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. 

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)