Beatitudes Blog

Burning Down the House

Submitted by Sara Miles on August 29, 2007 - 4:58am.

Reflections on Luke 12:49-56; a sermon preached at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church on Sunday August 19, 2007. 

If you were in church last Sunday you heard Jesus’ simple formula for overcoming fear: just give away everything you have to the poor. And you thought that was hard? Let’s try today’s challenge. Jesus says, I’ve come to bring fire to the earth and destroy your family. Do you think I’ve come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.
  What’s burning up here isn’t just money, as it was in the Gospel last week. It isn’t just religion, as it was two weeks ago when poor Peter tried to make a shrine to the ancestors to protect him from the blazing fire of the transfiguration. What Jesus is burning up in this reading is the past, and the future of the world as we see it in human terms. He’s replacing it with the fire of the perpetual present: the fire of Christ, the fire of baptism through death. The fire of new creation. 
He is burning down the house. Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem, heading into his death, and talking about burning down the whole damn house....

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Like Lambs Among Wolves: Gospel Reflections on the Temptations of Violence

Submitted by Sara Miles on July 17, 2007 - 7:09pm.

A guest essay by Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (2007). Sara is the director of ministries at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, where she founded The Food Pantry.

Crossposted from Journey with Jesus.

Long before I was a Christian, I was a reporter, and I specialized in writing about military affairs—specifically, revolutionary wars and the ways they played out on the ground in the Third World.

Writing about and living in such wars absorbed me totally. I used to feel ashamed that I found so much joy in the midst of the violence and dirt and ugliness. Some of it, I think, was the simple adrenaline thrill of danger, and a guilty but real happiness about coming out alive. Plenty of it was romance. But another piece was the intensity of connection that collective experience, even terrible collective experience, provides: the powerful intimacy of sharing life and death together.

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Ashes and Dust

Submitted by Sara Miles on February 23, 2007 - 3:38am.

This is the sermon preached on Ash Wednesday 2007 at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco by Sara Miles.

What does it mean to set off on this journey through Lent—this pilgrimage through the desert that leads to betrayal, the cross, death and the tomb before we awaken in the blazing impossible light of Easter?

What does it mean to understand our own deaths, and the death of everyone we love? What does it mean to say that our individual lives are but a breath, and our beloved bodies are mere dust?

On Ash Wednesday, we follow Jesus’ journey to resurrection—which is to say we walk, as a people, along Jesus’ path. A path that leads straight to the place of the skull, to betrayal, and to ashes.

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Gay Marriage--A Sign of Christ's Love

Submitted by Sara Miles on February 13, 2007 - 12:04am.

This Valentine’s Day marks the 3rd anniversary of San Francisco’s great civic act of affirmative civil disobedience, when Mayor Gavin Newsom offered to marriage to all. Over the next few days, thousands showed up; my wife Martha and I were among the couples married there.
Our marriage -–annulled by a court order---nonetheless profoundly changed the way I understood the religious meaning of the rite. Today, despite a debate over gay marriage that’s only become sillier, sadder, and more bitter, that experience continues to resonate.

I didn’t really believe in marriage three years ago: never in my life had my relationships with men or women been blessed by church or state. Martha and I, who’d been together for eleven years, hadn’t sought a public ceremony of any kind. Officially, my family wasn’t legal: our teenage daughter Katie was a bastard, and Martha no relative of ours at all. In many churches, our family was an “abomination.”

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Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion

Submitted by Sara Miles on February 5, 2007 - 5:21pm.

We welcome to Beatitudes Blog author Sara Miles. She is a self-described "left-wing journalist, cook and activist, a blue-state lesbian raised as an atheist," who "lived an enthusiastically secular life-until she wandered into a San Francisco church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine, and found herself radically transformed by her first communion." Her new book Take This Bread--A Radical Conversion is the story of her journey to faith, and of her decision to take Jesus' call to feed others literally, by organizing food pantries run by poor people. Learn more here. Phyllis Tickle calls this book "the finest confession of faith I've read in years....an astute assessment of the present intertwining of politics and Christianity in American culture." And our Anne Howard says: "this is the BEST description of Christianity, and the most HONEST description of church life, that I've ever read."

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