Elmer ate Chinese alone in a corner booth of Taste of NY Restaurant; chicken and broccoli with string beans. Elmer used a plastic fork.

He watched a neighboring table of young people; early twenties. They were hanging all over each other, familiar in the way of youth. One girl, in a yellow sweater, was reading a fortune from her cookie. Elmer couldn’t make it out but heard the last words

“in bed.”

Everyone laughed and Elmer smiled, tiredly.
He knew the game.

What if today, while I write, I am also in the “cloud of witnesses” cheering on myself, my family, my friends, and the sons and daughters of God as we awaken to love? What if, while you read this, you are also seated in Christ at the right hand of my Father? (See Heb 12:1 & Eph 2:6) What if we have been invited to live from the measureless omnipresent love of God that dwells within us? What if every prayer, every promise, every dream, every hope has its beginning and end in the measureless, retroactive, proactive, reconciling, omnipresent love of God?

In MacDonald’s sermon “Abba, Father!” he defines spiritual adoption as transformation. For him, as it was for St. Paul, adoption was not our familiar western version of taking a non-family member into our family, but an eastern one of a spiritual coming of age, a Jewish bar mitzvah. For us, it is a transformation from within of both an internal and external nature…

But, when I address literal inerrancy, I am not juxtaposing inerrancy with error, I am juxtaposing inerrancy with sacrificial love and resurrection life, with Jesus. I’m not playing the game of good or evil, right or wrong, inerrant or in error; I’m simply writing about the authority of sovereign love…

For years a literal, inerrant approach to scripture had me reading this story and wrestling with the nature of God’s goodness instead of the nature of man’s fallen thinking.

As though a good god is a god who would partner with the idea of child sacrifice to, in some way, test his kids. As though Abrahams’s demonic belief in child sacrifice is meant to define what God is like instead of what Abraham was like; what a fallen mindset is like, what we, humanity, are capable of attributing to the nature of God…

So how am I to deal with the good versus evil paradigm of the world that I still live in? Do I call it out? Do I expose, judge, and accuse those with opposing views and opinions? How do I involve myself in the fray without becoming frayed?

This preacher drowns with the disobedient outside the ark, with the chariot armies of the Egyptians, with the lost tribes of Israel, and with us. He does not want to be the only righteous human while the rest of us, his unrighteous brothers and sisters, go under. His baptism is our baptism.

What happens when we search the Scriptures in search of eternal life? It’s not long before we start defining the words on the pages as “infallible” and “inerrant.” And in my experience, an inerrant approach to scripture is a slippery slope into idolatry.

Look, if a future punishment is the only thing keeping a person from hurting others, by all means, that person might need to keep believing in hell. But let’s not pretend that person is whole or free. And whatever we do, let’s not give that kind of thinking a pulpit in our lives.

“This is my body, broken for you! Boys and girls, you are not abandoned, I will not leave you orphaned…”