The Word I Got Hung Up On...

A letter to the people who heard me scream it over and over again

Good afternoon, friends.

This post is a little bit different. It’s not an essay; this is a letter. I felt responsible to preface what I found with a very clear explanation, and I think you should hear it here first before you dig into the longer piece on the Berean Table

My Substack family is the audience I have been talking to for a long time now. Some of you have even been reading my essays long before the Berean Table had a name, and you know the position I hold simply because I am very adamant about getting it out.

The veil was torn from the top down. The cup went to friends in their hands; mediation was abolished, and there is no man who stands between you and Abba anymore.

You’ve heard me say it a million times: any system that says otherwise is selling something God already gave away for free and eliminated with the new covenant.

None of that has changed in my mind, so hold on to it before you dig into the deeper essay. I’m not taking it back. I’m clarifying.

I feel obligated to tell you how this started because, early on, that’s where the real problem crept in.

Years ago, when I started waking up to the system we call Christianity and looking at it for what it was, there was one word that grabbed a hold of me and would not let go. That word is **mediator**. Everywhere I looked in the institutional system, I saw men standing between the flock and God. I also saw a class system standing between them and the flock.

That is intervention into what the new covenant simply says is God— that covenant that Yeshua cut in his own blood.

Maybe it’s my years in the marketing world, but the in-betweenness of it all was so vibrant to me that I felt like I had a mission to get it out to the world. Unfortunately, that word **mediator** did not grasp

I actually began to scream it with blog posts, conversation, and social media.

I did everything I could to blow the shofar as loud as possible, showing what mediation looked like

And this is the part many of you don’t see; it doesn’t change a whole lot in the Christian mind. I don’t know if it’s self-justification or simply avoidance, but either way, it’s not resonating like it should.

Yes, there are people who do agree, and I appreciate that wholeheartedly.

But then there’s a lot of people who simply nod. And that was the strangest part to me. It took me a long, long time to understand how strange that was. Nobody really argues with me—perhaps maybe just the Calvinist.

But that being said, a Protestant hears no mediation and agrees before the sentence is actually finished. He will quote one mediator between God and men—1 Timothy 2:5—right back at me, and he’ll mean it, because this whole tradition was founded on saying exactly that against Rome.

I was also watching men agree with me and walk out completely unchanged, and for the life of me, I did not understand it. I assumed the problem was always my delivery, so I sharpened it, I rewrote it, I refined it. I assumed the problem was the audience, and it was not.

The actual problem was that, even though I had the right diagnosis aimed at the wrong church, I was almost correct.

And “almost correct” is the most dangerous kind of wrong because everything else in you says, “keep going.”

This is what broke it open for me, and it was going back to the text with an even harder question: Who was Yeshua actually hardest on? Not who did he correct or who got the woes.

When I found the real answer, it unwound my brain and unraveled my thinking because it wasn’t the priests. The mediating class of his time were the men who actually stood in between with blood, altar, and incense, and walked away with warnings.

Those woes are the hottest words he ever spoke, and they fell on somebody else. The charge he brought against them was not the charge that I had been bringing to the table all this time.

That being said, I’m not going to give you the explanation here, not because I’m withholding it from you. People know what I think of withholding.

However, it’s because this case deserves to be seen in its entirety, and I built that on the Berean table. I will unpack the word he used, the men he aimed at, what Rome did with fire and Latin, as well as what the Reformation kept when he gave the cup back.

There’s a test with five real marks you can run on your own congregation tomorrow morning without saying a word to anybody else.

And the door that’s been standing open the entire time will become evidently clear.

It is the most personal correction I’ve ever published because teaching being corrected is mine to own.

That is what being a Berean is all about.

I Have Been Screaming the Wrong Word →

One last thing before you actually read the article, and this is specifically for those who trusted me enough to keep listening.

The message you learned from me was not wrong, and it wasn’t an error. It was simply unsharpened, and there’s a very distinct difference. The difference matters for how you carry what I proclaim.

As I’ve said before, never take my word for things—neither the old teaching nor this. Take it the way Bereans took Sha'ul (Paul). Always go home, open the text, and critically argue against what I’m saying.

If this table or my efforts have ever taught you anything, let it be to refine your Berean heart. The day you stop checking me is the day I become the thing that this piece is all about.

I encourage you to read the article slowly, bring some questions, and start a discussion.

And if you’ve ever felt that same draft in the house, the in-betweenness you could not name, this piece is me handing you the word that I could not find.

Your brother in the Way,

Sergio

*By the way, this was handwritten, and the scanner said it wasn’t. So, whatever about the scanner.