The "Right Way" as a Righteous Vocabulary A few days ago, I wrote about the story we tell when we're afraid — the one that points at immigrants as the cause of our scarcity rather than at the systems that created it — and about Jesus's refusal, in Matthew 20, to accept empire's logic of domination: "Not so among you." I want to pick that thread back up here, because there's a phrase I hear constantly in these conversations that deserves a closer look. "I don't have a problem

Sometimes I genuinely wonder what people actually hear when I preach. Not what I say . Not what I carefully pray over, study, write, revise, and deliver. What people hear . Do they hear one word they don’t like and then mentally check out for the remaining fifteen minutes? Do they grab onto a phrase, assume they know where I’m going, and stop listening before I even get there? I suspect that happens more often than we’d like to admit. Last week, I was chatting with a congrega