What happens in the Kingdom of God parable I was given is that a landowner goes out and hires laborers in the morning and agrees to pay them the daily wage. But then every few hours he goes and finds...
Wanting to get at this idea that God meets us first under the oak tree, when our feet are dirty, not just after we have managed to clean them up, House for All Sinners and Saints has the practice of ...
This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time.
There are times when I hear my name, turn, and recognize Jesus. There are times when faith feels like a friendship with God. But there are many other times when it feels more adversarial or even vacan...
The fact is, we are all, at once, bearers of the gospel and receivers of it. We meet the needs of others and have our needs met. And the strangeness of the good news is that, like those in Matthew 25...
The disciples’ mistake was also my mistake: They forgot that they have a God who created the universe out of nothing, that can put flesh on dry bones nothing, that can put life in a dusty womb nothing...
The better you were at not doing these things, the better a Christian you were. It did not seem to me, even back then, that God’s grace or the radical love of Jesus was what united people in the Churc...
The beauty of our sky is really just a nice way for the earth to protect us from the terror of what’s so vast and unknowable beyond. The boundlessness of the universe is disturbing when you think abou...
So I was scared. I was scared about the fact that in order for me to be the kind of pastor I would want to be, I would need to look at some of my own personal stuff, which I was perfectly happy ignori...
Repentance in Greek means something much closer to thinking differently afterward than it does changing your cheating ways. Of
Our scars are part of our story, but they are not its conclusion. The past is ours and will always be a part of us, and yet it is not all there is. It’s a process, moving from wounds to scars to grief...
Next to Alma on our All Saints’ table was an icon of another accidental saint, Harvey Milk (the first openly gay person elected to public office in California, who was shot to death by a fellow city e...
My selfishness is not the end-all… instead, it’s that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit.
Moments of unity—holiness—actually alleviate isolation, which is not the same as simply distracting us from our isolation.
McPreachy’s Kool-Aid fountain of positive thinking.
Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore. The
In the ten years I've been pastor at HFASS, I've known young married couples who did what the church told them and waited, only to discover that they could not, on the day of their wedding, flip a swi...
In the story, the eunuch was riding along the desert road in his chariot reading Isaiah, and he was returning from Jerusalem having gone there to worship. But I started to wonder if he was also famili...
In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understan...
If the Gospel is where we find healing from the harm done to us by the messages of the church, then it must also be where we find freedom. Meaning that even if it is the last thing I want to do, I abs...