Shows
What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWhat does what we do in worship say about God, God’s character, and God’s disposition toward us?In worship, I see further out than I can see anywhere else.
2026-02-2610 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithIn Scripture, “evil” always has a face. The adversary, the tempter, the fallen angel reenters the Biblical story at many points.Evil is subtle, alluring, always in disguise, and shrewd.
2026-02-1911 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThere are afflictions that don’t precisely fit the usual diagnostic patterns.The Christian faith is a healing movement.
2026-02-1210 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithFundamentalism isn’t the only option for serious faith.Becoming fluent in the “grammar of the gospel.”
2026-02-0509 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithPreaching is meant to be a “sacramental act.”There are some things that can’t be understood by reasoned explanations alone.
2026-01-2910 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithIndiscriminate BaptismSurely we don’t expect parents to perjure themselves in public!
2026-01-2210 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithJesus was baptized alongside “sinners”“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down. . .”
2026-01-1510 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithIs there anyone in charge here? Some way to know for certain that there is some conscious intentionality behind the origin of the universe?God's “Word” is God reaching out to us who bring nothing to the table but our questions.
2026-01-0813 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithA star shall come out of JacobMatthew gathers biblical images to fashion something that’s less a piece of journalism and more like a hymn of praise.
2026-01-0110 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithIt’s a simple story.The very familiarity of it dulls our capacity to recognize how radical the story is.
2025-12-2909 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithAve MariaGod’s business is about lifting up the lowly.
2025-12-1809 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith“Is this the best of all possible worlds?”In Christ, God has offered a foretaste of a healed creation.
2025-12-1110 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithHe descended into HellWhat language shall I borrow to thank thee, dearest friend?
2025-12-0411 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThere is a difference between a trip and a journey.The journey reshapes the traveler.
2025-11-2711 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith"So it goes."The problem comes when accumulating resources becomes a kind of competitive game, where there can only be a few winners and a lot of losers. A vicious problem when the game turns into winner-take-all. The “art of the deal,” you know? I win. You lose. “So it goes. So it goes.”
2025-11-2010 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithSaving the WorldAs the prophet Jeremiah put it, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”
2025-11-1409 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithShe gave away “everything she had.”One day, without even knowing it, someone becomes Christ to us.
2025-11-0711 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithJudgment and GraceLegitimate self-interest easily gets swollen out of its proper proportions. Judgment isn’t an antiquated notion that needs to be put on the shelf. The words “Judgment and Grace” stand alone. The rest is commentary.
2025-10-3010 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWhat my mother told me.Maybe it’s not just about how to get to heaven.
2025-10-2310 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithMissed the FuneralThe deceased was wakened when he heard his own name.
2025-10-1610 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe very architecture of our souls requires that there be seasons of lament.In the shedding of tears there is healing.
2025-10-0911 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe Risks of Liturgical Indifference.Capturing the imagination in a multisensory fashion, to orient our love and our longing.
2025-10-0211 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithLiturgical Testimony to a Cosmic RedemptionJesus did not say. “Think this in remembrance of me” or “Feel this” or “Do this if you have time,” or “Make this really ‘special’,” but simply “Do this.” Just do it. Do this unrelenting testimony to the great homecoming banquet, the “renewal of all things.”
2025-09-2511 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithHow easy it is to get the Eucharist wrong.The apostle Paul describes the Eucharist at work in three dimensions: past, present, and future. It turns to the past “On the night when he was betrayed.” It embraces the present: “Do this. . .” It looks to the ultimate future, “until he comes.”
2025-09-1810 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithEvaluating Our LoyaltiesJesus attracted a lot of people who thought joining his parade might elevate their status. There were enough of them that Jesus felt that it was his duty to let them know where he was headed, and where they would be headed if they should sign on.
2025-09-1110 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithAnxiety, Deception, and IdolatryAuthoritarianism manipulates people’s fears and anxieties. It promises a redemption that is not in human hands to give.
2025-09-0410 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithDoctrineDoctrine needs to be pondered over a lifetime. One reflects on it as one grows and changes, with the various seasons and experiences of life providing a series of new perspectives, each one possibly revealing an insight not accessible earlier
2025-08-2810 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithReal PresenceWhile it might give information, the sermon is not about giving information. It’s meant to be more like an encounter. The sermon drawn from the text can become a sacramental vessel by which the Christ revealed in scripture becomes manifest among us.
2025-08-2111 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWhat motivates people to worship?No matter how threatening the times, worship always centers us in a framework of hope.
2025-08-1410 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithLiturgical Essentials: Bath, Book, Meal, and Attentiveness to the poor.When the apostle Paul met with the leaders of the Jerusalem church and received their blessing and acknowledgement of his calling to minister to the Gentiles, Paul recalled that, “They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do” (Gal 2:10).
2025-08-0711 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithYou can baptize with sand.Those responsible for planning and leading worship need to know a little more than that!
2025-07-2411 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithEmbracing RitualRecognized or not, ritual is basic to human life, not something primitive to be left behind as we learn to live more and more in our reasoning heads.
2025-07-1710 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithSpiritual deathSometimes it feels embarrassing even to say the word “God” seriously in certain circles.
2025-07-0410 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe cultural authority once granted to the church has been withdrawn.To prioritize trying to save our institutional life at any cost is a worthless endeavor if it leads us to be embarrassed by the very faith that God called the church into being to preserve and advance.
2025-06-2710 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithAtheist?Archbishop William Temple said that, “If you have a false idea of God, the more religious you are, the worse it is for you—it were better for you to be an atheist.” We’re living in times when, given all the options in play, it might be that to be an atheist may be the better choice.
2025-06-1910 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWe have a soul-sickness problem that manifests as a language problem.Maybe the church can rejuvenate its mission in the world by majoring for a while in careful listening. It may be that what the world needs most is a people dedicated to hearing.
2025-06-1210 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe power of Evil.Jesus’ confrontation with demonic powers has been validated, his struggle vindicated. The written story of Jesus’ ascension makes use of naive images that serve a purpose so long as we don’t get hung up on aerodynamic details.
2025-06-0510 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithBasic values require a sound foundation.For people of faith, the foundation lies in our perception of who God is.
2025-05-2910 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe Holy TrinityThe Muslims have my sympathy. Those who find themselves hung up on the arithmetic of one and three have my sympathy. The atheists have my sympathy. But the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit lays claim to something else: my heart, and soul, and mind.
2025-05-2210 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWhy the church?The church is nothing less than a priestly community whose purpose is to represent, as best as it can, something of God’s deep interest in the welfare of the whole human family.
2025-05-1511 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithDoubt doesn’t have to be cynical.I’d like to think that Thomas is using doubt as a tool with which to dig deeper. Doubt plays a role for people who work in any serious discipline. It can serve to test what we think we know.
2025-05-0811 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe kingdom of God is about justice, but justice is elusive in history and often thwarted.Anyone who preaches, or listens to sermons, has discovered that the text for last Sunday’s sermon and the one for this Sunday’s sermon may seem to point in opposite directions. Last Sunday’s text: grace. This Sunday’s: Judgment. Human beings tend to be uncomfortable with ambiguity. . . .
2025-05-0111 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithA traveling Bible study for some whose faith has been shaken.The authoritative voice one may learn to discern in Scripture is often drowned out by the sheer abundance and volume of other voices. But it hasn’t gone silent. Jesus’ voice always does the same thing: clears some things up; unsettles others. If you pay attention, Jesus’ voice, interpreting Scripture, wakes you up.
2025-04-2511 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith“’In the afterlife,’ Maud May told me, ‘God’s got a lot of explaining to do.’”God, viewed cross-wise, reveals God’s self not as relating to the world in dominating power, but rather as a God become present to the world in weakness, in vulnerability, in sharing the all-too-familiar status of victim.
2025-04-1711 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe eucharistic prayer in the newer service books highlights the central affirmations of the Christian gospel.Praying the Great Thanksgiving at Communion led me, over time, to reflect more deeply about eschatology, about which seminarians learn a little and then try to forget lest they be mistaken for fanatics!
2025-04-1010 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe anticipation of heaven’s refuge did not reject the hope of a cosmic redemption, but gradually pushed it to one side.“In scripture’s images of a heavenly banquet, we are led to a big-picture redemption, a cosmic resurrection, a transfiguration of heaven and earth, where God’s expansive generosity will be realized in the reign of Christ, whose embrace reaches to me and mine, but not only to me and mine!”
2025-04-0310 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithAdam and Eve had persuaded themselves that God might not be playing fair with them.Adam and Eve did what’s so easy to do: They followed their impulses, naively abandoned their trust as though trust were just a trick meant to deceive them. So, they reached out for that one off-limits thing that would prove to be, sooner or later, a terrible blend of heaven and hell.
2025-03-2710 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithFaith is, in some sense, always a mystery.“It does not take much exposure to religious extremism to find oneself sufficiently repelled as to want to distance ourselves, to shake the dust off our feet, to stalk off and leave it all to those Christians who seem to have kidnapped the God we thought we knew.”
2025-03-2011 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith“I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” says Jesus.“I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” says Jesus. The Holy Spirit speaks to the church; and we find ourselves rejecting some ideas that seemed like sure-enough certainties for centuries. The divine right of kings, trashed. Slavery, discarded; race-based privilege no longer credible. Male domination, rejected. Caste systems, overruled. Disdain for those who don’t fit prevailing patterns of masculinity or femininity, getting over it.
2025-03-1310 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWhy Does Love So Often Elude Us?“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Rom 7:15b, 19)
2025-03-0610 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithDisenchantments“Growing up is, very often at least, a series of disenchantments.” As childhood gives way to adolescence, and adolescence to young adulthood, we’ve got to figure out what to do with that early naiveté.
2025-02-2710 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithJudgment and Love go Hand in HandIt’s easy to critique other tribes, other nations; but the prophets did what wasn’t expected and isn’t easy.
2025-02-2010 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithAn Easter VisitorHe told me that it made no sense for me to be preaching about the resurrection to this young, well-educated congregation.
2025-02-1311 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought it Would BeIt was almost as though I had begun to hear a divine voice speaking to me in, under, and between the written words.
2025-02-0610 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithFairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of All Nature. . .Austin Farrer argued that “while theologians of the late Middle Ages primarily looked in the scriptures for propositions and modern theologians have looked there to sort out what is historical, we should be looking for images.”
2025-01-3011 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWalking on WaterOne of the persistent questions about the New Testament is what to make of the stories that describe Jesus doing things that require the reader to suspend disbelief.
2025-01-2210 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithPreach the Hard TextsSitting in that space between scripture and the tumble of the world, it seems the most rewarding sermons tend to be on the most difficult texts. Perhaps they are most often the most rewarding because they require the deepest dives into the text, the most artful wrestling of how to perceive and understand these things, both in themselves and in how they might touch the lives of people in contemporary society. In this episode, Byars posits that the intellectual and spiritual "lift" required make the more difficult texts perhaps especially important to tackle in one's preaching.
2025-01-1609 min2025-01-1009 min
New Books in SportsRonald Hutton, "The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft" (Oxford UP, 2019)Today we speak to Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom about the twentieth anniversary, and concomitant reissue, of the extremely important The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford UP, 2019). The author of over a dozen books and myriad articles, Professor Hutton’s work is both prodigious and percipient. We chat about the importance of the book and the reason for its reissue.Hutton brings witchcraft out of the shadows. The Triumph of the Moon is the first full-scale study of the only religion England has eve...
2020-12-2329 min
TransmissionsTransmissions: Georgia Anne MuldrowOn Mama You Can Bet, her new album under her Jyoti alias, Georgia Anne Muldrow embraces her jazz roots. Born and raised in Los Angeles, her parents were immersed in the city’s jazz community. Her father Ronald Muldrow worked with Eddie Harris; Rickie Byars-Beckwith, her mother, worked with Pharoah Sanders. And there’s the matter of her spiritual lineage: the Jyoti name was bestowed upon her by Alice Coltrane at her ashram. “I’ve had many experiences in that woman’s force field, and I’ve never forgot any of them,” Muldrow says, discussing how Coltrane’s work felt like “music from...
2020-08-261h 05
Union Matters!Believer on Sunday, Atheist by ThursdayAuthor and professor emeritus Ronald P. Byars at home.Regular worshipers may be believers on Sunday but (nearly) atheists by Thursday. The general public, not making fine distinctions, lumps mainline Protestants together with fundamentalists fighting to hold on to a privileged status already lost. Circumstances favor religious skeptics, who find themselves with rising influence. Church members in mainline denominations feel caught between a rock and a hard place. Thus comes the critical question of the moment: is Christian faith of an intellectually serious and recognizably generous sort still possible? Union Presbyterian Seminary Professor Emeritus of Preaching and Worship Ronald P...
2019-09-2040 minWealthy Sistas® REPLAY-Composer Rickie Byars Beckwith“Every song has a story behind it. Sometimes they are exciting and hopeful. Sometimes they are heart wrenching and full of questions.” – Rickie Byars Beckwith
A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, Rickie’s early musical roots can be traced to Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, Same Cooke and the music of Motown, Liverpool and Memphis. She began singing at the age of three and over time evolved her unique style, talent and flair to become lead singer with the New York Jazz Quartet, the Pharoah Sanders Ensemble and the Ronald Muldrow Ensemble. Rickie currently tours internationally as singer/songwriter and facilitator of women...
2012-11-2600 minWealthy Sistas® Composer Singer Author Rickie Byars Beckwith“Every song has a story behind it. Sometimes they are exciting and hopeful. Sometimes they are heart wrenching and full of questions.” – Rickie Byars Beckwith
A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, Rickie’s early musical roots can be traced to Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, Same Cooke and the music of Motown, Liverpool and Memphis. She began singing at the age of three and over time evolved her unique style, talent and flair to become lead singer with the New York Jazz Quartet, the Pharoah Sanders Ensemble and the Ronald Muldrow Ensemble. Rickie currently tours internationally as singer/songwriter and facilitator of women...
2012-03-1900 min