Another World is Possible
Dear Friend of Renewed Heart Ministries,
Thank You for Your Support of Renewed Heart Ministries in 2025
As 2025 has come to a close, I want to personally thank you for your generous support of Renewed Heart Ministries this year. Your commitment and generosity make our work possible, and we are deeply grateful for the trust you place in this mission.
Because of you, Renewed Heart Ministries continues to challenge injustice, amplify voices too often ignored, and encourage people of faith to follow Jesus in ways that are courageous, compassionate, and transformative. Your support allows us to create resources, foster conversations, and nurture communities committed to love, dignity, and liberation for all, especially those pushed to the margins.
In a time when injustice can feel overwhelming and hope fragile, your partnership reminds us that meaningful change is built together. Every gift, large or small, is a tangible act of solidarity and a powerful statement that justice, mercy, and radical love still matter.
As we look ahead to the coming year, your support gives us the strength to continue this work with clarity and resolve. We are excited about what lies ahead and honored to walk this journey with you.
Thank you for standing with Renewed Heart Ministries in 2025. Your generosity truly makes a difference.
With gratitude and hope,
Herb Montgomery
Director
Renewed Heart Ministries
renewedheartministries.com
Another World is Possible
Herb Montgomery | January 16, 2026
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our reading this week is from the gospel of Matthew:
When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee. Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah:
“Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people living in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
a light has dawned.”
From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” At once they left their nets and followed him.
Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. (Matthew 4:12-23)
There are so many good things to highlight in this week’s reading. Before we launch into the good stuff, though, let’s begin with a word of caution about the metaphor of light shining on people living in darkness.
The metaphor of light versus darkness is one of the most enduring symbolic frameworks in Western thought. People routinely associate light with goodness, truth, purity, knowledge, and salvation, while linking darkness to evil, ignorance, danger, and moral failure. Often presented as universal or neutral, this metaphor carries deeply embedded racial meanings that have shaped and continue to shape systems of oppression around the world.
Historically, as European societies moved toward global expansion and colonialism, they increasingly mapped symbolic associations between light and goodness onto human bodies. Whiteness became aligned with light, civilization, order, and rationality. And Blackness and darker skin were cast as closer to darkness, chaos, and moral deficiency. These symbolic associations did not merely reflect prejudice; they actively produced it. The metaphor provided a moral and theological framework that justified enslavement, colonization, and cultural erasure by portraying non-White peoples as needing “enlightenment” or “civilization.”
Religious language played a particularly powerful role in this process. Christian imagery of “light overcoming darkness,” though not originally racial, was weaponized within colonial contexts. Conversion narratives framed European Christianity as light entering the darkness of “heathen” lands, reinforcing the idea that Whiteness and holiness were intertwined. Over time, these metaphors became so normalized that their racial implications became invisible to those who benefited from them.
Again, though this colonial association may not be original to the authors of these passages, the fact that this metaphor has become racialized since then demands that we find better ways to tell the Jesus story today. The light/dark binary still shapes cultural assumptions. Terms like “dark times,” “black marks,” or “lightening” a space or person carry moral weight that subtly reinforces anti-Blackness. This does not mean that every use of the metaphor is intentionally racist, but it does mean the metaphor operates within a cultural ecosystem that is already saturated with racial hierarchy.
Interrogating the metaphor of light versus darkness is not about banning poetic language but about recognizing how symbolism can encode power. Dismantling racism requires not only changing laws and institutions, but also examining the symbols and language that quietly teach us who belongs “in the light” and who is consigned “to the shadows.” Jesus followers today can and should find less harmful metaphors.
This week’s passage also allows us to meet the gospel that Jesus himself actually preached in the canonical Gospel stories.
Much of modern Christianity has come to define the gospel primarily as assurance of heaven after death. In this framework, Jesus’ message becomes reduced to a transaction: believe the right things now so your soul can escape later. While concern for eternal life is present in Christian tradition, this narrow focus misses the heart of Jesus’ own proclamation. In the Gospels, Jesus does not preach how to get to heaven. He begins his ministry by announcing that the kingdom of God has drawn near.
Jesus’ gospel is about God’s reign breaking into the present world, and that’s not merely a promise deferred to the afterlife. The kingdom Jesus proclaims confronts systems of injustice, restores humanity to those on the margins, and calls people into transformed social relationships today. His parables are filled with economic reversals, debt forgiveness, landowners confronted by laborers, and feasts where the poor and excluded are centered now. This is not abstract spirituality; it is a vision of social, economic, and political renewal.
Where the assurance-of-heaven gospel often emphasizes individual belief, Jesus emphasizes collective or societal transformation. He calls for repentance not as private guilt management, but as a turning away from participation in unjust systems. “Good news to the poor,” “release to the captives,” and “freedom for the oppressed” are not metaphors for the afterlife in Jesus’ inaugural sermon in Luke; they describe real conditions in the world he inhabits. Salvation, in this sense, is liberation—healing bodies, restoring community, and challenging concentrations of power that crush human flourishing.
The gospel of the kingdom that Jesus preached also redefined righteousness. Instead of ritual purity or doctrinal correctness, righteousness is measured by care for the vulnerable: the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, and the foreigner. Judgment scenes in Jesus’ teaching do not hinge on confessions of belief but on whether people fed the hungry and welcomed the stranger. In Jesus’ gospel, faithfulness to God is inseparable from justice.
This does not necessarily deny hope beyond death, but it refuses to let that hope excuse indifference to suffering now. An assurance-of-heaven gospel can too easily coexist with oppression, offering comfort without change. Jesus’ gospel, by contrast, is dangerous. It threatens unjust hierarchies, exposes religious complicity with empire, and demands embodied solidarity with those the system defines as the least of these. To follow Jesus, then, is not merely to prepare for another world, but to participate in God’s work of transforming this one.
Lastly, I’d like to consider an alternative interpretation for what Jesus might have meant by the metaphor of “fishing for people” in this call to his first disciples. Ched Myers reads Jesus’ call to become “fishers of people” not as a metaphor for saving individual souls for heaven, but as a deeply political image rooted in the prophetic tradition of Israel. In Binding the Strong Man, Myers argues that first-century hearers would have recognized “fishing” language from the Hebrew prophets as a symbol of divine judgment against oppressive rulers. Far from a gentle invitation to evangelism, the metaphor signals the dismantling of unjust power structures and removal of elites who exploit the poor.
In texts such as Jeremiah 16:16, Ezekiel 29:4, and Amos 4:2, God promises to “hook” or “catch” kings, nobles, and ruling classes who have grown fat on injustice. Fishing here is not about rescuing the fish but about dragging predators out of the water, out of the systems that allow them to dominate others. Myers insists that Jesus is consciously invoking this imagery when he calls Galilean peasants to follow him. To “fish for people” is to participate in God’s work of confronting and overthrowing unjust rule.
This reading becomes sharper when set in the political geography of Galilee. Jesus calls fishermen working under Herodian and Roman economic control, where fishing rights were taxed, regulated, and often exploited by elites. These men are not being invited into a spiritualized mission detached from their lived reality. They are being recruited into a movement that challenges the very forces that keep them poor and oppressed. Leaving their nets and boats is not merely symbolic discipleship; it is an act of economic and political resistance.
This interpretation further emphasizes that Jesus’ proclamation of the “kingdom of God” must be heard as an alternative to the kingdom of Caesar. In this light, “fishing for people” is a strategy within a larger campaign to expose, unmask, and ultimately depose illegitimate authority. The people being “caught” are not the marginalized masses, but the rulers who have claimed divine sanction for their violence and greed. Jesus’ movement aims to bring these powers into the open, where their injustice will be judged.
This interpretation reframes discipleship itself. To follow Jesus is not primarily to persuade others to adopt correct beliefs, but to join a struggle for social transformation and change. The earliest disciples are trained not as religious recruiters, but as organizers in a nonviolent resistance movement grounded in God’s justice. Their task is to announce that the old order is passing away and to live as if that process is already fulfilled.
The eventual crucifixion of Jesus, I believe, confirms this interpretation. Rome did not execute itinerant preachers for offering private spiritual comfort. Jesus was killed because his vision of God’s reign threatened the stability of imperial and temple power alike. His “fishing for people” led directly to confrontation with the state, exposing who ruled and at whose expense.
This interpretation also challenges modern Christianity to reconsider how it reads Jesus’ words. If “fishing for people” means removing unjust rulers from power, then faithfulness to Jesus today requires more than evangelistic zeal. It also demands active resistance to systems of domination and a commitment to building communities that embody justice, equity, and shared power as signs that another world is not only possible, but already breaking in.
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. In this new year, what area of societal justice is Jesus’ gospel inspiring you to engage? Share and discuss with your group.
3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?
Thanks for checking in with us, today.
I want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters out there. And if you would like to join them in supporting Renewed Heart Ministries’ work you can do so by going to renewedheartministries.com and clicking donate.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
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Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.
I love each of you dearly,
I’ll see you next week.
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 3 Episode 3: Another World is Possible
Matthew 4:12-23
Where the assurance-of-heaven gospel often emphasizes individual belief, Jesus emphasizes collective or societal transformation. He calls for repentance not as private guilt management, but as a turning away from participation in unjust systems. “Good news to the poor,” “release to the captives,” and “freedom for the oppressed” are not metaphors for the afterlife in Jesus’ inaugural sermon in Luke; they describe real conditions in the world he inhabits. Salvation, in this sense, is liberation—healing bodies, restoring community, and challenging concentrations of power that crush human flourishing. The gospel of the kingdom that Jesus preached also redefined righteousness. Instead of ritual purity or doctrinal correctness, righteousness is measured by care for the vulnerable: the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, and the foreigner. Judgment scenes in Jesus’ teaching do not hinge on confessions of belief but on whether people fed the hungry and welcomed the stranger. In Jesus’ gospel, faithfulness to God is inseparable from justice.
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/another-world-is-possible
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery
Available now on Amazon!
In Finding Jesus, author Herb Montgomery delves into the profound and often overlooked political dimensions of the gospels. Through meticulous analysis of biblical texts, historical context, and social discourse, this thought-provoking book unveils the gospels’ socio-political, economic teachings as rooted in a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of the marginalized. The book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, presenting a compelling argument for a more socially engaged and transformative Christianity.
Finding Jesus is not just a scholarly exploration; it is a call to action. It challenges readers to reevaluate their understanding of Christianity’s role in public life and to consider how the radical teachings of the gospels can inspire a renewed commitment to justice, equality, and compassion. This book is a must-read for those seeking a deeper understanding of the social implications of Christian faith and a blueprint for building a more just and inclusive society.
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Catching Big Fish
Herb Montgomery | June 7, 2019
“The fishing metaphor was a way to denounce injustice against the vulnerable, and looks forward to social change.”
“‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will show you how to catch big fish.’ At once they left their nets and followed him.” Mark 1:17-18 (Personal translation)
Last week I was reminded of the hymn, How Can I Keep From Singing. Although this hymn has been around for quite some time in a minority of hymnals, Pete Seeger popularized it in the folk music of the 60’s. Seeger incorporated an additional verse from Doris Penn (from whom he’d learned the song) and modified the lyrics to have broader reach, much like we today can speak of “the reign of love” where the gospel writers used “kingdom. I want to share with you Seeger’s version as we begin this week.
“My life flows on in endless song
Above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the real, thought far off hymn
That hails the new creation
Above the tumult and the strife,
I hear the music ringing;
It sounds an echo in my soul
How can I keep from singing?
What through the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it live’th.
What through the darkness round me close,
Songs in the night it give’th.
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I’m clinging.
Since love is lord of Heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?
When tyrants tremble, sick with fear,
And hear their death-knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near,
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging.
When friends by shame are undefiled,
How can I keep from singing?”
(For a live version of Seeger’s rendition, see Pete Seeger: How Can I Keep from Singing? – Live, 1982)
These lyrics inspire me to keep believing change is possible: another world is possible. Faith communities characterized by a different set of values than what I was raised with are possible. Societies that are just, safe, and compassionate are possible.
And this leads me to our text about fishing this week. I briefly shared in Social Sins, Social Justice, and the Jesus Stories how the Hebrew prophets’ original use of the “fishing” metaphor in the gospels was more political than religious. During the Christian Revival era in the 1950-60s here in the United States, “fishing” language was popularized and transformed to mean bringing people into the Christian faith.
But Jesus’ audience, especially the working, fishing people of Galilee and Judea, would have had a different association with this metaphor. Consider again how this metaphor is used by the Hebrew prophets:
“I am now sending for many fishermen, says God, and they shall catch [the people of Israel]…” (Jeremiah 16:16)
“The time is surely coming upon you when they shall take you away with fishhooks…” (Amos 4:2)
“Thus says God: I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt…. I will put hooks in your jaws, and make the fish of your channels stick to your scales…” (Ezekiel 29:3f)
This language of catching the big fish was used as a symbol of disrupting and overturning unjust power structures both within Israel and within gentile empires. As Doris Penn wrote, “How can I keep from singing? When tyrants tremble, sick with fear, And hear their death-knell ringing.” I love how Myers sums up the Jewish background of this fishing metaphor: Jesus might have been using this language with the fisher folk in our text.
“Jesus is, in other words, summoning working folk to join him in overturning the structures of power and privilege in the world!” (Myers, Say to This Mountain: Mark’s Story of Discipleship, p. 10)
The fishing metaphor is a way to denounce injustice against the vulnerable, and looks forward to social change. This impacts those who endeavor to follow Jesus today in relation to Christianity’s complicity in unjust power structures. As Guitierrez writes, “The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order” (Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: 15th Anniversary Edition, p. 69) Christianity has often been used to legitimize unjust established orders like patriarchy, white supremacy, slavery, colonialism, homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia.
In each of the synoptic gospels, what finally got Jesus executed was his overturning tables, challenging the established order of economic and political injustice being bolstered by religion. That’s still happening in Christianity today.
What I also find intriguing about the Jesus stories is that although this is a story of overturning unjust structures of power and privilege, it is also a story about alternative ways of doing so. This is a story of alternative “fishing” methods, if you will. From Jesus’ teachings on reparations, nonviolence, and wealth distribution among the poor to the stories’ ending with a resurrection after a violent death, the stories about Jesus are stories where resurrection is the means of overthrowing the crucifying power of evil and injustice.
As I’ve said so many times before, the Jesus story does not say that the cross was Jesus’ saving work. If anything, the cross was an attempted interruption of Jesus’ saving work and was overcome through the resurrection. The resurrection reversed everything accomplished by Jesus’ execution, and it did so as an alternative, life-giving method of overcoming the evil and unjust use of the violence of a cross.
Speaking of unjust structures of power and privilege being overturned in this story, Rev. Canon Kelly Brown Douglass in her book Stand Your Ground, Black Bodies and the Justice of God reminds us:
“[God’s power] is not a power that diminishes the life of another so that others might live. God’s power respects the integrity of all human bodies and the sanctity of all life. This is a resurrecting power. Therefore God’s power never expresses itself through the humiliation or denigration of another. It does not triumph over life. It conquers death by resurrecting life. The force of God is a death negating, life-affirming force.” (pp. 182-183)
The Jesus story does not overturn injustice, hierarchies and exclusion by adding death to death.
Douglass goes on to quote Audre Lorde:
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” (“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider, p. 12)
We need more than temporary solutions. We must not underestimate how much damage mitigation temporary solutions can accomplish as we work for more lasting change. Ultimately, we must work to end structures that kill marginalized people. Methods that may have worked to keep us alive at one stage of our human evolution, enabling some to survive at the expense of others, must give way to life-giving methods whose goal is the inclusion, survival and thriving of all.
We can evolve further.
The challenges in our text this week are:
The gospel, the good news, is about the potential for change in the status quo.
This should cause us to question and let go of the status quo if we benefit from it, rather than continuing to give the established order continued religious legitimization.
The gospels also challenge some of the means and ways that unjust established orders are changed and overthrown.
And lastly: a change in the status quo must not end in adding death to death. It must overcome death. It must be an overthrowing, a reversal, a rejection of death that results in life and respect for the sanctity of life of all. It must be a refusal to let go of life and life for all.
As I shared last week, if the language of “gospel,” “Jesus,” “God,” “heaven,” or other Christian terms are associated in your experience with abuse, call them love instead. Seeger had to change the lyrics of the hymn we began with this week from “Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth, How can I keep from singing?” to “Since love is lord of Heaven and earth, How can I keep from singing?” and that’s okay. (More blood has been shed in the name of “Christ” than almost any other name in human history. I would have changed the word “lord,” too.)
What we are talking about is the reign of love as our established social order. And if the word “love” is also associated with abuse in your experience, we are still working toward a world that is just, safe, equitable and compassionate for you and for us all.
“‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will show you how to catch big fish.’ At once they left their nets and followed him.” Mark 1:17-18 (Personal translation)
HeartGroup Application
This week in your HeartGroups, engage this exercise together.
1. Name a few unjust power structures that you see in our present social arrangements today, both in larger society and within your faith community. Write them down.
2. Thinking of Jesus’ actions with the Temple money changers, describe how you would imagine Jesus would engage some of these unjust power structures today.
3. RHM’s book of the month for June is A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. If you’re reading this volume with us this month discuss as group how you see the power structures you’ve named play into larger systems of injustice.
Exercises like these are useful because they begin challenging the way we look at both our world and our faith in following Jesus. Next week, we’ll build on this.
Thanks for checking in with us.
Wherever you are today, choose love. Keep living in compassion, action and justice.
Till the only world that remains is a world where only love reigns.
I love each of you dearly.
Another world is possible.
I’ll see you next week.
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