Between Bread and Stone

This week’s Gospel brings us to Bethany, where Martha, Mary, and Lazarus stand at the center of one of the most powerful stories in John. Jesus meets a grieving family, weeps at the tomb, and calls Lazarus out of death, then commands the community: “Unbind him, and let him go.”

In this episode, we bring together the themes of the whole Lenten season, from Joel’s call to repentance to the wilderness, the well, the healing mud, and now the grave itself. We reflect on Martha’s deepened faith, the difference between the Lazarus of John and the Lazarus of Luke’s parable, and what this Gospel asks of the Church as we prepare to enter Holy Week: not admiration from a distance, but courage, proximity, and the work of unbinding.

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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.

In John 9, Jesus heals a man born blind using something unexpected: mud made from earth and saliva. The miracle is striking, but the real drama begins afterward. The people who claim to see most clearly—the religious authorities—cannot recognize what has happened in front of them.

The story raises an uncomfortable question for every generation of Christians: what happens when certainty becomes a form of blindness?

This week’s episode explores the symbolism of mud as creation material, the strange mixture of healing and humiliation in Christ’s method, and how spiritual blindness still operates today, including among those who speak the loudest about defending Christianity.

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.

In Episode 39, “Living Water in the Children’s Courtyard,” I sit with John 4 and the Samaritan woman at the well, reading the scene against empire’s quiet edits and Jesus’ choice to trust a marginalized woman as the first preacher to her town.

I then turn to the Monday pantry at St. Paul’s: roughly forty-five unhoused adults gathering in the children’s courtyard, cup noodles and coffee in the old Sunday school rooms, medical fragility visible in swollen hands and unhealed wounds, and the hard math of an $18,000 annual budget now facing a funding cliff at the end of March.

The episode names this as a trumpet moment in Lent, asking St. Paul’s for a time-limited “lifeboat” of support while new grants are pursued, and weaving in Joel’s call to return with all our hearts and Julian of Norwich’s image of God as Mother, who will not send away her children at the door. The question that frames the whole reflection is whether our worship “in spirit and truth” includes the people in that Monday line as part of the “we” of this parish.

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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.

In this episode, we meet Nicodemus after dark and let his quiet conversation with Jesus spill out into detention centers, parish halls, and city sidewalks. We explore what “born from above” might mean in a landscape shaped by immigration enforcement and visible poverty, and we lift up the work of SJRAISE and KWESI as concrete expressions of John 3:16–17. St. Paul’s Monday pantry appears here as a doorway into next week’s episode, which will sit more fully with the unhoused in Bakersfield. This reflection invites listeners to take one small step toward co-creating with the God who made us for love rather than condemnation.

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.

In this first Sunday of Lent, we walk with Jesus into the wilderness and listen closely to the tempter’s three offers: economic control, religious spectacle, and global power. Rather than treating them as abstract spiritual tests, we track how each one has a modern institutional form, from churches obsessed with metrics and “growth” to ministries that gamble with people’s lives in the name of faith, to movements that wrap empire and nationalism in the language of Christ.

Drawing on the older figure of ha-satan and the fully weaponized Satan of Matthew’s Gospel, we name the false gods at work in these temptations: Mammon, Mars, Moloch, and Thanatos. Then we follow how imperial Christianity merged with them, turning the Church from a wilderness people into a chaplaincy for power. The episode’s heart is the question of allegiance: what it means, in practice, to worship the Creator of Truth, the Spirit of Peace, Yahweh of Justice, and Jesus of Love when that worship requires turning down the deals that keep institutions safe.

Finally, we return to one line: “One does not live by bread alone.” From there we explore what it might look like for communities to refuse to turn people into fuel, to choose being small and truthful over being mighty and compromised, and to trust that, on the far side of refusal, angels still come and real bread still appears.

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.

This Ash Wednesday, I’m sitting with a hard question: what if the way many of us practice Lent has been shaped more by imperial Christianity than by the early Church? Joel calls for a fast that disrupts an entire society, not a private willpower challenge. Early Christians fasted on days of betrayal and crucifixion, redirecting real food and money toward those who would otherwise go without. Somewhere along the line, that dangerous rhythm was folded into a 40–day season that middle–class Christians can visit and then leave.

In this episode, I look at Lent as a containment strategy and as an opportunity. We trace the shift from weekly fasts rooted in betrayal and execution to a managed pre–Easter program, and then ask what it would mean to reclaim fasting as a year–round alignment with those crucified by empire. Along the way, I begin a thread that will carry us into Holy Week: the mythic pattern where power without conscience finally collides with reality and discovers that the only honest way forward is self–offering.

Joel’s trumpet does not invite us into 40 days of spiritual performance. It invites us to move our home address back to the margins and stay there.

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.

When the world finally feels clear for a moment, do we freeze it and worship the memory, or let it send us back down into the hard places where love is needed most? This episode sits with the Transfiguration as a mountaintop experience that many try to immortalize, and asks what happens when Jesus refuses to stay there.

If you’ve ever clung to a moment of clarity, feared intimacy with God or others, or wondered how spiritual “highs” connect to valleys of addiction, poverty, and injustice, this reflection is for you.

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.

This week’s moral question: What does it mean to be “salt of the earth” and “light of the world” in a country where Christian nationalism wraps itself in the gospel, and secular movements on the left enforce a different kind of unforgiving purity? How have both sides helped empire twist Jesus’ words into tools of domination, and what would it take for communities to reclaim this teaching for justice, mercy, and repair?

This episode of Between Bread and Stone holds Matthew 5.13–20 up against our current landscape of extremism, tracing how empire inverted “city on a hill” into civil religion, and how online purity culture mirrors the very Phariseeism it condemns. From there, we return to Epiphany: the light revealed in small, vulnerable communities, not in imperial spectacle. If you are tired of being told to choose between weaponized faith and weaponized shame, 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.

In this episode of Between Bread and Stone, we slow down with the Beatitudes and hear them as they would have sounded on that first hillside: under occupation, under surveillance, and under the shadow of public violence. We move line by line through Jesus’ blessings, exposing the “counter-beatitudes” of Christian nationalism and the way empire keeps trying to steal words like “peace” and “persecution” for itself.

We spend special time with “Blessed are the peacemakers,” asking who gets to wear that word today. Are peacemakers the ones who carry guns and battering rams in the name of order, or the ones who interrupt violence without becoming violent themselves?

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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 the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, this episode listens closely to Acts 26:9–21, Paul’s own account of his life as a persecutor and his encounter on the Damascus road. We explore how his experience of guilt, revelation, and self-preservation helped shape the Christ that dominates our written record, and how empire later learned to use that Pauline universe for control.

From there, the reflection turns to the present: ICE and federal agents killing citizens in Minneapolis, Christian language wrapped around state force, and a fake Jesus held up as the mascot of a nationalist movement. Between Bread and Stone asks whether a Pauline church can still repent in deeds, not slogans, and what it would look like for communities today to hear Christ say, again, “Why are you persecuting me.”

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.