Drew Downs

Make a New Normal

Discernment

  • a Homily for Proper 5B Text: Mark 3:20-35 Jesus is surrounded. He’s trapped. No way out. This morning’s story opens with a claustrophobic scene. This enormous crowd that has been following Jesus is getting out of hand. He has already feared getting trampled. Now they are closing He and his disciples in. They can’t go…

  • I do think that sometimes 1+1=5.  That doesn’t make me crazy.  It means that we ought to account for our own blind spots.  To help me explain, I’ve recruited my own daughter. As you can see, she has written an interesting equation on the white board.  She is so proud of it, she wrote it…

  • At a lecture in Atlanta recently, the Rev. Sam Portaro, author of Brightest and Best points out that “Children are actually written into Scripture.” They weren’t supposed to be seen.  They were property.  But Jesus spoke to them, healed them, accepted their donations, and told His disciples to be like them. We never take that last…

  • Maybe I shouldn’t, but I just did.  I changed the name of this blog.  Same address, new name. The Original Name When I first started blogging with WordPress, I began with a simple notion: that our approach as the church in planning for the future was MAD (mutually-assured destruction).  My argument (which I still believe)…

  • Conversations about energy rarely take into account the precipitating factor of our disagreement: that we long to be masters of creation. Scripture gives us an entirely different charge.

  • Saturday

    I played around with the idea of leaving a blank post.  Get it?  Absence…I decided that doing that would be perhaps a little too cryptic/existentialist. Yesterday we dealt with one of the problems of Good Friday, the day God died.  The day we remember the tragedy and triumph of Jesus’s death by crucifixion.  This happens…