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notes on the wilderness
You can watch this sermon above at 26:30. Advent 3AIsaiah 35Matthew 11:2-11All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Austin, Tex. Over the millenia, a consistent topic of inquiry in human thought has been the wilderness. What is it and what does that have to say about who we are? Is it a place of danger or a place…
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tools for fools, and other provocations
Faithful Christians, who follow Jesus to his logical conclusion, trust that violence ultimately has no real power. It is a tool for fools who don’t know any better. Death always consumes those who use it. But we proclaim Christ crucified, and lift up his cross as a reminder that we trust someone with more powerful…
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surprised by love
The language and imagery of Christian faith has always run thick with familial relationships… so when you rear children to view their parents as fundamentally people to be feared whose love needs to be earned by compliance, and then fuse this with the language of faith, that is a very potent mix indeed.
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lost causes found
It would be easier, nicer, to place ourselves in the role of the Samaritan who binds up the stranger’s wounds. Everyone wants to be the hero. But I have often observed that so much of the Christian life is lived lying flat on the road in a moment of not-knowing, in the unbearable tension of…
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revolutions of the heart
A reflection on the Book of Revelation emphasizing the importance of understanding God’s kingdom through Jesus’s sacrifice rather than violent dominion. It encourages Christians to embody love and tenderness in their interactions, promoting a revolution of the heart. The Resurrection empowers new beginnings, transformed relationships, and care for the suffering.
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what is good friday good for?
Many have concluded that Jesus doesn’t seem to have saved us from much of anything. Some of us return to the scene of the crucifixion and ask what, or who, Good Friday is good for. Saint John leaves us standing in front of a tomb with a stone nobody can move and Jesus on the…
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true story
As I was trying to make out an obscure scene from the book of Kings (or was it the Gospel of Mark?), something broke through into my awareness. The windows were still speaking, and in some mystical way, here we were to give them voice and carry them on. Like Louis, whether we meant to…
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reading other people’s mail
Throughout the Gospels, those in Jesus’ hometown are amazed at his teaching—they even recognize it as wisdom, from where they do not know—and yet Jesus is amazed to find that they are not moved to make any change. The compulsion to maintain appearances is too strong. The wisdom of the ages stands in front of…
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jesus comes out
Jesus reminds us that to follow him to go a little mad, to take the mind that the world has given us and lose it. What need do we have of a family that sneers at healing and forgiveness? In the household of God we have no family but the one in front of us,…
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what we need is here
Jesus models this way of new life in the midst of woundedness, because living in the midst of limitation and vulnerability is the only way we know how to be. We may not find what we want or what we thought we needed, but we will find what we truly and deeply need: connection, courage,…
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Noah Stansbury 