Between Bread and Stone

My pilgrimage took me to St. Thomas the Apostle in Hollywood for National Coming Out Day. Getting there involved a mutinous windshield, a mysterious freeway stoppage, and three attempts at parking.

Inside, I found one of the most magnificent High Masses I have ever attended, a remarkable history of ministry during the AIDS epidemic, and an organ that carries the memory of those who died.

Then came coffee hour.

Standing alone beside the corner of a stage, holding a cup of coffee, I found myself remembering what it was like to stand alone in the gay bars of Hillcrest and West Hollywood. The experience raised some uncomfortable questions about hospitality, belonging, and the Gospel of the wedding banquet.

This week’s letter to Father Luis follows those questions through Hollywood and back over the mountains, where I discovered that I was homesick for a place where people know my name.

You are welcome here.

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Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

On National Coming Out Day, Matthew’s Gospel gives us a troubling wedding banquet. The invitation eventually extends to everyone on the streets, yet one guest is bound and expelled for arriving without the proper clothing. I have some questions about that king.

This week on Between Bread and Stone, I examine the parable alongside Christianity’s history of religious coercion, a painful chapter in my own diocese, and the extraordinary story of Matthew Shepard, a young Episcopalian whose ashes finally found a resting place at Washington National Cathedral twenty years after his murder.

Along the way, I find myself imagining a robe hanging on a hook beside the banquet entrance.

It isn’t in the Gospel. But I’ve been wondering what might have happened if it had been.

You are welcome here.

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Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

I went to Taft looking for St. Andrew’s.

The doors were locked on a Sunday morning.

By lunchtime, a woman at a diner counter had given me sixty-one years of the town’s history instead.

Episode 79 follows a quieter kind of pilgrimage: through fading adobe, oilfield signs, old paintings, racial memory, grief, work, and the places where community survives after institutions become harder to find.

This week, the question of refugium moved outside the church walls.

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Francis most of us inherited is harmless: a garden statue, a bird on his shoulder, and pets lined up for a blessing.

The man himself was considerably more dangerous to imperial Christianity.

Francis renounced property, refused the logic of possession, called creation his kin, and told his brothers to live as strangers and pilgrims. Within years of his death, the Church began setting those instructions aside. Centuries later, men wearing his habit came to California, built missions on Indigenous land, confined the people they baptized, and placed Francis’s own name over the door.

This episode asks what happens when we reclaim the saint from the institution that inverted him.

For Californians, that question is not academic. His name is still on our cities, missions, schools, roads, and monuments. The history underneath those names is still present too.

We follow Francis back past the garden statue, past Serra, and past the imperial version of Christianity that used his habit while abandoning his instructions. What emerges is a Francis much harder to possess, and perhaps much more useful for the work that remains.

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

This week, my pilgrimage through the Diocese of San Joaquin took me to St. Michael’s in Ridgecrest, where a congregation once displaced from its church, a deacon’s work at California City, and a wall of artwork made by detained children began to converge around the same question: what remains when home is no longer within reach?

Episode 77 follows that question from All Souls to Tornillo, from a child’s painted landscape to the Holy House at Walsingham, and finally back to a word given to me before this pilgrimage.

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Episode 76 is about three shortcuts offered to Jesus in the wilderness: provision without dependence, protection turned into a guarantee, and dominion without faithfulness.

From rapture theology to the phrase “God will provide,” this episode asks what happens when faith becomes a mechanism for avoiding participation.

Christian hope does not make human agency disappear. Providence still has hands.

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Sometimes you arrive somewhere convinced that preparation will keep you from getting the important thing wrong.

Then somebody tells you what happened there, and the whole architecture changes.

Episode 75 is about a mountain congregation, a priest nearing the end of a very long ministry, and the question I almost failed to ask. It is also about what happens when the cup finally changes hands.

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

What is the difference between prayer and a procedure?

Episode 74 of Between Bread and Stone follows one question through scripture, Christian spiritual warfare, Andean practice, psychology, and sacrament: are we inviting, or are we invoking?

Invitation leaves room for relationship, freedom, uncertainty, and response. Invocation, in the sense examined here, treats the sacred as something that can be operated if the right words, objects, or sequence are used correctly.

This episode also brings back Inversion by Empire, looking at what happens when a faith built around relationship is converted into a mechanism of power.

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Dear Father Luis,

You asked me to share with you what I learned on this pilgrimage. I have finally started doing that properly.

This week’s letter comes from Sonora, where I went looking for the oldest Episcopal church building in California and came home thinking about a silent organ, a congregation that laughs when the liturgy wobbles, a town built on extraction, and a small garden behind the church that somehow feeds its neighbors.

I think I am beginning to understand what holds these places together. It is rarely the thing people photograph.

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

This Sunday in Between Bread and Stone, I sit with one of the hardest passages in Matthew: the parable of the unforgiving servant.

At its center is an impossible debt, a gift freely given, a servant who rebuilds the very system that released him, and an ending that appears to place torture in the hands of God.

Episode 72 asks what happens when mercy is turned back into accounting, how Mammon survives inside people who have been liberated from it, and why this parable has so often been aimed at survivors from the wrong end of the room.

The Ledger and the Gift is about debt, forgiveness, power, witness, and the difference between grace that frees and religion that collects.

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.