Colossians 1: 1-14 (links validated 6/18/25a)

Khosru is an Iranian refugee attending school in Oklahoma who’s the main character in Daniel Nayeri’s marvelous work of fiction, Everything Sad is Untrue. He understands something about hope’s fruitfulness (5). He says, “I don’t know how my mom was so unstoppable despite all that stuff happening. I dunno. Maybe it’s anticipation...“Imagine you’re in a refugee camp and you know it’ll be a year or more before anything happens. It’s going to be a tough year. But for the person who thinks, ‘At the end of this year, I’m going somewhere to be free, a place without secret police, free to believe whatever I want and teach my children.’ And you believe it’ll be hard, but eventually you’ll build a whole new life — that’s like winning the lottery. It’s like saying you’ll get one hundred million dollars at the end of the year. “But if you’re thinking every place is the same, and there will always be people who abuse you, and about how poor you’ll be at first. The sadness overtakes you; it’s like saying you’ll get soup and a sandwich at the end of the year, and that’s it. “Here’s the thing, you’ll both have the same year at [the refugee camp] Hotel Barba. But one of you will be looking around with joy and anticipation, wondering what you can do to prepare your kids for the new world. And the other will be slumped in the courtyard, surrendered to the idea that it’s all one long river of blood. I don’t know which belief is true — nobody does. But what you believe about the future will change how you live in the present” (italics added).

Who was Jesus? Who is he? The Princeton scholar of religion Elaine Pagels links those two questions in her newest work, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus(2025). And rightly so, because the two answers necessarily hang together. If Jesus is only one of countless men and women who illumined the world with their teaching, then we are free to respond to his insights as we see fit. Either we do or we do not find them helpful. But if Jesus was more than an ancient teacher, if he was God come into history as savior, then everything changes. This Jesus would demand more than our acknowledgment; he would come laying claim to our lives, the submission that creatures owe to their creator. For what would it mean for a stream to deny its source? Pagels is a superb popularizer, but the problem with her enduring project is contained in her opening promise to her readers: “We will go back and recover, as far as possible, what actually happened.”...

always good insights!

Elements of this week’s Epistolary Lesson are faintly reminiscent of Huck Finn’s experience with prayer. In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck recounts how his foster mother, Miss Watson, tried to teach him to pray. “Miss Watson … took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow, I couldn’t make it work.”...

Lew Smedes defied the 20-1 odds of surviving lungs spattered with blood clots. When his doctor congratulated him, he didn’t feel particularly grateful, partly because he hadn’t thought at all about dying. A couple of nights later, however, Smedes felt himself what he called “seized with a frenzy of gratitude.” He recalls, “My arms rose straight up by themselves, a hundred-pound weight could not have held them at my side. My hands open, my fingers spread, waving, twisting, while I blessed the Lord above for the almost unbearable goodness of being alive on this good earth in this good body at this present time.”

The author of Lord of the Rings J. R. R. Tolkein once had a good friend who was a committed atheist. Both men were professors and extremely well read. They would spend hours together discussing the twists and turns of ancient Norse legends and stories from the Middle Ages. Being a good Catholic, Tolkein would often try to persuade his friend Jack to consider the claims of Christianity but his fellow scholar always had a reason to reject them. The man could dissect a philosopher's speculation without even breaking a sweat. For every point suggested by Tolkein, Jack had a counterpoint. One evening Tolkein once again challenged his friend with the claims of the gospel. He pointed out that when his colleague would read myths of gods dying and then coming back to life, he was deeply moved but he stopped short of accepting the claims a Christianity because the story is simply a true myth, it really did happen. Tolkein's arguments were very unsettling for Jack and nine days later while on walking with his friends through a zoo C.S. Lewis, who was known to his friends as Jack became a believer. He would later write, "when we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and when we reached the zoo I did."...

("Mike Bullock is a contemporary poet, who has written a piece entitled, "Feet."...")