Friends,
This week began with Peter trying to talk Jesus out of the Cross.
It ended with me attempting to earn permission to attend a family barbecue by producing enough bricks for Pharaoh.
In between, we met two unnamed Christian women whose courage outlived the Roman governor who had them tortured. We watched a small and vulnerable movement become the Church. We asked why a loving God should be feared. We took the saints down from their marble pedestals long enough to notice the road beneath their feet. Finally, we admitted that many exhausted people do not need another lecture about self-care. They need another nurse on the unit, an evening without medical charts, a living wage, or a Church that remembers priests are human beings rather than Swiss Army knives wearing collars.
The subjects looked different, but a single truth kept turning up.
God has never waited for perfect material.
He builds with people who are frightened, tired, impulsive, wrong, brave, generous, confused, and still becoming. He does not ask us to perform the role of people who have arrived. He asks us to follow Christ from where we actually are.
Sometimes that means accepting the cost of love. Sometimes it means allowing holy awe to put us back in our proper place. Sometimes it means taking the next faithful step after failure.
And sometimes, brothers and sisters, the next faithful step is to sit down.
A Brief Word of Gratitude
This community crossed 3 percent paid support this week.
That may look like a small number on a screen, but it represents real people deciding that this ministry deserves the time, independence, research, and production required to keep growing. Your support helped us produce a deeply researched second podcast episode, keep these reflections open to everyone, and apparently conquer Norway, where the podcast briefly reached number 68 in Christianity on Apple Podcasts.
We take our international victories where the Lord sends them.
Our sustainability goal remains 10 percent, which means we still have a ways to go. But I have faith in you guys.
If you have the means to kick in ten bucks, I really hope you’ll make today the day.
I made what business-minded people would consider a very stupid decision. I chose to run a newsletter with no ads and no sponsorships, even though the platforms that evaluate publications for sponsorships give this space their highest possible ratings. We have no large donors and no institutional or denominational financial support.
Nearly everything here will remain free because I will not put the Gospel behind a paywall.
So, if you’re doing the business math, you’ll see that leaves just you and me, together spreading the Gospel as faithfully as possible and having a little fun along the way.
I’ll just say it plainly, that means I need your help.
If money is tight, please stay without a flicker of guilt. Your reading, prayers, comments, and shares are real contributions to this ministry.
If you have room to become a paid Supporting Contributor, I would be deeply grateful if you joined us today.
Support Message From the Margins
Your Brother in Christ,
This Week at Message From the Margins
A Little Nudge Toward Calvary
Peter loves Jesus. That is precisely why he pulls Him aside and tries to prevent Him from walking toward Jerusalem.
Jesus’ reply sounds severe until we notice what Peter is offering: a mission without sacrifice, a Messiahship without the Cross, and a way of following God that never interferes with the life we already planned to live.
The Cross is not whatever hurts. It is not abuse, mistreatment, a seasonal flu, or the long line at Starbucks. The Cross is the cost of faithfulness. Love costs time. Truth costs approval. Generosity costs money. Forgiveness costs pride. Discipleship costs us the fantasy that we can follow Jesus without ever allowing Him to rearrange our priorities.
Read A Little Nudge Toward Calvary
Episode II: How Did the Church Become the Church?
About eighty years after the crucifixion of Jesus, a Roman governor had two enslaved Christian women tortured because he believed their bodies might reveal the movement’s secrets. History did not preserve their names. It preserved only the title he used for them and the question their lives leave behind:
How did we get from Jesus walking the roads of Galilee to this?
Episode II follows that small movement into homes, cities, persecutions, meals, baptisms, arguments, ministries, and eventually the beginnings of the Church we recognize today. It is full of history and theology, but it is finally a story about people trying to make their faith durable enough to hand to another generation.
Your early responses made the long nights worthwhile. Mary said the history came alive and gave new meaning to what happens when she goes to church. Christy said it helped her feel more fully part of the Catholic faith. Even my bishop, who holds a doctorate in history, watched the whole episode before I woke up and said kind things.
Apparently, Father survived peer review.
If you have not watched yet, pour something good, press play, and come with me. If you have watched, please send it to one person who loves Church history, has questions about Christianity, or has been trying to separate Jesus from the institution that carries His name.
Watch Episode II: How Did the Church Become the Church?
You Do Not Have to Be Perfect to Follow Christ
We have done the saints no favors with all that marble.
Stone makes holiness look unnervingly tidy. The statues rarely show Peter putting his foot in his mouth, Paul pressing toward a goal he admits he has not reached, or the Corinthians behaving so badly that an apostle has to write them a very long letter.
Yet Paul still calls them saints.
Sainthood was their vocation before it was their achievement. They belonged to Christ, and then they had to learn how to live as people who belonged to Christ.
That is the road for the rest of us too. Perfectionism asks whether we look holy. Holiness asks what love requires now. Shame freezes us in a verdict. Repentance gives us somewhere to go.
Some days we stride. Some days we limp. Sometimes we discover that we have taken a long and stubborn detour. Christ is not standing at the finish line with crossed arms. He is on the road.
The marble came later. First came the road.
Read You Do Not Have to Be Perfect to Follow Christ
From the Archives
What If Sin Is About More Than Rules?
Many Christians were taught lists of sins. Far fewer were taught what sin means, why God cares about it, or how it belongs within a faith centered on love, mercy, and human flourishing.
This reflection asks us to move beyond a God who seems preoccupied with catching violations and toward a deeper question: What damages communion with God, our neighbors, creation, and the person we are becoming?
That is a useful companion to this week’s reminder that holiness is not spotless performance. It is a life being healed, redirected, and brought more fully into love.
Read What If Sin Is About More Than Rules?
In the Week Ahead
Work continues on Episode III of the Message From the Margins podcast, The Stone Which the Builders Rejected.
This time, we are leaving institutional history long enough to meet people Scripture places near the margins: Mephibosheth at the king’s table, Rahab inside a collapsing city, the woman Jesus calls daughter, Dismas beside the Cross, and the Ethiopian eunuch asking whether there is any reason he should remain outside the water.
These are not decorative little lessons about kindness. God builds with them.
Together, their lives ask a question the Church must never stop asking: What if the person respectable builders rejected is one of the living stones Christ intends to place near the center?
Get Excited! Episode III of the Message From the Margins Podcast hits Monday!
And Let Us Pray…
God of apostles, workers, frightened believers, and unfinished saints,
Thank You for building Your Church with ordinary people.
When we confuse holiness with performance, lead us back to the road.
When fear makes us hide from You, replace terror with the awe that draws us near.
When love asks something costly of us, give us courage to follow Christ.
When failure leaves us ashamed, give us grace to repent, rise, and take the next faithful step.
When work consumes the hours meant for life, teach us to remember that we were beloved before we produced anything.
Protect every person carrying an unreasonable load. Give rest to the exhausted, dignity to the worker, help to the caregiver, companionship to the lonely, and justice to those whose labor is treated as disposable.
Make room in Your Church for the people others overlook. Keep Christ as our Cornerstone, and form us into living stones of mercy, courage, truth, and welcome.
Amen.
How Can We Pray for You?
What are you carrying into the coming week?
Perhaps you need courage to accept the cost of doing what is right. Perhaps you are trying to return after a failure. Perhaps you are exhausted, grieving, frightened, or simply unsure what the next faithful step looks like.
Leave your prayer request in the comments. If you see another person’s request, please pause and pray for them before moving on. I gather these prayers into the leather-bound book I carry with me, and they are remembered at Mass and when I pray the Office.
No one in this community should have to carry the whole load alone.
If one of this week’s pieces gave language to something someone you love has been carrying, please send it to them. A simple “This made me think of you” can become a small act of grace.
If you know someone who might find a little hope, encouragement, or holy mischief here, please share Message From the Margins with them. Personal invitations are still the best way this ministry grows, one reader and one slightly bewildered Norwegian at a time.
If you’re a free reader and have the means to kick in ten bucks, I hope you’ll become a supporting member today. It keeps Message From the Margins independent, ad-free, and available to everyone. Together, we can spread the Gospel, have a little fun, and perhaps continue our slow but determined conquest of Norway.