Yesterday was a dear day, and people came whom I've not seen in years, including dear parishioner friends from my years as priest at Grace Church PCB and St Thomas by the Sea Laguna Beach. The celebration songs were really neat. The between-services brunch fed by folks of Holy Nativity was extraordinary even if I did eat just a little so as to avoid my usual postprandial hypotension drop and go to sleep in the pulpit during my homiletic endeavor.  Although that too has been done: one of the frequent skits, an ancient professor on the weekly television show "Laugh In" from eons ago nodding off and dropping into deep slumber during his droning lecture. In reverse it's happened to me as well, another dear parishioner, Frank Whiteside, whose family name was on the historical marker outside the church, regularly dropped off into a doze within two minutes of the start of my sermons. I loved it, and sometimes would make a point of a sudden shout, or slamming my hand down on ...

  The First Lesson Acts 8:26-40 An angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) So he got up and went.  Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah.  Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.”  So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him.  Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who c...

  Out here on 7H porch on an unimaginably idyllic Spring morning, with one of the pots of gardenia plants we bought for Linda, the one with single petals, up on the table right in my face so I don't have to lean down to bury my nose in it. In a Southerner's heart, gardenia fragrance is only equalled by the enormous Grandiflora blossoms, Southern Magnolia. White blooms turn yellow as they age but cling to the aroma until they fall off, or are lovingly touched, slightly turned, and drop into your hand. It's gone now, I think taken out by Hurricane Michael, but I remember a morning in 1938 standing at the front door of our house and watching as my father and an old black man named Dave lugged a three-trunk magnolia to the middle of our front yard and planted it there. I mowed around that tree all my growing up years and saw it spread far and wide to cover and shade the entire lower part of the front yard. Also, soon after we moved into the rectory at Trinity, Apalachicola, I h...

"Who was Mary Magdalene?" reads a National Geographic headline tucked behind Apple News to entice me, continuing, "Historians are still trying to figure that out." Been years since I've had a subscription to National Geographic. Never a subscription to Apple News and not biting now, so I'll miss that article. Besides, you and I can speculate just as well as historians and scholars, not to mention theologians, eh? She's named Mary Magdalene or Mary of Magdala to tell that she's from Magdala. Where is/was that? There are lots of maps, including (above) a NASA map of the Sea of Galilee, marked with towns to show maybe which town was meant.  Obviously, she was a Jew or she wouldn't have been hanging with Jesus in the first place. If Jesus and family had relocated from Nazareth to Capernaum by then, maybe Mary Magdalene was in the group of families with kids who joined up as they traveled to Jerusalem for festivals. Boys and girls did have crushes and...

  Shot by Israeli troops while getting aid, a boy in Gaza fights for his life Editor's note: This story contains descriptions of violence. RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Nimer Saddy al-Nimer is 12. His first name means "Tiger" in Arabic. Wavy locks of sandy brown hair rest just above his large brown eyes. He's skinny and tall for his age. He calls himself a "soccer addict," he's a fan of FC Barcelona, and Lionel Messi is his hero. He'd pretend to be the Argentine superstar when he played pickup games with his friends in the alleys behind the mosque near his home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City. But that was before the war. Nimer now lies inside a makeshift tent propped up by two-by-fours. The roof is a sheet of transparent plastic. The walls, old billboards and other scrap found here among the refugee camps of Rafah, on the opposite side of the Gaza Strip from his home. Nimer is in pain. It comes in waves. He's just had surgery on his st...