The Holy Spirit is conceiving new life and needs a partner. The Church, the body of Christ, is called to be born again and again and again. May we be a body in the infancy of innovative growth, a body vulnerable and yet powerful as the Church enters an unknown future full of new possibilities.
When the Holy Spirit joined my Uber ride
This is not one of those preacher stories that ends with someone saying the sinner’s prayer and getting baptized. But redemption traveled with us that night as we talked about life, pain and hope.
The scattering yet unifying Spirit and the place of LGBTQ persons in the Church
How do we discern how the Spirit works in our particularities for the sake of the larger mission? Today I imagine the Spirit’s fire would fall down on LGBTQ folk, enabling them to speak to God’s testifying work in their lives and in their communities.
The prevailing power of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit’s socialist tendencies
We need God’s very essence and being to persuade those in power to see the work that they do through God’s eyes, to adopt and embrace God’s view of things, and then to make it happen in the legislation they produce, the policies they enact and the initiatives they advance.
Looking for clues to thriving faith communities in a post-Christendom church
What characterizes a sort of Western “underground” church doing well within a larger context of the church having been pushed to the margins of society?
The ecstasy of God’s inner life is the model for human community
We seem to sing it better than we conceptualize it. We can muster a hearty rendering of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” probably pondering more about the “early in the morning” wording than the theological verities. I am speaking of the blessed…
The divine dance of the Trinity
Since the 14th century, the first Sunday after Pentecost has been celebrated in the Western Church as “Trinity Sunday,” presumably with the hope that one of these years we’ll figure it out. I’m kidding, but one of the ironies of…
Eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit — Who? Me?
La versión en español está disponible aquí. Pentecost Sunday prompted me to reflect again in my personal relationship with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. One of my first recollections dealing seriously and painfully with this doctrine happened in the…
The language of the Spirit: the way of love
How do you imagine the Spirit? The creeds speak of God in three persons, and the Spirit is often referenced as such. Some scholars note that the creeds meant something different than what we mean when we use the word…