Tag Archives: Subversive Theology

Devotional, Holy Week Series, Lent, Series

ALTAR AUDIT, Part 17: The Altar of Power

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Read John 13:1–17

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“But among you it will be different. Those who are the greatest among you should take the lowest rank, and the leader should be like a servant.” (Luke 22:26 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 dimly lit upper room scene shows a central figure kneeling low on the floor, washing another’s feet while others sit elevated around the room, the warm lamplight emphasizing the stark reversal of expected roles and authority.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “The Altar of Power” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Part 17: The Altar of Power. Power, as the world understands it, is not complicated. It is structured, ordered, and visible. There are those above and those below, those who lead and those who follow, those who command and those who obey. In the world of Jesus and the disciples, that structure was not questioned—it was assumed. A teacher stood above disciples. A master stood above servants. Everyone knew their place. No one beneath washed the feet of those above.

Foot washing belonged to the lowest position in the room. It was the task reserved for the one with the least status, the least authority, the least dignity in the eyes of the world. It was not symbolic or ceremonial. It was menial, embodied, and unmistakably clear. And then Jesus stands up.

The Gospel tells us that Jesus removes the outer garment. That detail matters. In that moment, Jesus lays aside the visible markers of authority and assumes the posture of someone beneath everyone else in the room. This is not simply an act of humility. It is a movement into the lowest position available. Jesus does not just serve. Jesus takes the place of a slave.

When Jesus comes to Peter, the tension surfaces immediately. Peter refuses. Not quietly or politely, but definitively: “You will never wash my feet.” This is not humility. It is protest. Peter is not lowering himself; he is trying to keep Jesus elevated. He is defending a world where teachers remain above students and masters remain above servants. He is protecting the structure.

Jesus refuses.

“Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

There is no softening in that statement. No compromise, no adjustment, no attempt to ease Peter’s discomfort. Jesus draws a boundary. If Peter cannot receive this—if Peter cannot accept a Christ who kneels, who descends, who refuses to remain above—then Peter does not yet understand what it means to belong to him. Peter is not rejecting service. He is rejecting a Savior who will not stay in the place the world says a Savior should occupy.

This is where the meaning of the moment sharpens. Jesus is not modeling a better version of leadership within the existing system. Jesus is not demonstrating kindness as an added virtue. Jesus is exposing the system itself and refusing to participate in it. The world builds power by climbing higher, securing position, and maintaining distance. Jesus reveals power by going lower, by removing what marks status, and by closing the distance entirely.

Jesus removes everything the world uses to measure power… and kneels.

That movement is not symbolic. It is revelatory. It shows that what we call power may not be power at all, and what we dismiss as weakness may be the very place where the truth of God is made known. This is why the moment unsettles us. We are far more comfortable with a Jesus who serves than a Jesus who dismantles. We can admire humility while still preserving hierarchy. We can speak about servant leadership while continuing to protect position, status, and control.

That is where this turns toward us. We still live within systems that depend on knowing our place. We still measure influence, authority, and worth in ways that mirror the world more than the God’s Kingdom. We still resist the idea that power could look like descent instead of ascent. And, like Peter, we often call that resistance reverence. We say we are honoring Christ, when what we are really doing is asking Christ to remain above us in ways that feel safer, clearer, and easier to manage.

Jesus does not accept that version of faith.

“Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

The invitation is not to admire what Jesus does. It is to receive it. It is to allow the collapse of everything we thought power was supposed to be, and to follow Christ into a way of being that no longer depends on staying above anyone else. In the kingdom of God, power is not proven by who stands above. It is revealed by who is willing to kneel.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
If we need Christ to remain above us, we may not yet understand the power Christ reveals.

PRAYER
God, unsettle our assumptions about power. Reveal where we have confused position with faithfulness and authority with truth. Teach us to receive the humility of Christ not as an idea but as a way of life. Give us the courage to follow, even when it dismantles what we thought power was supposed to be. Amen.

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

Devotional, Holy Week Series, Lent, Series

ALTAR AUDIT, Part 16: The Altar of Betrayal

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Read Matthew 26:14–16

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Even my best friend, the one I trusted completely, the one who shared my food, has turned against me.” (Psalm 41:9 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 cracked stone altar sits in an open architectural space overlooking a distant city skyline, under muted gray skies, symbolizing fracture, exposure, and the hidden structures behind what appears stable.
Image: AI-generated using Adobe Firefly and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “ALTAR AUDIT: A New Lenten Devotion Series” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Part 16: The Altar of Betrayal. Not all decisions are made out in the open. Some take shape quietly, in conversations that never make the record, in tensions that linger just beneath the surface. By the time something finally happens, the conditions have already been set.

Holy Week is full of those moments. Judas’ act of betrayal is one of them—and it changes everything.

We know this story, or at least we think we do…

Judas becomes the easy answer—the betrayer, the villain, the one who sold Jesus for silver. But the Gospels do not begin there, and if we begin there, we have already stepped away from what the text is actually doing. “Judas” is not a strange or cursed name. It is Judah, a common name, a shared identity. Over time, the Church has taken that name and turned it into a symbol of ultimate betrayal. Not just a person remembered, but a category created—a warning label. That move is not neutral. It creates distance. It allows us to point and say, “That is not us,” without ever asking how close the story actually comes.

The Gospels do not present a group of disciples who all understood Jesus while one stood apart. They show a community wrestling, misunderstanding, arguing, and resisting. They debated who would be greatest. They pushed back when Jesus spoke of suffering. They followed, yes, but not always with clarity and not always with courage. Judas is not introduced as the outsider. Judas is one of them.

And then the text tells us something both simple and unsettling. Judas went to the religious leaders. No summons. No recorded coercion. No dramatic recruitment. He went. And yet, the deeper question remains: how did he know where to go? By this point, the Gospels are clear that the leadership had already begun considering how to remove Jesus. Not publicly, not recklessly, but deliberately and quietly. The system was already in motion.

So we hold both truths at once: Judas went to them, and the system was already waiting to receive him.

No one had to explicitly tell Judas. He already knew exactly where to go.

This is how power often works. It does not always issue commands; it creates conditions. It signals what will be rewarded and makes certain actions thinkable long before they are taken. It maintains distance while leaving the door open.Someone close enough to see both sides—close enough to feel the tension—steps through it.

One person crosses the threshold. And it only takes one.

From that moment, everything begins to move. Access is granted. Timing is set. The arrest becomes possible. Once the machinery turns, others are caught in its wake. Peter, who swore loyalty, denies. The others scatter. Leaders justify. Authorities comply. The crowd follows. The chain of unintended consequences unfolds, pulling even the strongest voices into actions they never imagined they would take.

Judas is not the whole problem. Judas is the turning point.

Because it is easier to isolate betrayal in one person than to recognize the conditions that made it possible. It is easier to name a villain than to examine the system. It is easier to condemn Judas than to ask how often we have participated in quieter versions of the same thing. Systems still reward what they will not openly request. Truth still becomes inconvenient. Insiders still know exactly where to go when following Christ begins to cost too much.

We do not need silver. We only need a moment where allegiance becomes negotiable.

And here is the hardest truth of all. By turning Judas into a caricature, we have not protected the story—we have distorted it. We have made betrayal something distant, something obvious, something we would never do. In doing so, we have avoided seeing how close it actually is.

Judas betrayed Jesus.

But when we reduce him to less than human, when we refuse to see ourselves in the same circle, and when we pretend we would have stood firm while others faltered, we betray them both.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Betrayal begins long before the act—when following Christ becomes something we are willing to negotiate.

PRAYER
God, search us where we are most certain of ourselves. Reveal where our allegiance has become conditional, where comfort has replaced courage, and where we have chosen distance over truth. Give us the grace to remain faithful when it costs us, and the honesty to see ourselves clearly in the story. Amen.

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

Devotional, Series

Sacred Signs of Subversion, Part 12: Fire

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Read Exodus 3:1-6

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“For our God is a devouring fire.” (Hebrews 12:29 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 solitary flame burns in a cracked desert at dusk, glowing gold against deep shadows, symbolizing God’s purifying fire that refines without consuming.
Image: AI-generated using DALL-E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Fire” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Part 12: Fire. Fire has always drawn us close and frightened us away. It gives warmth and light but devours whatever it touches. From the beginning, fire meant awe. It danced through the wilderness as a pillar of flame. It blazed in the bush that burned but was not consumed. It fell from heaven at Elijah’s prayer and flared again at Pentecost in tongues of light. When Scripture speaks of fire, it’s not talking about destruction—it’s talking about presence. God’s fire refines. It burns away falsehood but never life.

But humanity has always been quick to claim the flames for itself. If God’s fire reveals truth, ours often hides cruelty. The same Church that sang “Come, Holy Spirit” once lit pyres in God’s name. Crusaders burned villages, inquisitors burned heretics, colonizers burned cultures. Even now, Christians still burn bridges and books, ideas and identities. We’ve mistaken zeal for love, wrath for holiness, and torches for testimony. The world smells the smoke and wonders why we call it worship.

We have baptized arson. We’ve turned the language of fire into slogans for vengeance and purity, using the flames of judgment to scorch those who think, love, or live differently. When we use “holy fire” to destroy, we mirror Cain, not Christ. We forget that the fire of God’s presence is the same fire that stood between enslaved Israelites and their pursuers, the same light that filled a frightened upper room with courage. Divine fire liberates—it doesn’t lynch.

Scripture’s fire is not that kind of fire. When Moses met God in the desert, the flames blazed yet left the bush whole. When the Spirit came at Pentecost, the disciples were set alight but not destroyed. That’s the pattern of divine fire: it consumes what poisons but preserves what’s pure. It doesn’t burn to punish; it burns to reveal. It’s the fire of covenant, of purification, of presence.

Human flames are never so merciful. Nebuchadnezzar built a furnace to destroy faith, but the fire bowed before the fourth figure who walked among the exiles untouched. Elijah mocked Baal’s prophets as they begged for their god to answer with fire, but only the Lord’s flame fell—and it didn’t just consume the offering, it consumed the stones, the water, and the pride of the people who’d forgotten who they were. Again and again, the fires we build to destroy are conquered by the fire that saves.

“Our God is a devouring fire,” the writer of Hebrews says—but devouring only what does not belong to love.

There is also the fire we fear to face—the one that burns within. The anger, grief, and longing that threaten to undo us are not always enemies. Sometimes they are the sparks of transformation, begging to be tended. God’s refining flame is not distant; it works in the marrow of our being. It burns away self-deception and pride, purges our need to control, and leaves behind only what can survive in love’s heat. The saints called it purgation; we might just call it growing up. Either way, it’s holy fire.

We’ve all felt both sides of the flame. There’s the heat that sanctifies, and the heat that scorches. The Church must ask which one it carries. Do our words kindle life or ash? Do our hearts burn with compassion or contempt? Because every time we ignite hatred and call it holy, we commit arson against grace.

The subversive truth is that God’s fire cannot be managed or weaponized. It isn’t ours to control. It is the fire of the bush that refuses to go out, the fire that melts our golden calves, the fire that burns in the eyes of prophets and poets who refuse to let the world grow cold. To stand near that flame is dangerous—but not because it destroys. It’s dangerous because it changes us. It burns away the false self until only love remains.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
The only fire God blesses is the kind that burns without destroying.

PRAYER
Consuming Fire, burn within us, not against us. Kindle what is holy and burn away what is cruel. Melt our hardness into compassion, our fear into courage, our pride into light. Make us flames that warm rather than wound and let your holy fire be known again in love. Amen.

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