Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

Forgiveness is needed as much by the forgiver as the forgiven. Joseph didn’t know how much he needed to forgive them, until that moment when the tears rushed out of him.

The Transfiguration, you see, is a story with all kinds of echoes and allusions, isn’t it. It looks a lot like Jesus’s baptism, with a voice from heaven announcing, “This is my Son, my Chosen. Listen to him!” And it’s got all the trappings of an Old Testament encounter with the divine. It’s not subtle. Moses himself is there, the first person to shine with glory from being in the presence of God o...

It’s telling that in Scripture, God makes creation by naming. He creates the stars and brings them into being by calling them each by name. Creation appears as an answer to God’s speech, the Word goes forth and creates, makes new, and a resounding wave of God’s own life bounces back to God, “it does not return to him empty,” as Isaiah sings. Humanity is a particular piece of this whole movement, t...

Believing such a gospel can change us. Believing such a gospel could give us the courage to be more truthful about our fears and our failures because it insists that the kingdom of God actually blossoms and rises and searches among the fearful and the failed. Believing this about ourselves might then make room in our hearts for the failures of our neighbors. And if we were really to let this nonse...

Through our adoption as God’s children - God’s heirs, grace is no longer a simple formula for our salvation. Instead, grace opens up an entire tapestry of a rich, often messy, ongoing journey in relationship, marked by growth, learning, forgiveness, service, and love.

There is an element of acceptance and an element of disruption in the life of faith. Both are essential. We need people in our lives who tend more toward one than the other. We need firstborns and we need tricksters. Maybe what we need to accept first is that there’s some of each of them in each of us. And maybe if we can learn to befriend the Jacob and the Esau in ourselves our lives will grow to...

This conversation between the Rev. Scott Walters and Dr. Scott Morris is the latest in our podcast series with Lenten Preaching Series speakers and other faith leaders, authors, and creative thinkers around the world. Dr. Scott Morris describes himself as “a one-note guy” who focuses on the link between faith and health. He believes that to follow Jesus, Christians must have a healing ministry. Th...

Sitting in the car the other day, Missy and I were chatting about the takedown of monuments and the difficulties of honoring figures in the past. I could probably find a more incendiary way to start a sermon if I tried, but actually, my point is that I veered off on a long tangent about how well Jesus has aged. Considering the vast differences in societal views between then and now, concerning wom...

Ever since I built my first blanket shelter, I liked the idea that I got to decide who to let in. And the notion that by providing for myself and my family I’m being a decent and responsible citizen goes deep. I knew the rules well enough to play at this kind of responsibility by the time I was five. But what Jesus seems to be saying is that this is the perspective my mind has to be trained out of...

Both the wilderness path and settlement path are blessed. But it often appears God may favor the uncharted path in the wilderness, the uncertain path where we must rely on God for everything.

Looking for ways to create positive change in the world even during a pandemic? Look no further than this interview between Heidi Rupke and the Rev. Fletcher Harper, the latest in our series of Lenten Preaching Series podcasts highlighting the work of faith leaders, authors and creative thinkers. The Rev. Fletcher Harper is an Episcopal priest and the executive director of GreenFaith, an organizat...

"There is a problem in us when we remove the trauma from our founding stories. There is a problem in us when we tell sanitized, cherry tree versions of our history or when we deny that we are the heirs in the deepest of ways of very flawed and sinful people. And the problem is that we can’t deal with the trauma in our lives today when we pretend its roots are only in the day before yesterday."

I have taught the Bible to Episcopalians now for many years, even as I remain the Bible’s student, learning from a text that I can only describe as alive — alive with the spirit of God, which has the power to lodge in our souls and transform them.

Maybe understanding people who should be incomprehensible to us will still be the sign that we’re beginning to live less according to the flesh… Less as individuals who understand themselves over and against their rivals and more as a people who live by a spirit that truly wants communion among all of God’s children. A Pentecostal people who won’t be satisfied any longer with a life that is anythi...

This conversation between the Rev. Paul McLain and David Waters is the latest in our podcast series with Lenten Preaching Series speakers and other faith leaders, authors, and creative thinkers around the world. David Waters is assistant director of the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis and columnist for the Daily Memphian. He was previously faith and education re...

Jesus in flight sees the cosmos as a whole. He sees beyond the imaginary boundaries of earthly kingdoms and imagines a world of boundless beauty and possibilities.

I’m interested in the Areopagus and in Paul’s clever imitation of Socrates in his argument. I like that he approached the Athenians rhetorically through an alley door they’d left ajar in their religious system, using their altar to an unknown god to lure them into the big T Truth. But honestly, right about now, I have a lot less need for what’s clever in my life than I do for what is real. And I t...

This conversation between Scott Walters and Molly McCully Brown is the latest in our podcast series with Lenten Preaching Series speakers and other faith leaders, authors, and creative thinkers around the world. Molly McCully Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded which was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017, and the for...

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sophie Pauti and I am a senior at Memphis Central High School. Thursday, March 12th was the day we found out that spring break was going to be a week longer. I took this as a blessing from God himself because I had been telling my mom “I’m tired of school, I am ready to walk across that stage and get that diploma today!!” Little did I know that March...

I don’t know about you, but when things are bad, my motto is that misery loves company. When everything fell apart with the coronavirus, in the absence of living miserable human company, right off the bat I read Daniel Defoe’s journal of the plague year from the 1600s. When we moved into isolation to save ourselves, the severe and bizarre desert fathers, the earliest Christian monastic movement, w...

This conversation between Heidi Rupke and Kaitlin Curtice is the latest in our podcast series with Lenten Preaching Series speakers and other faith leaders, authors, and creative thinkers around the world. An enrolled member of the Potawatomi Citizen Band and also a practicing Christian, Kaitlin Curtice writes on the intersection of Indigenous spirituality, Christian faith in everyday life, and th...

On Good Friday we lingered for a bit in the silence of Jesus when Pilate asks, “What is truth?” He wouldn’t… or at least he didn’t give an answer. What I put forth in that sermon was that we humans tend to mistake explanations for the truth sometimes. Or maybe it’s better said that we too often think the truth can be reduced to an explanation.

Salvation is a present reality as well as a future hope. First Peter more aptly describes these two dimensions as one by calling them a “living hope.” When Jairus said to Jesus, “Come and save my daughter,” Jesus didn’t say, “I’ll take care of that in the after-life.” Instead, Jesus went to the bedside and saved his daughter. And he saved someone else along the way.

This conversation between the Rev. Paul McLain and Jemar Tisby is among the first in our podcast series with Lenten Preaching Series speakers and other faith leaders, authors, and creative thinkers around the world. Jemar Tisby is the author of The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church's Complicity in Racism. Jemar is a graduate of Notre Dame and Reformed Theological Seminary an...

Have you ever come to the Easter story with a sense that we can take out whatever seems unhelpful, unbelievable, incomprehensible, or strange? And then enrich it with the meanings we think we need? I almost certainly will again before I finish this sermon. All I know to do is to come clean and ask you to agree with me that what we hope to do this Easter morning is to take our lives as they actuall...