Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

What’s saving your life right now? Perhaps some of the very same things that saved Moses and his generation: an apprehension of God, the invisible kindness of others, the strength of character your mother taught you.

In the end, faith looks like a kind of clear attention. A truthful way of seeing the world as it is or the person in front of us for who they are really can change everything, beginning with ourselves.

It’s scary in the boat and outside the boat. It’s unnerving just skirting the coastline sometimes. And it’s wild with foam and glitter. As we make our way through this known and strange world, buffeting winds will come at us sideways and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

“If we, like the people on the mountain that day, make a space where our beautiful, flawed, complicated history can actually be what asks us not to rush to act until we have listened to Jesus with curiosity and wonder, transfigurations are still possible.”

It’s fun to play with the idea of Jesus as an undercover astrophysicist, hinting two millennia ago at the broad reaches of God’s imagination.

God blesses Jacob because God is love, not fear. And love — perfect, unconditional, redeeming love — is the most powerful form of encouragement of them all.

Our life is indeed a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, so don’t bother trying to make sense of it. If you find a penny, pick it up. If you have some love, give it. And leave the end of your story in God’s good hands.

There’s a road sign that says, rest here. Take this exit ramp and leave the grind and churn, the struggle to keep up, to push ever onwards. Lean up against a burden stone to feel the release of your burden.

We keep reading the Bible to witness encounters that hit us hard, remind us we don’t know everything, and also tell us again and again that even when we feel banished, far from human presence, we are never alone.

I truly believe coming to know our true selves, our given and forgiven selves, not the ones we’ve struggled to construct and earn and prove, is the newness of life Paul wants us to walk in.

“Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” It’s a good question.

Mercy is always a gift, and it is always about the restoration of community, whether that’s a community of two or twenty or ten million.

There is a kinship at the very heart of the world, at the very beginning of the story, yoking us together for better or for worse.

Instead of grasping vertically toward the heavens, the people reach out horizontally by listening and talking to each other. Much like a jazz group, they play off each other. They build note by note, riff by riff, toward the ultimate reunion of all humanity with one another and with God.

When Jesus found fearful people huddled in locked upper rooms or on hillsides staring at the sky, he sent them right back down into the city. Right back into the liturgy of life in this world that he so loves. The incarnate liturgy in which his holy and life-giving Spirit is still to be found.

Jesus concludes his promises and reassurances by telling them that he will love them and will reveal himself to them. The love that he gives is not temporary, nor is it transactional.

Learning to let go and trust God with the details of the future can be a way of opening our eyes and our trust to the presence of God in the moment at hand. It truly can be a way, a truth, and a life for us right now. And this way is not just any way. It is the way of Jesus. The way of love. Maybe trust is just the space we need to meet this world with the kind of love Jesus taught and lived to th...

“Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.” When was the last time awe came upon you?

Baptism is the shaper of our identity as beloved children of God. God shapes us in a form that can be reshaped over time to meet the opportunities and challenges we encounter at different stages of our journey. God is constantly reshaping us, much like the ways Linus reshapes his blanket.

High school seniors Bruce Marshall, Jack Jordan, Dahlia Townley-Bakewell, and Sam Shiberou offer today’s sermon.

Christ is risen, my friends! Christ is risen! The only work that’s left for us to do is walk away from the stories of the empire, and commit together to being the people of Abel’s God, the community of Jesus, and to giving our fears over to his resurrection to be raised as joy.

We imagine the edge or the end guarded by dragons, but those are angels telling us to look around and see that this is not the end, and so this is not where we have to stay. In some ways, this invitation is just as fearsome as a mythical sea monster, it requires some boldness and at least a little bit of faith to say yes when the world says no.

Good Friday is a day of revolution. It is a revolution in which Jesus dies at the hands of oppression, then rises to new life to bring heaven to earth, not only in an afterlife but in the here and now. And Jesus invites us to join him as full, active participants in his saving work of bringing peace, justice, and hope.

Perhaps a challenge at the heart of the Maundy Thursday story to all of us is whether we might be humbler about the sources of evil and clearer about the commandment to love in all our relationships and dealings in this world.

Any week in the news could be Holy Week. Any week in the news we are just as likely to see the dastardly worst of ourselves on display in the larger machinations of our politics and in the crush of public and private cruelties. We must learn to look directly at these things, not to look away, and to find even there in the hurt and meanness, God present in the scrum.