A Positively Poetic Priest

Look up! (point up) My number one pet peeve about action and horror movies is that when people go into a room,  concerned about the enemy jumping them,  they never look up. And so many times that is where the people are hiding, on the ceiling or up above the door or whatever.  We don't look up.  I've heard that Bishop Sean, when he was here,  never noticed that the ceiling in the priest's office is sparkly. Apparently, he never looked up. When you go outside at night, do you ever look up  and stay a moment in awe and wonder.  Stars by day and stars by night,  God provides us light. Beyond our physical world,  Even in the darkness of our own minds,  we have a tendency to look down. I see this psycho-somatically,  when people are upset and troubled,  they are always looking down.  At the ground.  While there are plenty of marvelous things on the ground, that's not u...

Say Cheese! This coming Sunday is Social Media Sunday across the Episcopal Church, and in some other denominations. What is Social Media Sunday? It is a day for churches to highlight their gifts, members, and worship together by posting on social media websites to share the Good News of Christ with the world. Using the hashtag #sms18, churches all across the country will be sharing who they are with pictures, posts, and video. Here at St. John's and Grace, we have lots of gifts, members, and worship moments to share. We are going to participate in Social Media Sunday in a couple of ways. First, during the announcements time during both services, I will take a selfie of the congregation to post on our social media sites. Second, we are going to remind and encourage you to post on your social media sites about your time at St. John's or Grace and share your experience with others. Third, we are going to have a laptop in the Parish Hall open to our social media websites for ...

"The earth and everything in it, the world and its inhabitants, belong to the Lord." – Psalm 24:1 We have many many possessions. We think we possess them. However, everything in the world belongs to God, and we are only stewards of them. We come into this world as we leave this world, with nothing except ourselves. We cannot change our eternal lives by storing up possessions. In reality, the more we have, the more we are possessed by our possessions. As we come into the season of our Stewardship campaign, it is good to reflect on how much God has given us and how much of what we have is a gift. In the Jewish tradition, the understanding of what we give back to God is very clearly spelled out. We are to give God, through the Temple, the first tenth of all our harvest, our income, and our gifts. Yet, when Jesus comes and teaches the people, he doesn't specify how much or what percentage we are to give. He teaches that we should share out of a thankful heart. For those...

Everliving God, whose will it is that all should come to you through your Son Jesus Christ: Inspire our witness to him, that all may know the power of his forgiveness and the hope of his resurrection; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (BCP 816) Simply the word Evangelism usually leaves a dry feeling in the mouth of Episcopalians. "Go tell someone about Jesus? Isn't that for the Baptists or the Evangelicals?" Yes, it is for them to do, but it is also for us to do. Part of fulfilling our call as Christians is by sharing our stories of relationship with Jesus with other people. Jesus specifically tells his disciples to go out into the world and share, to tell other people and to have them tell other people. Jesus created not a religious institution, but a movement. Evangelism isn't about gathering more people into our church or converting people into Episcopalians, however much we might think that. Evangelism i...

Someone on the Internet is Wrong! Almost every conceivable opinion has been voiced on the internet. The internet has become like many other things in our lives, useful for both positive and negative uses, a tool in abuse and a tool in great educational and emotional triumph. Some churches have found themselves pushing back against the idea of using social media to share the Gospel proclamation. Other churches embrace social media as a medium through which new people can be reached. After all, there aren't that many people left without some kind of social media account. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Skype, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tumblr...   there is a social media site for everyone. Some people aren't against using social media for church business, but are definitely against using social media in church! How can the community worship while people are distracted with their phones? However, we can argue, no matter what, people are going to get distracte...

Easter Sunday Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia! The end is just the beginning. The gospel passage we hear this morning is the end of the oldest version of the gospel of Mark.  If you happened to pull out a Bible right now, you'd probably find two other endings, passages which try to give the gospel of Mark a conclusion and add on additional stories, those two other endings have been added on through the years because people felt that this ending was somehow unsatisfactory or unfinished. It is unfinished. The end of Mark is deliberately open-ended. Obviously, the women did eventually tell their story  or else it would have never been written down. But the hearers of this story are supposed to finish the story themselves.  The end of this story, the women finding an angel in the tomb instead of Jesus is really just the beginning of a long amazing story which shares what happens after Jesus' ...

After a couple of years of working for St. Gregory's food pantry, Sara Miles describes how her sense of mission changed. "My only sense of "mission" now was to show others that they, too, could feed and touch and heal and love, without fear. To catch them up in the desire to see more, taste more, without caring if they got a doctrine right or became a regular at my church. To get them walking, without the safety net of ritual correctness, along the path that Jesus blazed and to share the feast of their lives with others." (266)