Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

"What would it take for you to give up, at least a little, the credit-taking game and step a little more fully into a deeper faith in your belovedness by God?"

"What is real life? It’s not one thing. It’s not just suffering. It’s not just joy. It’s not just fulfillment. It’s all of it, held together by love."

Especially when we can’t find it, when we insist that it is still true, that there is a balm in Gilead, we are making a bold and audacious proclamation: Proclaiming that all the while there is still beauty and kindness, that repair is just as real as destruction.

Imagine her thankfulness when she sees that there’s someone who loves her enough to sacrifice everything to go find her and bring her home.

One thing a little time away has made clear to this sinner is that I need you if the old patterns are to be broken in me. I need a community of people trying to listen to Jesus and to live by the light of his love.

What if we admitted we're all afraid? It takes real courage to do this. It's a radical move, which is why fear and not hate is the opposite of love.

“Get it straight, before the voice comes to your house and says, ‘you fool, tonight.’”

We pray in order to be, to be in the presence of God, being transformed into the likeness of Christ, and that the miracle we get from prayer is God’s presence and God’s hearing us, not a particular outcome. And though that understanding lives somewhere in my heart and in my soul and a big place in my mind, the truth is that prayer remains a mystery for me.

The kingdom of God is real. What if we choose this story? What if we tell this story to ourselves and to everyone we meet on the way, and to every house we enter, and at every meal we eat? What could it look like to live inside that story, to imagine a world where the harvest is plentiful, where we all get to be there, where the wolves and the lambs lie down together?

Real freedom will cost you your illusions. But it will give you your name, your story, your voice, your joy. Your freedom. And it will be loud, and bright, and contagious.

My prayer for us and for the church is that we will fight with all our might and with as little fear as possible any effort, message, or policy that attempts to restrict or confine the love of God. The hope of the world may depend upon it.

The challenge of believing in the Trinity is not figuring out the formula; the challenge of believing in the Trinity is living a life that reflects our beautiful understanding of God as more than we can grasp or imagine.

Pentecost doesn’t reverse the effects of Babel so much as it breaks open our imagination. Opens us to the possibility of connection and reconciliation even in a world of difference and diversity.

“About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.” I wonder what would sustain me in that dark night? What stories or poems would emerge from my internal library? And if not in a jail cell, then in the other dark watches of illness or despair, or of the trap of spiraling worry.

So, for all the hardship and need we see and experience, let’s commit to being a community that tends to its joy and its curiosity. Which means we not only learn together and pray together and serve together, but that we also eat and drink together, sing and laugh together, rejoice in all the ways we can together.

For most of our history, we Christians have been re-drawing the lines between who’s in and who’s out, between whose beliefs are correct and whose are not. For one group, fundamentalists might be the problem; for another, it’s woke liberals. For yet another, it could be terrorists or immigrants or environmentalists, rich people or poor people, or Muslims or atheists or God knows what else. Our hear...

Just as Ananias embraced Saul as family by calling him, ‘Brother Saul,’ Ruthie and I will always think of you as ‘Sister Calvary.’ We are family to each other. You will always be in my and Ruthie’s hearts. And God’s ongoing story of conversion in all our hearts will never end.

Go be a Thomas. Not Thomas, the cool skeptic of tradition. But Thomas, who knows that an incarnate relationship with complicated people is what we’re made for, not membership in a religious club we join by storing beliefs in the attic of our mind, like furniture under bedsheets no one even thinks to sit on anymore.

Let the women at the tomb be our guides back into a love that’s at work in our lives still, right now, right here. Today.

I feel a kinship with the women in this kind of moment, in which the story is still unfurling. And I am grateful and profoundly moved by their witness, their belief, with only the barest bit of news to go on.

So say the prayers, whether it feels like anyone’s listening or not. Jesus did. Say the prayers, if only to remember that you’re not the only one whose ever felt like everything that matters is unsolved in their heart. Say the prayers as a way to be still, expand your soul to hold a little more life and hurt and, maybe even to pass back into this world something a little less like violence, and a...

When Jesus stood up and wrapped a towel around himself, in essence he taught them, ‘Do not be afraid to stoop down and offer the most humble service imaginable to one another. It is no more than I have done for you.’

Ó Tuama’s interests lie in language, violence, and religion. Growing up in a place with a long history of all three (Ireland, yes, but also Europe), he finds that language might be the most redeeming. In language, there is the possibility of vulnerability, of surprise, of the creative movement towards something as yet unseen. Any artist of words inspires him: from Krista Tippett to Lucille Clifton...

Davis is the 14th president of LeMoyne-Owen College. For the past 25 years, Davis has had the honor of pastoring St. Paul Baptist Church, Holmes Road, where he has witnessed the transformative power of faith in action. Alongside his pastoral work, he served for 17 years as both a faculty member and administrator at Memphis Theological Seminary, experiences that deepened his understanding of minist...

Ó Tuama’s interests lie in language, violence, and religion. Growing up in a place with a long history of all three (Ireland, yes, but also Europe), he finds that language might be the most redeeming. In language, there is the possibility of vulnerability, of surprise, of the creative movement towards something as yet unseen. Any artist of words inspires him: from Krista Tippett to Lucille Clifton...