Members of our adult Sunday School class are accustomed to our habit of treating written prayers as exercises in theological discourse. That is, dissecting them to discern what they say we believe about God.  A principle of Anglican theology is the Latin phrase lex orandi lex credendi , "the law of praying is the law of believing", which is to say that if you want to know our theology, all you need to do is look at what we do and say and sing and pray when we gather for worship. That reveals our theology as a praying institution [our real theology of course is what we do in daily life, how and whether we work at living out our Baptismal Covenant, in particular our promise to Strive for Justice and Peace among All People, and to Respect the Dignity of Every Human Being]. Our class sessions begin with the Collect for the Day, and we often pause to examine the prayer and work out its theology, what it says we believe about God. The prayer's petition can be revealing, but par...

Monday of Fourth of July week: the Fourth is on Saturday, so does the nation take as holiday Friday the Third or Monday the Sixth?  What makes sense is to take this entire week off, and next week too, which being retired I can do out here on 7H porch. Seeing covid19 rising angrily like some horror film monster to come stumbling back and resume beating up on us, we'll continue  keeping distance anyway.  Many families take summer vacation about now. Here in our Florida Gulf Coast Beaches part of the world, local economy relies heavily on what's come to be called the Hospitality Industry as less raw than Tourist Industry. Motels, condo rentals &c. Tourists crowding our many restaurants. We hear the EMS ambulances a lot. Beach police overwhelmed by traffic on Front Beach Road. Friends and family coming to visit for the long weekend. Fender-benders. Sunburns. Tatoo parlors ready with needles and ink. T-shirt stores screening whatever picture you want. A fatal motorcycle ac...

Aldous Huxley, it isn't your Brave New World, thank the stars, at least not quite yet, though we seem ignorantly if obliviously to be wishing and bringing it on ourselves. But with all that we see and are this morning, it's certainly Strange New World. Or strange new phase into strange new world. Because where reality Is one's perception of reality, one's world is as much within as without, and no two worlds are alike. More than generally Everyone's world is different, Each One's world is different and real, and there are billions of us.  My world, my reality, is what I see, realize, perceive, comprehend, understand as the world around me, that I'm part of and is part of me. The mind always circles back to Mark 9:1 And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power” where the operative word is ἴδωσιν from its root word ὁράω - -  see, look upon, exp...

It's sort of like pulling back the sheet to view the face of a corpse. I know what and who's under there, so it's no surprise. I face it, own it, remember it, have done so, including here, many times. I don't like to look at it. But politicians and many decent human beings are being discredited and shamed because of pasts that are now culturally unacceptable. S omeone recently, I think a governor? for a photograph of him wearing blackface when he was a college student decades ago. I never wore blackface, but I was there in the 1940s when others did and we all laughed at the racial characterizations. Am I "damned for all time" as a song in Jesus Christ Superstar sings of "Poor Old Judas"? What stirs this to mind? Statues of Confederate generals being pulled down in the racial upheaval. At the national capitol, removing portraits of House speakers who had served the Confederacy. Reading an article that characterized Robert E Lee as a traitor. Another a...

Virus cases soaring, governors backtracking, are we back to shelter in place? As the pic above says, for some it got old last time. Not for us in 7H. What is old right now is the Sahara dust that was, we thought, supposed to stay in the stratosphere and create beautiful sunrises and sunsets, but instead is turning Distance from clear to gray and making it uncomfortable to be out on the porch. Don't remember a sense of thick-feeling air before, instead of fencing the southern border we need an act of congress to build a water sprinkler system on the Sahara Desert, an executive order forbidding this to happen and ordering it to stop. If back to mandatory shelter in place, a question is will people stay inside? Wear facemasks when out? Social distance? Have groceries delivered? Will Fourth of July weekend in church be a replay of Easter Sunday in church?  Will compliance be enforced on noncompliant who are foolish about themselves and, love God love Neighbor, could...

Episcopalians, we are a church of The Book, and books, the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Oh, and The Hymnal. In worship we hear lots and lots of Bible readings. Sermons, homilies, almost always are based on one or more of the four readings for each Sunday. Our prayers come from the BCP so that we seldom offer and hear extemporaneous prayer or what members of nonliturgical churches may call prayer from the heart; though our prayers are from the hearts and souls, theology and faith of folks who wrote them over the ages.  Much of what we pray dates back centuries. Many of our prayers, including one Eucharistic prayer, date from Latin to English translation for Cranmer’s 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Some of our prayers date as far back and early in Christianity as the sixth and seventh century Leonine Sacramentary.  https://episcopalchurch.org/library/glossary/sacramentary.  But we pray these old prayers faithfully and earnestly. Many of us grew up with them such that t...

Sahara desert sand turning sky and sea gray lends not spectacular sunrise and sunset but a sense of gloom to the world. In spite of all the stiff-upper-lips of optimism, not totally unfitting for civilization's current place in history? In Cormac McCarthy's post apocalyptic The Road it must have looked like this when the man and the boy finally made it to the sea. Seeing that I skipped any sort of Bible study yesterday, this morning I'll try something now in the way of holiness. First off I'm still, from last Monday, agonizing over the Genesis 22 story of Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac. Right now I have in mind the first few verses God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”  a concomitant rabbinical tradition,  God said, "take your son, your only son"...

Thoughout his autobiography  Waiting for Snow in Havana  in which, from first page to last he longs for the Cuba of his childhood, Carlos Eire desperately remembers the spectacular Cuban clouds and the brilliant turquoise sea. Going from Cuba into exile in the United States at age eleven, he often bemoans never seeing them again. Well, I think he does once mention a day when he saw Cuban clouds while he was in Miami.  Early in my Navy career my ship did refresher training at the Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay. We sailed there from Norfolk in January 1959, bitter cold wind and snow battering us as we veered south into the Atlantic Ocean and headed toward Cuba hundreds of miles away. I was 23, Battista, known as a brutal dictator, was fighting Castro in the mountains. In fact as I recall, Castro was in the mountains in the area near Guantanamo where we were headed. I do remember that because of that conflict no one was allowed to leave the naval base....

We have wonderful and memorable as well as terrible stories not only in our Scripture but in our own lives and the lives of our families and communities, that become our personal history.  Randomly recollected and fresh, a category 5 hurricane with desolating damage, for us a ten month Hurrication exile, coming home to revised geography where landmarks are gone, lingering physical, mental and psychological aftereffects including an ineffable confusion as everyone around me pretends everything is restored. Covid19 bent on changing lifestyles, populations, and the landscape of civilization. Political strife setting a nation against itself in ways that will hasten its fall as every nation in history has fallen; leaving me thankful for life as it was for me personally in my generation but sad for loved ones and their destinies.  WW2 that gave me specific mindsets for my lifetime, but that's aftermath brought the Linda Peters family to town from Alabama. Robert Frost...

Most of us who have preached on this text, Genesis 22:1f, the Sacrifice of Isaac, have contemplated how Sarah must have felt as Abraham told her why he was up so early that morning, and where he was going, and why.  As someone wrote, "God said WHAT?" Sarah, the boy's mother, who, eavesdropping behind the tent flaps, had giggled as she overheard the Holy One promising to return for, she could only imagine what, as "it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women". Sarah who had named the boy "Laughter" for so many reasons. Sarah who, catching Ishmael tormenting his little brother, had burst into a rage of motherly protection and demanded that Abraham get his firstborn son out of her sight forever along with Hagar, his mother.  Sarah now feeling betrayed by God and man, bereft, distraught, screaming with grief that if he did such a thing, Abraham need never come home again. I recall, as an aside, the story from my own family history, told me by ...

"What should we do?  Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?" “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father,  and a daughter against her mother,  and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;  and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household." To a nation divided against itself, Jesus might say “Today this very difficult and troubling gospel is fulfilled in your hearing. Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear”.  And to baptized Christians obliviously lost in sin, Paul derisively says “Now that we are baptized, what shall we do? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may abound?” This week I was surprised, saddened and disappointed at a posting on social media that pictured a white man saying “Have you ever noticed?  The police leave you alone  if you aren’t d...