Drew Downs

Make a New Normal

  • Confronting the truth about our people is hard. Especially when the truth is about the evil of empire, oppression, and persecution. But that’s no excuse to avoid or deflect–we must engage with it. Arrogance and dealing with the enduring terror of empire “Anglicans persecuted everybody.” I felt my body squirm. The hairs on the back…

  • Making Home

    Jesus’s return home in Mark reminds me of the movie musical, The Greatest Showman. God’s dream is made, not by or for the powerful, but by the misfits for all of us. And for it to work, we must all have a part to play. Jesus and “The Greatest Showman” Proper 5B  |  Mark 3:20-35…

  • We mistake extremism in belief for political extremism. The rise of authoritarianism isn’t only tied to political division or partisanship. Authoritarianism is an extremism we can find anywhere in politics. Why our fear of division blinds us to the real threat to democracy We’ve taken it as gospel that we’re divided. It seems like we…

  • The Pharisees confront Jesus because his disciples break Sabbath law. Jesus turns the story around to show how few of them are really keeping the Sabbath. We could easily say the same about us. In Breaking the Sabbath, Jesus seeks to keep it. Proper 4B  |  Mark 2:23-3:6 “One sabbath Jesus and his disciples were going…

  • Dealing with love isn’t just for weddings: it gets to the very nature of God. From the Presiding Bishop’s sermon at the royal wedding last week to the Pentecost itself, we’re finding the very nature of God isn’t out there and other, but right here among, in, the very binding of us together. What actually…

  • There is a common cry of despair in the people of Gaza that sounds so much like West Virginia coal miners and residents of Peoplestown in Atlanta, Georgia. A cry of hopelessness and existential angst we show little willingness to assuage. The global response to the Gaza protests and Israeli gunfire last week has brought…