This sermon was given at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, Washington, D.C. on March 14, 2021, Laetare Sunday. John 3.14-21 (lectionary for the day here).
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Tag Archives: christianity
Gardens from Ruins
A sermon delivered at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Virginia, on Good Friday, 2019 (April 19).
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
The first time I visited London, England, nearly 50 years had passed since the end of World War II, but you could still see the scars. One of our teachers showed us small, ragged pockmarks in the sides of great lion sculptures along the Thames, where shell fragments had struck them. The Imperial War Museum and other sites narrate the violence of the battles and the violence of the Holocaust. German bombs fell on the city for six years, killing 30,000 people and destroying 70,000 buildings. The beloved dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral survived because teams of people remained at the church round the clock, chasing after and disposing of anything that fell on its roof. And even that St. Paul’s, if you go a few more centuries back in history, was reborn after its own destruction – the previous St. Paul’s, a massive Gothic structure, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 – the one we know was designed by the architect Christopher Wren, who re-visioned not only the churches but the very layout of London itself in the years following that great disaster.
The Stars Singing: An Advent Meditation
This reflection was written for the 2018 half-day retreat at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Christiansburg, Va. The Ann-Frances Chapter of the Daughters of the King holds this quiet day every Advent and Lent. The first meditation for the retreat, “Voice, Music, Prayer,” can be found here.
Creator of the stars of night,
your people’s everlasting light
O Christ, Redeemer of us all,
we pray you hear us when we call.
When this old world drew on toward night,
you came, but not in splendor bright,
not as a monarch, but the child
of Mary, blameless mother mild. continue reading.
Voice, Music, Prayer: An Advent Meditation
This reflection was written for the 2018 half-day retreat at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Christiansburg, Va. The Ann-Frances Chapter of the Daughters of the King holds this quiet day every Advent and Lent. The second meditation for the retreat, “The Stars Singing,” can be read here.
I have a friend who is an operatic soprano. A few years ago, one Christmas Eve in Memphis, Tennessee, 12 hours’ drive from where I was born and from where my parents and sister and niece and nephew gathered to celebrate Christmas without me, I stood in the side chapel of a darkened, candlelit church, listening to her sing “O Holy Night,” and I wept. That’s what her voice can do.