Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

The Rt. Rev. Phoebe Roaf: The Last Sunday after Pentecost by Calvary Episcopal Church

There is a spark of the divine image in every life. And if that spark is to burn on and burn a little more brightly tomorrow than it does today, it simply has to find some place of welcome in this world, a place where hospitality has been extended even to it. It’s how we were made by the loving source of that spark. All of us.

The Rev. Paul McLain: All Saints Sunday by Calvary Episcopal Church

What healing in ourselves and in our world might result if we, like a son of Timaeus on the roadside one day, walked away from all the false and lesser stories and into the good and blessed cosmos of Jesus?

Can you love this little life of yours even when you can’t control it? Can you believe that you are loved even inside the whirlwind?

So, what if Christians came to be known not as those people who think they know how to fix everybody else in the world but as people who believe that we are changed as our lives are bound together with all kinds of other lives. Maybe even the lives of people who believe that faithfulness can look like hopelessness, that wealth can look like poverty, that the fullest life can look empty.

When the storms and winds bear down on us, the masks are torn off our faces. Our innermost souls are now bare to God and everyone and we become in touch with a greater reality – the reality that a good life is not about reward or punishment. It is instead about living faithfully, step by step in a murky, often unfair world.

“Perhaps the question James is pressing upon us all is, “Will you turn your attention, turn your desires and your fears and your hurts, but also your joy and your hope and your gratitude, will you practice turning ever more of yourself and your life toward the aliveness of God that lives between us? Such turnings, such prayers, such intercessions really do still have the power to heal.”

Jesus was telling the disciples and us that when we take the last place in line, we enter the world of childlike imagination. From that last and lowly position, we have the perfect vantage point to wonder about things, to have the audacity to ask penetrating questions such as – Is this even the right line to be in?

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were the ultimate expression of the truth that God does the work of redemption as a pure and unqualified gift. All that’s left for us to do is try to believe that broken and imperfect lives like ours could be included in that perfect love and then live out of the gratitude that results.