Tag Archives: Spiritual Reflection

From the Advent Archives: Where is the Justice?

December 5, 2025 Rev. Todd R. Lattig Leave a comment

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Indeed, the LORD will give justice to his people…” (Deuteronomy 32:36a, NLT)

Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “From the Advent Archives: Where Is the Justice?” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

There come times in one’s life when it is realized that an act was far less timely in the moment it was committed to memory, and this is such a time. Eleven years ago, I saw the America I knew disintegrating—falling apart before my very eyes. Truthfully, we all did. Barack Obama was still president, a very consequential president, if not for anything else other than his race. Of course, he was consequential in many other ways too, but it was his race that would prove the most eye-opening for this country.

I grew up believing we lived in an America that was largely past racism. To be honest, I also grew up in an insular, small-town white bubble. What racism was I really exposed to? Plenty. But it was hidden in jokes, in what nuts were called, and in other subtleties that sound like normalities to people not on the receiving end of them. It ALWAYS bothered me, especially when I gave in and laughed or participated to “fit in.” Thankfully, I never got into the habit of it because I always disliked it. It made me uncomfortable. Why? Because I am an outcast too, and once you’ve been outcast for ANY reason, how can you then outcast others? It happens. But not on my watch.

What you are about to read is a devotion I published on December 5, 2014, in the wake of the acquittal decision in the Ferguson, MO / Michael Brown Jr. case. Now, more than ever, we can see that where we are today is not new, but something that had been brewing under the surface—where we like to keep things hidden.

In 1999, Mel Gibson starred in Payback, a 1950s-style crime thriller directed by Brian Helgeland. I say “1950s-style” because it had Mel Gibson narrating his own story in the kind of way you’d expect to see on the classic police show Dragnet. The twist is that Gibson’s character, Porter, is not a police officer, but a petty criminal who ends up being double-crossed by his former partner-in-crime and his estranged wife.

Porter had cheated on his wife who, to get back at him, joined forces with his partner to plot against him. They shoot him (with the intent of killing him) and steal $70,000 from him—money that he, no doubt, stole from someone else.

To make a long story short—and to do so without spoiling the gritty experience that the film is—Porter sets out to pay back (hence the film’s name) those who did him wrong. He wages a bloody and intense war on his former partner, his estranged wife, and eventually on the crime syndicate protecting them. By the end of the film you can’t help but wonder what justice, if any, was done. Still, it satisfies that inner need to see the “bad guy” get his in the end. Of course, Porter is a “bad guy” getting even with other “bad guys.” This is played up in the film’s slogan: Prepare to root for the bad guy.

There are times in our life when we feel we have been wronged by our family, our friends, our neighbors, and others. In those moments, we often cannot help but feel anger and the desire to get back at such people. Even when we aren’t seeking to get back at them ourselves, we wish that something would happen to them to “teach them a lesson.” We use terms like “karma” to express our wish for fate to slap them right where it counts—and, if possible, allow us to be there to witness it. I know that even while driving down the road, I have prayed that the person who cut me off would pass a police officer and get pulled over. I am sure I am not the only one who has prayed such a prayer.

We live in a world that sees REVENGE as justice. When things don’t go our way, when life seems unjust and no one seems to care that it is, we feel justified in taking things into our own hands and exacting our own brand of justice. In Ferguson, MO, for example, many protesters turned into rioters when they discovered that no charges were going to be brought against Officer Darren Wilson. As a result, a grieving family had to witness their son’s name being frivolously used to incite riots. Store owners and community members stood helplessly as they watched their neighborhoods burn. Innocent and peaceful protesters had to endure tear gas and fear for their lives, and police officers put their lives on the line to try and keep the situation under control.

Where’s the justice in all of that?

The fact is that our own brand of “justice” is often not justice at all. Revenge is not JUSTICE. Revenge is wrong, and it solves nothing. All it does is create more victims.

When I think of God’s justice, I think of a 2014 picture of an officer who, in the midst of protests in Portland, Oregon over the Michael Brown case, hugged a twelve-year-old boy who was crying because he saw the world around him falling apart. He was feeling the weight of the grand jury’s decision to acquit the officer involved in the shooting and was concerned about police brutality toward young Black kids such as himself. In response to seeing the boy crying, the officer asked him what was wrong and, when the boy told him, he asked if he could have one of the “FREE HUGS” the boy’s protest sign was advertising.

JUSTICE is LOVE. JUSTICE is MERCY. Justice is KINDNESS.

While the world around us is often UNJUST, God is calling us to LIVE JUSTLY, to LOVE MERCY, and to WALK HUMBLY with God. That doesn’t mean we sit back and let the innocent get trampled; rather, it means we peacefully and lovingly stand in solidarity with the oppressed without falling victim to the urge to GET BACK at the oppressor. LIVE JUSTLY and inspire others—through actions of peace and love—to join you in doing the same.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
“Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create.” – Pope John Paul II

PRAYER
Lord, help me to spread JUSTICE through peaceful actions of LOVE, MERCY, and COMPASSION. Amen.

Devotional, Series

Sacred Signs of Subversion, Part 20: Halo/Circle

November 24, 2025 Rev. Todd R. Lattig 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).

Devotional, Series

Sacred Signs of Subversion, Part 13: Black/Darkness

October 22, 2025 Rev. Todd R. Lattig Leave a comment

Read Genesis 1:1-5

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

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).

A biweekly devotional