source.” (pp. 78-79)

Perhaps, then, “the sound of sheer silence” by which Elijah finally sensed God’s passing presence is the same sound the melting snowflake makes as it kindles childlike wonder? Yet how might we ensure that the words of our faith remain rooted in this divine silence? Thankfully, the first step, if the poet Mary Oliver is to be believed (she is), is deceptively easy to take:

…just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak

—From “Praying”

I wish you all God’s rich blessings for the New Year, friends. May it be filled with moments of silent wonder, allowing your life to radiate outward from this deep connection to our Maker and Healer!

Shalom,

Ron Kuipers

Embodying Love

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved,

clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.

—Colossians 3:12

During Advent, as we contemplate the profound mystery of God coming to dwell among us in human form, my thoughts turn in gratitude to all those people in my life who have embodied Christ’s compassion for me, and whose living example has profoundly shaped my own stumbling efforts to walk our Messiah’s path of grace and love.

Hendrik Hart, who left us to return to the God of love in March 2021, was one such person. Henk not only nurtured my intellectual gifts, but also showed me true friendship by dressing my spiritual wounds, sensing my struggle to stay connected to God’s love in Christ while I was at the same time harbouring profound doubts about my conservative Calvinist upbringing.

Sometimes Henk would address this situation with humour. In those early days, he once jokingly introduced me to people at an ICS event with the words, “This is Ron Kuipers. ICS is the last stop on his way out of the tradition.” In the early 1990s, when he said those words, he might even have been right. Yet thanks to the loving and faithful witness of my ICS professors and the larger ICS community, I never in fact boarded that final train.

Yet no one more than Henk illustrated for me through both his actions and his words the profound and mysterious truth that God is love. Importantly, he did so without skirting the dark realities of pain, suffering, and death. During his life, Henk had to say farewell to his wife, Anita, as well as his daughter, Esther. While grieving their loss, he was nevertheless able to remain grateful for the love they brought into his life. This experience inspired him to write the poem “Love/Love II,” in which he writes, “I experienced Love / dawning forcefully / at the dark edge of the abyss / in their last journey.”

Henk’s expression of surprise at feeling the profound Presence of Love while he was bidding farewell to those whom he loved most eventually builds to a crescendo in a verse that, to my ear, evokes a deep Advent truth:

The birth of Love in our life, 

foretaste of eternity:

this inexpressible joy will be ours

forever.

Henk’s life embodied the truth that because God dearly loves us, we may clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience—even in our darkest hour.

So, in the spirit of the Advent season, I wish you all the profound Presence of Love, of Immanuel, and hope that you experience this Love every time the candles we light for one another, both literally and figuratively, pierce the surrounding darkness.

Shalom, friends!
Ron Kuipers

Yearning for the Messiah

And again, Isaiah says,

“The Root of Jesse will spring up,

one who will arise to rule over the nations;

in him the Gentiles will hope.” 

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him,

so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

—Romans 15:12-13 (New International Version)

I have been thinking a lot about hope lately, not just for myself, but especially for the millions of people across the world who suffer under the iron heel of a world at war. How are they supposed to hold onto hope? Where do the survivors of such violence find the resilience to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and rebuild? For they so often do precisely that, and that is a mysterious and wondrous thing.

When I first read Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, I was struck by a particular section in which he describes a supportive relationship between the very different emotions of joy and grief. He contrasts these related emotions to the equally reinforcing pair of pride and despair (pp.103-8). Pride involves the arrogance of assuming we can destroy what we did not create, a destruction we tolerate in the name of progress. Such pride includes a naïve optimism that underestimates the brokenness, danger, and difficulty in which we are mired, not to mention our human finitude in the face of all we do not control, and simply expects things to get better without thinking too much about how or why. When such expectations are dashed, as they all too often are, pride quickly transforms into its converse, an utter despair completely devoid of any hope.

Joy and grief work differently. Together, these mark the boundaries of what Berry calls “the human estate.” When we accept the gift of our lives within these bounds, then in those all-too-frequent moments of darkness that dash our joy and conspire against our hope, we will respond with grief rather than despair. Unlike despair, grief carves a difficult path that enables us to work through our loss so that we can live to hope another day. That is what it means to hope against hope.

Of course, what I have said about holding on to hope through the work of grief is easier said than done. Indeed, against so much evidence to the contrary, scripture asks us nevertheless to trust that God is at work healing, restoring, and renewing the world. But is that really so hard a thing to believe, after all? For we see God’s redemptive work wherever we witness the possibility of redemption being made real, whenever a cup of cold water is offered to someone who thirsts. However rare and fleeting such moments may be, their very existence bears witness to the fact that any and every moment is one in which the healing love that suffuses creation might break through.

And so, we yearn for “that day” when such possibility becomes fully actual, when our redeeming God will be all, in all. Until then, we live and act in hope, gaining the joy and peace that fills us when we let go and trust in our Maker and Redeemer’s shalom way.

Shalom, friends!

Ron Kuipers

Breaking Down the Wall

For he is our peace;
in his flesh he has made both groups into one 
and has broken down the dividing wall,
that is, the hostility between us.

—Ephesians 2:14

Throughout his letters, the apostle Paul is deeply concerned with unity. Jesus Messiah is our peace, he tells the church in Ephesus, and in Jesus Messiah we are—somehow—all one. But what does it mean for us to be one in Jesus Messiah?

One way to answer this question is to emphasize sameness. In Jesus Messiah, our differences no longer define us, for through his redemptive suffering and victory over death we are all made equal. While I think there is some truth in interpreting what Paul means by unity in this way, I remain convinced that the gospel’s deeper message is one that affirms rather than denies basic human difference.

1 Corinthians 12 offers a wonderful example of such an affirmation of difference. The chapter opens describing the variety of spiritual gifts with which God has blessed humankind. Next comes Paul’s insistence that the one body of Christ has “many members” (see vss. 12, 14). All these members contribute—through their difference—to the unity of the body of Christ. “If all were a single member,” Paul asks, “where would the body be?” (vs. 19). There would be no body at all, Paul insists, if all the parts were the same.

If, as we have just seen, Paul does not understand the basic fact of human difference to be problematic (to the contrary!), why does he remain so concerned with unity? Paul’s image of “the dividing wall” in Ephesians 2 tells us that his concern may not be to reduce difference to sameness, but rather to get us to see how in Jesus Messiah we might imagine and hope for an end to division and hostility—unity understood as solidarity rather than as uniformity. The unity of Jesus Messiah is peace, and that is the spirit through which we must approach our differences.

Scripture recognizes and affirms that we are given to each other in our uniqueness and difference, that our differences are the very gifts through which we might bless one another. From that basis, we are called to the unity that Jesus Messiah’s suffering love has revealed to us—to use our heads, hearts, and hands to imagine and realize all the different ways we belong to each other in and through our differences and, through that work and play of belonging, care for each other as well as the world we hold in common.

That we live in a broken world hardly needs emphasizing, and sometimes it is hard to see God’s redeeming hand at work healing, restoring, and transforming all the suffering we find in the world today. It takes no small faith to trust and participate in God’s work of renewal, but with the gift of such faith we can encounter difference without fear, confident that we will be able to find signs of God’s original blessing in everything we meet, in everything God made.

At ICS, we like to say that “the Gospel’s message of renewal shapes our pursuit of wisdom.” I can think of no better way to start a new school year than by reminding ourselves of everything these words might demand of us. It is not always easy or comfortable to approach difference and unfamiliarity in the Spirit of Jesus Messiah. It is a task that requires enormous patience and humility, calling for deep listening on our part before rushing to judgment—in a word: wisdom. Thank you for helping us be a school that strives to approach difference in this way—without fear, and confident that God’s healing path will present itself to us as we do so!

Shalom, my friends,

Ron Kuipers

God’s Gathering

…for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. 

Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, 

I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.

—Isaiah 56:7b-8

I have never really stopped to ponder the days immediately after our Messiah’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. When I read Matthew 21 or Mark 11, however, I am struck by the fact that in these passages Jesus appears to be in quite the mood. The first thing that sets him off is all the buying and selling going on in the temple, and he summarily proceeds to overturn the tables of these exploiters and schlock merchants, driving them out as he does so. The next day, feeling hungry, he curses a barren fig tree. Mark 11 makes a point of letting us know that the disciples heard Jesus’s curse, as if they were already walking on eggshells.

As I meditate over these stories, I also become struck by the way our Messiah’s imagination is charged with a vision of God’s kingdom of shalom. In this light, his anger and frustration seem to stem from the distance he experiences between that vision and his present reality. When he is driving the merchants from the temple, for example, he quotes the passage from the prophet Isaiah, above, chastising the merchants for instead transforming God’s all-welcoming home into a “den of robbers” (vs. 17).

Last month, ICS invited Yale theologian Miroslav Volf to speak to audiences at Martin Luther University in Waterloo and at the Toronto School of Theology. Volf’s talks focused on distilling the message of his most recent book (co-authored with Ryan McAnally-Linz) The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything. In this book, Volf offers the stimulating suggestion that God’s redemptive work is a kind of homemaking. God is at work in creation to make the world a home for God, a home in which all of redeemed humanity belongs and will be gathered. Our love for God, Volf suggests, is therefore intimately related to the God’s love for the world:

Since God is the ultimate good, humans ought to love God above all things and for God’s own sake. But to love God is to love the world that God loves—and to love it…with the love with which God loves it and which God is. If this idea appears startlingly ‘worldly’, that’s because the holy and transcendent God is surprisingly worldly—desiring to make a home and be at home in the beloved creation. (7)

From these words, I return to Matthew 21 and Mark 11 and see our Messiah’s consternation and impatience in a new light. Matthew 21 ends with Jesus’s suggestion that the Kingdom of God will be given to “a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom” (vs. 43). These are the people that Isaiah tells us our Maker and Redeemer is gathering, including especially all those people who have been cast out of all of history’s oppressive kingdoms, empires that fail to make a home for God precisely because they fail to make a home for these outcasts.

As we enter summer, friends, let us ponder God’s good creation that sustains and nurtures us, and imagine what part we might play in God’s homemaking. Let’s imagine that place and gather there. I’ll meet you by the fig tree laden with good fruit.

Shalom, and again I say shalom!
Ron Kuipers

Christ the Gate

I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved,

and will come in and go out and find pasture.

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

–John 10:9-10

When I hear the word ‘gatekeeper’, I tend to think of someone in a privileged, oftentimes undeserved position who from that perch may prevent deserving people from accessing certain goods to which they would otherwise be entitled. Indeed, the Cambridge Dictionary defines gatekeeping as “the activity of trying to control who gets particular resources, power, or opportunities, and who does not.”

Does Jesus Messiah claim to be this kind of power broker in John 10? I don’t hear his message that way. Jesus tells his audience that “the one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep,” and then proceeds in verse 3 to claim that “the gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice.” One might naturally conclude from this verse that Jesus does in fact claim the gatekeeper’s role, granting entry to the shepherd while barring the “thief and bandit” mentioned in verse 1.

Yet Jesus does not claim to be the gatekeeper in John 10, but rather the gate itself. That is a crucial difference. Moreover, the passage opens by telling us that the thief avoids the gate entirely, and instead “climbs in by another way” (vs. 1). It seems, then, that the gatekeeper’s job is rather easy, because only shepherds approach the gate, almost as if they are the only ones who know it is there or can recognize it for the peculiar entrance it in fact is. There is not much the gatekeeper can do, at any rate, to prevent the thief from breaking in at a different spot.

So, what of the gate itself, the gate that Jesus claims to be? What does this gate open onto? In verse 7, Jesus tells us that this gate, the gate he himself is, is for the sheep: “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.” Do we not spy true freedom here in this wonderful idea of “coming in and going out” to find pasture? While the thief only comes “to steal and kill and destroy,” Christ the gate opens instead onto the abundant life of the nurturing field (vs. 10).

How often do we pass by this gate without noticing it, I wonder, in the expectation of instead coming across a grand entrance to some great “gated community,” one designed as much to keep people out as to hem them in? Can such a checkpoint really be Christ the gate? What if instead this grand entrance is where the thief once broke in, and thus leads to the opposite of the abundant life Jesus promises?

Verse 8 tells us that the sheep can perceive and ignore the seductive messaging of all life’s thieves and bandits. The abundant life Jesus promises does not lie along that way. How do we know? Well, do the thieves and bandits lay down their lives for the sheep they hope to attract and control? Does trusting their promises lead to abundant life? We need to ask ourselves some tough questions here and as we do, strive to embrace the love that does in fact lay down its life for others (vs. 11, 15).

***

For the first time on this well-trodden path, I stop and notice the wind-worn, overgrown garden gate off to the side, where it swings freely on its aged hinges. With the slightest squeak, it beckons me to cross its threshold.

Shalom, friends!

Ron Kuipers