Jan 25, 2026 John 3:1-21 - Nicodemus: Pursuing and Questioning Faith

Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, and it is tempting to judge him for that. However, night is often where real faith begins. Nicodemus is not shallow or hostile. He is thoughtful, trained, and he is respected. And still, something in him is restless. 

 

The darkness that surrounds him is not simply fear; it is unknowing. It is the honest admission that what has sustained him so far is no longer enough. John gives us Nicodemus not as a villain, but as a mirror. Many of us arrive at faith not in confidence, but in quiet longing, unsure what we might lose if we ask the wrong questions.

Another possibility is that he was a very responsible leader who was swamped by tending to his daily responsibilities. He went to question Jesus to find out more about what he experienced at the first available chance he found after his work. 

Steeped in Jewish tradition and culture, Nicodemus would have been confident of his place in heaven. But, like last week's scripture reading, Jesus meets Nicodemus not with reassurance. Rather Jesus answers with disruption. “No one can see the reign of God unless they are born from above.” The language itself refuses to settle. Born again? Born from above? Jesus does not clarify the ambiguity, but rather leans into it. Faith, he suggests, is not an achievement or a credential. It is not a conclusion reached by the well-prepared. It is a beginning that originates in God, not in us. The Spirit moves like wind: uncontained, unownable, uncontrollable. You can feel its effects, but you cannot command its direction.

Our Wednesday group discussion on the wind was fascinating. For some of us, it was more clarifying than the "born again" language, but even this was as deeply unsettling for us, as it was for Nicodemus. Our lives are built on trying to "master" Scripture, or be true to our faith tradition. Jesus describes a transformation that undoes mastery altogether. You cannot earn this birth. You cannot manage it. You cannot even fully explain it. You can only consent to it. That is both terrifying and liberating. It is terrifying for those invested in control. It is liberating for anyone who has been told they are too flawed, too doubtful, or maybe too complicated to belong. God’s new life does not depend on pedigree or purity. It depends on openness. God never overrides relationships, either by certainty or by control. 

Instead, Jesus then reaches back into Israel’s story, recalling the bronze serpent lifted up in the wilderness. It is a strange image: healing comes not by denying suffering, but by facing it. The people are saved not by escape, but by looking directly at what is killing them, and trusting God there. Jesus dares to say that his own life will follow this same pattern. He will be “lifted up,” not onto a throne, but onto a cross. In John’s Gospel, this lifting up is both humiliation and exaltation, death and revelation held together. God’s saving work is not accomplished through domination, but through vulnerability. The cross is not divine cruelty demanded by God; it is divine solidarity with those crushed by violent systems.

Only then do we hear the words so familiar they risk losing their power: “For God so loved the world.” Not a purified world. Not a deserving world. The world as it is, fractured, fearful, resistant, beloved. God’s response to a broken creation is not condemnation, but love embodied and risked. “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved.” If condemnation is the loudest note in our theology, we have misheard the gospel. In John, salvation is not escape from the earth; it is healing within it, liberation from false stories about God, ourselves, and one another.

Kristen was troubled, as it turned out we all were, by the John 3:18 condemnation of those who did not believe in God's one and only son. Pastor Emillie suggested the author of the book of John may have had a different association with those words than we do now.  

Judgment is not God’s eagerness to punish. It is the revealing light of truth. Light and darkness here are not a moral sorting of people into good and bad. They describe our posture toward truth. We resist the light not because we are evil, but because exposure is costly. Systems of injustice require darkness to survive. So do personal illusions, about innocence, superiority, or control. Yet the light of Christ is not a spotlight meant to shame. It is a sunrise meant to awaken.

John 3 refuses to behave like an answer. It is mysterious not because it is obscure, but because it cannot be reduced to a formula. It is less a doctrine than an encounter. Pastor Emillie noted that after every sign John offers, there is immediate confusion that spreads.

She also let us know that, unlike the English language, Swahili, like Greek, has many words with different meanings for love with different emphases..

Greek Term	Meaning	Swahili Parallels	Emphasis

Agápē

Self-giving love

Upendo, huruma

Moral, spiritual, ethical

Philia

Friendship

Urafiki, udugu, ushirika

Mutuality, community

Éros

Desire

Mapenzi, mahaba

Passion, intimacy

Storgē

Familial love, shared life

Upendo wa wazazi

Care, nurture

As I currently understand, we must keep in mind that these Greek categories tend to separate kinds of love (eros vs. agape), especially in philosophical or theological writing, where Swahili tends to layer them.

Anyway, Nicodemus leaves without resolution, and that is the point. Faith here is not certainty; it is movement. It is learning to trust the wind, to consent to being remade, to believe that love, not fear, not condemnation, not and certainly not control,is God’s final word. We are left space to ponder and grow from what we are experiencing. 

Nicodemus comes at night, but the story does not end there. Light is already moving toward him. And toward us. We may come with questions, with half-understood beliefs, with lives carefully managed around what feels safe. Jesus does not turn us away. He invites us into the mystery, into a faith that is less about being right and more about being reborn, again and again, from above.

Truth is alive, relational, and still unfolding. 

Creator's 2025 Annual Report 

Jan 19, 2026 Martin Luther King Day

Today we observe a holiday meant not only to remember a life, but to renew a struggle that is not yet complete. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was never intended to be simply a day off, but a day on, a day of reflection, service, and commitment to justice still unfolding among us.

Dr. King named racism, poverty, and militarism as interconnected evils that threaten human dignity and democratic life. These forces are not confined to the past. They remain present wherever fear is used to divide, violence is defended as policy, and privilege is protected at the expense of truth.

King understood that justice does not come without struggle. He taught that nonviolence is not passivity, but courageous resistance to dehumanization. He knew that freedom must be renewed again and again by people willing to confront injustice honestly and refuse to accept it as normal.

Today we honor Dr. King not by mythologizing him, but by answering his call: to bear witness, to act with compassion, and to build what he called the beloved community in the places where we live and serve.

As King wrote from a Birmingham jail, “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over.” To honor him today is to make that refusal our own: choosing truth over silence, service over indifference, and justice over fear.

May we leave this day not finished with the work, but faithful to it and remain committed to standing again for what is right.

Jan 18, 2026 Cleansing of the Temple: When Public Disruption Becomes an Act of Love

The Gospel of John places the cleansing of the temple at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, as if to say: from the first step, this work will unsettle what we have learned to accept. This is not a scheduling error; it is a theological declaration. Jesus enters history already refusing systems that confuse God with control, holiness with exclusion, and order with righteousness.

The temple he confronts was not merely a sacred space. It was an economic machine, entangled with empire and protected by religious authority. What appeared reverent concealed a system that extracted from the vulnerable and insulated the powerful. When Jesus overturns the tables, he is not attacking a worshiping community; he is exposing a marketplace that charged admission to grace. His disruption is not rage for rage’s sake; it is love that refuses to cooperate with harm.

That matters because violence rarely appears as chaos at first. More often, it arrives wearing the clothes of necessity, procedure, and “defense.” Systems tell themselves stories: This is for safety. This is unavoidable. This is just how things are done. But John’s Jesus does not accept that logic. He walks directly into the heart of an authorized system and says, This does not reflect our God.

In our own time, we are confronted with stories that feel disturbingly familiar: lives ended or shattered during enforcement actions, official narratives offered quickly, questions asked slowly, if at all. From the border to interior cities, names like Renee Good, Marimar Martínez, José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, and others weigh heavily on our conscience. These are not abstract debates about policy. They are human lives trapped inside structures that too often prioritize power over truth, and authority over accountability.

John reminds us that Jesus does not confuse spectacle with faithfulness. Even signs and wonders do not impress him if they leave the human heart unchanged. He “does not entrust himself” to those who marvel without repenting, who admire without participating. Ronald Regan often used the phrase "Peace through strength" in his campaigns, but this means to an end, however effective, should not win Nobel prizes. The U.S threatening NATO allies with tariffs will not bring peace. God is not moved by spectacle. God is not moved by crowds impressed with strength; God is moved by communities willing to be transformed.

When Jesus speaks of destroying the temple and raising it in three days, he is not threatening architecture. He is announcing a revolution in where God dwells. No longer in fortified institutions, guarded by currency and credentials, but in living bodies, in vulnerable communities, in relationships shaped by mercy and justice. Sacred space shifts from stone to flesh.

And there is something subtle but profound suggested by the whip: The tool that Jesus fashions may have been used not for punishment, but for the purpose of guiding animals. Not an instrument of fury, but of restraining and controlling chaotic movement and a refusal to let things remain where they are. Holy disruption is not always loud anger. Sometimes it is the steady, intentional redirection toward life.

That is the invitation before the church now.

Where have we confused faithfulness with institutional survival?
Where have we accepted violence because it is legal, or exclusion because it is efficient?
Where have we learned to live with tables that should have been overturned long ago?

Holy disruption keeps showing up, in sermons and in communities that refuse to let human dignity be reduced to collateral damage. It is not about nostalgia for a purer past. It is about courage in the present.

The cleansing of the temple is not only about ancient Jerusalem. It is a call to holy resistance today: to imagine communities where access to God is not bought, where power is accountable, where love is fierce enough to interrupt systems that diminish life.

Jesus is still not looking for admirers.
He is looking for participants.
People willing to let their inner temples be examined, unsettled, and remade.

And that disruptive work is always, finally, an act of love.

01/18 Service

Sernon 

Guest Musician: Esther Shim 

Pastor Emillie' sermon focused on the temple's exclusionary institutional worship practices. What we do at Creator during worship means something and ideally embraces all of what people find meaningful each Sunday we meet. She preached about how she was distracted by what was said during a worship service she had attended. Practicing good worship can sometimes be tricky. For example, not having worship bound to a building is a blessing but sometimes calls for rethinking how we do worship with love.

Esther played an Offertory hymn beautifully on the violin and her expertise in liturgical accompaniment was evident.

There was a Pre-Budget presentation given after service by Mark, Creator's treasurer. Because the mortgage is paid off we are able to dream about outreach  that was not possible before.   .   

John 2:13-25: Reflection on Disruptive Love and Sacred Resistance

John places the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, not at the end as in the synoptic Gospels. For me, this is more of a theological declaration rather than a mistake of chronology. From the start, Jesus’ life and work challenge systems that confuse God with power, profit, and exclusion. We can see this in The Chosen video clip that Creator sent a link to, and we discussed

The temple in Jerusalem was not just a religious site. It was an economic engine, intertwined with Rome's power and local elites. Pilgrims were required to exchange Roman coins for temple currency and to purchase “acceptable” sacrificial animals. What appeared orderly and devout concealed an economy that burdened the poor and protected the powerful. When Jesus overturns tables and drives out animals, he is not rejecting worship itself; He is rejecting a system that monetizes access to God.

This scene unsettles those of us who prefer a gentle, conflict-free Jesus. Yet John shows us a Jesus whose love is fierce, whose holiness disrupts unjust arrangements. The so-called “cleansing” is not about restoring a purer past; it is about exposing a present injustice. Jesus refuses a religion that blesses exploitation while claiming divine authority.

When challenged, Jesus speaks of destroying the temple and raising it in three days. His opponents hear a threat to a building. John invites us to hear something deeper: God’s dwelling place is no longer confined to stone and institution, but embodied in Jesus, and, by extension, in living communities shaped by his Spirit. The resurrection reframes sacred space. What once centered power now gives way to relational presence. One thought that was beautiful to the participants was that whips may sometimes be used for animal guidance, which is not tied to anger 

This text asks uncomfortable questions of the church today. Where have we confused faithfulness with financial survival? Where have we protected systems that exclude, commodify, or silence, in the name of tradition? Jesus’ action in the temple reminds us that reform sometimes looks like disruption, and that true reverence for God may require turning over tables we have learned to live with. Holy Disruption came up over and over again. The Holy Distributors Series, Pastor Emillie preached on this summer, was the brainchild of an ELCA pastor whose congregation is in Minneapolis

Finally, John tells us that Jesus “did not entrust himself” to those who were impressed by signs alone, because he knew what was in the human heart. Spectacle is not the same as transformation. Jesus is not seeking admirers, but participants, people willing to let their inner temples be examined, unsettled, and remade.

The cleansing of the temple is not only a story about ancient Jerusalem. It is an invitation to holy resistance today: to imagine communities where justice, mercy, and access to God are not for sale, and where love is bold enough to disrupt what stands in the way of life.

Jan 11, 2026 Sharing Lit Candles Past and Present Through A Wedding at Cana and A Vigil in Minneapolis

The Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee Vigil 
near the for Renee Nicole Good Jan. 7, 2026.

“Truth has stumbled in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter.”  Isaiah 59:14

This week, a clarion call was heard for empathy and morality. Our scripture offered us a vision that stands in painful contrast to the world many of us currently inhabit. Another shocking moment, reminiscent of George Floyd's, moved our nation.

Both grief and hope are accumulating faster than we can metabolize them..When the steward remarks, “You have kept the good wine until now,” during the wedding at Cana, he names a reversal. In God’s economy, the best is not hoarded by the powerful or consumed early and wasted. It emerges precisely when a community is on the brink of embarrassment and loss. Glory, in this story, is not domination or self-display. It is relational abundance. Shame is spared. Joy is restored. The celebration continues. 

That vision stands in painful contrast to the world many of us are inhabiting now. 

Many of us are still reeling from the murder of Renee Nicole Good, a life taken by a federal ICE agent, followed not by humility or accountability from national leaders, but by a manufactured narrative designed to justify the unjustifiable. Within hours, she was labeled a terrorist, despite video evidence that clearly contradicts those claims. Truth did not matter. Control of the story did. The opportunity to spread intimidation is taken. We're shown the bloody airbag. Don't try to protest or resist; otherwise...

Before that grief could even settle, more blood was spilled. In our own East Portland neighborhood, two additional people were shot by federal agents during an immigration enforcement operation. Once again, officials claimed necessity. Once again, communities were left stunned and terrified. Governor Tina Kotek named what many feel in our bodies: the federal government is causing chaos in our cities and shattering trust across the nation.

Power rarely admits its own violence. It re-frames it. It renames the dead. It insists the victim deserved what happened. James Baldwin warned, “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.” And yet innocence is precisely what this administration claims, through repetition, spectacle, fear, and declarations of absolute immunity. When the state kills and then lies about why, it asks the public to participate in unreality. That demand is itself a form of violence. In such moments, lament becomes refuge for the sane.

In the Hebrew scriptures, lament erupts most fiercely when truth is under assault. The psalmists cry out not only against suffering, but against falsehood. The prophets rage when injustice is paired with deception. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,” Isaiah says, not as poetry, but as a diagnosis.

This moment carries many layers of sorrow: the killing of innocent people; the terrorizing of immigrants; the erosion of law and accountability; the steady drumbeat of a masculinity that confuses domination with strength and cruelty with order. These are not separate events. They are expressions of the same moral corruption, the replacement of truth with power and care with control.

Grief, in this context, is discernment. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. Lament is the refusal of indifference. It is what keeps conscience awake when institutions fall asleep. It is what keeps us human when lies attempt to numb us.

Anger, too, is warranted. Rage rises when accountability is mocked, and victims are erased, something our African American and Native American siblings know all too well. But lament gives rage a different shape. It slows it. Grounds it. Keeps it from becoming what it opposes. Lament says: This mattered. This life mattered. Truth matters.

Faith traditions do not rush toward closure. They let lament linger. They understand that before repair comes truth-telling, and before truth-telling comes the guttural cry: How long, O Lord?

So let us say plainly: calling Renee Nicole Good a terrorist does not make it so. Repeating a lie does not transform it into justice. Defending violence with propaganda deepens the wound it claims to heal.

Cana reminds us that the common good is not secured by control, scarcity, or performance. It is discovered when we notice one another’s needs, submit ourselves to shared practices, act together, and trust that God’s abundance is meant not for isolated selves, but for all of us, together.

We are allowed to cry.
We are allowed to rage.
We are allowed to say this is wrong, without qualification.

And we are allowed to keep believing in the long, unfinished work of goodness and justice, not because outcomes are guaranteed, but because surrendering to lies would cost us our souls.

Be kind to your tender hearts. Let them grieve. Let them tell the truth. And then, together, we return to the slow, necessary work of building a more just and generous world.

Bishop Curry Issues Statement on ICE Shooting in Minneapolis 

Sermon from a Sister ELCA congregation in Minneapolis 

Reflection on Creator's 1/11 Worship 

Today I stood inside a sanctuary filled with song, liturgy, memory, and the gift of generations, all supporting this worship through service. So many moments in the service were profound 

Wednesday's Scripture Reflection

Sermon 

Pastor Emillie's sermon was heartfelt. She preached how John writes of signs rather than miracles. Jesus began his ministry in a public celebration of joy. He blessed it with an abundance of the best wine. She helped the congregation understand this was the beginning sign of a ministry that would end on the cross. She also lamented the present temptation to let our hearts grow numb. We offered thoughts and prayers for Renee Good. This was something no one from this administration did. We did not allow the death of Renee Good to become background noise by asking, "Really, what business is it of mine?" We acknowledged and understood the poet, wife, and mother who has been taken away from us, and responded. It matters. 

Kelly Carlisle, a former Creator Music Minister, played piano to our appreciative congregation. Old memories were shared, voices blended singing familiar music about light and Christ. The Gathering Song, in fact, was "Christ, Be Our Light" and the selected Sending Song was "This Little Light of Mine", His performance was, at times poignant, at other joyous. When Kelly played "All That I Have" the congregation sang with a special and familiar reverence.

Creator hosted a MIGRA training after worship, with Storyline facilitating. We learned more about what is going on in our community and how to respond to ICE actions. This training was open to all and felt particularly relevant to what happened this week.

We're in this together. 

Jan 11, 2026 Reflection on the Wedding at Cana and Acting for the Common Good

 “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts.” Zechariah 4:6

We often read the wedding at Cana as a story about abundance or transformation, which is what it is, but in a careful reading today, it also appears as a quiet, radical reflection on the common good: how human joy, communal responsibility, and divine generosity are woven together.

This common good has me thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who spent his life naming a problem many of us feel but struggle to articulate: that modern moral life is deeply disordered. We argue endlessly about justice, freedom, rights, and responsibility, yet our arguments rarely persuade or heal. In After Virtue, MacIntyre suggests why. Our moral language is made up of fragments, words lifted from older moral traditions but detached from any shared understanding of what human life is for. We still talk about “values,” but we no longer agree on the kind of people we are meant to become.

MacIntyre called this condition emotivism: a culture in which moral claims are reduced to expressions of preference, power, or feeling: I want, I feel, I have leverage. In such a world, moral debate becomes performance rather than formation. Institutions are no longer places that shape character; they are stages upon which selves display themselves.

This is why "current" figures like Donald Trump do not appear as moral aberrations but as an exaggerated embodiment of modern assumptions. Trump speaks the languages our culture understands fluently: acquisition, dominance, and self-assertion. He does not seek to be formed by the roles he inhabits, even the presidency, but treats them as personal property. As MacIntyre famously warned, “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.” The deeper tragedy is not simply who governs, but our loss of the moral vocabulary needed to recognize character when we see it.

Recovering from this moral malaise requires more than replacing one leader with another. It requires restoring a shared grammar of the good, learning again how to distinguish a person of character from a person of mere success, and a community of shared purpose from a collection of competing selves. That kind of recovery is slow work. It involves education not only of the mind, but of the heart and will. It asks us, as MacIntyre insisted, to sacrifice some autonomy for the sake of belonging to practices and communities that can actually make us good. The church has played a part in this consciousness and may play more in the future, but as Pastor Steve preached, Christians may need to "walk their talk". 

The story of the Wedding at Cana begins not with preaching or command, but with a community celebration. A wedding in first-century Galilee was not a private affair; it was a public, multi-day event that united an entire village. To run out of wine was not merely inconvenient; it threatened communal shame. Joy here is not individual or optional; it is shared, fragile, and socially held.

Mary is the first to notice: “They have no wine.” Her words are not a demand or a strategy. They are an act of moral perception. She sees that the community’s shared joy and dignity is at risk. This is where the common good begins: not in policy, power, or spectacle, but in attention. Someone notices when joy is running out.

Jesus hesitates. “My hour has not yet come.” He resists being drawn into performance or premature revelation. Yet he acts anyway, not because the moment is ideal, but because the need is communal. The common good often calls us to act before conditions are perfect, before we are fully “ready,” because the stakes are relational.

The miracle itself is revealing for what it does not do. Jesus does not create wine for himself, for his disciples alone, or even explicitly “for the poor.” He creates it for a celebration already underway. The common good, John suggests, is not only about survival or efficiency; it is about shared flourishing. Joy, beauty, and festivity belong to communal life.

The abundance is extravagant, six stone jars filled to the brim. This is not a rationed charity. Yet the miracle flows through human cooperation. Servants fill the jars, carry the water, and present the wine. Divine generosity does not bypass human participation; it deepens it. Virtue, in MacIntyre’s sense, is learned not through isolated choice but through shared practices ordered toward a common end.

When the steward remarks, “You have kept the good wine until now,” he names a reversal of expectation. In God’s economy, the best is not hoarded by the powerful or consumed early and wasted. It emerges precisely when a community is on the brink of embarrassment and loss. The common good is not secured by scarcity or control, but by trust that shared life can be renewed.

John tells us this was the first of Jesus’ signs, revealing his glory. But the glory revealed is not domination or self-display. It is relational abundance. A community is spared shame. Joy is restored. The celebration continues.

In a world shaped by emotivism, competition, and fear of running out, Cana offers a different moral vision, one that MacIntyre would recognize as thick with purpose. The common good is not something we protect by withholding or performing. It is something we discover when we notice one another’s needs, submit ourselves to shared practices, act together, and trust that God’s abundance is meant not for isolated selves, but for all of us, together.

Jan 4, 2026: Worship Second Sunday of Christmas: Come and See While We Move to Walk the Talk

Today is the Second Sunday of Christmas and, as Pastor Steve pointed out, it is the Eleventh Day of Christmas. Also, Epiphany, on January 6, marks the beginning of a new season in the lectionary year. A star was added to the banner as our Epiphany reminder.  Bill Berry was accomplished, and he expertly provided the piano accompaniment for the congregation today.

Pastor Steve gave a persuasive plea through his sermon. He first pointed out how much we wish to dwell more on the Christmas story itself and learn more details about Jesus' early life. That is not what is found in the Book of John. After one of John's disciples exclaims, "Look, here is the Lamb of God," the man cannot answer Jesus' question about what he is looking for, but asks another question to Jesus, "Where are you staying?' The response is, "Come and see." And John's disciples immediately follow Jesus without recording any hesitation. 

As followers of Jesus, we are invited to do the same as we live our lives. Our faith that Jesus Christ, the messiah, is now found and present in each of us, isn't the best testimony to offer, is to immediately walk our talk?

Service  After worship, Paul and Debi shared their learning from an Oregon Synod visit to Palestine and showed a powerful video, Munther Isaac's Sermon to the West, There was a discussion afterwards about our Lutheran Christian siblings in Palestine. This was another reminder of what is going on in Palestine following after the Wednesday Advent Sumud reflection in December. Isaac made a plea that any stance condoning any coercive power to influence people as part of God’s will must be tested at the cross.

Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice 

Wednesday Reflection on today's scripture