Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

The Rev. Dan Matthews: February 23, 2023 by Calvary Episcopal Church

Mr. Jon Meacham: February 22, 2023 by Calvary Episcopal Church

I also believe to my core that, for all the horrific bugs in our operating system over the centuries, the Church still bears something sacred and relevant and as desperately needed as ever to this lonely, hurting world of ours. We don’t have to be a perfect community. Just one that’s humbly faithful to the way of Jesus in our relationships with friend, sinner, and stranger alike. And when we are,...

Paul invited the Corinthians to reorient themselves – to look upward and outward toward God. He invited them to join together in seeking out the place where the wounded heart of humanity meets the divine presence of God.

The Rev. Scott Walters: Futile Fasts And Fries by Calvary Episcopal Church

“Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things… Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,/ you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

Is there a moment — a conversation, an experience, an encounter — that changed the way you saw something forever?

Andrew found a teacher - a teacher who was willing to stay with his students as long as it took to impart and share some wisdom, even if it took forever.

The Rev. Scott Walters: A Seat in the Circle by Calvary Episcopal Church

God in Jesus rescues you and me the way search parties go out into the woods or out to sea to find the wayward, lost, or drowning soul who thought she could handle the hike or the currents on her own but got horribly turned around and is dangerously adrift.

The Rev. Miranda Cully's Christmas Day Service at Calvary Episcopal Church

The Rev. Scott Walters' Christmas Eve service at Calvary Episcopal Church.

This is the message from the dream, from the angel of the Lord: that in a treacherous world, we do better to stay together, reaching out and taking someone’s hand for the journey ahead.

The Rt. Rev. Phoeve Roaf discusses John's question "Are you the one who is to come or are we to wait for another?"

To turn completely around and to see oneself as nothing but a stone raised up by God, to see God’s favor not as a birthright but as a gift, one that can transform us and transform our world … to see ourselves like that is to have our lives lit up by grace. And it is to see the grace that is present in and extended by a loving God to every last soul we meet, whether they’ve come to know it, or beli...

What can we do to stop the violence around us? What we can do is cultivate hearts of gentleness, tenderness, and compassion toward those around us, toward our world, and toward ourselves. We can awaken and orient our minds toward the coming Jesus, who seeks to turn us away from actions, economic choices, words, and thoughts that are destructive, hurtful, and violent. He comes to convert every ounc...

We notice, and we wonder, and we watch for patterns, remembering that our finite minds will always bump up against infinity. This unnerves and comforts, maybe in equal measure.

Both prophets urged people to pay attention to the place where they stood and the moment that was unfolding because if God is with us at all in any meaningful way, it is not as some abstract principle or distant force, but in the life we are actually living. In crumbling temples and audacious building projects. In lush vineyards and lousy crop returns, in typhoons and childbirth, in love, and war,...

In the Beatitudes Jesus hands down to us, we identify with the poor and with those who have experienced or are experiencing loss and grief. When we are reviled and hurt, we even somehow find blessing within that, and we persevere, with God’s help. We keep going. We keep encouraging. We keep loving.

One day in Jericho, the salvation of the whole cosmos came to the house of a tax collector named Zacchaeus. I ask you, friends, what might it look like if the salvation of the whole cosmos came to your house or my house today?

God’s mercy doesn’t get portioned out in teaspoons, and it doesn’t pick and choose its beneficiaries against a careful checklist of deserving qualities. Everyone in the temple is doing the best they can; frankly, everyone outside the temple is too. They (and we) all go down to their homes in grace.

Faith is having our lives be fired and ordered by a vision of Shalom Shabbat, Sabbath Peace. Where hospitality is the law, because human dignity is a given.

Jesus is telling the Samaritan that just as his profound gratitude is a verb, the faith at the man’s core is also a verb, and the fruits of that faith - wellness, wholeness, and salvation - are verbs as well. None of them are one-time events, but processes to be lived out and shared in the lives of others. The most important part of what Jesus said to him was, “Get up and go.”

"We are worthless slaves. We have done only what we ought to have done.” You won’t find that mantra in any self help manual. But if the church can be a community of honest humility and thankfulness to God about how we got wherever we are, and a community that nurtures the hope even a tiny seed of faith can create, lives will be changed.

I struggle with the idea that the chasm is permanently fixed in the unknowable next chapters, but I know for a fact that the chasms are not fixed here. Whether or not it was too late for the rich man after his death, this story tells us that it’s not too late for the five living brothers and that it’s not impossible for us.