Tag Archives: Faith and Justice

Devotional, Series

God Beginnings, part 7: There’s No “Without” in God

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Read Exodus 33:12–17

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20 NLT)

A modern congregation sits in a warm wooden sanctuary as the center aisle opens into a wilderness road. Worshipers transition into the mixed multitude journeying toward Mount Sinai beneath radiant clouds, joining present-day worship with God’s covenant-forming presence in Exodus.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “There’s No ‘Without’ in God” at Life-Giving Water Devotions

When I sat down for worship on the first Sunday of my new appointment just a few short weeks ago, I did not yet have my bearings straight.

I did not fully know the order of worship or how everything moved. The people, patterns, and particulars were still unfamiliar to me. After spending time away from the regular rhythms of pastoral ministry during my renewal leave, I might have expected the experience to feel strange.

Instead, I felt at home.

The prayers, music, Scripture, sanctuary, and people gathered around me formed a rhythm I already knew. I did not need to understand every detail before I could enter into it. I still do not know exactly how I fit within these particular communities, but I recognize the life we are sharing.

So, in those first worship services that first Sunday, the unfamiliar was being held by something familiar…and it still is.

That experience does not give me a complete map of what lies ahead. It does not instantly answer every question or remove every uncertainty. But it reminds me that I am not beginning from nowhere. God’s presence is already here—in the worship, within the gathered community, throughout the surroundings, and within me.

Moses also knows what it means to face a new beginning without having his bearings straight.

The people of Israel have escaped Egypt, crossed the sea, and entered the wilderness. They have endured hunger, thirst, fear, conflict, and uncertainty. Then, while Moses is on Mount Sinai, they fashion a golden calf and worship it. The covenant has scarcely been established before it is violated.

Yet the journey must continue.

God tells Moses to lead the people forward, but Moses is not willing to settle for a destination. The promise of land is not enough. Survival is not enough. Even success is not enough.

“If you don’t personally go with us,” Moses says, “don’t make us leave this place.”

Moses understands that reaching the promised land without God’s presence would not be the fulfillment of God’s promise. It would only be arriving somewhere else.

A destination can be reached without faithfulness. A goal can be accomplished without love. An institution can survive without serving the purpose for which it was created. Something can succeed by every measurable standard and still bear little resemblance to the character of God.

The promised land without God’s presence would be only land.

So Moses refuses to go without God.

But how do people recognize the presence of a God who cannot be contained within any single place, person, feeling, or experience?

Sometimes God’s presence becomes tangible through another person—someone who stays, listens, carries, feeds, challenges, advocates, or walks beside us. Sometimes it surrounds us through a community whose shared life gives us somewhere to belong. At other times, it meets us through an unexpected opportunity, a timely interruption, a place of refuge, the natural world, music, art, memory, rest, resistance, or the sudden opening of a way we could not see before.

God’s presence takes more forms than we can name and often reaches us through instruments we were never taught to recognize.

That was already true of the people journeying with Moses. Exodus tells us that a “rabble of non-Israelites” also left Egypt with Israel. Other translations call them a “mixed multitude.” They were not merely outsiders traveling beside God’s covenant people. At Sinai, this varied multitude was gathered together and constituted as Israel—the covenant people of God. Israel had been Jacob’s name and the identity of his descendants; now God was forming a wider group of people, claiming them as God’s own, and leading them toward land promised to their ancestors.

That makes what follows even more startling. Before Moses descends from the mountain carrying the tablets of the covenant, the people fashion the golden calf. Almost immediately after being constituted as God’s covenant community, they violate that covenant. Yet even after this profound failure, Moses pleads for God’s presence to remain with the whole people.

And, as can be seen, God’s community was already larger and more complicated than a neatly guarded religious boundary.

That should matter to Christians.

We sometimes behave as though God’s presence can be found only among Christian people, inside Christian buildings, through Christian language, or within experiences carrying an approved Christian label. Yet God has never been limited by the boundaries we construct.

The person through whom grace reaches us may share our faith. That person may not. We may encounter God within a sanctuary, but we may also encounter God in a hospital room, a recovery meeting, a forest, a coffee shop, a concert, a protest, or around a kitchen table. God may speak through Scripture and prayer, but God may also reach us through people whom religious institutions have dismissed, distrusted, or excluded.

Grace does not wait for us to verify the religious credentials of its instruments before reaching us through them.

This does not mean that every voice, impulse, institution, or opportunity represents God. Discernment still matters. Moses gives us a way to begin that discernment: God’s presence cannot be separated from God’s character.

Where people are being driven back into bondage, we should hesitate before calling it God’s will. Where power is protected at the expense of vulnerable people, invoking God’s name does not make the work holy. Where conformity is demanded while compassion is withheld, religious language may be plentiful while the character of God is nowhere to be seen.

This is where Moses’ prayer becomes uncomfortable for the church.

Would we rather remain in the wilderness than reach a seemingly successful future without mercy, truth, justice, hospitality, and love?

Churches can pursue growth without discipleship, stability without faithfulness, unity without justice, tradition without living memory, and mission without love. We can become so determined to preserve an institution, complete a project, protect a reputation, or reach a destination that God’s presence becomes something we invoke only after our plans have been settled.

Moses refuses to use God as a ceremonial endorsement of the people’s journey. God must remain at its center.

For Christians, Jesus offers the same promise of presence at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus sends the disciples toward people, places, and circumstances they cannot yet imagine. They receive a mission, but not a detailed map. They are not promised ease, universal acceptance, institutional security, or visible success.

They are promised, “I am with you always.”

Jesus does not promise that they will never go without anything. They will sometimes go without certainty, comfort, approval, safety, and familiar landmarks. But they will not undertake the journey without Christ.

There may be plenty of “without” along the way, but there is no journey without God.

God’s presence may surround us before we have learned the order, found our bearings, or understood how everything moves. It may meet us through a familiar rhythm in an unfamiliar place. It may become visible in the companion beside us, the multitude surrounding us, the provision sustaining us, the beauty awakening us, the truth unsettling us, the resistance strengthening us, or the path opening before us.

The question is not merely whether God is present.

The question is whether we are paying attention to the many ways God may be present—and whether we are willing to refuse any destination that requires us to leave God’s character behind.

Moses would rather remain in the wilderness with God than reach the promised land without God.

Would we?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
No destination is truly promised land if reaching it requires us to leave the character of God behind.

PRAYER
Ever-present God, sharpen our vision so that we may recognize your presence in people, places, and forms we might otherwise overlook. Keep us from mistaking success for faithfulness or religious language for holiness. Wherever you lead, help us walk with the varied multitude you gather in mercy, truth, justice, hospitality, and love. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

ALTAR AUDIT, Part 6: The Altar of Preservation

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Read Mark 11:15–19

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“‘This is what the Lord says: Be fair-minded and just. Do what is right. Help those who have been robbed. Rescue them from their oppressors. Quit your evil deeds! Do not mistreat foreigners, orphans, and widows. Stop murdering the innocent!’” (Jeremiah 22:3 NLT)

Altars reveal what we worship. Some are obvious—raised platforms of stone and flame. Others are quieter, constructed in systems, reputations, loyalties, and assumptions. Lent is a season of holy examination. It calls us to look closely at what we have built, what we defend, and what we trust. In this series, we conduct an audit—not of budgets or buildings, but of allegiances. Lent strips away every false altar until only Christ remains.

A large stone altar block sits in the center of an open plaza with a deep crack running through it. Modern buildings loom in the distant skyline under a gray sky. The fractured altar symbolizes institutions that prioritize preservation over justice and compassion.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “The Altar of Preservation” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Part 6: The Altar of Preservation. Scripture often speaks about protecting the vulnerable. It is language most of us recognize immediately. When we hear the word, certain images rise naturally in our minds—the poor, the widow, the orphan, the foreigner. These are the people the prophets name again and again as deserving protection and care.

And rightly so. The Scriptures are unmistakably clear that the people of God are judged by how they treat those who live without protection in society.

Yet the word vulnerable is broader than we sometimes assume.

In the biblical imagination, vulnerability is not only about poverty. It is about power.

The vulnerable are those who lack protection within a system. Those whose voices are easily ignored. Those whose suffering is inconvenient. Those whose stories threaten the stability of what already exists.

In every age, the vulnerable include the ones whose truth is easiest to dismiss.

Jeremiah spoke into a society where the temple stood at the center of national life. It was the heart of worship, but also the heart of the economy. Pilgrims traveled from across the region to Jerusalem. Roman coins bearing the emperor’s image could not be used in the temple treasury, so money changers exchanged them. Animals for sacrifice were sold for those who had traveled far. The temple complex functioned not only as a sanctuary but as a marketplace, a treasury, and a gathering place for the whole community.

Commerce itself was not the problem. Jesus undoubtedly participated in it throughout his life.

What troubled the prophets—and later Jesus—was what happens when a sacred system begins to protect itself more than it protects the people God commands it to defend.

Jeremiah speaks plainly: rescue the oppressed, help those who have been robbed, refuse to exploit the powerless. These commands were not abstract ideals. They were the measure of whether the people truly honored God.

Centuries later, Jesus enters the temple courts and overturns tables. To many readers this scene feels like sudden anger, but it is actually a continuation of the same prophetic warning Jeremiah delivered generations earlier.

“You have turned it into a den of robbers.”

A den of robbers is not where robbery happens. It is where robbers hide.

Jesus’ accusation cuts to the heart of the matter. The temple—the very place meant to embody justice and mercy—had become a refuge for those who exploited others. The institution that should have protected the vulnerable was now protecting the system itself.

This is the altar of preservation.

Institutions often begin with holy purpose. Communities gather to worship, to serve, to care for one another, to embody the justice of God in the world. But over time something subtle can shift. The mission that created the institution becomes secondary to the survival of the institution itself.

Preservation quietly becomes the highest good.

Once that happens, difficult questions feel dangerous. Voices that challenge the system are treated as threats. The vulnerable become problems to manage rather than people to defend. Stability is valued more than justice.

And when preservation becomes sacred, the altar has already been built.

Jesus’ action in the temple was not simply about overturned tables. It was about a warning that echoes through every generation of God’s people: a religious system can continue to look holy long after it has forgotten what holiness requires.

The prophets were clear. Worship that ignores injustice is not worship at all.

The altar audit asks a hard question during Lent: What are we truly protecting?

The mission of God—or the systems we built along the way?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
When preserving the system becomes more important than protecting the vulnerable, the altar has already shifted.

PRAYER
God of justice and mercy, examine the altars we have built and the systems we defend. Give us courage to protect those without power, wisdom to recognize when preservation has replaced faithfulness, and humility to follow Christ wherever truth leads. Amen.

Devotional, Series

Sacred Signs of Subversion, Part 13: Black/Darkness

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Read Genesis 1:1-5

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” (Exodus 20:21 NLT)

Symbols carry memory and meaning far beyond words. The Church has always leaned on them—sometimes hidden in plain sight, sometimes dismissed or distorted. Yet the most powerful symbols are those that subvert the world’s expectations and draw us back to the radical heart of the Gospel. In this series, we’ll look closer at the sacred signs that shock, unsettle, and ultimately call us deeper into Christ.

A hooded figure stands in deep darkness, holding a small lantern that casts warm light over their face and hands. The rest of the scene fades into black with faint hints of distant stars, evoking a sacred, contemplative mood of hope within shadow.
Image: AI-generated using DALL-E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Black / Darkness” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Part 13: Black / Darkness. From the first page of Scripture, darkness gets a bad reputation. We read that God speaks light into being—and assume darkness was evil. But Genesis doesn’t say that. It says darkness covered the deep, and God called light into existence. Darkness came first, not as sin or failure, but as the fertile soil of creation. The cosmos was conceived in shadow. Before there was form or breath or blessing, there was black. The light was not God’s escape from the dark—it was God’s revelation through it.

Still, we’ve long feared what we can’t see. We’ve turned darkness into a synonym for sin, ignorance, and danger. “Light equals good,” we were told; “dark equals bad.” That language shaped centuries of theology—and violence. Women were accused of signing Satan’s “Black Book,” while the Bible condemning them was bound in black leather.

Colonizers called Africa the “Dark Continent,” as if God had never walked its soil. Even our stories and art absorbed the bias: bad guys in black hats, good guys in white hats; villains cloaked in shadow, heroes clothed in radiance. In Renaissance paintings, Jews were rendered in dusky tones, caricatured with shadowed faces and exaggerated noses/features and shadowed, while Christians were depicted as fair, radiant, and pure. Skin, soil, and soul alike were graded on a false scale of brightness. Racism, misogyny, and empire baptized metaphor as truth—and the Body of Christ learned to fear its own shadow.

Our suspicion of darkness didn’t stop at color. It crept into the mind. We label people with depression or anxiety as “in the dark,” as though despair is a sin instead of a symptom. We tell them to “look on the bright side,” when Scripture tells us even the darkness is light to God. We shame those whose minds move through midnight, when in truth, many prophets did too. Elijah begged to die beneath a broom tree; Jeremiah cursed the day of his birth; Jesus sweated blood under a moonless sky. To call these experiences “unholy” is to forget how holy shadows can be.

We’ve also turned on artists who dwell in shadow—the ones who name what others hide. Goth culture, heavy music, black clothing, and the haunting beauty of lament get written off as “darkness” and, consquently evil, as if Christ doesn’t speak fluent minor key. Yet those who linger there often see what polite piety refuses: the ache beneath our veneers, the longing in our loss. When the Church fears them, it only betrays its fear of truth. The Gospel was never meant to be sanitized—it was meant to shine in the dark.

Science and Scripture tell the same story: apart from God, all is night. The cosmos is mostly black—endless silence between small burning stars. Light is the rare thing; darkness is the default. Earth itself drifts through that night eternal, kept alive only because one star still burns. So it is with us. Without the Son, our souls freeze in their own shadow. But when Christ enters the darkness, we see what light really is.

Darkness, then, is both tomb and womb. It buries, but it also births. The tomb of Jesus was no less dark than the womb of Mary—yet both held the miracle of life. Faith does not demand we flee the dark; it invites us to trust God there. “Children of light” are not people who refuse to touch the night—they are those who enter it carrying flame. We are called into the world’s pain, prejudice, and mystery, to bear witness that God is not absent in the shadowed places. God is already there, waiting to be seen.

We are not meant to fear or curse the dark, but to step into it—bringing warmth, justice, compassion, and truth. The task is not to make the world brighter by our own brilliance, but to reflect the One whose light no darkness can overcome.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
The dark mind, the dark room, the dark season—these are not proofs of God’s absence but invitations to find God’s hidden fire there.

PRAYER
Light of the world, enter our darkness. Teach us not to fear what we do not understand. Expose the lies that have shamed your shadowed children. Kindle mercy where fear once burned, and help us carry your light with humility into every night we meet. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).