Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid

t has been heartbreaking to see and hear about the devastation in Maui this week in the aftermath of the wildfires that were sparked on Tuesday night.  One man described the scene as a huge blowtorch blazing through his neighborhood at unimaginable speed.  The beautiful, historic town of Lahaina, which was the capitol of the Kingdom of Hawai’i,  is a wasteland.  The remains of over 93 people have been found as of this morning and approximately 1,200 buildings have been burned to the ground.  One of those buildings was Holy Innocents Episcopal Church, which had been there since 1927.  It had a gorgeous painting of a Native Hawaiian Kanaka Madonna holding the Christchild.  The Anglican Church, of which we are a part, has an interesting history in Hawai’i.  Hawaiian King Kamehameha IV and his wife, Queen Emma, were Anglican. They invited the Church of England to establish the Church of Hawaiʻi, which was the state and national church of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi from 1862 until 1893, when the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown.  

Read More
The Rev. Shearon Sykes Williams
What if Jesus Really is the Son of God?

’m still getting used to the range of responses one gets while wearing a clerical collar in public. The other day while meeting a parishioner at a coffee shop I met a young woman working behind the cash register. As I gave her my order, I could tell that she was eyeballing me with the semi-perplexed look which I have come to recognize as the precursor to a question or exclamation about my clerical status. I simply smiled back and handed her my credit card, and after she returned it she beamed back at me and said: “that’s a really cool uniform; which restaurant do you work at?”

Read More
The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh
Sighs Too Deep for Words

Our passage from Romans today is one of my absolute favorites.  I have preached on it a number of times, usually at funerals, most memorably, my father’s.  It seemed especially fitting for his service since I had heard him preach on it so often.  He was a Baptist pastor and I still have a vivid picture in my mind’s eye of him standing in the pulpit, holding his Bible in his right hand, and giving witness to his faith in a very impassioned way.   He never met a passage from one of Paul’s letters that he didn’t love.  

Read More
The Rev. Shearon Sykes Williams
Finding Ladders to Heaven on Earth

Many of you probably know by now that I am hopelessly in love. Sure, with my wonderful fiancée Winnie, she is lovely and perfectly winsome and if I’m honest, probably not quite as lucky to be marrying me as I am to be marrying her. But that’s not what I am talking about. In addition to her, there’s something else that is wholly enrapturing to me and always has been. Something magnificent and arresting, something beautiful and fearsome, something strange and serene that compels me to drive three to five hours away nearly every weekend this time of year, just to catch a glimpse of it. I am in love with the ocean. Far more than leisure or the chance to work on my tan, being in that place where the land meets the sea is the closest I have found to the boundary between heaven and earth. 

Read More
The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh
Van Gogh and the Sower

This past May, my husband Robbie and I were blessed to take a two week trip to Paris, and in the middle of our time there, we took a train to Amsterdam and stayed there for 3 days.  The main reason that I wanted to go to Amsterdam was to visit the Van Gogh Museum.  It was something of a pilgrimage for me, not in the same way as making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to walk the steps that Jesus walked, of course, but it was a sacred experience, because through many of Van Gogh’s works, I experience God at work in me.  

Read More
The Rev. Shearon Sykes Williams