We will be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven because, and only because, of God’s abundant love and grace. And that is excellent news.

This is the work of faith: to be adaptable for the sake of love, for the sake of making more room for God in this world.

Telling someone how they’ve hurt you is an act of courage and an act of love. It gives them the opportunity to learn how to love you better.

Suffering, even the most senseless, even the most undeserved, always contains the potential for transformation.

Joy is the feeling of being most authentically ourselves, the feeling of most authentically embodying how God made us.

This story tells me that my desperate cries, and my repeated cries, are not a sign of futility, but a sign of faith.

Maybe Peter is supposed to be the model for our faith. A human model. Imperfect. Blundering. But he never stops trying to learn.

Listen to each other. Make space for the way God shines in each person. Make space for the way God shines in you.

The kingdom of heaven is like you pausing to notice it all around you.

So often, we long for things to be cut and dry. We want a hero and a villain. Good versus evil. Wheat and weeds.

A reader who opens a Bible isn’t a blank slate. We bring our past, our fears, our hopes, our own biases, our own agendas.

My LGBTQIA+ siblings, you don’t suffer from how God made you, you suffer from people’s rigid scope of normal, of right, of good.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. So my question for you is: How well do you love yourself?

Let us commit ourselves to an anger, tempered with love and guided by Christ’s teachings, that seeks to dismantle systems of oppression.

I’m here to say today that your joy, however it manifests, is welcome here, is needed here.

Visiting priest Linda Potter gives us a word on the gospel of Matthew.

We need to remember our own heroic nature, our capacity for courage, compassion, and action. -Rebecca Solnit

The Spirit comes to teach us how to make the world home for all people, in all the different ways God made us. Including ourselves.

Oneness is taking all of our different gifts, all of our different ways of being, and knitting them together in one body.

Seeing suffering and naming it, and then doing something about it is how we offer an account of the hope that is in us.