Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

Temptation is not about appetite. It is about autonomy. Secure yourself. Define yourself. Prove yourself. And Jesus refuses. “I live by what God speaks.” “I serve God alone.” He does not grab. He entrusts. I am convinced that sin, at its root, is trying to save yourself. And forgiveness is God refusing to abandon you when you cannot.

Forged from his Memphis gospel roots and shaped by Houston's vibrant jazz scene, Kirk Whalum is a singular voice in contemporary music. Discovered by jazz legend Bob James, Whalum went on to become an in-demand session musician for artists including Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Quincy Jones, and Barbra Streisand—most famously performing the iconic saxophone solo on I Will Always Love You. With more than 30 solo projects, including the chart-topping For You, and the Gospel According to Jazz series, Whalum is a twelve-time Grammy® nominee and 2011 Grammy® winner. He holds a Master's in Theology and hosts the daily podcast The Bible In Your Ear, blending music, faith, and service.

We all carry personal ashes- grief, addiction, regret, exhaustion. The forgiveness we withhold. The people we quietly despise. And we carry collective ashes -the injustices we lament and the systems we quietly benefit from and prefer not to see.

The same Jesus who was transfigured so magnificently that day taught us that the ones God calls beloved and even speaks through are not limited to a few famous prophets on a mountain a long time ago. Jesus says God's beloved ones are all around us, wherever we are, every day, if only we're given eyes to see our human sisters and brothers as the bearers of God image, God's image that they truly are.

We start by imagining ourselves as more than a bunch of broken-hearted, or just plain broken people. Can we imagine that we are salt? That we are capable of shining? And when we do that, can we imagine that we are salt for others or light for others?

When someone has nothing to prove to us and doesn't need our approval to validate them, our souls rest a little easier, and we really can see the world a little more clearly for what it is...Maybe that's meekness. People didn't find their burdens lightened in the presence of Jesus because he was insecure and told everybody only what they wanted to hear. The meekness of Jesus was, and this is Rowan Williams again, “a habit of calm attentiveness, stillness, freedom from the fretting worry of keeping control.”

"Dr. King said, “There is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.” He lived out the absurd, but liberating conviction that the only place in a sacrificial system a follower of Jesus will faithfully occupy is as its victim, its lamb...The good news is that there really is abundant life and liberation in the way of Jesus."

As I get older, and lose more of the people I love, I hang much less hope on my rational comprehension of whatever awaits us on the far side of death. Scripture itself isn't very clear about the details and I haven't yet been visited by an angel with inside information. But my trust in the truth and the hope of the scriptures somehow has only deepened over the years. And I find myself, if not more certain about the details, so much more confident in the divine Love that awaits us. I do believe that somehow all the vulnerable infants, and all the anxious parents, the hopeful, foreign wise ones and even the violent tyrants, all exist only within the absurdly wide mercy of God. So do you. So do I. So do all of the living. So do all of the dead.

“Let it be unto me according to your will,” was not an act of blind obedience or resignation to a fate. It was an opening of a space in Mary to receive the gift of God. And in doing so, Mary wasn't setting herself apart from us. She was showing us the way. What do you need emptying of, dear virgin friends, so that God can prime you with glorious gifts, that your life might be given away with no expectation of return?

But if we wake up resolved to choose a relationship with God, we can be fairly certain that we'll be asked to do things that might make the neighbors talk, that might push us toward people we'd otherwise avoid, that we'll be asked to stand up for truths that aren't popular or even sensible. I hate to say it, but sometimes it might even look like our lives are on fire.

" Mutual grace seems to be part of Paul's plan to unite the early Christian Church, and every generation of believers has had to grapple with this question of what is foundational to our faith. This ongoing work requires both the intervention of the Holy Spirit and I think a measure of sacred imagination to envision what has not yet come to be. And in this season of Advent, we are invited to slow down to exhale in the midst of the busyness of the season as we prepare our hearts and our minds for the coming of God incarnate."

The only moment we really ever have to become the self that Jesus is calling and loving and inviting us to be is the moment we're in right now.

Your King is with you. Not far above, but right beside you. Not condemning, but companioning. Not turning away, but turning toward you.

We just keep showing up together in the present with the lives we actually have. And maybe find that the risen Christ does keep showing up among us, not in the ways we planned for. But with a new word, a new wisdom for a new day that we were never meant to anticipate.

Because this life is where we are now, and wouldn't it be extraordinary if we could flip the script around, so that instead of projecting qualities of this broken world onto the next, we could instead take the hints we get about the wholeness that awaits us and get about the business of living that way now and here?

Maybe All Saints' Day is the day we're reminded that the Church isn't the place where we get free of enemies Jesus asks us to love. It's where he traps us with some of the most obnoxious ones and says, “Here we are, folks. Shall we get on with it?”

If you've been told you're too much or not enough, if you've been carrying fear, shame, exhaustion, or rage, hear this good news. The Lord stands beside you.

And yet a door to another world still stands open to every moment. A door to a better way. Which is to see your life, not as an achievement of your savvy and your will, but as a gift. A gift from a loving God who doesn't trick us into faithfulness or force us into submission, because that's not love. A gift from the God who woos us with blessings that are given in spite of our selfish shrewdness, not as rewards. Blessings given simply because it is the nature of love to bless. A door stands open. But you won't be tricked or shoved through it. Because it's open to life in the realm of gift and love. It will still cost you everything you've tricked this world out of thus far. But could you send all of that to the far side of the river, and limp through the door into another way of being alive?

And so this little moment of counsel from twenty-five-some-odd centuries ago helps me learn how to do that. What to do when I find myself waking up in a strange place that I don't recognize and can only mutter: I don't understand this world, I don't want this, I don't know what to do with all this. “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce… Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

"What would it take for you to give up, at least a little, the credit-taking game and step a little more fully into a deeper faith in your belovedness by God?"

"What is real life? It's not one thing. It's not just suffering. It's not just joy. It's not just fulfillment. It's all of it, held together by love."

Especially when we can't find it, when we insist that it is still true, that there is a balm in Gilead, we are making a bold and audacious proclamation: Proclaiming that all the while there is still beauty and kindness, that repair is just as real as destruction.

Imagine her thankfulness when she sees that there's someone who loves her enough to sacrifice everything to go find her and bring her home.

One thing a little time away has made clear to this sinner is that I need you if the old patterns are to be broken in me. I need a community of people trying to listen to Jesus and to live by the light of his love.

What if we admitted we're all afraid? It takes real courage to do this. It's a radical move, which is why fear and not hate is the opposite of love.

“Get it straight, before the voice comes to your house and says, ‘you fool, tonight.'”

We pray in order to be, to be in the presence of God, being transformed into the likeness of Christ, and that the miracle we get from prayer is God's presence and God's hearing us, not a particular outcome. And though that understanding lives somewhere in my heart and in my soul and a big place in my mind, the truth is that prayer remains a mystery for me.

The kingdom of God is real. What if we choose this story? What if we tell this story to ourselves and to everyone we meet on the way, and to every house we enter, and at every meal we eat? What could it look like to live inside that story, to imagine a world where the harvest is plentiful, where we all get to be there, where the wolves and the lambs lie down together?

Real freedom will cost you your illusions. But it will give you your name, your story, your voice, your joy. Your freedom. And it will be loud, and bright, and contagious.

My prayer for us and for the church is that we will fight with all our might and with as little fear as possible any effort, message, or policy that attempts to restrict or confine the love of God. The hope of the world may depend upon it.

The challenge of believing in the Trinity is not figuring out the formula; the challenge of believing in the Trinity is living a life that reflects our beautiful understanding of God as more than we can grasp or imagine.

Pentecost doesn't reverse the effects of Babel so much as it breaks open our imagination. Opens us to the possibility of connection and reconciliation even in a world of difference and diversity.

“About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.” I wonder what would sustain me in that dark night? What stories or poems would emerge from my internal library? And if not in a jail cell, then in the other dark watches of illness or despair, or of the trap of spiraling worry.

So, for all the hardship and need we see and experience, let's commit to being a community that tends to its joy and its curiosity. Which means we not only learn together and pray together and serve together, but that we also eat and drink together, sing and laugh together, rejoice in all the ways we can together.

For most of our history, we Christians have been re-drawing the lines between who's in and who's out, between whose beliefs are correct and whose are not. For one group, fundamentalists might be the problem; for another, it's woke liberals. For yet another, it could be terrorists or immigrants or environmentalists, rich people or poor people, or Muslims or atheists or God knows what else. Our hearts harden, our beliefs solidify, and we reduce God to a tidy formula, and we are on the verge of destroying everything that is beautiful and true and holy.

Just as Ananias embraced Saul as family by calling him, ‘Brother Saul,' Ruthie and I will always think of you as ‘Sister Calvary.' We are family to each other. You will always be in my and Ruthie's hearts. And God's ongoing story of conversion in all our hearts will never end.

Go be a Thomas. Not Thomas, the cool skeptic of tradition. But Thomas, who knows that an incarnate relationship with complicated people is what we're made for, not membership in a religious club we join by storing beliefs in the attic of our mind, like furniture under bedsheets no one even thinks to sit on anymore.

Let the women at the tomb be our guides back into a love that's at work in our lives still, right now, right here. Today.

I feel a kinship with the women in this kind of moment, in which the story is still unfurling. And I am grateful and profoundly moved by their witness, their belief, with only the barest bit of news to go on.

So say the prayers, whether it feels like anyone's listening or not. Jesus did. Say the prayers, if only to remember that you're not the only one whose ever felt like everything that matters is unsolved in their heart. Say the prayers as a way to be still, expand your soul to hold a little more life and hurt and, maybe even to pass back into this world something a little less like violence, and a little more like love.

When Jesus stood up and wrapped a towel around himself, in essence he taught them, ‘Do not be afraid to stoop down and offer the most humble service imaginable to one another. It is no more than I have done for you.'

Ó Tuama's interests lie in language, violence, and religion. Growing up in a place with a long history of all three (Ireland, yes, but also Europe), he finds that language might be the most redeeming. In language, there is the possibility of vulnerability, of surprise, of the creative movement towards something as yet unseen. Any artist of words inspires him: from Krista Tippett to Lucille Clifton, Patrick Kavanagh to Emily Dickinson, Lorna Goodison to Arundhati Roy. Ó Tuama loves words — words that open up the mind, the heart, the life. For instance — poem: a created thing.

Ó Tuama's interests lie in language, violence, and religion. Growing up in a place with a long history of all three (Ireland, yes, but also Europe), he finds that language might be the most redeeming. In language, there is the possibility of vulnerability, of surprise, of the creative movement towards something as yet unseen. Any artist of words inspires him: from Krista Tippett to Lucille Clifton, Patrick Kavanagh to Emily Dickinson, Lorna Goodison to Arundhati Roy. Ó Tuama loves words — words that open up the mind, the heart, the life. For instance — poem: a created thing.

Davis is the 14th president of LeMoyne-Owen College. For the past 25 years, Davis has had the honor of pastoring St. Paul Baptist Church, Holmes Road, where he has witnessed the transformative power of faith in action. Alongside his pastoral work, he served for 17 years as both a faculty member and administrator at Memphis Theological Seminary, experiences that deepened his understanding of ministry within both church and academic contexts. In 2024, he was named the 14th president of LeMoyne-Owen College, a role he believes to be a divinely appointed extension of his calling. For Davis, faith is not confined to Sunday worship—it is a way of life, a guiding force in every season and every role he has held. Whether in the pulpit, the classroom, or now on the campus of a historically Black college, he has always viewed his work as ministry.

As Temple Israel's eighth senior rabbi, Greenstein's tenure and legacy live through intergenerational engagement and relevance of Reform Jewish values. In addition to serving as a pastoral anchor for his congregation, Greenstein is pouring his energy into innovating the pipeline for the next generation of Reform Jewish rabbis as well as building a healthy future for the religious and cultural fabric of post-October 7 Israel.

To taste and see and smell that we're loved like that can change us. It can heal us. It can raise dead parts of us into new life. And it can make us into people whose lives and loves keep expanding just like these gospel stories do, until they include more and more of the world around us and more and more of the worlds within us.

Prior to her election and ordination as bishop of Mississippi, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Dorothy Sanders Wells served as rector of St. George's Episcopal Church, Germantown, Tennessee, from 2013 until arriving in Mississippi in May 2024. Wells is committed to the work of community dialogue, racial healing, and justice and equity for all of God's people. She is an award-winning freelance essayist, and many of her works--most of which are centered around issues of justice and equity--can be found at muckrack.com/dorothy-wells.

Chu serves as an editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure, teacher in residence at Crosspointe Church in North Carolina, and parish associate for storytelling and witness at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley in California. He is the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America (Harper, 2013) and Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand (Convergent/Penguin Random House, 2025). He is also the co-author, with the late Rachel Held Evans, of the New York Times bestseller Wholehearted Faith. Chu is a former Time staff writer and Fast Company editor whose work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Modern Farmer. In his weekly newsletter, “Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer,” Chu writes about spirituality, gardening, food, travel, and culture. An ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America, he lives with his husband, Tristan, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Taylor is a New York Times best-selling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest. After serving three congregations—two in downtown Atlanta and one in rural Clarkesville, Georgia—she became the first Butman Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College, where she taught until 2017. Since then, she has spoken at events with wonderful names like Wild Goose, Evolving Faith, Awakening Soul, and Gladdening Light, but her favorite gig is being the full-time caretaker of a farm in the foothills of the Appalachians with her husband Ed and very many animals. Her new book, Coming Down to Earth, from Convergent Books, will be out in 2026. Chu serves as an editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure, teacher in residence at Crosspointe Church in North Carolina, and parish associate for storytelling and witness at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley in California. He is the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America and Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand. He is also the co-author, with the late Rachel Held Evans, of the New York Times bestseller Wholehearted Faith. Chu is a former Time staff writer and Fast Company editor whose work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Modern Farmer. In his weekly newsletter, “Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer,” Chu writes about spirituality, gardening, food, travel, and culture. An ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America, he lives with his husband, Tristan, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Taylor is a New York Times best-selling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest. After serving three congregations—two in downtown Atlanta and one in rural Clarkesville, Georgia—she became the first Butman Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College, where she taught until 2017. Since then, she has spoken at events with wonderful names like Wild Goose, Evolving Faith, Awakening Soul, and Gladdening Light, but her favorite gig is being the full-time caretaker of a farm in the foothills of the Appalachians with her husband Ed and very many animals. Her new book, Coming Down to Earth, from Convergent Books, will be out in 2026.

Like Jesus, the fatted calf nourishes and sustains others. Like the Eucharist, the meat from the fatted calf becomes a little part of all who partake in it. The fatted calf reminds us of the self-giving love of Jesus.