Category Archive

So some of us gathered on Monday for a tour of the Southwood United Methodist Church to see if we might be interested in moving in there and becoming a cooperative parish or sharing space in some other way. (Southwood is a gay-friendly (indeed mostly gay) small congregation in Oak Cliff that hosts a community garden and is looking for ways to share their facility with other like-minded folks so we were invited to check it out.)

The words ‘possible brain tumor’ are powerful enough to startle any one of us back to a space of noting the wind on our cheek and giving thanks for caring relationships. Bill was so appreciative of all of the prayers over the past two days and kept calling us ‘God’s angels on earth.’

The more time I spend in and with this community, the deeper I sense the connections that are here. The power of long-term friendships and the ways that unfolding, tender new ones can give profound encouragement and hope. The mystery of relating to people, with all their particular bumps and bruises, yet somehow also participating in the body of Christ. Bill offers us all a simple reminder which echoes the scripture passage of the week: to love one another fiercely is our work.

My cousin Chuck passed away on Friday and I’m headed to his memorial service tomorrow so the blog post comes early this week. I’ve been remembering Chuck in little passing moments since I heard the news. Chuck enjoyed his life and his enjoyment rubbed off on other people. A big man, he would don a silly hat with a pig snout on it, a family tradition, and preside over the auction/fundraiser at our annual reunion with a grin and booming voice. He proudly held up and sold off handmade quilts, quarts of pear preserves, and other goodies contributed mostly by the old-timers and bought by the younger generations

So earlier this week I was going to a familiar dark room, perhaps similar to the one the disciples inhabited when Jesus made his first and second appearances and they were there with the door locked in fear. In my familiar dark room I look around at my life and say, am I doing enough? I know that we are …

“Jesus breathed on them” (v22). This verse has me wondering…what did the Risen One’s breath smell like?

Did it smell of springtime and fragrant buds? Or was it otherworldly, some new scent they had never before encountered? Did his breath still carry a trace of the rich spices with which he was anointed for his burial? The gall of the cross? Or was there still something of the tomb which clung to him now, even as he stood before them so wonderfully alive?*

Welcome to Eastertide. Thankfully we have fifty days starting with Easter Sunday to rest in (or wrestle with) the mystery of the Resurrection.

DART Stations of the Cross is a community art project which links an ancient spiritual practice with mass transit. It is presented on Good Friday by two emergent churches in the Dallas area, Church in the Cliff and Journey. Participants are encouraged to arrive at the Mockingbird DART station between 6 and 7 pm this Friday, April 2nd and to …

Those of us hungry for Truth cannot merely wave palm branches and lay down cloaks this Sunday without considering our own shadow sides: the fear and anxiety and seeds of doubt that block our path toward fuller living. And the invitation, reverberating through Jesus’ life and the prophets before him, to cultivate practices that transform our fear and our pain so we do not continue to transmit them.

The soul is a wild animal.

Today’s Isaiah passage reminds me that God provides the nourishment for us all, even the wild ones. God gives water in the wilderness, makes rivers to flow through the desert. And out of this water comes life.

So our job is not to spoon feed each other so much as to honor the wildness in our peers and to trust that the Spirit is somehow providing for them, providing for us all. How to honor each other’s wild bits?

I’m tired of Lent.   The worship team hatched this clever idea of trying to ‘destabilize’ our regular worship pattern during Lent as a way of asking how much is Enough? How much can we strip away and still have a Holy encounter? What if we mess up the chairs and make it all chaotic and/or force people to set …

The Isaiah passage for this week raises some interesting questions that disrupt a simplistic take on Lent as merely the season “to give up” or even to “take one” new practices. Isaiah probes deeper – asking his minority community in exile: “What are you really hungry for?” “What do your feed yourselves with?” And perhaps most interestingly for our contemporary context “What do you spend your money on which doesn’t actually nourish you?” Calling out with the cadence of a merchant at a busy market, Isaiah invites his listeners to come, even with no money in our pockets, and to fill arms and baskets with Yahweh’s good food and drink.