Quiet Time: Clobbering the Clobber Texts

Gracious God, You who poured out Your Spirit on all flesh — sons and daughters, young and old, servants and free — I come to You this morning knowing that Pentecost was the day You shattered every boundary we thought was permanent. When Peter stood up in Jerusalem and declared the words of Joel, the crowd didn't hear a careful theological lecture. They heard fire. They heard a God who refuses to be contained by our categories of who deserves the Spirit and who doesn't.

Lord, the Black Church was born because somebody read the same Bible that slaveholders read and found liberation where others found chains. Our grandmothers hummed freedom songs over scriptures that plantation preachers twisted into shackles. We know in our bones what it means when people use Your Word as a weapon — and we know what it means when Your Spirit breaks those weapons into plowshares.

So give me courage today to sit with the hard passages, not to explain them away, but to read them the way Mama taught me to read everything: with Your love as the lamp and Your justice as the road. Where I have used scripture to shrink someone else's dignity, forgive me. Where others have used it to shrink mine, heal me.

In the name of Jesus, who looked at every person the religious authorities rejected and said, "You too — especially you." Amen.

Carry this with you today: the same Spirit that fell at Pentecost is still falling, still filling unexpected vessels, still speaking through voices the gatekeepers never authorized. Your quiet time isn't a retreat from the world — it's where God arms you with enough love to walk back into it.