Matthew 17:1-9

The Transfiguration isn’t a rebuke of fear. It’s an embrace of it — an embrace that calls us to live in a fundamentally different way. God is beckoning us to new, Transfigured, resurrected life, if only we are willing to go to the mountaintop.

Matthew 5:1-13

There is no blessing for those who place order above wholeness, or the law above what is truly right. But there is a blessedness beyond reason to those who place wholeness and righteousness above human whims.

Matthew 2:1-12

The hard part of faith isn’t scrounging up grace — the hard part is recognizing grace when it’s right in front of our faces. The hard part is recognizing and accepting and receiving grace when it’s moonwalking across our lives.

John 1:1-14

We will only be able to worship this tiny, fragile baby Jesus, when we dwell in his presence with those who are vulnerable.

Luke 2:1-20

Christ is brave enough, strong enough, powerful enough to stand the smell of this world, the ugly reality we know, the darkness all around us, and invite it into his eternal light.

Luke 1:26-38

Joy makes us live in new ways, with new habits, and new families, and new responsibilities, because we are called to herald the complicated, yet saving birth of Jesus Christ. We are called to herald new life—each and every time—by choosing joy.

Luke 1:5-25

The pattern of joy is not to burst out with as many words as we can, or to start telling the world about how good things are, or to launch into a flurry of do-goodery. The pattern of joy—this choice of joy—begins with quiet contemplation.

Philippians 4:4-9

Paul’s words are a rebuke of over-personalizing and over-individualizing faith. Instead, Paul might be telling us that if we ever want to find the peace of God, we have to do it with one another — Our liberation in God is bound up in one another’s.

Isaiah 65:17-25

God has shown up in our lives through Sunday school teachers, and friends, and winter jackets, and Thanksgiving pies. Now we get the opportunity to continue this great circle of sharing

Job 19:23-27a

Before any social or material change to his circumstances, and before anything concretely changes in his life, Job’s redemption comes in the form of an authentic articulation of his inner life.

Romans 13:8-14; 14:1-4, 7-10

We join the Church today in remembering our mortality and that we die in the same manner that we were born: held in love, shepherded by the Lord of all, and part of a communion of saints that is far bigger and more beautiful than we can ever grasp.

Luke 18:1-8

We come to realize that just as we petition God as that widow, so too does the Spirit petition us, asking our unjust hearts to joyfully acquiesce to hope.

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

Once we shake up the etch-a-sketch, and we accept the reality of our circumstances, that’s when we get to have fun. Try drawing a new image, in a new style, with a different story. You can use that image you drew to give inspiration to the next; our dreaming was practice for the new dreams ahead of us.

Matthew 25:31-46

One of the most unexpected divides in this story is between those who were trying to discern which people were “deserving” of grace and those who were extravagantly indiscriminate in their care for others.

1 Timothy 6:6-19

Our lives are always making a confession of what is valuable to us. Will our lives make a good confession—that virtuous, loving, faithful, patient, gentle confession? Or will we miscalibrate our sense of what is valuable?

LUKE 16:1-13

[Today's] parable stands out from the others, because it shows us that money can also be used to sculpt new relationships, mend the breaches of our community, and give unexpected freedom to those who are burdened.

DEUTERONOMY 30:15-20

In the exodus from Egypt, in wandering in the wilderness, in observing the sabbath, in building the homes of God, and in prophesying against injustice, we see that choosing life places us on a path that is anything but straightforward; and we see that choosing life requires choosing it again and again.

Deuteronomy 24:17-18 and Jeremiah 2:4-13

The Hebrew people are commanded to communally remember the traumas of their ancestors, not for the sake of white-knuckled self-determination, but for the sake of their communal wholeness.

Ephesians 4:1-6

We this child go into the care of the Spirit, who will guide him, teach him, bring him to unexpected places, and bring him back to the unique image that God has placed within him.

Luke 12:32-40

Christ will not come again as a militaristic punisher. Christ will come again as a guest from a wedding banquet — Christ will come from a place of abiding joy and unmeasurable love.