by Bishop Mariann | Apr 9, 2023
Watch Bishop Mariann’s Easter Sermon
Peter began to speak to Cornelius and the other Gentiles: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ–he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem.
Acts 10:34-43
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed . . .
John 20:1-18
Hear this prayer, for us all (with thanks to Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie)
O God, we stretch out our hands to you on this Easter morning.
We need you to pull us up and set us on our feet again. . .
Blessed are we who stretch our our hands to you
in doubt and grief,
in sickness of body and mind and spirit,
Our prayers not fully realized,
rejoicing. . . anyway.
For that is what makes us Easter people:
carrying forth the realized hope of the Resurrected One,
singing our alleluias great and small,
while it’s still dark. Amen.1
What a gift to be with you here, to take in the grace and love of this moment and this place. For we are all living in an Everything, Everywhere, All at Once2 world, and it’s a lot to hold. (I was cheering for that movie to win Best Picture, sight unseen, based on the title alone, because it sums up what life feels like for so many people these days.)
I pray that you receive here the hope God longs to give, so that you may live with joy and purpose, grace and generosity of spirit in your everything, everywhere, all at once life. I’m so glad that you’re here.
Let me begin by placing what we have gathered to celebrate within a larger frame of spiritual quest and practice, the rhythms and rituals that can help us find meaning and connection to the mystery we call God.
On the big canvas of life and society, all religious traditions, including Christianity, establish ways of marking time according to a calendar of seasons and celebrations that are linked to the earth’s travels around the sun, and highlight events from a given religious narrative. The narrative is rooted in historical memory yet it holds spiritual significance transcending time and space. Thus religious celebrations like this one are never only about remembering the past, for they invite us, through the lens of past events, to look within and around for authentic spiritual encounter in the present, and they point us toward a future beyond the horizons of our sight. Most of the time, in the frenzy of everything, everywhere, all at once, we are, to our detriment, oblivious to this deeper rhythm. But it’s there for us whenever we stop long enough to look and listen for it, and to drink from deeper wells.
That there is considerable overlap across religious traditions, such that people of different faiths have similar celebrations at the same time, shouldn’t surprise us. The synchronicities validate that we’re all onto something real. The Franciscan priest Richard Rohr makes the case that Christ is universal.3 It’s not that everyone is Christian, but the truth of Christ, the life force we find in Christ, isn’t only available for those who follow Jesus. If that life force finds expression in other traditions, praise the God who loves diversity and show no partiality. For all our differences, we are one human race. This fragile earth is the island home for us all.
In every spiritual practice, there is, nonetheless, what’s known as “the scandal of particularity.” Which is to say that if you want a spiritual life of any depth at all, you need to claim your particular path or, perhaps better said, acknowledge the path that has claimed you, and walk it. Otherwise you risk being enslaved by superficiality and all manner of distraction that will keep you running on other people’s hamster wheels for the rest of your life, without adequate inner strength to stop, get off, and find your true self and deeper call.
Speaking particularly then, Christians circle the sun each year commemorating the big events in the life of one man–Jesus of Nazareth–and reflecting upon His teachings. The bulk of each year is spent on the latter, in long seasons that our Roman Catholic friends call Ordinary Time. We gather in church on Sundays, or in small groups, or take time in private devotion, to slowly make our way through the repository of Jesus’ teachings found in the Bible. There is a lot of repetition and rehearsing of familiar tales and His great one-liners, because Jesus’ teachings aren’t the kind to consider once and be done with. They’re meant to take up residence inside us and become the worldview and the lens through which we attempt to live Jesus-inspired lives.
We proclaim the Scriptures are inspired by God not because they lack factual error or contraction, but because they tell of our spiritual forebears’ encounters with God, across millenia, they attempted to describe with words, metaphor, and poetic imagery. Sometimes, as we read, we, too, feel the power of divine encounter. The words seem to leap off the page and into our hearts. We hear an invitation through them to live and to love as Jesus loves, and claim his values as our own: compassion, forgiveness, solidarity in suffering, respecting the worth and dignity of every human being, pursuing justice through nonviolent means and sacrificial love. The point isn’t to learn more about Jesus, but to become more like Him, as we, over time and struggle, learn to place our trust in His forgiveness and love, and draw courage from His Spirit.
There is no shortcut on the spiritual path. It is the journey of a lifetime.
The commemorative celebrations of the Christian year, like today, are like bells tolling to get our attention, encouraging us to stop and consider one BIG spiritual truth encapsulated in a key event in Jesus’ life that, if we choose, can become part of ours.
Two celebrations stand out in significance. We celebrate Jesus’ birth at Christmas, as the coming of God into our world as it is, and to us as we are.
This week we have commemorated the events culminating in Jesus’ death. We need several days to do this, beginning on the Thursday of Holy Week, when we place ourselves at the table where He shares a last meal with His friends, washing their feet and saying to them, and us: “I have given you a new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
Then comes the long night He spends in prayer, and we do our best to stay awake, as He asks God to spare Him the inevitable suffering that is to come. On Friday, we linger over the worst day of all, when all His male disciples desert, deny, or betray Him, and the women stand helplessly by, as He is beaten and put to death, even though His crucifiers know that He is an innocent man. There’s nothing good about what happens to Jesus on so-called Good Friday, but it’s impossible not to be in awe of Him as we remember that day. “Father, forgive them,” He prays, “for they do not know what they are doing.” Until His last breath, Jesus chooses the path of love. Until His last breath.
Then there’s a day of nothing at all, which is a good thing, because grief is exhausting.
But then…
Then, while grief is still fresh, Easter morning comes. Morning comes while it is still dark. Mary goes to the tomb and is stunned by what she doesn’t see. She runs and gets two of Jesus’ closest disciples to join her, or at least that’s one version of the story. There are several, and they don’t match up well. You put them alongside each other and all they have in common is an overriding sense of chaos and confusion.
Of these varied accounts, Rowan Wiliams writes “We read of fear, grief, doubt…the consistent echo of disorientation and surprise… and the piercing note of shock.”4
Keep in mind that the gospel narratives were written down a generation or more after these things had taken place with the explicit intention of convincing people like you and me that this was the most important thing to know about Jesus. Though Jesus tried to prepare His disciples for what was going to happen, nobody, according to these stories, saw it coming. Those who lived to tell the tale couldn’t bring themselves to tidy up the rawness of their experience, and those who later wrote the stories didn’t even attempt to bring coherence or clarity to what had been handed down to them.5
I don’t know about you, but given the chaos and confusion in my life, I find all this strangely reassuring.
There are two points upon which the confusing, chaotic accounts agree.
1. The tomb was empty.
2. Jesus encountered His disciples in resurrected form.6
I have no idea what a resurrected person looks like, but it’s clear that Jesus wasn’t resuscitated, brought back to live as before. Resurrection is something else entirely, which perhaps explains why no one recognized Him at first. It wasn’t until Jesus called Mary by her name that she knew who He was; it wasn’t until Jesus broke bread with the two disciples on the Road to Emaus that they knew: it wasn’t until Jesus assured Simon Peter three times that he was forgiven for the three time he denied Jesus that he knew; it wasn’t until Thomas, the doubter, a week later touched the wounds in His risen body that he knew.
When do you and I know? Now there’s a mystery.
It’s said that faith is more caught rather than taught, which suggests that it comes to us, as well, in the form of some encounter, generally mediated by another who shares a story of Jesus encountering them and the difference it made. Or we see such faith lived in another, we find ourselves wanting what they have.
I met a man a few weeks ago, and over our dinner conversation he told me that when he converted to Roman Catholicism, a friend gave a book on the lives of the saints. “Welcome to the Church,” his friend said, “The saints are the best part of us.” He didn’t mean one-dimensional people who have no fun at all, but rather earthy people who live gritty lives through which, something of Jesus’ love shines through. And we catch it.7
Sometimes we put ourselves in the place of potential encounter and He comes to us. Or He comes when we’re running in the other direction, or at the bottom of some mess of our own making or of what others have done to us. He comes to us. He calls us by our name.
We celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, not apart from His death, but as God’s response to it.
Here’s the big point of Easter: Jesus lives.
If Jesus had come only to take our sins upon Himself and be in solidarity in our suffering, His mission would have ended on the cross. But His mission didn’t end there, because He didn’t come only to die for us. He came to live for us, and to enable us to live fully in this world, and to join Him in healing this world.8
Resurrection is God’s promise to us that death is not the end, because our God is a God of life, and life rising from death.
Resurrection is God’s promise that this life as we know is not the end, that there is another realm. And there’s going to be some sweet sounds coming down on the Night Shift.9 We have another home. And we are not alone.
Resurrection is what makes it possible for Jesus of Nazareth, who lived over 2000 years ago, to be more than an historical figure for us to learn about and admire from a distance. He can be a living presence in our lives, a personal and communal Savior, there for us, who both loves us unconditionally and invites us to walk with Him on the path of sacrificial love for the healing of this world.
We don’t have to ask for Him to love us; that’s a given. We don’t have to accept Him as our Savior for Him to save us; that’s what He does. But Jesus invites us to follow him. We can say yes or no. It’s a free choice, with no threats of eternal punishment for those who choose otherwise. It is an invitation made in love.
Jesus’ resurrection is what we celebrate today, and it’s a big deal–big enough to merit all we can bring to it, all this extravagant splendor. But for those who choose to follow Him, it’s one day alongside every other. So we’ll be here next week, to gather around this table, or one like it somewhere else, and we’ll take up his stories and teachings again, considering our life in light of His, striving to live His Way of Love.
We show up every Sunday, we say our prayers each day, we study his teachings, and we go where He sends us, because we realize how much we need Him. We need his love and forgiveness and grace. And we’ve come to love him in return. We refuse to allow the cynicism and mean-spiritedness and brazen abuse of Him by others to sway us from His true path of love. He is the source of our strength, the strength of our life. He lives. Because he lives, so can we, in this everything, everywhere, all at once world.
So if he’s knocking on the door of your heart today, for the first or the thousandth time, why not let Him in? If he’s inviting you to take one step further on the path of love, why not take it? If you have experienced death, I am sorry. May you hear His assurance that death is not the end, and that new life awaits you. He loves you. He is here for you. He is grateful to you and for you. He’s so glad that you are here. And so am I, because in you and in me, and in all of us together, His love lives on.
1Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, The Lives We Actually Have: 101 Blessings for Imperfect Days (New York: Convergent Books, 2023), 210-11.
2Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture
3Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019).
4Rowan Williams, Interpreting the Easter Gospel. Kindle Edition, Location 1576.
5Williams, Kindle Version.
6David Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021), 396.
7My dinner companion was Robert Ellberg, and he tells this story as introduction to his book, A Living Gospel: Reading God’s Story in Holy Lives (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019)
8With eternal gratitude to the late Rachel Held Evans for this insight, beautifully expressed in Inspired: Slaying the Giants, and Loving the Bible Again (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2018).
9Music video for the Commodores – Nightshift
by Bishop Mariann | Apr 6, 2023
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.
John 20:1
At one of those small shops that specializes in quirky gifts, I perused the display of greeting cards and came across an Easter card. On the front was a depiction of the resurrected Jesus standing in front of his disciples. The caption read: “Okay, everybody, let’s get the story straight. The last thing we need is four different accounts of the Resurrection!”
It made me laugh, in the way that only religious satire can. For that’s exactly what we have in Scripture–four versions of what happened on Easter morning. They vary significantly in the details, yet are singular in proclamation: Jesus was raised from the dead.
No one, actually, sees His rising. The first witnesses appear on the scene after the event itself, and what they see at first is nothing at all–an empty tomb. Then, in a series of encounters, first to the women and then the men, Jesus appears to them–not resuscitated to carry on as before, but present in mystical, mysterious ways. First in the garden, then on the road to Emmaus, and then in an upper room where some of the disciples were hiding in fear.
“Go back to Galilee,” other messengers tell the disciples. “Go back to where you began with Him.” When they do, Jesus appears to them on the hillside and along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. They see Him, talk with Him, encounter Him again and again, and each time they feel His presence, forgiveness, and empowering spirit, enabling them to live with courage and love.
It was as implausible a proposition then as it is now, and as easily refuted as anything I might say to you about why Jesus’ resurrection matters to me.
But here goes: I have seen Him, too, and felt His presence in my life–not all the time, and not without long stretches of emptiness–but often and consistently enough to give me confidence that He is real. I have experienced His grace and forgiveness in the times that I have felt least deserving of them.
I am not immune to doubt, and I struggle to believe in the face of the world’s suffering as much as anyone. Yet Jesus keeps showing up, making His presence known to me in prayer and when I read the Bible, in the countless graces of each day, and most especially in the examples of His other followers whose witness takes my breath away.
I am not interested in Christian platitudes that gloss over the anguish of the human experience when the worst happens. Thankfully, neither is Jesus. As best I can understand, His answer to that anguish isn’t to take it away (how I wish it were), but to enter into it fully and assure us that it will not have the final word. I take that promise on faith and hold onto it even when–especially when–the evidence suggests otherwise.
I was asked in a podcast interview recently what gives me hope. It’s a question not to answer lightly. What I remember saying was something like this: “Hope, for me, comes as a gift that I can’t easily explain and I can’t evoke on command. On the other hand, hope is also a spiritual practice. I need to actively seek it out, spending time with those who embody hope in the most hopeless of situations. I need to ask for it in prayer, and fill my heart and mind with what gives me hope.
It’s all too easy to be cynical, I said. To be hopeful requires effort. That’s what following Jesus looks like for me–turning my gaze toward Him, dwelling on His life and teachings, and learning to trust, as so many have before me, that He is with us and for us. It’s especially important that I turn to Him when my hope is gone. When, by grace, His consolation comes, hope returns as the gift it is, and I am given strength to carry on. I’ve learned that I can go a long way on bits of hope–and that the joy of it is real.
On Easter morning, no matter what, those of us who follow Jesus however imperfectly will rise to say in one voice: Allelujah, Christ is Risen! As the psalmist reminds us, “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” Or in the words of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, “Even if you are not ready for day, it cannot always be night.”
Because He lives, hope cannot die. Because He lives, so can we, with courage and love. Because He lives.
by Bishop Mariann | Apr 19, 2022
Peter began to speak to Cornelius and the other Gentiles: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ–he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.”
Acts 10:34-43
On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.
Luke 24:1-12
Good morning. What an honor to address you this morning. I pray that my words may convey something of the hope that Easter represents, and where my words falter, that the Spirit of God will speak to you directly with whatever it is your heart most needs to hear.
To set the context for what I hope to convey, let me begin with a few vignettes. They’re mostly personal accounts, but as I speak, perhaps similar or analogous memories will come to mind for you.
When I first stood on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and then spent several days hiking down to the bottom and up again, I was completely undone by its majestic, wild, dangerous beauty. Whatever the word sacred had meant to me before, it now had to take into account what my eyes beheld at every switchback. The Franciscan priest Richard Rohr speaks of creation as God’s first incarnation, and the Grand Canyon had that impact on me–it was a revelation. As I was leaving, I remember feeling strangely comforted by the fact that the canyon would always be there, and that no matter where I was I could call the canyon to mind. I haven’t been back for 30 years, but it remains for me a mystical place of connection.
In Celtic spirituality, places like the Grand Canyon, or any location that is sacred for you, is called thin, in the sense that the veil which separates this world from all that lies beyond is transparent and porous. These are places where we can connect to the past, present and future all at once; and they confirm, at least for some of us, the ancient human intuition that there is, in fact, another realm beyond this life.
A thin place isn’t always one of beauty. Gordon Cosby, one of the most influential mid-20th century pastors in Washington, DC, described when the veil was lifted for him on the battlefield of Normandy during World War II. As a chaplain, he helped bury hundreds of young soldiers, including his best friend. At the grave of his friend, reading from Scripture he had a powerful revelation that there was life on the other side of the grave. He also realized that most of the soldiers he ministered to had little or no spiritual resources to draw upon in the hell that they found themselves in. So when he returned from the war, Cosby was determined to create a faith community where people could develop a spirituality that was both deep and wide. He called it “the Church of the Savior,” one of the first truly inter-racial faith communities in Washington, DC, dedicated to a ministry of deep spiritual growth and sacrificial service and commitment to justice.
These thin places and experiences speak to us of a dual reality of life as we know it and life beyond what we know. When we’re in a thin place, we sense the presence of that realm to which we cannot yet go, but whose reality we no longer doubt.
In late August and September of 2005, the residents of New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi and Louisiana experienced the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. You may recall that nearly two thousand lives were lost, hundreds of thousands were displaced, and the damage to property and community infrastructure was catastrophic. Moreover our national systems for crisis management failed the impacted communities miserably, and it was clear for all the world to see that thousands of people in this country couldn’t get clean water, much less shelter or adequate food. I was living in Minnesota then, just a few hours south of where the Mississippi River begins as a tiny trickle out of Lake Istaka. The river that served as a peaceful backdrop to my life in Minneapolis was, at the very same time, wreaking havoc on countless people two thousand miles south.
Every time that I passed the river, or a tributary to it near our house, I couldn’t stop thinking about the people who were suffering at the river’s end. I could carry on my normal life, but I was somehow connected by that river to others who were experiencing incalculable hardship.
Now there are many ways we can feel that kind of visceral connection to other people who in real time are experiencing life in a vastly different way than we are. Perhaps right now you have family or friends, or you yourself have lived or served in a part of the world that is at war now, or experiencing famine, or some other hardship. And you’re here, and there’s this urgency inside you, a desperation to do something for those you love or care about–in large part because you’re fine and they are not. That disparity–and that’s what I’m asking you to think about–motivates us all to do brave and sacrificial things; it calls upon one of the noble attributes of our species. that of empathy. Empathy is like muscle; the more we exercise it, the stronger it gets. That’s not by accident. We were made that way for a reason. More on that a bit later.
One final vignette: Once, as a favor to a neighbor, I presided at a wedding for a couple that I did not know well, the sister of my neighbor and her soon-to-be-husband. It was an outdoor wedding at a city park, not at all religious, except for me, but it was lovely, as most weddings are. After the ceremony, a young woman approached me, introduced herself, and asked if we could talk. When I said yes, her eyes filled with tears. She told me that she had once dated the groom. The romantic side of their relationship didn’t last, she said; they were still friends, and she liked the woman he married. Yet she was still single, and lonely; she had dreaded attending the wedding, and it was just as hard as she feared it would be. “Still, I’m glad I’m here,” she said through her tears. “I really am. I wanted to be here for them, you know? To celebrate their joy.”
That is one of the most poignant expressions of our capacity to hold two realities at once, that in our sorrow, we can be genuinely glad for another’s happiness. It is the love of a dancer or an athlete sidelined because of an injury, who is nonetheless present to cheer on those able to fulfill the dream that is now denied them. It is the love of parents who realize that what they have to give isn’t what their children want or need, yet even in rejection, they offer their blessing.
With all those vignettes in mind, here is what I’d like to say about the meaning of this day. We will never fully understand it, but we experience its power as we hold seemingly opposite experiences together–this world and what lies beyond; our capacity to feel the sufferings of another to such a degree that we are moved to take them on as our own; being willing to share in another’s joy even when we are grieving.
Easter lands there. Richard Rohr describes the Easter mystery this way: “the body of Christ is crucified and resurrected at the same time.”1 That’s not an historical assertion. It’s a mystical one–an act or way of being that unites death to life, this world to the next, reaching down to the deepest human sorrow and raising us up to whatever joy is possible after the greatest loss.
What we need to remember when we consider all of this is that Jesus, before the resurrection, was, for those who knew him, a human embodiment of a thin place. Before he died, people in his presence couldn’t stop thinking that they were in the presence of God. Listen to how the world religion scholar Huston Smith describes Jesus:
Circulating easily and without affectation among ordinary people and social misfits, “healing them, counseling them, helping them out of chasms of despair, Jesus went about doing good . . . He did so with such single mindedness and effectiveness that those who were with him found their estimate of him persistently modulating to a new kae. They found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this is how it would behave.2
And then died, a cruel and vindictive way. His followers were devastated, not only because they loved him and that he was such a good man, but because he seemed so much more than a man. “We had hoped,” one of the disciples says a bit later in the Easter narrative, “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel.”
That’s why the empty tomb became such a powerful place and symbol. It became a thin place for the women who went there early in the morning to care for Jesus’ body. They were terrified, as you just heard. They hadn’t yet encountered Christ, but his body was gone. There were these men telling them to go back to Galilee, which is where they came from, and that Jesus would meet them there. It made no sense, but the women knew that they were on sacred ground, that the veil between this world and that other realm was lifted for them, and Jesus was somehow moving freely between those two realities.
The reason we are here, friends, in this Cathedral is that for those who follow him, he still moves between both those realms. Whatever happened to Jesus on that first Easter morning, Christ is now and forever a spiritual being in the realm that lies beyond us, who is also with us in our reality with us in all its heartbreaking and wondrous complexity. That’s what Christians believe and experience. It’s what anyone can know if we let him in.
There’s another dual reality of Easter: the juxtaposition of grief and joy. There is no getting around it. So if you’re not feeling super joyful today, rest assured that you are in good company–if you noticed, the women at the tomb weren’t especially joyful, either. For it takes time for a new life to emerge for death; it takes time for grief to ease; for forgiveness to do its reconciling work.
But if you are feeling joyful, for Jesus’ sake, shield your joy. For even in times of great sorrow and struggle, there is a place for laughter and goodness, and when they are given to us, we need to savor and protect them, lest the world keep us forever anxious and afraid. In the words of the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black American to win the Pulitzer Prize, “Say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony hushers, ‘even if you are not ready for the day, it cannot always be night.’” That was her way of saying to all those who would keep her down, “No one is going to steal my joy.”3
Which brings me back at last to the ways we are connected to one another. For while resurrection is something that only God can do, it’s also about us, how we experience death and life at the same time, too. It’s what my colleague Bishop Jake Owensby calls “a resurrection-shaped life.” By God’s grace, we, too, can be for others walking thin places, whenever we show up; whenever we reach across the disparities of human experience with a love that shows no partiality, that’s focused on doing good and offering our blessing.
So when your heart is breaking for what another is going through, follow where your heart leads–that’s resurrection working in you. Go to the places where love is needed most with whatever love you have to give–that’s resurrection in you. Wherever there is joy, do your best to celebrate and protect it, even if it’s not yours–that’s resurrection working in you. Be open to the people and places that help you believe that there is another realm of life beyond this life, and trust that when the time comes, Jesus will be there to help you cross over.
But in the meantime, you are here, as I am, and we are called to live with compassion and love, even as our hearts break. We can’t do this on our own, or perfectly, and we aren’t meant to. Resurrection is God’s best work, and it’s happening right now in all the wounded and sacred places of our lives and of this world. We can be part of it, whenever and however we choose to receive it for ourselves, and then offer what we can in a resurrection-shaped life.
May it be so. Amen.
____
1It Can’t Be Carried Alone by Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation, April 6, 2022
2Huston Smith, The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 48.
3Speech to the Young by Gwendolyn Brooks, from BLACKS (Chicago, IL: Third World Press, 1991
by Emily Snowden | Feb 16, 2022
Join The Rev. Dr. O. Wesley Allen and The Rev. Magrey R. deVega and other celebrated preachers on this three-day online preaching conference focused on preaching the texts of Easter with focus on on preaching to a hybrid congregation.
Hosted jointly by the Episcopal Preaching Foundation and the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, this conference is designed to inspire, equip, and empower preachers in more effective and faithful preaching.
March 22-24, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. with breaks throughout the day.
Attendees will gather to learn from presenters in plenaries, hear exemplary preaching, and gather in small moderated preaching groups with the insights of nationally celebrated speakers and preachers. Participants will leave the conference with refined tools for crafting a sermon, tips for delivering sermons to a hybrid congregation, and an Easter sermon ready to go. Hear and learn from celebrated preachers.
Conference faculty include: The Rev. Dr. O. Wesley Allen, The Rev. Magrey R. deVega, The Rev. Dr. Gayle Fisher-Stewart, The Rev. Canon Charles A. Cesaretti and The Rev. Nancy Frausto.
by Emily Snowden | Feb 16, 2022
Join The Rev. Dr. O. Wesley Allen and The Rev. Magrey R. deVega and other celebrated preachers on this three-day online preaching conference focused on preaching the texts of Easter with focus on on preaching to a hybrid congregation.
Hosted jointly by the Episcopal Preaching Foundation and the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, this conference is designed to inspire, equip, and empower preachers in more effective and faithful preaching.
March 22-24, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. with breaks throughout the day.
Attendees will gather to learn from presenters in plenaries, hear exemplary preaching, and gather in small moderated preaching groups with the insights of nationally celebrated speakers and preachers. Participants will leave the conference with refined tools for crafting a sermon, tips for delivering sermons to a hybrid congregation, and an Easter sermon ready to go. Hear and learn from celebrated preachers.
Conference faculty include: The Rev. Dr. O. Wesley Allen, The Rev. Magrey R. deVega, The Rev. Dr. Gayle Fisher-Stewart, The Rev. Canon Charles A. Cesaretti and The Rev. Nancy Frausto.
