Growing up, ministers would tell me that God wanted to use me. Even as an adult, I have had people tell me they believe God is using me to do God’s work. And it’s not just me. I cannot count the number of times I have heard people explain their own experiences and the experiences of others by saying that God had used them to accomplish God’s purpose. God uses ordinary people, they said. God uses your brokenness, they intoned.... Read more
Proper 12 — Year C — Luke 11:1-13 There is no war on poverty in this country. There is no war on hunger. Instead, there is a war on the poor and a war on the hungry. Politicians today are targeting and bargaining away the food on the tables of the poor in the name of fiscal responsibility. For the first time since the 1970s, there is no funding for food stamps (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) in the broad, bipartisan... Read more
For three unconventional retellings of this parable to enliven the well-worn story, visit here (the Immigrant Samaritan), here (the God Samaritan), or here (the Wrong Samaritan) Proper 10 – Year C – Luke 10:25-37 Jesus doesn’t really want you to be the good Samaritan. At least, that’s not the point of his story in this week’s Gospel. Unfortunately, when Christians hear this story, we think Jesus is asking us to be the unlikely do-gooders in the world who bind wounds... Read more
On July 29, I was ordained to the transitional diaconate in Northern California with eight other wonderful people, including two others from my sending parish, Grace Fairfield. The following day, I got to preach this sermon in the same church where I was confirmed and where both my children were baptized. It was good to be back. Proper C: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14/ 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21; Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20, Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9: 51-62 One of the greatest... Read more
Like most of my good ideas, this one happened by accident. Four days into the Lenten season, I had nothing — no fast, no practice, no structure for the 40 days — even though I had spent most of January talking up the season to my two sons. We had gone to our Ash Wednesday service and imposed ashes on each other’s foreheads. But I was in danger of losing that teachable moment about follow-through and commitment in spirituality. For... Read more
Sparkhouse’s animate:faith has one major flaw. And it’s a glaring one. It’s marketed for young adults. I was an early adopter of animate:faith. And by early adopter, I mean I signed up to be notified as soon the series became available for purchase. If memory serves, I ordered the series, if not the first day it was available, then pretty close to it. As a youth director, I sift through a lot of curriculum, and it is always a crapshoot... Read more
God is not all-powerful. At least, not in the ways we tend to define power. For us, power means that we get our way, that we can impose our will upon the world around us, that we can conform others into our images in order to achieve unity and security. In our minds, we equate power with control, sovereignty. So, when the world spins out of control as it did in Oklahoma this week, and at the Boston marathon a... Read more
The God of Pentecost doesn’t have an official language. This is the shocking revelation of the day of Pentecost, but one often lost amid the day’s more bombastic metaphors of rushing winds, descending doves and intoxicated disciples with tongues touched by fire. But in a country with a history of suppressing other languages in the name of unity and imperialism and in a nation where a xenophobic English-only movement is gaining ground with ads like this targeting immigration reform, this is... Read more
In college, I thought that by the time I was 32, I would be working at a large daily newspaper, not a month away from ordination in the Episcopal church.* As a journalism student and a greenhorn reporter in Alabama and Northern California, I assumed I would spend the majority of my adult life in a newsroom. I thought that I would take all the late-night lessons from the college newspaper office that inexplicably smelled like old cabbage and apply... Read more
Violence and tragedy has again struck. And it is hard to know what to say, what to do, particularly now that mass and social media have made us all witnesses to carnage and horror. And it is even harder to remember, in moments like these, that the kind of violence our nation has experienced only sporadically is a day-to-day lived reality in many countries throughout the world. It has hard to remember, as we say that God is weeping at our... Read more
Edges of Faith
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