When we travel today, we rarely choose roads the old-fashioned way. Most of us enter a destination and are offered a route shaped by preferences we don’t even remember setting. Preferences like “fastest route” or “avoid tolls.” We tap “Go” and trust the voice guiding us forward. Only occasionally do we override the map and choose a different way.
How many roads in life do we travel that way? Roads suggested, shaped, selected for us long before we stop to ask where they lead — long before we even notice we’re on them.
We are living in a moment when the roads available to us are being shaped not just by laws and policies, but by rhetoric, fear, and narratives that demand a response.
Across the country, immigration enforcement has intensified. Federal agents have been deployed into cities in search of immigrant families, including those with legal status or pending asylum claims. And people of color, or those who speak with a foreign accent, are living with renewed uncertainty. Ordinary acts, like attending a required check-in appointment, have resulted in detention.
Just days ago, a Colombian family seeking asylum — here legally while their case was being processed — was deported after the father was detained during what had been a routine immigration check-in.
The family attended Newtonville United Methodist Church, located in the hamlet of Newtonville in the Town of Colonie, NY. The church is a historic, active faith community that has been serving the area since 1799. This small church surrounded the family with love and support, including housing, advocacy, and friendship. So, for the people of this congregation, the debate about law and mercy was no longer theoretical. It had names. It left empty seats.
At the same time that we are already reeling from the daily news of immigration crackdowns gone awry, long-standing environmental protections have been dismantled. Once again, accompanied by the repeated claim that climate change is a hoax. It’s likely people welcomed that decision. Most of us are alarmed. Once again, the road seems to split.
Rhetoric is offered as explanations. We are told enforcement is about removing “bad people.” We are told deregulation is about freedom. Depending on which road we are already traveling, we either exhale or brace ourselves.
These are not abstract policy debates. They shape how we think about mercy, responsibility, belonging, and truth itself.
This past week, I sat in a room with other pastors discussing a case study about how a congregation responded to an immigrant family attending their church. The study presented a scenario that recurs in most congregations. Members did not agree on how and how much to help the family. Tensions rose during a meeting in which a request was made for substantial financial assistance.
Our conversation, which lasted for a couple of hours, was thoughtful and sincere. Some raised the question of documentation — whether legal status should shape how we respond. Others reminded us that Scripture calls us to obey governing authorities. That faithfulness includes honoring the law.
On the other hand, I can’t imagine asking someone whether they had ever received a speeding ticket, cheated on their taxes, or harbored negative thoughts about people unlike them before deciding whether to help them. How is immigration status any different?
What struck me later wasn’t that we disagreed. It was how certain each of us felt that our road was the faithful one. No one in that room was trying to be unfaithful. We were all trying to discern what obedience looks like.
And yet we found ourselves standing on different roads. One road emphasizes order. One road emphasizes mercy. One road leans toward caution. Another welcome. We discovered how easily we gravitate toward the road that feels most responsible to us.
And each road can quote Scripture. That’s the part we don’t like to admit because that realization is unsettling. It’s true that the apostle Paul urges believers in his letter to the Church in Rome to be subject to governing authorities. Yet the Bible also tells us that the apostles declare in Acts of the Apostles 5, “We must obey God rather than men.” Moreover, Jesus knowingly broke the law when He healed on the Sabbath and overturned tables in the temple.
Scripture does not flatten the tension between law and justice. It holds it. And so must we.
These are not abstract debate points. These are families. These are communities. These are future generations. And the roads being laid out shape how we think about mercy, responsibility, law, and power.
We’re all facing a time of discernment. When leaders amplify rhetoric that echoes white nationalist themes…When demographic changes are framed as threats rather than gifts… When legal arguments press toward racial profiling. As Christians, we’re called to pay attention.
When scientific consensus is dismissed because it interferes with political goals…When institutions meant to safeguard public health are weakened…When truth itself becomes negotiable depending on who is speaking…as Christians, we’re called to pay attention.
Not because we are partisan, but because we are disciples. The question is not simply what policies we support. The question is what is shaping us.
What kind of people are we becoming as we walk these roads?
Scripture does not flatten the tension between law and justice. It holds it. Which means the question is not simply, “What does the law say?” The deeper question is: What kind of people are we becoming as we follow these roads?
Matthew tells us that strangers came “from the East” in search of a newborn King. They were foreigners. Astrologers. They were people who dressed differently, spoke with unfamiliar accents, and read the sky instead of the Torah. However learned they were in their own land, here they were travelers — dependent on hospitality, vulnerable to the integrity of the ruler whose territory they entered.
Ideally, they would have been welcomed with warmth. Instead, they were manipulated.
They arrived in Jerusalem asking a simple question: “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?” They expected competence. They encountered insecurity. They expected joy. They found fear. Herod received them not as guests but as instruments. His was the road of control — power maintained by threat, information gathered for harm, religion consulted for advantage.
But the story does not end in the palace.
The foreigners continue on. They kneel before a child. They offer gifts without leverage. They listen — not to the anxious ruler but to a dream. After encountering the Christ child, the visitors from the East are warned in a dream not to return to Herod. And so, as Matthew tells it, “they went back to their own country by another road.” No confrontation with Herod. No public statement. No political victory. Just a different road.
They returned to their country by another road, since God had warned them in a dream not to go back to Herod.
Matthew 2:12
Revelation often leads to reorientation.
Their status as outsiders matters. Matthew could have written a story in which the priests or the scribes recognized the Messiah first. Instead, he tells of foreigners who see what insiders miss. Grace crosses borders before borders are defended. The first to worship Christ in Matthew’s Gospel are not guardians of purity, but seekers from afar.
Epiphany always unsettles our assumptions about who is inside and who is outside.
The lectionary this week offers another epiphany story. In the 17th chapter of Matthew, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with Him up a mountain. There, Jesus is transfigured before them. His face shines like the sun. His clothes become dazzling white. And standing with him are Moses and Elijah — the Law and the Prophets — not abolished, but fulfilled and gathered up in him. Understandably, the disciples are overwhelmed, afraid, and disoriented. When a voice from the cloud declares, “This is my Son, the Beloved… listen to him.” Notice the pattern.
On the road to Bethlehem: light appears. Outsiders kneel. A warning comes. They change direction. On the mountain, a light blazes, disciples fall to the ground, and a voice speaks. They are told to listen — but then they must descend the mountain and return to the work below.
In both stories, glory is not given for spectacle. It is given for guidance.
It is not incidental that the three disciples on the mountain were also outsiders. Fishermen from Galilee. Men without status in Jerusalem’s religious hierarchy. They had walked with Jesus, yes. They had heard his teaching. But on that mountain, they experienced Jesus anew — not merely as Rabbi, but as the radiant convergence of Law and Prophets, promise and fulfillment.
Epiphany does not simply inform. It transforms.
Perhaps the Magi’s transformation was nothing more than geographic. They went home another way, but we’re not told the rest of the story. But the disciples’ transformation was vocational. They would listen to Him — even when Jesus spoke of suffering, even when He challenged inherited assumptions about power and greatness.
In both stories, revelation interrupts the road we thought we were on. And in both stories, the choice that follows is quiet but decisive.
Herod remains on his road — anxious, threatened, violent. The Magi step onto another. The disciples could have clung to the mountaintop, building shelters to preserve the moment. Instead, they descend, carrying with them a deeper understanding of who Jesus is.
Light is given not to dazzle us, but to direct us.
Epiphany invites us to ask: When we encounter Christ — in scripture, in a stranger, in truth that unsettles us — do we double down on the road of control? Or do we listen and allow our direction to change?
Grace comes first. Listening follows. Then comes the long obedience of another road.
In the final chapters of our companion book, we return to where we began: grace. Not as sentiment, and not as reward, but as the persistent presence of God that refuses to be exhausted by human failure. After walking through identity, truth, suffering, neighbors, and responsibility, the book does not end with solutions or strategies. It ends by reminding us that transformation is not self-manufactured. It is received—often slowly, often unevenly—through grace that keeps meeting us where we are.
These chapters press an uncomfortable truth: grace does not remove us from the world’s brokenness; it changes how we remain within it. We are not transformed out of conflict, injustice, or complicity, but transformed within them—learning to live differently even when outcomes are uncertain, and power feels lopsided.
The closing sections resist the temptation to declare victory. Instead, they emphasize faithfulness over effectiveness, presence over purity, and endurance over resolution. Transformation, the book suggests, is less about becoming someone else and more about becoming more fully who we were created to be—people shaped by grace rather than fear.
That arc mirrors the stories we have been tracing.
The visitors from the East are not changed not by confrontation, but by encounter. They do not overthrow Herod. They do not fix the system. They simply cannot return the same way they came. And this is the kind of transformation described in the stories of the accidental saints Nadia Bolz-Weber encountered. Not dramatic reversals, but reoriented lives. Not moral superiority, but deepened clarity. And not escape from responsibility, but new ways of carrying it.
Grace, then, is not the excuse to “let it go.” Grace is what makes it possible to keep going without becoming hardened, cynical, or cruel. It is what allows us to choose a different road—even when the world we leave behind remains unchanged.
Our author sums up grace this way:
There’s this power of God in the universe that is restorative and redemptive, and no one is worthy of it, but everyone gets to receive it. It’s powerful, but it’s offensive at the same time, because it’s not fair, and it doesn’t work into our notions of justice. It changes us, and it’s what we need, but it doesn’t mean it feels good. If it’s real grace, it’s never going to feel good.
That is not cheap comfort. It is disruptive mercy. Grace unsettles the powerful and humbles the certain. It exposes fear masquerading as strength. It refuses to let us baptize our preferred road simply because it is familiar. And it calls us—again and again—to listen to the Beloved Son and walk accordingly.
If Epiphany reveals light, and Transfiguration intensifies it, grace is what enables us to walk in it. If transformation is directional, then the question before us is not abstract: What road are we on?
Discernment is not about achieving perfect clarity. It is about cultivating the capacity to listen. Listen to Scripture, to the Spirit, to the cries of our neighbors, and even to the discomfort that exposes our own complicity. It is about noticing when rhetoric echoes fear more than faith. It is about asking whether our posture toward strangers reflects Herod’s anxiety or Christ’s welcome.
We will not all map the terrain in identical ways. The clergy conversation reminded us of that. Faithful people can stand at the same crossroads and describe the landscape differently. But the measure of our road is not partisan alignment or personal preference. The measure is whether we are being shaped by grace rather than fear.
This is the final episode of our Epiphany Series. Next week, we begin the Season of Lent, where we’ll stay with Matthew until Easter, looking closely at a part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. As we travel together over the coming weeks, I invite you into three practices:
The first is attentive listening. Return often to the Gospel stories. Sit with the light of Epiphany and the command of the mountain: “Listen to him.” Notice where Jesus consistently stands—who He protects, who He challenges, who He welcomes.
The second is honest examination. Ask where control, resentment, or cynicism may be steering your direction. Grace is offensive precisely because it dismantles the narratives that make us feel secure.
And third, pray for an embodied response. Choosing another road is not theoretical. It shows up in conversations, in advocacy, in hospitality, in the refusal to dehumanize. It may not fix the system. It may not produce quick results. But it is faithful.
We are not called to be spectacular. We are called to be responsive.
The strangers from the East returned home by another road. The disciples descended the mountain and followed. We, too, are invited—not to escape this moment, but to remain within it differently.
Light has been given. Grace is present. The road before us is not predetermined. The question is whether we will listen—and whether we will walk accordingly.
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Pastor Tommy
Nadia Bolz-Weber. Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People. NY: Convergent Books, 2015. (ISBN 978-1-60142-755-7 ).
Bianca Vázquez Toness. “In Minnesota, sending a child to school is an act of faith for immigrant families.” © AP News, Feb 6, 2026. Link.
Patrick Tine. “Family of asylum seekers ‘adopted’ by Colonie church leave after father’s deportation.” © Times Union, Feb 10, 2026, Link.