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“The summary of the gospel in its fullest sense is that God has a dream for the world’s wholeness. Our calling is to embody that dream together.”
—Catch The Vision—
Michael's vision for ministry is to encourage and support people of faith to build communities of justice, joy, compassion, and peace.
—PACIFIC PILGRIM—
Michael likes to think out loud about things that matter. He occasionally posts poems, liturgy, reflections, and sermon notes on at the PacificPilgrim blog.
—Along the Way—
To find out more about God's dream for the world’s wholeness, read the Along the Way sermon blog, or listen to Michael's sermon podcast.
“We won’t save places we don’t love; we can’t love places we don’t know; and we don’t know places we haven’t learned.”
—The Sermons—
Sermon Audio
The world is not as God intends. The truth at the heart of the gospel is that God has empowered us to change that. This is what the Sabbath is all about.
Jesus’ teachings challenge us not to see ourselves above Creation, but alongside it as kindred earthlings.
When the Bible is turned into a tool to justify violence, faithfulness to God requires us to reread it, contest it, or even resist portions of it.
Truly inclusive Christian communities have the audacity to wrestle with the Bible. That is what it looks like to act with faith in God. They do this by joining with the generations before them and inspiring those who will come after them in the struggle to become faithfully human.
Truly inclusive religious spaces are those that say, “We long for you to be included among us because we cannot fully encounter the mystery of God without you.”
Love is messy. Love is uncontrollable. For most of us, our ability to love grows in seasons. We move from charity to solidarity, and then conversion. We realize that our salvation is caught up in the salvation of others, and then it becomes a force to be reckoned with. Let us be like Jesus, planting seeds of the “kin-dom.”
Covenants are not just contracts, exchanges of property or actions. Covenant are about binding two parties together in a way that creates a new identity. God’s covenant with us is rooted in a promise of peace, since from the very beginning humanity was created to live in covenant partnership with God.
We are truly at home in the places we are fully loved, where we are fully animated by love.The Resurrection frees us to be at home in God’s love. In God’s love we discover who we truly are!
Flags are totems that allow us to imagine and identify with our community. The flags we carry tell the world who we are and what we stand for.
God's love empowers us to risk following Jesus beyond our places of comfort, to bluntly confront the power of death so that it can be exposed and defied.
—The Pacific Pilgrim Blog—
PacificPilgrim Blog
The most important thing to know about climate change is the first sentence in David Wallace-Wells’s second paragraph: “None of this is true."
To build that just society we were promised generations age we must begin by believing that in the soul of America, at the core of our humanity, it is in our divine calling to build a just society for that works for the well-being of all of us.
Kentucky is filled with smart, bold, and creative people. We have the resources to change things. What we lack is the political will. It’s time to change that!!!
God's good Creation was under attack, and the fate of human civilization as we know it was in jeopardy. As we move into the sixth major mass extinction of species in the planets history because of the destruction of human inaction, I pray it is said of me that when I came to understand the threat we face, I was not afraid to sound the alarm.
It is time that we own up to the truth that the economic structure of our communities is a spiritual issue. Our faith communities can no longer rest on the sidelines watching as people organize to take back their communities. We must join in the fight, providing spiritual and other resources. We are long past the moment when we can ask people to join our faith communities and offer their time, talent, and treasures while we watch large corporations and a decaying democracy take those same things away from them without investing into their quality of life. If our faith has anything to offer, if Christianity is going to matter to the up-and-coming generation, it will be because we found ourselves on the sidelines with them fighting for the future of their community.
“To to put it in these terms, you have called on me tonight to lead you in calling on God to bless tonight’s meeting, a ceremonious way of marking our collective calling as a community.”
Prophetic, faith-based, deep organizing gives people in crisis a new way of seeing themselves and a more profound understanding how the world works. This helps construct a kind of solidarity that can last long beyond the current moment and create the kind of people-power that brings real systemic change.
Diplomatic leaders know that their decisions affect people. That is why the skills that mobilize and organize communities are the most essential to effect change.
“The Tormentors invites us to see that things are not as they seem, that the world is not as clear as we imagine, that our greatness is not in our ability to control, that the lines we have drawn are not the building blocks of reality, and that there is life to receive from the world when we let the the deep love at the heart of the universe teach us how to see what it is trying to teach us.”
I am convinced that when religious communities exclude others, leaving them to believe that God has abandoned them, they have excluded God. These communities have abandoned their Creator to worship their religious institutions.
“When our policy makers publicly use the Bible to support any kind of violence, especially violence against children, I believe we have a responsibility to lead our faith communities to speak back: “You can’t use our sacred texts that way!” When we do so, we stand in the good company of folks like Moses, Daniel, John the Baptist, Jesus, the Apostle Paul, Gandhi, and Dr. King.”
Hate is not just a feeling, it is an organizing force that works to destroy the world. That is what we all should be working to eliminate within ourselves and our world.
“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and” moved to the suburbs.
No, that’s not quite right….
Was it not necessary?
