God did not enter the world of our nostalgic, silent-night, snow-blanketed, peace-on-earth, suspended reality of Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered our violent and dist...
Che Guevara, since
I can't imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. I can't imagine that God doesn't reveal God's self in countless ways outside of the symbol system of Christianity. In a way...
Wish I could show them how their loyalty to a doctrine or an interpretation of a few Bible verses has created harm in the bodies and spirits of the people in my care.
The resurrected Christ does such an unbearably loving and merciful thing. He does not rebuke Peter for failing him in his time of need. Instead he gives Peter breakfast, and then he gives Peter three...
What they don't tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends. Not everyone gets to have a whole new shiny-but-messy life like I have, and I've never c...
What Mary would do is show up and remind us that despite the violence and fear, it’s still always worth it to love God and to love people. And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defian...
There are many reasons to steer clear of Christianity. No question. I fully understand why people make that choice. Christianity has survived some unspeakable abominations: the Crusades, clergy sex-s...
The eunuch sought God despite the fact that he had heard that there was no love for him there.
Our identity has nothing to do with how we are perceived by others. But it’s still tempting to believe. I mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be tempt...
My full immersion into the world of TBN and a Christianity that can seem like it’s from another planet entirely, rather than strengthening my confidence in the sufficiency of my own tradition, has act...
Many of us were taught that if you do not fit inside the circle of the church’s behavioral codes, God is not pleased with you, so we whittled ourselves down to a shape that could fit those teachings,...
Jesus was a real revolutionary and that Christianity had unfortunately given the guy a bad name.
It felt like a gift that had been caretaken by generations of the faithful and handed to us to live out and caretake and hand off. Like a stream that has flowed long before us and will continue long a...
I stood the next day in the copper light of sundown in the parish hall where House for All Sinners and Saints meets and confessed all of this to my congregation. I told them there had been a million r...
I can, however, talk endlessly about the way I’ve been thrown on my ass over and over by the Bible, the practices of the church, and the people of God. That is to say, by religion.
I believe that God’s word of grace can also come through simple, imperfect everyday human love.
God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new.New doesn't always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks lik...
Because in the end, we aren’t punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins.
To say Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy is to lay our hope in the redeeming work of the God of Easter as though our lives depended on it. Because they do. It means that we are an E...