I also had to deal with the fact that I simply could not express the level of antiracist outrage I wanted to, knowing something that no one else would know unless I said it out loud: despite my politi...
How is it that Judas, who betrayed Jesus once and was filled with remorse, became the villain, while Peter, who denied Jesus three times and wept bitterly, became the rock on which the church was buil...
And the thing about grace, real grace, is that it stings. It stings because if it's real it means we don't deserve it. ... And receiving grace is basically the best shitty feeling in the world.
When Jesus again and again says things like the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, and the poor are blessed, and the rich are cursed, and that prostitutes make great dinner guests, it m...
The Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It’s about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and...
From demons.
When what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over, try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force seeking to...
When the forces that seek to defy God whisper if in our ears—if God really loved me, I wouldn’t feel like this… If I really am beloved, then I should have everything I want… if I really belong to God,...
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...
We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in...
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 is our God. Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps. A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross....
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...
The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority.
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...
Shit, I thought to myself, I’m going to be late to New Testament class.