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: episcopal
Being the Resurrection: An Easter Reflection
Just imagine.
They thought the world had ended. Everything they believed had fallen apart. The man they trusted, the man they followed, leaving their families and work behind, had died, and it was not a dignified or gentle death. They were unable to comfort him as he left. They mourned. They were afraid, hiding behind closed doors, unsure if they would be next. People gossiped. A poor man, a good man, had died, and the powers that be were ok with that. The world was dark. There were earthquakes.
This was not the plan.
And then, Sunday morning. Just imagine. A garden, blooming with flowers, shining and green, and a woman, alone, grieving, walking in that bright place, perhaps thinking how strange it was to see such beauty and feel such sadness, to be surrounded by life and growth when Jesus was dead. continue reading.
Sunday to Sunday: Finishing the First Week
So an entire week has passed at seminary and it feels a bit like a year, in a good way. All of the first-year students (including M.Div., M.A. and Anglican Studies folks) have started a month earlier than the rest of VTS, “nesting,” “orientating” (including figuring out the online learning system and the best way to get to the grocery store without a car), making various Hogwarts references and jumping into our first classes.
The first stretch of the journey!
Well, we’re off! One packed minivan left Roanoke on Wednesday evening to begin the journey to school. This past Sunday was my last Sunday at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal, and Wednesday my last full day at St. John’s Episcopal.
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.
Dissonance and the Hope of Harmony
A “dissonant day.” That’s what the Reverend Barbara Kay Lunblad, a Lutheran pastor who’s taught at Yale, Princeton and Union Theological Seminary, calls today – a “dissonant” day of clashing images, one “big and powerful, the other small and poor.”
This is a day like the chord you just heard, made up of notes that aren’t in harmony with one another. Christ the King Sunday tells part of the violent end-and-not-end of Christ’s story, just before we begin to tell the beginning of it, this Sunday before Advent.
A Deep Trinity of Days: Maundy Thursday reflection
Just four days ago, on Palm Sunday, we read the story of Christ’s betrayal and death. We took on the voices of Pilate, of Judas, of Peter, of Christ, of the crowds. We stepped into roles in the narrative, adding our voices to a story that began in adoration and ended in sadness, even in dread, moving from Hosanna to Kyrie, from the soft green of palm branches to the rough wood of the crucifixion tree.