Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

Jesus loved and sought out people on the margins. Foreigners and sinners. The unclean and the poor. Women and heretics and more. He sought them out because he wanted them to see they were beloved and blessed by God.

We often make the deep water a metaphor for going out on mission work to distant places or places we have never been. Peter and the disciples would later venture into places across Europe and Asia they never could have imagined. But I wonder if deep water could also be a metaphor for the uttermost places within our hearts, our minds, our souls.

Whether we noticed or not, Jesus was present to us today. And he will be tomorrow. Whether in the face of a neighbor who needs our compassion and our care, or whether in the Divine Love that asks us, in some moments, to set aside our striving and our doing and simply rest in its healing embrace.

Jesus came to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and to call us to believe all over again in the idea of Jubilee, even when you can’t see it, even when you’re not sure if it could happen or has ever happened.

Jesus saw nonviolence not as a passive response, but as a way of directly confronting evil in such a manner that he, and we, do not succumb to it. Instead, he, and we, show it for what it is to the world and to the perpetrators themselves. Jesus sought and still seeks to replace the way of violence with The Way of Love.

As we step into another year of life on Earth together, perhaps one resolution we could make is to take seriously what energies we let our lives be exposed to. And then commit to return, over and again, week after week, to be nourished and transformed by these living sacraments to the way, not of violence, but of love.

We’ve all got different ideas about what constitutes a disaster: everyday mishaps, personal tragedies, political nightmares, global catastrophes. But by definition, from its roots, a disaster is to be without a star. Dis-aster.

The incarnation was not a one-time event for Jesus. It is a springboard for entering relationships with us – relationships that are lasting, relationships that are timeless.

The grace of the Incarnation is not just that God’s love became incarnate in Jesus. It’s that some of it has become incarnate in you.

The Rev. Katherine Bush: The Fourth Sunday of Advent by Calvary Episcopal Church

Joy is something more profound and permanent than momentary happiness or temporary pleasure. It is bathed in the muck, mire, and tears of living a story – a shared story.

The Rev. Scott Walters: The Second Sunday of Advent by Calvary Episcopal Church

The Rev. Katherine Bush: December 1, 2024 by Calvary Episcopal Church

The Rt. Rev. Phoebe Roaf: The Last Sunday after Pentecost by Calvary Episcopal Church

There is a spark of the divine image in every life. And if that spark is to burn on and burn a little more brightly tomorrow than it does today, it simply has to find some place of welcome in this world, a place where hospitality has been extended even to it. It’s how we were made by the loving source of that spark. All of us.

The Rev. Paul McLain: All Saints Sunday by Calvary Episcopal Church

What healing in ourselves and in our world might result if we, like a son of Timaeus on the roadside one day, walked away from all the false and lesser stories and into the good and blessed cosmos of Jesus?

Can you love this little life of yours even when you can’t control it? Can you believe that you are loved even inside the whirlwind?

So, what if Christians came to be known not as those people who think they know how to fix everybody else in the world but as people who believe that we are changed as our lives are bound together with all kinds of other lives. Maybe even the lives of people who believe that faithfulness can look like hopelessness, that wealth can look like poverty, that the fullest life can look empty.

When the storms and winds bear down on us, the masks are torn off our faces. Our innermost souls are now bare to God and everyone and we become in touch with a greater reality – the reality that a good life is not about reward or punishment. It is instead about living faithfully, step by step in a murky, often unfair world.

“Perhaps the question James is pressing upon us all is, “Will you turn your attention, turn your desires and your fears and your hurts, but also your joy and your hope and your gratitude, will you practice turning ever more of yourself and your life toward the aliveness of God that lives between us? Such turnings, such prayers, such intercessions really do still have the power to heal.”

Jesus was telling the disciples and us that when we take the last place in line, we enter the world of childlike imagination. From that last and lowly position, we have the perfect vantage point to wonder about things, to have the audacity to ask penetrating questions such as – Is this even the right line to be in?

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were the ultimate expression of the truth that God does the work of redemption as a pure and unqualified gift. All that’s left for us to do is try to believe that broken and imperfect lives like ours could be included in that perfect love and then live out of the gratitude that results.

What do we believe in these days? And what do you and I not believe? This is not just a philosophical exercise, and it’s not just for mindless recitation. What we believe and don’t believe will ground us and reshape our lives.

The purpose of the Church, then … the purpose of Calvary in Memphis … is to be the kind of community in which people begin to see themselves as desired by God. A place where we see ourselves as occasions for divine joy.