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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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how human?
Maundy Thursday1 Corinthians 11:23-26John 13:1-17, 31b-35All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Austin, Tex. “How human is your Jesus?” That’s the question I ask myself from time to timeJust to see if I remember.“How human is the Son of God?”Just to make sure I haven’t lost the plot of the outlandish claim That whatever it was that set…
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planted, watered, fed
The stone is rolled away from our hearts, the embers of our love for the one who loved us first are fanned into flame, stilled hearts begin to beat, slack lungs fill with breath, adrenaline courses through every vein, and the body of Christ runs out into the world to find someone to tell. This…
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irrepressible thoughts of death day
Barbie must go on a journey of realizing that self-awareness is a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. In the end she finally chooses to stay in the Real World and lean into becoming human: self-awareness, death, and all. She leaves behind life as she thought she knew it so she can…
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“god is under the rubble”
God comes into the world and calls for war to cease. God calls for a ceasefire: unconditional, total, now, and forever. A vision of the world that does not look like Mary’s song is not the work of God, and it is not the work of Jesus.
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the king’s party
The kingdom of heaven may be compared to this, but God help us all if the comparison is favorable. It may not seem like it, but we are closer to good news now than we were. At least now the story is starting to tell the truth, about the kings of this world and the…
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expanded horizons
I do actually wonder what my life would look like today if I didn’t have Lewis’s stories rooting around in my heart as I wandered from place to place looking for God. When I think about the pivotal moments in my spiritual life, I often think about how someone or a group of someones had…
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Noah Stansbury 