Luke 2:1-20 In the summer of 1992, I was blessed to go to the Barcelona Olympics, to serve as an editor at that great sporting and cultural events. To do my job properly, I had to lug along one whole extra suitcase filled with reference books not for sports, but for the world – because this was in the days before the Internet, when Google wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s mind. The summer of 1992 was the culmination of some of the wildest three years in history. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Germanies were united, and the Soviet Union had collapsed. … [Read more...]
Suck it up! Deal with it!
December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Mark 1:1 Good old Mark – he never misses a chance to beat us over the head with the obvious, does he? I once sat in a theology class with one of the most respected theologians of the Church, Bishop Mark Dyer, shortly after he came to Virginia Seminary. “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” he intoned. We all looked at him blankly. “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” he repeated, giving us one of his sterner looks. More blank looks. “Who said that?” he asked. Even more blank stares. “Which Gospel … [Read more...]
Now thank we all our God …
December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment
In the early 1600s, Europe was torn asunder by the Thirty Years’ War, a war that began because of religious intolerance between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire and devolved into a power play involving most of the European powers. It was one of the most destructive wars ever in European history.[1] The walled city of Eilenburg, Saxony, was a flash-point in that war. The town changed hands repeatedly, and was filled with refugees fleeing the destruction. Toward the end of the war, in 1636, Swedish forces laid … [Read more...]
Tales from the communion of saints …
November 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Today is All Saints’ Sunday, the day when we celebrate the saints of God who have gone before us, the saints of God who are among us still, and the saints of God that we hope to be. And what better way to celebrate the saints than to tell stories about them? Our first story took place two weeks ago near Doswell, Va. For those of you who don’t know where that is, think Kings Dominion. On Sunday, Oct. 23, an 8-year-old boy, Robert Wood Jr., visited the North Anna Battlefield Park near King’s Dominion with his family. Robert, severely autistic and unable to communicate with others, … [Read more...]
Why not??
October 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Philippians 4:1-9 OK, it is true confession time: How many of you have something that Steve Jobs created? ... How many of you have something that Steve Jobs created? iTunes? An iPod? An iPhone? An iMac? A MacBook? An iPad? Isn’t it amazing how ubiquitous those little things are? In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company that he had co-founded with Steve Wozniak, the company that had fired him, and within a few years of his return, our world was a different place. First he gave us the iPod, that magical little device that carried thousands of our songs. Two years … [Read more...]
Define yourself …
October 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Philippians 3:4b-14 Who are you? Who are you? How do you define yourself? When I was a child, back in the ‘60s (and yes, I’m telling you my age now) we used to define ourselves by our ethnicity … who was Irish, who was Italian, who was French, who was English. And while we might have been nice about the terms we used to define ourselves, we certainly were not nice when it came to defining others. By the time I was 7, I think I knew every derogatory term out there. You name an ethnicity, and I knew the name. And I used it. Because that’s what we did in those … [Read more...]
We are the link …
September 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
John 14:6-15 When Bonnie asked me to come here to preach on the Feast of St. Augustine, I started looking for stories about your patron saint. Most of stories I found are ones you already know, but there is one story that dates back to his youth, when his mother, Monica, wanted him to embrace the Christian faith in which he was raised and become a priest. Augustine, we all know, had other ideas. The official biographies, which I think you well know, tell the story of how he left home to teach rhetoric. The unofficial biography … [Read more...]
Gospel-worthy
September 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Philippians 1:21-30 The House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church is meeting in Quito, Ecuador, this week. One hundred and sixteen bishops from the 109 dioceses spread out over 16 nations have gathered to pray, to learn … and to think … One thing they were asked to think about came from Don Compier, a liberation theologian who recounted to the bishops a recent conversation he had had. Compier told them that “he was recently asked by someone in another denomination: ‘If you care about the poor, why are you an Episcopalian? Aren’t you just interested … [Read more...]
Extravagant forgiveness, extravagant love
September 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Matthew 18:21-22 How many of you have found yourself weeping this week? How many of you have found yourself turning off your televisions and radios, turning past stories in the newspaper, skipping the Facebook comments … … because you just can’t go there again? Ten years after the horrible tragedies of 9/11, many of us, myself included, are still filled with grief. We have moved on from the immediate shock, from the numbness, from the piercing pain that came with the attacks. But we are still filled with grief. • • • This morning’s Gospel lesson from Matthew … [Read more...]
You are invited to the dance … whatchya gonna do?
September 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The keynote address at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, College Park, Md., at their Homecoming Dinner, 10 September 2011. A story from the 2nd century after Christ, of two monks in the Egyptian desert: A disciple went to Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I am able, I keep my little rule, my little fast and my little prayer. I strive to cleanse my mind of all evils thoughts and my heart of all evil intents. Now, what more should I do?”Abba Joseph rose up and stretched his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He answered, “Why not be transformed … [Read more...]
