Reflection for February 22, 2026 John 11:30-44 Jesus calls “Lazarus, Come Out.”

There are two Lazaruses in the Gospels.

The one John describes lived in Bethany, brother of Mary and Martha, beloved friend of Jesus. He died. He is mourned. And in one of the most intimate and unsettling stories in scripture, Jesus calls him back to life.

The other Lazarus appears only in a parable, a poor, unnamed-in-history but named-in-story man in Gospel of Luke 16:19–31. He lies at the gate of a wealthy man, hungry and covered in sores. He dies and is carried to Abraham’s side. The rich man, in torment, begs that Lazarus be sent back to warn his brothers.

Abraham replies:

“If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

Then, in Gospel of John 11, someone named Lazarus does rise from the dead.

And many still do not believe. They do not repent. The authorities plot and organize, even planning to kill Lazarus. They are not convinced.  

The resonance is difficult to ignore. Most scholars believe these stories developed independently. Luke never mentions Lazarus of Bethany. John never references Luke’s parable. Historically, they are almost certainly separate figures.

But literarily? Theologically? Spiritually? The echo is striking. In Luke, Lazarus exposes economic blindness. In John, Lazarus exposes religious blindness.

In Luke, a rich man cannot see suffering at his own gate. In John, religious leaders cannot see resurrection standing in their midst. In both stories, death is real, and a reversal is dramatic. In each, Divine justice is revealed while still many refuse to see.

Before the miracle, before the command, before all the drama, Jesus weeps. This is not triumphal resurrection theology. This is embodied grief. And that matters deeply. Jesus does not bypass death. He does not make suffering spiritual. He stands before the tomb and feels it.

The story refuses easy answers. It does not say, “Everything happens for a reason,” but rather that Love stands before death and trembles. And then Love speaks.

When Lazarus comes out of the tomb, he is still bound. “Unbind him,” Jesus says. “Let him go.” Resurrection is not merely resuscitation. It is communal liberation. The miracle intensified the opposition because resurrection always threatens systems built on fear and control. A dead man is manageable. A living witness is dangerous.

In John’s Gospel, Lazarus becomes a sign and a problem. Which raises the unsettling connection to Luke’s parable: Even when someone rises from the dead, some will not believe. Why? Because resurrection is not just about whether miracles are possible. It is about whether we are willing to change. 

The name “Lazarus” means God has helped. In Luke, God helps the poor man beyond death. In John: God helps the beloved friend through death. In both, God’s help reveals uncomfortable truths. The poor are seen. The grieving are accompanied. The tomb is not ultimate. and systems of blindness are exposed. 

This is a scripture for this moment in our collective history. We live in a time of economic disparity and religious exhaustion. We step over suffering at our gates. We defend institutions rather than embody love. We say we want resurrection,  but resist its implications.

John’s Lazarus walks out of the tomb, and still hearts harden. In Luke’s, Lazarus cannot return, yet the warning remains. Together, they whisper, the problem is not lack of evidence. The problem is an unwillingness to see. 

What does “Come Out” mean today? Perhaps the command is not only for Lazarus. “Come out.” Come out of denial. Come out of systems that entomb others. Come out of theological certainty that leaves no room for tears. Come out of fear. 

And then, “Unbind him.” Since resurrection is communal work and liberation requires participation. The story does not end with belief spreading everywhere. It ends with tension rising. The raising of Lazarus sets the stage for the cross. Resurrection is always costly. But here is the deeper promise: Death does not get the last word. Grief is honored. Love is embodied. Systems of blindness are exposed, and even in resistance, Life keeps speaking.

“Lazarus, come out.” The question is not whether someone has risen.

The question is,:Will we listen?

February 18, 2026 Ash Wednesday John 10: 1-18 Rend Your Heart and Not Your Clothing

Joel 2:13 - Rend your heart and not your clothing. 

For Ash Wednesday, 2021, Sister Joan Chittister asked two questions that Pastor Janell then brought to the congregation, as Creator pondered this verse from Joel. This brought to my mind answers to these questions:

1) What doors of your heart do you need to open this Lent? and 

2) What "worlds" in life have I "allowed to go sterile" in my life?

I have felt both unsettled and grounded every Ash Wednesday since. I have been aware of impermanence, yet held by a community where faith is lived rather than explained. Ash Wednesday that year became a moment of shared humanity, honest questioning, and sacred solidarity, affirming that faith is something to be inhabited with a life, not just beliefs.

Faith inhabiting a life, what does that mean?  

“Rend your heart and not your clothing.” Joel’s words refuse the safety of surface religion. They cut past gesture and spectacle and go straight for the interior life, the places we protect, avoid, or quietly let go numb. Lent, in this light, is not about what we display, but about what we dare to open.

Sister Joan Chittister’s questions linger with me. They are unsettling in the best way. What doors of your heart need opening? What worlds have you allowed to go sterile? They assume that hearts have doors, that lives have inner ecosystems, and that neglect, not malice, is often what leads to barrenness. Nothing dramatic. Just unattended places where imagination, tenderness, courage, or hope once lived.

Ash Wednesday has a way of finding those places.

When the ritual shifts from well-practiced to embodied, from observed to inhabited, faith stops being something we manage and becomes something that happens to us. Words like you will die stop floating above our heads and land in our bodies. Grief, aging, political anxiety, and communal loss are not distractions from faith; they are the very terrain where faith is tested and told. And last year, I went from observing to inhabiting.

What emerged is not morbid fixation, but clarity. Death was no longer an abstraction; it became connective tissue. Personal sorrow links arms with social fracture. Private fear echoes public unrest. And suddenly Christian witness is less about answers and more about presence, about standing honestly in the truth that we are dust, together. Last year's Ash Wednesday called for the presence we can embody this year.

To rend the heart is to let that truth be felt. That kind of honesty does not come easily. It requires spaces, like Ash Wednesday, that make room for humility without humiliation, sorrow without despair, questioning without exile. Music that aches. Scripture that doesn’t resolve too quickly. Ashes imposed not as spectacle, but as sign of a shared vulnerability. Rather than Pastor Emillie imposing ashes on those attending, we imposed ashes on each other last year. In such moments, faith is not explained. It is practiced. Lived. Breathed.

This is what it means for faith to inhabit a life that begins, not with a demand, but with a voice. Listen.

So we have today's Scripture reading from John. Before confession, before ashes, before bread and cup, there is a call. The Good Shepherd speaks our name into the noise of our lives. He knows where we have wandered. He knows which doors are rusted shut. He knows which inner worlds have gone quiet from neglect or grief or fear. And still, he calls.

Ashes tell the truth we resist: life is fragile; love is costly; death is real. But they also tell another truth just as boldly, we belong. The mark on our skin is not only about mortality; it is about claim. You are mine. Not owned by fear. Not defined by failure. Not surrendered to sterility. Claimed by love that lays itself down.

The cross traced in ash holds both realities at once. We are dust. And we are loved beyond death. Lent does not ask us to choose between them. It asks us to live inside the tension, trusting that what feels like loss may also be an opening..

So Lent is not about proving devotion or perfecting discipline. It is about opening what has closed. Tending what has gone sterile. Learning the sound of the Shepherd’s voice amid the many others competing for our attention. Trusting that even in shadowed valleys, we are not abandoned.

We leave Ash Wednesday smudged and honest, ash on our skin, grace in our bodies. We go not as polished saints, but as beloved sheep who know where to return when we lose our way.

February 15, 2026 John 9: 1-19, 24-29,32-35 Seeing Clearly, Even When the Light Is Uncomfortable on a Transfiguration Sunday

Transfiguration is observed on the last Sunday of Epiphany. In the Three-Year Lectionary, Transfiguration is on Feb. 15, 2026, which is three days before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. 

Our John 9 Gospel reading begins with what feels like a very human impulse: Who’s to blame? The disciples see a man, blind from birth, and immediately reach for an explanation that keeps the world tidy. Was it his sin or his parents’ sin? Why would a good God permit this? If suffering can be traced to fault, then maybe it can be controlled. Maybe it can be avoided.

Jesus refuses the premise entirely. “This happened so that God’s works might be revealed in him,” Jesus says, not as a justification for suffering, but as a redirection of attention. Stop looking for blame. Start looking for what love is about to do.

That shift, from searching to explain to transformation, sets everything else in motion.

On this Transfiguration-adjacent Sunday, we’re used to talking about light: dazzling light on a mountain, Jesus glowing with divine clarity, the voice from heaven saying, “Listen to him.” We love light when it is heavenly and reassures us when it confirms what we already believe. When it feels holy but not disruptive.

But the light in John 9 is not polite. Jesus heals a man by making mud, rubbing it on his eyes, and telling him to wash. When the man comes back with sight, everything breaks open. The miracle is undeniable, but instead of celebration, there is interrogation. Just like Pastor Emillie has pointed out as being so common in John, the neighbors argue. The religious authorities investigate. The healed man is summoned again and again, pressured to explain himself, to explain Jesus, to fit the experience into an approved theological framework.

The irony is sharp: the man who could not see now sees clearly, while those who are certain they see are increasingly blind.

This is where John’s gospel becomes less about eyesight and more about courage. The healed man does not suddenly become a theologian. He doesn’t have answers to every doctrinal question. He simply tells the truth of his experience: I was blind. Now I see. When pressed to denounce Jesus, he refuses to perform the expected script. His honesty becomes an act of resistance.

And that honesty costs him. He is cast out.

Transfiguration light often feels glorious from a distance. But up close, light reveals fault lines. It exposes systems that rely on silence, conformity, and fear. In John 9, illumination doesn’t make life easier; it makes it truer.

For many of us, this story lands close to home. Many of us know what it is like to be questioned for telling the truth of what we have seen and lived. We know what it is like to be told, “Give glory to God by agreeing with us,” when what is really being demanded is compliance. The command is to assimilate. We know what it is like to be pushed to the margins because our testimony doesn’t fit someone else’s certainty.

John 9 reminds us that faith is not about defending perfect explanations. It is about bearing witness, to healing, to change, to grace that refuses to stay within our approved boundaries. And then comes the most tender moment in the story.

After the man is cast out, Jesus goes looking for him.

This is not incidental. Jesus does not just initiate healing; Jesus remains present for the social and spiritual consequences of that healing. He finds the man and asks, “Do you believe?” Not as a test, but as an invitation into relationship. This is his invitation to a transfiguring truth.

The light of God is not reserved for mountaintops or moments of spectacle. It shines in muddy encounters, in contested truths, in the quiet dignity of someone who refuses to deny their own healing. It shines when Jesus seeks out those who have been excluded and says, in effect, You are not alone. You belong. We need to counter the national narrative that led to some to condemn the Bad Bunny halftime show. We need to rise above last week's infamous racist tweet or "truth". 

As a congregation, we are called, not merely to admire the light in a muddy encounter, but to live by those moments. That means choosing curiosity over blame. Listening to lived experience. Trusting that God is revealed not through control, but through compassion that disrupts unjust systems.

The question John 9 leaves us with is not, Who sinned? It is. What does it mean to see?

To see clearly may mean losing the comfort of certainty. It may mean standing with those whose stories challenge the status quo. It may mean trusting that the God who dazzles on the mountain is the same God kneeling in the dust, shaping new sight out of earth and breath.

And it may mean believing, again and again, that even when the light unsettles us, it is still the light that heals.

Pastor Emillie's sermon 

February 8, 2026 John 4:46–54 From the Well to the Word: Learning to Trust Before We See

James Baldwin reminds us that “the first duty of a human being is to assume the right to see.” Not to dominate. Not to control outcomes. Simply to see clearly and honestly. That duty is fragile and fierce. It can be taken away. It can be punished. And yet, it is the ground of all moral life.

What we are witnessing in our public square right now is a crisis of seeing. Journalists arrested for holding cameras. Legal observers are treated as threats. Witnesses labeled as criminals. The violence is physical. It is an assault on shared reality. When those who document are detained, the message is unmistakable: do not trust your eyes. Look away. Let the story be told for you.

And still, people keep seeing.

They keep recording. They keep naming. They keep standing in the vulnerable space between power and truth, knowing full well the cost. This, too, is faith, not the soft faith of reassurance, but the costly faith of presence. The kind that refuses unreality even when unreality is being enforced. Another component of becoming a beloved community today.

Janet's former Bible Study group was well-named (forgive the pun) as "The Well". John’s Gospel for this upcoming Sunday understands this tension of presence deeply. It does not imagine belief as naïveté or certainty. It understands belief as something forged under pressure, shaped in the space between promise and proof. At the well, a woman risks being seen. On the road, a father risks trusting a word without evidence. Neither receives guarantees. Both receive life.

Pastor Emillie quoted one of her seminary teachers that the way of Christ leads to life. We thought about this as we are mindful we are following Jesus to this death on the cross. Pastor asked us how we reconciled this with the teacher's declaration. Alex Pretti was mentioned. The talk turned to the consequential difference between an individual's death and the way of death for a community. 

Considering this, we are on a knife-edge with John's story. The royal official walks home carrying nothing but a sentence: “Your son will live.” No escort. No spectacle. No visible sign to shield him from doubt. He must decide whether the word is trustworthy before the outcome confirms it. This is not passive belief. It is active courage. It is choosing reality before it is safe to do so.

That same courage is required of us now. How do we insist on clarity when distortion is rewarded? To trust evidence when doubt is manufactured?  Or refusing to remain silent when witnessing becomes dangerous?

The Gospel does not ask us to close our eyes. It asks us to open them wider and then to walk accordingly. Jesus never tells the woman at the well to ignore her thirst. He names it. Jesus never tells the official to stop fearing for his child. He meets him there. Faith, in John, is not the absence of fear; it is movement through fear toward trust.

And here is the quiet, radical hope threaded through both reflections: truth does not depend on spectacle to be real. The healing can happen at a distance. Life returns without witnesses. The Word is already at work before anyone can verify it. Likewise, clarity does not need amplification to be true. Reality does not need permission from power to exist.

Authoritarian systems depend on confusion, on isolation, on the slow erosion of confidence in one’s own perception. The Gospel offers something else: relationship, testimony, and shared seeing. Faith that ripples outward. Truth that flows like living water, finding its way through cracks no wall can fully seal.

So we keep seeing and witnessing. We keep trusting the Word that calls life forth, even when the road home feels long. Truth-telling is not extremism. Witnessing is not threat and clarity is not naïveté.

It is fidelity, to reality, to one another, and to the God who still meets us by wells, on roads, in courtrooms, in sanctuaries, and in the long walk between promise and fulfillment.

And still, the water flows.

Pastor Emillie's sermon 

Is transformation possible? Three stories.

A Prayer for Alex Pretti Faith ripples outward. 

February 1, 2026 John 4:1-42 The Woman at the Well: A Gospel According to Thirst

This story of encounter starts by saying that Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John. The Gospel notes, however, that it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So, as he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee, there is a fundamental water association to what is about to happen. The scripture Jesus follows is filled with holy men who had found their wives at wells. For a reason he himself knows, he must go through Samaria. near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there.

Then Jesus, tired from the journey, sat down by this well. It was about noon. Those details matter. This is not the Christ of lofty abstraction or untouchable holiness. This is a thirsty, weary body resting on the edge of a shared human need. Revelation begins not in triumph but in fatigue. The well is an ordinary place, common and utilitarian. And yet Scripture often locates transformation in such spaces. Wells are where people come because they must. You can delay many things, but not thirst. And it is there, in that place of necessity, that Jesus meets a woman who has learned to live with both physical and social scarcity.

Jesus breaks the silence with a request: “Give me a drink.” This is not an instruction or correction. He begins with vulnerability. He places himself in her debt and anticipates the evangelist she will become after this encounter- a source of living water. This is already about a reversal of power. Jesus is a Jew speaking to a Samaritan, a man to a woman, a rabbi to the socially suspect. He does not cross these boundaries to make a point; he crosses them because love goes where it is not supposed to go.

The woman is startled, rightly so. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me?” Her question is the sound of history speaking. It carries centuries of exclusion, hostility, and inherited distrust. Jesus does not dismiss her concern. Instead, he opens a deeper conversation, not about who belongs where, but about what truly satisfies.

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,” he says, “but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”

This is not a promise of escape from need, nor a denial of the body’s limits. It is an invitation to a different source. In John’s Gospel, living water is not doctrine or moral achievement. It is about a relationship with the world. It is a life rooted in the inexhaustible generosity of God, a well that opens within a person, even one who has been told again and again that she is empty.

Jesus answers her question of why he would speak to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” She responds by asking about the source of living water.

It is the moment she is open to becoming one source. He calls for her to call her husband, and she replies she has no husband. Jesus acknowledges that she is right about her five previous husbands and that the man she is with now is not her husband.

The number five is important in the Bible.Pastor Emillie guided our discussion with details that many of us did not previously know. Obviously, having five husbands is central to who she is. Yet it is doing far more work than it looks like on the surface. John rarely accidentally throws in a number. At the literal level, this names her lived reality, complex and painful. She is likely socially stigmatized, given her appearance at noon, but John rarely stops at biography. He uses personal stories as theological symbols.

Here, Pastor explaoned the Samaritans accepted only the first five books of Scripture (Genesis–Deuteronomy). They rejected the Prophets and Writings that Jews embraced. So when Jesus names five husbands, many scholars hear an echo that the Five “husbands” are the five books that have shaped Samaritan religious life. The “one you now have” could represent a religious system that claims covenant, but lacks fullness. In the Hebrew Scriptures, covenant faithfulness is often described as marriage. Idolatry is adultery. Jesus isn’t shaming her; he’s naming Samaria’s spiritual history with uncanny precision.

And, after the Assyrian conquest, five foreign groups were brought into Samaria, each with their own gods. Israel “married” itself to these influences. So here, five husbands could refer to the five foreign allegiances of Samaria, a people spiritually fragmented, not evil, wounded, and mixed

Jesus stands at the well as the true bridegroom, offering not condemnation but restoration. There is also a Johannine theme of moving from partial truth to fullness. John’s Gospel constantly contrasts Signs vs. fulfillment, Law vs. grace, Seeing vs. believing. Here, Jesus is the one, the Messiah, who knows her fully and still asks for a drink. And, quietly, this woman becomes one of the first evangelists in the Gospel  

Jesus named her story, not to expose her, but to see her. “You are right,” he says, affirming her honesty. This is one of the most astonishing moments in the Gospels: a woman who has been misread by society is read truthfully by God. There is no condemnation here, only clarity. And clarity, when offered in love, becomes freedom.

This also illuminates what Jesus might have meant when he replied to Nicodemus, "I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit." and last week's John 3:18 passage. Rather than this being a condemnation of those who did not believe in God's one and only son, together with  Pastor Emillie's sermon last week of "just in case" altar calls, this is an observation of humanity's nature. In those moments when it is hard for us to believe in Christ as Messiah. That is when we lose our connection to living water  

The woman responds to Jesus' clarity, not with shame but with theology. “I see that you are a prophet.” And then she asks the question that has divided communities for generations: Where is the right place to worship? Which mountain? Which tradition? Which people get it right?

Jesus refuses to be conscripted into that false choice. Worship, he says, is not about geography or pedigree, but about truth and spirit. God is not contained by our boundaries. God is already present, already active, already nearer than we imagine.

Then comes the turning point. The woman speaks of the Messiah, the one who will come and explain everything. And Jesus says to her, plainly and without disguise, “I am he.” This is the first unambiguous self-revelation of Jesus as Messiah in the Gospel of John. And it is given not to a religious leader or a disciple, but to a Samaritan woman at a well, in the heat of the day

This also speaks to what Pastor Emllie referred to in last week's sermon, as her altar care repetitions (or as she put it, those "just in case"affirmations). We don't need to be thirsty, to have our "just in cases" anymore when we believe in Jesus as the Messiah.  

The woman leaves her water jar behind. Another detail matters too. The object she came for is no longer what she needs. She runs, not away, but toward her community. The woman who came alone, at noon not to be seen, returns as a witness. The one who avoided the crowd becomes the bearer of good news. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done,” she says, not as an accusation, but as wonder. Her testimony is imperfect, provisional, deeply human. And it is enough.

Many Samaritans believe because of her word. 

Jesus still sits by wells. He still asks for water. He still waits for those who come at noon, convinced they must remain unseen. And he still offers a life that does not deny our wounds but transforms them into springs of living water. He sits for us, and for the world.

Pastor Emillie' Feb 1 sermon

St. Brigid's Day

Chat about St. Brigid's Day  

Bible Project's Video Clip Water of Life Why Water Matters in the Bible

End of Epiphany Season Candlemas (observed) Through us, Jesus is the Light of the World

A Prayer for Alex Pretti Faith ripples outward.  

 Be sure to check out Sarah's comments on this blog entry. 

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 presents 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 with 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 fascinated me. For some of us, the wind metaphor 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.

The Gospel's Truth is alive, relational, and still unfolding. 

Remembering wham Creator Lutheran Church received the RIC Certificate 

 Today's Service

Sermon

Pastor Emillie preached about being a Christian before her time as a  Lutheran. She was afraid how she was living did not measure up to what God expected so she performed many altar calls as her church demanded "just in case".

I grew up Lutheran, but I related. This kind of faith worked for my dad, but it doesn't for me. I don’t follow Jesus because I’m afraid of hell. I follow Jesus because he’s worth following, even if I’m wrong about how the story ends and Pastor Emillie's sermon clarified that for me today. 

The last Sunday in January is normally observed as RIC (i.e., Reconciling in Christ) Sunday. Creator voted to become an RIC congregation in 2009. Many parts of today's liturgy expressed our prayers and desire to continue to become more inclusive as a community. 

What is happening in Minnesota weighed in our thoughts and prayers as well. A Prayer for Alex Pretti 

Our annual congregational meeting happened after service, where we passed our 2026 Budget and approved our delegates to the Synod Assembly this coming May.

Be sure to check out Sarah's comments on this blog entry.  

Creator's 2025 Annual Report 

RIC Newsletter 

Prayer for Alex Pretti and Family - Creator's Prayer for Protectors, for Justice, for the Courage to Stand for Community

Creator, like other ELCA congregations, embraces our community and generally finds the following: Being a citizen of a country involves all who participate in the ongoing work of a pluralistic democracy, seeking freedom, justice, and belonging for themselves and for others. 

ELCA Presiding Bishop Yehiel Curry We Will Not Grow Weary

On Minnesota - What Is Yours To Do? 

On the Streets of Minneapolis Bruce Springsteen “There were bullets where mercy should have stood.”    Reaction to On the Streets of Minneapolis 

Holy One of justice and mercy,
You who hear the cry before it becomes words,
You who know grief before we dare to name it,
We come to You carrying a sorrow that is older than this moment
and sharper because it has arrived again.

You tell us through the prophet:
Learn to do good. Seek justice. Correct oppression.
Bring justice to the fatherless. Plead the widow’s cause.
Not as a slogan.
Not as a metaphor.
But as a way of life.

We confess how often we have wanted grief to be new,
so that we would not have to face its lineage.
How often we have wanted violence to be an exception,
so that we could avoid reckoning with the systems that authorize it?
Forgive us for the comfort we have mistaken for peace.

Grief has found us again.
It has found us in Minneapolis.
It has found us in the names we carry.
Names that refuse to be reduced to statistics,

Names that settle into our bodies and will not let us sleep.

This grief is not only private.
It is communal.
It is ancestral.
It is the grief of those who know what it means
to be watched, targeted, disappeared,
and told that this is the cost of order.

And yet, Holy One,
From this ground of grief, You are calling something forth.

We thank You for protectors,
For those who refuse to stand apart,
Who chooses presence over distance,
who stand shoulder to shoulder in the cold
because abandoning one another is no longer an option.

Bless their courage.
Bless their anger when it is born of love.
Bless their fear when it sharpens care rather than cruelty.
Bless their refusal to let state power have the final word
on whose life matters.

Teach us to understand that protection is holy work.
That standing-with is a form of prayer.
That justice is not an abstraction,
but a practice learned in streets and kitchens,
in shared warmth and shared risk,
in communities that organize not from hierarchy,
but from relationships.

Where empire insists on control,
Teach us connection.
Where law is used to erase dignity,
Teach us to plead the cause of the vulnerable,
not from pity, but from solidarity.

Make us people who do not look away.
People who know that grief can orient us toward responsibility.
People who understand that love, when it becomes communal,
is a force strong enough to interrupt violence.

Give us the imagination to see one another clearly.
Give us the humility to follow the wisdom
of those who have been naming this truth for generations.
Give us the endurance to stay present
long after the headlines move on.

May we learn to do good, not someday, but now.
May we seek justice, not in theory, but in practice.
May we correct oppression, not with silence, but with our bodies,
our voices, our shared life.

And when fear tells us to retreat,
remind us that protection is what love looks like
when it refuses to be alone.

Amen.

At the Deathbed. Edvard Munch, 1895.

My Brother-In-Law Bill Davie Readiing this on his Poetry Break  (19:42)