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Unlikely Saints

on November 05, 2017

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All Saints' Sunday A
Matthew 5:1-12

Holy Trinity; Valley Stream

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A guide to Louisiana pronunciation

My prayers this morning are centered on my homeland. Louisiana braces once again for the landfall of a powerful hurricane - this time nearly three years to the day after the Hurricane Katrina debacle. I've been in hurricanes. To be honest, they can be kind of fun. If you're in a place where it is safe to not evacuate, you hunker down with your family and friends. After the power goes out you cook all the food in the freezer to try to keep it from spoiling. You sit up all night watching battery powered televisions and listening to battery powered radios to get the most up-to-date information possible. But it is decidedly more difficult to be sitting in New Jersey and watching it all unfold from afar. It is difficult to be consumed with worry as you see those places that are so familiar, and think about the people that you love who inhabit them, and to not know what's happening. Perhaps most difficult, however, is listening to news anchors in New York trying to

The "stupidity" is already factored in

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost In the name of God: our mission, our means, and our support. Amen. From time to time, this meme floats around social media channels, and every time I run across it, it makes me smile. It says, simply, that when God gave you some kind of calling in this life, your “stupidity” (their word) was already factored in. It’s an oddly comforting thought, isn’t it? So often when we’re faced with following God’s will in our lives, we hold ourselves up short – who are we to do something so bold as to act for God? Who are we, in the midst of all of our failings and shortcomings, to think we can help bring God’s will into reality? It’s a problem about as long-standing as people’s interactions with God at all. Even Moses, when encountering God and being called to bring God’s message to Pharaoh, questions God, saying, “O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of

The Pelican in her Piety

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost In the name of Christ our protector, and our companion. Amen. In recent years, the image of the “Pelican in her Piety” has been meaningful to me in my practices of prayer and meditation. You may have seen it before. It shows a mother pelican, with her wings spread protecting her chicks, and her head down. The image first caught my attention when I was visiting a cathedral and I saw it among the symbols depicted on the baptismal font. It caught my attention, because I recognized the image from the state flag of Louisiana, where I’m from. So I started digging into it. If you look closely at one of these images, you’ll see a small drop of blood in the center of the pelican’s chest. Centuries ago, observers saw this blood from mother pelicans feeding their young and mistakenly came to believe that she had punctured her own chest with her beak and was feeding her young with her own blood. It didn’t take long for religious observers to hear about t

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