Noah Stansbury


Jesus makes choices in this story, that’s true. But the moral of the story is less about what he does than about who he is and his ability to stay grounded in that relationship in a way that we struggle to. The moral of the story is not, “Do what Jesus did, just try harder.”…

Every year we walk this way into the season of Lent and every year it bears repeating that Ash Wednesday is not the grand kickoff of a 40-day self-improvement challenge. Ash Wednesday is about taking responsibility for our share of what went wrong, so God can draw near to us and empower us for the…

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…

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…

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. 

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…