Episodes

  • Not Taking God’s Name in Vain: Authority, Faith, and Christmas

    Not Taking God’s Name in Vain: Authority, Faith, and Christmas
    Dec 23 2025

    What does it actually mean to “take God’s name in vain”? In this Christmas-season conversation, Charlie and Brian trace the commandment back to its Jewish roots, where names carry authority, responsibility, and consequence. From the ineffable Name to performative Christianity, from “the war on Christmas” to costly signaling, this episode invites us to examine how power, faith, and compassion intertwine. If we claim the name of Christ, the question is not what we say, but how we live.

    Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

    Thank you for Tips / Donations:

    * https://ko-fi.com/cedorsett

    * https://patreon.com/cedorsett

    * https://cash.app/$CreationsPaths

    * Substack: https://www.creationspaths.com/

    New to The Seraphic Grove learn more

    For Educational Resource: https://wisdomscry.com

    Creation’s Paths: A Creation Spirituality Primer

    Social Connections:

    * BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/creationspaths.com

    * Threads https://www.threads.net/@creationspaths

    * Instagram https://www.instagram.com/creationspaths/

    #CreationsPaths #Christopagan #CreationSpirituality #CosmicChrist #AntiImperialFaith #AdventReflections #ChristmasTheology

    Chapters:

    00:00 Introduction

    00:28 The Phrase “Taking the Lord’s Name in Vain”

    01:12 Host Introductions

    01:57 Understanding the Ten Commandments Context

    03:38 The Sacred Name and Ancient Taboos

    05:51 Moses and the Power of God’s Presence

    07:08 Sacred Names and Holy Objects

    08:40 Jesus and the Name of God

    10:25 Taking on the Name of Christ

    11:48 Performative Christianity at Christmas

    13:03 The War on Christmas

    14:48 The History of “Xmas”

    16:41 Evolution of Religious Language

    18:31 Personal Responsibility and Authority

    20:28 Virtue Signaling and Costly Signaling

    22:26 Judging by Fruits, Not Words

    25:04 Approaching Sincere vs. Performative Beliefs

    27:00 Reflection Questions

    27:19 Invitation to Dialogue



    Get full access to Creation's Paths at www.creationspaths.com/subscribe
    Show More Show Less
    30 mins
  • Animism & the Living God: Seeing Christ in All Things

    Animism & the Living God: Seeing Christ in All Things
    Dec 16 2025

    What does it mean to say that God is not distant, but present in all things? In this episode of Creation’s Paths, we explore animism, panentheism, and the Cosmic Christ as ways of seeing the world infused with divine life rather than ruled by fear or domination. We talk about discernment, authority, power, and how the word in changes everything. This is an invitation to learn how to see, listen, and act from interconnection rather than separateness.

    Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

    Thank you for Tips / Donations:

    * https://ko-fi.com/cedorsett

    * https://patreon.com/cedorsett

    * https://cash.app/$CreationsPaths

    * Substack: https://www.creationspaths.com/

    New to The Seraphic Grove learn more

    For Educational Resource: https://wisdomscry.com

    Creation’s Paths: A Creation Spirituality Primer

    Social Connections:

    * BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/creationspaths.com

    * Threads https://www.threads.net/@creationspaths

    * Instagram https://www.instagram.com/creationspaths/

    #Animism #LivingGod #CosmicChrist #Christopagan #CreationSpirituality #Druidry

    Chapters:

    00:00 Introduction: God in All Things

    00:40 Welcome and Host Introductions

    01:16 Defining Panentheism and Animism

    01:57 Housekeeping: Support and Reviews

    02:14 Distinguishing Animism from Pantheism

    03:35 The Power of the Word ‘In’

    04:55 Brian: Addressing Fear Around Animism

    06:24 Seeing Through Rhetoric and Projection

    07:27 Authority is Granted, Not Intrinsic

    08:22 Jesus as the Cosmic Christ

    09:52 Challenging Trite Devotionals

    11:15 Leaning on Cosmic Power, Not Personal Strength

    11:51 God is for Everything, Not Just Sunday

    13:09 Where Was God in the Holocaust?

    14:24 The Civil Rights Movement: Living God

    14:57 Brian: Speaking to the Divine in Others

    16:12 The Cozy Lie That People Can’t Change

    18:03 Personal Transformation Through Community

    18:26 The Oklahoma University Case Study

    19:47 Charlie: Persecution as Identity Signal

    21:47 Yetzer Tov and Yetzer Rah: Balancing Inclinations

    22:57 Recognizing the Voice of God in Separateness

    24:06 God Created Light and Darkness

    25:01 Understanding Motivations: Fear, Woundedness, Approval

    26:48 Reconnecting to Our Interconnection

    27:35 Being the Good Guys: Speaking Truth to Power

    27:54 Wrap-Up and Community Engagement

    28:48 Closing Prayer



    Get full access to Creation's Paths at www.creationspaths.com/subscribe
    Show More Show Less
    29 mins
  • The Black Madonna and the Solstice of Grace

    The Black Madonna and the Solstice of Grace
    Dec 9 2025

    Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

    Thank you for Tips / Donations:

    * https://ko-fi.com/cedorsett

    * https://patreon.com/cedorsett

    * https://cash.app/$CreationsPaths

    * Substack: https://www.creationspaths.com/

    New to The Seraphic Grove learn more

    For Educational Resource: https://wisdomscry.com

    Creation’s Paths: A Creation Spirituality Primer

    Social Connections:

    * BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/creationspaths.com

    * Threads https://www.threads.net/@creationspaths

    * Instagram https://www.instagram.com/creationspaths/

    #christopagan #creationspirituality #druidry #blackmadonna #originalblessing #advent #winterSolstice #MaryMotherOfGod #creationtheology #viaTransformativa

    Chapters:

    00:00 Introduction to Advent and Mary

    00:25 Mary’s Integral Role in the Story

    01:11 Today’s Focus: The Black Madonna

    02:10 What is Advent?

    03:07 The Immaculate Conception Revelation

    04:23 Reframing the Immaculate Conception

    05:34 Why Mary Corrected the Church

    06:02 Augustine’s Original Sin: New and Novel

    08:06 Original Sin as a Tool of Control

    10:17 Mary as Original Grace

    11:41 The Struggle with Original Blessing

    12:42 Original Sin and Empire

    15:43 The American Context of Original Sin

    16:04 Mary’s Choice and Community

    19:09 Modern Example: Rejecting the Needy

    20:20 Mary the Refugee

    23:28 The God Who Casts Down the Mighty

    23:54 Shifting from Original Sin to Original Blessing

    26:08 Finding Grace by Giving Grace



    Get full access to Creation's Paths at www.creationspaths.com/subscribe
    Show More Show Less
    29 mins
  • What is the point of Creation Spirituality?

    What is the point of Creation Spirituality?
    Dec 2 2025
    My friends often joke that I am a predictable, spiritual stereotype. They joke that they can predict my answers and ideas based on the punchlines of comedians who mock the religious… They aren’t wrong.The Meaning CrisisI am one of those people the meaning crisis beat into the darkness from which I thought I would never return. Over my life I became increasingly disconnected from my family, my friends, my faith and my life. My family tend to judge me without care or compassion for my own mental or physical health. I am an avatar for their wishes, dreams, and expectations and not a person in and of myself. Friends are physically so far away, because I have lived all over the country, my friends live all over the country and it is hard to keep in touch with them, especially as it has become harder for me to travel. The church abandoned God for the Republican Party. My body keeps me from doing so many of the things I want to do as my chronic ailments have gotten worse over time.The results of all of this is I am left drowning in the same sea of disconnection and loneliness as everyone. I’ve been able to keep my head above water, but it is so tempting sometimes to just let myself go under. While I know or at least see a path to the shore, riptides keep pulling me back out to sea.Current events don’t help. Every time I watch the news, my faith in the social contract, progress, and our ability to correct errors is shaken and cracked. I know historically, the ideological pendulum swings back and forth. It is hard to live through this prolonged swing to the right especially when as the mechanics of the state have been twisted to cover up and prevent the pendulum from swinging back the other way.I know I am not the only one feeling all this, but I don’t see enough spiritual teachers being honest about it.The Light in the DarknessAt the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to became a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.- Emma Goldman, Living My LifeWe are not at our best when we are serious and solemn, entirely focused on the Cause, whatever the “Cause” might be. We are at our best when we are really and truly alive and bringing that vitality to our causes.Anarchism is simply the rejection of unjust hierarchies and working through right relationship in accordance with the sovereignty of ourselves and others to build an equitable world. I want to build and live in a just, equitable, and compassionate world. That goal is the light on the path out of the meaning crisis for me. That is why I share it to the best of my ability.Science and reason are great, but they have nothing to offer to the search of meaning, purpose, or fulfillment. We can study those things all we want, but their is no way to objectively measure happiness, fulfillment, meaning, purpose, and connection. We need a different technology for those things, and we have three: religion, spirituality, and magic. The problem is they have been used to control, dominate, and suppress people. Any technology can be misused, that doesn’t mean we throw it out. We have to reclaim it for its proper and good use.How do we find meaning?These are like diagnostic questions you can ask about in order to (sort of) measure how much meaning in life you have. What do you want to exist even if you don’t?Second, how real is it? Is it really real? Third, how much of a difference do you make to it now? If you can answer all three of those you have meaning in life. If one of them is missing, it’s reduced. If they’re all missing, you’re in trouble.John Vervaeke, Metaphysics of MatteringThese are the diagnostic questions to discover how much meaning we have in our lives:* What do we want to exist even if it doesn’t?* How real is what we want to exist? * How much of a difference do we make to building it now? The ...
    Show More Show Less
    25 mins
  • Thanksgiving & Gratitude in a Complicated World

    Thanksgiving & Gratitude in a Complicated World
    Nov 25 2025
    Gratitude in a Mixed WorldThere is a strange quiet that settles over the landscape this time of year. Not silence exactly, but the thickened hush that comes when winter begins to gather itself at the edge of the horizon. The bright colors fade into deeper tones. The days shrink. The nights stretch. And somewhere inside that long dark, something ancient begins to stir.Gratitude always feels different in this season. It does not arrive as a cheerfulness or a forced smile. It comes more like breath in cold air, visible for a moment before it disappears, reminding you that you are alive, still moving, still here. This year especially, I feel the weight of a world that is hurting, and the resilience of a heart that refuses to close. Gratitude has become less about counting blessings and more about choosing to see that there is another way to live.Because let’s be honest. Many people have chosen to live life on “difficult mode.” They cling to a belief that the only way forward is to make someone else fall behind. They accept stories that tell them scarcity is inevitable, cruelty is necessary, and the suffering of a neighbor is simply the cost of their own survival. Governments amplify these lies. Systems reward them. And people absorb them until they feel like it is the only possible shape of the world.But gratitude, real gratitude, is a radical act. It refuses that worldview. It says: there is more than this. It whispers: you can choose differently.And that is what has been sitting on my heart this year. Even in the midst of hardship, even with so many living in fear, even with power systems grinding down the most vulnerable, we still have the ability to imagine better. Gratitude does not erase pain. It does not ask us to pretend. It invites us to see the small openings that remain, the slivers of light that widen into possibility.Every November, the same story tries to reassert itself in our collective memory. A story of pilgrims and Indigenous people sharing a peaceful feast, a myth invented long after the fact to soothe a national conscience uneasy with the truth. The real history is far more complex and far more tragic, shaped by violence, theft, and cultural erasure. And yet the myth persists because something in us longs for the image of people sitting down at one table, recognizing each other’s humanity.I don’t honor the myth, but I do honor the longing.That longing is a tender thing. It points toward the world we wish we had inherited and the world we are still capable of building. It asks us to tell the truth about the harm done and still find a way to nourish the good that remains.This is where gratitude becomes holy. Not as denial, but as practice. Not as distraction from suffering, but as one of the ways we refuse to let suffering be the final word.We begin with awe, the first of the Four Paths. Awe at the simple fact that we can feed one another, that despite the greed of corporations and the cruelty of policies, we still live in a world where abundance is possible. Awe that we can see what is happening in the world rather than living in the dark, because our phones let us witness what once would have stayed hidden in silence. Awe that even in grief, we are capable of compassion.From awe, we move into the Via Negativa, the honest naming of what is broken. Gratitude does not deny harm. It looks directly at it and refuses to let it consume the entire horizon. Gratitude says: yes, this is true, and yes, there is still something good. It is the art of holding both at once, of letting sorrow deepen us without hollowing us out.Then gratitude leads us into the Via Creativa, because once you recognize small goodness, something in you wants to protect it. You begin to imagine ways to nurture it, expand it, share it. Gratitude makes us inventive. It makes us curious about what might grow if we cared for it. It turns us toward actions that feel humble and hopeful at once.And finally, gratitude draws us into the Via Transformativa. The small good we recognize, the small good we celebrate, becomes fuel for justice. Gratitude gives us the energy to tend the world, to push back against cruelty, to choose a path that leads toward healing. Gratitude is not passive. It is preparation. It is the way we gather strength for the work ahead.Brian and I harvested our sunchokes this year, waiting as instructed until the first hard frost had passed. We planted them without knowing what to expect, without knowing how they’d take to the soil, without knowing if they’d flourish or fail. When we finally pulled them from the earth, they were generous. And as we washed them and sorted them, we found ourselves instinctively doing what people have done for millennia. We measured the harvest. We appreciated the effort that led to it. We saved the seeds, thought about next year, and planned how to care for the soil that cared for us.That cycle is older than any nation, older than any holiday, older than any myth. ...
    Show More Show Less
    23 mins
  • No Kings The Voice of The Ancestors Cry Out a Samhain Reflection

    No Kings The Voice of The Ancestors Cry Out a Samhain Reflection
    Oct 28 2025
    The veil thins. Candles flicker in windows, pumpkins grin like little guardians of light, and the wind itself seems to carry whispers. On this night of Samhain, the air is crowded not just with ghosts and shadows, but with memory. The ancestors are near. They gather around us not as specters of fear but as companions in the long struggle for freedom.They murmur their old refrain: No Kings.It isn’t only a political cry; it’s a spiritual declaration. No kings over conscience. No kings over the sacred spark in each soul. No kings over the earth that belongs to no one and to everyone.And yet, empire still rides: headless, hungry, searching for a new crown to wear.The Headless Rider of EmpireEvery age has its horseman. Ours rides draped in flags and algorithms, clutching power with a grin that never reaches the eyes. Empire doesn’t always look like soldiers on horseback; sometimes it’s the dull hum of propaganda, the endless scroll of outrage meant to make us afraid and divided. Fear is the tyrant’s favorite sacrament. It is how empire keeps us bowed.But Samhain teaches another kind of reverence, the courage to face the dark and discover that we are not alone in it. When we remember the ancestors, we remember that empire has fallen before, that courage has survived worse nights than these.As we light our candles this year, we are not warding off ghosts. We are calling them in.The Communion of the Courageous DeadTo honor the dead is to remember their unfinished prayers. Our ancestors were not perfect saints; they were human beings, flawed and luminous, stumbling toward freedom. Some resisted tyrants with sword or song. Others sowed seeds, healed wounds, or hid the persecuted in their homes. Some were themselves entangled in empire’s lies and it is ours to set those wrongs right.Their presence tonight is not sentimental. It is strategic.They come to remind us that the fight for freedom is ancient and ongoing, that our bloodlines are braided with courage. Every generation must reclaim liberty from the jaws of fear. The dead lend us their memory so we can stand our ground without trembling.So when you feel the chill tonight, do not recoil. Let it steady you. It is the breath of all who refused to kneel.The Spell of FearEvery empire survives by casting the same spell: Be afraid, and obey.They conjure phantoms of scarcity and strangers, they whisper of purity and order. They tell us that power is safety and obedience is peace. But fear is a liar.Samhain breaks that spell. It invites us to laugh at death, to dance in the graveyard, to mock the old specter of control. In every carved pumpkin grinning against the dark, there is an act of rebellion. Every costume is a playful reminder that masks can liberate as much as they conceal.We can take the tyrant’s favorite tools, fear and spectacle and turn them inside out. Make them ridiculous. Make them lose their power. Empire cannot stand when its priests of fear become the butt of the world’s laughter.This is holy mischief. Sacred mockery. The ancestors knew it well.No Kings: The Theological HeartWhen we say No Kings, we echo both the prophets and the mystics. The Hebrew scriptures warned Israel what kings would do: take sons for war, daughters for labor, and the fruit of the land for greed. Jesus of Nazareth refused a crown and washed feet instead.To walk the Christopagan path is to remember that divinity does not enthrone it indwells. The Holy is not found in palaces but in the gathering of people who love one another enough to live free.Every tyrant dreams of being worshiped. Every mystic knows that worship belongs only to Love.The Work of Ancestral HealingTo honor our ancestors is not to whitewash them. Many of us carry lineages tangled in empire’s violence colonizers and enslaved, oppressor and oppressed. Healing that wound begins with honesty.The ancestors cry out, not to defend their sins, but to urge our repair.In Hebrew mysticism this is called tikkun olam the mending of the world.Our task is not to make the past pristine but to fill its cracks with gold, like kintsugi pottery. To make beauty from brokenness. We do this through truth-telling, solidarity, and mercy.We the LivingWe are the living continuation of their courage. The blood of resistance runs in our veins. We, too, must stand in our time as they did in theirs against tyranny in every disguise: political, ecclesial, corporate, or psychological.But take heart. The ancestors are not trapped in dusty graves; they walk with us in every act of conscience, every laugh that punctures fear, every community that chooses cooperation over control.When you light your Samhain candle, whisper their names. But also whisper your own. You are part of the lineage now.Practice: The Circle of Memory and FreedomCreate an Ancestral Altar of Resistance* Gather tokens of courage. A photo of an ancestor who stood up for justice, a candle, a stone from the earth you walk on, a symbol of freedom a feather, a ...
    Show More Show Less
    28 mins
  • Satanic Panics and Power Grabs: Fear as Control

    Satanic Panics and Power Grabs: Fear as Control
    Oct 21 2025
    There’s a rhythm to panic.It begins as a whisper, something dark is coming for your children, your faith, your way of life. Within days the whisper becomes a flood. Media blares, pulpits thunder, and neighbors begin to look at one another with suspicion. Each new generation dresses its fear in different clothes: witches, rock music, rap lyrics, foreign dolls, queer joy, or artificial intelligence. The names change, but the spell is the same. Fear becomes a liturgy.Satanic panics are not born from spiritual warfare; they are crafted through power’s deep insecurity. History shows that whenever people in authority feel their grip loosening: when women, workers, youth, or marginalized communities begin to claim their voice, someone declares that evil is afoot. The panic becomes a tool of empire, sanctified in religious language. Fear does what swords and laws cannot: it convinces people to police one another in the name of holiness.Creation Spirituality asks us to start from a different ground: Original Blessing rather than original fear. The cosmos is not a battlefield between God and darkness. It is a living communion of being, a web in which even tension can be transfigured. To believe that God can be outmatched by any adversary is to confess a smaller god than the one who breathes galaxies into being.The Mechanics of FearFear functions like static, when it fills the air, it drowns out truth. It narrows perception until everything feels dangerous, even difference itself.Empire has always known how to tune that frequency. In the early witch trials, fear justified the theft of land and silencing of women’s wisdom. In the 1980s, it sold records, elections, and purity rings. Today it drives algorithms and fundraising emails. Every panic has its merchants.The pattern is older than the word Satan. In Hebrew scripture, “the satan” simply meant the accuser, a prosecutor within the heavenly court. This figure worked for God, not against, testing integrity rather than spreading evil. Only later did the concept harden into a cosmic enemy. When imperial religion absorbed that dualism, it found a useful weapon. Once you can label your opponent “satanic,” you no longer have to understand them; you only have to destroy them.A Practice of DiscernmentSo what does resistance look like?Begin by asking the question that every prophet has asked: Who benefits from this fear?Whenever a headline, preacher, or politician insists that your neighbors are dangerous, pause. Take a breath. Feel your feet on the ground, the air in your lungs. That moment of embodied awareness breaks the enchantment. It creates the space where Spirit can speak.Then, look for the fruit.Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits.” Does the message lead to compassion, justice, and community or to suspicion, profit, and control? Discernment is not about having secret knowledge; it is about noticing outcomes. The fruit tells the truth.A second practice follows from the first: curiosity.Fear collapses complexity, but curiosity expands it. Ask what story is being told beneath the story. What wound or insecurity is driving it? When we meet fear with curiosity, we transform it from weapon into teacher. The empire thrives on reaction; the kingdom of God grows through reflection.Fear, Insecurity, and EmpireCharlie and Brian named the heart of it in the episode: “Equality to the privileged feels like oppression.”That single sentence explains much of Western history. When those accustomed to superiority encounter genuine equity, it feels like loss. Empire trains us to measure value through hierarchy, so the movement toward balance feels like descent. But in truth it is an invitation to live no longer as masters or victims, but as kin.Creation Spirituality reminds us that all life participates in the same divine energy. Fear fractures that awareness; it convinces us that safety can only come through dominance. Every satanic panic, from Salem to social media, has served that same illusion. When we remember our interconnection, the illusion loses its power.Media Literacy as Spiritual DisciplineThe next great panic may not be about witches or music but about machines. Already we hear whispers that artificial intelligence will replace souls, that technology itself is demonic. But as Charlie observed, the danger is not the machine it is the human tendency to hallucinate, to fill gaps in understanding with stories that flatter our fears.To resist this, we must treat media literacy as a spiritual discipline.Before sharing, pause.Before believing, verify.Before reacting, breathe.Truth requires patience, and patience is a kind of prayer. In a culture addicted to immediacy, waiting long enough to discern reality is an act of rebellion. It is how we refuse to be ruled by the algorithms of panic.The Practice of GroundingTry this simple act whenever the world feels too loud:Place your hand over your heart. Feel its rhythm. Whisper, “I am held in the...
    Show More Show Less
    30 mins
  • No Rapture, No Cry: A Christopagan Response to Escapist Theology

    No Rapture, No Cry: A Christopagan Response to Escapist Theology
    Oct 14 2025
    The modern obsession with leaving the world began, oddly enough, with a fall. In 1827, John Nelson Darby tumbled from his horse, banged his head, and started writing a new idea into the Christian imagination. He sketched a future where the faithful are whisked away from the grit and grief of history while the rest of creation burns. A quick exit. An escape hatch. A promise that the real home is elsewhere and that the earth is disposable, like a cracked cup you set in the bin.This is not ancient. It is not apostolic. It is recent and it is seductive. It tells a suffering people, your pain will be over soon, the plane is already boarding, no need to change anything down here. If you have felt that tug toward evacuation, you are not foolish. You are tired. That fatigue is understandable in an age of fires measured in miles, plague-years mapped by grief, and a public life where cruelty is mistaken for strength. The promise of escape is shaped to meet that ache. It is also a lie.The Kin-dom is already here.That is the heart of realized eschatology, the teaching we carried in the episode and carry again in this essay. “Eschatology” means the study of last things. Realized means the future is not only ahead of us. It is breaking in now. Jesus described it as a reign spread out among us, hidden like yeast in dough, like a seed in soil, like light within the body. The Kin-dom is the web of right relationship in which all can breathe, eat, heal, and flourish. Not a passcode. Not a flight plan. The Kin-dom is a way of living.From DespairDespair is honest. It names what is broken. The temptation is to make despair a home. Rapture-thinking offers a furnished apartment in that neighborhood. It whispers, if the world is going to burn, the moral thing is to detach. Sell your goods. Quit your job. Leave your lease. Tell yourself it will be over soon and the pain will end. The trouble is simple. People get left behind in our leaving. Children, neighbors, the unhoused, the exhausted caregiver down the hall. And the earth herself.We must say this plainly because our faith is not a riddle. Jesus did not ask us to decode news cycles. He asked us to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, visit the sick and the imprisoned. These are not optional extras. They are the criteria he gave for what salvation looks like when it is walking around in a body. If we are known by our fruits, then escapism is sterile ground. It cannot grow love.There is another reason the escape story keeps getting told. It flatters power. If we are leaving any day now, then the powerful do not have to reckon with what their choices do to air, water, soil, and bodies. If the earth is a demo model to be replaced, who cares about rivers turned to poison or forests to ash. If the poor are props in a cosmic drama, who cares whether they eat. History shows the same pattern again and again. Doctrines that separate faith from works turn out to be very useful to those who profit from our apathy.To DiscoveryDespair does not have to be destiny. What if the ache we feel is not proof that the world is ending but a summons to begin. The Kin-dom has already arrived. We do not wait for permission to love. We do not ask empire how to heal. We participate in the life that is present.The early church learned this quickly. Expectations of an immediate ending gave way to the discovery that Christ is already here. Not absent. Present. Not awaiting return from a distance. Active in the web of relationships that make for life. If that is true, our question shifts. Instead of asking when we leave, we ask how to live. Instead of hunting for dates, we look for neighbors.This is where realized eschatology becomes simple and practical. If the Kin-dom is here, then our daily life is the place of devotion. Prayer is our breath when we choose to share air with one another. Eucharist is the shared table where food becomes love. Repentance is not a sad impossibility. It is repair as ordinary as changing a habit, paying a debt we owe to a community, or stepping back from a lie we learned to speak without thinking.There is an old word for hell in the gospels, Gehenna. It was a trash heap outside the city. When Jesus warns that some will be given over to Gehenna, he is not talking about a theme park in the afterlife. He is asking whether we want to live in a world organized like a dump, a society that treats people and places as disposable. The counter-picture is the Kin-dom. A shared life where no one is tossed aside.To DevotionDevotion is what love looks like on repeat. Not a one-time burst of zeal. A cadence. A rhythm. A set of holy repetitions that strengthen the soul for a lifetime of service. In the episode, we joked that rapture apparently means selling your Xbox and leaving a note. That is darkly funny. It is also a parable. If you can decide in a weekend to abandon your life, you can also decide in a weekend to begin again. The choice...
    Show More Show Less
    27 mins