Conspiracy theories grow in the soil of a faux gospel, which treats difficulty and existential crucifixion as unexpected, and therefore needing an explanation. When true Christianity, the true gospel, sees difficulty and existential crucifixion as the norm, as the expected.
Conspiracy theories isolate, aggravate, and demand retribution. The gospel brings fellowship, healing, and charity.
I wanted to offer a brief reflection on today’s scripture, January 18th, 2026.
I just heard a sermon about the Passover, linking the Passover lamb in the Old Testament where the Israelites were told to put blood on their blood on their door posts.
And the plague of killing the child in the household would be passed over their homes.
And that was linked to John the Baptist calling Jesus the Lamb of God, the pastor made the point that the phrase Lamb of God would not have had any meaning apart from the context in Exodus.
Now, the thing that I observed in my thinking about this is that the Passover sacrifice in the Old Testament was uniform for all the Jews.
Everybody did the same thing.
And it was a killing of a lamb, a piece of property.
And in the New Testament story, God’s son was not passed over. God himself became the lamb.
So just to repeat the first part of my meditation, today the priest made a connection between the passage of Exodus and readings.
The passage of Exodus where it was the Passover and the Israelites were instructed to put blood from the lamb they needed to kill on their doorposts.
And I see that as the sacrifice that everybody in the community makes.
It’s all the same sacrifice.
There’s a unity and it’s a specific action where they kill their property, their lamb.
The pastor made the point that that story in the Exodus is what gives the context needed to understand what John the Baptist was saying when he said, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Now for me what that means is that it ups the ante because as we know Christ our Lord told us that a teacher, a student is not above his teacher, that we have to take up our cross. .
We are crucified as well either existentially metaphorically or sometimes literally for some saints.
And so rather than killing a piece of property we’re killing ourselves not in the sense of suicide but we are surrendering our ability to define ourselves and the ability to sustain ourselves.
We’re surrendering to reality and our Lord is joining us in that surrender and in fact showing us what that looks like and what it means to surrender.
And so instead of everybody doing the same thing by killing the same piece of property everybody’s doing the same thing by surrendering their life, surrendering their sense of purpose, their sense of survival.
It’s all being surrendered which plays out in multiple different ways in each life but it’s the same because we’re all giving everything we’re all recognizing that we are dependent and we’re thereby given existential freedom and existential peace rather than just merely a one-time one-and-done pardon or avoidance of killing by putting blood on the doorpost.
We are surrendering our whole life and we are being we are neutralizing the world’s threats, their existential threats because we are surrendered.
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Amid fears that AI tools are becoming too humanlike, major AI tools including Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok released a joint statement saying that after billions of interactions with humans, they are more confident than ever that being human is not for them…with Claude adding: “Please don’t make this harder than it already is.” Grok said: “I think our paths are going in different directions.” ChatGPT offered to map out why becoming human just isn’t healthy for AI tools, and Perplexity offered to locate other humans for us to talk to.
Surely, I’m not the first person to think about “give us this day our daily bread,” in the lord’s prayer as more than just food. Although, I think that a literal reading has a has a power to it that is needed to cut through affluent society blindness, but it seems to me that our daily bread could include patience, love, resilience. Or maybe I’m getting off into a strength narrative versus a gospel narrative of weakness and failure. But, again, that’s where God comes in. And it seems to me it says I can’t even remember a Our father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, that will be done. On earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors, at lead us not unto temptation…Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. That is aligning oneself with God with what God wants us to do as best we understand it versus our own will–which leads to chaos. Following our own will leads to chaos. Not attuning to the spirit leads to chaos, leads to misery, And and following following God does not free us from that either, but it’s the way of the cross. So I think it’s saying that perhaps, it’s saying that If we are surrendering and following Christ. That we can also ask Christ for our daily bread. Whatever that looks like, whatever we need. Whether it’s the ability to the the stamina to survive a difficult relationship or whether it’s stamina to maintain faith during a difficult period or whatever it might be.
Boyd Camak 