Choice and Compassion As a priest, I have opportunities to meet with people in the very most difficult times in their lives, times when they are struggling and seeking to make decisions that hopefully will lead to health and wholeness. Compassion and understanding are so important as people share the difficulties they are dealing […]
Beneficiaries Most rectors make a mistake when we come to a church. We come in and act like nothing good has been accomplished before our arrival. In our efforts to spur growth and chart our course of leadership, we talk about our new initiatives and the changes we are going to institute. Changes are […]
Belonging We all want to belong. Life is hard and dangerous and lonely. We yearn for a safe place where we can feel connected. When we do realize that there is a force in life larger than us that cares for us we feel that we belong. Then we feel that something larger than us […]
Faith Hurts A mother of a young boy came home one day to find the family cat dead in the back yard. She wasn’t sure just what had happened. It looked like maybe a dog had gotten the cat but it was very much dead and she decided to go ahead and bury the cat […]
Easter – The Eternal Christ Jesus doesn’t become the Christ. Christ becomes the Jesus. We talk a lot about grace in the Episcopal Church but do we really believe it? Face it. At some level you probably think that those who are good get rewarded with heaven and those who are bad are punished […]
Now and Not Yet We belong to heaven but we live on earth for this time. We are souls but we have a body. Spread throughout Christian teaching, and particularly focused at Easter, is the proclamation that we are saved by the blood of Christ on the Cross. Because of God’s mighty acts, not our […]
Holy Week 2019 Palm Sunday – April 14 Passion Narrative and Eucharist at 7:30 am * Breakfast and Christian Formation Classes * Children’s Procession of Palms, Passion Narrative and Eucharist at 10:30 am * Monday in Holy Week – April 15 Eucharist in Chapel at 12:05 pm Tuesday in Holy Week – April 16 […]
Hard Decisions Some decisions are harder than others. In life we do our very best to make good decisions and then we seek to carry out our decisions. We tend to think that good decisions will bring about peace and calm but sometimes they don’t. In making decisions, it is best to seek peace […]
Open and Shut God keeps opening things. And we keep shutting them. In the Old Testament we hear the stories of Israel being chosen by God to receive blessing and fruitfulness. Repeatedly, when things seemed impossible or beyond hope, God opened their world and provided for them abundantly. As Israel lived with that specific blessing, […]
Options In the 1930s the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote what has come to be known as the Serenity Prayer. The shorter form of the prayer focuses our attention on things beyond and within our control: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, […]