Galatians 5:1,13-25
As I was gathering some thoughts about today’s readings last week I found myself focusing on our epistle reading for today which we will pretend Mary just read. I was focusing on the letter to the Galatians and also on the upcoming Independence Day holiday. I started thinking about the many connotations that these words freedom and liberty have taken on…
Acts 11:1-18
As long as I have been here at St. Paul’s Church, about 30 years I think, I have had the distinction of being the only member of the clergy staff with a southern accent. It isn’t quite as pronounced as it was years ago when I was growing up in Piedmont, North Carolina…
Luke 2:[1-7]8-20
Many years ago when I was attending a conference in New York City I had a chance to join a group of friends and about five or six thousand other people at Radio City Music Hall on a Saturday evening for the annual Radio City Christmas spectacular …
Mark 13:1-8
This morning I want to invite us to consider a hypothetical question, a question that some of us may have pondered before. The question is this: if you were stranded all alone on a desert island and could have only one book with you, what would it be? …
Tonight our Lenten journey is nearly over. The last leg of the journey began last Sunday as we reenacted Jesus’ triumphant procession into Jerusalem accompanied by cheering crowds. Today it ends with a different kind of procession…
The more Christmases I celebrate the more I am convinced that Christmas is for poets. One of my favorite Christmas poems was written almost a century and a half ago by a man named Phillips Brooks. At the time, Brooks was rector of Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia, and he wrote this poem for his Sunday School class, having been inspired by a visit he made to Bethlehem a few years earlier…
“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” This saying of Jesus from today’s Gospel reading is so familiar to some of us that no matter how it is read we tend to hear it in the King James version: “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are Gods…”
When I was preparing for ordination about 30 years ago, I spent what was known as an Anglican year at the Virginia Seminary in Alexandria. In order to gain experience I assisted with Sunday services at St. Dunstan’s in Bethesda, MD. One of my duties was to give the children’s homily at the family service. So Saturday afternoons would often find me in the children’s section of the seminary library, looking for inspiration for something to say that would hold a child’s attention even for a few minutes…
A little over a week ago I got a phone call from my brother John who lives in Tennessee with his wife Susan and their eight yeard old daughter Rachael. John called to say that they were flying to RDU on Sunday and driving to the Outer Banks the next day and could we get together during their stopover? He also told me that Rachael had just finished a week of Vacation Bible School…
In last week’s Gospel reading we rejoiced with Mary Magdelene as she discovered the empty tomb on Easter morning and ran to tell the other disciples, only to encounter Jesus himself on the way. As today’s Gospel reading begins, it is evening on the same day and the disciples, minus Thomas, are huddled behind locked doors…