The Unnamed, XI: Pilate's Wife

Epiphany–Lent

March 26, 2023 • Squire Prince • Matthew 27:11–26

Too often, we are so comfortable in our spaces, places, and races that we turn blind eyes to our siblings of humanity who are crying out for relief. We turn our heads to paradise while many, purposely outside of our gaze, are stomped upon by systems of oppression, violence, and hate. We focus on our bubbles of comfort and safety, while many just blocks away from us starve, giving up whatever items they can to have just one more meal, and a moment of warmth.

How often are we captivated in fear by how others feel about us? Fear about losing friends or losing social status? So much so that we don’t speak out when others use their power or influence for wrong. We silence ourselves and allow ourselves to be a part of the problem because “that’s not our fight” or to save face and space.

What's Been Saving Your Life? VI: The Practice of Walking on the Earth: Groundedness

May 12, 2024 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Exodus 3:1–12

This message might have just as easily been received elsewhere. Maybe Moses didn’t have to go into the wilderness to hear, to see, to take off his shoes, and receive what was holy. Maybe he didn’t have to go beyond the mountains with a herd of sheep, into a wilderness beyond the wilderness in order to meet God. This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the one who numbered the stars. The one who ordered the planets. The one spoke the words “let there be light” and there was light. This is not a God of the margins, but of the center, a God about whom this whole story is written. But Moses isn’t paying attention. And it takes a burning bush to turn him toward God.

What's Saving Your Life Right Now? V: The Practice of Paying Attention : Reverence

May 5, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Revelation 4

We know that reverence is one of the things that is saving our lives right now. We know what makes us flourish. We know what’s good for us. We know what we need, because every day as we scroll through our media, we encounter a swollen, grotesque, vainglorious ego scowling out at us from the screen, reverencing nothing and respecting no one, and we know instinctively that that is exactly what we don’t want to be. It’s ironic: to live large, to live up to the towering stature of our full humanity, we remind ourselves now and then that we are in fact small, contingent, unnecessary creatures, living only by the grace of that Crafty Wizard who threw a hundred billion galaxies across vast eons of emptiness. And so now and then we pause from our daily round to hear something like George Frideric Handel’s "Dettingen Te Deum", a staggering paeon to the matchless majesty of God Godself, the “luminous deep being a lofty light,” as Dante puts.#_ftn1 #_ftnref1Dante Alighieri, Comedy, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, ll. 115ff.

The Practice of Pronouncing Blessings: Benediction

April 28, 2024 • Katie Lancaster • Numbers 6:22–26

In 1979, archaeologist Gabriel Barkay was excavating the funeral site of Ketef Hinnom in West Jerusalem, and came across a small piece of silver amid the debris pottery and other artifacts. He describes them as about the size of a filter on a cigarette, it being the tobacco heyday of the 1970s and all. Two pieces of silver about the size of a pencil eraser, the size of a tic tac, the size of a ladybug. It wasn’t solid silver, but instead, a silver scroll. Unroll it and in tiny script are the words of the blessing I read to you today. It is from 600 BCE. Think of the artistry. Who pounded the silver? Who chose which blessing to include? Who took a small carving tool to write the text? Who rolled the silver into a small amulet? Who wore the amulet with its holy blessing? The blessing of the wilderness was held dear, embraced, honored, retained, remembered, condensed, and passed on. The blessing of the wilderness, or rather the blessing in the wilderness, was transmitted, entrusted, bestowed generation to generation, so that we might hear it. “May YHWH bless you and keep you.”