November 27, 2022 - The First Sunday of Advent

Lectionary Readings

O God of our salvation, awaken us to your love and enchant us by your grace ☩ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            Imagine a world in which different people got their news from different sources. Maybe there isn’t much imagination required. But imagine what it would be like to change the network and get our news from a completely different vantage point. At its best, this is what the season of Advent helps us to do. Advent reorients and repents our understanding of time, our vision of ourselves and the world, and our hopes and fears. Our assumptions about life are seen afresh and anew by the coming light of Christ. Advent helps to correct our vision.

November 24, 2022 - Thanksgiving

Lectionary Readings

Gracious Lord, give us the bread of life always. Amen.

            “Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest home.” It is so good to be here with you all this morning to celebrate Thanksgiving. I have nothing at all against parades, turkeys, or football, but Thanksgiving never feels quite right to me without gathering to give thanks to God. The danger of being thankful in the abstract without having a subject for our thanks is that we start to think that we earned all the good that we have by our own striving or by being lucky. It is meet and right though to gather in the name of God, to sing hymns of praise to God, and to celebrate the Eucharist, the Great Thanksgiving, on this day of gratitude. Such worship directs our thanks not inwardly or to chance, but rather to the God who has chosen us and loves us in Jesus Christ and intends these blessings for us.

November 6, 2022 - The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

Lectionary Readings

O God of the living and the dead, help us to come and see the glory of the Resurrection which is more than we can ask for or imagine. Amen.

            The phrase “more than we can ask or imagine” is familiar to us because it is one of the verses of Scripture that we close Morning and Evening Prayer with. It comes from the letter to the Ephesians in which St. Paul writes, “Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” Because of our self-reliance and limited imaginations, we can be unaware of just how awesome and grand the Resurrection is. It’s like the story of the two fish who are swimming along and one fish says to the other, “The water seems nice today” and the other responds, “What’s water?”. Because we live in a post-Easter world, one in which the stone at the tomb has already been rolled away, it can be easy to be oblivious to the Resurrection all around us.

November 2, 2022 - All Souls

Lectionary Readings

O God of the living and the dead, help us to wait in faith, hope, and love. Amen.

            “I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope. My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning,” so says the Psalmist. On All Souls, we watch and wait. We name the fact that the idiom “time heals all wounds” is a lie. We acknowledge that grief is never something we “get over,” but rather it is like a scar that reminds us of a wound. In a world that does not know how to sit in grief, on All Souls’ Day the Church says that such waiting is the holiest thing we can be doing.

November 1, 2022 - All Saints

Lectionary Readings

Oh, blest communion, fellowship divine! We feebly struggle, they in glory shine; yet all are one in thee, for all are thine. Amen.

            A blessed Feast of All Saints to you all. On this holy day on which we celebrate the Communion of All the Saints, it is good to be with the saints of St. Luke’s Parish. There are some feasts, such as Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, the Ascension, and Pentecost on which we remember particular events, but on All Saints, we are not recalling something that happened in a particular place or time, rather we celebrate something that happens in the fullness of time. All Saints is the celebration of the beloved community of God. The icon that we dedicated earlier this year of the Feast of Pentecost can also be interpreted as an icon of All Saints because it portrays the wonderful and blessed diversity of the Body of Christ.