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...
Nadia, 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. Damn.
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...
I thought of how God had sent a prostitute to help the Hebrew spies who would, through her help, and only through her help, conquer the city and fell the walls. I also wondered: Had that been humilia...
I remembered that, at one point in my life, my own depression had felt so present, so much like a character in my life, that it had actually felt right to go ahead and give her a name. I named my depr...
I realize God may have gotten something beautiful done through me despite the fact that I am an asshole, and when I am confronted by the mercy of the gospel so much that I cannot hate my enemies, and...
I need a place to confess that I don't have everything figured out. Christianity is not a program for avoiding mistakes; it is a faith of the guilty. There is no right or perfect way to be. We learn f...
I have come to realize that all the saints I’ve known have been accidental ones — people who inadvertently stumbled into redemption like they were looking for something else at the time, people who ha...
I hate that this is God’s economy. That the salvation of my enemy is tied up in my own. Which is why I sometimes say that the Gospel is like, the worst good news I’ve ever heard in my life.
God isn’t waiting for you to become thinner or heterosexual or married or celibate or more ladylike or less crazy or more spiritual or less of an alcoholic in order to love you. Also, I would argue th...
Getting closer to God might mean getting told to love someone I don’t even like, or to give away even more of my money. It might mean letting some idea or dream that is dear to me get ripped away.
But that so rarely works. And if our hearts and brains don’t acknowledge these kinds of truths, they don’t just go away. They burrow into our bodies. For me, any truth I try to push aside seems to see...
But I cannot pretend, as much as sometimes I would like to, that I have not throughout my life experienced the redeeming, destabilizing love of a surprising God.
Being part of Christ’s bizarro kingdom looks more like being thirsty and having someone you don’t even like give you water than it looks like polishing your crown.