Maybe somebody used the Bible like a blunt object. Maybe a pulpit shamed your body, your love, your questions, your doubt. Maybe the offering plate kept coming around while the truth never did. Maybe a man in a robe told you God was angry, and you finally decided you were done being afraid.

I will not argue with your reasons. They are real, and some of them are holy.

But I am asking you for one thing.

Don’t hate all of us.

Before the Buildings

Before there were megachurches and televised preachers with private jets, there were hush arbors.

My ancestors, who were not allowed to gather, who were beaten for reading, who were sold away from their children, slipped into the woods at night. They turned over an iron pot to catch the sound so the master would not hear. And there, in the dark, they prayed.

Not for a bigger house.
Not for a parking space near heaven.

They prayed to survive. They prayed to stay human in a system built to make them property.

That is where the Black church was born—not in a building, but in stolen breath and forbidden song.

Whatever you think of church people, know that some of us come from that.

The Garage on Everest Street

When I was a boy in the barrio, we called them the “alleluyas.”

They met in garages.

I still remember one of them—the people who gathered in a garage on Everest Street in Oxnard. No steeple, no stained glass, no salary. Just folding chairs, a tambourine, and people who had nothing the world wanted, lifting their hands anyway.

People laughed at them. I understood the laughing.

But I have lived long enough to know that those garage-praying people were holding something the laughers did not have.

They were poor, and they shared. They worked the farms that kept us fed.
They were tired, and they showed up.
They were nobody, and they treated each other like somebody.

The Church Empire Kills

You may never have heard of Óscar Romero.

He was an archbishop in El Salvador. For most of his life he was careful, cautious—the kind of churchman the powerful liked. Then he watched the poor get gunned down by their own government, and something in him broke open.

He began to speak.

He told soldiers to stop killing their brothers and sisters. He named the violence of the state out loud.

And in 1980, while he stood at the altar with the bread in his hands, they shot him dead.

He is one of many.

Liberation theologians across Latin America took a stand against a theology of domination—a religion that blessed the boot on the neck—and some of them paid for it with their lives.

That, too, is church.

Not the church of empire.
The church that empire kills.

Naming What Cannot Be Named

So when you say “church people,” I want you to know who you might be talking about.

Some of us still call on God.

I’ll admit we get the language wrong. We say “he” and “him” as if the Source of all things could be squeezed into one gender, one pronoun, one small idea.

Forgive us our grammar.

We are reaching for something too big for our mouths.

Don’t be too harsh in your judgment of people who are simply trying to name the unnameable.

And some of us have stopped looking up and started looking within.

We find there a timeless, borderless Source. Some call it Universe. Some call it Flow. Some call it Intended Reality.

I call it Presence in the midst of Absence.

It is what makes you feel something when there is nothing left to feel—when all that is left is heaviness and pain. It is what makes you hope when there is no reason for hope anywhere in sight. It is what makes you love, what makes you show compassion, in the middle of a nihilism that says nothing matters.

We did not invent it.

We just stopped ignoring it.

The Ones You Don’t See

These praying, searching people are all around you right now.

They may not show up in your feed.

The algorithm prefers the loud ones, the cruel ones, the ones who turn faith into a brand and grievance into a business.

The quiet faithful don’t trend.

The woman praying over a hospital bed at 3 a.m. does not go viral. The man who forgives the unforgivable gets no notifications.

So you may have concluded that the worst of us are all of us.

They are not.

When the Floor Falls Out

Here is what I want you to hear, and then I’ll let you go.

It might not always be the case, but some of us are people who will love you when you look down on us. We will love you when you ridicule us. We will keep on loving you when you are sure we are fools.

It is the one thing we were actually taught, underneath all the noise.

And one day—God forbid, but one day—when the floor falls out from under your life, when the diagnosis comes, when the grief arrives that no podcast can fix, you might need somebody who knows how to sit with you in the dark and not run.

It might be one of us.

We’ll be here.

Hating no one.

A voice came through my headphones, soft and certain. It told me to breathe. It told me to open my hands. Then it told me I deserve abundance. Material abundance. Good things, flowing to me, because I am worthy of them.

I wanted it. I will not pretend otherwise. I am seventy-one years old. It has been a long road. I sat in the early Cape Town light and let the voice tell me I deserve good things, and something in me leaned toward it and said yes.

I am not going to take that back.

That is where this begins.

You have to understand why a man reaches for a voice like that. I watch a country that has quietly decided most of its people will not get to breathe.

A house is out of reach for a whole generation.

Young people carry debt that does not shrink, only follows. They work two jobs, three jobs, and still cannot see a doctor. They are one accident, one diagnosis, one envelope away from the street.

It’s the air the meditation is leading into. It’s the desert.

So the voice in my headphones is water. Or it sounds like water. You deserve abundance.

Of course I pressed play. When the world builds a desert around you, somebody will always come to sell you the rain-feeling. The meditation is not a luxury I chose out of comfort. It is the balm this economy hands you in place of a home. I reached for it the way the thirsty reach.

And this part I will not surrender: the voice was not lying.

I am a child of God. So are you. We were not made for scarcity. We were not made to apologize for needing. My people especially have been handed a cruel gospel for a long time — suffer well, wait quietly, your reward is in heaven and not here. A voice that says you deserve good things now is pushing back against something institutional. Good things now is the ancestors’ voice. It’s the voice that told a Black boy he was God’s own child in a country built to tell him otherwise.

Worthiness is not the lie.

So I receive it. I am not refusing the gift. I am taking it all the way.

But the yes carries me to a place the meditation didn’t seem to go.

Because the voice taught me to open my hand. And an open hand can do something a closed hand cannot. An open hand can receive. But an open hand cannot grab. It cannot close around a thing and hold it back from everyone else. The same openness that lets the gift in is the openness that lets it pass through.

The meditation said the gift comes to me.

My intuition and my tradition say the gift comes through me.

One word. To.

Through.

The whole thing turns on one word.

Because if I really believe the gift is mine to keep — mine because I deserve it, mine because I aligned myself and asked the universe correctly — then I have to believe the back of that hand too. I have to believe the Haitian did not deserve. The Congolese did not deserve. The Palestinian did not deserve. The Cuban did not deserve. The woman asleep under the bridge in the cold did not arrange her thoughts properly.

You cannot take the blessing and refuse the verdict. It is one belief, not two. The prosperity gospel in softer clothes — incense instead of passing the plate, but the same old trick. My comfort, proof that I deserve it. Their suffering, proof that they do not.

I cannot pray that prayer. Not with Port-au-Prince on my heart. Not with Havana on my heart. Not with Gaza on my heart. Not in the world I actually live in.

But notice — I did not have to refute the meditation to get here. I only had to finish it. The open hand it taught me to make is the very hand that cannot hoard. Receive completely, and you arrive at your neighbor. Not as a tax on the gift. As the gift still moving.

I think that is why I recoil from the billionaire. From a man like Elon Musk.

For a long time I thought he was the opposite of that morning meditation. He is not. He is its end. He is what you get when you take *you deserve abundance, you attract it, you are worthy of more* — and tear out the part of a man that ever says enough. No ceiling. No one left with the standing to stop him. He is the manifestation gospel that worked.

He is not a different animal from the man who pressed play this morning. He is that same hunger, grown to the size of nations.

And here is what my tradition lets me see that the business pages cannot. The trouble with that much wealth is not only that it is unjust, though it is. The trouble is what it does to a soul. Past a certain point a man no longer has his wealth. His wealth has him. Walter Wink called these things the Powers — and a Power does not simply sit in your account. It possesses. It drives. It cannot stop, because piled-up money carries no inner voice that says enough. That word has to come from outside a man. And he has built a life where no one can get close enough to say it to him.

The rich young ruler walked away sad, and the Lord looked at him and loved him. I can refuse the man’s life and grieve the man in the same breath. That is not weakness. That is seeing him clearly enough to mourn.

He’s the closed hand that believes it’s full.

Diane and I left California.

We left because we could not afford to grow old there. And we landed in Cape Town, where the same dollar that could not buy us a life back home buys us relief here.

I could call that “a privilege” and move on. That’s the easy word. The honest word is harder. The gap between what my money cannot do there and what it can do here — that gap is the whole reason I am sitting in this light. I didn’t step out of the global arrangement. I found the side of it that pays.

I am an American elder living in one of the most divided cities on God’s earth, where my comfort sits directly on top of other people’s impossibility. There are people priced out of the city of their birth by exactly the kind of arrival Diane and I made.

I’m not going to punish myself for it. I said it already in this piece: receiving is no sin. The cheaper life is a gift like any other gift. The only question is the one this whole essay keeps asking. Open hand or closed. Did I come here to simply hoard and pull the door shut behind me? Or did I come to a place whose struggle could become mine — the way the struggle of the African American, the Haitian, the Palestinian, the immigrant, the Congolese is already mine, or is teaching me, slowly, to call it mine?

Living here is reception only if the hand stays open to the people it sits me down among. Otherwise it is the closed hand again. Just in better weather.

When I started writing this, I went looking for someone to stand in for the suffering. I thought of my children first.

But my children are okay. Some of them carry mortgages they manage. Some rent and make the rent. Some never went to college and do not seem to miss it. They are not overextended. They did not chase the bigger thing. Somewhere along the way, my five children learned a word this entire economy is built to keep you from ever learning.

Enough.

That is the rarest word there is these days. Enough.

Billionaires can’t find it.

The meditation never said it.

A whole machine runs day and night to make sure you never once feel it. And my kids found it. Not by giving things up. By knowing when they had what they needed, and stopping.

That is the answer to Musk. Not poverty. A person who has what they need and is not driven to seize more. The open hand at human scale. I do not have to turn my children into victims to put them in this essay. I get to put them in as evidence. As the thing I am reaching for, already alive in my own house. That is not pity. That is praise.

Here’s a reality that is closer to my consciousness than Elon Musk’s: My grandchildren are under the rubble in Gaza. My sons are mining for cobalt in the DRC. My daughter is awaiting cooking fuel in Havana. My wife is awaiting my justice as I languish in a cell as a political prisoner next to Mumia Abu-Jamal in Pennsylvania.

So I will keep pressing play.

I will keep sitting in the morning light with my hands open. Not to attract a bigger pile. To remember the shape my hands are supposed to hold. Open. Open. Open. I go into the quiet so I can stay out in the trouble. The prayer in the closed room is not escape from the chaotic street. It is the only thing that lets a man walk that street for a lifetime and not fall apart — also not turn into the very thing he is fighting.

The voice this morning was right. I deserve abundance. We all do. It just stopped one word too soon. Abundance was never meant to come to me. It was meant to come through me — to my children, to my city, to the Haitian and the Congolese and the stranger at the border, and out, and out, until it reaches the Dream of God, where there is enough, and no one has torn out the word for it, and every hand in the Beloved Community is open.

That is the long way home.

And I am still on it.

Ten minutes from here, two rivers meet.

The Liesbeek and the Black River.

They come together in a very old neighborhood.

There are trees. There is the sound of water.

The ancestors of the Khoisan have known this region across tens of thousands of years.

They prayed there. They lived there. They resisted there.

In 1510, they fought off Portuguese colonizers on that ground.

It is sacred land.

And Jeff Bezos has built Amazon’s Africa headquarters there.

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We are not the first to walk through fire. That is the whole secret.

When the trouble comes for us — and it comes — we are not standing in it alone, and we are not standing in it new.

They were in the hold of the ship and did not stop singing. They were under the lash and still taught their children to pray. They were told by the law that they were property, and they answered, in the dark, that they were God’s. They did not survive because the danger spared them. They survived because they carried something the danger could not reach.

And they handed it down.

That is what our ancestry is. Not a wall that keeps the harm away — the harm came, and it still comes. It is a set of tools pressed into our hands by people who used them to stay human in conditions built to make them less. The moan. The shout. The prayer that argues with God and keeps praying. The laughter that should not be possible. The way the community closes around its wounded.

So when we are afraid, we reach back, and the reaching is not empty. A great cloud of witnesses leans in. They are not surprised by this. They have done this. And because they did, we know it can be done.

That is the protection. Not that we will not suffer.

That we will not be destroyed.

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I still don’t.

Having led a congregation in Santa Barbara for 36 years and running, I understand the importance of pastoral responses to troubled times. Religious leaders of all stripes are invited to be present during people’s most difficult experiences.

We seem to be at a national inflection point, because white dominance knelt on George Floyd’s neck, just as it has knelt on our collective neck for four centuries. I have heard white church leaders calling for prayers to “heal our divided nation,” but the only healed America Black people know is in our dreams. In this moment, we are not thinking of healing the nation; we are gasping for breath.

“White dominance,” “white supremacy,” and “white nationalism” are terms that are rarely ever studied, even uttered, by white people, including many Christians, and especially white evangelicals, but they pose an ongoing threat to the well-being of African Americans.

I am amazed, but also alarmed, that several church leaders have reached out to me in response to this difficult experience. My head is spinning.

Your interest is a good thing. We need relationship. We need solidarity. We need koinonia. I love the ancient text that promises the day when the lion will lie down with the lamb. Note, however, that only one of them needs to do deep internal work regarding predatory tendencies.

When I was a child, African Americans were entertained by programs that erased us. I watched Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, and The Flintstones, and in order to enjoy them, we had to pretend that African Americans didn’t exist, or that we were a novelty. We have similarly experienced your churches.

I hope you understand my slowness to engage as reasonable. Recently, I was asked by more than one church to participate in a “service of lament.” I have been in a state of lament all my life. I don’t need a service for it. Until now, many of you have questioned my experiences and brushed aside my lament.

After Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, some of the same religious leaders who declined to publicly recognize Colin Kaepernick, perhaps for fear of alienating donors, rushed to the closest African American they could find. You may be sincere, but I am not ready to talk about this until you are more ready to talk to me. While you shielded your congregation from controversy, you failed to honor your parishioners who remain frustrated, seeking spiritual solace in a hostile environment.

It feels like you are more interested in saving your organization than saving Black lives. That’s what history tells us. A quarter of a century ago, I sat in a room with some 30 church leaders in Santa Barbara after the LAPD brutally beat Rodney King. I did not realize when I entered the room that the objective of the meeting was to pray for law enforcement.

It is cause for celebration that people around the globe are noticing the oppression and insult that African Americans and the rest of the Diaspora live with daily. Vigils and marches, led by people of all ages and races, have gotten the attention of church leaders, and you are having to reckon with your complicity with that oppression and insult, and your silence.

If you had no conscience, what would your next decision be?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”

Is the church an active conscience for America? If you had no conscience, what would your next decision be? When we look at lawlessness in law enforcement, how many churches, based on their role as conscience, have ever taken responsibility for that lawlessness?

Your Faith Needs to Be Disinfected

The Father of American Evangelicalism, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), is a study in current practices. He lamented the cruel slave trade, but he purchased and owned Africans. This kind of duplicity runs rampant in American religion. Some people explain, “But he was just a man of his times.” What they ignore is that abolitionists were working hard on this continent long before Edwards chose to buy Venus, his first acquisition, a 14-year-old girl.

While you spray-clean your church buildings, while you scrub your Eucharist elements, and sanitize your hands, they all remain contaminated. Your faith needs to be disinfected. Western Christianity gave up the immune system of its liberative properties in order to accommodate imperial power. Western Christianity, conservative or liberal, bears responsibility here for disinheriting both Native nations and Africans, and that’s before we start talking about other continents and islands.

‘Make the Main Thing the Main Thing’

I know many of your churches have been reached out to by white Christian anti-racism advocates, and you denied them. You said, “It is not our focus right now,” or “We are already doing the work,” or “Our church is not ready for that.” Perhaps you are beginning to see your mistake of not engaging sooner. A popular saying among churches that choose to remain silent in the face of mortal, neck-crushing injustice is, “We want to make the main thing the main thing.” This is code for somehow featuring the name of Jesus without the message of Jesus. You can heartily sing hymns and choruses about the very Jesus you ignore.

To some, our struggle for freedom may come off as angry and confrontational … because it is, and confronting is the thing the churches in Santa Barbara have not effectively done, or even tried, in most cases.

Five persons who spoke at the rally led by Healing Justice: Black Lives Matter SB are people of deep faith who uplift Jesus, including myself. So, I am here as a Black pastor in Santa Barbara, standing for Black liberation, lifting up Black joy, celebrating Black life. If you want to do the same, I invite you to join us. Recognize the essentiality of Black faith.

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Black Joy Is Real

Rev. James Ficklin has led a faith community, Greater Hope Baptist Church, longer than anyone here, for some 54 years. He has a story to tell that you need to hear, of growing up as a Mississippi sharecropper, migrating West, and dealing with new expressions of anti-Blackness in Santa Barbara. We all have our stories, but we are more inclined to tell them when the listener is serious about creating change.

As I said at the aforementioned rally of May 31 at the Sunken Gardens, “A lot of you see the Black joy we have with all the artists, the music … the joy of the brilliant, beautiful young women leading this movement. Black joy is real, but you cannot have Black joy without knowing Black pain, Black sorrow.”

If you are serious about this, email me.
Find me on Facebook.
Come to our churches.

We need churches to stand for Black liberation.

That would be so exciting.

But I find myself asking a deeper question. What kind of community would it be if Indigenous people had to fight alone for their rights? If Black people were the only ones calling out anti-Blackness, immigrant families had to defend themselves alone, queer communities were left to stand alone, and disabled individuals bore the full weight of disability justice?

A truly supportive community would bring everyone together, supporting each other’s efforts and standing united.

What kind of moral imagination would it be if each wounded group had to become its own rescue squad?

The wounded have always had to organize around their wounds. There is dignity in a people rising up for themselves. There is holiness in refusing to disappear. There is power in saying, “We are still here.”

But a society is spiritually feeble when people only show up for the wound that has their name on it.

If I only care about anti-Blackness because I am Black, that is survival, but it is not yet love. If I only care about immigrants because someone in my family is undocumented, that is loyalty, but it is not yet justice. If I only care about Palestine because the grief finally entered my own house, that may be moral clarity, but it is not yet neighbor-love. If I only care about disability because my body, my child, my aging parent suddenly needs access, that may be compassion, but it is late compassion.

The command was not, “Love your neighbor once your neighbor becomes you.” It was not, “Love your neighbor once your neighbor’s children look like your children.” It was, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

“As yourself” does not mean I erase myself. It does not mean I deny my own people, my own history, my own beloved dead. It means I refuse to make my pain the only pain that counts. It means I must hear another mother’s cry before the body in the street is my son. It means I must resist the cages before my relatives are inside them. It means I must oppose the bombs before the rubble contains people I already know.

This is where public morality fails. People wait until they are affected. They wait until the policy reaches their address. But by then the machinery has already been built, the silence already normalized, the neighbors already taught to look away.

So protest must become more than a gathering of the aggrieved. It must become a school of solidarity, teaching us to stand where we are not personally centered, to lend our bodies and voices and risk to people whose suffering does not increase our social capital.

That is what it means to refuse empire’s favorite strategy: divide the wounded, rank the suffering, and make every community beg alone.

Here in Cape Town, the scene is different. This weekend opens into Youth Day, born from the memory of young people who rose up against apartheid education and paid for courage with their lives. South Africa remembers June 16 not as a sentimental celebration, but as a day marked by children who understood what many adults, worn down, had learned to tolerate. They looked at the order of things and said no. No to being taught inferiority. No to a future designed without their consent.

Youth Day is a public holiday that honors the Soweto Uprising of 1976. Police opened fire on the unarmed students, tragically causing the deaths of at least 176 pupils in Soweto alone. Some estimates suggest that up to 700 people lost their lives. It was truly a significant and impactful protest.

Desireè B. Stephens watched “No Kings” online and mentioned that it seemed more like a parade than a protest.

Nothing wrong with parades, though! But I’d like to think that a more perfect day for parades is still ahead. Every nation wants to honor its brave young people after the fact. It is much harder to listen to them while they are still disrupting the peace.

The United States has its young people in the streets. Gaza has children whose names the world still refuses to carry. Immigrant children are taught that borders matter more than breath. Black children are still forced to grow up early. Queer and trans children are still told their existence is a problem, even in the very month we claim to celebrate their right to exist in joy.

So the question is not only whether we will protest. The question is whether protest will enlarge us. Will we march only when the slogan fits our biography? Will we wait until the fire reaches our roof?

Or will we understand that the neighbor is not the one who resembles us? The neighbor is the one whose vulnerability makes a demand upon us. The neighbor is the one empire has taught us not to notice.

“Love thy neighbor as thyself” is not private niceness. It is a public discipline. It is a political ethic. It is a refusal to let the wounded fight alone.

The test is not whether Black people can keep naming anti-Blackness, or Palestinians can keep begging the world to believe their dead are dead. The test is whether the rest of us will finally become neighbors.

Not allies for a season. Not spectators with opinions. Not sympathizers at a safe distance.

Neighbors. People who cross the road. People who bind the wounds. People who pay the cost.

So march this weekend, Friend. March in the colors of Pride. March toward the memory of Soweto’s children. But do not march only for your own. Cross the road. Cross the world. Raise the stakes for yourself. That is where your neighbor is waiting for you.

Love, real love, has never once agreed to stay in its lane.

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Turning, looking

“The look didn’t just see Peter.
The look made Peter remember.”

Setting the Scene

In the upper room. Later in the courtyard.

Jesus and his friends have eaten the last meal.

The bread has been broken.

The cup has gone around.

Then Jesus turns to one of his friends and says:

Simon. Simon.

Two times.

You say a name twice when you need the person to listen all the way down.

Simon. Simon, listen.

Satan has wanted to have you. He will sift you like wheat.

But I have prayed for you.

I have prayed that your faith will hold.

And when you return — after your comeback — help to make your friends strong.

So listen to what just happened in that little speech.

Jesus says, you are about to be shaken.

Jesus does not say,

I will keep the shaking from happening.

Jesus does not say,

you are too strong to be shaken.

Jesus says,

I have prayed for you.

Jesus says,

when you come back.

Not if.

Peter is going to fail.

Jesus already knows.

And Jesus has already named the assignment on the other side of the failure:

Strengthen your cherished friends.

The work after the wound is already given.

This is beyond Peter’s comprehension. So Peter says,

Lord, I am ready to go to prison and to die with you.

He wants to prove something.

Jesus answers —

Peter, the rooster will not crow today before you say that you do not know me.

Three times.

Peter probably waved that away, like when you think a friend is being dramatic.

You only know later what it was.

Preaching from Cape Town

I am preaching this from Cape Town.

You may have heard rumors that there is beauty here.

Table Mountain when the fog lifts.

The Atlantic right there.

Light on the water that looks like it was made for exactly this hour.

But South Africa carries deep wounds.

Violence. Inequality.

The unfinished ache of history.

Diane and I are witnesses.

But what we are not, here, is the political bullseye.

That’s not nothing.

For a Black man who spent much of his life as the only one, or one of the few, in the room —

that is not nothing.

But I am aware —

my people in the United States do not have that relief.

The weight I carried there has not lifted for them.

It is still on their shoulders.

Every day.

I do not preach from above that weight.

I preach from beside it.

Across an ocean.

Still feeling it.

Still yours.

And maybe that is why Peter’s story came to mind.

Because Peter knows something about distance.

At a Distance

So they arrest Jesus.

They lead him to the high priest’s house.

And Peter follows.

At a distance.

You know that distance?

Close enough to see?

Far enough not to be seen?

Peter edges into the courtyard.

The night is cold.

The guards have built a fire.

Peter joins them there.

A servant girl notices him in the firelight.

She stares.

She says,

This man was one of Jesus’ followers.

Peter says,

Woman,

I don’t even know him.

A little later, someone else looks at him.

Aren’t you one of them?

No, man.

About an hour after that, someone else notices.

Hey, he is one of them. He is a Galilean too.

“Man, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

And while Peter is still speaking —

the rooster crows.

And Jesus turns and looks across the courtyard at Peter.

The Look That Makes Us Remember

And we know what the look did.

Suddenly, Jesus’ words flashed through Peter’s mind:

Before the rooster crows tomorrow morning, three times you will deny that you even know me.

Get this:

The look didn’t just see Peter.
The look made Peter remember.

The look returned him to the upper room.

The look brought back “Simon. Simon.”

The look brought back “I have prayed for you.”

The look brought back “after your comeback.”

Maybe the look brought back the assignment.

Peter is standing at the wrong fire — and the look presents him with the whole evening:

The meal.

The bread.

The cup.

The prayer Jesus prayed.

The words Peter did not believe.

The love he was given before he came up short.

That’s why he weeps bitterly.

Not just because he has been caught.

But because he has been sustained the whole time.

Sustained in the prayer.

Sustained in the commission.

Sustained in the warning he did not accept.

And only now — only at the rooster,

only at the look,

only at the remembering —

does he understand that Jesus has been sustaining him all along.

The Private Look and the Public Look

But Jesus’ look is never only private.

Yes, Jesus looks at Peter.

Yes, Jesus sees a frightened man trying to survive the night.

But Jesus also looks at the world Peter is standing in.

Jesus sees the courtyard.

Jesus sees the fire.

Jesus sees the power that made association dangerous.

Jesus sees the system that taught Peter to protect himself by denying the one he loved.

So when Christ looks at us,

the look is personal.

It sees the private failure.

The fear.

The compromise.

The moment we kept warm at the wrong fire.

But the look is also public.

It sees the structures that train people to distance themselves from suffering.

It sees the rooms where silence becomes policy.

It sees the pulpits where truth is delayed until it is safe.

It sees the institutions that do not need an order because they already know which way the wind is blowing.

So what has it cost when pulpits covered for Israel by ignoring Gaza?

People have stayed warm,

standing by the fire.

But it was the wrong fire.

Let that register.

The Same Eye Sees

The same eye sees a people under siege —

unable to get medicine,

unable to get food,

paying the price for what governments do to each other.

The same eye sees every generation of Black people told their lives matter less —

that anti-Blackness is the water we swim in,

so old,

so deep,

that some have stopped noticing they are drowning.

I say “our ancestors” from the Black story that raised me —

and I offer that witness as a gift to the whole church.

Our ancestors knew that water.

They followed Jesus at a distance too.

They prayed in hush arbors.

Whispered spirituals under threat.

Learned how to survive while being watched.

They carried faith carefully.

They trusted God when the night riders were near.

They were sifted like wheat.

Generation after generation.

And the prayer of Jesus held them.

They were seen enough to be used —

but not enough to be loved.

That is what the powers do.

But Jesus does the opposite.

Jesus saw enough to love.
And love is what sustained them.

Love is what kept them praying.

Love is what kept them dreaming beyond the plantation,

beyond Reconstruction betrayed,

beyond segregation,

beyond every empire that ever tried to tell them they were nothing.

And because they kept being held,

there came generations who marched.

Who organized.

Who survived.

Who voted.

They went back.

And they strengthened their siblings.

That is the assignment Jesus gave Peter.

That is the assignment my ancestors carried.

That is the assignment in this room.

This Gathering Is an Upper Room

Every face on this call.

From Cape Town to California.

Wherever you are.

Those who listen later on YouTube.

This gathering is an upper room.

The strengthening is happening already.

Here.

In us.

Not somewhere out there.

Here.

Our mothers.

Our fathers.

They dreamed toward a horizon they could not see.

They were prayed for before they fell.

They came back.

They strengthened their children.

They strengthened their children.

And one of those children is here on the southern tip of Africa preaching to you.

Diane crossed this ocean with me.

We are not standing outside what we are preaching.

We are in it.

And the same eye that found Peter in the courtyard finds us here.

Inside the beauty.

Inside the danger.

Inside the dream our parents carried and could not finish.

Looking at the Ones Who Stood Close Anyway

The same eye has also been looking at the ones who stood close anyway.

Looking at the Black parents who showed up at the Santa Barbara school board meeting one more time,

after their children were assaulted and name-called at school,

without adult intervention.

Looking at Wendy Sims-Moten being insulted during public comment while she sat on the School Board.

Looking at every child who fears anti-Blackness and still tries to learn.

Looking at the immigrant who keeps showing up for class.

Or work.

Looking at the Muslims who keep showing up for Friday prayers.

Looking at Cori Bush.

Jamaal Bowman.

Mahmoud Khalil.

Looking at all the people who keep showing up.

And — dear ones — looking at you.

Looking at you, on this call, who carried what you carried this week that nobody knew about.

Looking at you, who said one small true thing when it would have been easier to say nothing.

Looking at you, who refused to laugh at the cruel joke.

Looking at you, who answered the question Peter was asked —

Were you with them?

And you said quietly,

faithfully —

I am.

Somebody has been weeping because they were seen.
Somebody has been weeping because they kept warm at the wrong fire.
But somebody else stood close and paid for it and is still paying.

Hear me.

The weeping is not the end of the story.

The cost is not the end of the story.

God sees you.

Three Sacred Scenes

There are three sacred scenes in this story.

The upper room: the meal, the prayer, the commission.
The courtyard fire: the denial, the look, the remembering.
The morning fire: the bread, the mercy, the work returned.

After Easter, in the gospel of John,

the risen Christ builds a fire on the shore.

He cooks fish on it.

He calls his friends in from the boats.

He calls Peter in.

Peter — who came apart at the courtyard fire — comes and sits at the morning fire.

Jesus does not say a word about the denials.

Jesus feeds him.

Before Jesus questions him.

Before Jesus recommissions him,

Jesus gives him bread.

Then Jesus asks him a question.

Do you love me?

Three times — because the denial was three —

Peter answers each time.

Yes, Lord.

And what does Jesus give him back?

The upper room.

Feed my sheep.

Tend my lambs.

Strengthen your siblings.

The commission Jesus gave him before the disappointment is the commission Jesus gives him after the disappointment.

The fall did not undo the call.
The denial did not erase the prayer.
The morning fire is mercy with breakfast on it.

The Gospel at the Fire

This is the gospel.

Christ prays for you before you fall.

Christ sees you when you fall.

Christ feeds you after you fall.

And Christ restores you to your calling.

Dearest ones —

if you have been sifted this year —

if you have stood at the wrong fire —

if you have said I do not know him when you did know him —

hear what Christ has been saying about you since the upper room:

I have prayed for you.
I have prayed your faith will not fail.
And when you come back — strengthen your siblings.

Strengthen the ones who are still standing close and paying for it.

The look did not come to crush you.

In a world where every voice —

every algorithm,

every empire,

every screen —

wants to use you,

the look came to find you.

The look came to remind you that you were prayed for before you fell,

and that the work is still yours when you turn back.

Let yourself be looked at.

Let yourself remember.

Let yourself weep what needs weeping.

And come to the morning fire.

There is bread on the coals.

There is work to do.

There are sheep to feed.

Friend —

look up.

Christ has been looking at you all along.

God sees you.

Amen.

When the judge dismissed the case against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the wire copy did what wire copy does. “The move deals an embarrassing blow to the Trump administration, which made the Maryland man the face of its deportation campaign.”

I read the piece — I’m glad I did — but some time ago I trained myself to skim past any sentence in which Donald Trump is reportedly embarrassed, crushed, destroyed, enraged, or infuriated. Some legacy outlets do it. Some independent outlets do it. Plenty of social media posters do it.

How do you shame a shameless administration?

It is the same drug in a different wrapper, and it does the same thing to the brain: it tells you that your enemy is suffering, so you can stop paying attention.

I take everything else with a grain of salt. The dismissals, the firings, the latest being Tulsi Gabbard — I notice them. I do not believe any of it amounts to a turning. A regime that eats its own is not, by the act of eating, becoming kinder. It is only hungrier. So I hold the small mercies carefully and I do not confuse them with deliverance.

From here, across the ocean, talking to friends who are still there, it looks like the system is collapsing. I keep thinking of the Apocalypse. “Babylon is fallen, is fallen”

— and only after Babylon falls, in Revelation 21, does the New Jerusalem come down out of heaven so God can wipe away every tear. That language used to feel like a sermon for someone else’s century. It does not feel that way now. It feels like the morning news. The hard part of that text, the part American Christianity does not like to sit with, is the order of operations. The new thing does not arrive on top of the old thing. The old thing has to come down first.

I will be honest with you. I am glad I am not there.

I am 71. My parents grew up under Jim Crow. They lived and struggled and prayed and worked and bled so that their children might live in a country where they could walk in their full dignity. I have spent my own decades trying to honor that hope. To watch the country now is to watch a generation in power try to undo, in plain daylight, the very thing my parents bought with their bodies. As an African American elder, I will not pretend that watching that from any distance is not a relief. Diane and I have been in Cape Town for one month. We are looking for a place to stay. We are trying to learn this city — its kindness and its hardness both — and I am aware every day that the air here is not the air I left.

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South Africa has its own troubles. I will not romanticize this place; the people here do not romanticize it either. There is a Black-majority government that strikes many here as out of touch with its own country. Some take that as evidence that the Black movement is finished, that the long arc of the freedom struggle has run out. I do not read it that way. Movements are not governments. Movements are not parties. Movements live in the people who keep showing up.

Two weeks ago I went to a Nakba Day protest here in Cape Town. What I saw on the street felt very South African to me: visible solidarity from all kinds of people, Black folks among them, but a whole broad-spectrum coalition. And what struck me — what I want to underline — is that the hope, determination, and power were pouring from voices supporting Palestinians. The energy in justice movements right now, on this continent and beyond, is being carried by people who refuse to look away from Gaza. That is not incidental. That is a sign of where the moral center of gravity actually sits.

I love the people who fight the powers. Nina Turner. Briahna Joy Gray. Lamont Hill. There are others. I am pulling for all the prophets.

What those three share, beyond their fire, beyond their refusal to be domesticated, is that none of them will pretend the genocide in Gaza is not happening. You cannot be a justice fighter in 2026 and route your speech around the bodies of Palestinian children.

I applaud my friends who want ICE abolished. I applaud my friends who want Democrats to take the midterms. I want those things too. But to want those things while keeping a polite silence about Gaza is disingenuous, and the disingenuousness is corrosive, and it eats the movement from the inside. Many people who hate Trump have still not understood that opposing Trump is not, by itself, a politics. It is a posture. A real politics has to center the people whose lives the empire is grinding — and that means Palestinians, and that means African Americans, and it means both at the same time, without one being used to silence the other.

This is where John Roberts comes in.

When the Supreme Court gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act, when the Court signed off on map after map drawn to erase Black political voice, that was not a side issue. That was the project. John Roberts has spent a career on it. He can, if he wishes, look at this Congress and say “mission accomplished.”

He earned the line. He earned it in the worst sense of “earned.”

If the same American public that poured into the streets over the overturning of Roe had been pouring into the streets, year after year, over the persistent dismantling of Black voting power, we would be living in a different country. We would have had different presidents. We would have a different Supreme Court. We would not be here.

I do not say this to scold anyone’s grief over Roe. That grief is real, and the loss is real, and women’s lives are at stake in it. I say it because the country has been told, again and again, that the assault on Black political life is a Black problem, a regional problem, an old problem, somebody else’s problem. It is not. It is the foundation under everything else that is now falling. Pull that foundation, and the house comes down on everyone. The house is coming down on everyone.

So what do I want?

I want good news. I want my children and my grandchildren — who live there, who are making their lives there — to flourish. I want my friends to live without the daily, low-grade dread of a maniacal government. I want Abrego Garcia, and every person like him whose name we will never know, to be returned to their families and left alone. I want ICE dismantled. I want the people doing the work of opposition to win, and to win soon, and to win in ways that hold.

I am also, today, glad I am not there. I will not lie about that to make anyone feel better. The relief of distance is real, and at 71, after a life of trying, I am allowing myself to feel it.

What I can offer from here is this: a word of encouragement to the people who are there. In the language of Jesse Jackson — keep hope alive.

Not the cheap kind of hope that confuses the bad guy’s bad day with the arrival of justice. The other kind. The kind that knows Babylon is falling and still goes to the protest. The kind that holds Abrego Garcia’s freedom and Gaza’s grief in the same hand and refuses to drop either one.

I notice I have said a great deal and concluded nothing. That is the honest report from across the ocean today. Some weeks the work of a pastor is to sort it out. Some weeks the work is to refuse to pretend it is sorted. This is the second kind of week.

Grace and courage to you. Keep going.

— David

So we’re here again in many rooms, different towns, different continents.

Today, I’d like us to visit a different shore,

just after daybreak.

The disciples are out in a fishing boat.

After the cross. After the empty tomb.

After the times the risen Christ came to them in a locked room.

They have gone back to fishing.

They have worked all night.

And they have caught nothing.

Let’s go there.

Because that is where this story begins.

And it’s where many of us are.

The disciples went back to the boats,

but not because they had lost faith.

They went back because they did not know what else to do.

They were tired.

They had lived through the worst week of their lives. They had seen the corpse. They had seen the empty tomb. They had seen the risen Christ in a locked room.

And after all of that, they still went back to the work they knew.

I understand that. I think you understand that.

There is a tiredness that comes from doing the work for a long time.

There is a tiredness that comes from believing the work matters.

There is a tiredness that comes from casting and catching, casting and catching, until one night you cast —

and you catch nothing.

Not without faith.

Not without hope.

Tired.

And many of you are tired too.

You may not have stood in the same boat I stood in.

But you have stood in your own.

You have shown up for the work.

You have driven to the protest. You have held the signs. You have written the emails. You have attended the meetings.

You have done the long, slow work of believing the world can be kinder than it is.

We have fished all night.

And there are mornings when the net is empty.

But the story does not end at the empty net.

Just after daybreak, John tells us, Jesus stood on the shore.

The disciples did not know it was Jesus.

He called out across the water:

“Dear ones, you have no fish, have you?”

No.

We have not.

He told them to cast the net on the other side of the boat.

They cast.

And the net filled with fish.

Then John said, “It is the Lord!”

Then Peter grabbed his coat, jumped into the water, and started swimming toward the shore — followed by everyone in the boat.

And I am fascinated by this sentence:

When they had come ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread.

A charcoal fire was already burning.

Fish was already cooking.

Bread was already there.

Before they had cast a single net.

Before they had earned anything by their morning’s work.

Breakfast was already on the fire.

Christ does not put them to work on an empty stomach.

He says: “Come and have breakfast.”

That is the first word from the risen Christ in this story.

Not “go.”

Not “do.”

Not “prove yourself.”

“Come and eat.”

Hear this, my friends.

Feeding comes before sending.

We are fed before we are asked to feed others.

Breakfast comes first.

So if you have showed up to your screen weary this morning, here is the gospel:

The fire is already lit.

The bread is already on the coals.

Breakfast is already there.

Before you cast another net.

Before you answer another question.

Before you do another thing.

But the breakfast is not the end of the story.

After they had eaten, Jesus turned to Peter.

And he asked him a question.

He asked it three times.

“Simon son of John, do you love me?”

Three times.

Now we have to remember something.

The story does not pretend what didn’t happen.

On that night Jesus was arrested, Peter said three times: “I do not know him.”

Three times.

He said it standing by a charcoal fire in the courtyard, warming his hands.

Three times he denied his friend.

And now, on this morning, the risen Christ has lit another charcoal fire.

The same kind of fire.

And by this fire, he asks the question that matches each denial.

“Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?”

Peter says yes.

Yes.

Yes.

By the third time, he is hurt. Peter felt hurt because Jesus asked him a third time, “Do you love me?”

Of course he was hurt.

“Do you love me?” is addressing that moment of denial.

It is naming what happened.

Three times.

Until the truth has been told.

Jesus does not skip the truth-telling to get to the new beginning.

The denial is not pushed aside.

It is met.

Slowly.

By a fire that remembers.

This was not a reprimand.

This is Jesus telling the truth with him.

There is a difference.

And the difference is that the truth-telling ends with:

“Take care of my sheep.”

I have to name something this morning.

If I do not, everything else I say will sound hollow.

This last year, I have been asking a hard question in my own heart.

I have asked it of friends I have walked beside for years.

I have asked it of pastors.

I have asked it of churches and other faith communities.

“Do you love what you said you loved?

Do you love what you said you loved?

Do you love what you said you loved?”

The question has come up most sharply over Gaza.

It has revealed what we love, what we fear, and whose suffering we have been trained to explain away.

Christ does not ask Peter:

“Were you careful?

Did you protect your relationships?

Did you create unity?”

Christ asks: “Do you love me?”

And love does not look away from children under rubble.

Love does not look away from a detained child.

Love does not look away from victims the powerful would rather forget.

I think of little Hind Rajab.

Six years old.

Alone in a car after her family was killed.

Calling for help on a phone for hours while the world listened and did not come.

Then the paramedics who went to rescue her were killed.

Twelve days later, their ambulance was found next to her car.

Her name is Hind.

And the people I expected to say her name —

said nothing.

Some of the people I had stood with for years answered with silence.

Some changed the subject.

And I have had to learn something painful about the home we left.

In a town like ours, power does not always have to give an order.

Sometimes the donors are the weather.

They do not have to say, “Don’t speak.”

The institutions already know which way the wind is blowing.

The synagogues knew.

The churches knew.

The supervisors knew.

The foundation knew.

And the people doing good work with the foundation’s good money knew too.

They knew that to speak clearly about Gaza was to risk the work they were trying to do for the poor of our city.

And that is how the silence got built.

Not by a command.

By a climate.

Not because everyone was cruel.

Not because everyone had stopped caring.

But because the air had taught them what could be said, and what could not be said, and who would pay the price for saying it.

That is why this hurts.

Because silence is not always empty.

Sometimes silence is full of calculations.

Full of fear.

Full of grants and friendships and reputations.

Full of all the little things that teach good people how to look away.

The denial happened.

The silence happened.

And it does not go away just because we pretend it didn’t happen.

But — and this is the gospel — Jesus does not stop at the question.

After Peter says yes, Jesus says: “Take care of my sheep.”

The assignment still stands.

The sheep are still hungry.

The world is still on fire.

The charcoal is still warm.

“Tend my sheep.”

The students at the Liberated Zone at UC Santa Barbara, who slept in tents. Some were arrested.

Diane, who prepared food and took it to them.

The few social media warriors who refused to look away when the story was hard.

First Congregational Church.

The Mary Collective.

The ordinary people without microphones, without titles, without power.

They were not silent.

They were sometimes silenced.

But they were not silent.

Like you all. Beloved Community. Jesus Collective.

We are not silent.

We are sometimes silenced.

There is a difference.

So what does this story ask of us this morning?

First, it asks us to come to breakfast.

To let Christ feed us before he sends us.

The work has been long.

The night has been long.

The net has come up empty more times than we can count.

Come and eat.

There is bread on the coals.

The fire was lit before you arrived.

Second, it asks us to let the truth be told.

Not to skip it.

Not to pretend the silences did not happen.

Telling the truth is not the same as putting someone down.

It is the slow work of love refusing to lie.

And third, it asks us to receive the assignment again.

“Look out for my sheep.”

Wherever the sheep are.

The hungry are still hungry.

The detained are still detained.

The bombed are still bombed.

The silenced are still silenced.

The work has not stopped because we have moved.

The work has not stopped because we are tired.

The work has not stopped because some who said they loved us went quiet.

For Diane and me, caring now means tending from across an ocean.

It means preaching to a Zoom screen on Sunday morning.

It means writing from inside Cape Town.

It means loving the people of our Collective from a new place.

So here is the gospel for tired disciples.

You have fished all night.

You have caught nothing.

The net came up empty.

The friends who said they loved you went quiet when it cost them something.

You have left the place you thought you would always live.

You are in a new room, in a new city, wondering whether the work was worth what it took.

And just after daybreak, the risen Christ is already on the shore.

Already with a fire.

Already with bread.

Already calling across the water.

Not to reprimand.

Not to send you out yet.

But to feed you.

Come and have breakfast.

And then, when you have eaten, when the bread has settled in you, the question will come.

“Do you love me?”

It will come three times.

Because the denials were three.

And the truth will be told.

And then, by the same fire, the good shepherd will say:

“Look out for my sheep.”

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We have fished all night.

The net is empty.

The breakfast is already on the fire.

And the work still stands.

“Come to breakfast, beloved.”

We have sheep to feed.

Love is patient and kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking.
It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.

Breathe Consciously

There are times when love is mistaken for safety—
What I mean is, it gets confused with keeping quiet, keeping the peace, or keeping one’s distance from what hurts.

Getting along with everyone.

In those moments, love is reduced to sentiment:
a comforting thought, a decorative idea that makes no demands and risks nothing.

But the love that endures—the love that scripture speaks of—is not sentimental.
It is not neutral. It is not protected.
It does not shield us from the pain of the world—it draws us nearer to it.
It does not function as an escape from conflict—it becomes a commitment to stay, to speak, to act, even when it’s uncomfortable or dangerous.

We are seeing, in real time, how the world treats that kind of love:

• Journalists reporting from Gaza have been killed—systematically. Dozens silenced because they insisted on telling the truth from the ground.

• Even as global leaders pointed to a fragile ceasefire, the killing continued. Saleh Al-Jafarawi, a Palestinian humanitarian worker, was killed two days after the ceasefire began, on October 12.

• Students protesting apartheid and genocide are being surveilled, suspended, and arrested—not for violence, but for moral clarity.

• Clergy are being dismissed—not for wrongdoing, but for faithfulness to the image of God in every Palestinian life.

• Activists, like Leo Martinez, are being removed and discredited—not because they lack compassion, but because they refuse to compartmentalize it.

• Descendants of resistance, like Mandla Mandela, are warned not to speak, because their memory makes empire nervous.

These are not hypotheticals.
This is what love costs, now.

Last year, I named something I want to restate here:

Some among us have paid a personal cost for holding fast to what is right.
Your convictions, your clarity, your unwillingness to compromise on the dignity of the oppressed—these things have cost you status, relationships, opportunities, sometimes even your safety.

And yet, I imagine that many of you—most of you—would feel more unsafe, more soulfully disoriented, if this community were not what it is:

• A space that speaks clearly.

• A space that does not flinch.

• A space where truth is not a liability, but a form of faithfulness.

I remember, back in early 2024, our friend Dr. Robina Bhatti expressing how relieved she was that our community did not pretend there was no blood on our government’s hands in Gaza.

So I pray that we continue to be a people who choose the risk of love over the comfort of compliance—a love that tells the truth, a love that remembers rightly, a love that endures.

“Love is patient. Love is kind.”
These words are forms of resistance.

Patience, in a world that rewards immediate gratification and punishes imperfection, is not passivity—it is protest.
It is the refusal to rush past the grief, the questions, or the work of repair. It is the act of staying with what is broken long enough to witness its healing.

Kindness, too, is often misunderstood.
It is not politeness. It is not appeasement.
It is the decision to meet the world without cruelty, even when cruelty is the cultural default.

These are radical disciplines.
And when lived out, they disrupt.

We see this clearly in the stance of Greta Thunberg—not merely as a climate activist, but as a moral voice who has expanded her sharpening lens to a full ecosystem of justice.
When she stood publicly in solidarity with the people of Gaza, she did so knowing the backlash would be swift. And it was. She was removed, silenced, dismissed.

Still, she spoke. Still, she speaks.

This is what love does.
It does not calculate safety.
It does not withdraw when called upon to bear witness.
It persists—not because it is easy, but because it is necessary.

“Love is not boastful. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others.”

Love that is rooted in humility does not need to center itself.
It does not need to be right in every conversation.
It does not demand the microphone or the spotlight.

But that does not mean it lacks conviction.
It means it seeks alignment—not with applause, but with truth.

This is the humility we saw in Judith Elia, a pastor whose only offense was telling the truth with clarity and care.
She was removed from her congregation not because she was cruel, but because she was faithful.
Because she named the humanity of Palestinians in a moment when such clarity is considered controversial.

She chose alignment over approval. And for that, she was punished.

But let us be honest:
She would have been far more wounded had she stayed silent.
Silence would have been its own kind of exile.

There is a kind of humility that does not lower its voice, but raises it at the right time, for the right reasons, on behalf of the right people.

III. The Memory of Love

“Love keeps no record of wrongs.”

This does not mean forgetfulness.
It does not mean erasure.
It means choosing not to build our lives around vengeance or resentment.

But love still remembers.
Love remembers in service of justice, in the name of truth.

Mandla Mandela, grandson of Nelson Mandela, speaks from that kind of memory.
When he declares that “apartheid in Palestine is no less than what we faced in South Africa,” he is not speaking carelessly.
He is tracing a lineage of violence.
He is connecting struggles across time and geography, not to dilute them, but to deepen our understanding of how oppression behaves—and how liberation responds.

He reminds us that our freedom is incomplete when it is disconnected from others’.

Love that remembers well does not dwell in bitterness—it moves with intention toward solidarity.

“Love does not rejoice in injustice but rejoices with the truth.”

This is the pivot point.

If your love has no vision for justice, it is sentiment.
If it cannot name injustice plainly, it is comfort, not commitment.

And so let us say it clearly:

A ceasefire changes nothing about apartheid.
The bombs may pause, but the blockade remains.
The occupation remains.
The permits, the checkpoints, the dispossession of land, the generational trauma—all of it persists beneath the silence.

The killing continues. Saleh Al-Jafarawi—a humanitarian worker—was killed on October 12, two days after the ceasefire was declared.

And let us be clear:
The genocide happened.
It did not disappear.
It simply moved off the front page. That forgetting is a kind of violence, too.

Your Western-centric media wants you to focus on the bodies of Israeli hostages and the conflicts among Palestinians, but to ignore the fact that Palestinians have been held hostage for years and years, and to forget that:

• Thousands of children have been killed.

• Hospitals have been bombed.

• Whole families erased.

This is not a misunderstanding.
It is the deliberate and ongoing destruction of a people—and we all watched it happen.

Love cannot mistake headlines for healing.
Love holds its gaze.
Love remembers.
And love does not wait for permission to tell the truth.

Yet we are told—in op-eds, in press briefings, even in international prize ceremonies—that peace has been restored.
That clarity is divisive.
That neutrality is virtue.

Earlier this year, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a recipient who openly aligns with Zionist ideology—an ideology inseparable from occupation, apartheid, and the erasure of Palestinian life.
It shows how Israel intimidates Norway as much as it does Arab countries. This is not a fluke. It is the pattern.

The Nobel Peace Prize… has too often functioned not as a recognition of justice, but as a ceremony of self-congratulation for pathological Western powers.
A tool of moral laundering for empire.

The non-Western Global peoples have to be asking if Israel can exist as part of the community of countries.

We have all been taught Western values. Values that justified expansion by claiming to bring “civilization,” “liberty,” or “progress” to other peoples. In practice, this often meant subjugation, resource extraction, cultural erasure, and violence. We keep hearing that “our Western values are in jeopardy.”
This means you and I are a threat to Western values—the values of Colonialism, imperialism, and violence. There are plenty of good Western values, but they are mostly aspirational and generally selective of white populations.

When awards are handed out for the kind of peace that keeps systems of violence intact,
we are not witnessing justice—We are watching empire praise itself for its restraint, while the rubble is still warm.”

Love that rejoices in the truth refuses that kind of validation, refuses to confuse the comfort of whiteness with the work of liberation.

“Love never gives up. It always trusts. Always hopes. Always perseveres.”

If love were only a feeling, it would be insufficient for moments like this.
But love is more than emotion. It is infrastructure for endurance.

Leo has endured.
Mandla has endured.
Greta is enduring still.
And so are many of you.

You are still showing up.
Still raising your voice, still boycotting.
Still refusing to forget the names the news no longer mentions.

This is the resilience of love—not the absence of grief,
but the refusal to be numbed by it.

Everything else will pass away.
Awards will fade.
Institutions will fracture.
Applause will grow silent.
Sermons will be forgotten.
But love—when real and rooted in justice—endures.

Love that lasts is not just about what we say, but how we stand, where we show up, what we risk, and what we refuse to look away from.
Love outlives every regime, every dismissal, every fear.

It stretches across time and memory, reaching toward what is yet to be.

This love—the love that held Judith, steadied Mandela, and gave Greta the clarity to speak—is not theory.
It is practice.
It is presence.
It is power.

So what will we do with it?
We love in public.
We name what others will not.
We remember what must not be forgotten.
We keep faith with the stories that still need telling.

And we believe—still—
Love is stronger than death,
Truth is louder than empire,
Liberation is the language God still speaks.

May you hold a love that refuses to look away,
Listens before it judges,
Speaks when silence is easier,
Sees history’s patterns and chooses freedom every time.

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May you love like Leo.
May you love like Greta.
May you love like Mandela.
May you love like Christ.
May your love not just survive this world—
But transform it.

I’m sitting in a rented place in Cape Town.
Diane and I are beginning again at an age when many people assume the beginning years are long behind you—
and this move is testing what we believe about blooming late in life.

Our address is changing,
but our affection for our community
and our participation in its life
are not ending.

In fact, if anything,
this new season may deepen
how much we depend
on the life we share together.

From “Boomer” to “Bloomer”

And that has me thinking
about a word that follows my generation everywhere.

You’ve heard it,
maybe even used it—
Boomer.

It’s a convenient label.
A demographic category.
Sometimes affectionate, sometimes dismissive.

But almost always with an assumption built in:
that our defining chapter is already behind us.
That the most interesting parts of our lives
have already happened.
That what remains
is mostly maintenance.

Maintenance of health.
Maintenance of assets.
Maintenance of routines.
Maintenance of a story that has already been written.

But I am increasingly suspicious of that story.

Because the longer I live,
the more I realize
how unfinished a human life remains—
even in its later chapters.

There are still conversations I have not had.
Still landscapes I have not learned to love.
Still assumptions I am trying to unlearn.
Still possibilities I had not imagined until recently.

So maybe the better word
for this stage of life
is something else entirely.

Not Boomer.
Bloomer.

A bloomer is someone
who refuses the idea
that growth has an expiration date.

Someone who understands
that maturity is not about
closing down possibilities
but about opening them
more deliberately.

And blooming,
when you think about it,
is rarely a solitary act.

Gardens flourish
because many hands tend them.
Many eyes notice what needs care.
Many hearts remain invested
in the life that is growing there.

Whatever blooming still lies ahead
for Diane and me
will not happen in isolation.

It will depend, in part,
on the community that has nurtured us
and walked with us—
including all of you.

What Our Community Has Meant

Diane and I have spent many decades
in church leadership.
We have served in many communities
over the years.

But what we have experienced

in our current group
has been unusually authentic and rich.

This community has nourished us
in ways they may not fully realize.

A Pandemic Garden

2020 — During the pandemic,
when the world suddenly became
very small and uncertain,
I began gardening.

There was something grounding
about tending a small patch of earth
while so much else
felt unpredictable.

But the truth is,
that little garden
was not the only thing
that I found sustaining during those years.

This community did too.

During months when isolation,
anxiety,
and uncertainty
weighed heavily on so many people,
our life together—even through screens—
steadied us.

Collective Grief and Family Distance

We are living in a time
when the weight of the world
is not easy to set aside.

As we witness the troubling grip that Israel has
on many of our government officials,
drawing nations into conflict—
not only in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Syria,
the wider Middle East—
but in other regions as well.

For more than thirty years,
the nations of the world have stood before
the United Nations calling for an end
to the blockade of Cuba—
again and again, nearly every nation saying “end it”—
while the United States and Israel have often
stood almost alone in refusing.

And when a nation can blockade Cuba for generations
and then extend its power into places like Venezuela,
or Nigeria,
reshaping governments and futures—

it reveals a pattern of power that pressures,
isolates, and reshapes nations that refuse
to align with it.

Something else that heavily burdens
Diane and me are the fears carried by families
facing abduction, detention, and separation here at home—
it becomes harder
to keep our hearts settled.

And right alongside that,
there is another layer to this beginning.

This move will take us farther
from our children and grandchildren.
And in a time when the world already feels uncertain,
distance carries a different kind of weight.

I have felt that as
I have been preparing these words.

A kind of distractedness.
A heaviness that doesn’t quite lift.
A sense that even as we go about our days,
something larger is pressing in on us.
Collective grief.

And in a time like this,
communities like this one
matter more than we sometimes realize.

They become places
where people remember
how to listen to one another.
Where compassion still has room to breathe.
Where faith continues to grow quietly
beneath the surface.

This community
has been that kind of garden for us.

How We Got to Cape Town

This new beginning in Cape Town
did not emerge out of nowhere.

In May of 2024, my mother died—
the Sunday before Mother’s Day.
She was the last of our four parents.

With her passing,
a quiet threshold opened.

The generation that had anchored our lives
for decades
was suddenly gone.

Grief has a way
of rearranging the map of a life.

It asks questions
that are easy to postpone
when the old structures
are still standing.

Around the same time,
another truth
was becoming harder to ignore.

Our long-term future in Santa Barbara—
a place we love deeply—
was beginning to look
financially precarious.

Some of you remember that in 2020
I stepped down from my church in Oxnard,
where I had served as pastor for 27 years.

I had no doubt that the time had come,
even though a major part of our income
came from that church.

Oxnard was where I learned
I could love unconditionally
while being loved
conditionally in return.

Oxnard was where I learned
I could grow,
but only see a few people
willing to grow with me.

2020 was when I came to
understand I was worth so much
more than the price tag attached to me.

That’s how I wound up
with you as friends.

Also in 2020,
I listened to Whitney Houston’s final album,
the whole album,
at least a dozen times.

But look,
this move to Cape Town is exciting,
so please don’t feel sorry for us.

Loss and reality together
have a way of clarifying things.

They invite a question
that can feel
both unsettling and freeing:

If we were going to begin again somewhere,
where might that be?

One thing we knew right away
was this:
wherever we might go,
the relationships
that have shaped our lives here
would not simply disappear.

Geography may shift,
but the deeper ties of community
have a way
of stretching across distance.

“Full of Sap and Green”

That brings me
to the quiet wisdom
of Psalm 92.

The psalmist writes
that those who are rooted in God’s life
“flourish like the palm tree,”
that they are “planted in the house of the Lord,”
and that “they still bear fruit in old age;
they are ever full of sap and green.”

I love that image.

People who may look weathered
on the outside,
but who are still
very much alive
on the inside—
still drawing strength
from deep, hidden roots.

And in a world that wears people down,
that image carries even more weight.

To speak of bearing fruit in old age
is not just comforting—
it is a quiet act of defiance
against everything that diminishes life
before its time.

According to Psalm 92,
a life rooted in God
is not a story of steady decline
into irrelevance.

It is the story
of a tree
that keeps drawing life
from a source
it did not create.

A tree that keeps
sending up green shoots.
A tree that keeps
bearing fruit
long after the world assumes
it should be done.

And gardens,
as anyone who tends one knows,
are never finished.

They are always being
pruned and replanted.
Always adjusting to weather.
Always beginning again.

Psalm 92
gives us permission
to see our lives that way.

Not as something we are simply maintaining,
but as something still growing.

Blooming as Quiet Resistance

Blooming in later life
looks different
than blooming in youth.

It is slower.
Less concerned
with proving something.
Less anxious
about recognition.

It becomes more interested
in depth.
More interested
in becoming someone
rather than becoming known.

And in a time like this,
to keep growing—
to keep tending what is life-giving—
is not naïve.

It is, in its own way,
an act of quiet resistance.

Perhaps that is
one of the deeper invitations
of aging:
not merely to grow older,
but to grow wider.

To let experience
soften us
instead of hardening us.

To become more curious
instead of more certain.

To remain open
to the possibility
that life may still have
new forms of beauty
to offer.

And communities
matter deeply
in that process.

None of us
blooms alone.

We borrow courage
from one another.
We borrow hope
from one another.

Sometimes we even borrow imagination
from one another
when our own
begins to run thin.

Diane and I
have found that kind of nourishment here.

Which is why
this next chapter
is not an ending for us.

Our address will be changing,
but our affection for this community
and our participation in its life
are not ending.

If anything,
this new season
will ask us
to rely on one another
even more—

to keep tending
this shared garden of faith
together,
wherever we happen
to be planted.

By birth year
we may be Boomers.

But a human life
is not a demographic category.

It is a living,
blooming story—

like a tree beside living water,
like a garden
that is never quite finished.

So perhaps the deeper question—
for all of us,
in every decade of life—
is this:

Are we still willing
to bloom?

Are we willing to trust
that, as the psalmist dares to say,
we might still “bear fruit in old age,”
that we might still be “full of sap and green,”
because our roots
are sunk deep
into the life of God?

And are we willing
to keep tending this garden together—

not because the world is easy,
but because even now,
God is not finished growing life in us.

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This essay was published during our first days living in Cape Town. If this work helps you stay human, faithful, and morally awake in a disorienting time, I invite you to become a subscriber. Your participation (including sharing with others) keeps this witness public and available to readers who need it.

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We are together from many rooms, neighborhoods, and continents.

Diane and I are with you from Cape Town. Table Mountain at our back. The Atlantic between many of us. Different skies over us. Different time zones.

In a way, we are far apart.

And yet, we are so close to one another.

In common Spirit, we are located.

We are found. We are named. We are welcomed.

We are called—

friend.

That may be especially good news today.

Because there are seasons in life when a person can feel dislocated even while doing what they know is right.

You can be exactly where you are meant to be and still feel the strangeness of standing in a new place.

You can trust that God has led you and still feel the dislocation in the relocation.

I will tell you plainly: This is a word I need.

Diane and I are in the right place. And we are also in a new place.

Both can be true.

I suspect that is true not just for one couple moving to a new city,

but for many of us who are

trying to live bravely during these unpredictable times.

So, can we hear this word together?

Jesus at the Table: The Maps We Can’t See

Jesus used the image of a wedding feast to picture God’s dream—the Beloved Community.

And Jesus begins by noticing.

Luke tells us:

“When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable.”

Before Jesus teaches, he watches the room.

Before he speaks, he pays attention.

He notices how people arrange themselves.

He notices who moves toward honor.

He notices who seems secure.

He notices who waits near the edge.

He notices the invisible map of the table.

Every table

has a map.

Every room

Is mapped.

Every society

Is mapped.

Couldn’t a Zoom space be mapped?

Who feels free to speak. Who hesitates. Who has been listened to before. Who has learned not to expect much room.

Jesus notices all of it.

Because so much of our pain begins in being unseen.

Unseen in your gifts.

Unseen in your grief.

Unseen in your exhaustion.

Unseen in your humanity.

We do not have a head table here. We are gathered in little squares, from different rooms, carrying different burdens.

Some cameras are on. Some are off. Some voices come easy. Some are quiet. Some arrive joyful. Some arrive weary. Some carry grief no one else can see.

And still—

The Spirit notices the room.

That’s already grace.

Dislocated Lives in an Unsettled Time

We are living in a time when many people feel unseen.

The world feels unsettled. Communities are strained. Families are divided. There is loneliness in the air.

Some of us are dislocated by poverty, racism, ableism, illness, grief, or political cruelty.

Some by migration.

Some by the loss of a role we thought would always be ours.

Others are dislocated more quietly—

present, but not quite held.

visible, but not quite seen.

nearby, but not quite welcomed.

Somebody here knows what I am talking about.

So all I have to do is affirm it:

God has been saying to you,
“I see you.
I got you.”

And then Christ leans toward the one watching from the edge of the room and says:

“Move up higher.”

“Friend, move up higher.”

Learning to Hear New Voices

When Jesus sees the guests choosing places of honor, I don’t imagine him sneering.

I do not imagine contempt.

There was a time when I might have preached this text differently.

When I was a young pastor, I had mistaken Western Christianity for the gospel.

My bookshelves were full of white men.

So was my pulpit.

So was the Jesus I was preaching.

It took years and other voices to free me.

Howard Thurman.

James Cone.

Jacqueline Grant.

Desmond Tutu.

Not just theologians. I listened to Angela Davis. Malcolm X. Frantz Fanon. Filmmakers like Raoul Peck. Social commentators like Briahna Joy Gray and Marc Lamont Hill.

James Baldwin said:

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

That was in a radio interview 65 years ago, and, yes, it’s true today.

It can be exhausting.

People wield their colonizer daggers and keep stabbing, cutting us, and daggers are most effective when someone is in close proximity.

Oh, but the healers have been near us too.

Thank you, Jesus.

Geographically now?

I may be in a space to regather… and reconnect with renewed energy.

For the record, each year I read some twenty books written by women—mostly Black and other minoritized women.

Not as a project.

As a need.

Because the God who meets Hagar at the spring is not on the empire’s syllabus.

Empire, Atrocity, and a Different Kind of Revival

Dear ones,

I am weary of Westernized voices in the household of God.

It’s so easy for us to settle for atrocity when we live in an empire that destroys other countries around the world.

We destroyed Vietnam.

We destroyed Haiti.

We destroyed Palestine.

We destroyed Sudan.

We destroyed Iraq.

And there are more.

May we never stop naming them.

I’m not surprised that a country that covers up the genocides in the Americas—massacring more than 80 million humans, a country that has demolished modern states throughout the world—I’m not surprised that it’s okay with terrorizing African Americans.

It’s clear to me that America is still not remorseful over Manifest Destiny, and over slavery.

One reason all of us keep coming together is that many of you are weary, too.

If the evil doesn’t tear at you, you need to be born again.

But Dear Ones, take heart.

Christ is calling us.

Christ is calling us into a revival that will not come to us from the empire’s library.

It will come the way revival always comes—

through the voices long unheard.

It will be a revival of the generosity of…

friends.

So to the women whose names were left off the syllabus—

“Move up higher.”

To the African, Asian, and Latin American scholars, like Gustavo Gutiérrez, that the West called “contextual” while calling itself “systematic”—

“Move up higher.”

To Indigenous elders, like LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, who were called exotic when they were teachers—

“Move up higher.”

To Henrietta Lacks.

To Rosa Parks

To fierce Jewish mothers, like Judith Lesner,

To Hagar at the spring, hearing her own name from the all-seeing God—

“Move up higher.”

“Friend, Move Up Higher”: Humility as Relief

These days I read this passage tenderly.

When I see the guests scrambling for places of honor, I see human beings trying to be somebody.

Who among us does not know that hunger?

When the world feels uncertain, we reach for signs that we matter.

We want to be respected.

We want our life to count.

Jesus understands that need.

But he wants to free us from the stressful rush, helping us find peace and calm.

So he says…

When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor.

Take the lower place.

Then the host may come and say—

“Friend,
move up higher.”

Friend.

That word is the sound of grace.

And before it comforts us, it releases us.

Humility here is not humiliation.

It is relief.

The relief of not having to climb.

The relief of not having to prove our worth in every space.

The relief of trusting that our place is given by God, not seized from someone else.

You do not have to compete your way into belovedness.

You do not have to be impressive to be precious.

This is good news in a weary time.

Who Gets Invited?

Then Jesus turns

his notice from the guests

… to the host.

Look, it’s one thing

For the guests to take a lower seat.

It is another for the host

to set out more seats —

and to set them

for people

who can’t pay you back.

Do you only welcome people who can repay you, confirm you,

make you more comfortable?

Or can your welcome reach beyond the circle of repayment?

Please hear me on this.

Dear People, the question is also for us.

Whose face is not yet on this Zoom that should be?

Who in our own communities, in our own families,

has not yet been told that there is a seat

with their name on it?

We wait to be invited.

But the invitations are already in our hands.

In a dislocated world, Jesus gives us a table where no one has to climb,

or prove, perform, or repay

in order to be called

friend.

Where Black women are not asked to make themselves smaller before they are heard.

Where African theologians are not asked to translate themselves for Western ears.

Where disabled bodies are not an afterthought—they are indispensable.

Where the grieving are not asked to become cheerful before they are welcome.

And there is an old song that sings this table:

There is a balm in Gilead
to make the wounded whole.

There is a balm in Gilead
to heal the sin-sick soul.

This community already knows about that table.

There is tenderness here.

There is care here for people the world overlooks.

That matters.

That is holy.

That is part of the gospel already alive among us.

So I do not hear Jesus scolding us.

I hear Jesus blessing what is already here and inviting it to grow.

A Scattered Table, A Holy Noticing

For a church that gathers on Zoom, this takes a particular form.

Our table is scattered.

We do not always know what is happening just outside the frame.

So our hospitality becomes a kind of holy noticing.

We notice names.

We notice absence.

We notice silence without judging it.

We notice who may need a call, a note, a prayer, a little space.

We notice that a camera off does not mean someone is far away.

We notice that quiet is not always disengagement.

And in whatever ways we can, we say to one another:

“Friend, there is room for you here.”

Not because you are feeling strong.

Not because you can give something back.

Simply because you are beloved.

“Move up higher.”

Christ, Our Table and Our Friend

This is the table Jesus gives.

And the good news is, Jesus does not only teach this table.

Jesus is this table.

And he is the guest who takes the lowest place.

And he is the host who invites those who cannot repay.

And he is the one who finds people in their dislocation—

the sick,

the grieving,

the ashamed,

the weary,

the excluded,

the people standing at the edge wondering whether the invitation could possibly include them.

When he finds them, he does not say:

Prove yourself.

He says—

Friend.

That word is the sound heard by the person who thought the table was for other people.

The one who had stopped expecting an invitation.

The weary soul who thought they had to keep climbing forever.

The miracle is not only that the lowly are lifted.

The miracle is also that the anxious are freed.

Freed from climbing, and comparing.

Freed to receive your own place as a gift.

Because we have all been welcomed by a grace we cannot repay.

We did not earn our seat at the table of God.

We were found.

Located in our own dislocation.

We were called friends.

So let Jesus give us relief.

Relief from the fear that our place is insecure.

And then, from that relief, let us become a table of relief for others.

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A Sign of God’s Dream

In a dislocated world, may this community be a sign of God’s dream.

A Zoom space, yes.

Substack, yes.

A scattered table, yes.

But also a place where the weary can rest from climbing, where the overlooked can be seen, where the lonely can be remembered, and where the voices long unheard are finally welcomed.

Christ has found us in our own dislocation.

Christ has welcomed us when we could not repay.

Christ has called us friends.

So to the weary—

to the global majority Christ has been waiting on humanity to hear—

Friend.

Move up higher.

Rev. Dr. David N. Moore,

Cape Town, South Africa — May 2026

Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions, and videos and ideas from other producers.

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The world can astonish us.

And we will be surprised further.

People from every imaginable orientation
are capable of whiplashing our expectations.

Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Sunnis.
Patriots.
Mennonites.
Communists.
Neoliberals.
Hindu nationalists.
Pagans.

You name it.

The future will not unfold
according to our stereotypes.

(You could take a moment to admire your own ascent, here.)

The Distance a Body Can Travel

Over these past weeks, I have been writing about the distance a body can travel.

From certainty to curiosity.
From doctrine to breath.
From the Jesus of civil religion
to the Christ my body knows.

My horizon has been moving.

But the deeper truth is this:

The horizon is not only moving for me.

It is moving for us.

The Dream of Beloved Community

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke often about what he called the Beloved Community.

He did not imagine it as sentimental harmony.

He understood conflict too well for that.

The Beloved Community was a vision of a world
where justice and love were strong enough
to organize society itself.

A world where poverty would not be tolerated.
Where violence would not be normalized.
Where racism would no longer determine
whose bodies could breathe.

It was not naïve.

It was courageous imagination.

The Horizon Before Us

There are signs that this horizon is moving.

Across the world, people are questioning
systems that once felt immovable.

Some of the kids are refusing inherited prejudices.

Communities are asking harder questions.
about power, race, gender, and belonging.

Faith traditions are wrestling with their own histories.

Some resist.
Some retreat.
But many are listening.

Listening to voices once pushed to the margins.

Listening to the earth itself,
groaning under the weight of human exploitation.

They hear the Spirit moving
through unexpected places.

The horizon is shifting.

Breathing Together

Throughout this series, I have written about breath.

In Scripture, the Spirit is breath.

Ruach.
Pneuma.

Life moving through bodies.

When the parasympathetic nervous system engages, breathing deepens.

The body moves
from vigilance
toward restoration.

For communities shaped by generations of trauma—
racial terror, war, displacement, misogyny—
that restoration is not simple.

But when people gather
in truth
and courage,

something happens.

Breath returns.

Hope becomes possible again.

“Always pray and do not give up.”
— Jesus (Luke 18:1)

I believe this is what Jesus was pointing toward.

Not religious exhaustion.

But spiritual respiration.

“And pray in the Spirit on all occasions…”
— Ephesians 6:18

The Beloved Community may begin with justice.

But it is sustained by breath.

By people learning
how to breathe together again.

A Global Family

Earlier in my life, I believed family was mostly defined by shared beliefs.

Today, my understanding of family has widened.

I am less comfortable with faith-identity labels.

I have experienced real solidarity
with people who do not share my tradition.

I am learning from Buddhists.
From courageous Jews.
From Indigenous wisdom.
From agnostics and atheists
whose moral courage puts many believers to shame.

These relationships have not weakened
my regard for Jesus.

They have deepened it.

Because the Christ my body knows
is not confined to a narrow boundary.

The Spirit moves
where breath is needed.

And breath is needed everywhere.

At this very moment,
someone is coming up for air.

The Work Ahead

Beloved Community is not inevitable.

It requires courage.

It requires honesty about history.

It requires the willingness to see
where religion has served domination
rather than liberation.

It requires repentance.

But it also requires imagination.

The ability to believe
that the future can be wider than the past.

That families can expand.

That justice can grow roots.

That breath can return
even to places that have been suffocating
for generations.

The Christ My Body Knows

When I began this series (in Santa Barbara, now in Cape Town), I spoke about two Jesuses.

One felt like embodied solidarity.
The other felt like civil religion.

Along the way, we have walked through
empire, crucifixion, lynching, Scripture, breath, and transformation.

When this series began,
I wrote that my nervous system
could recognize the difference
before my theology could explain it.

One Jesus tightened my chest.

The other slowed my breathing.

And now we arrive here.

Not at an ending.

But at a widening.

The Christ my body knows
does not ask us
to retreat into smaller worlds.

He invites us toward a larger one.

Toward a horizon that keeps moving.

Toward a community
where justice and love
are strong enough
to hold us all.

Toward the Beloved Community.

And when I look toward that horizon,
I feel something in my body.

My breath deepens.

Hope returns.

And I remember:

The horizon is moving.

And we are moving with it.

Author’s Note:

This piece concludes a series exploring how faith shifts—not only in belief, but in the body: in breath, in tension, and in the widening of what we are able to see and hold together.

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Tuesday morning, Diane and I will close a door in Santa Barbara for the last time, but not on our people.

I’ve been searching for the right words for this moment. Not with sermonic style — I sort of used those last Sunday. Not the “truth to power” kind — those have been building up for months in these pages. Something softer. Perhaps a letter. The sort you write to people who have been with you long enough to earn the story.

So here it is.

The floor with Midget

I grew up in the projects — Eliza Court, Oxnard, California. My father was in the U.S. Navy, often absent for long stretches. When he was home, he tried to militarize us. I could never make my bed perfectly enough.

My closest friend was my Cockapoo “Midget,” which I would one day find was an insensitive name. She followed me almost everywhere, protected me on my paper route, waited at the bus stop when I came home from school. When she grew weak and went blind, my parents decided she should be euthanized. The night before, instead of sleeping in my bed, I slept on the floor with my arm around her.

Daddy came in and saw us. He started to chide me for being on the floor. My mother redirected him.

It would be a lifetime before I understood what she was doing. My mother was always my father’s teacher. He became who he was — the kindest, gentlest, most patient man I have ever known — because of who she was to all of us.

Our Shiba Inu, Sachi, died in October, seeming to anticipate that we could not take her to South Africa. She was 16. I have been thinking about that boy on the floor again. About what it means to stay close to the ones who are leaving. About the grace of not being chided for grieving.

Diane has been teaching me the way my mother taught my father. I see it in her, and in so many of the women in the constellation that is my life. Thank you for helping to demilitarize and humanize me.

The long way here

I have spent most of my adult life in Santa Barbara. Pastor, provider, educator — often the only Black person in the room. I dropped hints. I left space. I made room. I waited for my white evangelical colleagues to act on what I believed they already knew.

They were kind. Kindness, I have since learned, is not the same thing as courage.

In 2015, I told a lunch companion that I celebrated the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. Two weeks later, he threatened to report me to the jurisdictional bishop. Some days after that, I received a call — not from the bishop, but from our international Presiding Bishop. For two and a half hours, we talked. He suggested I resign.

I told him: I remember times when one child would get angry, take their ball, and go home. But Bishop, I’m not mad at anyone.

I put the responsibility back in his hands. The denomination has mostly ignored me since. I have no regrets.

Santa Barbara is beautiful. It is also Chumash land. A people lived there, built there, made life there, long before it became what many of us have known. I did not always name that truth loudly enough. I am naming it now, before I go, because integrity requires it.

What the trance named

Before dawn on December 25, 2001, I fell into a trance.

A voice guided me through some of the world’s most significant moments — the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989, people streaming across joyously, borders dissolving, the impossible becoming ordinary. Then South Africa, February 11, 1990: Mandela walking free after 27 years.

The voice asked if I remembered my surprise at those moments. I did.

Then it said: the next great global event will be greater than both of these.

Three words followed: Africa Will Arise.

I am 71 years old. I was 2½ in 1957 when Ghana raised its flag. I was 35 when Mandela walked out of prison. The arc I have been watching my whole life, the arc I have been writing about, the arc the Spirit named in a trance on Christmas morning — that is where we are going.

Cape Town carries its own history. Land taken. Communities removed. Neighborhoods erased. We are not moving there in innocence. We are moving there carrying inheritance and complicity — trying not to be trapped in guilt, but also not asleep.

A Black couple, moving between histories. Still trying to walk truthfully through places shaped by force that people now call home.

What I am carrying

I am carrying Beloved Community Church — you, the ones who show up to a Zoom screen on Sunday mornings from across the Central Coast and beyond, who break bread on screens, who have been my congregation, and my teachers. And I am carrying the Jesus Collective, the broader community of friends committed to a faith that refuses empire, my healers. An ocean will not change either of those. We will still gather. We will still commune.

I am carrying my children. The heaviness of an ocean between us and ordinary moments is real. I am not romanticizing the distance. I am simply trusting — the way I trusted on the floor with Midget, and later, Sachi. I am trusting in the same way, I think, the Jesus’ friends trusted behind locked doors — that love does not require proximity to hold.

I am carrying this Substack. I have only been here eight months, and you found me anyway. You may not know my face or my congregation’s names. You know the argument. You have been inside these pages through the school that didn’t close for MLK Day, through the bishops and the senators, through the trance and the prophecy. You are part of what I carry.

And I am carrying Diane. Just as my mother, Ruth, carried my father, David — quietly, steadily, influencing. She is the reason I can take this step. She is the reason I am still becoming.

The invitation

I will be writing from Cape Town. Not travel writing — I am not a tourist. Witness. The same eye that watched a principal offer me a day off and understood immediately what it meant, turned toward what Africa shows me that Santa Barbara never could.

If these words have accompanied you, and you have not yet subscribed, this is a good moment to come closer. The long way home is entering its final leg, and I intend to write from inside it.

If you have been sitting with these words in private and have not yet told anyone — tell someone. Solidarity travels by word of mouth. It always has.

We go. We. go.

Not ready. Not certain. But willing.

Still growing. Still becoming. Still trusting that the same voice that called Mary by name in the garden is still calling — in the places where we are afraid, in the work we cannot yet see the end of.

And whatever comes next, God is already there.

An ocean away. Still here.

Rev. Dr. David N. Moore

Cape Town, South Africa — April 2026

Earlier this week, the world saw a photograph of an Israeli soldier smashing the face of a statue of Jesus in a Maronite Christian village in southern Lebanon. The image circulated quickly, and so did the official response: condemnation from (some) church leaders, statements of outrage, and finally an apology and a promise from the IDF to restore the statue to its place.

I have no strong opinion about Christians being offended by this desecration. While I am at best uninterested in white Jesus, their offense is understandable. Sacred images carry memory, devotion, and communal meaning, and the destruction of such an image by a soldier in an occupying army is not a minor matter.

But just how valuable are those memories, devotion, and communality? Can they not also be diversionary consolations?

The speed and focus of the apology raise a deeper question: What does it mean when a statue receives prompt outrage, apology, and repair, while the people whose lives are being shattered by the same military power are still waiting?

Not because desecration does not matter. If an IDF soldier destroyed an image identified as Jesus, then Christians may be right to condemn the act.

But I am hardly impressed by the promise to restore an image of Jesus while the living image of God in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon remains under assault.

Because Jesus will be fine when people are fine.

Jesus does not need the imperial superstructure to defend his honor while it destroys the poor. Jesus does not need soldiers, states, or public relations offices to protect his image while children are buried under rubble. Jesus does not need a restored statue more than Palestinians need restored homes, restored safety, restored freedom, restored dignity, and restored life.

A statue can be replaced.
A child cannot.

An image can be repaired.
A people must be liberated.

And if Christian outrage moves faster for stone than for flesh, then the problem is not with the people questioning the apology. The problem is with a religious imagination that has forgotten where Christ said he would be found.

Jesus said, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

That means the condition of the people is not separate from the honor of Christ. It is the measure of it.

So yes, restore the statue.

I guess.

But do not call that justice.
Do not call that repentance.
Do not call that moral seriousness.

Let’s not find ourselves falling into a trap of identifying with a statue.

Jesus will be fine when people are fine.

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Until then, every apology that repairs the symbol while ignoring the suffering is too small.

Trump posted this. Neither is a portrayal of Jesus.

Recognize when you are in a propaganda feedback loop.

Easter has already happened.

And still, in ways we may not fully understand, we the people are a threat to everything that has ever tried to diminish human dignity.

Diane and I are living inside a real change now.

Luggage. Travel. Taxes. Change of address.

But it is not only our life that is shifting.

It feels, to me, as though many of us are living in a world that will not hold still.

Families shift.

Certainties shift.

Old assumptions give way.

People are carrying fear about money, about government, about war, about whether truth itself can still find a place to stand.

So when this passage from John’s Gospel meets us in a locked room, it does not feel distant to me.

Trembling, with fear and excitement.

Easter can come in with energy. All that “He is risen” joy.

That is where the disciples were too.

John’s Gospel says they were together in a house, with the doors locked.

And here’s what captivates me:

This was not before the resurrection.

This was after.

After the empty tomb.

After Mary had said, “I have seen the Lord.”

After the burst of hope.

And still, the doors were locked.

That may be one of the most honest moments in the Bible.

They had heard the good news, and still did not feel safe.

That feels familiar.

Because you can believe something holy has happened.

You can trust that God is at work.

You can sense that death did not win.

And still, you can feel afraid in the same world you were in before.

That does not make you hopeless.

Because the world does not change overnight just because something awesome has happened.

For the friends of Jesus, the empire was still there.

The same systems.

The same authorities.

The same machinery of humiliation and death.

The same power that had tortured and killed Jesus was still in place.

So of course the doors were locked.

And that matters, because sometimes we try to make resurrection too smooth.

Too clean.

Too quickly victorious.

But these disciples were not followers of a religion.

They were admirers of a friend.

They were people who had watched someone they loved be brutalized by the state.

They saw what power could do.

They knew what fear felt like.

They knew what it meant to wonder whether what happened to him might happen to them.

That is not a nice story for them to remember.

That is a locked door.

And still, that locked room is where Jesus comes.

Not after they pulled themselves together.

Not after they became brave.

He comes right into the room that still smells like fear.

And he says:

“Peace be with you.”

Not, “Peace when the imperial superstructure collapses.”

Not, “Peace once your nervous system settles.”

Not, “Peace once the threats are gone.”

Peace, right there.

Peace in the room where the fear is still real.

And then he shows them his hands and his side.

He does not come back hiding the wounds.

He does not return as though nothing happened.

He comes back marked by what was done to him.

This matters.

Because the peace he brings is not the peace of forgetting.

It is not the peace of pretending the wound was not a wound.

It is not the peace of asking violated people to quiet down so everybody else can move on.

No.

He shows them the wounds.

As if to say:

What was done was real.

Do not rush past it.

Do not call it small.

Do not make peace by erasing the evidence.

And then, almost in the same breath, he says:

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

Which is hard.

Because it would be easier if he had said:

“Rest a while.”

“Take your time.”

“Wait until you feel ready.”

But he does not.

Peace and sending, at the same time.

And then he breathes on them.

How about that?

Breath.

Spirit.

Life.

Jesus does not only speak peace.

He breathes it into them.

Which is to say: the peace he gives is not just a calming thought.

It is not a slogan.

It is not denial.

It is something living.

Something breathed.

Something that enters frightened people and gives them a different way to stand inside the same hard world.

And then comes the part we often soften because it unsettles us.

He says:

“If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

That’s enormous.

That is authority.

Not only the authority to bless.

Not only the authority to comfort.

But the authority to discern.

The authority to tell the truth.

The authority not to rush forgiveness where truth has not been told, where repair has not been sought, where harm is still being denied, where the wounded are still being asked to bear more than they should bear.

There are people in this world who know exactly why forgiveness cannot be rushed.

Survivors of sexual violence know it.

People whose children were taken by war know it.

Families whose daughters were beaten, imprisoned, or killed by regimes that fear their freedom know it.

Communities whose land was stolen know it.

The violated often understand something the comfortable would rather not face:

And maybe that is part of what this passage entrusts to people of Jesus.

Not cheap grace.

Not pressured reconciliation.

Not a religious performance where the wounded are asked to make everybody else feel better.

But moral seriousness.

The authority to say:

No, what happened matters.

No, we will not bless denial.

No, we will not call it healed when it has not been healed.

No, we will not confuse being “spiritual” with being available for further harm.

There are some wrongs that cannot be met honestly with immediate forgiveness.

Some wounds require truth first.

Some harms require protection first.

Some histories require reckoning first.

And to withhold forgiveness in such moments is not always a failure of grace.

Sometimes it is exactly what keeps grace from becoming an accomplice to injustice.

So yes, after Easter, his friends are still afraid.

But that is not all they are.

They are also becoming a threat to what has been done to people.

A threat to the lie that the power of the state gets the last word.

A threat to the lie that wounds should be hidden.

A threat to the lie that violated people must hurry toward forgiveness for the comfort of those who benefit from forgetting.

And I am carrying that with particular weight these days.

Because Diane and I are preparing to cross an ocean.

Sometimes it feels right.

Like something we have been moving toward for a long time, even when we could not fully name it.

And sometimes it feels like standing at the edge of something I cannot quite see the bottom of.

A step into a future I believe in, but cannot entirely control.

And there is also this:

What it means to leave children here.

An ocean.

Time zones.

Missed ordinary moments.

The ache of not being there in the same ways you once were.

And I know I am not the only one who knows something about that.

Maybe not the same story.

Maybe not the same geography.

But the same feeling that life changes and you do not get to master all of it.

That the world feels heavy.

You can feel it everywhere right now.

Families under strain.

People living with quiet fear.

Communities wondering what will be protected and what will be sacrificed.

A world in which the vulnerable are still being asked to bear the cost of someone else’s power.

So we come back to this truth:

Christ is risen, and people are still afraid.

Christ is risen, and the wounds are still visible.

Christ is risen, and people of Jesus are still a threat to what has been done to people.

And Diane and I also have to tell the truth about where we stand.

The land we are leaving is not untouched by history.

Santa Barbara, beautiful as it is, is Chumash land.

A people lived there, built there, made life there, long before it became what many of us have known.

And much of what was built afterward came after their world was broken apart.

That is an inconvenient truth.

And where we are going, Cape Town, carries its own history.

Land taken.

Communities removed.

Neighborhoods erased.

Lives reorganized by race, power, and dispossession.

And here we are, a Black couple moving between those histories.

Carrying inheritance and complicity.

Not standing outside history.

Not pure.

Not untouched.

Trying not to be trapped in guilt, but also not asleep.

Trying to walk truthfully through places shaped by force that people now call home.

That, too, is part of integrity.

That, too, is part of what it means not to make peace with forgetting.

I’ve been thinking about Mary in the garden.

Weeping.

Confused.

Looking for a dead body and finding a gardener.

She doesn’t recognize Jesus at first.

She’s looking for death and she stumbles into life.

A gardener.

That image won’t leave me.

Because a gardener knows the real work starts after the bloom that is Easter.

But this?

Right here?

This is the tending season.

Quiet.

Unglamorous.

Kneeling in the soil.

Pulling what needs to go.

Watering things you won’t see bloom for a while.

So the question isn’t whether we believe the Easter story.

It’s whether we can tend, even when we can’t see the result yet.

Can we show up to the soil and trust the seed knows more than we do?

Before I close, what you carry, who you are to each other, it matters.

I see it.

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I see it in Diane, in the life we’ve built.

In Linnea, Michael, Sayuri, and Kenichi.

The steady ways people show up.

Sally, holding things together behind the scenes.

Shella.

Your strength to stay open is upholding us.

David and Leslie.

Robina and Evan.

Matt Moore, preparing our presentations, doing the quiet work.

Jacob and Chelsea, building lives together.

This matters to us all.

Bob and Margie, influencing for good.

Marci.

Naomi.

Maria and Greg.

Peter and Susie.

Diane Fox.

Rosie and Efrian.

Julia and Clint.

Kalon and Ruth.

Scott and Barbara.

Caroline and Will.

Elena and Tim.

Akiko.

None of us comes here empty.

We bring our families, our histories, our communities.

The love.

The loss.

The faith we inherited and the faith we had to make our own.

Ana Rosa and Nicholas.

Lisa.

Jade.

Matt and Sarah, with this new baby girl.

Bonnie.

Jasmin and Mark.

Bronda.

Julius.

Peter and Barbara.

And several others.

Many more dropped in.

More will come.

Each life carrying something real.

Seen and unseen.

Each one bringing your many worlds into this world.

I can hear the message of resurrection and still be afraid.

We can feel something has shifted and still know the world is heavy.

There is an awakening underway.

But here’s what I’m standing on:

Hope doesn’t have to be simple to be real.

Sometimes hope looks like this:

Taking a step without having it all figured out.

Holding grief and still moving forward.

Trusting, not because you’re certain, but because something in you knows you’re not alone.

We go.

We go.

Not ready.

Not certain.

But willing.

Still growing.

Still becoming.

Still trusting that the same voice that called Mary by name in the garden is still calling us.

By name.

In the places where we’re afraid.

In the work we can’t yet see the end of.

And whatever comes next, God is already there.

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Walls and Tight Boundaries

When faith loosens, breath returns, and the horizon begins to move

Sometimes transformation only becomes visible when we stop to look back.

The road behind me has stretched farther than I once imagined.

There was a time when I lived within tight boundaries—
doctrines, certainty,
and the expectation that faith meant holding the line.

As a child in Black churches, it felt like family.

We leaned on stories like Joseph’s—
how he went from betrayal and prison
to power in Egypt.

We needed that hope.

But we also believed every word of the King James Bible was literally true.

At 20, I was called “Hatchet Man” by peers.

I dismissed their critique, convinced I was guarding truth.

Questioning the Frame

Over time, something began to shift.

I started questioning the whiteness embedded in my faith.

I came to understand it as a kind of Christian West supremacy—
a dominant expression of Christianity exported wherever Western power ruled.

Even in seminary, which reflected that same lens, I felt the tension.

When I learned more about the history of the King James Version—its ties to British empire—I began asking different questions:

What about people who don’t speak English?

What about communities whose encounter with Christ did not begin in Europe, or even within Christianity?

I began to wonder if what I had been given
was not the whole of the faith,
but a narrow frame presented as the whole.

The Pastoral Shift

As a pastor, especially in predominantly white evangelical spaces, my horizon shifted again.

I listened closely to the voices around me:

John MacArthur.
Billy Graham.
Jerry Falwell.
Chuck Swindoll.

Jack Hayford stood out.

He was a Pentecostal pastor and scholar who seemed open to more than one stream.

I attended his conferences.

And eventually, I said something out loud:

All of your guest speakers are white.

To his credit, he listened.

And over time, something changed.

That mattered.

Because it showed me something I had not fully seen before:

Faith could stretch.

It could breathe beyond the limits it had been given.

The Absence We Learn to Ignore

But even then, something was off.

Evangelical media surrounded me.

And the absence was unmistakable.

Black singers were welcome.

But Black prophetic voices were not.

We were invited to perform.

Not to interpret.

Not to name.

Not to challenge.

I remember telling a colleague:

One day, people will pay attention to Black preaching—because people hurt.

When the Body Begins to Breathe Again

When I think about that season now, I think about the body.

About breath.

The parasympathetic system allows the body to rest.

To restore.

To breathe deeply again after vigilance.

Because the truth is:

the body knows when it is not safe.

Even when the theology says everything is fine.

The Christ my body knows has been guiding me toward breath.

Each time my horizon shifted—
when doctrines loosened,
when cultural limits became visible,
when something in me said this is too small—

I felt it first in my body.

A release.

A breath.

A widening.

The Spirit, like breath, expands our capacity for life.

The Horizon Still Moves

I have come far.

But I have not arrived.

The Spirit is still moving.

Still unsettling.

Still inviting me beyond what I thought was enough.

The Christ my body knows is not finished with me yet.

And maybe that is what faith is:

Not certainty held tightly.

But breath received again and again.

A life that widens.

A horizon that keeps moving.

And next, I find myself wondering—

what would it mean
for all of us
to breathe this way together?

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There is a familiar feeling in the air again—
a kind of lifted gaze,
a collective inhale,
a sense that we are witnessing something historic.

And in many ways, we are.

The Artemis II mission has just completed a successful journey around the moon—the first time human beings have made that trip in more than fifty years.
A diverse crew.
A long arc bending, at least symbolically, toward inclusion.
A moment that feels, for many, like a return to possibility.

And people are celebrating.

The joy is real

Let’s say that first.

There is something genuinely moving about watching human beings travel nearly 700,000 miles, circling the moon and returning safely.

There is something powerful about seeing
a woman,
a Black astronaut,
an international crew
cross a threshold that once belonged to a very narrow slice of humanity.

And there is something deeply human about wanting to believe
that this—this reaching outward—
is a sign of who we are becoming.

We want that to be true.

But Gil Scott-Heron is still in the room

And whenever we reach for the heavens,
Gil Scott-Heron clears his throat.

Because in 1970, he already named the contradiction:

“A rat done bit my sister Nell…”
“Whitey’s on the moon.”

Not as a rejection of science.
Not as an argument against exploration.
But as a question of priority.

Who gets lifted?
Who gets left?
Who pays the cost of wonder?

The discordant moment

Because here is what sits alongside the celebration:

While the mission was inspiring millions,
there are proposals to cut NASA’s budget by roughly 23% overall,
with nearly half of space science funding eliminated.

“Extinction-level,” one advocate called it.

So even the very project being celebrated
is being hollowed out.

That alone should give us pause.

But it is not the only tension.

The quiet shift: from public dream to private capture

The Apollo missions were always entangled with empire—
Cold War prestige, national power, global messaging.

But they were, at least,
public.

Now the architecture of space is changing.

SpaceX is not just a contractor—it is becoming the infrastructure.
Its vehicles, its timelines, its ambitions are shaping what counts as possible.

And Elon Musk is not merely participating in the story—
he is narrating it.

Mars is not just a destination.
It is a brand.

The moon is not just a shared horizon.
It is an asset class waiting to be defined.

What kind of “we” is this?

The astronauts speak of humanity.

The marketing speaks of humanity.

The spectacle invites us to feel included in humanity.

But Gil Scott-Heron’s question lingers:

Who is the “we”?

Because here on Earth:

• Housing remains out of reach for millions

• Healthcare is uneven and fragile

• Entire regions are living inside climate precarity

• And the same political system that funds rockets debates whether people deserve food, care, or dignity

So the issue is not simply cost.

It is moral imagination.

Spectacle as anesthesia

The danger is not the mission.

The danger is the use of the mission.

Because spectacle has always been one of the most effective ways to:

• unify without addressing injustice

• inspire without redistributing power

• elevate symbols while neglecting systems

We are invited to feel awe.

And awe is not wrong.

But awe can become a kind of anesthesia
if it is not accompanied by clarity.

The deeper question

What Gil Scott-Heron asked was not:

Should we go to the moon?

But:

What does it mean that we can go to the moon
and still not take care of each other?

That question has not gone away.

It has intensified.

Because now we are not only reaching the moon—
we are preparing to commercialize it,
privatize access to it,
and narrate it through the voices of those
who already control so much of life on Earth.

A different imagination

What would it look like

to hold both truths at once?

To say:

Yes—this is beautiful.
Yes—this is human ingenuity at its finest.

And also:

No—this does not absolve us.
No—this does not answer the cries still rising from the ground.

Because maybe the question is not whether
“Whitey’s on the moon.”

Maybe the question is:

Who is still being asked to wait
while we celebrate the sky?

There is a line from Jesus that has a way of returning at moments like this—
not to diminish what we can do,
but to ask what we will do with what we can do:

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

And the question lingers—
what does it mean for a society’s treasure to rise into the sky
while so much of its sorrow remains on the ground?

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Closing

Beloveds,
we are a people who know how to look up.

But we are also a people
who are called to look around.

And until the distance between those two gazes
is closed—

Gil Scott-Heron will keep speaking.

And we would do well to keep listening.

Whitey on the Moon

Jesus came to divest his people, not of scriptural text, but of their cultural dependence on scripture in a changing world. They had varied understandings that often led to contention. So he says, look at me, the Human One (often rendered “Son of Man”).

But Jesus does not stop there.

He anticipated the inevitability of insular perceptions of himself.

After calling their focus to himself, he wants to de-center himself,

so he says, “the spirit will reveal all things.”

This is Jesus showing them that intuition is life. If our nervous system is dysregulated, we will find ourselves overriding our intuition.

The spirit.

This is our pathway, not so much to reject scripture,

but to put it in its place. Jesus is the embodiment of that revelation,

but he desired that they understand what he was about:

he was about them.

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.”

— John 16

Delivered in doctrines.
Contained in statements of faith.
Guarded by denominational boundaries.

My responsibility, I believed, was to learn those doctrines well and defend them faithfully.

Faith was something to master.

But life has a way of revealing what the body cannot bear.

And over time, the Spirit began to teach me a different posture.

Not mastery.

Listening.

The Season of Certainty

In earlier years I lived inside systems that promised clarity.

Denominational frameworks told us what faithful Christians

believed about nearly everything.

About Scripture.
About salvation.
About sexuality.
About women’s leadership.
About reproduction and bodily autonomy.

There were answers ready for every question.

Some of those answers I defended passionately.

I believed anti-queer theology protected biblical authority.

I believed opposition to abortion demonstrated moral seriousness.

I accepted traditions that limited women’s equality because I was told this was faithfulness to Scripture.

I do not recount this with pride.

But it is part of the road that brought me here.

The systems that shaped me were not only theological.

They were cultural.

They formed imagination as much as belief.

The World We Were Waiting For

Another piece of that formation sat quietly beneath the surface.

Many in our denomination carried an expectation about the end of the world.

Not always loudly stated—but present in sermons, prophecy conferences, and Bible study charts.

History, we were taught, was moving toward the Rapture.

The faithful would be taken away.

Wars in the Middle East were watched with fascination.

The modern state of Israel occupied a central place in that imagination—not simply as geopolitics, but as prophetic necessity.

It was a quiet theology.

Woven into the culture more than debated as policy.

The world became a stage for prophecy.

Human suffering could be interpreted as signs of the timetable.

Political alliances could be justified as participation in God’s unfolding plan.

At the time, I rarely questioned it.

It was simply the air we breathed.

But over the years something began to trouble me.

If the gospel is good news for the poor,
why did our theology seem more interested in timelines than in people?

If Christ stands with the oppressed,
why did our imagination sometimes treat war as confirmation that prophecy was progressing correctly?

Gradually I realized:

The Christ my body knows is not waiting for the world to burn so the faithful can escape it.

He is present within the world, breathing life into it.

Not abandoning the earth.

Redeeming it.

And perhaps this is part of what Jesus meant:

“You cannot bear them now.”

Sometimes the Spirit must slowly loosen the imaginations we inherited—

so we can see the world, and our neighbors, again.

Returning to the Room

After several years away, I suggested to my wife that we attend our denomination’s jurisdictional convention again.

Not to rejoin the machinery.

Just to see old friends.
To walk familiar hallways.
To remember where we had come from.

Before we left, I told her:

“If someone starts railing against same-sex marriage, I’m walking out.”

We arrived.

We saw faces we had known for decades.

There were hugs.

Memories of earlier years when we believed we were building something good together.

For a while, it felt almost comfortable.

Then the rhetoric began.

Not quietly.
Not thoughtfully.

That familiar tone—moral certainty mixed with applause lines.

Though the applause felt thinner than I remembered.

I felt my body tighten.

The nervous system recognizes things faster than the intellect.

The room felt smaller.

I came very close to standing up and leaving.

What stopped me was not agreement.

It was grief.

These were people I had loved.

People who had shaped my life.

Walking away would have been easier than staying present with the realization:

The Spirit had carried me somewhere many of them were not ready to go.

And Jesus’ words returned to me:

“You cannot bear them now.”

Truth does not arrive for everyone at the same moment.

But the body often knows when the Spirit is widening compassion.

Naming the Silence

A few years earlier, in 2017, I was invited to present my book at one of the non-plenary sessions of our denomination’s convention in St. Louis.

During the conversation afterward, I noted that Joel Osteen had been invited as a plenary speaker.

That in itself was not unusual.

We often invite an outside voice.

But I found myself naming something that had been quietly forming in me.

There were many prophetic voices within the African American community we were not platforming.

I mentioned Rev. William Barber II.

Someone wondered aloud why voices like his were not invited.

I remember saying:

We do not need to speculate.

Barber celebrates sexual and gender diversity.

Sometimes the voices we exclude are not excluded by accident.

Sometimes exclusion reveals the limits of what a community believes it can bear.

When the Body Began to Notice

Moments like that did not create the shift in me.

They revealed it.

Over time, I began noticing something happening inside my own body.

Conversations where LGBTQ people described the wounds faith had inflicted.

Rooms where women’s gifts were evident—but their leadership restricted.

Pastoral encounters where complicated pregnancies were treated as abstract morality instead of lived experience.

My mind had answers.

But my body noticed the cost.

The nervous system registers before the intellect explains.

A tightening in the chest.
A heaviness in the room.
A sense that the gospel was narrowing compassion instead of widening it.

Something in me began to listen differently.

Breath, Spirit, and the Black Church

In Scripture, Spirit is also breath.

Ruach.
Pneuma.

Breath is life moving through a body.

This language is not foreign to the Black church.

We know what it means to breathe together.

In hush harbors, breath carried songs of survival.

Spirituals rose from lungs that refused to let oppression define the final word.

Howard Thurman spoke of Jesus as good news for those “with their backs against the wall.”

Martin Luther King Jr. preached sermons that moved like breath through a crowd.

Fannie Lou Hamer sang freedom into trembling bodies.

William Barber continues that witness—calling the church back to the poor, the excluded, the wounded.

The Spirit has always moved through breath.

The Christ my body knows does not merely instruct the mind.

He steadies the breath.

When the Body Can Finally Breathe

There is a part of the nervous system that activates when the body senses safety.

The parasympathetic system.

When it engages:

Breathing deepens.
Heart rate slows.
The body shifts from vigilance toward restoration.

For communities shaped by oppression, this shift is not easy.

Hypervigilance becomes inheritance.

But when the Spirit moves, something different can happen.

The breath deepens.

The shoulders lower.

The body finds enough calm to perceive truth again.

This is not escape.

It is restoration.

The kind that makes witness possible.

Perhaps this is why Jesus promises the Advocate.

Not merely to deliver information—

but to guide communities into truth they could not bear while they were still afraid.

Listening Widely

The shift in my life did not mean abandoning faith.

It meant widening the circle of listening.

Listening to LGBTQIA+ faithful whose lives bear witness to grace.

Listening to women whose leadership reflects the Spirit’s gifts.

Listening to communities across the global church.

Listening to the earth itself, groaning under exploitation.

Doctrine had once taught me where truth was allowed to appear.

The Spirit began showing me:

Truth was already speaking in places I had been trained not to hear.

The Christ My Body Knows

The Christ my body knows did not leave his disciples with rigid answers.

He promised the Advocate.

The Spirit of truth.

A presence that keeps guiding communities into understanding they were not ready for before.

I still value theology.

But now theology walks beside listening.

Listening to the body.
Listening to wounded people.
Listening across difference.
Listening to the earth that sustains us all.

The Christ my body knows is breath.

And sometimes, the first sign of the Spirit’s guidance is as simple as this—

the body finally breathes again.

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Author’s Note:

This reflection continues an exploration of how faith, embodiment, and the Spirit’s guidance unfold over time—often beyond the limits of what we were first taught to believe.

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