Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

Silence. There may be as many forms of it as there are words in a language. And I’m beginning to wonder whether all sorts of silences, not just the reverent and prayerful ones, are worth paying attention to when we come across them in scripture.

In many ways, the cross is a symbol for Ubuntu. The four points of the cross can be seen as arrows pointing outward to embrace and connect Jesus and all humanity in all directions, south, north, east, and west. The four points can also be seen with arrows pointing inward to acknowledge that we each bring unique gifts to Jesus and to each other, and that we are somehow more because of each gift, an...

So James looked around. And he saw fellow Christians, who said that they believed in the radical leveling of humanity in the way of Jesus, where there was supposedly no longer Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. And yet here were Jesus’s people arranging themselves according to the same old criteria the world had always used. He could tell by their seating charts and the deference they...

The Song of Songs and Reverend Al teach us that there is an intersubjectivity to our lives and that we are all in this together. The Song of Songs reminds us that God longs to relish that kind of connection with us, and yearns for us to relish it with each other. And God longs to end our anxieties, to fill us with hope, and to inspire us to be that hope.

When Jesus tells the people after the feeding that he is the bread of life, he is not giving a lesson in eucharistic theology. And when he says “believe in me,” he is not establishing membership requirements for becoming a Christian. He is inviting them into a deeper, more mature life, a life of intimate connection to one he calls Father, the source of all life.

It’s astonishing that stories written down more than 25 centuries ago, stories about two humans and a tree in a garden or a king who realizes he’ll need wisdom to rule well … it’s amazing that these stories speak so clearly and directly to life in a nuclear age of quarks and quantum computing and all the rest. What they ask is, “Do you have the wisdom, the moral discernment, to be entrusted with t...

I don’t suppose you could argue successfully that Memphis is on any kind of mountaintop, but it is on a bluff above a mighty river; and that is not nothing. What I not only believe but know is that there have been many transfigured moments within the life of this community—moments when light has shown brighter than any darkness around. I believe that pairing our founding with this sacred story fro...

The brilliance of the story is that we’re all Davids. It’s so easy to see what’s wrong in someone else. Nathan shows David to himself only by making him think he’s looking at someone else. Someone at whom all of David’s righteous indignation and moral superiority is aroused to set things right. And then, what may be the most unbelievable thing in David’s whole unbelievable saga happens. Nathan’s f...

Jesus is teaching his disciples, the 5,000 gathered, and us that in this new kingdom he is bringing about, nothing is lost. Nothing is wasted. And he is not just talking about food. He is talking about people. All our lives have significance and purpose. And just as he gave instructions to gather every last crumb, Jesus will not abandon any of us.

It might seem like what would open us best to surprise would need to be strange and unfamiliar, but it doesn’t. Our worship tradition, our hymns and organ pipes and tower bells, our chalices and vestments and wobbly brass crosses are more like idols if they only settle us reassuringly into the stability of the past. They’re meant to be objects carried through the wilderness of so many centuries to...

Whatever yearning that John the Baptist’s presence and words had stirred up inside Herod Antipas was being denied oxygen before it really had a chance to breathe, through Herod's own evil order. His false integrity of being true to a misguided oath severed his hope for real integrity in the possibility of developing an inner spiritual anchor through further conversations with John.

Christian theologians today, like Kathryn Tanner, are asking Christians to look again at how the societies and economies we live in now form us and even ask us to understand Jesus’s teaching on their terms, rather than the other way around. Which means that you and I, if we’re to be faithful to Jesus, must struggle to ground our deepest identity in his way, his truth, his life. Even as we acknowle...

In today’s Gospel, we meet two people who hope for something more. One woman hopes that just by reaching out and touching Jesus she will be healed. One man, with a daughter close to death, hopes Jesus can just get to her in time. Two very different people, one very same hope brings them through the crowd.

I want a faith and a language about faith that delivers me more fully to the world I’m alive in and matters to the life I’m actually living in that world. Don’t you? If I hear a phrase like “Jesus saves,” which I very much believe, I don’t want it to register like a number on the Richter scale. I want to be thinking about being saved from forces that might stop a pendulum clock, cause walls to cre...

Mark seems to be telling us that there is not a point that can be extracted from the stories. The point, or the power of Jesus’s message is only experienced from within the stories. Maybe because, as Flannery O’Connor put it, “A story really isn’t any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase.” The gospel, according to Mark, can’t be paraphrased. It must be entered. Trusted. Experienced. That...

What would it mean for us to be icons – at work, at home, and around this city with everyone we encounter? What would it mean to look at each situation we face, even our biggest problem or our deepest hurt, as an opportunity to be raised up to the eternal presence of God, and to invite others to be raised up alongside us? What would it mean to write your whole life as a prayer?

Our names for God, our concepts of God, our doctrines of God are not God. They are tools. Tools whose sole purpose is to bring us near to God.

The space between the logs. I think that is where we find the Holy Spirit. It is in the deep breaths between actions. It is in the silences between words and music. It is in the rocks turned into snowflakes.

But if Judas was actually a good guy who was just misunderstood, the story of our redemption loses something else. It no longer includes the kind of betrayal that really happens in this world. And in some ways, such a betrayal really can be a culmination of all sorts of forces that break our lives and our world apart. There are questions of power and money and violence and loyalty and so much more...

In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives the disciples his commandment, “that you love one another as I have loved you.” After eight years here, I hear Calvary’s commandment: that I go out into the world and love as I have been loved here. At the end of the day, love is grace. Endless, undeserved, unexplainable grace for ourselves and others, for our quirks and mistakes. Grace.

But what I do trust is that we were brought together by the Holy Spirit, whose reconciling work in the world happens through our hopeful and failing selves. The church is one of those rare places in the world where we voluntarily enter a room with people we just don’t get. You sit down by strangers and hear that those who do not love do not know God, and sometimes you you feel deeply the implicati...

Throughout this past year and in the time going forward, it means everything to know that the Lord is with us, and that his rod and staff comfort us. We are called to share this comfort with one another, to help each other find and go down the right paths, to wipe away one another’s tears.

So, what if Easter is about letting go of some of our concrete expectations and understandings, and learning to see deeper connections and patterns and meanings, the timeless way, a quality without a name in our faith beneath its familiar forms?

Jesus teaches his disciples and us that the Good News isn’t good if it stays in a locked room. Are we ready to go out and share and be the Good News? Are we ready to be apostles?

But if we begin with terror and amazement we’ve known, we can enter the redemption story from right here. Because there never was a more holy age than ours. Our strange pandemic age included.