June 2025

I began my seminary studies at the age of 40, and when I began, I still had the perfect 20/20 vision of my youth. Four years into my five-year program I noticed that the words on the pages of the multitude of books we were required to read were getting increasingly blurry. I got my first pair of readers and voila, my vision cleared when reading. Eventually the clarity of my vision began to devolve. Now I wear progressive lenses that have different levels of magnification depending on if I am reading or looking straight ahead. I am sure many of you can relate to this experience. My eyesight has gotten progressively worse over time.

Well, if something can devolve, then we know that something can also evolve. If wine gets better with time, we can get better over time. It’s like the old saying, “I may not be the best saint, but I’m not what I used to be.” Isn’t that the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers, to make us better over time, evolving us into the image of Christ? The concept of evolution (small “e”) is the foundation of the saying, “reformed and always reforming,” the battle cry of our ancestors from the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s as they protested the abuses that were devolving the Roman Catholic faith tradition that had taken over Christianity at the time. Christianity moved forward.

Holy siblings, we are meant to be transformed, not to be static and not to devolve, yet it happens because people are resistant to change. It is in our nature. We tend to close our hands around opinions, beliefs, or ideals, trying to write them in stone like laws on tablets and we (the royal we of humanity) then try to make everyone around us conform to these opinions, beliefs, or ideals. Rarely anymore do we allow for people wearing different lenses to look at the bible and come to another conclusion, claiming the bible makes “it” clear. We forget, intentionally or unintentionally, that the bible “clearly” had no issue with slavery, yet we have been able to look at the totality of scripture and rightly conclude that slavery is not a part of God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. The bible “clearly” says that to follow Christ you must give everything you own to the poor, but when we talk about this issue, we place all sorts of conditions around it because we know it is more complicated than that. We pick and choose whatever scripture fits our narrative. Furthermore, we have become increasingly unkind to each other when we disagree.

Did you know that at the same time the Reformation was reshaping Christianity, those same people went to war over how Christ is present in the elements of communion? They killed each other over it! I fear we are reaching that kind of fervor over differences in our understanding of Christianity in our current time. There are folks who ardently quarrel over placing the Ten Commandments in classrooms, courtrooms, and other public spaces. Honestly, I have never understood why Christians want the Ten Commandments and not the Beatitudes. Imagine if we had “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” in our courtrooms or “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” in our classrooms. Alas, the fervor seems to be for the latter and not the former, even though the former is written in red letters. You know what that means. Oh boy, clarity at this point seems like a pipe dream.

Thinking about all this brings to mind the wonderful treatise on love in 1 Corinthians, chapter 13 that concludes “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” This scripture “clearly” states we do not know everything but someday we will. Reading scripture though these lenses allow for differences in interpretation because it acknowledges that God alone knows fully. We do not. Not yet anyway.

Beloved, let us remember, Jesus fulfilled the Law, and those stone tablets have been lost to human history but, thanks to the Holy Spirit, the Law of Jesus’s heart is written on our hearts. Let us also remember the warning from Paul to the Galatians 5:14-15 “for the whole Law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If you, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” If we hold on to these three—faith, hope and love—if we allow them to grow, ever evolving within us, we will, by the power of the Holy Spirit, be able to discern God’s will with increasing clarity until that day we see face to face. Amen?!