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 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 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...
People don’t talk enough about what the freedom of a Christian looks like.
On All Saints’ Sunday, I am faced with sticky ambiguities around saints who were bad and sinners who were good.
Oh hey, God told me to tell you something: Get over yourself.
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.
I’m not running after Jesus. Jesus is running my ass down.
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 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 realized that I had been called to proclaim the Gospel from the place where I am and proclaim where I am from the Gospel.
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 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.
Good Friday is a stark and unapologetic display of remorse. Remorse for the way in which humanity kills ourselves and the creation and love and God him/herself.
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...