Tag Archives: Rev. Todd Lattig

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 11: No Disposable Parts

Leave a comment

Read 1 Corinthians 12:12–22

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future” (Ephesians 4:4 NLT).

Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “No Disposable Parts” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I love music. I mean, I really love music. Heavy metal, industrial, rock and roll, goth—get me going and I am there! My musical tastes are actually far more eclectic than those categories might suggest. I can move quite happily from Beethoven to Bon Jovi to Jewel to Stryper to, well, yes, Marilyn Manson.

At least I’m balanced!

To be honest, people are often shocked that I would listen to—or, worse yet, attend—a Marilyn Manson concert. My reaction is: Why? Would Jesus not find himself at such a concert too? Jesus was called “a glutton and a drunkard” and “a friend of tax collectors and other sinners” because of the company he kept (Matthew 11:19). He repeatedly went where respectable religious people thought respectable religious people should not go. Besides, I’ve been listening to Marilyn Manson since I was, well, a teenager—and here I grew up to become a Christian pastor. Who knew, right?!

Over the years, I’ve had several opportunities to see the band live. The last time I saw Marilyn Manson in concert, he stopped at one point and talked about something that has followed him throughout his career: people trying to dispose of him. Most recently, that story has included serious allegations of sexual abuse and the enormous public and professional fallout surrounding them. After a four-year criminal investigation, however, prosecutors ultimately declined to bring charges, determining that the domestic-violence allegations fell outside the statute of limitations and that the sexual-assault allegations could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Some of the civil claims against him were also dismissed, withdrawn, or settled. Accountability for harm matters, but so does telling the whole story rather than freezing someone forever at the moment of accusation. Still, something Manson said that night struck me. People had tried to dispose of him, he said, but he had never been disposable.

That word caught my attention because Manson had been using it long before his most recent controversies. In 2000, he released a song called “The Disposable Teens.” The song gives voice to the alienation and anger of young people pushing against systems of authority and social expectations that seem to have little place for them unless they become what those systems expect.

The title itself is unsettling: disposable teens.

People young enough to still be discovering who they are, yet already receiving the message that if they do not fit, behave, believe, achieve, produce, or conform correctly, society can simply move on without them. More than two decades later, I heard the person who sang about disposable teens standing onstage insisting that he himself had never been disposable.

Sitting there listening, I found myself agreeing with him on this:

No human being is disposable.

That does not mean our actions do not matter. Human dignity does not eliminate accountability, consequences, repentance, justice, or the responsibility to repair harm. Christianity does not teach that because every person bears sacred worth, everything every person does must therefore be accepted. There is a profound difference between holding someone accountable and declaring that person expendable.

Paul makes an even more radical claim about the Christian community in 1 Corinthians 12. The church in Corinth was a mess. Its members competed over status, spiritual gifts, leadership, knowledge, wealth, and importance. Some considered themselves more significant than others. Into that fractured community, Paul introduces an image they could hardly misunderstand: a body.

One body, composed of many parts.

But Paul does something fascinating with the image. He addresses disposability from both directions. First comes the person who feels disposable. The foot looks at the hand and essentially says, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body.” The ear compares itself with the eye and reaches the same conclusion.

I know that voice. Perhaps you do too.

Because I am not like you, I do not belong. Because I cannot do what you do. Because I do not look like you. Because my gifts are different. Because my body works differently. Because my mind works differently. Because I am too old, too young, too wounded, too strange, too uncertain, too much, or somehow not enough.

Paul’s response is wonderfully straightforward: saying you do not belong does not make you stop belonging. The foot remains part of the body. The ear remains part of the body. Difference does not disqualify belonging.

Then Paul turns the argument around. Now it is no longer the foot saying, “I do not belong.” It is the eye saying to the hand, “I don’t need you.”

That is the voice of superiority rather than insecurity. It is what happens when one part of the body decides it possesses enough importance, power, ability, resources, knowledge, or status to determine whether another part is necessary. Paul rejects that sentence too. In fact, Paul says that the parts of the body that seem weakest are actually indispensable.

Notice what Paul does not say. Paul does not say the weaker parts should be tolerated because perhaps someday they will become stronger. Paul does not say everyone deserves a place because everyone can eventually be made useful. Paul does not tell the apparently weaker members to discover their hidden productivity so the rest of the body can justify keeping them around.

They are indispensable.

That distinction matters because even churches can begin measuring human worth according to usefulness. We may never say it aloud, but our questions can reveal the calculation: Can you serve? Can you teach? Can you sing? Can you give? Can you sit on a committee? Can you volunteer? Can you help us grow? Can you still do what you used to do?

There is nothing wrong with discovering and using our gifts. Paul spends considerable time talking about them. But the Body of Christ is not a machine whose parts earn their place by remaining productive.

A person lying in a nursing-home bed is not less part of Christ’s Body because they can no longer serve on a committee. A person with a disability does not need to demonstrate some inspirational hidden talent before becoming indispensable. A teenager sitting silently in the back of the sanctuary does not have to become “the future of the church” before being valued as part of the church now. And notice how often, when we speak about that future, we attach expectations about how they should look, talk, believe, behave, and belong when they get there. The exhausted person who presently needs more from the community than they can give back is not a drain on the Body. And the person whose gifts, personality, questions, identity, or way of moving through the world does not fit neatly into our existing structures is not spare equipment waiting to be discarded.

Belonging to the Body is not something we earn by proving our usefulness.

This is where Paul’s metaphor becomes particularly uncomfortable for institutions, because institutions inevitably make calculations. Budgets must balance. Programs must be evaluated. Buildings must be maintained. Organizations have to make decisions about what is sustainable and what is not. 

But people are not programs. People are not buildings. People are not line items.

The Church may sometimes have to let structures die. We may have to close programs, change traditions, merge ministries, relinquish buildings, or admit that something which once served the mission no longer does. None of those decisions makes the people connected to those structures disposable. The Body of Christ has no surplus members.

That means neither of the false conclusions Paul sets up is available to us. We cannot look at ourselves and say, “Because I am not like you, I do not belong.” And we cannot look at another person and say, “Because you are not like me, I do not need you.” The first denies the place God has given us. The second denies the place God has given someone else.

Perhaps that is why the phrase I heard at that concert stayed with me: I was never disposable.

Neither were you. Neither is the person you find difficult. Neither is the person who can no longer produce what they once produced. Neither is the person whose presence complicates the community rather than making it more efficient. Neither is the person the world has decided would be easier to ignore.

God is creating something new, and according to Paul, that new creation looks remarkably like a body: different parts, different gifts, different functions, joined into a life none possesses alone.

There are no disposable teens. There are no disposable adults. There are no disposable people.

And in the Body of Christ, there are no disposable parts.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Belonging to the Body is not something we earn by proving our usefulness.

PRAYER
God of every member, free us from believing that our differences make us unnecessary and from treating the differences of others as reasons we do not need them. Teach us to honor the dignity of every person, use our gifts without measuring our worth by them, and become a Body in which no one is treated as disposable. Amen.

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

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 10: Rivers in the Wasteland

Leave a comment

Read Isaiah 43:19–21

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4 NLT)

Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Rivers in the Wasteland” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I have loved volcanoes since I was a boy. I had a book about them that I returned to repeatedly, studying the pictures and learning about the devastation—and transformation—they could produce. Two volcanoes especially captured my imagination: Mount Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens.

Vesuvius possessed the mystery of the ancient world. Its eruption in 79 CE buried entire communities beneath ash and volcanic debris, capturing human fear and imagination for nearly two millennia. As a boy, I was fascinated by the pictures and by the story of a thriving world suddenly entombed beneath the earth.

Mount St. Helens felt different because its eruption was not ancient history. It happened in 1980, during my lifetime. The blast leveled forests, displaced wildlife, and left hundreds of square miles looking barren. The photographs showed a landscape so thoroughly devastated that it seemed impossible for life ever to flourish there again.

Perhaps that was what fascinated me most. Volcanoes reveal both the terrifying power of destruction and creation’s astonishing capacity for renewal.

There is nothing romantic about the devastation they cause. Landscapes disappear. Habitats collapse. Lives are lost. What once sustained life becomes difficult to recognize.

Yet devastation is not the only thing volcanoes produce. As volcanic material weathers over time, it releases minerals into the earth. What initially buried the landscape can eventually contribute to remarkably fertile soil. New plants take root. Animals return. Entire ecosystems begin developing across ground that once appeared incapable of sustaining anything.

The landscape does not return unchanged. The forest growing around Mount St. Helens is not the same forest that stood there before the eruption. New life does not erase the devastation or restore everything that was lost. It emerges from altered ground.

Volcanoes remind us of a truth embedded within creation: destruction may radically change the landscape without gaining the authority to determine its final future.

The people receiving the words of Isaiah 43 understood what it meant for their world to erupt. Jerusalem had fallen. The Temple had been destroyed. Many had been carried into exile in Babylon. Their political, religious, and communal lives had been torn apart. They were not enduring a temporary inconvenience. They were living amid the collapse of the world they had known.

Into that devastation, a later prophetic voice continuing in Isaiah’s tradition announces that God is making a road through the wilderness and creating rivers in the wasteland.

God does not deny that the wasteland exists. Scripture does not tell the exiles to rename devastation as blessing, pretend that displacement did not wound them, or become grateful for everything they had suffered. Babylonian exile was not good merely because God could bring life from it. Faith does not require us to call destruction holy before we are permitted to hope.

Instead, Isaiah announces that devastation does not exhaust God’s creative possibilities.

Psalm 23 offers a similar promise: “Even when I walk through the darkest valley…” The familiar language of the King James Version calls it “the valley of the shadow of death.” Either way, the psalm does not promise that faithful people will never enter death-shadowed terrain. It promises that we do not enter it alone.

The crucial word is through.

God’s presence does not always remove the valley or immediately return us to where we were before entering it. Sometimes the only faithful path leads directly through terrain we would rather avoid. Yet Isaiah adds something astonishing to that promise. God not only accompanies the people through the wasteland; God brings water into it.

God creates the conditions through which life can emerge in the very place that appeared incapable of sustaining it.

Isaiah says that even the wild animals will honor God because God provides water in the wilderness. On the surface, this is a beautiful picture of creation receiving God’s provision. Within prophetic language, however, wild animals often carried an additional meaning. Jackals, ostriches, and other wilderness creatures were associated with abandoned ruins. Their presence indicated that human settlements had collapsed and cultivated places had reverted to wilderness.

They were signs that civilization had left and desolation had taken over.

Isaiah reverses the image. The wild animals no longer testify only to abandonment. They become witnesses to renewal. The creatures most closely associated with the wasteland are among the first to recognize that water is flowing there.

There may even be some prophetic irony in that. God asks the people, “Do you not see it?” Meanwhile, the wild animals are already drinking.

Creation recognizes God’s provision while human beings are still deciding whether it counts.

Perhaps that is because we frequently expect renewal to look like restoration to a former condition. We want the same forest, the same structures, the same communities, the same bodies, the same relationships, or the same versions of ourselves we knew before everything erupted. We pray for new life while quietly defining it as the recovery of the old one.

But God does not promise the exiles a replica of their past. By the time the first exiles returned, nearly fifty years had passed since Jerusalem’s destruction—and about sixty since the first major deportation. Many returnees had been born in Babylon and knew Judah only through inherited stories. Meanwhile, Judah had not remained empty. Those who survived there had cultivated the land, raised families, and formed lives of their own. The return brought competing claims about land, belonging, and authority—not an uncomplicated homecoming. There was no road back to the world as it had been. God would have to make a new one.

The Church must hear this when looking at struggling congregations, neglected neighborhoods, wounded communities, and people whose lives no longer fit familiar expectations. Institutions often survey altered ground, calculate what has been lost, and conclude that nothing valuable can grow there. Resources are withdrawn. Communities are abandoned. People are treated as liabilities because they cannot reproduce what existed before.

God sees differently.

God sees the minerals hidden within the ash. God sees water beneath the wasteland. God sees ecosystems that do not yet resemble anything we recognize. And those dismissed as wild, unwanted, unrespectable, or out of place may be the first to drink from the river and recognize that God has not abandoned the terrain.

The same is true within us. Some experiences alter us permanently. We may never become the person we were before the eruption, and healing does not require us to do so. God’s new creation is not confined to reconstructing an earlier version of our lives. Grace can nourish something genuinely new—something shaped by what we have survived without being defined solely by it.

The ash remains part of the ground, but it does not prevent the ground from becoming fertile.

God leads us through the valley. God remains with us in the wasteland. Then, sometimes slowly and beyond the timetable we would choose, living water begins to flow through the devastation.

The wasteland is real.

But it does not get the final word.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God does not always restore the former landscape; sometimes God creates a new ecosystem within it.

PRAYER
Life-giving God, remain with us when the landscape of our lives is altered beyond recognition. Lead us through death-shadowed valleys, help us perceive the rivers you are creating, and give us courage to welcome life even when it does not resemble what came before. Amen.

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

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 9: Can You See It?

Leave a comment

Read Isaiah 43:18–19

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“And the one sitting on the throne said, ‘Look, I am making everything new!’ And then he said to me, ‘Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true.’” (Revelation 21:5 NLT)

Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Can You See It?” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

During the last couple of years I lived in Pennsylvania, I knew spring had arrived when the groundhogs began appearing. First, I would see Mama and Papa Groundhog venturing out again. Then, later in the spring, their pups would emerge and begin exploring the world around them.

And no—they never appeared on Groundhog Day.

They followed no human calendar and waited for no ceremonial announcement. By the time I saw them, the changing season was already underway. Life had been stirring beneath the ground before any groundhog—or pastor—appeared above it.

That is the tension within God’s question through Isaiah: “I have already begun! Do you not see it?” God is not merely promising that something new will happen eventually. God declares that the new thing is already emerging, even while the wilderness still looks like a wilderness.

These words were not written by the eighth-century prophet Isaiah himself. They come from a later prophetic voice continuing in Isaiah’s tradition, speaking to the people of Judah during the Babylonian exile. Jerusalem had fallen, the Temple had been destroyed, and the people were living far from home under foreign rule. They needed more than a comforting memory of what God had once done; they needed to recognize what God was beginning to do among them now.

The exiles knew what God had done before. Their ancestors had been enslaved in Egypt, trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the sea, with no visible road to freedom. Then God divided the waters and made a way where no way appeared possible. The Exodus became the defining testimony of Israel’s deliverance—a sacred memory passed from one generation to the next.

Yet Isaiah declares, “But forget all that—it is nothing compared to what I am going to do.” God is not commanding the people to erase their history or diminish what God had done. In fact, the verses immediately preceding this passage deliberately invoke the Exodus. The past still testifies to God’s faithful character.

The warning concerns what happens when sacred memory becomes a boundary around what God may do next.

Before, God made a road through the sea. Now, God promises a road through the wilderness. Before, God divided the waters. Now, God promises to bring water into a wasteland. The landscape changes. The method changes. God’s faithfulness remains.

The people knew how to recognize the God who made a road through the sea. The question was whether they could recognize that same God making a road through unfamiliar terrain.

God declares, “I have already begun! Do you not see it?”

That question suggests something unsettling: God’s new work may already be emerging while God’s people remain unable—or unwilling—to perceive it. They may be staring toward the sea, waiting for familiar waters to divide, while life is already breaking through somewhere else.

This does not mean that everything new comes from God. Newness alone is not evidence of holiness. Not every innovation is faithful, every disruption is deliverance, or every promise of change is life-giving. Institutions can adopt new language, introduce new programs, and advertise new visions without confronting injustice, relinquishing control, or changing anything substantive.

God’s new work must be discerned according to God’s revealed character. Does it produce the fruit of the Spirit? Does it cultivate love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Does it tell the truth, practice mercy, pursue justice, extend hospitality, loosen bonds, and restore life?

Discernment protects us from two equal dangers: worshiping novelty simply because it is new and rejecting God’s work simply because it is unfamiliar.

The second danger can be particularly difficult for churches and institutions to recognize. We may pray passionately for renewal while quietly prescribing what renewal must look like. It must use our familiar language, preserve our established structures, affirm our existing authority, and resemble a previous season when God’s presence seemed especially clear.

A testimony can become a template. A former movement can become a monument. Nostalgia can disguise itself as faithfulness.

Then, when new life begins emerging through unfamiliar people, overlooked communities, or places we had dismissed as barren, we may resist the very renewal for which we prayed. We may conclude that God is absent because God is not working through the people, practices, and patterns we expected.

The same temptation exists within us personally. We can become attached to the way God once met us, the work through which we once served, what once gave our lives meaning, or the person we once believed we had to be. Those memories may remain sacred, but they do not have to dictate our future. Honoring who we have been does not require us to remain there.

Sometimes the new thing God is revealing is not an opportunity appearing outside us, but a truer life already emerging within us. It may begin quietly—small enough to overlook, unfamiliar enough to mistrust, and alive before anyone else recognizes or approves it.

The past testifies that God makes ways where none appear possible. Faith trusts that God is not restricted to making the same way twice. Honestly, I praise Jesus for that!

Friends, the new thing may already be emerging.

Can you see it?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God’s faithfulness does not require God to repeat the past.

PRAYER
Faithful God, free us from confusing familiarity with faithfulness. Teach us to honor what you have done without restricting what you may do next. Give us wisdom to discern your character, courage to recognize your new work, and faith to follow the road you are creating. Amen.

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

Devotional, Series

Sacred Signs of Subversion, Part 20: Halo/Circle

Leave a comment

Read Matthew 17:1–8

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“And the Lord—who is the Spirit—makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.” (2 Corinthians 3:18 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.

Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Sacred Signs of Subversion, Part 20: Halo / Circle” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Part 20: Halo / Circle. Funny how halos show up in all the wrong ways. One of my favorite examples comes from Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I. Brooks plays a fugitive hiding out as a waiter in a Jewish restaurant—only to end up serving the disciples in the Upper Room. After taking their orders and being shushed, Leonardo da Vinci barges in, insisting the scene won’t work unless they’re all seated on the same side of the table. He rearranges them, steps back, shouts “Freeze!”—and in that instant, Brooks is caught holding his serving tray perfectly behind Jesus’ head, forming an accidental halo. It’s absurd, irreverent, perfectly Brooks… and strangely revealing.

Because halos in art were meant to show divine radiance—yet over time, they’ve become props. Decorative. Harmless. A safe symbol that demands nothing and reveals nothing. But nothing in Scripture suggests that divine radiance is safe or sterile. When Jesus is transfigured on the mountain, His face blazes like the sun, His clothes turn white with unfiltered glory, and the disciples collapse in fear. Holiness does not politely glow. Holiness burns. Holiness exposes. Holiness reveals injustice and disrupts every false peace upheld by power.

Michelangelo understood this unsettling quality when he carved Moses with horns. Yes, it came from a mistranslation, but the effect was striking: true holiness is nothing like the sanitized halos we hang above our nativity sets. It is unpredictable, untamed, and always upends the status quo.

But halos also hint at something deeper—the circle. The shape of belonging. The shape of boundaries. The shape of who’s inside and who’s out. Humanity is always drawing circles: worthiness, purity, identity, doctrine, comfort. And the Church has drawn plenty of them too. We have fenced pulpits, fenced communions, fenced holiness itself.

But Jesus keeps redrawing those circles until they break open.

He touches lepers.
Blesses children.
Lifts women.
Eats with outcasts.
Honors Gentiles.
Invites the excluded.
Calls disciples from the margins.

Every circle drawn to keep someone out becomes the very circle Jesus expands.

I think about my friend Mark Miller—composer, justice-seeker, prophetic soul—whose song Draw the Circle Wide has become one of my favorites. Its simplicity is its brilliance. “Draw the circle wide… draw it wider still.” In one line, Mark captures the entire Gospel. God does not shrink circles; God expands them until every person knows they belong.

And yet, halos have often been co-opted by purity politics. Holiness became a behavior to perform, an image to maintain, a glow to admire. Respectability replaced righteousness. The Church began rewarding people who looked holy—those who fit the image—rather than those who lived compassionate, courageous, Christ-shaped lives. But Jesus never once pursued respectability. He never polished His radiance. He never curated His glow. He let His holiness disrupt rather than impress.

Still, the halo’s circular shape whispers a deeper truth. The circle is one of the oldest sacred forms in human history—no beginning, no end. The shape of resurrection. Of covenant. Of completeness. Of shalom. Scripture describes God’s glory in circular imagery: rainbows, wheels within wheels, arcs of light. And Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that we are being transformed “from glory to glory”—drawn again and again into divine wholeness. The circle of holiness doesn’t just surround Christ; it gathers us too.

Put everything together and the symbol becomes clear:

Halos are not awards for the flawless.
Circles are not fences for the worthy.
Radiance is not a performance.
Wholeness is not a possession.

Holiness is not about shining above others—
it is about drawing others into the light.

Holiness widens every circle until those once pushed to the margins find themselves at home in its glow. Holiness lifts those the world overlooks. Holiness gathers, restores, and refuses to close.

And maybe that’s the real scandal of the halo: not that it crowns the holy, but that it invites the whole world into God’s radiance.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
True holiness doesn’t draw circles to keep people out—it draws circles of light to bring people home.

PRAYER
Radiant God, draw us into Your transforming light. Break the small circles we cling to and widen our hearts with Your compassion. Make us people who reflect Your glory with courage and welcome. Shape us into a community where all can find their place within Your circle of grace. Amen.

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

RECLAIM Video Series

Reclaim, Episode 2: “Fasting”

Leave a comment

In this brand new video series, Pastor Todd of First United Methodist Church of Newton, NJ brings passionate awareness and helpful tips on various transformational Christian practices and theology. Each episode will inspire and motivate spiritual growth through time-tested practices and and wisdom.

This week’s episode invites you to RECLAIM fasting as a wholesome and healthy practice in our lives. In this episode, Pastor Todd will discuss what fasting is and answer the question, “why fast?”. In this episode you will also find his own experiences with fasting, as well as tips for different ways to fast.