God’s persistent, gentle love will save the world.

3 Reminders for Leaders in Hard Times

The Ten Commandments contrast Pharaoh’s economics of oppression with God’s economics of liberating, neighborly love. They are a manifesto for a new community of resistance against the ever present evils of empire, which seeks to own, exploit, and possess.

I’ve started a Substack to share my weekly meesages to the diocese and clergy, as well as occasional meditations and sermons. Here’s this week’s message about Absom Jones, and forming communities of witness and resistance.

Everything has a way of coming back around. What seems unstoppable and inevitable never is.

—Jimmy Carter

Only four more “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending” days until Christmas. Let us not squander them.

Christ the King Sunday

As we find ourselves in a moment when Christian Nationalism—that abomination that equates the dominance of a racially narrow understanding of America with the kingdom of God—is again ascendant, this feast is as important as it has ever been.

The apocalyptic key that ends one church year and begins another reminds us that in a world that is falling apart, full of reasons to fear, God’s reign of love looks like disruption. The hope of new life emerges as the stones in which we previously trusted fall away.

That we are commanded to love our enemies is not a strategy to guarantee that all enmity can be overcome, it a reminder that for Christians our lives must be determined by our loves, not our hates.
—Stanley Hauwerwas
A Better Hope

“It is a terrible misunderstanding of the Gospel to think that it offers us salvation while relieving us of responsibility for the life of the world, for the sin and sorrow and pain with which our human life and that of our fellow men and women are so deeply interwoven.”

—Leslie Newbingen