I am holding up for you the two books that we turn to the most in this community of faith along the journey: The Holy Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. Each of these books has lots of language and imagery that in some ways are not very familiar to us…
Today I would like to reflect with you upon relationship. You might expect that I would reflect upon our relationship with God…
I wonder if many of you have seen the holiday animated film called Gotta Catch Santa Claus? It’s several years old and has a real catchy theme song: “he’s on his way in a super cool sleigh” and “gotta find proof that he’s on the roof”. For those who don’t know the adolescent girl lead doesn’t believe in Santa and the boy lead wants to catch Santa to prove it to her…
There’s a lot of context for today. First of all today is the biggest single outreach day of St. Paul’s in our entire calendar year. Today with the gifts that you’ve brought and the gifts that were brought at the earlier service and the gifts that were brought all last week from people who couldn’t be here today, over 480 tags were taken off of the St. Nicholas Tree. I can’t imagine all the thousands of dollars that 480 tags, each one representing sometimes more than one gift or a really large gift, the amount of money that that is…
In J.K. Rowling’s first book called The Sorcerer’s Stone the hero of the story, Harry Potter, at the age of eleven and in his first year of boarding school finds himself, by accident, in a nearly empty room with a 7-foot free-standing mirror. He is hiding from a professor and the school janitor so he has to lay low for a few minutes…
I will always remember hearing my mother’s voice saying, “What is this world coming to?” When I was a teenager and a young adult I smiled when I heard her say that because I was thinking, “she just can’t keep up with the changing times.”…
This morning we have two lessons from the Old Testament and from the Gospel that are about God’s provision. So I’d like to explore those two lessons and think about what it means that God will provide. I have to confess to you from the outset that the times in my life when I have been in challenging and difficult circumstances and someone has stepped up and said, “Don’t worry, God will provide;” that hasn’t really been a great comfort to me…
Have you ever been caught up in a time when everything was moving faster than you could track and you felt like things could fall apart at any minute and maybe like you are hanging on for dear life? Probably it’s just me … I don’t know, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to this day today, with the week I have had. You know how much I love my job, and of course the danger of loving what I do so much is doing too much…
I would like to paint three images, or pictures from our lessons today. I believe that they have a common theme … reminding us that we are heirs – that we are children of God, reminding us that we can indeed encounter God in our lives, even bear the fruit of God’s blessings in our world, and finally, and most especially in our Gospel lesson, reminding us that indeed, all of us are God’s children, the wheat and weeds together, and that God asks us to wait for our encounters with God, to wait when things go wrong, to wait for the blessings of God which indeed will come to us…
About a month ago a very dear friend of mine, a clergyman, got in touch with me to let me know that the baby his wife has been carrying for 20 weeks has spina bifida. Some of you may know Joe and Sarah Hensley. BJ, our former associate here, and Joe were in high school together and I have known Joe since my first work in this Diocese in 1995…