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May 11 - June 2, 2021
the Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It’s about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life,
If feminist scholar Mary Daly was right, that “If God is male, then male is God,”
Unitarians just don’t talk much about our need for God’s grace. They have a higher opinion of human beings than I have ever felt comfortable claiming, as someone who both reads the paper and knows the condition of my own heart.
That’s what we call ‘liturgy.’ People have been doing those things and saying those things for a couple millennia, and I’m pretty sure… next week, too.”
My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word.
“you have a limited amount of time and emotional energy in your life, and you are squandering tons of it on this one situation just so you can maintain the idea you like to have of yourself as being a loyal friend.”
(The late writer David Foster Wallace was right: The truth will set you free… but not before it’s done with you.)
Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, he contrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times I’ve substituted being good (or appearing to be good) for truth.
The truth does crush us, but the instant it crushes us, it somehow puts us back together into something honest. It’s death and resurrection every time it happens.
“Fear not, brothers and sisters, God, who is full of grace and abounding in steadfast love, meets us in our sin and transforms us for God’s glory and the healing of God’s world. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, your sins are forgiven, be now at peace.”
Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.
There simply is no knowable answer to the question of why there is suffering. But there is meaning. And for me that meaning ended up being related to Jesus—Emmanuel—which means “God with us.” We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.
Dear God, I just hate everyone right now. If you don’t remove this anger and resentment I’ll never get through this liturgy. Please, please, please, I beg you. Please. Help me.
I mean, let’s face it, “nothing” is God’s favorite material to work with.
I realized that sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is talk honestly about being wrong.
God, please help me not be an asshole, is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life.
And with an openness that felt like spiritual waterboarding (Jesus holding my head under the waters of my own baptism until I cry uncle), I had a long conversation with my enemy.
I’m asked to find God in suffering. And every time I go looking for God amidst sorrow, I always find Jesus at the cross. In death and resurrection.
This is our God. Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps. A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross. Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering. This is a God who bears suffering. I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering; God transforms it.
if God’s first move is to give us our identity, then the devil’s first move is to throw that identity into question. Identity is like the tip of a spool of thread, which when pulled, can unwind the whole thing.
when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn’t free us at all. It just keeps us chained. What if forgiveness, rather than being a pansy way of saying it’s OK, is actually a way of wielding bolt cutters and snapping the chain that links us?
think it’s the only way we know how to be vulnerable; to do it sideways.
God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new.
“It happens to all of us,” I concluded that Easter Sunday morning. “God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.”
“Lack of connections is death,”
How we feel about Jesus or how close we feel to God is meaningless next to how God acts upon us.
When one of the main messages of the church is that Jesus bids you come and die (die to self, die to your old ideas, die to self-reliance), people don’t tend to line the block for that shit.
Churches that try to live into the beauty of radical hospitality and the destabilizing idea that Jesus is experienced in welcoming strangers don’t tend to be described as “sprawling.”
“Everyone is fed. It’s doesn’t matter if you are a homeless guy who is scamming and doesn’t even care about Occupy or a lawyer on a lunch break.” He pauses. “The only place I’ve ever really seen that is at communion.”
The greatest spiritual practice is just showing up. And Mary Magdalene is the patron saint of just showing up. Showing up, to me, means being present to what is real, what is actually happening. Mary Magdalene didn’t necessarily know what to say or what to do or even what to think when she encountered the risen Jesus. But none of that was nearly as important as the fact that she was present and attentive to him.
