The View from the West Mesa

 Beginning a new job often involves receiving a license or some other official indication that the practitioner has official permission and authority to engage in the profession. Doctors, lawyers, nurses, various sorts of therapists, and even many clerics receive a piece of paper that grants them authority to do their jobs, and attests that they are qualified.  Scripture gives us a lot of information about Jesus’s birth but then there is very little about his childhood other than a trip to the Temple. The next time we see Him, he’s meeting John the Baptist at the Jordon. John has told us that Jesus is the One who is greater than himself and he wants people to pay attention to Jesus. Before the two of them leave the Jordan that day, Jesus will ask John to baptize him and after an initial balking, John agrees. So they go into the river and John baptizes Jesus. While they’re in the river after the baptism, an amazing thing happens—the heavens open like they did when the angels an...

God says through Paul in the first Corinthian letter that love never fails. We can all agree when things are going well that love never fails, but Paul’s admonition is most critical when the world isn’t going well.  Here is what we are told, “love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”  Paul wrote this to a congregation or set of congregations of the people of God, folks attempting to live as disciples of Jesus. They were failing at the very core of their practice, love for one another. It didn’t look that way to them. They thought they were OK in their cliques, their ignoring and abusing of each other, of their picking sides aligned with their favorite preacher. What they were doing every day seemed rational...