As we wrap up our study of Our God is Undocumented we find ourselves in the tension between the false stories we'd like to believe, our lived experience, and the true stories that are often more complex and difficult to understand.  Standing between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we explore some of the false narratives that circulate during the holidays and how the practice of hospitality might be the key to helping us connect with deeper truth.

It sure is sad to see this book come to an end!  But we're eager to pick back up with our 8-week (Advent and Epiphany) study of Christine Pohl's book, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition.

This episode is all about purity.  Which is why we chose an amazing piece of music to jump start our conversation.  In the book, Ched walks us through purity codes in the Gospels and helps us to see how Jesus chose to interact within his historical context.  Reading Ched's exegesis quickly turns our focus to purity codes that exist in our own cultural/ social/ historical context(s).  

What are the purity codes that are present in your life?  How and when do they show up?  Do they determine how you live?  Who you spend time with?  How you make your decisions? 

​Listen in and let us know what you think!   

We kick this episode off with another throwback-to-youth-minsitry tune by Audio Adrenaline, Big House, because these chapters (5 and 6) are all about God's expansion of human concepts of inclusion and exclusion.  In chapter 5, Ched helps us understand that there's even disagreement in the Bible about who should be allowed in the house of God; there has always been tension between "faithful covenant-keeping" and "self-righteous gate-keeping," (p.105).  In the episode we explore some moments in our own lives where we've had to stand in that tension between "purity"/"dignity" and God's call to welcome all outsiders.  In the next chapter, by Matthew Colwell, we meet Amalia Molina.  Her moving story calls us to consider how we are participating in the expanding love of God, even in our most difficult and challenging moments.   

Enjoy the episode!  Send us your thoughts, we'd love to know how these stories are making an impact on your lives! 

-Chrissy 

In this episode we encounter stories that are difficult to read.  From the Genesis call to protect the murderer, to the Judges account of the concubine who clings to the threshold as she takes her last breath, and finally to the heart-breaking (and yet inspiring) tale of Amalia and Gil... these two chapters were so difficult to read (and discuss) that they reminded us of our journey through Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy.  

As disturbing as these stories are, we felt responsible to hold them up and to sit in the discomfort for a while, knowing that we live in homes and worship in a sanctuary with many "thresholds".  These chapters force us to reckon with questions like: Who is on the other side of our thresholds?  Whose bodies do we blindly and ignorantly step over each day as we go about our lives with blinders on?  And, How might we begin to open those physical and metaphorical doors to welcome and love those who we find on the outside?

Listen in... it's rough, I'm warning you.  We'd love to know what you think!

​-Chrissy