The Pulpiteer

This week is a special episode as I'm joined in the pulpit by Sky Makare, a young woman from the San Gabriel congregation. Tune in as we explore issues of beauty and ugliness, cat calling and the threat of sexual violence, and the many unfairness's and injustices that continue to negatively impact the lives of women in today's America.

Spurred by Texas HB 2548, Chas Moore of Austin Justice Coalition invited me and other community members to a press conference on February 20, 2025. Join me for an exploration of the White Christian Nationalist roots of these anti-diversity, anti-equity, and anti-inclusion bills - and a call to our brothers, sisters, and siblings who identify that way to a deeper relationship with God, the world as it is, and all of us... a relationship that must be the source of our healing.

What does it mean to be a healthy man in today's America? In today's world? Are we providing our young men with prosocial and compassionate ways to express their masculinity - some troubling data suggests not. How do our historical and cultural understandings of masculinity need to change to adapt to feminism, anti-racism, and post-colonialism without simply regressing to patriarchy and supremacy? Join us in this important struggle.

Read the Sixth Chapter (Expanding Our We) of our Congregational Read: What It Takes to Heal by Prentis Hemphill. Come prepared to share, so will I. We'll see if we can't do some healing and expand our we, together.Starting and ending with the Metta Meditation, we'll explore who is worthy of the protections of being human? Is there a threshold beyond which those who are damaged or do damage to others are no longer worthy of human protection?

Join us this week for a colloquy on race through the lens of the magical negro. I am honored to have as partner and co-conspirator in this work - Mr. Spoon. Hear the song never sung & more...

Engage with the World is inspired and named for chapter five of our congregational read for this year, Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. In it, we struggle with what it means to hold love at the center, with how we so easily and often get it wrong, with the eternal search for a place to stand and a lever to move the world.

We explore the power of story to blind us to the world that is, to remake the world as it wishes to become, and to transform our relationships with one another. 

A good-old-fashioned fire-communion, some Dr. Seuss for the kid in all of us, and some James Baldwin to invite us deeper than we ever wanted to go. That sounds like the recipe for a strong start to the new year. Join us won't you? ...God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time...

This week is a live recording inspired and named for chapter four of our congregational read for this year, Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. If you, as a podcast listener, would like to read along, we’d love the company. Our plan is to do a chapter a month, usually on the third Sunday of each month - with the podcast coming out the following week.

What is the right relationship between body, mind, emotion, and spirit? And what does any of that have to do with presence? What if these questions aren't two different ones, but one question from two perspectives. What if one pathway to both questions lies upon the path of meditation? Let's explore...

This week is a live recording and it is inspired by (and named after) chapter three of our congregational read for this year, Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World.

This episode is inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass & addresses itself to the American national election that just passed. Special thanks to the Haudenosaunee people for their capacious sharing of the Thanksgiving Address.

What does Sanctuary mean? What do we need from our sanctuary - from our sacred spaces - in this moment? Can they be safe enough for us to complete the dissolution necessary to our transformation? Safe enough to fall all the way apart? Would that allow us to reconfigure ourselves in ways previously unimagined? Do concepts like 'wisdom' and 'stranger' help us in this struggle? Join us and let's find out, together.

This mythological and mystical story comes to us from renowned storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw and is the second in our Smoke Hole series. It is a tale of patience and boldness, of duty and nature's allies, and ultimately about distinguishing between what is essential and what is superfluous. Join us around our imaginary fire as we spin a tale from the troves of old Europe.

This episode is inspired by chapter two of our congregational read for this year, Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. For those of you who don’t yet know, Prentis Hemphill (They/Them) is unearthing the connections between healing, community accountability and our most inspired visions for social transformation. Prentis is a therapist, somatics teacher and facilitator, political organizer, writer and the founder of The Embodiment Institute. They self-identify in the book as queer and black.

Pet Blessing, Georgetown Pride 2024, Hurricanes, Elections, a need to slow down, and we still need to find time to reflect on our Soul Matters topic for the month: Living Love Through the Practice of Deep Listening. That a lot going on, we'll see if we can't find some space to breathe as we contemplate all these things, our perfect storm.

Please join us for a special bonus episode this week, as I have the honor of being interviewed by Sunny (15) and Stella (13), two members of our San Gabriel congregation. From ice cream, to pets, to favorite clothes & time travel - join us for a fun ride.

This mythological and mystical story comes to us from renowned storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw and is the first in our Smoke Hole series. It is a tale of dark energies and bewitchment, power and corruption, of bloodlust and unlikely allies, and ultimately about the victory of the simple and faithful over the complex. Join us around our imaginary fire as we spin a tale from the troves of old Europe.

Based on the Preface and First Chapter (Vision) of our Congregational Read: What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World by Prentis Hemphill. Come listen as we explore and share. We'll see if we can't do some healing and cast a vision, together.

I've given myself a few weeks to begin to digest my experiences at the Orphan Wisdom School in Ontario. So this is the first part of sharing what I learned there.

Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue. – Clearing by Martha Postlewaite

If we subscribe to this progressivist view of history, of evolution, of the unfolding of life in the universe – a view nominally supported by the hearts of the great wisdom traditions, by our own transient observations, and by the findings of science (at least in the human or Earthly near term – perhaps not on the longer galactic time scale). Well, if we subscribe to that – one element of our progress might be that our blessings get better and better, that we get wiser and wiser – In that spirit, let’s unpack this new benediction, a riff on the Davidson Loehr benediction from this summer: May you find: Questions more Profound than Answers. Play more Proficient than Mastery. Vulnerability more Powerful than Invincibility. Supplication more Productive than Control. And a Peace that Passeth all Understanding. Maybe it needs some more work, maybe you can help me out…

We often think of justice work as 'external' - we focus our attention on the parts of cultures and systems and institutions that lie outside of us, outside of our control or influence. But this focus makes two mistakes - first, it presumes that we are not implicated in systems and cultures we choose not to identify with, and second, it fails to recognize that our ability to replace the culture, system, or insititution with something better is contingent upon our having done the internal work to create a new possibility. We'll look at some emerging voices in the field of healing justice - voices helping guide us to do the internal work that makes justice possible.

This is the third of a three part sermon series based on the benediction. May you find: Questions more Profound than Answers, Vulnerability more Powerful than Strength, and a Peace that Passeth All Understanding.  Is it a peace that is available to us? Even in the midst of the suffering of others? Even in the midst of our own suffering? Is it the answer to suffering, or the antidote, or the cure, or a balm, or what? Well friends, we'll have to agree to wrestle those questions together and see if we can't exhaust our way into a better understanding of this promised peace.

This is the second of a three part sermon series based on the benediction. May you find: Questions more Profound than Answers, Vulnerability more Powerful than Strength, and a Peace that Passeth All Understanding. And here’s how we’re going to honor it: We tried it scripted, we tackled ‘questions more profound that answers’, now it’s time to go one layer deeper, It’s time for ‘vulnerability more powerful than strength’. 25 minutes of Q&A without the script.

This is the first of a three part sermon series based on the benediction. May you find: Questions more Profound than Answers, Vulnerability more Powerful than Strength, and a Peace that Passeth All Understanding. And here's how we're going to honor it: You Ask, I answer... well, probably more like ponder, speculate, ruminate, you get the idea.

A good covenant is easy to write and hard to practice. What can we do to better live the promises we've already made? How can we honor the spirit of a promise when its literal interpretation shifts from hard to impossible? If a promise can't be kept literally, is it worthless? What do we really owe each other anyway? These questions and more as our struggle continues.

We can't interrupt the transmission of intergenerational trauma without asking deep questions. In the research on play, on imagination, on unconditional love - we begin to see the shape of some similarly deep answers. But can we do the work? Can we relinquish our expectations of conformity and compliance in favor of a world made more chaotic by human expression released from traditional fetters?

In a sequence of five stories from three authors, we'll attempt to find a path through the forest of judgement, into the clearing of showing up for each other, and on to a seemingly mythical land of transcendent connection. Join us won't you? Thanks and acknowledgement to our three authors: Eckhart Tolle, Stephen Jenkinson, and Charles Eisenstein.

 I’m not asking if such a future is possible or plausible or what changes have to happen to bring it about. I’m asking a question about the present, a question about our own social and mental and emotional and spiritual state — I’m asking if we can, through the lens of our imagination, see such a place from here.

Could it be that the best thing about democracy is the part of it that we do the worst? After all, if you look back at the history of the idea, it only really had one serious precondition. A precondition that this country stopped taking seriously as soon as it extended the franchise. Could more attention to this one prerequisite be the linchpin for healing our ailing democratic institutions and culture?

I’ve long struggled to find an MLK Day tradition that I feel does adequate justice to his life and message as a modern day prophet. So, for the first installment in what I hope will become a long standing practice, we will use Dr. King’s spotlight to highlight the message of a lesser known but sympathetically aligned fellow prophet… one whose life was also cut short by intentional violence, dare we say, assassination. I call this practice, this tradition in the making, ‘Prophets in the Graveyard.’

Who are our dead? Are they a subset of ‘the dead’? Are they a going concern, or just a past with whose echo we must contend? Are there obligations that linger between us, the living, and them, the dead? Do those obligations flow in two directions, or in one? Do these answers inform our approach to our own deaths, or the deaths of those we love? What role does memory, after which this Memorial holiday is named, play in all this? Are some dead more or less worthy of remembrance? Is the blood that soaks a cause a measure of it’s importance, or its prestige, or maybe our own ungrieved regrets?

This episode is an homage to Easter, which I read as an invitation to struggle with one of the deepest areas of mystery: life, death, & rebirth. I want to share with you some writings from one of my most influential teachers, Stephen Jenkinson. He is author of books like “Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul” & “Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble.” What if the teachings of Jesus are inviting us into this deep struggle with living and dying?"

Mother's Day started as a Peace Movement, but what has it become? Between it's lost peace roots and our fraught relationship with gender-roles, can we find a meaningful space for celebration? for gratitude? for hard-earned lessons? Well, we're going to try. With a little bit of that exoteric vs. esoteric discernment that we started exploring last month, and a smidge of gratitude for the mothering we've received, and a smattering of critical reflection on the parts that didn't go so well and on some others that did, all laid out on a blanket woven from memories and stories of mothers lost, and of mothers found.

In episode two of The Pulpiteer, we'll struggle with Jesus' core prophetic teaching of the transformative power of love. We'll use two contemporaries, Marshall Rosenberg and Alfie Kohn, to help us bring this wisdom into focus and to ask some hard questions.

In this first episode of the Pulpiteer Podcast, we'll tackle this question: What is Church For? Is it a social club? Or a general purpose social justice non-profit? Is it an entertainment? A show? A musical performance? A Sunday morning day-care respite? Is it a lecture? A ceremony? A ritual? A backstage pass to the preferred afterlife? (revised version October 2024, intro music included)