In the end, the conscience-stricken David brings the subject of enmity back around. “May the Lord judge between you and me,' he yells at Saul from a safe distance, 'And may the Lord avenge the wrongs you have done to me, but my hand will not touch you.… May the Lord be our judge and decide between us. May he consider my cause and uphold it; may he vindicate me by delivering me from your hand.”

There’s a part of Jesus’s story in Luke 19—there’s some debate over whether it qualifies as a parable—that is about human solidarity. It begins in what we might call the ‘here and now’ with a certain rich man clothed in finery and eating the best food. A beggar named Lazarus, covered in sores, sits right outside his house.

Jacob was fleeing the wrath of his brother Esau and the disappointment of his father Isaac, when he 'stopped for the night because the sun had set' (v.10). The 'certain place' he had reached was named Luz, which according to the name apparently refers to an almond grove. In a fact that never failed to amaze us Sunday School kids as much as the glorious ladder did: Jacob took a stone and used it as a pillow!

The global stocktake (GST) at COP28 will be the first conducted since the Paris Agreement went into full effect and began its five-year cycles. In the third year of a cycle, the parties will conduct this 'inventory' of 'where they’re collectively making progress' on the Paris Agreement goals. Two years later, they will return to the COP (in this case COP30 in 2025) and bring more ambitious targets for emissions reductions, based on what the GST reveals.

Jesus died for us. We often need to be reminded that he also lived for us. I don’t simply mean that he lived long enough to articulate for us a set of teachings, as wonderful an accomplishment as that is. I mean that in his incarnation, in his en-flesh-ment, as an embodied being embedded in creation, Jesus showed us how to be a human being. This month’s theme prayers for Climate Intercessors will feature the role that plastics—its production and its pollution—play in climate change. Jesus showed us how to be a consumer. Read More.

Cataclysms and bad news aren’t the only things that can cascade. So can thoughts and memories and connections. I remembered that the first time I had ever heard about the possible collapse of what is called the global ocean conveyor belt was in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Excerpt: There is no doubt about it, John 11 is the story of a miracle.  Jesus calls Lazarus forth from the grave and it is another one of Jesus’s seven signs in this gospel that he is divine, another occasion for one of his seven I AM statements, in this case, “I am the resurrection and the life.”  I will begrudge no one in our Climate Intercessors prayer network who wants to pray for the miracle of preventing a 1.5°C warming.  Yet, as I read John 11, while it is obviously the story of a miracle, I don’t believe it is a story about miracles.  It is about death and life, and about how in Jesus we live, and breath, and have our being even unto eternity. Read More.