Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

Lent is a time to listen, to see, to sense, and to pray. It is a time to give space for the light of Christ to penetrate the fog and shine through the darkness. It is a time for us to be and share that light with each other and the world around us. It is a time for us to offer big and little gifts of revelation.

Jesus’s healings were primarily symbolic actions, meant to violate and disrupt the social order of his day. They were challenges to the structures that defined who counts as human, because the kingdom of God has a scandalously different definition of who does.

Demons are one way Christians have talked about this idea that really, the essential you, past your mental and psychological baggage, past the body and its abilities, past the mood fluctuations and mindfulness exercises, deep down past your DNA and your questionable wardrobe choices, there is a you. Of course, we’re careful to say all of those outside things matter in the growth of a soul, you are...

The hope buried in the heartbreaking story of Jonah is that it asks us whom it would hurt us to see forgiven. And it asks us to see the mercy of God extending to them, not only for their sake, but for ours. For opening yourself to the One who so fervently adores precisely these, is to apprehend just how near that fervent love has also always been to you.

There could be no Samuel without an Eli. And there could be no Eli without a Samuel. Samuel went on to live out the lessons Eli taught him. He stood up to kings, He told truth to power. And he never stopped listening to the voice of God.

On Tuesday morning, I decided to preach about hate today. Which, some would say, is not a typical topic for the Sunday of Jesus’s baptism. But, in my morning devotions, I’d been reading from Jesus and the Disinherited, a slender but remarkable book by Howard Thurman, published in 1949. And the chapter I read from Tuesday morning was titled “Hate.” You see, Howard Thurman says we can’t comprehend J...

What we need to be are more like magi if we’re to be Jesus’s Church. Spending our energy only on the act of giving our gifts away to one another, to our neighborhoods, to our cities, to the next stranger who stumbles in upon us. We’re to be a community that’s continually laying things at other people’s feet and letting them go. Tending, most essentially, not to the things or the influence or the r...

Maybe the message of the tenth day of Christmas, the New Year’s fallout, is that this pursuit of the divine contains all this, too. Jesus goes dark for twenty years after this event, growing and listening and questioning. As much as we wanted God to show up and make all things immediately right, apparently faith isn’t an on/off switch. Your salvation isn’t a formula.

This is the sign, in a Bible full of signs. Signs that are not meant to satisfy us, but to draw us into the ways God has come to us over time. And Incarnation is the sign in which we meet God down at the broken and ordinary end of things where we live.

There’s an old rabbi with the fabulous name of Ben Bag Bag who offers this advice on reading Scripture: “Turn it and turn it again, for all is in it; see through it; grow old and worn in it; do not budge from it, for there is nothing that works better than it.”

“…this Advent I invite you to spend a little less time anticipating, no matter what you’ve been told Advent is all about. I invite you to spend less time anticipating whatever it is you think will finally make you whole, whether it’s more time or more knowledge or more progress toward anything at all you don’t think you have enough of. Instead of yearning for some other life or even for a Messiah...

I’m often asked when will the Second Coming of Jesus take place, or has it already taken place, or is it constantly taking place. A more important question is: what is Jesus coming to do? Yes, he is coming to restore us and to save us. But more importantly, he is coming to recondition our hearts.

Today is the last Sunday after Pentecost, the final Sunday of our church year, we mimic the trees outside in shedding our green coverings. Since about 1925, this day has also been called Christ the King Sunday. In terms of public holiday awareness, I think this day probably ranks right up there with Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day or National Scrapple Day, these holidays that really do exist but only...

There is a deep paradox in the way of Jesus. At its heart, it is a way of grace over law, a way of unconditional love and radical acceptance. But he also tells us this way will cost us everything, beginning with our impulses toward self-preservation and our need for security above all else. The liberating, world healing, abundant life of Jesus demands making our peace with these risky lives we’ve...

Covenant inherently means there are separations and divisions that need to be knit back together. We can see this in our personal and communal journeys, especially when we try to move forward without God. We can see this in our national life, where we as the Church are called to be the voice of unity, civility, service, understanding, healing, hope, peace, and love.

The feast of All Saints, I think, is meant to go to work on the hearts of Christian people in a number of ways. One is that it’s meant to expand our bubbles by expanding the bubble our definition of the Church lives within. Another is to see the Church, and by extension, all of humanity, as a living, growing, emergent, interconnected whole, of which any one of us is a tiny, but utterly unique and...

Sometimes I hear “love” used as a panacea; e.g., just add love and it’ll be better. I think anyone who has spent any time in a family with others understands the demands and complications and sacrifices of real love. I’m always suspicious when love looks like the path of least resistance, when it’s easy on us, when it’s easy for us. Anything worth doing is difficult, and if love is the thing most...

You see, sometimes it’s not such a bad thing to be put in your place. For many of us, the orbits of our lives have gotten so much smaller over the past months. We feel so much less in control of what we can do and where we can go. Our hurts and our flaws seem to surface more quickly and stand out more starkly on the small stages of our coronavirus lives. It all takes its toll. But grace doesn’t wo...

Intercessory prayer changes us as much as it does the person or persons for whom we are praying. As we lift up each name before God, we are somehow lifted up to God as well. We carry the messiness and the murkiness of our own lives, and our hope for ourselves and others in the midst of that messiness and murkiness into the life and light of God. And God listens. And God cares. And God acts. And of...

The story of Exodus is a story about how hard it is for anyone to be set free from Pharaoh. How does one stop serving the gods of greed and accumulation and begin to trust the God who feeds everyone only enough for each day? How do you unlearn the habits of domination and subjugation, to learn the sort of independence that entails mutual, community-wide thriving? How can we begin to trust the kind...

We learn the ways of the kingdom of heaven as we practice the art of receiving and the art of letting go. So that maybe one day, to the vineyard owner’s question, “Are you envious because I am generous?” a eucharistic people will come to answer, “Yes. But we are starved for another way of being. Deliver us from our obsessions with fairness and status and anything but grace. Teach us to receive our...

Gratitude, like legacy, is not a concrete noun. At its best, it too is an active verb. It is a gift to be paid forward, especially to the young and the most vulnerable among us. But gratitude is more than action, it is a way of life.

What the way of Jesus requires of his community is not unqualified inclusion of everything, but a radical, unconditional love for every human being, especially the least and the last. And then he calls us to a way of forgiveness that extends all the way out to our enemies. These are not ways of being that humans simply fall into when given the freedom to do so. They require us to consciously build...

Poor Peter. It was only last week where he and Jesus had a real moment together. See, Jesus has been making a name for himself, and it’s not altogether a good one. Sure, people know who he is, but the room gets quiet when he walks in, the people cough and look away and some do that thing where they make a loud statement to try and make it look like they haven’t just been talking about him. People...

So, what’s this “Saved Savior” trope in the Bible all about? Have you noticed it? Maybe not the term “Saved Savior,” since I made it up yesterday. But have you noticed that a lot of the most important savior types in the Bible have to get saved themselves first?