Perhaps you can resonate with the idea that we are, at our core, in our truest selves, spiritual beings which transcend physicality and 3-dimensional reality. Like me, maybe you can find comfort in the idea that when our time of being inside this physical reality is over, we return to Spirit, and to our truest and most brilliant selves.

As a nation, we are experiencing our own awakening right now. We are in the midst of an uprising for Black lives the world has never seen. Millions of us are flooding the streets, risking our lives, to call for justice since George Floyd’s public lynching. Millions more are rising up in solidarity. Revolutionary love is when you are brave enough to see no stranger.

Perhaps the story isn’t so much about God but about us. But if you accept that the Bible is the work of many authors, the story tells you nothing about God. Instead, it tells you what the various authors’ believed.

The question is how can we get the conservatives to accept the idea that we are responsible? Jesus showed us what to do. How can we get them to accept that now it is up to us to do it?

“Ocean” is a song of finding comfort in divine presence, yet still embracing some anxiety. A high-quality song download is FREE to the first 200 people.

People who do not share in the basic assumptions of our cultural/religious narrative are a big problem, since by their very existence they cast doubt on the transcending and absolute certainty of our truth (revealing to us its essentially fictional nature) and thus expose us again to the repressed anxiety our fictions function to allay in the first place.

Sermon with Rev. Jacqui Lewis, Middle Church, March 15, 2020

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II preaches at The Washington National Cathedral on June 14, 2020

We’ve been thinking about leadership the wrong way. What if good leaders lead like God? And what if God’s leading is open and relational?

Logic and faith should be partners! A healthy spirituality does not deny reality but rather interrogates and interprets reality. We are not seeking to escape this world to be transported into an imaginary “other” world but rather to logically, ethically, lovingly transform the only world we know into a better, more compassionate world. For faith communities to be relevant in the emerging world, we must embrace an evidence based approach to our spirituality that is defined by critical thinking and a fearlessly prophetic scrutiny of our own beliefs.

Printed together with several short inspirational works, At Death’s Door is a fictitious account of a meeting between a dying man and an old fellow who just might be God! In this story, philosophy meets theology, and human love meets divine love.

I feel like we are being strangled, the life choked from us – disbelief, sorrow, fear, rage. Violence in the streets, jails, and cages at our border, targeting black and brown men, women, and children; a virus stalking us all, turning familiar comforts into threats.

Some people are highly devotional because it is scary having one’s paradigm shattered. This is to be exposed to the chaos of one’s own mind (the devil!). It is much easier to cling to the established artifacts of one’s own thinking then to fall into the pit of chaos. Most people would rather die than admit that the belief system/paradigm that they have carried most or all their life is wrong in spite of proof of error time and time again.

I come to you with a heavy heart. I feel the weight of the pain of America this morning. The fires that we see on the news, maybe these are pentecost fires. These are certainly symptomatic of a deep pain among the poor and people of color, especially black people.

We are all spiritually, if not physically/chemically, intertwined to symbiotically and synergistically coexist for the mutual benefit of all.

“Searching for God”
SCRIPTURE Acts 17.22-28
with Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft

I hold in my consciousness two previously unimaginable opposites; on the one hand the possible even likely extinction of humanity and on the other, the potential for our unimaginable birth of a new embodied divine humanity, the mutation realized and resplendent.

Incarnation is about that which is divine becoming real in what is natural, banal, human, or secular. What is the divine?