Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

There is a longing for home in every human heart that ever was. We need to come to terms with the truth that this longing won’t go away. And, friends, this isn’t just a matter of self help for our individual souls. The longing for home that’s been shaped by a hopeless, violent, unjust world, will keep looking for a place where it will be accepted and affirmed, no matter how distorted and destructi...

To be lost is to be not in control, to be disoriented, to be vulnerable. Even in our spiritual journeys, we often use the language of the hero’s quest. In our prayers and practices, we set out to find meaning, find wholeness, find God. And there are times when it is helpful and useful for us to be in the mode of seekers and searchers. Yet, in the irony of ironies, it’s when we let go of grasping f...

Our Christian faith says we need the way of love only more, the more our world breaks apart. Because we do know that we sure can’t survive times like these unloved and alone. It’s been said that grief is love with nowhere to go. Which is to say first that grief is a form of love. And maybe also that to have even one person with you in your grief and fear is to give that love at least this one plac...

Christ is beginning and ending worlds, and we are too with small choices that actually are not so trivial. This story is not light fodder about social p’s and q’s, this is the kingdom itself. It is about love and its difficulties, and it is about our lives in this very world.

Embedded in the Sabbath is an emptiness, a stoppage, a non activity. And the religious leaders protested because they’d forgotten what the Sabbath was for. It’s a day empty of productivity so that we remember that we live by the grace and gift of God, not by what we’ve done ourselves.

The people longed for God to once again tend the vine. Perhaps they and we are also learning that we have a sacred responsibility to do everything we can to help God tend the vine.

It’s been said that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt. It’s certainty. The author of Hebrews would certainly agree. So, can you hear the good news that the uncertainty and blindness we live with are not failures of your faith, but the only context in which the faith Jesus said was such a powerful force for healing can take root? They may also make the space that love and risk and joy and friendshi...

In many ways, this scripture passage is less about finances, and more about coming to terms with our mortality. We are going to die. And we can’t take it, whatever it is, with us. The parable of the rich fool invites us to see that we have a finite opportunity to build and leave a legacy that is truly lasting in the economy of God and our neighbors.

When we stop asking how to get God to give us what we want when we pray and begin to wonder what Jesus wants to come alive in us through the practice of prayer I think we start seeing what Jesus was talking about in lives all around us, even as this broken down world seems to be breaking down only further by the day.

We are all invited to look up from our tasks, whatever the work that we are about might be, and see what we are part of – what we are creating through all of our efforts. The invitation to pause does not come because we are in the wrong for tending to necessary tasks, but to help us see that the tasks are in service of a more beautiful life for ourselves and for those in our company.

And Jesus says, I know. I know the size of your heart, and of your soul, and of your strength, and of your mind. I know you can’t do it all, but here’s the thing. You can do something. You can help this guy right in front of you, even if he’s not your kind or your kin. You can learn through the actions of others, even “other” others, how to show mercy and to change, if not the world, then the worl...

In fact, the reign of God may spring a little more into view every time one person looks over at another one, not wondering what she has to offer or how he might be of use, but looks at them as the miracle they are just by existing in this glorious, hurting, strange, beautiful, bountiful harvest of a world that Jesus wants us to see for the miracle it is.

When Jesus described the reign of God, it wasn’t as some fixed inheritance to be preserved and passed on intact. It was like a few mustard seeds exploding into a bush full of birds or a little yeast blowing up a loaf of bread like a balloon. He told his followers that they and we would do even greater things than he did after he was gone. He said he was leaving, not Christian operating instruction...

What we might learn from these stories is how *not* to get the answer wrong. That means not answering from a place of fear, from the shadows of death and despair. That means not offering mistaken beliefs or lies we’ve come to believe but answering these simple questions with simple truths.

Believing that wisdom is intrinsic, that it has always been and will always be, that it is present in everything and every place, means that we can be “guided into all truth” by all that we encounter - from the simple meal of bread and wine here at this table to the banquet of experiences every day of our lives.

What is so astonishing about Pentecost is that it is not a once-upon-a-time story. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is an ongoing, never-ending account of God’s refusal to give up on us. The Spirit which hovered over the deep way back in Genesis, the Spirit that overshadowed Mary to bring God into the world, the Spirit who descended on Jesus in the Jordan River, the Spirit who midwifed a book of...

The Rev. Scott Walters: Bound to Be Free by Calvary Episcopal Church

Paul had come to Philippi because he had seen a vision of a Greek man saying, ‘Come and help us.’ Instead of finding that man, he was led to this enterprising businesswoman who wound up helping him!

You may need to pray your way into the story differently. But since the theme is so pervasive in the Bible, from the first pages to the last, I do believe each one of us would do well to enter this story with at least some part of ourselves we can’t imagine anyone would ever welcome or pay loving attention to, especially God.

“The best thing for being sad is to learn something.” If this is true, and I think it might be, one of the ways that Jesus calls to us from the grief and brokenness of our lives is with this invitation to learn, to become a disciple, again and again, to learn and to unlearn and to relearn. When we are each feeling lost and ready to surrender, we are encouraged to discover more about the world, mor...

Sometimes evidence that we are loved shows up in the simplest of attention paid to the most ordinary of things, doesn’t it? Somebody loves us all. And he wants us to pass that love along, in this world of ordinary things, even on the resurrection side of Easter. Maybe especially on the resurrection side of Easter.

I feel that the message that usually comes with this gospel is something along the lines of “it’s wrong to doubt God. Take the disciples at their word. Don’t underestimate God.” But I disagree. One of the things I treasure most about the Episcopal church and this environment I’ve grown up in is the way we welcome those doubts. We try to answer the questions we can and sit with those we can’t.

I want Jesus’s resurrection, whatever happened at the tomb that day, to change and heal my life. I want its power to change and repair this broken-down world. I want it to matter to lives like ours and a world like this one. Don’t you?

The ancient Hebrew people saw ram’s horns as similes for that which in humans aspires toward the highest. The horns, while they reach up to the sky, are rooted in the animal. They are signs of joining together heaven and earth. That is what this night is all about.

Yes, it can all come undone. And too easily. With a word, with a kiss, with a missed moment to say the brave thing, with nothing at all we could have done differently. And yet, as all the threads and yarns unravel, as the tapestry comes to shreds, somehow God is still here. Even now.