Friend, I seek to follow in the Way of Christ, I am a pastor, a professional theologian, and a professor at a Christian seminary… I have spent the majority of my life doing a few things: practicing love in the way of Jesus, opening to the narrative of God’s shalom through Scripture, and working for more just structures, leadership, and systems in and for those who gather in local churches.
I don’t know a lot, but I’m coming to know this… loving God, neighbor, creation, and self is very difficult. Yet, the primary way Jesus defines God’s shalom is the practice of such love: the kind of love we see in Christ. The kind of love that has Jesus go to the cross rather than perpetuate human systems of violence. This is the kind of love that offers forgiveness, healing, invites relationship, extends grace, and is holy.
Of course Jesus reclaims holiness from the religious, makes it clear that holiness is love of all, and demonstrated compared to the way God sends love to the righteous and the unrighteous. Holiness as an expression of love.
I have to admit, that I often don’t love well. Sometimes I genuiely don’t know how to love in a given moment. I know how to hate, how to be angry, how to assume superioiusltuy or rightness, or even to sow division… I am learning that when I don’t know how to love, a good starting place is to think about all the unloving things that comuld be done, and then… not do any of those things. Its a starting palce.
All people of have have the right to believe what Spirit testifies in their hearts, but I urge all who seek embody a more shalomic imagination as seen in Jesus the Christ to lean toward love.
Last year I highlighted some of some of the important LGBTQ+ theological writings followers of the Way of Jesus the Christ are researching, writing, and reading to help us love God, love neighbor, and love self…
Peace, dwight
