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You aren’t supposed to understand the sacraments
Each Sunday I am privileged to worship and share in Holy Eucharist with a people committed to serving GOD. It is an awesome responsibility and brings feelings of great joy, humility, gratitude, and occasionally frustration every single time. We gather in word and song and prayer, lifting our bodies and our hearts and voices to…
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The Church’s Missing Ingredient
I’m tired of the blame. The health and vitality of the The Episcopal Church and the Mainline generally is an oversimplified story of the 20th Century, too easily shouldered on the leadership of the 21st. It’s always the politics or the practice or the beliefs or the Bible or the liturgy or anything else ad nauseam, but…
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I Was a Guest on Padre’s Pods!
Last week I was interviewed by a good friend of mine, Sean Maloney for his podcast, Padre’s Pods! We talked about the cult of independence in response to Joy Bennett’s piece “Independence: The False Gospel Destroying American Christianity,” critiquing the culture’s demand for independence, I shared my love for Special K through a personal story, and…
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What does Jesus communicate?
I have this feeling that we all live with a paradox about Jesus. On the one hand, we feel confident, every one of us, that we could actually answer that question What Would Jesus Do? And, at the same time, when pressed on what Jesus’s most important message is, we shuffle our feet, look at…
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My neighbor has a strange view of GOD
You can’t save yourself, but… A couple of months ago, my neighbors put out a simple yard sign with an open book and block letters across it. The sign read: I drove by it many times, each one thinking “I know which neighbor I don’t need to invite over for Christmas dinner.” Or maybe I…
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Making a church for all
My entire life, I’ve felt lesser. As if my opinion didn’t matter. In church, that is. In the world, it was a completely different story. I was a good student, Honor Society and all that. In high school, I co-chaired a youth initiative for the regional community foundation and served the state on its youth…
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Being Called Is Not Enough…to the church
A little while ago Deborah Bryan, a blogger friend who writes at The Monster in Your Closet invited contributions to a series she called “Oh, Yes I Did!” The series is an opportunity for people to tell a story of overcoming adversity, particularly when you’re told you can’t do it. You should read her own words on…
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How Pentecost reveals our Story
Preachers love the Day of Pentecost. There is so much to work with. The images are so vivid, more vivid in our imaginations than they could be in reality, I’m guessing. One of my favorite plays is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which is rightly called a “tragicomedy”. When I read it, I hear these voices, playful and…