Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.
As a teenager, I loved how I looked in the outfit of using drugs and exercising poor judgement. I had tried it on, spun around in the mirror, and decided I would choose this look, this image, this ide...
I've never fully understood how Christianity became quite so tame and respectable, given its origins among drunkards, prostitutes, and tax collectors....Jesus could have hung out in the high-end relig...
While we as people of God are certainly called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, that whole we're blessed to be a blessing thing can still be kind of dangerous. It can be dangerous when we sel...
Personally, I think knowing the difference between a racist and a saint is kind of important. But when Jesus again and again says things like the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, and...
My former bishop Allan Bjorberg once said that the greatest spiritual practice isn't yoga or praying the hours or living in intentional poverty, although these are all beautiful in their own way. The...
What is meant by the phrase the Word of God. To us, the Word of God is, first and foremost, Jesus, the Word made flesh. Secondly, the Word of God is any way in which the story of God’s self-revela...
There is a reason Mary is everywhere. I've seen her image all over the world, in cafés in Istanbul, on students' backpacks in Scotland, in a market stall in Jakarta, but I don't think her image is eve...
As a teenager, I began to question the Great Christian Sorting System. My gay friends in high school were kind and funny and loved me, so I suspected that my church had placed them in the wrong catego...
Usually when you are grieving and someone says something so senselessly optimistic to you, it's about them. Either they want to feel like they can say something helpful, or they simply cannot allow th...
Here’s my image of Ash Wednesday: If our lives were a long piece of fabric with our baptism on one end and our funeral on another, and we don’t know the distance between the two, then Ash Wednesday i...
From my father I heard only these words: But you were born for such a day as this. He closed the book and my mother joined him in embracing me. They prayed over me and they gave me a blessing. And som...
I know that people who don't believe in God might scoff at the idea that the creator of the universe has the time or inclination to try incessantly (and with not much long-term success) to change my h...
This is exactly, when it comes down to it, why most people do not believe in grace. It is fucking offensive.
The greatest spiritual practice is just showing up. And Mary Magdalene is the patron saint of just showing up. Showing up, to me, means being present to what is real, what is actually happening. Mary...
I looked harder at Matthew 25 and realized that if Jesus said I was hungry and you fed me, then Christ's presence is not embodied in those who feed the hungry (as important as that work is), but Chri...
I realized that sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is talk honestly about being wrong.
It’s about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live.
Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word. My se...
But around God’s table, and around God’s people, you don’t have to pretend or overcompensate. You can just be. And in just being, you can, in the fierce and loving eyes of God, be known, be whole, an...