Author: Bryan Richardson

Re:Verse reading–Luke 15:1-2, 11-32 (day three) 

“This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”  As it turned out, Jesus would do even worse than that.  But that’s because he understood people were lost.  In the days before that word denoted a demographic or a class of persons who don’t subscribe to a particular version of theology, Jesus felt the giant wound of the human race.  He sensed acutely, agonizingly, that people were missing.  You can hear it in his story of the two brothers.  You can hear it in his metaphor of the lost sheep.  You can hear it in his parable of the banquet.  Jesus is grieved at a great absence.  What do you think about that?

Re:Verse reading–Luke 7:36-50 (day three)

“He who has been forgiven little loves little.”  So. Love demonstrated is a function of forgiveness received.  That would explain a lot.  You want to love, but you just can’t get there.  Your workaround is to settle for an appreciation of the idea of love, which most of the time looks like our definition of niceness.  Or, it takes the form of fondness for the collective—humanity, people groups, “the lost”, etc.  But the daughter outgrowing your expertise, or the boss emailing you, or the colleague besting you—these are problems you’re left with solving.  Good luck with that.  How about this: If nobody can love like a person forgiven, start there.

Re:Verse reading—Luke 6:17-45 (day three)  

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”  The getting of our goat consists in the favor that God lavishes on other men—that we cannot be the arbiters of the Lord’s grace.  Those without any learning, any power, any influence were esteemed by God?  Surely this was novel theology.  Jesus repeatedly declared, however, that his detractors hadn’t listened to the very prophets they accused him of misrepresenting.  Even Jesus’s own disciples boasted that they had shut down others who acted in the name of Jesus because they weren’t part of the Twelve.  But God’s grace will not be held hostage to our spiritual poll taxes.  The disenfranchised are right at the center of God’s attention, and should be at ours.  If the lowliest aren’t blessed in your presence, in whose presence will they be?

Re:Verse reading–Luke 5:1-11 (day three)

“Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!”  Peter is convinced of his own sinful state because Jesus…is the better fisherman?  Clearly there’s more going on here than a demonstration of superior net-casting techniques.  The sense of the passage is that Peter has also been listening to Jesus’s teaching.  And that teaching consisted of unalloyed, unmitigated, unprecedented good news.  God’s compassion for people regardless of rank or station?  Check.  The eternal nature of life in God’s kingdom now open to all who will receive it?  Check.  News doesn’t get any better.  Or does it?  Jesus’s fishing instructions extend the concerns of the kingdom of God from spiritual realities by and by to material realities here and now.  No longer is there religious life and regular life.  There’s just life, and Jesus is trustworthy in all of it.

Re:Verse reading–Luke 4:14-30 (day three)

“All spoke well of him.”  Jesus will eventually warn people that the “yea-sayers” pose a particular kind of danger to the human soul. We’ll gravitate toward those who give us good press, and pretty soon, we’re not loving people, just using them to prop up our self-regard.  Jesus remained unfazed by the initial rave reviews.  How did he do that?  Well, it’s not insignificant that immediately prior to his visit to Galilee, he spent an extended time away in solitude. The Bible indicates that Jesus often did this.  Jesus understood that one must be able to live alone if one is going to live with others.  In these times of separation, he could listen for neither supporters nor detractors, but only for the voice of God.  And then he would return to the presence of people in love and discernment.

Re:Verse reading–Luke 4:1-13  (day three)

“[The devil] left him until an opportune time.”  You know those things that catch your eye, get your goat, tick you off, push your buttons, turn you on? Yeah, Jesus could have listed those things as well. Whenever you finally admit to the Lord how difficult the struggle really is, he responds by saying, “That was my struggle too.” The Bible says he’s sympathetic, not unsympathetic, because our temptations were his temptations. Believe it. This wilderness encounter was only the beginning of what the devil had planned for Jesus. The devil even showed up in his friend Peter’s counsel for crying out loud. To face temptation well, we must learn from Jesus to struggle like he struggled before we can learn to resist sin like Jesus resisted sin. Pay attention.

Re:Verse reading–Luke 3:1-20  (day three) 

“But one more powerful than I will come.” When the people asked John what they should do to escape destruction by the wrath of God, he did not wax systematically theological. He simply gave them a picture of what the world looks like when it’s set right: Live generously, conduct business honestly, treat people with integrity, work hard without complaining. No one was excluded—not the military, not the government, not the average joe. That is exactly the kind of world his hearers were longing for. Once that picture is in the air, the next question is, “How do we get that kind of world?” And that’s when all eyes turn to Christ. Evangelism efforts could learn from this pattern: Set the vision before people, then introduce them to the only one who can lead them there.

Re:Verse reading–Luke 2:39-52  (day three)

“They found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.”

Do you know why it’s so hard to bring ourselves to ask honest questions? Because questions reveal to anyone who hears them what we’re interested in and what our limitations are, the exact two things we tend to hide—our frailties and what we really think. But Jesus demonstrates that this is the way human beings grow—and he introduces no alternative. Scripture shows us that Jesus is divine; he is God. But he’s human nonetheless, and fully so. Jesus did not appeal to special privilege when it came to growing up the hard way. As his questions shaped his spirit, his inmost thoughts and his weakness grew into his obedience to God and his self-sacrificial love. What questions are you asking?

Re:Verse reading–Luke 2:1-20 (day three)

“They spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child ”  Research into corporate communication culture has shown consistently that the company grapevine remains a valuable and mostly reliable source of news.  In fact, a sizeable portion of employees rate the grapevine higher than formal channels of communication when it comes to telling the unvarnished truth.  You know why?  Because momentous news never fits well into carefully crafted containers of control.  People who try to dribble it out to the masses only get in the way, and pretty soon, people figure that out.  The ancient grapevine spread the gospel without stilted methods or flashy gimmicks and despite efforts by fearful leaders to rewrite it.  The buzz was that something good had occurred in a backwater village.  This was back-fence conversation—the way the gospel is meant to be shared.

Re:Verse reading–Luke 1:1-38 (day three) 

“How can I be sure of this?”  Doubt is a function of our finiteness: We don’t know everything, so we doubt.  Rightly channeled, doubt can press us on to further investigation of mystery.  In that way, doubt can lead us to deeper faith.  Zechariah and Mary both express doubt to the angelic messenger.  In Zechariah’s case, lifelong training in the theological and scriptural tenets of the priesthood and the high holy work of service to his people has welled up in his soul as…skepticism.  It’s as if Zechariah’s posture is one of looking back at the priesthood’s storied past and asking, “Where’d all the glory go?”  Conversely, Mary seems to look out at the future from where she stands and ask, “What glories are yet to be?”  Doubt isn’t a bad place to start.  But it’s a terrible place to end up.