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 not only physical; it is epistemic. 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.

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.

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

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.

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.