GOD BREATHED
- Kaloma Smith
- Jun 29
- 11 min read
The Word We Stand On: Human, Sacred, and Alive
5-Day Devotional · Just Ask · June 2026
Amazing family,
Can you actually trust a book written by people who were grieving, occupied, afraid, and under the boot of empire? That is the question my brother Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews put before us this past Sunday. And it is the right question to ask, because how you answer it changes everything about how you hold scripture, and what you expect it to do for you.
Rev. Mathews told us about his grandmother. Mama Bea. A woman in Four Corners, Louisiana who raised 19 children and over 80 grandchildren. When he was 12 years old, she called him to the front room, handed him a Bible, and had him read a passage aloud. She helped him with the words he stumbled on. She was proud. Years later, a cousin told him she could not read. She was reciting from memory. She had done what the psalmist declared: Thy word have I hid in mine heart. As Rev. Mathews said, her life became the sermon.
This week's five days will move through the four lessons Rev. Mathews offered from 2 Timothy 3:16-17. The Bible is human. It is sacred. It is for our formation as a people. And it engages both the heart and the mind. Each day asks you to hold it differently. The words have been traveling toward you for a long time. Let them find you this week.
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Sermon Notes · Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews
The Word We Stand On: Human, Sacred, and Alive — follow along with the full slides from Sunday's message.
DAY 1 - God Breathed Through People
2 Timothy 3:16-17 · NRSVUE
“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”
Most of us were handed a Bible that had already been spiritualized past recognition. The blind man was never really blind, we were told. That was just a metaphor. Move through the body quickly, because what matters is the interior lesson, the universal principle. And somewhere in that process, the actual bodies disappeared. The Roman soldiers disappeared. The empire disappeared. What was left was a self-help book with ancient credentials.
How many of us, if we're honest, have walked away from a scripture passage feeling like we missed something? Not because the text was too hard, but because we came to it already knowing what it was supposed to mean. Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews named this plainly on Sunday: many of us were handed a Bible that had been stripped of its humanity, mystified and allegorized, lifted above our real life. That stripping is not reverence. It is loss.
The text says all Scripture is God-breathed. Theopneustos in Greek. And that word matters, because breath requires a body. God did not hover above human history and beam a perfect text down from the sky. God breathed through real people in real situations. Through writers who were exiled. Through poets who were grieving. Through prophets under occupation. The Bible is human not despite God, but because of God. That was always the method. Think about what that means.
And before you ask whether that compromises the Bible's reliability, consider what God did in Jesus. Took on actual flesh. Entered a specific time, place, body, culture, and community. If God's light can shine through a human body with all of its limits and contradictions, it can shine through a human book with the same. This is not a smaller claim than what you were taught. It is a larger one.
“The humanness is not the problem, Church. The humanness is the method.” — Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews
Reflection
When you read a passage in the Bible, do you let the bodies in it stay real — the hunger, the fear, the grief — or do you move past them quickly to find the universal principle?
Prayer
God, I have been taught to spiritualize what you put into flesh. Forgive me the habit of evacuating the bodies from the stories, of moving past the blindness and the hunger as if they were inconvenient to the point. You went to the bodies. Teach me to go where you keep showing up. Let me read this book the way its writers lived inside it, in the real world, under real weight, trusting that your breath is in it still. Amen.
DAY 2 - Sacred Not God
John 1:1 · NRSVUE
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
There is a phrase that has stayed with Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews for over 40 years, from the day his campus minister handed him a Bible when he was licensed to preach. She said: this is God's Word, but it is not God. Simple enough. But most of us have never heard that sentence out loud, or if we heard it, we set it down too quickly. Because the distinction it names is the one that changes how you hold the book.
At some point in the American Christian tradition, reverence for the Bible became indistinguishable from worship of the Bible. You can see it in how we respond to someone questioning a passage — not as an invitation to think together, but as a threat to defend against. You can hear it in how we use it: chapter and verse as a closing argument, a way to end the debate rather than begin the inquiry. Don't get me wrong. The Bible is sacred. It is the gathered witness of generations who walked with God through the worst of times. But it is a road, not the destination. The Word preceded the book. And the book only serves the Word.
Abraham had no Torah. He had a voice that called him out of Ur. Moses received the law, but before him the people walked with God without it. Esther had no vision, no scripture cited. Just a conversation with her cousin Mordecai, reasoning together about what faithfulness requires when lives are at stake. None of these encounters was mediated by a printed page. And all of them did exactly what Paul says Scripture does: teach, correct, train in righteousness, equip for good work. The Word was alive before the book. The book came to bear witness to that relationship, not replace it.
“The Word preceded the book, and the book only serves the Word, not the other way around.” — Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews
Reflection
Have you ever seen the Bible used to close a conversation rather than open one? What is the difference, in practice, between honoring Scripture and worshipping it?
Prayer
Lord, I want to hold this book well. Teach me to treat it as the road it is, not the destination I want it to be. When I pick it up, let me come looking for you, not just for ammunition or comfort. The Word is not bound to these pages. Let me remember that. And let these pages do what they were always meant to do: point me to you. Amen.
DAY 3 - Sent Somewhere Together
2 Timothy 1:5 · NRSVUE
“I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.”
Paul is writing from jail. Death row in Rome. He has no way of knowing how much time he has left, and he writes to Timothy not with theology but with inheritance. He reminds Timothy of his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. This is what Paul considers urgent when he is near the end. Not doctrine. Not a systematic framework. The river of faith that ran through the women in Timothy's family, and whether Timothy knows he is standing in it.
We were handed a version of Bible reading that made it deeply personal. You, alone, with your highlighter, mining for the verse that applies to your situation this morning. There is nothing wrong with that. But it is not the whole thing, and Paul knew it. When he writes to Timothy about Scripture, he does not say it is useful for your personal devotion. He says it is useful for teaching, and teaching is communal. For reproof, and reproof requires a relationship. For training in righteousness, and righteousness is not interior decoration. The formation Paul has in mind is for a people being sent somewhere together.
The genre matters here. A proverb makes a claim differently than a gospel narrative. A letter written to a specific church in a specific crisis was not written as universal law for all time. A parable is not a history lesson. When we flatten all of scripture into one register and read everything as personal devotion, we might miss what it is actually doing. History in Scripture asks what happened and why it matters for who we are. Poetry asks what it feels like to stand before God. Wisdom asks how we learn to live well together as a people. Reading well means asking what kind of writing you are holding, and what it is trying to do.
“Scripture is not a horoscope for your personal interior life. Church it is a formation tool for a people who are being sent somewhere together.” — Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews
Reflection
What would shift for you if you read the Bible primarily as someone who belongs to a people being sent somewhere — rather than as an individual looking for personal guidance?
Prayer
God, you gave this book to a community, not a lone reader. Forgive me for reading it in isolation, for treating it as my private source code when it was always meant to form a people. Show me who I am reading with this week. Let their questions change what I notice. Let their lives make the text come alive in ways my own reading can't reach. We are being sent somewhere together. Form us for the work. Amen.
DAY 4 - Hid in the Heart
Psalm 119:11 · NRSVUE
“I treasure your word in my heart, so that I may not sin against you.”
Mama B had 19 children and over 80 grandchildren. She lived in Four Corners, Louisiana, and when Rev. Mathews was 12 years old, she called him to the front room and handed him a Bible. She told him to find a passage and read it. He read. She helped him with words he stumbled on. She was proud. Years later, a cousin told him their grandmother could not read. He protested. Went back through the memory. Who actually read the words on the page? He did. But when he didn't know a word, she told him what it was. Did she look at the word, or did she just know the word? She knew the word.
She had done what the psalmist declared. Thy word have I hid in mine heart that I might not sin against thee. No seminary. No study Bible with color-coded cross-references. Just decades of hearing the Word in community, of letting it wash over her, of taking it in through her ears and hiding it so deep that it became the structure of her life. And she embodied it so well that her life became the sermon. Her witness was the Word.
For most of Christian history, most Christians could not read. You all missed it. That faith traveled on breath, not paper. It was sung, it was spoken, it was embodied in community for over 14 centuries before mass literacy made private reading possible. People came to know the Word through their hearts and their ears rather than their eyes. Which means that lectio divina — the ancient practice of reading scripture aloud, slowly, multiple times, letting certain words shimmer — may already have been your practice. You just didn't have a Latin name for it. You may have been doing it since you first heard the Word in a room with people who loved you.
“She was not a reader. She did not read the words on the page, but she took what she had been hearing and she hid it deep in her heart... her life became the sermon.” — Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews
Reflection
Who in your life has passed the Word to you through the way they lived it, not just the way they quoted it? What did their embodied faith teach you that a text alone could not?
Prayer
God, thank you for the grandmothers. Thank you for the people who carried the Word in their bodies before they ever held it on a page. Let me receive from them what I did not know I was receiving. Let me hide your word in my heart, not just in my notes. And let my life, in whatever room I am placed in, point to something larger than itself. Amen.
DAY 5 - The Word Is Alive
John 1:14 · NRSVUE
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
Four days before Easter, Rev. Mathews had no sermon. He was a panicked preacher in Indianapolis, carrying Ferguson in his body, and he had been asked to preach resurrection when crucifixion was all around him. He had been reading the Gospel of Mark devotionally for months. Slow. Lectio. But the Word had not yet moved for him. Not yet.
A friend told him to go back to Mark. This time in manuscript form, observing and interpreting and praying for application. He returned. And in that process he began to see how the urgency and danger and tension in Mark's resurrection story mirrored the Ferguson moment. He came to imagine himself as one of those terrified women who encountered the angel who told them that Jesus was alive and risen and already back outside in the world. He had his sermon. And the sermon healed him.
That is the pattern this whole week has been pointing to. The Word is not bound to the pages you hold. It was alive in a prison cell in Rome where a dying man wrote his last letter. It was alive in the African wilderness where desert mothers and fathers hid the Word in their bodies when they had no page to read from. It was alive in the hush harbors before dawn, where enslaved people sang what they were forbidden to read and found in the Hebrew children's story their own God and their own deliverance. It was alive in a front room in Four Corners, Louisiana, where a grandmother handed a twelve-year-old a Bible she could not read but knew by heart. It was alive four days before Easter, when a panicked preacher went back to Mark and the angel said: He is not here. Go outside.
That Word is in you. You did not come to this week empty-handed. Paul's word to Timothy is the same word to you: rekindle what has been given to you. Fan it into flame. Pass it forward. Show them who you are.
“The Word is alive. And it is alive in this room right now. It is alive in you. It is alive in me.” — Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews
Reflection
When has the Word met you in an unexpected place or season — not as a printed page but as something alive, moving, already outside waiting for you?
Prayer
Living God, I did not begin this. The river of faith ran through hush harbors and prison cells and front rooms before it reached me. I am standing in the middle of something much older and larger than myself. Let me not treat the Word as a resource I manage. Let it find me. Let it heal me the way it healed a panicked preacher four days before Easter. And when the crucifixion feels like all there is, remind me that the angel is already outside saying: He is not here. He is risen. Go. Amen.
A Prayer for the Week Ahead
Lord,
This week we handled a book we thought we knew. And what we discovered is that we were never just reading a book. We were standing in a river. A river that ran through writers under Roman occupation and poets in exile and mothers who hid the Word in their hearts before they could hold it on a page.
Send us out this week as people who know what we carry. Not credentials, not certainty, not five-year plans. We carry the living Word that has been running through generations of faithful people and has found its way into this room and into us.
We are not empty-handed. We are not the first. And the Word is not finished. Amen.
The Conversation Continues
Every Sunday at 3549 Middlefield Rd. in Palo Alto, a room fills up with people who are still working out what they believe and why they're here. You do not have to arrive with answers. You do not have to perform certainty. The conversation is already in progress and there is room for you in it. UAMEZ Church has been holding that room open for over 100 years.
3549 Middlefield Rd, Palo Alto · Sundays at 10:00 AM
Grace and peace,
Pastor Kaloma
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