But as much as being the person who is the best Christian, who follows Jesus the most closely can feel a little seductive, it’s simply never been who I am or who my parishioners need me to be. I’m not...
Because in these healing texts, Jesus does not just cure people’s diseases and cast out their demons and then say, Mission accomplished. He’s always after something more than that because the healing...
Any identity other than child of God is spiritually meaningless.
And then he went from Saul to Paul, from being the best at being a Jew to being the best at being a Christian. Only, at some point he realized that no one could really pull that off. That’s when Paul...
And the strangeness of the good news is that, like those in Matthew 25 who sat before the throne and said Huh? When did we ever feed you, Lord?, we never know when we experience Jesus in all of this....
Pas • triks) noun 1). A term of insult used by unimaginative sections of the church to define female pastors. 2). Female ecclesiastical superhero: Trinity from The Matrix in a clerical collar. What on...
We actually have the authority to remind each other of the gospel and defy the darkness of living in a broken world by pointing to the light of Christ. We all need to have our bruised, papery hands...
There are times when the truth won’t let us go. Sure, I can avoid other people’s scrutiny by telling my bullshit side of the story over and over to anyone who will listen. But I know the truth. And so...
The thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.
The holy things we need for healing and sustenance are almost always the same as the ordinary things right in front of us.
Looked at you, gave you bread, and said, Child of God, the body of Christ, broken for you. Child of God. Child of God. We’re all children of God. And we’ve been given the authority, even the duty...
Hoping perhaps that their virtues — their ability to have faith in God in the face of an oppressive empire or a failing crop or the blight of cancer — might become our own virtue, our own strength.
Without higher-quality material to work with, God resorts to working through us for others and upon us through others. Those are some weirdly restorative, disconcerting shenanigans to be caught up in:...
We met the next day for coffee and when I asked her what was up she said, I think I'm having a crisis of faith. To which I thought, Yeah, she continued, I-I think I believe in Jesus.
To connect to the holy is to access the deepest, juiciest part of our spirits. Perhaps this is why we set up so many boundaries, protections, and rules around both sex and religion. Both pursuits expo...
This community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disa...
The week that the gospel text was that awesomely weird story of Jesus casting a legion of demons out of a naked dude and into a herd of pigs, pigs who then threw themselves over a cliff and drowned in...
Sometimes I wonder if that is what faith is: risking an openness to something bigger than ourselves — something from which we are made and yet without which we are not complete, our origin and our com...
Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we can stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary,
Our ‘ministry’ is Word and Sacrament —everything else flows from that. We see a need, we fill it. We fuck up, we say sorry. We ask for grace and prayers when we need them (a lot). Jesus shows up for u...