R. Joseph Owles - Author

05/31/2026

The birds are birding
The dogs are do***ng
The hummingbirds buzz
like a plucked bass string
I sit among rabbits, squirrels,
and meandering butterflies

It is the moment,
not the words
that is the prayer

In the unstill stillness
kissed by the breeze
I am overflowing prayer,
spilling out onto the dirt
Not a faith in belief,
But in accepting my acceptability

This is the day that the Lord has made—
no, the moment,
the second,
the flash of instant

Be still and know I am God
Be still and know
Be still
Be

05/30/2026

The eleven disciples went into Galilee, to the mountain that Jesus chose for them. When they saw him, they prostrated themselves in worship, but they hesitated. Jesus came to where they were and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth was given to me; therefore, as you go into every nation, make disciples, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep every commandment I have given all of you. And understand this, I myself am with all of you each and every day, even until the completion of this age." ~ Matthew 28:16-20 (my translation)

Some important points to consider:

"but they hesitated" — Traditionally, this is translated as the eleven worshiped "but some doubted." But, there is no "some" in the Greek. All eleven went up the mountain. All eleven prostrated themselves. All eleven hesitated. That's the most credible and human part of the story, and some nervous King James Christian Cosplay translator didn't like it and added some hypothetical "some," which translations have followed ever since. Of course they hesitated. They are not sure they are seeing what they are seeing. After what they went through, how could they be sure? But they had the faith to go, and even if they had the very human response of questioning what they were seeing and experiencing — wondering whether it was a dream or a delusion — they still worshiped. Doubt or hesitation isn't the opposite of faith; certainty is, because certainty doesn't need faith. Doubt is the space in which faith can grow.

"was given" — Ἐδόθη is the aorist tense, not the perfect tense, as it is always translated. It is not "All authority in heaven and earth HAS BEEN GIVEN to me" but simply "WAS GIVEN to me." And the "was given" doesn't say when it was given. The tendency to read it as it was given after the death and resurrection is a reading into the text, not a reading out of it. It is Atonement theology, not Christology. All authority in heaven and earth was given to Jesus from the beginning. That is not an interpretation, but clearly stated throughout the entire gospel — demons state it and respond to it and are driven out because of it; the storms respond to it and are calmed; illness and medical conditions respond and are healed; miracles, exorcisms, healings, all of it are manifestations of that total authority Jesus was given. Even Moses and Elijah confirm it when they appear with Jesus on the mountain top, and God testifies to it when God says, "This is my beloved Son. Listen to him." God doesn't say to listen to Moses or Elijah or Peter or Paul, or to the Torah, or to the prophets, but to Jesus because he is the one with the authority. The resurrection doesn't earn it. It confirms it.

"as you go" — The traditional translation of "Go, therefore, and make disciples" makes the "go" an imperative. But they are not commanded to "go." The "go" is a participle. It is "going" or "as you go." It is not a command to go into all the nations of the world, but a statement that they will be going somewhere. They can't stay on the mountain with Jesus forever. They will be going, and as they go, the imperatives happen: make disciples, baptize, and teach. "Go therefore into all the world" reads more like a recruitment poster. It is Jesus as the Galilean version of Uncle Sam saying, "I want you!" But what is actually happening in the text is more like "as you live your ordinary lives, wherever you go from here, live what I told you. When people ask what you are doing and why, tell them. Some will come along. Baptize those who do. Teach them to live what I have told all of you. Lather. Rinse. Repeat." It's not so much a Great Commission as it is a Mundane Commission. Teach by how you live. Let your life be the teaching.

And what are they to teach? "Every commandment I have given all of you." All authority in heaven and on earth was given to Jesus, and the demons, the storms, the diseases, the lack of resources, the patriarchs and prophets all acknowledge it, and God testifies to it. The only ones who seem not to see it or respond to it are Christians. But if we can't be bothered to live the way Jesus said to live, then whatever we have to say about him is meaningless. We teach by how we live. And how do we live? We feed the hungry. We welcome the stranger. We visit those who are incarcerated, who are shut in, who are lonely. Why? Because that is how Jesus said we should live, and Jesus has ALL AUTHORITY. All authority on Sunday morning in a sanctuary? NO! ALL AUTHORITY IN HEAVEN AND ON EARTH—that's EVERYWHERE! Jesus never says to teach them a set of doctrines or propositions about him for people to carry in their heads, but to teach a way of being that is made visible in their lives. The first Christians were persecuted because there was no way to hide being Christian when it was their whole lives. Christians today would have no problem skating through those persecutions untouched.

"I myself am with all of you each and every day" —Jesus is with them—Jesus is with us—in the teachings Jesus gave us to live. Jesus and the teaching are one. If we believe in the Lord, we believe in the Lord's teachings. And if we believe it, we do it. If we don't do it, it's not belief, it's mental ma********on. Belief and faith in the Greek word pistis are not ideas in the mind but a direction of life. It is an orientation, a direction on how to live. If I believe I cannot fly, I don't run off the roof of my house, flapping my arms trying to fly. When Paul says, "If you believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead," he is not saying if you hold an idea in your head or convince yourself of an impossible idea. He is saying if you believe it, you'll live as though it is true. If Jesus is LORD (Adonai), and God raised Jesus from the dead, how is your life reflecting that? How is Jesus with you in how you live your life? How do people look at you and see Jesus? Because if they don't, it's not because Jesus has moved far away from you, but because you have moved far away from Jesus.
________________________
For anyone who wishes to challenge my work, the Greek text is:
Οἱ δὲ ἕνδεκα μαθηταὶ ἐπορεύθησαν εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν εἰς τὸ ὄρος οὗ ἐτάξατο αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς,17 καὶ ἰδόντες αὐτὸν προσεκύνησαν, οἱ δὲ ἐδίστασαν.18 καὶ προσελθὼν ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἐλάλησεν αὐτοῖς λέγων, Ἐδόθη μοι πᾶσα ἐξουσία ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ [τῆσ] γῆς.19 πορευθέντες οὖν μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη, βαπτίζοντες αὐτοὺς εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ καὶ τοῦ ἁγίου πνεύματος,20 διδάσκοντες αὐτοὺς τηρεῖν πάντα ὅσα ἐνετειλάμην ὑμῖν· καὶ ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ μεθ' ὑμῶν εἰμι πάσας τὰς ἡμέρας ἕως τῆς συντελείας τοῦ αἰῶνος.

05/26/2026

The stranger robbed, beaten, and left for dead is all of humanity who are abused by the systems and structures of power and the world.

The callous priest and Levites are the systems designed to help them, but who ironically are incapable of helping due to their own internal demands and obligations—The church that spends more on its building and salaries than on feeding the hungry and helping the poor; the government program that is bound by regulations that stimy assistance rather than enact it; the non-profit that spends its budget on advertising and the salary of the one in charge; the general sense that the man should not have been walking down that path in the first place and deserves what he got.

But the One who helps is the Christ who comes to us in the despised and cast off—the refuse of society; the unclean, unskilled, unwanted individual who has nothing to prove and nothing to protect, so that it can actually act and make a difference.

Christ is the Good Samaritan. And if you are beaten and bloodied, left for dead on the side of the road, and if you have witnessed all the mechanisms, programs, and people who were put in place to help you cross to the other side of the street as if you don’t exist, then go to Christ, who goes to you, probably in the form of the one you most despise.

05/23/2026

The real danger to Christianity isn't atheism.

It's so-called believers claiming to follow Jesus while systematically doing the opposite of what he said.

At least the atheists know what they don't believe in.

These "Christians" forgot who they are supposed to be and never met the one they say they believe in. Jesus is a mascot, not a Messiah, and their faith is their politics and their grievance.

05/23/2026

PENTECOST

The Holy Spirit is the very heart of God. It proceeds from the Father through the Son into human hearts, guiding, teaching, and comforting. The Holy Spirit binds the Father and the Son to each other into One Divine Being, and it is God within us. When God made the first man, God breathed into him, and he became a living Nephesh. The word is not soul, but Nephesh. It is the welding of spirit, body, intellect, and emotion into a single entity—so unified that to remove any part is to destroy the whole. This living beingness is the direct result of God breathing into the first man. The word for breath is the same word for Spirit. God In-Spirits the man with Godself. (And humans are not the only creatures who are Nephesh; all living, breathing things have Nephesh as well.)

The presence of this Holy Spirit is marked by the “Speaking in Tongues,” not gobbledygook or random sounds, but in actual human languages. When the Spirit was present in the first man, there was only one language, so nothing miraculous seemed to occur, except that human beings and God could speak directly and clearly to each other—an ability obscured by sin.

We see this “miracle” or gift of the Spirit in Acts on Pentecost. The Apostles stand and preach, and all the people heard it in their own languages. I have always believed they heard it not just in their native tongue, but in the specific dialect of their own neighborhoods—the private slang of their kitchens and family tables.

This was possible because the Holy Spirit, as the Heart of God, speaks to the human heart and not to the ears. What is spoken by the tongue gets stopped in the ears. What is spoken by the heart penetrates the heart and pierces the soul. Indeed, this is stated in the text: “When they heard this, they were pierced to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what should we do?’” (Acts 2:37)

Beloved, the language of the Holy Spirit is the language of Truth and Love spoken to the heart. So that all people could understand the Holy Spirit speaking to them, they were convicted. Not convicted as criminals, condemned in a court of law to prison or death. They were convicted as in convinced of an unknown error—the error of sin, not as a crime, but as a sickness, a mental and spiritual illness that so deluded them, they could not see their error as anything other than reality. It is like those who lived in abusive, alcoholic homes who cannot conceive how dysfunctional and askew their “normal” life is at home. But the Spirit cut through years of calcified delusion like a vinegar made of Truth and Love. For the first time, the people could hear, understand, and see the depth of their own distortion. So they asked, “What should we do?”

Beloved, this same Holy Spirit that breathed life into Adam and who spoke through the Apostles is in you. Whoever receives the Holy Spirit through baptism, who validates it through Confirmation, and who is empowered by it if they do not aggrieve it through sin, is the temple of the same Holy Spirit as the Apostles. The Love who is God, who speaks Truth, who is the Christ, speaks to the hearts of people around the world, and by speaking directly to the heart, it speaks the language of every people.

Someone will say to me, “If this is true, and if you have received the Holy Spirit, why do you not speak in different languages?”

To this very valid question, I reply, “I do indeed speak in the languages of all people, because I belong to the body of Christ, that is, the Church, and she speaks all languages in every part of the world every day!”

Beloved, on that first Pentecost, the Church was a handful of people, so when the Spirit spoke, it was “miraculously” heard as different languages of the different peoples from different nations assembled in one place. But now the Church has spread into the world, speaking as if it were Pentecost every day. It speaks Truth and Love in all times and in all places. If Pentecost is a miracle, the miracle is that the miracle has never stopped.

And what is this Spirit speaking? What is this Truth? What is this Love?

It says now what it said then: that God the Father, out of love, gave the Son to human beings to be enjoyed, but human beings rejected God’s love and killed the Son on the cross. But God rejected our rejection, and raised Yeshua from the dead, and all who receive him, by keeping his commandments and living as he instructed, live a new, unending life in the here and now, not simply after they die. “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.” (Acts 2:36)

That is the message preached in all tongues in all nations every day throughout the world by the Holy Spirit speaking through the Body of Christ. This is what we celebrate on this Feast of Pentecost.

05/22/2026

Let the billionaire keep his money.
Soon he'll be squeezing through the needle's eye,
Which will be the wine press of God's wrath.

Woe to you who are rich, for you have your reward.
But that needle dangles before you,
And you will be shredded to pieces
Trying to pass through its eye.

The poor and the vulnerable
Are surrounded by angels.
They stand in the presence
of the Most High God,
Advocating for the poor and powerless
Day and night.

But the wealthy and the powerful
Are surrounded by money and sycophants.
The money cannot speak
And the sycophants only say what is wanted to be heard.

One is life
and the other is death.

Let the billionaire keep his wealth
Because that is all he has.
He looks like something,
But so does a v***r on a cold morning.
But look again. It was just a breath.
It was only a phantom--
A hint of a something that was never there.

05/19/2026

I don't have Trump Derangement Syndrome.
I have Prophet Derangement Syndrome.
I have Christ Derangement Syndrome.
I have Scripture Derangement Syndrome.

Frequent encounters with each of them have made me so deranged that I believe:

The poor should be fed
Wages should be fair
God alone should be worshiped
The stranger is to be welcomed
The most vulnerable are to be protected
Truth must be spoken to power
Enemies should be loved (because if we do this right, there are no enemies)
If we don't forgive, we are not forgiven
Forgiveness is the key to answered prayer
What we do to others is what we do to Christ.

And if you call yourself a Christian and this list offends you or you think it is "woke," then maybe Jesus isn't the guy for you, and maybe you confused Ayn Rand with the Bible.

05/18/2026

MARTYRDOM TO LIVE BY

The ancient martyrdom of the church —
The Red Martyrdom flowed with blood and death.
That is the FIRST martyrdom.

The nearly as ancient martyrdom of the monastics —
The White Martyrdom flowed from the desert —
a slow death of abandoning possessions and self.
That is the SECOND martyrdom.

But I propose a THIRD martyrdom —
A Gold Martyrdom of Encounter, Vulnerability, and Change.

I see this martyrdom in my spiritual father, Francis.
During a crusade, he went to the Sultan Al-Kamil.
He went to "convert" but expected to be killed.

But Al-Kamil did not kill Francis.
He did something far more permanent and irreversible.
He changed Francis.
Francis remained a friar and a Catholic Christian,
But he no longer saw the Muslim Horde as in need of conversion.
He saw them as people and pious in their own way.
He learned from them
And he took what he learned and added it to what he knew,
So that he knew more—and knew God more.

To be sure, Francis went expecting death
And to be equally sure, he died,
Not in biology but in his views.

That is the Gold Martyrdom!

Beloved,
You may be asked to sacrifice your literal life;
You may be asked to sacrifice your possessions;
But chances are, you will be required to do neither.

But every day, beloved, you will encounter others —
Enemies, friends, strangers, people who exasperate you —
And in those moments, I ask you to face the Gold Martyrdom —
The everyday True Martydom of the Faithful.

Because saying you would die for your faith is easy
When you are never expected to die for it.
Saying you would give up everything for your faith is easy
When you are never expected to give up a thing.
Contemplating Red and White Martyrdom is easy
When you are fed and comfortable in a climate-controlled shelter.

But the difficult martyrdom of faith is to encounter others,
Be vulnerable,
Be available, be willing to let yourself be changed.

That is making your life a living sacrifice for God (Romans 12:1)
That is the hard, narrow road of faith.

Blessed are those who are called to this Third Martydom.

05/16/2026

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