How are your New Year’s resolutions doing? Are you on day three at the gym? Without soft drinks? Reading your bible every day? Or did you stumble coming out of the gate? If you did, who cares? No one is keeping score or documenting your successes and failures other than you, so why should you? Each New Year Nadia Bolz Weber likes to share the following reminder: There is no resolution that, if kept, will make you more worthy of love. You, as your actual self and not as some made up ideal, are already worthy. I appreciate this reminder that she shares with her readers each January 1st. As I instinctively feel the pull of lofty aspirations while one year comes to a close and another begins to bloom, it’s a blessing to hear the gravity of her words and be pulled back down reality, and so this year I’ve focused less on a New Year’s resolution and more on the New Year’s revelation.
To say that I’ve recently become enamored with the writings of Leonard Sweet would be quite the understatement. I discovered him quite by accident, but these days I like to attribute accidents to providence. Leonard Sweet is an American theologian, semiotician, church historian, pastor, and author who currently serves as the E. Stanley Jones Professor Emeritus at Drew Theological School at Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey, the Charles Wesley Distinguished Professor of Doctoral Studies at Evangelical Seminary, the distinguished visiting professor at Tabor College, and visiting distinguished professor at George Fox University in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of more than sixty books, but he crossed my path via an article he wrote entitled “Algorithmic Possession” in which he tosses a lifeline to a culture being devoured by the dark underbelly of technology. The paragraph that gripped me was this:
Click on a single plane crash and boom: your feed erupts in flaming wreckage from every corner of the globe. Suddenly it feels as if the world itself is falling out of the sky. This is not news. This is algorithmic possession. Algorithms don’t simply show you content. They shape consciousness. One wrong tap bends reality. You’re no longer scrolling—you’re spiraling. Each of us now lives sealed inside our own code-curated universe. Your neighbor inhabits a different reality. Your spouse lives in another. Truth fractures. Hope evaporates. Reality is no longer shared—it’s served. And here’s the cruel twist: the more you try to understand what’s happening—clicking to learn why you feel anxious, angry, or hollow—the tighter the grip becomes. Algorithms feed on inquiry like parasites feed on blood. What emerges are the mental-health viruses of our time, magnified at scale:
Anxiety that never exhales.
Depression without dawn.
Rage that has no object.
Doomscrolling that erodes the soul.
This isn’t accidental. It’s profitable. These are not random symptoms. They are designed outcomes. Algorithms monetize attention by cultivating extremism in every register—outrage on the right, despair on the left, nihilism everywhere. They don’t ask what is true or good or beautiful. They ask only: Will this keep you hooked? And too often, the answer is yes.
His writings were the Christmas gift I didn’t ask for desperately needed. Sitting here on day three of the new year, another Sweet treat fell into my life in the form of the theologians article, “The New Year We Already Live In”.
In his essay from New Year’s Eve he wrote:
Peter’s rooftop vision in Acts 10 is often reduced to a debate about diets or boundaries. But the voice from heaven—“What God has made clean, you must not call common”—was not simply revising a menu. It was redrawing reality.
Nothing is outside God’s reach.
No place is profane by default.
No person is beyond belonging.
This is the scandal—and the glory—of incarnation. God does not hover at a safe distance. God moves in. God takes up residence. The Word does not become an idea or an institution. The Word becomes flesh. A withness.
The Word didn’t become religious.
The Word became human.
And that changes everything.
So as this new year dawns, perhaps our calling is not to strive harder or climb higher, but to wake up—to live with open eyes and open hands inside the grace we already inhabit.
To discover that:
Every breath can become a prayer.
Every kindness can become a sacrament.
Every moment can become an invitation to participate in the life that animates all life.
BOY STOP! The Word became a WITHness. This is not a resolution, this is a revelation, and it got me thinking about the many revelations I’ve experienced over the last decade or so that have shaped my faith in profound ways, opening doors for growth that I never knew was possible. As I begin a new year I felt it would be appropriate to share some of those revelations.
Let me start with one borrowed from Sweet:
The gospel is not the announcement that we must find our way to God, but the revelation that God has already found us—and has been closer than our next breath all along.
What if our greatest problem with God is not that he’s too big and clever for us to comprehend, but that he’s humbler, gentler and closer than we ever imagined?
“Most Christians do not have fellowship with God; they have fellowship with each other about God.” ~ Paris Reidhead
Western Christianity is junk food devoid of spiritual nutrition. This is why America is spiritually malnourished despite having a church on every corner.
One of the severe limits of “saved/not saved” language is it leads to a myopic view of salvation. When this happens, many don’t see the need to be continually rescued from the enslaving powers of the world. In Christ we are: Saved. Being Saved. Will be Saved
The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.
Anne Lamott
“Jesus didn’t die on the cross so we didn’t have to. He died on the cross to show us how to”
- Dr. Robby Waddell
The wrath of God is the love of God wrongly received. — Brian Zahnd
The doors of hell are locked from the inside.
C.S. Lewis
What is hell? The suffering of being no longer able to love.
Dostoevsky
If eternal conscious torment is true, then:
• evil never ends
• suffering never ends
• reconciliation is never complete
Yet Paul says: “Through Christ, God will reconcile all things to Himself.”
And Revelation ends not with hell expanding, but with death, mourning, crying, and pain passing away.
If evil continues forever in a parallel eternal hell, then evil is never actually defeated. It’s just quarantined.
That’s not victory, it’s just containment.
Leslie Nease
19th century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher defined heresy as, "that which preserves the appearance of Christianity, and yet contradicts its essence"
Every time I read the Sermon on the Mount, I wonder how we managed to make Christianity about everything except that. — Beau Stringer
Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. And perhaps if he believed you were capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy. Thomas Merton
That’s what’s hard about reading Jonah - I have to look at how maybe I too need my enemies to stay my enemies, since it’s hard to know who I am if I don't know who I’m against. — Nadia Bolz-Weber
The test of Christianity is not loving Jesus, but loving Judas. George Woodruff
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