Drew Downs

Make a New Normal

discipleship

  • I fight the grass, forcing its way up through cracks in the sidewalk and driveway like an OCD sentry, defending the palace from natural invasion – grass our persistent interloper. My right thumb, the out side of the pointer, just below the tip, begin to ache, like I’ve been writing with a flat pencil. The outer…

  • Of course I love church. That goes without saying. But I don’t always love the church. I don’t always love the way we do church or the way we incarnate the church. It sometimes gets to me and drains me. Some of that is me. But a lot of it is the way we approach church as church members…

  • Do

    Jesus’s departing prayer incites a different kind of revolution Easter 7B  |  John 17:6-19   A Strange Prayer I might get into trouble for saying this, but please don’t pray like Jesus. If you take John 17 as your example and try to learn to pray like this, then, I don’t know if we can…

  • Learning in the absence of Jesus Lent 5B  |  John 12:20-33 Wishing to See “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” It is a deceptively simple moment. We’d almost overlook it. These people come to Philip looking for Jesus. Philip goes to Andrew and they both go to Jesus. “Sir, we wish to see Jesus,” they…

  • A mother-in-law’s gratitude at odds with the public spectacle. Jesus leaves town, perhaps because of his notoriety, but perhaps also because the people are more interested in him, in the wonders that he has done, in the power that he possesses. And not in what GOD is calling him to actually do. Not in what…

  • How Jesus calls us to act now to do something audacious, in spite of ourselves, precisely because GOD is audacious a Homily for Epiphany 3B  |  Text: Mark 1:14-20 Calling I love these call stories: these stories of Jesus calling the disciples to follow him. I think they’re pure gold for us. They may not be…