Bishop Loya
Persistent Gentle Kindness
Oct. 18, 2025 10:43 Filed in: Commentaries
Beloved in Christ,
When I was seven, I was hospitalized several times in a short period for a respiratory illness that was much more serious than I had any ability to appreciate at the time. I remember very little from those days in the hospital. I remember the image of my grandmother sitting in a chair next to my bed, and I remember when Pastor Van from First Lutheran Church came to visit. I found it supremely odd that the church pastor would stop by the hospital to see me. I don’t remember a single word he said. I don’t even remember what he looked like. But I remember him being there. His presence, and my grandmother’s steady kindness, have left large and lasting imprints on the shape of my whole life. Two ordinary moments, with ordinary people, exercising ordinary kindness, are among the most durable memories I carry with me.
In these present days, when there is so much pain, and fear, and anger swirling in all directions and from all sides, it is so easy to get hooked into thinking that being a force for good and hope must involve big actions fueled by righteous anger. When I find myself going to that place, as I often do, when I get tricked into thinking following Jesus is about trying to win a battle rather than participate in God’s project to heal the world with love, it’s helpful to remember that my grandmother and Pastor Van helped shape my whole life by small, almost forgettable acts of gentle kindness.
In our reading from 2 Timothy this week, the writer urges us to “be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable.” If it feels like the world is falling apart, it’s because it is, and it nearly ever has been. Our work is not to stop it from falling apart. Our work is not to be the most right and impose a new order on the falling apart world. Our job, when the weather is good and when it is very bad, is to be persistent in gentle kindness. Our job is to keep showing up in our very small communities that are dedicated to showing up as God’s gentle kindness in the world. Jesus did not take the falling apart world by angry force. He met it, as he meets it still, with persistent gentle kindness. And the resurrection we affirm as real each and every Sunday settles forever that God’s persistent gentle kindness is the most powerful force in the universe.
The kingdom of God is not ours to engineer or to impose. Rather, just as the Lake Superior tributaries have carved out the canyons that hallow and transform yet another part of our beautiful Minnesota, so our persistent gentle kindness, through small communities over a long arc, when caught up in the resurrection’s power, will flood the whole earth, and make all things new through the glorious power of love.
Grace and Peace,
The Right Reverend Craig Loya
Bishop X
Episcopal Church in Minnesota
We Have Been Set Free
Oct. 10, 2025 07:40 Filed in: Commentaries
Beloved in Christ,
Like most people, I am at my worst when I believe I have something to prove. When I think I need to prove to others that I am smart enough, or good enough, or right enough, or likeable enough, or worthy of love, or whatever, then everyone who is different than me is a threat, every criticism is an attack, every disagreement is a battle I have to win. That gnawing feeling we all carry somewhere inside that we are deficient in some way is called shame, and when we live from this place, our whole life feels like a fight.
Our reading from 2 Timothy this week urges us to stand before God as “a worker who has no need to be ashamed.” The heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that we are loved, immeasurably and unimaginably, not because we have proven ourselves worthy, but simply because we have been created by the God who is infinite love.
To be sure, we are called to act morally, to live righteously, and to reflect holiness. But not in order to convince God and others that we are good enough. Our actions, like the Samaritan leper’s gratitude in this week’s gospel, are a response to what God has already done for us. We don’t act in order to win our freedom, we act because we have already been set free.
Our current culture and politics frames life as a binary battlefield with only winners and losers. It secures that field by constantly poking at the shame inside us. You don’t have enough. You haven’t done enough. The world, or the nation, or the church, or your family, would be fine if you just tried harder and did more. It’s all a lie. Following Jesus is about subverting that lie with the gospel of God’s limitless love.
If you are discouraged by the state of our nation, if you want to be a force for healing and good, then instead of just fighting harder in a world designed to lock us in perpetual warfare, try standing “before God as one approved by him. A worker who has no need to be ashamed.” Try starting each day, each conversation, each encounter in that place.
When we set down the struggle to secure some imagined freedom, and accept that we have already been set free, we find, finally, the power to join God in setting the whole word free with irresistible joy, with unshakable hope, and with revolutionary love.
Grace and Peace,
The Right Reverend Craig Loya
Bishop X
Episcopal Church in Minnesota
Don't Just Do Something...
Apr. 03, 2025 12:10 Filed in: Commentaries
Dearly Beloved,
In the gospel lesson appointed for this coming Sunday, Jesus and his disciples are gathered at the home of Lazarus a few days before Jesus's arrest. They are no doubt engaged in something that seems important, when Mary barges in with a jar of expensive and pungent perfume, anointing Jesus’ feet, and wiping them with her hair. It’s a scene of disorienting intimacy. The awkwardness in the room is palpable.
Judas raises the obvious objection: why would we waste something so expensive on such a weird and frivolous act, when the money could be given to the poor? There is work to be done, good to accomplish in the world, forces of evil to overcome. Let’s get on with it.
Like Judas, we often draw a hard line between action and contemplation. Especially during hard times, we tend to favor the former over the latter. Prayer is all well and good, we imagine, but action in the world is what really counts. We have to do something!
Mary’s interruption of a church meeting with an act of extravagant contemplation reminds us that the actions we take in the world will always be misguided unless they are grown in the soil of regular and intimate encounters with Jesus. Occasionally, we have to flip the injunction of “Don’t just stand there, do something!” to “Don’t just do something, stand there, with Jesus!”
Mary’s contemplative perfume is, of course, meant to transform the stink of death. And that’s where the false binary of prayer and action breaks down. We all know the world stinks of death, of injustice, of fear, and of suffering. The time we spend simply being with Jesus in prayer, and in our weekly worship, isn’t about accomplishing anything, or even making ourselves feel better. The time we spend in prayer is about being saturated in the perfume of God’s love, so that we render the scent of it wherever we go. Standing there, doing nothing with Jesus, is the only way we can ensure our acting in the world is really for Jesus, and not just imposing our own will. So beloved, in these late days of Lent, for the love of God, don’t just do something, stand there, with Jesus, until death’s hold on the world is fully and gloriously swallowed by God’s eternal Easter Day.
Grace and Peace,
The Right Reverend Craig Loya
Bishop X
Episcopal Church in Minnesota
In the gospel lesson appointed for this coming Sunday, Jesus and his disciples are gathered at the home of Lazarus a few days before Jesus's arrest. They are no doubt engaged in something that seems important, when Mary barges in with a jar of expensive and pungent perfume, anointing Jesus’ feet, and wiping them with her hair. It’s a scene of disorienting intimacy. The awkwardness in the room is palpable.
Judas raises the obvious objection: why would we waste something so expensive on such a weird and frivolous act, when the money could be given to the poor? There is work to be done, good to accomplish in the world, forces of evil to overcome. Let’s get on with it.
Like Judas, we often draw a hard line between action and contemplation. Especially during hard times, we tend to favor the former over the latter. Prayer is all well and good, we imagine, but action in the world is what really counts. We have to do something!
Mary’s interruption of a church meeting with an act of extravagant contemplation reminds us that the actions we take in the world will always be misguided unless they are grown in the soil of regular and intimate encounters with Jesus. Occasionally, we have to flip the injunction of “Don’t just stand there, do something!” to “Don’t just do something, stand there, with Jesus!”
Mary’s contemplative perfume is, of course, meant to transform the stink of death. And that’s where the false binary of prayer and action breaks down. We all know the world stinks of death, of injustice, of fear, and of suffering. The time we spend simply being with Jesus in prayer, and in our weekly worship, isn’t about accomplishing anything, or even making ourselves feel better. The time we spend in prayer is about being saturated in the perfume of God’s love, so that we render the scent of it wherever we go. Standing there, doing nothing with Jesus, is the only way we can ensure our acting in the world is really for Jesus, and not just imposing our own will. So beloved, in these late days of Lent, for the love of God, don’t just do something, stand there, with Jesus, until death’s hold on the world is fully and gloriously swallowed by God’s eternal Easter Day.
Grace and Peace,
The Right Reverend Craig Loya
Bishop X
Episcopal Church in Minnesota
Making Space for God
Mar. 05, 2025 13:51 Filed in: Commentaries | Spiritual Practice
Beloved in Christ,
Lent arrived with a blizzard that has now dispersed almost as quickly as it arrived. I woke up especially early this morning to get ready for a 7:30 am liturgy, and was just leaving the house when I got word of the decision to cancel. There I was, full of the adrenaline-fueled, frenetic energy that comes from trying to get out the door quickly, and suddenly I was forced to just stay put, and sit still. Now, after a few hours, the sun is peaking out, the wind is dying down, and it’s a new world compared to what things looked like this morning.
In just a few hours, Minnesota’s weather has given us the perfect pattern of the journey from Lent through Easter. The frenetic, anxious energy with which we so often approach our lives is rooted in a deeply disordered faith. We, like our original parents in the Garden of Eden, so often live our lives as if we are like God, as if the world depends on our efforts rather than God’s power and love. Human sinfulness, injustice and oppression, and the badness that so often marks our relationship all grows from our desire to possess, control, and force our will upon the world and the people around us.
Ash Wednesday’s reminder of our mortality, and Lent’s call to repentance, is an invitation rightly order our faith. It’s a time to remember that God is God, and we are not. Just like a good Minnesota blizzard, Lent forces us to stop, and to stay put for just a while. We cannot know God’s mighty power to save if we aren’t regularly making space for God in our hearts, lives, relationships, and calendars.
We can’t respond to God’s call in this season of government chaos, incoming injustice on all sides, uncertainty, and fear with more frenetic energy. We can’t live like it is up to us to save the world. Our actions will only be faithful if they are rooted deep in the soil of prayer. So as we travel these forty days waiting for God’s sun to emerge again, how can you heed Lenten’s blizzard call to sit still, to stay put, to dig deep into the soil of God’s power and love, so that together, we might bear the true and lasting Easter fruit of live, justice, peace, and everlasting joy?
Grace and Peace,
Bishop Craig Loya
Lent arrived with a blizzard that has now dispersed almost as quickly as it arrived. I woke up especially early this morning to get ready for a 7:30 am liturgy, and was just leaving the house when I got word of the decision to cancel. There I was, full of the adrenaline-fueled, frenetic energy that comes from trying to get out the door quickly, and suddenly I was forced to just stay put, and sit still. Now, after a few hours, the sun is peaking out, the wind is dying down, and it’s a new world compared to what things looked like this morning.
In just a few hours, Minnesota’s weather has given us the perfect pattern of the journey from Lent through Easter. The frenetic, anxious energy with which we so often approach our lives is rooted in a deeply disordered faith. We, like our original parents in the Garden of Eden, so often live our lives as if we are like God, as if the world depends on our efforts rather than God’s power and love. Human sinfulness, injustice and oppression, and the badness that so often marks our relationship all grows from our desire to possess, control, and force our will upon the world and the people around us.
Ash Wednesday’s reminder of our mortality, and Lent’s call to repentance, is an invitation rightly order our faith. It’s a time to remember that God is God, and we are not. Just like a good Minnesota blizzard, Lent forces us to stop, and to stay put for just a while. We cannot know God’s mighty power to save if we aren’t regularly making space for God in our hearts, lives, relationships, and calendars.
We can’t respond to God’s call in this season of government chaos, incoming injustice on all sides, uncertainty, and fear with more frenetic energy. We can’t live like it is up to us to save the world. Our actions will only be faithful if they are rooted deep in the soil of prayer. So as we travel these forty days waiting for God’s sun to emerge again, how can you heed Lenten’s blizzard call to sit still, to stay put, to dig deep into the soil of God’s power and love, so that together, we might bear the true and lasting Easter fruit of live, justice, peace, and everlasting joy?
Grace and Peace,
Bishop Craig Loya