by Guy Sayles | Jan 23, 2010 |
At the heart of the Christian faith, there is this irreducible and astonishing claim: roughly 2000 years ago, God came to live among us in the flesh and blood, mind and heart, limits and potentialities of one human being: Jesus of Nazareth. In this one brief life, the...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 18, 2010 |
This past weekend, I was honored to offer the invocation at our community’s prayer breakfast in celebration of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To have been asked was a surprise of grace. I grew up in Atlanta, Dr. King’s hometown, during the most intense days...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 11, 2010 |
Prayer is, quite simply and profoundly, being with God. It is speaking and listening in order to know and be known; it is hearing and being heard, as ways of holding and being held. Prayer is more than asking and receiving; it is, as Roberta Bondi has said, “the...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 3, 2010 |
Like many other people, I have learned a great deal from the world’s great religions. I have been challenged by the simplicity, focus, and gentleness of many followers of the Buddha, impressed by the devotion and passion of many adherents of Islam, and, of course,...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 31, 2009 |
Christians believe that, in one brief and remarkable life, the life of a first century Galilean Jew named Jesus, we have experienced God more fully than in anything else in creation and more completely than in anyone else in human history.We experience God, to be...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 25, 2009 |
I was glad when our recent snow melted just enough–and city workers and merchants had shoveled and salted enough–to make narrow walkable trails through downtown. On both the 23rd and 24th, after several days of being cooped-up inside, I took long walks...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 19, 2009 |
In her fine book, Dakota, Kathleen Norris writes about what she has learned from the fierce beauty of that vast stretch of the High Plains which serves as the beginning of the desert West. Sparsely populated, often barren, and frequently harsh, those plains are...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 16, 2009 |
This past Sunday, my sermon grew out of my reflections on the day’s reading from Zephaniah 3. What follows is an excerpt:Jesus is God’s leverage to lift our cynicism and to free us from sadness. Deep in his bones, flowing in and out of his lungs, coursing...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 9, 2009 |
I just finished Chris Hedges incisive, brilliant, and disturbing analysis of American culture, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. The book is blunt and even graphic in places, so my recommendation that you read it comes with a...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 1, 2009 |
Sunday night, as a part of our Hanging of the Green service, we sang the poignant and lovely hymn “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” That hymn, based on a medieval poem, includes a question with which I gladly and gratefully wrestle:What language shall I borrow...
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