Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

Dr. Catherine Meeks is a storyteller with a purpose. Born in 1946 in segregated Arkansas, Meeks has spent a lifetime working on issues of racial healing and the promotion of life. The daughter of a sharecropper and a teacher, she grew up hearing her father talk about a 12-year-old brother who died from a burst appendix before she was born—refused service at a white hospital. “I grew up in that kin...

The Rev. John Pitzer is a native of Texas and currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he serves at Trinity Episcopal Church as associate rector of outreach/mission and pastoral care. For twenty years, Pitzer was a friar with the Order of Preachers, commonly known as the Dominicans. He served at St. Peter's Catholic Church in Memphis which has been a neighbor to Calvary for over a century....

Once we are reconciled to God, we become part of God’s ministry of reconciliation. The best way we can continually fill the hole in the heart of God and the holes in our own hearts is to reconcile with one another. Not just when it’s easy, but most especially when it’s hard, even when it seems impossible.

Maybe love is the source of all true and enduring forms of justice because love cares so deeply for what is good in its beloved that it can’t look away when that goodness is denied or destroyed.

Jesus removed whatever demon this unclean spirit was. He did so through the authority of his speech, his language. But he removed a perhaps larger demon at the same time. He removed the stigma this man felt. It was as if Jesus erased the scarlet U for the unclean spirit this man felt on his forehead.

God’s desire for Nineveh was not that people settle up some debt for their sins. It was only that they turn from their destructive ways of being in the world and come more fully alive.

Maybe Christ is inviting you and me to let our uncertainty not be a shield but to have enough humility and hope to come and see that the world is filled with the glory of God.

Don’t you think that turning our loneliness into the abundant life we were created for might be why Jesus risked stepping into that line of complicated humans at the Jordan River to strike up a friendship that has now extended even to us?

I wonder if grace could be better described as the warm waters of birth that nurture us in the womb, that bathe us in unconditional love, and then launch us into new light and life, no matter what our age.

You and I and every child who’s ever been filled with anticipation for what delight might await them in the morning have known a form of unconditional love. Jesus would just expand radically what and whom in this world we might come to love in just that unabashed way, as we come to trust that God loved each one of us in just that unabashed way first.

There was a teller sent from God, whose name was John, whose name was Gwendolyn, whose name has been forgotten, whose name is known only to us. They came as tellers to tell about the light, about the love, about the times like this, so that all might believe that love is true and triumphs; and God’s actual, so that all might believe that among us we’ll find God already and always.

The Rt. Rev. Phoebe Roaf: The Second Sunday of Advent by Calvary Episcopal Church

Psalm 100 invites us into a spirit of intimacy. It reminds us that we are made by God, we belong to God, and we are the sheep of God’s pasture. We are entrusted to the intimate, loving care of our shepherd – a shepherd willing to leave the 99 to come find and care for any one of us who is lost. Ultimately, the Psalm reminds us that God is good.

When we begin with the conviction that God is the one who calls to us in the garden, or the good shepherd who takes off after us when we stray, and if we believe the kingdom of God is a realm of gift and grace, not scarcity and fear, we might pause before assigning every characteristic of the master in the parable to God. And in that pause we may notice that fear of the master is what caused the m...

What this passage is really about is hope – the hope of the unity of the living with the dead in Christ. The image of being caught up in the clouds with Jesus, reunited with those we love can be a beautiful one, whether it’s real or metaphorical. It invites us to wonder: are there ways we can be caught up in the clouds while still here on earth?

If we truly let our hearts and minds absorb how Jesus says blessedness can actually manifest in a life, well maybe we’d be present enough to our neighbor to help lift her poor spirit and satisfy her hunger and thirst in deeper ways than the ones that just reinforce our own virtuousness. Maybe we’d also receive the next unfolding moment of our lives for the unmerited gift that it is.

Love is the simple and even obvious answer, but we also know it’s not the easy answer. That’s why we keep looking around at the burning world and wondering, what are we really supposed to do about all this?

I think Jesus still calls us to drop the illusion that the things that matter most in this life are scarce and that our true worth is not a gift and a given but something that each of us must earn for ourselves. These are the illusions the empire of money depends on. Jesus calls us away from that realm because it’s a realm that’s just too small for the abundant life the human heart was created for...

In feeling their shared pain and struggle, Euodia and Syntyche are invited to feel a gentleness toward one another. When we feel a gentle spirit toward someone else, especially someone from whom we’ve been estranged, we give space for two vulnerable hearts to beat in rhythm with each other. These are the moments when Jesus is most near to us. These are the moments that lead to joy.

The question Jesus keeps pressing upon me and upon all of us is What does it look like for us, here and now, to set aside our confident, violent visions of what we think would set things straight and ask what love requires? Ask perhaps what these strangers to us might actually need in their lives to make them a little more whole.

Because even an easy question like “Which child did the will of his father” leads to another more difficult question: which child are you? Which child am I? Our willingness to let these ancient stories nudge at us, poke at us, and even interrogate us is what faithful engagement is all about.

The wisdom of God calls to us still, saying our economies don’t have to be built on the stingy ideas of our small minds.

“But here’s the question the parable poses to us. What do you need to forget? And what do you need to remember? Do you ever find yourself remembering and ruminating on some hurt you know you need to be set free from somehow and forgetting the many gifts and graces that have arrived in your life since the first breath you drew this morning? I sure do.”

One of the questions that kept coming to me during the sabbatical was: ‘Saved for what?’ That’s still an open question for me, and perhaps it is for all of us. But that ride with Cloudy and Hadrian and my coffee with Phil propelled me closer to an answer, or at least gave me a new beginning toward slowing down and taking the time just to live that question.

If we let ourselves be drawn toward the mystery of the God who has no adequate name, we might also let ourselves be drawn toward the mystery of each other. Because your name is inadequate to who you are in the depths of yourself as well, as is the name of the person you think you know best in this world and the name of your oldest and archest enemy.