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Making it work: Intercultural and interfaith marriage
Get PDFThere’s a beauty of intercultural relationships that is often admired but rarely discussed beyond the superficial. For the last five years, I have been married to a man—and married into his family—that adds a new cultural dimension to my already intercultural family. While I have navigated cultural differences my entire life, I have learned a new way of being with others who are unlike me. I have also learned that, though we are bound together by marriage, being family is more a choice that requires intentionality, grace, and patience
Jesus’s surprising embrace of family: Familialism, family, and discipleship in the Gospels
Get PDFNorth American Christians seeking religious revival can find familial language in Scripture a compelling starting point. Shedding an old family and stepping into a new one is a powerful idea for those desiring radical community, and it is an idea Jesus seems to promote at length. It is concerning, however, that encouraging followers to separate from their existing families is also a tactic abusive leaders can use to isolate vulnerable people. Is this what Jesus was doing when he said, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters . . . cannot be my disciple”? On their own, these words can become manipulative, and Jesus’s teachings on family have indeed been weaponized by exploitative cults. Given the damaging potential of misinterpreting Jesus’s message, clarifying the relationship between Jesus, discipleship, and family is crucial.
In order to understand Jesus’s emphasis on discipleship as a new family, we have to consider the culture of familialism that shaped first-century Judea. Family’s place at the center of socioeconomic life in Jesus’s time and place means family imagery in his context promotes engagement in a new, public form of community, not a retreat into an isolated group. Jesus explicitly endorses connections with existing kin, except when those connections directly interfere with the demands of mission
Praying as God’s children: Images of God and the Lord’s Prayer
Get PDFIn spoken prayer, humans are challenged to articulate an image of God. The variety of verbal images of God in Scripture is appropriate to the limits of human language and the variety of human experience of God. Every life situation may yield a new encounter with God and a new way of putting to words who God is. Each metaphor tells a story about how the one praying relates to God.
When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray in Matthew 6 and Luke 11, he instructs them to address God as father. This metaphor tells a surprising story: that followers of Jesus relate to God as children to a parent. In this essay, I journey through the Lord’s Prayer, collecting biblical, theological, and ethical insights to explore Jesus’s rich verbal image of God
