Have I ever told y’all about the time I was hiking and came across a burning bush that started talking to me? The bush told me that it was God and that I was chosen to set God’s people free.
Or the time I met a guy named Paul, a courtyard preacher, who told me that all those rules — not committing adultery, not murdering, not stealing, not coveting — are all summed up in one command: love your neighbor.
Or the time I met a guy named Jesus, who told me that if I wanted to be his follower, I’d need to deny myself, be prepared to die for my beliefs.
These are wild stories. Prophetic stories. I can’t believe I’m just now telling you about them. (wink, wink)
Okay — surprise, surprise: none of that actually happened to me.
But I have tried to put myself in the context of the scriptures that appear in the lectionary this week: Moses’s sandals as he approaches an inextinguishable burning bush summoning him to free the Israelites from captivity.
I have tried to imagine what it would have felt like to be part of the early church that Paul preached to about the urgency of loving your neighbor.
I have tried to put myself in the place of one of Jesus’s disciples who, in our passage this week, pleaded with him not to go into Jerusalem and hand himself over to the authorities —
and to whom Jesus said: listen, following me is going to be a struggle. If you want to follow me, you need to be prepared to pick up a state-sponsored tool of capital punishment — a cross — and be willing to die a gruesome death too.
In each of this week’s scripture readings, there’s a palpable sense that we’re standing at the end of history:
God’s people cannot remain in captivity any longer. Jesus’s revolution is carrying him toward a cross. Paul is describing the power of love as a double-edged sword.
There is urgency here. The end is near. The world needs agents of change.
It can be hard to put myself there. Sadly, familiarity — the fact that some of these scriptures I grew up reciting in a Christian day school, or seeing printed on a T-shirt — can rob them of their power and their meaning.
Maybe that’s why I have a soft spot for adaptations, however fraught, that set Bible stories in a modern context.
As a kid, we used to watch The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible, where a group of teenagers travel back in time to witness Bible stories firsthand.
My family still remembers one episode on Noah’s ark, when the rain starts falling and one of the characters supposedly from the actual period yells out, in a mild New Jersey mocking accent, “It’s just a passing shower.”
Other adaptations feel more prescient — like Cotton Patch Gospel, adapted from Clarence Jordan’s translation of the New Testament set in Georgia USA: a one-man performance backed by a four-piece bluegrass ensemble.
I had a tape cassette of this one and memorized the entire soundtrack:
Somethin’s brewin’ in Gainesville
Wonder what it could be?
Somethin’s doin’ in Gainesville
Come on down and see
It’s Gainesville where the Wise Men went
Turned a sinner’s stable to a revival tent
It’s a hell of a place to be heaven-sent
It’s Gainesville-bound for me!
In Cotton Patch Gosepl, instead of being crucified on a cross, Jesus is lynched.
But my favorite adaptation is one I learned about in divinity school, from one of my favorite professors, Chuck Campbell.
Dr. Campbell was a homiletician — he taught preaching — but I actually took his course inside Butner Federal Prison, on the principalities and powers.
In passing, he mentioned a film called Jesus of Montreal. “You should watch it,” he said. “It’s apocalyptic.”
Apocalyptic? Huh. That’s quite an endorsement.
I tracked it down back when Netflix would still mail you obscure DVDs. It was in French with subtitles. (We should watch it together as a congregation sometime — maybe with Joe Lee.)
Dr. Campbell didn’t mean this film was apocalyptic in the Walking Dead sense — not a cataclysmic event resulting in widespread destruction, though that’s a genre that clearly fascinates a lot of people; I think Netflix has an entire category devoted to it now: apocalyptic fiction.
He meant apocalyptic in the theological sense: something that tears open time and history to reveal what’s true and urgent about God in the here and now.
The film opens with a priest, Father Leclerc, looking to breathe new life into his church’s annual Passion play.
He recruits a gifted actor named Daniel, freshly returned to Montreal from drama school, and gives him creative license to make the production his own.
Daniel assembles a cast — and, with a shoestring budget and little patience for churchly propriety, he turns to unlikely places to find them: underemployed actors doing voice-over work for pornographic films among them.
He does his own biblical scholarship and rewrites the script from the ground up.
The new production is unconventional and theologically provocative. Instead of staying inside the sanctuary, crowds follow the cast and crew through the streets of Montreal, watching a portrait of Jesus who is out among the people.
It’s unorthodox. It’s scandalous. It’s apocalyptic.
Despite this new production’s popularity — or maybe because of it — Father Leclerc feels the institutional pressure and starts taking measures to shut down the very production he commissioned.
Meanwhile, Daniel’s own life starts mirroring, more and more, the character he’s playing: he confronts corrupt admen the way Jesus confronted the money-changers, gathers a following of the marginalized, and absorbs mounting pressure from the institutions around him.
At the final performance, the audience turns unruly. In the chaos, the cross Daniel hangs on is jarred loose, and he falls, sustaining life-threatening injuries.
The cast rushes him to a hospital that is indifferent to his condition; by the time they reach the next one, he has died.
His organs are donated, giving life to others in need. The cast goes on to found a new theater in his name.
Apocalyptic, huh?
Jesus of Montreal makes the story of Jesus palpable for a modern audience. It tears open time and space to reveal something about God that is just as true and urgent now as it was for Moses, for Paul, for Jesus and his disciples.
Do we believe it? Are our lives emanating with this kind of apocalyptic love?
The God of vengeance that Margaux read about in Psalm 149 is the same God fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah.
The same ferocity with which the psalmist describes God binding and defeating the enemies of God’s people is the same God who, in Jesus, upends our sense of justice by telling us to pick up our cross instead.
The continuity that runs through this week’s scriptures is that God is with us, fueled by love, fighting for justice and summoning us to join in this fight in our time. Right here. Right now.
What does apocalyptic love look like in the face of agencies that kidnap children, or deport immigrants to countries where they have no ties — or to places where they know those immigrants will be imprisoned alongside violent gangs, specifically to terrify them into self-deporting?
What does it look like in the face of corporations that extract wealth from the backs of underpaid laborers, that claim water and air and energy as their own, that spin up shell company after shell company and declare bankruptcy after bankruptcy to dodge responsibility somehow accruing more wealth and more power.
What does it look like when our livelihoods are traded among anonymous shareholders inside complex financial instruments, who then silence politicians with anonymous donations?
What does it look like when schools are bombed — when food and basic security are withheld from innocent people as punishment?
These are massive problems. Often, the principalities and powers are working to paralyze us, demoralize us, disenfranchise us from taking action. The doom scroll.
We have lost three people the past few days who did not lose their agency to love.
Wendell Berry. Gloria Steinem. Dolly Parton.
It’s fair to say that these three are more famous than most.
Their calling was more recognizable than perhaps it is for most of us, but it didn’t start that way.
In the days since their passing, I have been reading and listening to their stories.
For Berry, it was prophetic to leave the literary scene in New York City and return to Kentucky — to write essays that assailed the industrialization of agriculture, and poetry that expressed an affection for place, and smallness, and contentment.
For Steinem, the double standard between men and women — one that so many before her, and around her, endured — grew into a righteous anger.
She started speaking out in smaller settings, which led to invitations to speak to larger groups, until she became a figurehead of the feminist movement.
In the podcast series Dolly Parton’s America — I highly recommend it — I listened to stories about Dolly, like the one where she wrote the song “I Will Always Love You” and sang it for Porter Wagoner, who then sued her for a million dollars when she left his studio.
She settled, and paid it off over years.
Years later, when Wagoner was facing bankruptcy, she bought his catalog and gave it to his children in an act of radical forgiveness.
It is probably true that most of us will not be eulogized in The New York Times or a podcast series. But the same love that animated Wendell, Gloria, and Dolly is accessible to us.
They demanded change now. They embraced a radical, transgressive love.
They didn’t wait for a burning bush — they saw it in the strip-mined mountain, in the single mother who couldn’t find an apartment in lower Manhattan, in the receptionist who was sexually harassed at work.
These prophets didn’t wait. They couldn’t wait. Their love was too fierce.
They weren’t counting the cost of acting — they were counting the cost of not acting.
How will we encourage each other to access this love. To find the courage to put our lives on the line and demand that the way things are is not the way things have to be.
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In closing, I’d like to share a song I sing to myself when I feel overwhelmed by the weight of the world, and by the cost of discipleship.
It’s by Michael Kiwanuka. I’ve invited Eric Hostetler to accompany me.
This song — a mantra — reminds me that even though believing is hard, it’s beautiful —
that God has already prepared the way for us, and that we will be waving our hands freely, rejoicing alongside the ancestors — the prophets who loved apocalyptically in their time.
[listen to the audio recording here of Chas singing “Getting Ready to Believe” by Michael Kiwanuka]
https://chapelhillmennonite.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Recording-80.m4a