We have a special guest who’s going to be with us this morning, and taking that into consideration I’d like to share with you only a few thoughts, kind of a “homilette.” He’s certainly an odd kind of figure: John the Baptist. If you think about John the Baptist as we just heard in the Gospel reading, we have certain images in our mind. Oftentimes John is portrayed as being in the desert, oftentimes standing in a river, sometimes holding a staff, oftentimes wearing what looks like animal skins. He’s depicted in our gospel reading today as eating locusts and wild honey…

So you may ask, “Why are we reading about the crucifixion of Jesus in our Gospel today, the week before Thanksgiving, a little over four weeks until Christmas? What does this crucifixion story have to do with where we find ourselves? Isn’t this more of a Gospel reading we hear on Good Friday or somewhere around Easter time? Why are we reading it in November?” I’d like to talk a little about that; why the church gives us this reading today…

Sally was scheduled to preach this morning but she has caught that cold that seems to be going around, so we agreed that it would be better for her to stay home today. So to use a baseball image, we’re calling in a lefty from the bullpen and I’m coming to the mound here. I can’t assure that I have my fastball, but I’ll do my best to get it over the plate. I’d like to offer a couple of reflections from this gospel reading from Luke. It’s not the most comforting words in the world. Luke is writing at a time, probably in the eighties, when a real tragedy had occurred. That was the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, probably around 70 or 72 AD…

Happy Feast Day! Today is the day we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, which actually was Monday but in the Episcopal tradition we celebrate that feast the Sunday following unless the Feast Day falls on a Sunday. This Feast of All Saints: it’s a day where we remember the call we all have to be saints and remind ourselves that a saint is not just someone who has gone into eternal life, but we too are called to be saints. The idea is that you don’t become a saint by dying, you become a saint by living…

I would like to thank my daughter Rebecca for introducing me to a book and also literally introducing me to the author of the book. My daughter is a freshman at UNC Charlotte, and there was a book that was required reading for her course in “Global Connections.” The book is called The Blue Sweater. It was on the New York Times Best Seller List. It was written by Jacqueline Novogratz. It’s a story that she tells about her life. I’d like to tell you the story of the blue sweater…