I became a father in March 2003. I was pouring concrete in Reed, Colorado, the day Melodie went into labor. I got the call, cleaned up my tools, and drove the 40 minutes home. When I got home, Melodie was watering plants and tidying up the house. I jumped in the shower and shaved. I wanted to be clean-shaven when my baby arrived. My daughter was born late that night. The delivery went smoothly. We were young and happy and naïve, and now I was a dad. I nuzzled my clean-shaven cheeks into my new daughter’s face. It was good and beautiful, but it all felt normal. Life-changing, to be sure, but normal. Some people talk about how their lives changed the moment they became fathers. Yet for me, the transformation was gradual. The father I would become would be revealed slowly over decades. When I became a father, I thought I knew what to expect. I observed the lives of fathers and parents I knew. Some were good at it and made it seem easy. Some, I couldn’t understand why they chose the methods they seemed to employ. I thought that what I needed most was to believe the right things about what it means to be a father and to live accordingly. And yes, that is true. But there is so much more to it. All my observations came from a limited and privileged vantage point. I had to confront the story I was actually living in. I could only know so much from the outside. I didn’t know the backstories or family dynamics of most of the other fathers I knew, nor did I really know their temperaments or those of their children. But more importantly, I didn’t have their lived experience or my own to understand their circumstances. But I would.

We often approach the narratives we find in scripture from a similarly limited vantage point. I have found we especially approach the Gospel narratives this way. We arrive at the text carrying theological assumptions that took centuries to develop,1 and we weigh what we read against those assumptions before we’ve finished the first paragraph. The divinity of Jesus is one of the clearest examples. We believe Jesus is divine — a settled theological claim for many of us — and so we read the Gospel accounts, looking for confirmation and stacking evidence. We turn the story of the Gospel into fodder for YouTube apologetics debates. I don’t think we are being dishonest. It’s just hard not to assume the points of an argument when we already know the conclusion. We tend to skim the text, looking for evidence rather than actually reading and entering into the narrative. To me, defending a set of theological propositions is just way less interesting than the story—the flesh and blood story—we are actually presented with.

This isn’t just a scholarly problem. It’s a human one. We do it with everything. We read the ending into the beginning. We meet someone and immediately start sorting them into categories. We walk into a room full of people, and in about 4.5 seconds, we’ve decided what kind of crowd it is. The brain is efficient, and efficiency has a cost: we stop paying attention to things that don’t fit the story we’ve already started telling. On the one hand, when we re-read a story, we see things we missed the first time. On the other hand, when we already “know” the story, even if this is technically our first time encountering it, we can and often do miss the details of what’s actually in it.

So, what if we reread the Jesus story again—for the first time?

Luke was not the first person to tell the story of Jesus.2 He says so himself. His opening lines acknowledge that: “Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us” (Luke 1:1 NRSVue). He knew those accounts. He knows what they say.3 And he decides to tell it again. Not because the others got it wrong, but because there is something in the careful following of the plot details that matters. The Greek word he uses for his own method, parakoloutheo, means something like a close investigation, a tracking of events from the inside. Luke is not just reporting accurate information; this involves interpretation. Luke is following the story, allowing the story to lead—wherever it takes us. And he intends his reader to do the same.

Robert Tannehill describes what Luke produced as the longest and most complex narrative in the New Testament, written by “an author of literary skill and rich imagination who had a complex vision of the significance of Jesus Christ.”4 What’s striking, especially if you’ve spent time with John’s Gospel, is what Luke doesn’t do. John opens with a declaration: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2). Thesis first. Identity announced before the story begins. Luke opens with a priest burning incense in the Temple and a couple too old to have children. There is no prologue about cosmic origins, no narrator stepping in to tell you who this person is. The identity of Jesus in Luke is something you arrive at gradually, through the accumulation of scenes and encounters and moments of partial recognition, rather than something you’re handed in the first paragraph.

That’s not a deficiency. It’s a feature, not a bug. What looks like a low or underdeveloped view of Jesus is actually Luke doing something much more subtle than a plain declaration of Jesus’s divine nature. The narrative leads you to expect the right things, and then, before you can lock in the conclusion, the story shifts. You come right to the edge of naming who Jesus is, and Luke pulls back. King? Yes, but... Divine? Maybe... He confirms your suspicions and then disappoints them in the same breath. The narrative leads the reader to expect the right thing, but often in the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons— so that when the recognition finally comes, it arrives on the story’s own terms rather than ours. This is not evasiveness. It’s a strategy for a progressive unveiling of the significance of Jesus’s identity.

Consider whom Luke chooses to let in on this. The first witnesses to Jesus’s birth are not dignitaries or priests. They are shepherds, “scorned in the first century as shiftless and dishonest,”5 exactly the kind of people a royal birth announcement would bypass. Simeon, the first person in the narrative to grasp the full significance of what is happening, is described only as righteous and devout. He is obscure, barely a footnote to the historical record. Anna is a 105-year-old widow who spent her days fasting and praying at the temple, with little social standing and no platform. In Luke’s account, divine knowledge about the meaning of what is transpiring is consistently given to someone obscure and less than noteworthy. And that is the point. Faithful, Spirit-led individuals are brought in on what is being revealed, even if they do not fully see or understand the implications. The people who should have known are the last to find out. The people nobody was watching are the first to see. That pattern holds all the way through.

As Kavin Rowe observes, Luke “does not confine his christology to certain key statements but instead develops his christological perspective via the intricate interplay” of the narrative, building meaning across characters, encounters, and moments of recognition and misrecognition all the way to the end.6 Stories written as stories, Rowe notes, “are probably meant to be read as such.”7 Luke is not making an argument that happens to be told in narrative form. The story is the argument. This logical progression is significant because it does not presuppose or assert the thesis from the outset; it gently and subtly guides the reader toward the conclusion. Through repeated scenes and motifs, the Gospel gradually leads readers to discern who Jesus is and to grasp the particular way in which his identity is exercised and revealed—both to the reader and to the characters in the story. Which means the argument only works if you follow it in order, from beginning to end, without skipping to the conclusion.8

This is what Tannehill calls “narrative rhetoric”: the way Luke constructs “a narrative world which readers are invited to inhabit imaginatively,” shaped by particular values and beliefs that are meant to be convincing precisely because they are discovered rather than declared.9 There is, Rowe writes, “a cumulative aspect to the argument, one which depends on the work as a whole … only when we arrive at the end can we look back to divine the whole.”10 Luke very carefully crafts this narrative and intends his reader to follow it closely. When you do, something happens that doesn’t happen when you’re told what to believe: you start to see it for yourself.

The whole narrative is building toward a single moment of recognition. Near the end of Luke’s Gospel, two disciples walk the road to a village called Emmaus alongside a stranger. They don’t recognize him. They speak with him for miles about the very events he was central to, laying out their grief and their shattered hopes, and they still don’t know who it is. Then they stop for a meal. The stranger takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. Their eyes are opened, and he vanishes from their sight. That is Luke’s culminating move — not a spectacular revelation, not a throne or a triumph, but a quiet one, in the breaking of shared bread. Ancient Greco-Roman literature had a word for this kind of narrative moment: anagnorisis, the dramatic unveiling of a hidden identity. Luke knew the device. He used it carefully throughout the story to bring the reader to exactly this point. The truth of Jesus’s identity comes as a moment of revelation. That is exactly what a story requires.

That, I would argue, is exactly the point.

I became a father in March 2003 and thought I knew what it meant. I had watched fathers. I had formed opinions. I had a framework. Do better than what I saw before me or than what I experienced. What I didn’t have was the lived experience of following the story from the inside, which turns out to be the only way you actually learn what fatherhood is.

Luke invites the same thing. Not a framework applied to Jesus, but an experience of following the story closely enough to arrive somewhere you couldn’t have gotten by being told. So let me ask you this question: What do you actually know about Jesus? And what have you simply inherited? Not as an accusation. As a genuine distinction. There may be more room between those two things than you’ve allowed yourself to notice.

A faith formed by following a story is different from a faith formed by inheriting a verdict. I find it interesting that what we are given is four stories about Jesus rather than an evidence file or debate notes. A faith formed by narrative tends to hold conclusions with more awareness of what it took to get there, which makes it a little harder to weaponize and a little more open to where the same movement of God might lead next. The Gospel writers seem to think that matters. The way you arrive at something shapes what you do with it once you’re there.

What Luke is setting the stage for, across his Gospel and into Acts, is a community that learns to recognize Jesus — in Scripture, at the table, in mission, and by the Spirit. That community doesn’t arrive at its convictions by having them handed down from a podium. It arrives the way the disciples on the Emmaus road did: by walking, by listening, by sitting down to break bread with a stranger, and by having their eyes opened in the ordinary.

Adapted from a sermon preached November 10, 2024, for Rêver Church.

There is something about returning to the house you grew up in that acts as a sort of time machine. In October 2024, I drove out to Colorado’s West Slope1 where I grew up. My mom had just received some difficult health news. I spent a few weeks with her, taking her to appointments, learning about blood pressure medications, and helping her plan for the future. It has been a long and difficult season for our family, with more doctors’ appointments than any of us could count and a worry that seems to take over. She is doing a lot better now, although it was genuinely scary for a while. We eventually helped her move to the Front Range so she could be closer to us and receive better care. But those few weeks in the house where I grew up turned out to be something I had not expected: I found myself wandering through old rooms, pulling things out of closets, and being ambushed by memories at every turn. A house has a way of holding on to things, especially memories. Birthday parties. Holidays. Childhood sleepovers. The backyard, where at the start of one summer, my brother, my neighborhood friend Nathan, and I once ceremonially burned an algebra textbook doused in cheap cologne to celebrate the end of school. Only to wake up at 1:00 a.m. to firefighters pounding on the front door, our celebration, having not adequately been extinguished, spread to the neighbor’s fence and the shed. I think about the repair work that followed. I remember, Eagle Scout Nathan, whose idea the whole celebration had been, did not show up to help with the repairs. My brother and I spent that week pulling scorched boards off the neighbor's fence, covered in soot and ash, and I remember growing angrier the more we worked. It seemed profoundly unfair. As the oldest of four boys, the world being fair has always mattered to me in the very particular way it seems to matter to oldest children. But I also remember what my mom told my brother and me: we were responsible for our part, and our part was what we had to take care of, regardless of what Nathan did or did not do. I have learned a lot from my Mom over the years — a lot about love and responsibility.

Nostalgia has a way of doing what good theology also tries to do: it makes you think about what it means to live well with other people in the same space. During my time on the West Slope, I kept thinking about family, about obligation and care, about the structures we build to hold the people we love. During that season, I was preaching from Paul’s letter to the Colossians at our church on the Front Range. My time on the West Slope had caused me to miss a couple of weeks of preaching, so I decided to preach remotely on the next section: Colossians 3:18-4:1. I kept chewing on this passage between appointments and while planning low-sodium meals.

This passage and a similar one in Ephesians are among the most misread passages in the New Testament.

Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae was written into a world that the twenty-first-century reader barely recognizes. The Roman Empire was not really a democracy2; it was more an elaborate hierarchy, and the household was its basic social and economic unit. Roman law gave the paterfamilias, the male head of the household, sweeping authority over everyone under his roof: wife, children, and slaves. These relationships were not simply personal; they were also political. Stable households were good for the empire, and in the Roman social-imagination, it was expected that those relationships would reflect that stability.

Into this world, Paul writes what scholars call a Haustafeln, or household code. These lists of instructions governing household relationships had a long history in Greco-Roman moral philosophy, and the readers in Colossae would have immediately recognized the form. What they might not have recognized so quickly was what Paul was doing with it, however. Nijay Gupta describes Paul’s approach as a “contextual-ethic,” a strategy that works within existing social structures not to endorse them but to transfigure them from within.3 The question is not whether Paul maintained the form of the household code but rather what he did with its content. When you slow down and read carefully, the answer is surprising.

The first thing to notice is who is addressed first. In each of the three pairings that make up Colossians 3:18-4:1, Paul addresses the socially subordinate party before the one with power: wives before husbands, children before fathers, and slaves before masters. This inversion was not accidental. Emphasis in Greek prose was carried by word order, not punctuation, and Paul consistently places the person of lower social standing at the front of the sentence. Scot McKnight notes that this opening move reframes everything, insisting that “the oneness of Christ in the community of Christ revolutionizes what it means to be those in Christ.”4 These relationships have not been abolished but have been reimagined. Every person in the household is first and foremost a person in Christ, and that changes the grammar of the whole thing.

To wives, Paul says: “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord” (Col. 3:18 NRSVue). This verse often makes people flinch, and, understandably, so. The history of its use has been problematic. However, the gut reaction can sometimes prevent us from reading what is actually there.

The Greek verb hypotassō means to order oneself under, to arrange oneself in relation to another. What is striking about Paul’s use of it here is that it is reflexive. Wives are not told to be submitted; they are told to submit, an active construction that gives them agency in the act. Paul is speaking to the wives as moral agents capable of deciding how to respond, rather than as objects to be arranged. To “give such agency to ancient wives,” Holly Beers writes, “(to self-submit or self-order, as it were, in ways that make sense in the Lord) would have been fairly radical.”5

Paul’s qualifier matters as well. The phrase “as is fitting in the Lord” is not a rubber stamp on cultural convention. This is a theological renegotiation of the assumed, social order. McKnight argues that the household code in Colossians operates on a “linear and nonreciprocal” social model that Paul proceeds to subvert.6 The subordination of wives was the cultural default; Paul embeds this default inside a phrase that introduces a different Lord than the one the Roman world had come to expect. The gospel does not arrive as a frontal assault on the Roman social order. It works from within existing structures, transfiguring them by the pressure of a different loyalty. McKnight calls the submission of verse 18 “an instance of cruciform living,”7 modeled on the one who, though equal with God, took the form of a servant. Submission is to the Lord and is not degradation; it is discipleship shaped entirely by the cross.

Paul then turns to husbands. “Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly” (Col. 3:19). The word Paul uses for love here is agapaō, the verb form of agapē, the kind of love that Paul’s letters consistently describe as God’s own self-giving orientation toward humanity. This word does not imply romantic affection. It is the word for the love that empties itself out. This kind of love was not a Roman cultural expectation of husbands. James Dunn, in his commentary on Colossians, frames the entire household code not as an assertion of authority but as a reconfiguration of obligation: Paul speaks “not of authority and rights but of obligations and responsibilities.”8 The point is not that husbands have divinely sanctioned power but that they must answer for how they exercise the power afforded to them by the social order they happen to occupy. This is true for all those who occupy seats and positions of power. I would argue that Roman social structure was situational rather than divinely prescribed. Paul, here and throughout the rest of the section, describes how to live within the existing system rather than prescribing a divine social order. If that is true, the same expectations would be there in a society ordered around a materfamilia social structure. This reading is not just a challenge to patriarchy, it’s a challenge to all coercive, self-indulgent, and anti-cruciform power structures.

Beers further presses this idea. “In the household code,” she writes, “Paul is not talking about rights; he is challenging the person who has more social honor and power in that ancient context, the man, to use it not for himself but for his wife. Using one’s honor on behalf of another, rather than oneself, is a kind of submission.”9 This is a remarkable observation because it means that love in Paul’s sense is itself a form of downward movement. The husband does not hold his position and dispense affection from a distance; he is called to pour himself out toward the one in his care. McKnight captures what this means in practice: the love Paul calls for is “a covenantal commitment to presence, advocacy, protection, and provision” for the wife’s flourishing.10 The point, ultimately, is not a renegotiation of power but something deeper: “The text … does not advocate sharing power; it advocates sharing life and love with one another as a new kind of power.”11 Paul reframes the social order rather than ratifying it. The Apostle to the Gentiles understood the social reality of his time and allowed a cruciform worldview to radically reshape it. I would argue that, although Paul’s argument does not go far enough toward gender equality, it paves the way for that work to be done.

The commands to the children and fathers each occupy a single verse, but they are worth a close reading. “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord” (Col. 3:20). Children in the ancient world were expected to obey; this was not news. However, Paul adds the Lord as the reference point, thereby shifting the child’s obedience from parental authority to divine relationship. Paul then turns to fathers: “Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart” (Col. 3:21). McKnight notes that this cuts against the cultural grain: the father’s relation to his children in Paul’s vision is “not one of imposing authority but of caring nurture.”12 The father is given the responsibility of protecting the child’s spirit, not of exercising power. A paterfamilias accountable for his children’s emotional well-being was a social expectation that differed significantly from that of Roman social philosophy.

The longest and most theologically dense section of the household code concerns slaves and masters, where Paul’s strategy of subversion reaches its most radical expression. Paul devotes five verses to slaves, an astonishing proportion given that Greco-Roman philosophical literature rarely addressed slaves as moral agents in any meaningful way. The very act of speaking to them and providing them with theological instruction on how to inhabit their condition with dignity and faith was countercultural. He tells them to work as for the Lord, not for their earthly masters, because the Lord will render justice and there is no partiality with him (Col. 3:22-25). While this certainly does not go far enough, in a world where slaves ranked at the very bottom of every social scale, this was a radical reassignment of worth.

However, it is the command to masters that is the most striking. Colossians 4:1 reads, as Beers translates it: “Masters, provide your slaves with justice and equality, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.”13 The Greek word translated as “equality” here is isotēs, and McKnight’s analysis of it is illuminating: In the Greek world, isotēs was a term used not for relationships between social unequals but for relationships among citizens of comparable standing, even among oligarchs.14 To apply it to the master-slave relationship was to import the language of civic equality into a context where it had no business appearing. McKnight concludes that in this command, “the power differential between masters and slaves is diminished dramatically.”15 Paul’s emphasis on the relinquishing of power by those in authority was a profound challenge to the social order of the day. Paul does not merely upgrade the social status of the wife, the child, and the slave. He calls on the one with higher social standing to relinquish his claim to power and control within the social hierarchy. Interestingly, Paul sent this letter, like many of his letters, to a local house church. The one receiving the letter, a follower of Jesus and leader in the church to be sure, was most likely the head of his household, making him the one Paul addresses in all three accounts: husband, father, and master. Paul understands that he has little political weight to change Roman social ordering, but he does have the power to influence the church. He does this by subverting readers’ expectations. Those in power often invoke religion to affirm their position, thereby conferring divine authority. Paul does not offer that. The common literary rhythm and structure of household code, here subverted, challenge the use of religion to justify authority.

I do want to acknowledge that Pauline household codes have not always been read this way. Beers is direct about this history: “The household codes have often been weaponized and used to legitimate abuses of other people, especially women and slaves.”16 This history is real and must be acknowledged. At the same time, Beers argues that reading Paul’s actual text carefully, in its ancient context, reveals something quite different from the weapon it has been made into: “Paul most certainly was charting a new path of resistance” to the dominant social order, a path defined not by revolution from outside but by transformation from within.17 We can claim to elevate the voices of the marginalized all we want, but if those in power do not make room for their voices to be heard and considered, very little will change.

I returned from those weeks on the West Slope thinking a lot about how we care for one another, which is perhaps what spending time with a sick parent does to you. There is something about the asymmetry of that kind of love, the giving that cannot be immediately reciprocated, that kept bringing me back to this passage. My mom certainly demonstrated this kind of love repeatedly throughout my childhood. She sacrificed a lot to ensure that my brothers and I had what we needed. Paul is not much interested in symmetrical exchange. He is interested in something more demanding: that those who hold more power use it for those in their care rather than for themselves. This is neither fairness nor obligation. It is more like love — an agapē kind of love. In the ancient world, when a Roman householder opened a letter from Paul and heard that the measure of his authority was not what he could demand but what he owed, in justice and equality, to everyone under his roof, including the slaves, that was not a modest claim. I think about that summer sometimes when I reflect on this passage. Paul never asks whether the Roman householder thought his obligations were fair. He does not negotiate with him about what the social order required or what he deserved by virtue of his position. He simply points to the work that was his to do. When the shed catches fire, the question is not who ought to have prevented it. The question is what you owe to the people standing in the smoke with you. It was a revolution, written in the language of household management, smuggled into the most ordinary relationships of everyday life.

Adapted from a sermon preached January 11, 2026, at Vineyard Longmont.

I grew up on the western slope (what locals call the west side of the state) of Colorado in a very white community, listening to almost exclusively Christian music. Think Steven Curtis Chapman and Michael W. Smith. I was one of those kids who would genuinely question your Christianity if your playlist had anything secular on it, and I had been taught that gangster rap, especially, was something faithful people did not touch. I had since expanded my repertoire. But for some reason, hip-hop had still remained taboo in my mind. This brings us to the story I want to tell.

It was 2016. I was in Southern California visiting friends, and late one night we ended up at a little restaurant in downtown Pasadena. My friend was tired after dinner and asked me to drive home. I said sure, climbed into the driver’s seat of his Jeep. I should have been suspicious when both of my friends jumped in the back seat. I need you to picture this clearly — a white guy with a big beard, brand-new flat-brim baseball cap, sitting in a Jeep, two friends giggling in the back seat. At that moment, I couldn’t think of a more aggressively white combination of things.

We were stopped at a street corner when one my friends reached up from the back seat, plugged his phone into the USB port, knowing about my feelings about hip-hop, and blasted a track from the 1991 hit album Straight Outta Compton at full volume. I can’t name the song in polite company, but if you know, you know. The whole car was pounding. And right at that moment, my other friend reached between me and the door and rolled my window down.

I looked over, and there was a group of young racially ambiguous men on the corner, bobbing their heads to the music. They looked over at me. I have never seen a more confused look on anyone’s face in my life.

The story is funny. But it broke something open in me. Sitting there at that red light, with that music shaking the car, I realized there was an angst in those lyrics that I couldn’t relate to. And I didn’t know what to do with that. Was it a completely different world? Was it sin? Was it just cultural distance? I went home that night and did what I always do: I started researching. Background is everything to me. I can’t engage with something I don’t understand. First, I read everything online about NWA's history. I still don’t trust Eazy-E. Then I read a stack of books on Race. Books like The Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. My eyes were opened.

The context I found changed me.

I didn’t relate to that music because I hadn’t lived the life it was describing. My experience and theirs were worlds apart, and I had been too sheltered, too comfortable, and too certain of my own categories to notice. That realization landed harder later that year when I found myself in a room with a group of Black church leaders, and they began to tell me what their experience in the broader church world had actually been. What they described was blatant, undeniable racism, and it was closer to home than I had ever let myself believe. It was something I had no framework for, because I had never been asked to see it.

God brought me to that moment. I’m sure of it. It was disorienting in the way that waking up from a deep nap is disorienting: you open your eyes, and for a moment you don’t know what year it is, where you are, or how long you’ve been asleep. Sometimes the moments God puts us in feel exactly like that. We wake up and discover we’ve been sleeping through something that mattered.

That was 2016. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Because we are living in a moment that keeps demanding the church wake up, and instead we keep reaching for the snooze button. This brings us to Romans 13.

The World Paul Was Writing Into

It seems Romans 13 has been making headlines lately. But with these references, we arrive at the text without any sense of where we are. The letter doesn’t open with this passage. When we open our Bibles to Romans 13, we land in the middle of a much longer argument, in the middle of a much larger story.

Here’s some of that story. The emperor Claudius, no stranger to cruelty, eventually expelled the Jewish population from the city of Rome entirely. Likely, among those expelled were some of the voices in the early church who argued that Gentile believers needed to be circumcised and follow the Law of Moses to be fully included. Those voices were gone. What remained was a Gentile church, largely poor, largely marginal, many of them slaves or freedpersons, trying to figure out what it meant to follow Jesus in the most powerful city on earth.

And then Claudius died, probably gruesomely. There was no peaceful transfer of power in Rome. Nero came to power. Initially, he looked like a savior: he invited the Jews back and seemed eager to make things better. But things didn’t stay that way. With the return of the Jewish people to the city of Rome came the Jewish Christians back to the Church. Tensions grew. The church began to fracture. People stopped seeing each other. They started demanding things of one another and stepping on each other’s toes. They stopped seeing each other as people.

Paul writes the Epistle to the Romans in that context. Not into a stable Christian empire with voting rights and religious freedom. Into a city where the church is fragile, divided, and closely watched. Participating in commerce required offering incense to Caesar. Every transaction in the meat market was entangled in the idolatry of empire. Loyalty to Jesus put people at economic and social risk every. single. day.

That is the world in which Paul says: Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.

That’s a really strange thing to say in the middle of a burning empire. I don’t know whether Paul wrote it before or after Nero “allegedly” lit Rome on fire and blamed Christians for it. I don’t know if he wrote it before or after Nero started stringing believers up to use as human torches for his garden parties. But he wrote it into a world where those things were possible, even imminent.

So what does it mean?

Pastoral Wisdom, Not Political Theory

What do Paul’s words in Romans 13 mean? It cannot mean that everything an empire does is godly. It cannot mean that the person with the most power gets to define what is right. It cannot mean that the dream of a Christian empire is a biblical one. It cannot mean there is no place for resistance to evil authority. If it were to mean that, what do we do with the Hebrew midwives who defied Pharaoh’s command to kill the firstborn sons? What do we do with the prophets who spoke directly against imperial power? What do we do with Nathan walking into the king’s chamber to say, You are the man? There is a long tradition in the Hebrew scriptures of exactly this kind of resistance, and Paul knew it.

In Reading While Black, Esau McCauley argues that Paul “has more in mind here than some flattened sub-biblical form of meekness.”1 The passage is not a blank endorsement of power. Paul is establishing “the sovereignty of God and the limits of human discernment,”2 which means the governing authorities are accountable to something above themselves — and so is any reading of this passage that tries to silence the church. No one in the Roman church was powerful. They were poor, they were marginal, they were at the edges of society. Paul is not speaking to senators or magistrates. He is writing to people who have to navigate empire every single day without being crushed by it or consumed by it. The question he is answering is not how should governments be organized but how do we remain visible without being erased? How do we stay faithful without confusing the gospel with rebellion?

This is faithful restraint for the sake of witness. It is not moral surrender, and it is not political endorsement of whoever happens to be in power.

There is also something quietly subversive happening in the text that we tend to miss. When Paul says there is no authority except from God, he is not flattering Nero. He is reminding Nero, and the church, that Nero’s power is derivative. He is subject to something higher than himself. N.T. Wright puts it plainly: “Romans 13 constitutes a severe demotion of arrogant and self-divinizing rulers. It is an undermining of totalitarianism, not a reinforcement of it.”3 The passage carries, Wright argues, “a hidden ‘nevertheless’ at its heart. Jesus is Lord; nevertheless, his followers must obey their earthly rulers. This is not because the rulers have somehow, in theory, already submitted to his lordship, but despite the fact that they have not done so.”4 Authority is real, but it is ordered. Honor does not equal worship, and submission does not cancel moral discernment.

The Frame That Changes Everything

To understand Romans 13, you have to back up to Romans 12:9, because Paul does not drop this passage into the letter in isolation. Beverly Roberts Gaventa’s commentary makes this point with force. Paul’s goal throughout chapter 12, she argues, “appears to be the strengthening of the vulnerable Roman communities of faith,” and the passage about governing authorities grows directly out of that pastoral concern.5 The governing authorities are installed by God and remain God’s servants — not the other way around. It is “the failure — sometimes willful failure — to recognize that way of prioritizing things,” Gaventa concludes, “that makes this passage perennially vulnerable to misuse.”6 Romans 13 cannot be detached from let love be genuine.

The passage that immediately precedes the instruction about governing authorities tells us to bless those who persecute us and not curse them. To rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. To live in harmony with one another and associate with the lowly. To not repay evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. To overcome evil with good.

THAT is the moral frame. Submission in Romans 13 is shaped and limited by the cruciform love described in Romans 12. James Dunn locates the passage squarely in Paul’s larger project of redefining the people of God. “The abruptness of the transition and the starkness of the command,” he writes, “can be properly appreciated only if we recognize the force of two factors. One is what we have described as Paul’s attempt to redraw the boundaries of the redefined people of God. The other is the political realities confronting the Christian groups in Rome.”7 Paul’s exhortations grow out of identity. These are descriptions of what it looks like to be a people already being reshaped by God’s mercy. Submission here is not passive compliance. It is disciplined love. Obedience that contradicts cruciform (cross-shaped) love would contradict the Gospel Paul has been proclaiming since chapter one.

But then Paul pivots. Romans 13:8 is the hinge: Owe no one anything, except to love one another. Every other obligation Paul names in this passage — taxes, revenue, respect, honor — has a limit. You pay what you owe, and the account is settled. Love is different. Love is the debt that is never discharged. Which means authority is never an end in itself, order is never ultimate, and submission is always evaluated by the standard of love for neighbor. Romans 13 does not subordinate love to authority. It subordinates every other obligation to love.

Paul lands the passage with an urgent call to wakefulness. You know what time it is. It is already the moment to wake from sleep. That isn’t a rhetorical flourish. The day is near. The night is far gone. Throw off the works of darkness. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ. This is eschatological urgency, and it governs the whole argument: the reason we don’t render unlimited allegiance to earthly powers is that we know whose future is coming.

What Kind of People Are We Becoming?

If we stop reading at verse 7, we become a compliant people. If we keep reading, we might become a people whose identity is formed and rooted in love above all. People awake to the time they’re living in, engaged with the world as it actually is, shaped by the mercy of God into something the empire has no category for.

Paul ends this section by quoting Jesus: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Paul sometimes gets criticized sometimes for not being connected enough to the teachings of Jesus. But here he quotes him directly. And it sends us back to where we need to end.

Imagine Jesus standing in the synagogue in Nazareth in Luke 4 and reading from Isaiah, a prophet who knew exactly what it meant to speak truth to power. He reads: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

This is not a metaphor. Jesus is not offering a spiritualized abstraction. He is announcing a mission. Let me be clear, a gospel that lacks that mission at its center is not Christian. A gospel that is not good news to the poor, that does not mean freedom for the captive, that does not move toward the oppressed, is not the gospel of Jesus.

Which means Romans 13 can never be used to silence that mission. If love is the one debt we always owe, then the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed are never optional concerns. They are the point. They are the people with names and stories that Paul’s whole argument is trying to form us to love.

Jesus came for them. Jesus came for us. We were once those people.

The question Romans 13 actually asks is not must I comply? It is: What kind of people are we becoming? Are we becoming people whose love is visible, whose engagement with power is disciplined, whose allegiance to Christ is unambiguous, even when that costs us comfort, approval, and the ease of looking away?

I’ll be honest: I came into this post with a heavy heart. The world is heavy. Rome is burning again, and it would probably be good for my blood pressure to turn off social media. But I can’t look away from what’s happening. I don’t think God is looking away either. The church was never supposed to.

Awake. Attentive. Active. Faithful. That is what we are called to be.

That is what the debt of love demands.

If you see me wearing a flat-brim baseball cap, it’s my reminder of that moment back in 2016 when everything changed.

If you want to listen to the original sermon, you can find it on YouTube.

In the 1994 movie “I.Q.,” there is a scene where the character played by Tim Robbins, Ed, tries to get Meg Ryan’s character, Catherine, to dance. Catherine tells Ed that he can never get to where she is from where he is. She flirtatiously uses Zeno’s Paradox to explain the impossibility of making it across the distance. Zeno’s Paradox, at least according to Catherine, states that if the distance between two points is halved and subsequently halved again, there would be an infinite number of halves remaining. Something similar is true when we talk about God. All assertions about the divine are approximations at best, never quite approaching the whole truth. In the gospels, when Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” His answer, “You are the Christ,” is fully divine revelation, but it is not complete divine revelation. Peter speaks of that which he does not fully understand. When we do the work of theology, ideally, our approximations get us closer and closer to answering Jesus’s question for ourselves.

Ed finds himself in this situation with Catherine because he pretends to be an up-and-coming physicist. Ed is, in fact, an auto mechanic. In the movie, Catherine is the niece of renowned physicist Albert Einstein, played by Walter Matthau. Ed feels he must pretend to be something he is not to impress Catherine, a genius in her own right. We are constantly answering Jesus’s question from a place of not being truly ourselves in the moments the questions come. Peter made a bold claim rooted in not only who he understood Jesus to be but also in how he understood himself. My assertions about who Jesus is, like Peter’s, come in the context of my background and social location and how I understand those things. My response is tangled up with my hopes, desires, disappointments, and current understanding of the world and scriptures. I have often mistakenly believed I have come to my final answer to Jesus’s question. Yet, there is always more than what I currently see. Peter understood Jesus as ‘The Christ.’ Yet, Peter could not even have imagined how that truth would come to mean what it meant.

For me, the question’s significance lies not in the answer but in the answering. After explaining Zeno’s Paradox, Catherine demonstrates the paradox by halving the distance to Ed and halving it again as the music from the Jukebox plays. Eventually, the two of them are dancing, having never fully crossed the distance between them. To me, Jesus’s question to Peter is an invitation into what Fr. Richard Rohr calls the divine dance. This is the dance of relationality that the Father, Son, and Spirit have been caught up in for all eternity. I can only answer the question from where I am now, but the question leads me into the dance, every step a step closer for eternity.

Viewing the answering of the question this way requires an open hand and a willingness to backtrack and deconstruct our previous answers. Yet, when I answer Jesus’s question this way, I move ever closer to the one who is “The Christ” rather than becoming more entrenched in my understanding of what “The Christ” means to me. This way of approaching the question invites me into not only a trinitarian sort of relationality with the divine but also into relationship with and provides grace for others on the journey of answering Jesus’s question. The work of theology is never really finished answering the questions about who God is and the nature of the divine. I must continually allow my current answers to the questions to evolve and move closer to the truth. In the answering, we are transformed. This is the way to dance.

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In John Green’s book Turtles All the Way Down, the main character wrestles with the idea of existence. A friend tells her about a lecture by philosopher Bertrand Russell. The lecture about astronomy was refuted by an audience member, saying, “The earth was not situated in space, but rather it was sitting on the back of a giant turtle.” Russell asked what the turtle was standing on. The audience member proclaimed, “On the back of another giant turtle. It’s turtles all the way down.”1 Perichoresis is a theological concept that describes how the three Persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) live in each other and share their lives with each other. The concept of perichoresis shows how the three distinct persons of the Godhead share a common divine nature and exist within each other without losing their own identities. This is often called a “divine dance” of love. I appreciate that this perichoretic shape of trinitarian theology carries through into so many other areas of theology. Perichoresis provokes powerful imagery. Father Richard Rohr describes perichoresis as a divine circle dance.2 Perichoresis defines the shape of every system of theology.

The unity and mutuality of the triune God invite us into a relationship with God and others. As a result, the mutuality of God, myself, and my Christian siblings mirrors God’s dance in our understanding of Ekklesia and Koinonia. Noted 20th and 21st century Theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, puts it this way: “The unity of the disciples for which Jesus prays corresponds to the mutual indwelling of the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father. Their unity is based neither on the monarchy of the Father nor in the example of the Son, but on the mutuality of their indwelling—the trinitarian perichoresis.”3 The life of the Trinity is an eternal and mutual kenosis.

This perichoretic divine dance further extends to express the work of salvation. In our salvation, we are being included in the life of God. According to Moltmann, “Because the salvation of the creatures exists in their being included in the eternal life of the triune God and in participating in it, we understand the unity of the triune God as an open, inviting, uniting, and integrating community (John 17:21 “[that] they also be in us”).”4 This being included in the life of God becomes a sort of mutual indwelling that leads to a perichoretic unity with God.

The Eucharist is a physical representation of this perichoretic unity. Copeland says it this way, “Eucharist is that inalienable gift that anchors believers in time, connects them one to another as well as to their origin, intimates their future, and concentrate the greatest imaginary power and, as a consequence, the greatest symbolic value.”5 Sin, then, is the separation from that perichoretic unity with God. It is the stopping of the flow of self-sacrificial love. This is why the othering of racism is so damaging. It stands in the way of the flow of the life of God. It short-circuits the mutual indwelling. According to Copland: “Racism opposes the order of Eucharist. Racism insinuates the reign of sin; it is intrinsic evil.”6 The remedy for these ills is to be brought back into unity. Moltmann says this: “If sin is the separation of the creatures from the eternal source of their life, then salvation lies in their inclusion into the community of eternal life.”7

Alongside perichoresis, kenosis and apokatastasis are among my favorite theological ideas because they name the outward movement of the triune life toward creation. If perichoresis describes the mutual indwelling of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, kenosis names the self-giving character of that divine life. The Father makes space for the Son and the Spirit. The Son makes space for the Father and the Spirit. The Spirit makes space for the Father and the Son. The life of God is, in this sense, endlessly self-giving. In Christ, that divine self-giving does not remain enclosed within God’s own life, but enters fully into human life and, as Dr. Lois Malcolm puts it, “enters the most radically opposite reality to God: death.”8 Yet death cannot finally master the life of God. In entering death, God defeats it from within, making space for abundant life.

This is why apokatastasis is not merely about individual salvation, but about the restoration of all things. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus enact God’s reconciling purpose not only for humanity but for creation itself, which has been disfigured by sin. In that sense, apokatastasis is the overflow of divine life into all that has been alienated, fractured, and subjected to death. For Malcom, apokatastasis is the “performative enactment of hope.”9 That is a helpful phrase because it keeps restoration from being reduced either to abstract theory or to a closed system of inevitability. It is hope grounded in God’s action and promise. Malcom rightly insists that the outcome cannot be controlled, since human creatures must respond to God’s grace and may resist it.10 And yet I am not sure that the necessity for human participation finally stands at odds with promise. Rather, apokatastasis may be understood as the patient fulfillment of divine promise, the long and gracious work by which God draws creation toward its intended end. If salvation requires our participation, that participation may finally be understood, with Gregory of Nyssa, not as an alien imposition but as the creature’s most natural movement into the life of God.11

One challenge to this way of thinking, as presented by many reformed thinkers, is the idea of predestination. Scripture indeed speaks of predestination to salvation. This brings with it the problem of those who do not accept the free gift of grace. This has led to the logical conclusion that if there is a predestination to salvation and some do not accept the gift, then they are predestined to do so. This notion is called double predestination. In my view, double predestination only exists because we cannot see beyond the horizon of time and death. Double predestination then becomes a solution to the limitations of human logic. Scripture certainly speaks of predestination, but it also speaks of the endless patience of a God who is not bound by time.

All of this speaks to how we might view our responsibility in the world as followers of Jesus. The Great Commission, as seen in Matthew 28, is foundational to the Pentecostal identity: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age”(Matt 28:19-20). Every missions service held in the local churches I grew up in proclaimed this verse as the church’s mandate. The Pentecostal notion of spirit empowerment is that we are empowered for Kingdom mission. During my undergrad, I was taught that the Missio Dei was the very heartbeat of scripture. In addition, the work of mission was urgent. Generations were dying without an opportunity to respond to the message of the Gospel. I have struggled with this framework for the kingdom work we, as Christians, are called to for many years. This struggle has intensified as the political divide between evangelical churches and anyone who thinks differently has widened. The “other” has become an outright enemy. I believe there's a fundamental misunderstanding about the role trinitarian-shaped hospitality plays in mission.

Sanchez frames mission in terms of justice, and for him, the most crucial consideration for our approach to justice is the “who.” We must consider the specific needs of the people for whom we do the work of justice. Sanchez calls this a “Neighbor-oriented approach.” He says this about this approach: “Seen from a neighbor-oriented angle, vocation paradoxically makes the command of love real or incarnate by narrowing its sphere of influence to concrete neighbors…”12 Loving our neighbor means understanding their specific needs as well as their way of being in the world. However, for mission to fit the perichoretic shape, it must be more than just other-oriented.

Hospitality is central to our work in the Kingdom for Yong. This notion of hospitality is first rooted in the hospitality of the mutual indwelling of trinitarian perichoresis. Second, it is rooted in a Pentecostal understanding of Spirit baptism. In baptism, we become hosts to the Holy Spirit. When we host, the Holy Spirit comes to us as we are, yet it is a mutual indwelling. We are invited into the life of the Spirit and are consequently transformed. Finally, hospitality is the foundation of our approach to the other. When we invite the other into our lives, they can know us only on our terms. However, when we are invited into the life of the other, we must come as guests. For Yong, the foundation of trinitarian hospitality is the willingness to be a guest in the life of the other. This entering into the other’s life requires coming on their terms, necessitating a kenotic approach. This Kenotic and perichoetic way is modeled on all layers of theology and must be integrated, especially, into our notion of mission.13

Perichoresis becomes the framework, or perhaps better, the paradigm, for all of Christian theology. It is not simply one doctrine among others, but the shape that gives coherence to the whole. The divine dance of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit becomes the choreography of the life of Christ followers. What is eternally true of God’s own life comes to shape salvation, sacrament, community, and mission. Theology is therefore more than description; it is participation in the life of the God it names.

This reality moves from abstraction to embodied practice in the sacraments, in fellowship, and in koinonia. We are enveloped into the life of triune love and taught to live that love with one another. In Christ, by the Spirit, the church is drawn into God’s own mutuality. That same pattern sends us outward in mission. If mission is to be trinitarian in shape, it must be marked by hospitality, humility, and the willingness to become guests in the lives of others. Such a posture is kenotic, making space for the other in a way that mirrors the life of God.

So when I say, “It’s all a dance,” I mean that the deepest logic of Christian theology is communion. The life of God is self-giving, mutually indwelling love, and that life becomes the pattern for the church, for the sacraments, and for the work of mission. Perichoresis is not only a way of speaking about God. It permeates every area of the Christian life. It’s Perichoresis All the Way Down.