Dear Saints and Sinners...

Today marks the official beginning of The Painted Word Studio.

I start from the ground — from the dust.

Just as God once gathered dust and breathed life into it, I begin with what is small, humble, and uncertain yet grounded. But unlike God, I have no infinite wisdom, no clear plan, no way of knowing if this will take form in the way my heart imagines. I only have faith — a stirring in my spirit, a restlessness in my bones, and a conviction that something new is being born.

Today is All Saints Day which feels fitting to try to start something new that honors the saints before me--those named and unnamed. I especially think to my closest ancestors like my Grandma Rosie who shared her belief in God and her own divine encounters without ever taking me into a church building. I grew up unchurched but with the oral traditions and teachings of the women in my family. While I grew up a "daddy's girl," I always noted the strength of the matriarchs that held us together.

However, this All Saints Day feels heavier. For one, I am preparing to speak at the funeral service of a pastor who loved God, "with every drop" of his being he once professed during a visit. The nursing home he built from the literal dirt, a call from God, and a shoestring budget is now where I serve part-time as a pastor. It feels emptier walking these halls now that he is gone.

Also, this week, I wept at my desk in the office of the church where I still serve full-time as pastor — the same congregation I’ve led since the pandemic began. Outside our doors sits a small wooden food pantry box, one that our congregation and community stocks for whoever may need it. Take what you need, leave what you can. My phone buzzed again and again that day, each alert from the security camera reminding me that someone had stopped by.

We installed the system for safety and privacy — not for surveillance or control — but what I see on that screen is a threat--not to our safety as a church but to our soul as a nation. I see faces. I see need. I see a constant stream of people — parents, elders, children, strangers — coming quietly, sometimes in the rain, sometimes under cover of night, to take what they need. And that need has never been greater in all the years we have kept that pantry stocked.

Every first Sunday of the month, our small congregation practices what I believe Jesus would want: to extend the table beyond ourselves and into the community. We bring our food pantry donations to the altar and bless them alongside the bread and the cup.

Communion, as theologian Willie James Jennings once wrote, is not “a middle-class snack.” It is not something we eat because we are so special behind the walls of the church in our assigned pew. No, it is an ordinary meal made extraordinary by the King of kings and Lord of lords — the One who humbled Himself into the ordinary, washes our dust covered feet, and says, "Take a seat."

It’s wild, isn’t it? How often we imitate the wealthy who lord over us instead of entering the discomfort of those Jesus called “the least of these”? But that’s the table I long for — not one set for power, but one shared with purpose.

Unlike other communion Sunday weekends, I find myself wrestling with the very act of communion itself because of the government shut down and the implications that is already having on our community. How do I raise bread to my lips while others go hungry? How do I preach abundance in a world where I watch scarcity play out on my phone screen? How do we eat the bread remembering it as the body of Christ and ignore His body, still broken in the streets outside our doors?

I have no easy answers. Maybe I’m not supposed to. Maybe All Saints Day is not about answers at all, but about remembering — the saints who walked before us, who dared to believe that holiness was found not in perfection but in compassion, not in power but in presence.

But today I also need to name something hard. For generations, the Church — across denominations and ages — has systematically shamed its body of believers. It has called you and me sinners-- unworthy and unclean, while Jesus Himself said the poor, the meek, the hungry, the persecuted are blessed. He walked with those the empire despised and the religious institution rejected: women, lepers, tax collectors, sex workers, refugees, and the forgotten. He lifted their heads, not to shame them, but to see them.

So this All Saints Day, I want to reclaim the everyday sainthood of the ordinary person--believer or not, you are beloved by the Divine from which you came. The Divine that sustains you from breath the breath with life. I want to remind the ones who hold faith while holding two jobs and still struggling to make ends me--remember your blessedness. The ones who give out of their lack. The ones who doubt but still show up. You all are saints. Not because you are perfect, and sure as hell not because some patriarchal system of corrupt power guised as church said you did enough for them to honor you, but because you keep loving in a world that makes it so hard to do so.

And to the sinners — not the struggling souls we all are, but the ones who hoard power, exploit people, and mistake privilege for blessing; those who harm others through greed and self-preservation, often hiding behind titles and systems— Jesus had words for you too:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)

This is one of the first scriptures I memorized before ever picking up a bible. My grandma Andrea taught me of it. And let’s not pretend it's a hyperbole. The same empire that crucified Christ still exists today — polished, modern, and profitable. And the church across the denominations is still in bed with it. The struggles everyday people face are not moral failures; they are manufactured burdens. The scarcity we experience isn't of God--it is of man. Creation has more than enough for us all to live well but some want to live in luxury beyond what anyone truly needs.

Scarcity, war, famine, illness....so much of it comes from the greed of elites — even those who parade their “humble beginnings” while hoarding wealth and influence. Perhaps they, more than any, will have to answer for the suffering they perpetuate.

What I’m doing here — this work, this writing, this art — is about revealing truth in the lies we’ve been sold, reforming faith for the people who’ve been left outside the walls of institutions that used the Word of God to shame and control them.

The Painted Word Studio LLC is about reclaiming that Word — spoken, painted, and lived — as liberation. And while I wanted it to be a church, I didn't want it to be an institution so I had to structure it differently as a small business that supports ministry. Like the tentmaker faith of Paul and the sharing of the gospel by Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth--I too want to form my life around spreading the good news without walls.

I don’t have all the answers. But I have a message, and so do you. Write to me. Tell me your story, your questions, your prayers, your anger, your hope. I will listen. I will pray. I will respond as faithfully as I can — sometimes privately, sometimes publicly (maintaining your privacy and concealing your identity), always with care.

📬 PO Box 13, Vandergrift, PA 15690

To the saints, thank you for lighting the way. To the sinners, you are beloved too and can make a difference in this world if you turn your heart towards God. To all of us, may this be the start of something holy and honest — a faith that lives in our hands, our art, and our acts of love.

Brightest blessings,

Rev. TJ