Author Archives: Tay Moss
About Tay Moss
Priest, blogger, diplomat: Tay Moss helps people navigate God's crazy universe with humor, good food, and an occasional idea. He is leading his congregation (Messiah, Toronto) through major transition as they launch a fresh expression of church. His professional interests include missional church, new media, and the mysterious arts of the priesthood such as manual acts and cassock-wearing. In spirituality: a monastic. In management: a skipper. At home: a cook. A man with too many hobbies, Tay also finds himself sailing, cooking, watching TV, producing videos, brewing, and building canoes. He can be followed on twitter (@taymoss), pinterest (wtaymoss), youtube (taymossninjapriest), and facebook (tay.moss).4th Sunday After Pentecost: ask “who” not “what”
God is not reducible to the stuff that happens or the things we have. God is primarily revealed to us as three divine persons with whom we relate, and our bias toward a functional, transactional, doing-God moves us away from an abiding, loving, being-God. “Who is this?” should be our go-to existential query. Continue reading
Easter 7: the ones who were given
Just try understanding yourself as a gift the Father has given to the Son and vice-versa for a second. A precious heirloom given and given again as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace of intra-trinitarian love. Usually when we think of gifts given by God we think of vertical variety: stuff coming down to us. But this horizontal transaction suggests something about the nature of the economy of the trinity which should fascinate and tantalize us. Continue reading
Lent 4 – The cruciform church
Preach Christ crucified. Preach also the church crucified and resurrected by God’s grace. For it is only when we conform the Church to the image of the True Cross that we can, with Jesus, be lifted up. Continue reading
Last Sunday of Epiphany – Things Transfigured and not Transfigured
The truth is that we don’t know why God shows himself in great glory to some people and not to others, but we do know that there is nothing we can do to cause or earn such encounters. They happen or they don’t. And sermons which make people feel guilty or in any way inadequate because they don’t should be avoided at all cost. So should sermons that attempt to recreate the Jesus light. Instead, we should focus on what we can affect, which is not what we see, but how we see it. Continue reading
Advent 4: it all comes tumbling down
The lectionary path through Advent B feels like a four-sided die skittering across a board game. It tumbles through the four-facets in the order of Mark-Mark-John-Luke-Matthew. Each possible landing leads to a very different past and thus a very different future. Continue reading
Pentecost 19: Jesus Rifles
Rendering the tax is now, ironically, a gesture of rejection rather than acquiescence. “Here is your dirty blood money,” Jesus says, “and you are welcome to it.” The currency of the realm (cash, lives taken by violence, whatever) is counterfeit in The Kingdom’s economy. We should hand them over with as much disregard as we would monopoly money given to children. Continue reading
Pentecost 15: The Gollum gap
Preach the gap between our aspirations and our reality: the Gollum Gap. Gollum, the character from The Lord of the Rings who obsesses over the precious magical ring like all of us–seduced by our dreams of what we want. It doesn’t matter whether that desire is for a sailboat, a watch, a peace park, or an end to cancer. The truth is that our covetousness distorts our view of reality. Continue reading
Pentecost 12: a short, sharp, smack
The satanic temptation is to forget that following Jesus means leaving other things behind. Part of the price of costly grace is abandoning false ideologies no matter how satisfying or comfortable they might feel. Instead of jumping to the defense of his ideas about the what of Jesus, Peter should have just shut the hell up (literally) and listened. Continue reading
Pentecost 9: rowing in the storm
Where this Gospel story goes sideways for me is when Jesus shows up. This is even more terrifying to the disciples than the storm! The truth is that for many of us the hard labor in the storm is actually a more comfortable reality than encountering the awesome power of Jesus to master those forces. Continue reading
6th Sunday after Pentecost: tell it slant
I think the structure of the universe has something interesting to say about how we get to the centre of things. I contend that our efforts to point squarely in one direction and say, “there, that’s the centre/truth/origin” will never be anything more than a gesture at a guess of an approximation of an estimate. Yet there is another way. Continue reading
