Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

Over and again in the New Testament, we hear that we can’t disentangle what we believe about God from how we live with other people. In fact, we often learn what we really believe about God in the way we treat others.

After retiring as rector of St. Bartholomew’s in Manhattan, Buddy Stallings wondered what church for him would look like going forward, even pondering life with very little church involvement. To his delight, no matter how maddening the church sometimes can be, the church—all it is and longs to be—continues to live at the center of his life. As a priest, his path to God has been most vividly illum...

We come to claim Ash Wednesday as the stand-in for the unknown anniversary of the day when the fires will go out and there are only ashes. We do this not out of a sense of gross morbid curiosity, not to wallow in dark fascinations, but as O’Donohue says “to gather ourselves / and decide carefully / how we now can live / the life we would love / to look back on…”

After retiring as rector of St. Bartholomew’s in Manhattan, Buddy Stallings wondered what church for him would look like going forward, even pondering life with very little church involvement. To his delight, no matter how maddening the church sometimes can be, the church—all it is and longs to be—continues to live at the center of his life. As a priest, his path to God has been most vividly illum...

Jesus not only heals the son from his demon, he also works to heal the disciples and us from our addiction to knee-jerk reactions and quick fixes. He invites them and us into the slower and more fulfilling path of taking the time to listen to God and each other.

What are we spreading as Jesus’s Church? Is it the same old judgment and condemnation the world’s violent battles are made to arouse in us? Or does what we have to offer the world have a different source? A source that is mercy. A source that is love. Gift. Forgiveness. Give these away with your life, says Jesus, especially to your enemies and opponents, and these are what will come back to you an...

His words blessing the poor and the hungry and the weeping and the hated are every bit as miraculous as his words blessing the bread or inviting Peter out into the deep water. Again and again, Jesus offers a world that is more than pain and logic.

Unconditional love is a love that is too busy pouring itself out on the world to wonder whether enough love comes back to it to be worth the effort. Unconditional loving is its own reward. It’s a vibrant way of being alive in the world, not a grim Christian obligation.

What makes plans holy? I believe they are plans conceived and bathed in prayer, with little pockets of air dispersed throughout them to give room for the blowing breath of the Holy Spirit.

If you’re looking for holy scriptures that present a single, unadulterated, and righteous perspective, I’m afraid you’re going to have to look elsewhere than the Bible of Christians and Jews. But I’ve come to believe that these contradictions are not flaws. They are features. They are essential to how scripture goes to work on our common life over time.

When Christ promises that he comes to bring us life in abundance, that promise is not lopsided. He comes to open our eyes to the world and its deep need, to our neighbors and their pain, to the abundance of work that must be done for justice. And he comes to show us how to dance, how to look up and see the beauty of this amazing world, to remind us to gather with friends around a table and tell st...

Jesus wants to become fully immersed in our lives. By waiting in line, he honors the norm of the community – the community in which he wants to be fully enmeshed. He wants to be an abiding presence and a change agent within us. He wants to be a companion, waiting in line with the rest of us.

From the beginning of Jesus’s story, it’s clear that, in spite of Israel’s hope for a messiah who would deliver them definitively from the circumstances of their lives, we see their savior and ours caught in the same world that they and we are caught in. Redemption, the story tells us from its onset, will not come by way of a conquering hero or by one who transcends the limits the rest of us live...

Precisely because it’s hard to imagine God being God in the world we need lots of stories: baby-sized and all the way up to whale-sized and to keep going, no doubt, to the reaches of our language and of our imaginations.

What’s more, this Jesus will grow up and teach us a different way to live in a world like ours. And his method will not be to reassure pretty good folks like us that we pretty much see things for what they are. He will tell stories, violate norms, ask questions meant to provoke or expose our deep confusion about how God sees things. He will tell us that the ones we see as last, and least, and lost...

Your skin and your bones are so wonderful, and they are good even on the days when you and I wonder about that, and they are carrying us around this big, tumultuous world. And yet, you and I are also so much more than skin and bones. I wonder about those moments when the realization grabs us, as surely as Elizabeth grabbed Mary. When we are touched and touched; when we feel someone squeezing our h...

Maybe the God of Advent is a God who loves us too deeply to be anything but angry and hurt when we build our lives on nothing. A God who grieves when we turn from the offer of God’s selfless love and build false selves for the sake of a world that says, “Sure I’ll love you if it’s in my interest to do so. Knock yourself out proving you’re worth my attention.” Maybe Malachi rages like a jilted love...

Advent, and life for that matter, are not only about Jesus coming to us. They are also about us coming to him. Are we willing to draw near to him in faith? Are we willing to acknowledge and to accept help beyond what we can do for ourselves?

The Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, Ph. D., is dean and president of Virginia Theological Seminary.

Our real lives are intertwined with the kingdom and the saints. We don’t leave one world and enter another when we walk into or out of church or the woods or our homes or our offices or our classrooms. It’s not separate, none of it. The boundaries are not fixed – in fact, there might not be any boundaries at all. Because it’s all real. Nothing is separate. The home of God is among mortals. This is...

So maybe there’s a way of remembering, even a form of nostalgia, that is not a wishing we were back in another time and place, but the opening of a present experience of love for the world as it is, in all its beauty and brokenness. And maybe there’s a love for the things of the world, even by way of memory or nostalgia or that sacred homesickness, that can actually be, not a distraction from, but...

“Take heart. Get up. He is calling you.” Take heart. Take another look at the one standing in front of us, offering us eyesight and insight. “My teacher, let me see again.” Can you and I see where Christ might heal each of us, and can we see the way that God might lead you and me, and how beautiful the way might be if we just opened our eyes?

Like a number of buzzwords and phrases in business, the term ‘servant-leadership’ has been bandied about so much that it can seem to lose its meaning. At its heart, it is not just a business philosophy. It is a way of life. As we move forward together as families, as a congregation, as a people, how do we serve each other along the way, and learn that the service we offer each other may be the Way...

See, I really do think this is a love story. A sad one, about how hard we can make it for love, even God’s love, to get through to us.

As we see the divine gaze in the human mirror of each other, we accept the unconditional absolution and love of God and the desire to do better in offering that same love to all those around us. We need to change our ways of being and seeing, and then we need to make amends.