There’s not some magic place “out there” where the movement is happening, without us. It’s happening right here, right now, on these streets, where young men and women of color are aggressively policed every single day. And we must reckon with it. Continue reading

Rest is a spiritual practice and a justice issue. Forbes reports that “almost 1-in-4 Americans do not receive any paid vacation or paid holidays, trailing far behind most of the rest of the world’s rich nations.” Continue reading

God is light years big, but chose to compress herself until she was so very small, that she might gestate silently in the womb of a woman who no one would have cared to remember. Continue reading

It doesn’t matter if you submit or resist. If you say “yes officer, thank you officer,” or claim and name your rights as a citizen. It doesn’t matter, because if you’re a black woman in this country, a black man or trans person or a child of color, you’ve been pre-selected to pay the price for the sins of our nation. Continue reading

"I need you to talk to the people who look like you," a Black clergy colleague once told me. This year, I've heard this call, or a version of it, from Black colleagues around the country. You have to talk to your people. To your context. To your congregation. Continue reading

Our city is jumping for the chance to take sides. To make this an “us versus them.” To allow one man, who was so ill that he took his own life, to represent a movement that is calling for justice for all people. Continue reading

For centuries in this country, and today, we have arranged for black men and women to be the bearers of our collective fear, shame and guilt. Continue reading

Earlier this year, a loved and trusted colleague of mine who is black, the Rev. J. Lee Hill, Jr., posted something on facebook that changed me. He wrote, “White colleagues preaching on Sunday (YES, I AM TALKING TO YOU!): your text of cultural context this Sunday is NOT mental illness and #RobinWilliams. Your text is #Ferguson, #MikeBrown, and the over-militarization and justification of white town cops, policing black and brown communities---and it DOES go with your selected scripture texts." “Oh.” I thought. “My colleague J. Lee is talking to me. He’s really talking to me.” I sure wasn’t planning on... Continue reading

Death is awakening to the knowledge that there are things in this life that we can lose, and lose forever. Things that can never be recovered. Continue reading

Paul’s statement opens up a lot of room for people who’ve felt that the boundaries we have set up around male and female, the containers we sort people into, if you will, don’t leave enough room for them to simply be the people that God made them. Continue reading

We have seen the waters break their boundaries and bring us to our knees: us New Yorkers, who believe that we can build skyscrapers that pierce the heavens. Continue reading

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's the week of September 7. The text is Amos 5:11-24. When I was in high school, I was in the band. And one of the things our band did every year, for a reason that I’m still not entirely sure of, was to go and play at Disneyland over Spring Break. I guess there was some kind of program for this sort of thing -- Disneyland was peppered with these gazebos where various highschool groups would play, and the park visitors would gather around and listen for a little while and eat their... Continue reading

I'm trying something new here -- posting and ACTUAL RECORDING of my sermons online. Tell me how you like it okay? This is the sermon I preached the week of August 31. It's the first in a series we're doing at St. Lydia's on Justice. The text is 1 John 3:18-24, which you can read below. Here's the sermon! The Difference Between Love and Rescue Listen online or right click to download 1 John 3:18-24 This is a text written by a teacher in the Johannine community (a group of Christians who were particularly connected to the Gospel of John)... Continue reading

Why? Why the litany of names? Why the loss of so many innocents? This is why: Because we have made it so. Because we, in this country, have been like Pharaoh, afraid to share our power, afraid to loosen our hold on wealth, keeping the people in chains. Continue reading

It is not one cop. It is not one town. It is the architecture of our nation. It is the dwelling place that offers no place -- no beams or rafters or security for our children of darker hue to be at home to build a nest, to live in safety. Continue reading

One of the women I met outside on a bench said to me: “We need more people like you coming in here. People who aren’t scared to come in here.” Continue reading

This is a sketch of the sermon I preached at St. Lydia's the week of March 2. The text is the story of the woman with a hemmorage of blood, Mark 5:21-42. You can read it here. When my grandmother was a girl, no one told her what it meant to get her period. And so when she woke up one morning when she was twelve or thirteen to find blood between her legs and assumed that she was dying. Raised in a rather Victorian home, she told no one about what was happening to her body for several days,... Continue reading

This is a country where the state of Florida is trying to convince us that there’s nothing really wrong with gunning down a 17 year old child because he is black. We cannot afford to stay in our own little boxes. Continue reading

We do not know what happens between the planting of tears and a joyful harvest, only that a strange and unlikely reversal takes place. In which the dregs of what we have to offer become the only thing God needs. Continue reading

Occupy became a kind of promise. I began to see what happened there, not as a vision of how the world should be run, necessarily, but as a glimpse of a possibility of a different way. Occupy was like a hole punctured in the everyday that let a new kind of possibility stream in. Continue reading

I had forgotten how much finding the end of something feels like giving birth: pushing a new and sometimes unwanted reality into being in the midst of pain and tears and human messiness. Continue reading

Perhaps your life has been one long wilderness, a long search for home. Or perhaps you have only just being called out into territory that seems arid and barren. Perhaps you have met God in the moments when you have cried out, or perhaps you trust, like Hagar, that God will not neglect you. Perhaps you have no such trust. Perhaps you yearn for an end to this wilderness. Continue reading

The people around Hagar overlooked a sacred truth: that as one of God’s creatures, her body belongs to no one but herself. The people who lived around Hagar lived in a system that endorsed using her body as a empty container. Continue reading

Perhaps our longing draws us to the outermost limits of our desire. Calls us to explore that farthest boundary of our need and live there for a while. Continue reading