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Jered Weber-Johnson | Craig Lemming | Marjorie D. Grevious | Barbara Mraz | Guest Preacher | All
“What languages and cultures saturate your daily life? Who made your shoes? Who picked your coffee beans? What are the untold origins of the music you love? Racist, xenophobic, Christian Nationalism will fail. God loves diversity.”
“The sort of acknowledgment of Jesus Christ for which Monica prayed for her son speaks directly to the situation in which we find ourselves today, on this fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, and that acknowledging Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord in this particular way is something that we need, rather desperately in fact, in our world today.”
“The more we try to make exclusive distinctions between us and them, the more God makes differing bodies bridges between them and us. Holy Baptism and Holy Communion are the sacramental sites of God’s bridge-building in our very bodies.”
“In the garden that morning, Mary Magdalen, alone, eyes full of tears, thought she met the gardener, only to be surprised into joy when she recognized it was Jesus. I imagine she caught him in an embrace, that they twirled in amongst the flowers, to the songs of the early birds and the rhythms of the insects buzzing. And Jesus told her, do not hold onto me. This was a dance of abandon, a body resurrected and a whole world went free, unrestrained, unafraid, unabashedly itself as it was meant to be.”
“This Great Vigil of Easter removes Empire’s fears, erasures, and stone-cold-heartedness and replaces God’s holy, loving, and liberating spirit within our hearts of flesh. Christ’s love fills us so fully that we too come out of Empire’s tombs.”
Rejoice, Mother Church: and come together all of you that love her: sing with joy, you that have been in sorrow: that you may exult, and be filled from the breasts of God’s consolation. Amen.
Tho…
“Saint Katharine is considered blessed because she chose to look beyond what was, to bang the drum for parity and equality, to continually walk toward the need and to act on her belief that God values and loves everyone without ceasing.”
“The image of Ieshia Evans captured the imagination of so many, because of the way it juxtaposed a courageous vulnerability with a world bound in systems of death and destruction. Evans’s galvanizing witness in that moment showed us a more human way to be in the face of great suffering and evil. “
Genuine amazement might seem like a rarity these days. Cause for wonder might feel aloof and out of reach – those moments when the impossible happens, when hope is answered, beauty dazzles us, when something feels miraculous. Like you, I yearn for these things.
Stillness comes with wisdom and age. It is in the later chapters of life you may come to realize you hear more and learn more when you make space and time for quiet stillness. In that place you can hear the soft voice of the Holy Spirit and what it has to reveal to you.
I don’t know what you did to cope, but I retreated into old school love songs to survive last week. Many of us feel betrayed. Betrayed across lines of gender, race, and class. Betrayal hurts both the victims and the perpetrators. I cope with this pain of betrayal by overindulging in old school love songs.
The waters of baptism and fire of the Holy Spirit frighten us because they are the birth pangs of new life. New life in kinship with the very people we have comfortably curated our lives to ignore, to forget, and to betray. Renewing our Baptismal Covenant reminds us that baptism into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus requires us to keep our word. To keep our promises to love God and to love all our neighbors as ourselves, in thought, word, and deed.
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