Author: Dana Kramer-Rolls

“Christ gave us all this and yet we are called to follow him into a world of death because his Father’s Kingdom has not yet come, and we are the ones sent out to bring it. Sometimes faith is a hard thing, but we can’t be filled with the presence of our saving God by trivializing evil, pretending spirituality is all rainbows and unicorns. Or by torturing ourselves with the Bad News, when the Good News is so close.”

“We need our temples, and we need our priests and pastors, our teachers, our mentors, our scholars. But we need them to guide prayer, not own it. We need our faith communities and our personal practice of our faith to be ever reminded that God is with us, loves us, and will grant us whatever good things we need. But we are also part of the Kingdom, and God’s plan takes precedence over our personal very human personal requests.”

“We can be the worst of the stumbling blocks. And if you doubt that, I give you the so call Christian Nationalist movement. Or the harshness of biblical literalist. But even in a less extreme case, in our everyday ministry with our own parish family, we can be petty, judgmental, cruel, forgetting that God is in charge, and preaching humility isn’t just a way to have power over the weak. We are all flawed, and deep down a little afraid, struggling, hungry for God’s love.”

“What those friends of Jesus saw and heard on the mountain when Jesus transfigured was their future selves holding the spark of the Spirit, becoming the temple. That is what we bring to our physical houses and churches to make these places holy. We are the temple.”

“What was it Jesus said? That the healthy don’t need a doctor (Mk 2:17). So the sick come in our doors, and we live with them. And heal them to the extent we can, and to the extent we can’t we tolerate and try to love them. We may be the best cure for the current hate/outrage/anger culture we live in. The world, God’s world, needs us.”

“Tell my disciples (now hiding in a locked room) that you have seen me and what I have told you (Jn 20: 11-18). He makes her move. Makes her spread the word, a word of joy. He eases her pain. In his love he gives her new purpose.”

“When he raises her up, he is giving her life, the same life breathed into all Creation. When she rises and serves them, this is more than the current understanding of the diaconal role. She is acting in the priestly role of taking the elements of the world and offering them in gratitude back to God.”

“Joseph is us, perhaps a whole lot richer than most of us, but still us. And he does what he has to in order to honor the body of his beloved, if sometimes perplexing, teacher according to the rituals of his people.  And he takes a big risk with the Roman authority and his own Temple authority to do it. He is, indeed, a good and righteous man, or at least working on it.”

“Stephen teaches us to forgive in the most terrible times. He teaches us about a good death, even bleeding from a hundred wounds.”

“We live in a world of complex people in various stages of self-recognition before God, with all the sins of ego and envy and grasping for power that fight with the fruits of the Spirit within us. That’s the sad truth. Are we swimming in the current, the words of Jesus guiding us through the rapids and whirlpools, or are we being swept away by our needs, lack of faith, the secular world?”