Today we hear one of the most iconic stories in all of scripture; the story of God delivering his chosen people, the Israelites, from the pursuit of their enslavers, the Egyptians. As we know, the story goes that God miraculously parts the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to cross to safety, while the Egyptian army is left scrambling in the muck until the sea comes crashing down upon them, swallowing them into the depths.
Read MoreLast Saturday, thousands of people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. They came together to pay tribute to the landmark civil rights event in 1963 where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. They also came to stand against all of the current threats to the racial progress that we have made in this country over the last 60 years. Just as last Saturday’s March on Washington was ending, a young white man walked into a Dollar General store in a predominately Black neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida and killed 3 African Americans, 19 year old "AJ" Laguerre Jr., 29 year old Jerrald Gallion, and 52 year old Angela Carr. How utterly heartbreaking. The chasm between God’s dream for us and how things really are is so very great.
Read MoreGood morning. For those who don’t know me, my name is Josh House, and I’ve been at Saint George’s for about 8 years. I’m also honored to say that I’m the most recent member of Saint George’s to be sponsored for ordination as a priest and to be sent to seminary.
Read MoreThis week I have been busy preparing so that everything is in order once I return from my wedding in two weeks. As I sat down to begin working on my sermon for this Sunday, I was hoping that the lectionary would throw me a soft ball that would help me in this task. Something nice and pleasant that I could maybe tie into love or nuptials, or going back to school, or these lovely days of late summer.
However, as we have just heard from the lips of our Lord, this optimistic wish of mine was not granted. Instead we receive today one of the most difficult and baffling passages in all of the Gospels. Let’s quickly revisit what was just proclaimed.
Read Moret 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’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?”
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